By the end of his shift, Brenner had completely forgot about the incident at Franz Josef Station. He couldn’t have known just how often in the coming days he’d find himself still thinking about that snatched-up sandler. Maybe it was a premonition somehow that he was sitting in his apartment as cranky as he was this evening.
He watched TV till nine, and then he began deliberations. I don’t mean to say: melancholic, just a little, you know, like how his grandmother always used to say to him, very stern: “This is why you shouldn’t brood!”
Now, too, as he sat in his apartment, he could’ve used someone to give him a shake and remind him: “You shouldn’t brood!”
But with honest-to-goodness brooding, you don’t typically brood over something concrete. Brooding for the sake of brooding, as it were. Tonight, though, Brenner was brooding over whether he should still go down to the Kellerstüberl for a beer or not.
It goes without saying, though, when you’ve been brooding over a dilemma like this for three hours, you’re pretty close to certified brooding. He could see from his apartment that the lights were still on in the bar down in the basement below the crew room. Every night there were poker games down there, and his co-workers often played for money, don’t even ask. The element of risk from working in emergency services gets so ingrained that, even after your shift ends, you still need it.
But instead of going down to the Kellerstüberl, he brooded his way back to the first time he’d ever been in a Kellerstüberl. Because one thing you can’t forget: When Brenner was a kid, the War still wasn’t all that long ago. People were just glad to have a roof over their heads. Then came the years when people were putting in new heating systems. And then, the years when everybody was getting a new bathroom installed. And then, the years when everybody was getting new furniture. And then, the years when everybody was getting a new kitchen put in. And then came the years when everybody had everything.
And then came the year—I remember it exactly, 1968, when the Olympic Games were in Grenoble—when everybody was building a bar in their basement, what we call a Kellerstüberl.
Back then, Brenner would give his grandfather a hand in his carpentry workshop during school vacations. And on this particular vacation, they had to dress up the ceilings of ten Kellerstüberls with wood paneling. Every Kellerstüberl had its own character somehow, and somehow every Kellerstüberl was exactly the same. An overstuffed L-shaped sectional, a black coffee table. A fold-out bar with interior lights, full of cheap whisky and cognac. A lit-up Venetian gondola. A turntable with three Elvis records, or, for my part, “Take the A-Train.” And a wood-paneled ceiling with recessed lighting.
And Brenner, needless to say, of a certain age at the time. Because in the winter of 1968, Brenner was, hold on, a good seventeen years old. All I’ll say is this: wood paneling wasn’t the only thing he nailed in the various Kellerstüberls of his summer vacation. Girls, too, so to speak. But enough about that. What it comes down to is this: You shouldn’t brood!
At midnight Brenner finally realized this, too. But a bad sign must’ve been hanging over him today. Because instead of just going to sleep and putting an end to his bad day, he went down to the Kellerstüberl anyway.
When he first started working here, he’d often pop down for a beer. But ever since Bimbo and Munz made it into the Kronenzeitung, things had got a little trying with his co-workers. I don’t mean to say megalomania, but, well, get a load of this.
Surely you’re familiar with how the newspapers are always taking these photos where people are pointing off in some direction. Let’s say somebody rescues a kid out of some raging torrent of a river. Then, some press photographer goes and says to the brave mensch: Stand over there and point at the river. And beneath the photo it says: “The brave child rescuer points to the treacherous rapids from which he rescued the child.” Or somebody sees a UFO, and he points to the place where he saw the UFO. Or somebody breaks into your house, and you point to the empty place where, until recently, your entertainment center once stood.
No other examples are coming to me now, but I think you get the general idea. And that’s exactly how Bimbo and Hansi Munz were pointing at Rosi’s stand outside Vienna General in the newspaper, where the director of the Vienna blood bank was so savagely shot that it took his girlfriend Irmi right with him.
“AMBULANCE ARRIVES WITHIN SECONDS—TOO LATE” was the headline. And beneath the photo it said: “First Responders Big and Munz point to the place where Leo Stenzl and his paramour were struck down.”
When you read something like that in the newspaper, you might well be troubled by the kinds of things that go on in the world. But you don’t think about what a photo like that can do to a person like Bimbo.
Bimbo immediately exchanged his Ray-Bans for a pair of mirrored sunglasses: “So that my groupies out on the streets don’t rip me right out of my vehicle,” he was constantly saying. Or: “So that those lusty nurses over at the trauma center don’t start nibbling at me before they’ve even stuffed their patients into the elevator.” Doesn’t matter, though, what Bimbo said—ever since his photo appeared in the Kronenzeitung, he just said it twice as loud as he used to. And he never used to be the quietest, either.
