Wolf Haas - Eternal Life

So, when he didn’t stir right away in the morning, I wasn’t exactly surprised. That he was sleeping the drink off. Wasn’t a ghost after all, I thought to myself, if he’s got to sleep one off, too. But, then, I did go look in on him. There he was, lying dead on the floor. Didn’t even make it into bed.”

Brenner didn’t finish his bread now, but asked the owner if she’d show him the body. He followed her up the creaky wooden stairs to the second floor. And when the owner unlocked the door to the room, he no longer wondered if the dead man was really Lorenz.

“I just thought he was going to take the bottle of rum to go,” the owner said.

“There, there,” Brenner said. She was scared of the police, and that was convenient for him now, of course. Because he was going to need a few hours.

“Lock the room back up,” he said, and then the two of them went back down the narrow wooden staircase, but he took the lead this time and the owner followed. Interesting, though. On the way down, the steps creaked much less than on the way up. The cabbie was waiting at the bottom, because, needless to say, him with his 120 kilos wasn’t going back up those stairs anytime soon. But he got his moment of triumph now because Brenner hadn’t believed him at first, this whole story about Lorenz.

“And don’t talk to anybody about this. Above all, not with the police. I’ll be back this evening,” Brenner says to the owner outside in the parking lot.

And sitting back in the taxi now, he asks Johnny: “Do you know where Andi the Fox lives?”

Johnny didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, but Brenner knew him well enough by now to know that meant: “Yes.”

“Why is it exactly that you drive so slow?”

“I drive perfectly normal.”

Now, of course-Brenner still had his headache. And for every meter that Johnny crawled along, it seemed to him like his headache got twice as bad. He tapped on the glove box nervously with his fingers, it was made of wood in Johnny’s old Chevrolet, but the tapping was no use, and so Brenner said:

“For god’s sake, drive a little faster!”

“I’m not a fire truck,” the cabbie said, pulling a half-smoked Virginia out of his jacket pocket and relighting it.

But Brenner knew that he only had a couple hours’ time now, because if he wasn’t back by evening, the owner would call the police anyhow, out of sheer fright.

“I’m telling you nicely for the last time now that you should drive faster!” Brenner shouted.

But Johnny Goggenberger the taxi driver only slowed down demonstrably. “And I’m telling you nicely for the last time now that my Chevy hasn’t gone over seventy in twenty-three years and it’s not going to today, either!”

Now, that was only half-true. Because, shortly thereafter, eyewitnesses saw the pink Chevrolet racing well over a hundred in the direction of Zell.

They were surprised, because Johnny’s driving style was known near and far. And they couldn’t have known that Brenner was sitting next to him and pointing his brand new Glock at the cabbie. Needless to say, Brenner was glad now that he’d popped by Perterer Jr.’s one more time after all the day before yesterday.

“Well, I’ll be damned. You’re going to be sorry,” the agreeable chauffeur said.

“If you say ‘I’ll be damned’ one more time, I’ll shoot.”

In his other hand Brenner had the car phone and was calling information to get Andi’s number. But it was just his mother at home, and naturally: no clue where Andi was.

“New destination: Preussenstadl,” Brenner says to Johnny, with the gun still in his hand. Within a matter of minutes, the Chevrolet was there.

“Look, that wasn’t so bad now, was it, Johnny?” Brenner says and gets out.

“I’ll be damned, you lunatic!” Johnny says and drives off so fast, you’d have thought he didn’t realize that nobody was threatening him with a gun anymore.

The Preussenstadl looked like a cabin, but not like the kind you’re thinking: rustic. Because it had five floors with fifty-two apartments, I’m talking ultra-modern on the inside with two elevators. And so you never had to wait very long for the elevator to come, because when one of them’s way up on the fifth floor, and you’re waiting in the lobby, that’s what the second elevator’s for.

But Brenner didn’t take the elevator now. Handless lived on the fourth floor, but somehow Brenner had something against elevators on this particular day, you can’t forget: headache and then all the excitement, so maybe a person prefers to take the stairs instead of stepping into an elevator.

The German lived in an east-facing garçonnière on the fourth floor. She buzzed him in the front door to the Preussenstadl, practically the instant Brenner rang the bell. He was surprised that she didn’t even ask who it was through the intercom, but just pressed the buzzer. Needless to say, though. He didn’t know the entrance to the Preussenstadl was monitored by a surveillance camera. You’d like to think a detective would notice a thing like this, but he’d reckoned so little on there being a camera behind the antlers that he hadn’t noticed it.

Now, when he got to the fourth floor, he saw right away that one of the apartment doors was ajar, practically, come in. He gave a light knock, though, more out of formality, and then he went in. He wasn’t surprised, of course, to find that the German wasn’t alone now. Because he’d come here on account of Andi, and so it didn’t surprise him that Andi was there, either. But he wasn’t expecting to find that, in addition to Andi and the German, somebody else was there. And Andi was already looking scared, but Clare Corrigan, so pale-white doesn’t come close.

It couldn’t have been the light, though, because the German looked perfectly normal, and when you consider, an old woman, she even looked flat-out healthy.

Now, the German had a glass coffee table in her living room, and the three were sitting around it and watching as Brenner walked into the apartment. Because the door between the foyer and the living room was standing wide open. The foyer had gray laminate flooring and the living room had been laid in fleecy white carpet. It struck Brenner all over again that the camera he didn’t notice but the carpet he does.

“You can keep your shoes on,” the German says.

Because she’d noticed his hesitation, of course. On the one hand, he was reluctant, street shoes on white carpet. But on the other hand. Entering the living room in socks-at that moment it seemed like the entrance to the Heidnische Kirche.

“Please have a seat!” the German says, genially, after he takes a few timid steps across the white carpet, and it was so soft that you really sank into it.

Now, surrounding the glass coffee table was an honest-to-goodness sectional, so, plenty of room. On one section sat the German, and next to her was Andi, so they were facing the door that Brenner came in through. Clare was sitting with her back to the window, because, across from the window, the TV was on with the sound off. Briefly he wondered how Clare would react if he were to sit directly across from her so that she couldn’t see the TV. But then he said:

“I prefer to stand.”

“Would you care for something to drink?”

The migraine pills always made him terribly thirsty, he’d often drink five, six liters of water in a day. And today, three pills and practically no water, so you can imagine just how thirsty he was.

“No thanks, not thirsty.”

The German got a little irritated now, in a way that Brenner had never cared for. “Do sit down!”

He just couldn’t stand this tone. When somebody got snippy with him. And especially when it’s an old woman, he was particularly sensitive. Psychological, maybe.