Morgue Drawer Four (17 page)

We’d find out right away if that was good enough.

Olli didn’t say anything and stared at Martin; Martin didn’t say anything and stared at Olli.

“How much do you want to spend?” Olli asked. Also standard.

“I propose a wager,” Martin said, without real conviction.

Olli jiggled again; I hoped he was laughing. “A wager? Well, let’s hear it,” he said.

Martin swallowed. “My girlfriend Birgit used to have a car like that,” he started in a trembling voice. “She saved up a couple of years until she could afford it. She’s totally crazy about cars, and at some point it just had to be that one.”

Olli’s eyes disappeared almost completely behind his rolls of fat, which were squeezing out from top to bottom.

“After a couple of days the car disappeared,” Martin continued. We had agreed that the verb “to steal” in all its principal parts would be avoided entirely.

“She was howling her eyes out, for two specific reasons: first, she loved that car, and second, it wasn’t insured yet.”

Olli bent forward, to the extent that this was at all possible with his galactic corpulence. “Not insured?” he asked. A small twinkle appeared in his left eye. We were on the right track!

Martin shook his head.

“And what’s your deal?” Olli asked.

Martin shrugged. “I don’t care about cars, but I love my girlfriend.”

Now! It had to be about to happen, I thought, and, bingo! We’d done it. Olli was crying. Thick tears were running down his cheeks; he was sincerely touched that this wool-wearing gnome had the courage to enter this lion’s den and get his sweetheart’s car back. The fattest guy since Jabba the Jigglemonster from
Star Wars
just so happens, when he has time, to spend the entire day watching the sappiest romance movies conceivable. His personal DVD collection ranges from silent black-and-white films to animated movies and everything in between that the lachrymal-gland-squeezers in Hollywood, Bollywood, and wherever else in the world had ever captured on celluloid. And he watches all of them again and again. And he weeps during every movie, even when watching it for the twentieth time.
And
he loves women with a weakness for cars.

Olli ranks among those men who are not embarrassed of their tears. But he doesn’t make a big deal about it. He pulled a gigantic handkerchief out of his pants pocket, blew snot into it, and returned to the topic.

“You wanted to propose a wager?”

“If my girlfriend’s car key fits in a car that you’ve got here, then I’ll take that car with me.”

Martin’s hands were dripping with sweat, his knees were shaking, but his voice was coming across fairly sensibly. Good thing, too.

“Just like that?” Olli asked.

“Just like that,” Martin confirmed.

Olli pressed a button on his phone, and in the next moment Greenbeard came in. That’s not his real name of course, but one time he ate five liters of woodruff-flavored gelatin on a bet, won the pot, and five minutes later puked everything back out. In so doing, there was certain residue left in his beard. What his real name is, I’ve forgotten.

Olli held out his fleshy hand, and after a brief hesitation Martin put the key into it. Olli handed the key to Greenbeard, and whispered a few sentences into his ear. There wasn’t anything we could do but wait.

That was the most dangerous moment of this whole operation. Olli might bag the key and demand a surcharge from his end customer for that, but my senses told me he would stick to the deal. And in fact after three rather long minutes, the BMW drove out, pulling up to the entrance.

“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” I told Martin, who was standing in front of Olli’s desk the whole time sweating blood and water.

“Just a moment,” Olli said as Martin turned around. “How did you know that you would bust the bank here with your wager?”

Martin shrugged. “It was a message from Sam,” he said with a wink. “Thanks,” he added afterward, but he got no answer because Olli was already weeping again.

We stepped over to the car, climbed in, and drove to Birgit’s place.

Birgit was overjoyed. She drove Martin back to Olli’s, where the trash can was still parked on a side street, Martin got into the trash can and Birgit into the BMW, and everyone went home, happy and content. Except for me, once again no one was paying attention to me; I was bored, and Martin had forgotten to turn on the TV again.

Martin’s boss was nice about Martin getting to work a half hour late. He took Martin aside and asked him in a collegial tone if he was feeling fit enough to work again, and all that claptrap. I listened in a bit and then went in search of Katrin. She was already deep in conversation with Jochen.

“…acting pretty strange, the past few days,” I heard her say. “And then this mugging on top of it all. But he won’t say anything. I’m slowly starting to get worried.”

Ah ha, they were talking about Martin. His colleagues were gossiping already.

Meanwhile the guy they were gossiping about was pleased as Punch, because visiting him at his desk was none other than Birgit.

“…as just a little thank-you. Because you were having such a hard time with the old headset and its cord was bugging you.”