You’re going to say, Maybe Brenner was just jealous of Bimbo’s fame. But I’ve got to tell you, save the psychologizing for somebody else.
When, shortly before midnight, Brenner opened the door to the Kellerstüberl, he was almost sorry that he’d left his apartment. Because the curtain of haze that met him, that was no joke. Unbelievable how six, seven EMTs could produce a haze like that.
The haze wasn’t just from the cigarettes, though. Although it was about as smoky as a high school bathroom in there. And it wasn’t just the beer haze, either, even though all three tables were overflowing with empty and half-full beer bottles. The Kellerstüberl was just way too small for the Rapid Response Center. Two average-sized rounds of poker, and it was already crowded. And when you’ve got six men in there, smoking for hours on end, and seven men drinking—because Hansi Munz didn’t smoke—you’d like to think that’s reason enough for there to be a haze.
And it would’ve been enough, too—it would’ve been three times enough. But that wasn’t even all of it.
You see, we didn’t used to know this, but today we do. About the hormones. The sexual ones. There’s a hormone all its own for that—that nature gave us, I mean—and there’s nothing inherently bad about it, either. And the men have got their own and the women have got their own.
The men’s one is called testosterone, technical term, as it were, but the EMTs know their way around technical terms a little. Because, courses and training, the works. But you don’t actually have to know your way around technical terms—anybody that set foot in the Kellerstüberl at that moment would’ve had to struggle to keep from passing out. Because the air was practically held together by testosterone.
Back to the science again: when the man is sexually en route, so to speak, his body just pumps out this hormone. And when you’ve got seven men en route—because Hansi Munz, although he didn’t smoke, testosterone nonetheless—and it’s just a small room, like it was in the Kellerstüberl, then—that’s a smell I don’t want to describe in any detail.
Now, Why the smell? you’re asking yourself.
I said: six men were smoking and one was not. But I haven’t even got to the feminine side yet. Because there was also a woman there. Old Lanz’s daughter, sitting right in the thick of all these EMTs, and you could tell right away that she already had a few beers in her.
Angelika still lived with her father, even though she was fast approaching twenty-five. But her mother died when she was sixteen, and ever since then, she’s run the household a bit for her father.
But don’t go thinking Angelika was a child of grief. Quite the opposite. Because she was the only young, unmarried woman living at the Rapid Response Center. And surrounded by any number of men, young and athletic and in uniform and everything. Needless to say, Angelika got a little curious, too, now and then, about what’s under that uniform.
But that’s how people are. You appreciate what’s off in the distance more than you do what’s under your nose. Now, over the past few years, Angelika had sampled her way through the ranks of the Vienna Rapid Response a bit, but it was only six months ago that she truly fell in love—with the boss of Pro Med Vienna of all people!
Needless to say, major hullabaloo among the Rapid Responders, but before the rumor ever really got off the ground, it was already over between Angelika and the Pro Meddler, and at least that way, she didn’t have to move out of the Rapid Response Center.
For a few months there, Angelika had been looking as if god knows what kind of fish had slipped through her fingers, but a few days ago, she was seen talking to Bimbo for an hour and a half down in the courtyard, and now here she is, first time back down in the Kellerstüberl again.
Her hair, bleached and ruined by some beauty-shop butcher, seemed to have awoken to new life—I don’t know if it was due to the witching hour or the recessed lighting or the hormones or Bimbo, who happened to be giving her a light with his Zippo just now.
“Suck!” Bimbo roared at Daughter Lanz, as he held a humongous flame to her that nearly sent Angelika’s straw-dry mane up in flames. “Suck! Don’t blow, Angelika!”
But Angelika Lanz already knew that when it comes to cigarettes, you’ve got to inhale, because she’d chain-smoked her way through the last ten years. And what Bimbo explained to her next, she’d also already heard hundreds of times:
“That’s why they’re called suckerettes.” This was Bimbo, mind you. Anyway, she played along, inhaling a deep lungful so that the tip of the cigarette glowed orange like a Roman candle.
“Suck! Don’t blow, Angelika,” Bimbo said again, but provocatively quiet for how drunk he was now.
“Sure,” Angelika answered softly and poured a little beer into her half-empty glass.
“What do you mean, ‘sure’?” Bimbo asked. “Are you gonna give me a cigarette, too?”
“Sure.” Angelika held out her pack of Kims to him. Bimbo took a good look around, smirking, as he took one of her chick-cigarettes. Then he placed his Zippo on the coffee table in front of Angelika: “Do you have a light?”
