The Sweetness of Life Page 13

  As usual, it was Bitterle who was the first to make an appearance but not by much on this occasion—hardly had she removed her fake-fur coat than young Lipp was at the door. He was wearing a thickly padded lumberjack’s coat over a light-gray woolen sweater. “This is a bit odd,” he said. “I almost feel like I’m on vacation.” Eyltz had e-mailed him, he said, in that peremptory tone he always used: with immediate effect and for the duration of the investigation, Lipp was assigned to the serious crime squad of the Kriminalpolizei for the Wilfert case. He was to show up at eight o’clock on Monday, December 30, at the office of the chief Kommissar in charge of the case, to whom he would be provisionally reporting. “At least you know where you stand,” Kovacs said. Lipp grinned sourly.

  Wieck arrived in uniform, including regulation winter coat, and immediately turned red when she saw Lipp in civvies. She had not known what was expected, she stammered, and she had thought it silly to phone somebody just to ask what she should wear. “It doesn’t matter,” Bitterle said. She was wearing olive-green wool pants and a black turtleneck sweater. She looks like a secondary-school teacher, Kovacs thought. Latin and Greek, perhaps. He was also relieved that she was not going to be troubled by the presence of a second woman. It must have something to do with me, he thought: this conviction that two women in the same place must herald the start of a disaster. “We’re missing Mauritz,” he said, because he could not think of anything else. “The fat guy from forensics?” Lipp asked.

  “Exactly. The fat guy.”

  “He’s usually very punctual.” Bitterle looked at the clock.

  “Perhaps he’s got a cold,” Kovacs said. “He was working yesterday, I hope.”

  “Great,” Lipp said, beaming. Lipp’s first name was Florian, he had moved out of his parents’ house nine months ago and lived alone. He had attended a technical school for metalworking, but did not go on to study engineering at college as his father, a director at a large elevator manufacturer, would have wished. Instead he had joined the police force. During his job interview he had said that he did not want to be one of those millions who abandon their childhood dreams. He had wanted to be a policeman from the age of five, and he had stuck with the idea. At the bottom of the employment form there was a note written by Rahberger, head of the personnel department: “Immature?” They had taken him on anyway. The only thing there was no information on was Lipp’s sexual orientation. It was alleged that in his first year of police training he’d had a relationship with a schoolgirl, but that was more a rumor than anything else. It bothered Kovacs that he knew nothing, and also that he was bothered by this. In the past I could sniff out a queer ten kilometers away, he thought. It’s not like that anymore. Either they’ve changed or I have.

  Kovacs dragged the rectangular whiteboard from the other end of the room to the meeting table. He took a sponge and wiped off the Christmas tree that he had drawn an hour or so before. Then, using a thick, dark-blue marker, he made a vertical and horizontal line to divide the board into four boxes.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Lipp said.

  “A homemade structuring system,” Kovacs answered. “As simple as my provincial criminologist’s brain.” At the top of the four boxes he wrote: “What have we got?,” “What do we need?,” “Who’s doing what?” and “Notes.” Lipp copied the whole thing into his notebook. Bitterle had her head bowed and was looking at the palms of her hands. Kovacs was annoyed that he had run himself down yet again. “Basically, violence is simple,” he said.

  Mauritz was at the door when Kovacs was noting “right-handed” in the “What have we got?” box. He held up a white paper bag and said, “Breakfast!” The others looked at Kovacs. He sighed out loud and put the pen down.

  “Go and make us all a cup of coffee,” he said.

  Kovacs had already forgotten that Lipp and Bitterle both wanted tea rather than coffee when Christine Strobl, the departmental secretary, rushed in and passed him the telephone. “The fourth attempt,” she said. “No name and very annoying.” He went out into the corridor.

