Jutta Profijt - Morgue Drawer Four

“So far so good,” I whispered to calm him down.

He approached a group of six boys who were standing together smoking, gawking up and down the street.

“Excuse me, um, good evening,” Martin said. The six of them were now gawking at him.

“I have a question for you,” Martin said politely.

Still no reaction. I looked around, everything quiet.

“I’m looking for a woman,” he said, fumbling in his pocket for the drawing.

“To fuck,” one of the boys said, and the others laughed.

“No, no,” Martin quickly corrected himself. “I met her and would like to see her again.”

“But not fuck her?” the guy asked again. “What else is a woman for?”

Martin had unfolded the drawing and was showing it to them. One of the boys grabbed his balls when he saw the drawing and moaned loudly. The others laughed again.

“Do you happen to know her name?” Martin politely asked.

“You met her and don’t know her name?” the spokesman said. “What did the two of you do, then?”

The roars were growing louder. Counter to my fears, Martin stayed pretty cool. He was pretending the sleazy comments weren’t even reaching him, although I could sense the waves of disgust emanating from his direction. If he found my little jokes disrespectful, then he must be pretty close to puking here.

“I’ll take you to her,” the ringleader said. “Give me a hundred, and I’ll take you to her right away.”

I didn’t need to make a sound; the red warning light in Martin’s brain had started flashing all on its own.

“Is she here right now?” Martin asked after a millisecond, during which I was afraid he’d start screaming out loud.

“Of course.”

Somehow the situation was slowly getting absurd. We were looking for a woman we knew was in the freezer at the Institute, and this guy is telling us he’ll take us to her. Now how to explain we knew he was bullshitting us when you weren’t allowed to say what you knew? But Martin had a great idea.

“Could you check?” Martin asked. “Just give her a call.”

“She’s around here,” the guy replied, standing up to his full height. “Why, don’t you believe me?”

The menacing tone of the last question was not appealing to either of us, but Martin admittedly had the disadvantage of being vulnerable to attack if it came to that. He winced on the inside but then pulled himself together and stayed really casual on the outside. For Martin, I mean. Under his duffle coat you couldn’t discern much of his shivering, fortunately.

“I don’t have a hundred euros on me,” Martin said. “So it’d be easier for you just to call her. Then she can tell me if she wants to see me or not.”

“Phone calls are so impersonal,” the guy said.

The others were standing closer together, and an intangible but still-appreciable aggressiveness was in the air.

“Please give me the picture back,” Martin said. “I don’t think this is heading anywhere.”

“We’re not heading anywhere because you don’t want to come with us. We want to help you,” the spokesman murmured.

I almost puked. When guys like this say, “we want to help you, man” in a tone like that, then you should really get far, far away really, really fast. The help they mean is usually not of the type that one might wish for. Or do you think full blows to both sides of the head at the same time are very helpful? Occasionally their objective is only to “drive bad thoughts out of your mind,” but usually it drives only one thing—namely, a hole into your eardrum.

“Thank you, but I’d prefer not to burst in somewhere unannounced,” Martin said, taking two steps to the side and walking past the boys on his trembling legs. “You can keep the drawing, if you’d like.”

We kept walking, and I looked behind us again. The boys had crumpled the drawing up into a little ball and were swatting it back and forth to each other like a beanie bag. One of them was talking in a language I didn’t understand, and the rest of them gave loud and dirty laughs. In the end they didn’t seem to want to pick a fight beyond taking the picture. I was relieved and informed Martin of my observations. He was also slowly exhaling all the air he had taken from fear as the boys were cackling.

He found his tongue again amazingly fast, and then I quickly got what was coming to me.

“I feel really no particular inclination to serve as the strange object of amusement again for interviewees with testosterone swamping every sulcus of their brains.”

Which in simple words meant: He’s scared shitless of gorillas. And he’s right.

“I’m sure that sooner or later the detectives will figure out the name and address of the woman by their own means, and they can then conduct the further investigation,” he grumbled at no one in particular. His blind faith in the abilities of the criminal investigation unit did him credit of course, but they also showed how little a clue he actually had. Because the investigators are not the ones who control the discovery of information like that: folks on the street do. And as far as the willingness to cooperate goes on the part of boneheads like the aforesaid testosterone junkies, Martin was actually going to need someone to clue him in at some point. But right now didn’t seem like the best time.

“There is always somebody who comes forward with a helpful piece of information,” Martin said. He was starting to sound like a defiant little brat who starts every sentence with “but I want…”

“And when will that be happening?” I asked him. “Next millennium? When the little green men start landing here? By then the worms will have eaten their fill and be relaxing on my bones, burping, and there won’t be even one bastard around anymore who gives a rat’s ass that the bitch that your computer blurred up a pretty picture of may have been the reason that some small-time car thief got pushed off the bridge.”

I shouldn’t have said the word “bitch.” It just slipped out; in the lingo of my world it doesn’t imply anything negative, either. It just means “woman.” But Martin didn’t know that; he of course speaks only his silted academese, so now I had a real problem. I noticed it the millisecond I said it. Martin was closing the game down. And not just that, he turned around and started walking back to his car. Not a good idea.

“Martin, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that, I didn’t mean it that way; the people who I hang out with just say ‘bitch’ and don’t mean it in a bad way, but please don’t walk back past those big guys.”

It seemed like he didn’t hear me at all, but the big guys did seem to see him. One of them, anyways. He stood up and watched the little roly-poly man in the little wool coat approach his boys in their T-shirts.

“Martin, wake up and turn around!” I yelled. “Let’s talk about it again, I’ll apologize again, a hundred more times, no problem, but turn around now and get scarce before those bruisers up there decide your curiosity is pissing them off more than they let on before.”

He pretended not to hear me at all.

“Goddamnit, Martin, they’ll punch your nose in so flat you’ll only be able to breathe the thin air at two thousand meters.”

No response, even though I’d made an extra effort to imbue my warning with a scientific touch.

“Plus you’ll puke, piss blood, and you’ll spend your next twelve paychecks on the dentist.”

He hesitated, but now he’d come too close to them again. Meanwhile, four of the big boys had turned around and were watching him. Martin kept staring at the ground in front of him. I sensed that he was slowly panicking.

“Take off!” I yelled again. “Now!”

Martin bent over, reached into the dirt with his right hand, stood up again, mumbled a friendly “There’s my button!” toward the big boys, turned around, and started breathing again. Shallow and fast, but even so…air in, air out, that’s all you can do when you’re in utter panic to keep your lungs from sticking shut like a vacuum-sealed freezer bag.