“Sure.” Angelika took the lighter carefully in her hand, so as not to break off one of her five-centimeter-long nails, and gave Bimbo a light with his own lighter. “Suck, don’t blow, Bimbo,” Angelika said.
Now, of course. One word begets the other.
And alcohol involved. Its disinhibiting effect’s well documented. Although you’re often sorry the next day and would like not to be reminded of it.
But Brenner sure remembered every detail the next morning. How Angelika took Bimbo at his word, right then and there before his assembled crew. How she made Bimbo glow like the orange tip of a cigarette in front of her father’s raucous co-workers, who cheered her on like she was a striker in the Bundesliga.
What I don’t know is if Angelika still remembered it all the next morning, or if she was sorry. After all, she lived in the same place as the very men who, for five whole minutes, transformed the Kellerstüberl into a hornet’s nest.
All I know is this: Bimbo sure as hell wasn’t sorry, because he was the big hero the next day. He sat in the crew room, happy as a pig in muck, rehashing his escapades from the night before with a few co-workers.
When old Lanz came in, at first they all fell silent. But then, Lanz lit a cigarette.
And then, needless to say, Bimbo: “Suck! Don’t blow, old man!”
And then, the others completely lost it. You’d have thought the entire incident had been suppressed for millennia only to bust forth here and now in the presence of this handful of EMTs. That’s how amusing Bimbo’s remark was.
Old Lanz’s face was burning, almost as red as Bimbo’s the night before, when Angelika had taught him how to smoke.
And as Hansi Munz and the others proceeded to make ever more explicit insinuations as to what kind of a masterpiece Daughter Lanz had performed on Bimbo while completely drunk the night before, Lanz simply walked out and finished his cigarette in the courtyard. Before old Lanz was safely out of earshot, though, Munz quickly crunched the numbers for Bimbo: “For that, you would’ve had to shell out at least three thousand schillings with a professional.”
“At least,” Bimbo crowed. “And even then—nowhere near as good as with Lanzette.”
Now, Brenner had been on the police force for nineteen years. And needless to say, you experience things along these same lines there, too. I don’t want to sugarcoat anything now. You know that old chestnut, “Call the cops! A woman’s been raped—oops, too late, they’re already here.” Well, it often checked out.
Or maybe it wasn’t a chestnut so much as a jestnut that the police would sometimes say in and among their own ranks. And I don’t even know if they still say it today now that all the nice old adages have wound up forgotten. That’s just the natural course of things, though, you can’t be old-fashioned and accentuating the negative all the time.
But every jestnut contains a kernel of seriousness. And there’ve been a few cases already that I’d rather not speak of. For your protection more than mine. And yet, you’ve got to admit: compared to the EMTs, Brenner’s colleagues on the force were real mensches.
But Brenner didn’t have much time to give this any thought now. The bell went off, and he was up and hoofing it past Lanz, who was just putting his cigarette out on the windowsill. And from that alone you could tell that old Lanz really wasn’t doing too well. Because, for whatever reason, the windowsills in the courtyard were sacred to Junior. And if he had seen that, don’t even ask.
As he ran, Brenner noticed that he was still feeling last night’s Kellerstüberl antics. But, old saying, nothing to do but bite on through! Join the fun, i.e. join the 770. And watch out that you don’t puke in your own vehicle. Start the engine, shift into drive, two-way radio:
“Seven-seventy headed out.”
“Seven-seventy copy. Proceed with lights and sirens to Per-Albin-Hansson-Siedlung. Fourteen! Small child to the eye clinic. Loctite superglue.”
“Copy.”
Brenner’s partner today was Hansi Munz. And needless to say, whoever’s not driving’s manning the radio.
“Up and at ’em, gentlemen!” fat Nuttinger said, having a bit of fun at their expense over the radio now. Because he knew that Brenner and Munz had been there at the Kellerstüberl, too, last night.
“Kiss my ass,” Munz replied. But needless to say, he wasn’t pressing the speak-button on the microphone anymore.
Just as they were delivering the kid who’d glued his eyes shut to the clinic, the next run was already coming in over the radio, a dialysis patient, and then a diabetic shock, and then a motorcycle accident, and by the time they returned to the station, it was already three-thirty in the afternoon.
Their colleagues in the crew room, though, weren’t looking as cheery as they had that morning. Because one after another, Junior was summoning all parties involved in the Kellerstüberl incident the night before to his office. And it just so happened to be Munz’s turn now.
While Brenner waited out in the hallway because he was up next, Lil’ Berti sidled up to him, grinning: “You were there, too, last night, eh?”
“What is this, kindergarten? Where you’ve got to answer for every little orgy?”
“Might as well be. The others have all come out of Junior’s office acting awfully sheepish and quiet.”