  The woman had a shrill voice, and the first thing she said was, “The next time it’ll be the head!” Kovacs shut his eyes. Things leak out, he thought, especially on weekends. He said nothing. After a while the woman seemed to realize that he was listening to her, and she began to give some order to her flow of words. She wanted to remain anonymous and was calling from a phone booth, as she suspected that the police would do nothing this time either. She’d heard of people who’d tried in the past to do something and had only got themselves into the most awful difficulties. It had happened three days ago, on Friday afternoon, maybe at four o’clock, but while it was still light. She’d been out walking her dog, just wandering around you might say, and by chance she’d come along Bergheimstraße, a couple of minutes on the Graz highway, then east—but she didn’t need to explain that to a member of the police force. From there the road sloped down toward the town, and in the garden of number four there was a mound, two or at most three meters high—maybe it was earth excavated from the cellar that they hadn’t cleared away. A little girl had trudged up this hillock, pulling a blue sled behind her, a short, flat, one-man type. At the top the girl sat on the sledge and slid down right to the end of the garden, which you could do because the whole thing was on a slope. Then she turned around, plodded back up the garden and up the mound, and tried to slide down again. But this time she only got as far as the bottom of the hillock, because all of a sudden a man was standing in her way. With a face like thunder he stopped the girl in mid-slide, yelling, “I told you to stay in your room!” He yanked the sledge from under her, so that she fell on her back in the snow. He took the blue sledge in both hands and swung it sideways, smashing it against one of two T-shaped iron washing stands that were fixed into the ground. He let the pieces fall to the ground, hurried back over to the crying girl, lifted her up, and did the same with her. He grabbed the child under her armpits, twirled her through the air, and crashed her legs—well, the bits below her knees—against the iron pole, just like that. For a moment the girl stopped crying. She was wearing a gray coat with white polar bears on it; the woman had noticed that quite clearly. She had watched the episode from the street, ducking behind a barberry bush and holding her dog’s mouth shut, a small dachshund mix. She’d rarely been as frightened in her life and didn’t move until the man had disappeared into the house with the child in his arms. She’d imagined he might appear again with a gun, looking for witnesses, so she’d run away. Then, about an hour later, she’d come back, this time without her dog, as she’d been wracked with guilt. The ambulance and police cars were outside the house, so she’d turned back, convinced that somebody else had seen the incident too. Yesterday she’d heard from a friend who helped out in the kitchens at the hospital that the girl was in casualty but had been admitted as the victim of a “car accident.” That was the reason why she wanted to report this man to the police. His name was Norbert Schmidinger.

  Kovacs moved his legs wider apart. He felt he had not had enough sleep. From the kitchenette came the clattering of cutlery. He lied to the woman on the end of the phone that he had jotted down some notes, but for them to be able to use her statement she would either have to tell the story again to one of his colleagues, exactly as she had told it to him, one thing at a time, or bring in a written version herself. If she was worried about remaining anonymous, she could just send somebody else. The woman breathed deeply. She had already written something, she said, it was as good as sent.

  Life is like a piece of knotted string—nothing for long periods of time, then it all happens at once. For a short while Kovacs felt the urge to smash the phone against the wall. “It’s the neighbor, simple as that,” he said out loud.

  Mauritz, who was just coming past with a full pot of coffee, asked, “Which neighbor?”

  “Tell you later,” Kovacs said.

  A man who breaks his own daughter’s legs, he thought—everybody knows him yet nobody dares
do a thing about him. They’d had endless dealings with him for years, and in all that time nobody had attempted to make a usable statement against him. Psychopaths scare people, he thought, irrespective of whether they’re fathers, teachers, or politicians. Psychopaths intimidate, humiliate, and beat people up. People are afraid of these things, of being intimidated, humiliated, and beaten up. Deep down, fear is always rational.