Scattered on Martin’s desk was enough packaging for Christmas and birthday combined, and his right ear was covered by an earpiece that concealed almost his entire outer ear, with a little boom sticking out in front that presumably contained the mic. Boy, he totally looked like crap in it, though, with his shiner on the left and this cyborg ear on the right, but Birgit was beaming at him. What exactly was this woman’s ideal of male beauty? She probably voted for Alf as Sexiest Man Alive and went soft at the knees seeing the party leaders on the floor of the Bundestag.

Martin in any case was smiling in bliss, dictating “Birgit is the greatest” into his computer. Cool, huh? I left the two love birds to their cooing and roamed through the building in search of something more exciting. Gregor struck me as not the worst option. He was standing in the lobby with his cell phone to his ear, fumbling in his chest pocket for a pen.

“Yeah, go ahead,” he mumbled once he’d found it. He sank down onto one of the chairs in the lobby, took a pad of paper out of his jacket’s side pocket, and jotted down some address that didn’t ring a bell for me right off the bat. Except that it was in the area where Martin and I had gotten our heads smashed in the night before last looking for information about the dead woman.

“And the witness, what’s her name?” Gregor asked, listening carefully and writing a name down. Ekaterina Szszcyksmcnk. All right, obviously that wasn’t really her name, but I found her last name impossible to remember; it was just a string of random consonants no normal person could possibly pronounce.

“And she was certain she recognized the woman from the pictures in the paper?” Gregor asked. I couldn’t hear the answer.

“Does she know her name?”

Brief pause.

“Too bad. Oh well. Still, it’s a starting point at least. I’ll head over there now.”

He hung up, said hi to Birgit, who was apparently on her way out, as he walked past her to take the elevator to Martin’s floor. Martin was sitting at his computer, dictating words that aroused him, such as “multiple perforations of the lung” and “a strikingly well-defined margin resulting from the use of a dull tool causing separation at the root of the penis.” I turned my attention to other things. More beautiful things. Katrin, who was watering the ferns. I fawned around her a bit, but of course she didn’t notice me. Really too bad. It could’ve been so nice going out on a double date. Martin and Birgit, me and Katrin.

Martin had stopped describing what were apparently the fatal results of some real-life telenovela, so I turned my attention to him and Gregor to get my hands, as it were, on the latest information. But first Gregor subjected his friend to a highly embarrassing interrogation.

“What the hell happened to you?” was the opening line.

“It’s not that bad,” Martin said, heroically.

Poser. Yesterday he was crying his eyes out, and now today he was pretending he was an American soldier whose kneecaps can get shot to smithereens without a wince or whimper.

“Yeah, I can tell…” Gregor said. “Geez, your head slips off your pillow and hits the mattress, and this is how you come to work!”

Martin smiled ruefully. “I guess we’ve known for some time that hard mattresses are definitely not as healthy as people used to assume. Maybe I should buy myself a new one.”

Birgit’s visit seemed to have cheered him up dramatically; now he was even making little jokes at his own expense.

Gregor didn’t smile. “I hope you filed a report with the police.”

Martin shook his head. “Against the mattress?”

He was going to carry this number mercilessly through to the curtain; I wouldn’t have thought him capable of that.

“We’ve got some leads on that anonymous woman,” Gregor said. “I’m telling you this so you’ll stop sniffing around on your own and getting yourself all clobbered up.”

“Who is she?” Martin asked.

Gregor shook his head.

“Does your information match my, uh, research?” Martin added.

“No comment.”

“Man, Gregor. We’ve talked about cases before; we’re a good team,” Martin said.

He looked disappointed or sad; I couldn’t interpret his hangdog look exactly.

“Yes, we’re a good team, as long as you stick to your autopsy tools and your brain—and stop using your fists.”

Martin didn’t say anything.

“I only want to protect you,” Gregor said. “First off, so you quit taking a couple blows to the jaw every day, and, second, so you avoid stress on the job. I mean real stress. You do know that the district attorney will kick you in your coroner’s ass if you interfere with official police business by conducting your own investigation and withholding information. You’re still part of the criminal prosecution, after all. You could lose your job.”

That hit the mark. Martin grew pale as a ghost.

“In addition, you seem to have a penchant for picking fights with people who don’t wear kid gloves. If what you’ve told me is true, then there have already been two murders in this case, and they’re somehow connected. Do you think people like that will balk at murdering some piddly little coroner?”

Martin slumped in his chair.

Gregor laid his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Think about what I’ve said, and go to the movies, or ask Birgit out to dinner, or some other innocuous activity to get your mind off things.”

Martin nodded weakly, and Gregor gave him another friendly pat on the shoulder before leaving.

“Well that’s some news!” I said.

Martin winced. “Were you listening in?”

“Of course,” I said, in a good mood.

“Then you understand that Gregor didn’t actually cough up the information we need. I can’t do anything more.”