  While he was demolishing a braided brioche in three mouthfuls, Mauritz told him how the day before he had taken imprints of the tire marks, and then dug in the snow around where the body had been found, square meter by square meter. In total he had found four nails—two eighty-millimeter ones, one hundred-millimeter one with a countersunk head and a zinc-coated roofing nail—the remains of a sack of chemical fertilizer, a rusted door fitting, a green Lego brick—a four piece as he recalled from his childhood—and finally, perhaps the most interesting find in his opinion, a brown leather button you might find on a loden coat or a sports jacket. He could not, of course, say how long it had been lying there. In any case, no button had been missing from Wilfert’s jacket; he had checked that again. Georg, the Maywalds’ son, had turned up at regular intervals, circling the tape around the sealed-off area and asking questions like, “Can you find anything at all in the snow?,” and “What if you don’t find out what happened?” He, Mauritz, had remained silent even though curious children like that could trick you into chattering away. As agreed, he had refrained from mentioning that Wilfert had been murdered; not a hint of it, not even to Georg’s mother, who invited him in for lunch. There had been a perfectly decent chili con carne with homemade bread and cider. Ernst Maywald was not there; they said he had gone to his brother’s to help cut up some larch branches. The smaller of the two daughters spent the whole time staring at the wall and not saying a word.

  Their discussion then turned to how even body-temperature blood freezes rapidly when the temperature is minus ten degrees; the totally uncharacteristic fragments of footprints—Vibram soles, size forty-two—which had been found here and there; and the fact that this vehicle, whatever it was, looked to have stopped at the ramp up to the barn and not driven up it. It was still unclear what had actually pulverized Wilfert’s skull. Kovacs did not mention the meteorite, and Mauritz also remained silent on this point. Bitterle’s research had shown that the severing of a head or the mutilation of a face was a characteristic behavior of mentally ill people or people with serious personality disorders, and that the literature on the subject showed that an astonishingly high proportion of these offenders were sons who felt compelled to annihilate their mothers, something that did not apply in this case, of course. But one could still infer that a considerable amount of energy had gone into the violence, which was expressed not least by its absurd aesthetic. “Aesthetic?” asked Wieck, and Bitterle said, “Yes, aesthetic. Like a damn painting.” Kovacs wrote aesthetic on the board; Wieck shook her head, and all of a sudden Lipp put up his hand like a schoolboy. “I’ve thought of something,” he said. “There was an episode of Father Brown on TV in which someone was murdered by a hammer that had been dropped on his head from a steeple.” None of the others could recall the episode. “Well, I was at the crime scene all of yesterday and I didn’t see any steeple,” Mauritz said, “even though it was Sunday.” Lipp looked a little offended. “I was only saying,” he said.

  In the end Lipp was given the job of asking around in the hunting club and OAP association, the two places where Wilfert often socialized with people outside the family. Bitterle was to check Wilfert’s financial affairs and savings and draft a press release for issue later on in the afternoon. Mauritz announced he was going to look through all available data on tire treads. Then he planned to jump into the car and drive to Salzburg, where one of his aunts had a shop that sold tailoring accessories. She was the right person to answer any questions about buttons.

  Twelve

  It’s snowing. If I look up I can see a hundred thousand million of them. Sometimes a flake lands on my eye. Then I have to blink.

  Beyond the snowdrifts and the thick, gray clouds and the thin, blue clouds and the stratosphere, there is the universe. Geonosis and Coruscant and Naboo and the four suns that shine forever and forever again.

  This is the mission: sit on one of the tree trunks lying next to the wildlife observation center, where they cut down the reeds from a boat in late autumn. Read the newspaper article again and look out at the lake. Feel it penetrating you. You are a tool. That’s what he said—penetrating you—and he kneed me in the ribcage to expel any foreign air from my lungs. I fainted.

  You can’t go out onto the lake from here. The ice is thin and part of it, toward town, beyond the dark observation center building, has disappeared completely. The ducks and graylag geese are gathering at the point where the river flows out of the lake. Two swans pass by from time to time.

  A kilometer to the west they say the ice is twenty centimeters thick. They drilled down and measured it before they set the fireworks off there on New Year’s Eve. We were all there. Dad was in a really good mood, but Mom made a mistake. His clients are his clients, says Daniel, and he can drink as much punch with them as he wants, and she shouldn’t get involved. She did get involved and said that yes, young Grosser was right: a silver Z3 is a nicer car for a woman than a dark-green MG Cabrio. Basically she flirted with young Grosser, which meant that the next day her face looked like a blueberry flan. That’s what my dad said at breakfast the next day, “Your face looks like a blueberry flan.” And later Daniel told me, “BH instead of SI.” Then he punched me because I didn’t know that SI means sexual intercourse. So I thought I deserved it.