Ha, he can’t seriously believe he can get out of this whole business that easily, can he?

“The witness who recognized the photo in the paper of your lovely body is named Ekaterina Something and lives only a couple of steps away from the club where we talked to that bouncer,” I said. No—I cheered.

“How do you know that?” Martin asked, devoid of enthusiasm.

I told him about the advance information I had. He hesitated.

“The witness is totally harmless; she won’t do anything to us. We’ll just go over there and ask her about everything she knows about the dead woman,” I said.

“How do you know that she’s harmless?” Martin asked with clearly discernible doubt.

“Because she reported it to the police herself,” I said. God, you had to explain everything to him.

“I’ll give her a call,” Martin said.

“Good idea,” I said. “Look her up in the phone book under Ekaterina Something.”

Martin didn’t say anything.

“Tonight we’ll drive past her place on the way home,” I decided.
Basta.

Martin went back to his work and turned on the mic, which he sets to
PAUSE
when he’s not currently dictating anything. He had not agreed, but he hadn’t shot me down, either. So in high spirits I repeated the word that Italians use to close a discussion:
basta.

On Martin’s screen the word
basta
appeared. We both stared at it for a few seconds. Speechless.

“Where did that come from?” Martin asked aloud.

“From me,” I answered.

Both of those sentences appeared on screen, as well.

We stared again.

“Say something else,” Martin thought.

Nothing happened on the screen.

“How does the headset connect to the computer?” I asked.

That question was written out, too.

“Infrared port? Or Bluetooth? Or is that the same thing?” Martin thought, but he didn’t speak it aloud. No reaction.

“Cool,” I thought, and that word appeared in neat black letters.

“I like this kind of connection,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was looking for with the TVs, so I can turn them on myself when they’re on standby.”

Again the sentence was written, but instead of
standby
the words
sand fly
appeared on the screen.

“Hey,” I yelled. “What happened there?”

“Unless you pronounce things very clearly, the program will misunderstand a word now and again,” Martin explained.

“That may happen with you, but I don’t mumble when I’m thinking,” I said.

Martin didn’t answer. He was still shocked. But then hope suddenly starting blossoming within him.

“Now there’s a way for you to make yourself noticeable,” he said. “You can prove to Gregor and the others that you exist.”

I had to think about that for a moment. Big time. I said as much to Martin, who couldn’t understand my hesitation at all. I didn’t feel like discussing it with him now, and I receded into my thoughts.

Should I have been happy? Presumably. But at the moment I was confused. This new communication option was a little bit like online chat. Online chat is so fucked up you can’t even imagine. People who don’t even know each other meet in a chat room on the Internet and tell each other the most intimate details of their lives. Their most secret desires, their violent fantasies, their sexual preferences. Suicidal thoughts, proposals of marriage, insults: everything is blown out into the world for anyone to read. How much sicker can human beings get, actually? And how much further from reality? They fucking feel like they they’re among friends in their cozy little chat rooms—but in reality they know only the ridiculous nicknames of the psychos otherwise floating around in there with them. It could be your neighbor outing himself as a serial murderer, or your own mother offering to blow you off. There is nothing human about any of it. You can’t form an image of the person behind the name; all you see are letters and numbers, and you react with compassion, anger, or horror. And I should become one of them? Some invisible ghost communicating via computer screen? I imagined complimenting Katrin and then the sentence “you’ve got awesome tits” appearing. Or better yet, appearing with a small error: “you’ve got awesome nits.” Would you be into that? That’s what I’m saying. So for now I decided to stay clear of Martin’s computer whenever he had his new headset switched on. I felt shitty enough without a body; I didn’t need to end up with my voice and feelings slaughtered in some jumble of letters, too.

At some point around noon Martin did a short walk-through of the building to check on me, and I thought that was exceptionally nice of him. That’s how it should be. He still remembered I had once had a body, and he perceived me as a feeling, whole being—OK, well not entirely whole, but still, as whole as somehow possible. His concern touched me, and I could tell him that directly without having to think some carefully formulated sentence into a port. It did occur me that he might be checking on me only to keep me from getting up to no good with my newly discovered gift of communication, but I quickly pushed that thought aside. I needed a bit of support, and I was determined to find it in Martin’s behavior.
Basta
.

At quitting time, Martin stopped briefly at a street food stand to pick up a veggie burger with a tofu patty and colorful side salad. That’s the kind of dinner guinea pigs eat, or people with colostomy bags, but he shoveled that health fodder into his mouth with a full appetite. Meanwhile I was dreaming of a big, thick hamburger with meat, sauce, and onions gushing out on all sides, gunk running down your sleeve to your elbow. People’s tastes are so different.