  I put the page from the newspaper into a transparent sleeve so it wouldn’t get wet. The sleeve is from my dad’s office, but it’s best he doesn’t know. He goes through phases where he couldn’t care less if you took sleeves from his office, and then at other times he’s not like that at all. You never know which phase he’s going through at any one time. I think that that’s what he means when he talks about his personality. He says that the personality of a successful car dealer is to pretend you’re predictable, whereas actually the opposite is true.

  The headline is not nice: “Town Gripped by Fear.” It hits you hard. Underneath is a large picture of a slope covered in snow, a barn behind—where the body was found, apparently. The article says that it’s not just a simple murder but a monstrous crime that should make everybody afraid. “The victim’s windpipe and artery were slashed with a razor-sharp instrument.” Underlined with a thick red marker. It says the daughter is completely devastated; she can’t understand how someone could have done that to her father, who’d been a kind and gentle man all his life. The whole family is in counseling. “The world is unfair,” Daniel says. “The world couldn’t care less whether you’re a kind and gentle person or not. Inside, for instance, they make you eat shit or they fuck you up the ass, and nobody asks you what you were like before.” Then he pinches my chest hard and twists it until I start screaming. At the end of the article there is a lot of stuff about the lack of a motive, the fact that the man had no money—neither in his wallet nor in his bank account—that his will had been sorted out a long time ago, and that in the hunting club and wherever else he used to go he’d always been a respected and well-loved individual, from which, the paper said, one had to conclude that the murderer must be sick and full of hatred.

  I sit there looking out over the lake. It starts to snow more heavily and I picture a thick, fluffy layer soon forming on the ice, and the snow crystals right at the bottom sinking into the ice and fusing with it.

  To my left, where the dark water begins, the ducks are making a hell of a noise. Some of them disappear into the boathouse and then come out again soon after. There’s a small gap in the bars below the planks inside the boathouse. I’ve no idea if the people at the wildlife observation station are aware of it. The coots, for example, pass through the opening with ease, although the geese can’t
do it anymore and the swans are much too big anyway.

  It was Daniel who gave me the Stanley knife. It’s the middle one of a set of three, it’s got a retractable blade you can fix and a red plastic handle. Special offer, he said, four Euro ninety. But it’s as sharp as an expensive one. Inside it’s just teeming with weapons, he said. You imagine that it’s a safe place, but that’s completely wrong. “If someone presses a blade into your back, you drop your pants there and then, or open your mouth wide or whatever,” he says. Then he shows me what it’s like and he’s right.

  It doesn’t matter whether it’s holiday time or not. During the semester I sit in class and there are certain things I don’t understand. Over the holidays, my dad walks around the apartment five times every morning and Daniel teaches me stuff.

  The ferry only operates from March to October. I imagine them deciding to use an ice breaker so that people can go to Mooshaim and Sankt Christoph in winter as well, and I picture everybody standing on the lake on New Year’s Eve, glasses of sparkling wine in their hands, waiting for the fireworks, when suddenly this huge boat comes up to them with its steel shell and many thousands of horsepower.

  I’m going to put on the cloak and mask and then I’ll be so dark that I won’t stand out against the background. I’ll go over to the boathouse under the cover of the trees. Around the back of it I’ll get the Phillips screwdriver from my backpack and unscrew the padlock fitting from the door. As the boathouse has four windows—two facing south, one east and one west—it’ll be light enough inside, Daniel said. There’ll be two or three plastic dinghies inside. At first the ducks will get a fright and try to escape through the gap in the bars, but as soon as I offer them some white bread they’ll turn back and come over to me. I’ll lay the Stanley knife and warhammer on the main plank, next to the water’s edge. Ducks like white bread, Daniel said. He also said a bit more over to the left-hand side of the neck. If something happens it doesn’t matter; you won’t see any spots on the black cloak.