“Even Bimbo?”
“When Bimbo was in there, Junior was shouting so loud that you could make out nearly every word from the crew room.”
“All because of Angelika? Since when is Junior such a moralist?”
“Less because of Angelika. More because of Bimbo. Little by little, he’s just been getting too cocky for Junior.”
“Now, all the sudden?”
“Ever since he was in the newspaper. Bimbo just can’t be stopped anymore. A couple of nurses in the geriatric ward have already filed a complaint about him.”
“Is he snagging up seniors now?”
“It’s the patients that are geriatric—not the nurses.”
And seconds later, over the intercom came: “Herr Brenner, to the chief’s office, please.”
Munz ran into him on the stairs: “Have fun,” he said, his vocal chords wobbling.
But when Brenner walked into the boss’s office, big surprise.
Junior didn’t bite his head off one bit. Quite the opposite. He even offered him a seat—and so politely that you’d have thought Brenner was one of the five bearers of the golden responder badge. Because the silver responder badges are for EMTs, but golden—for paramedics only, and if you knew that a paramedic’s ambulance is nothing more than an operating room on wheels, you’d start to grasp why you can count the number of living organ donors on one hand.
A few framed photos were hanging on the walls behind Junior, in which his father could be seen with various prominent people. The old man had been dead three years already, but it probably would’ve seemed disrespectful for Junior to swap the photos out for some of his own.
Even the pope was in one, from his trip to Vienna a few years ago when he blessed the ambulances. The pope had a little dust on his lips, but not because he’d kissed the runway at Schwechater airport, but because the glass in the frame hadn’t been dusted in some time. You could tell from the man standing next to the pope. He also had dust on his face. But dust or no dust: you’ve never seen such a proud, contented smile as that of the old Rapid Response boss at the papal blessing of his fleet.
From some of the older drivers’ stories and from Frau Aigner in accounting, Brenner knew that the old man had been a real you-know-what. How best to explain it? You’ve got to picture him a little like those Japanese. Who after fifty years in the jungle still refuse to believe that World War II is over. That’s how the old man upheld his militarism at the EMS. Roll call, commanding tone of voice, the works. And if you don’t have black socks on with your uniform: death penalty.
That’s just an expression among the drivers for when, as a disciplinary measure, you get dispatched to a week of blood-donor duty out in the provinces—and it remains the most feared death penalty even today. But these days you only get it for severe violations, like when the shop boss overlooked a broken tailpipe on the 590 a couple weeks ago, and the exhaust found its way in to the patient in the back of the box. Or the DUI two years ago, where Hansi Munz didn’t properly close the sliding door, and then, on the on-ramp to the autobahn, he lost a wheelchair—together with its patient—but Munz, in his stupor, didn’t notice and kept on driving. The patient, thank god, dead on the spot, but Hansi Munz, needless to say, banished to the Waldviertel, one whole week, blood donations. But like I said: with the old man you’d have got that for a pair of white socks.
On the face of things, Junior was the spitting image of his old man. Except that the old man didn’t have a mustache. And Junior’s mustache was one of those sharp wedges that you could’ve uncapped your beer bottle on at any given moment.
You’d like to think a classic cop-stache like that wouldn’t seem all that unusual to an ex-cop like Brenner. But given the resemblance between father and son, suddenly Junior’s mustache wedge looked to Brenner like it’d been glued on. And once it seems like a person’s mustache has been glued on, it’s only a matter of time before their character comes to seem a little glued on, too, i.e. one big boss performance.
And so Brenner starts in on the profile now: voice too confident, gaze too steely, gait too swaggering. And the way he’d just cleaned house, of course, too sweeping.
But I guess Brenner just wanted to trot out his psychology know-how a little. Because the old man in the photos, well—he let it go. Although I have to admit, next to the pope, he almost looked more papal than the pope himself.
And he even cut a good figure next to the mayor of Vienna. Well, not next to the current mayor, who anybody’d cut a good figure next to. Next to the old mayor, though, him with the wife. You know, back when that hussy from the Prater was going as the mayor’s wife for a while.
Junior noticed that Brenner was looking at the photos, and promptly said: “As a charitable organization, we constantly find ourselves perched in the public eye. We simply can’t afford such escapades.”
Brenner just nodded silently. He still thought Junior was talking about the whole incident at the Kellerstüberl.
“We’ve got enough problems as it is,” Junior said now, as if by “we” he meant Junior and Brenner, and it was all them others that were the problem. After each sentence, Junior always looked back up at the ceiling, a strange habit, and Frau Aigner from accounting once told Brenner that Junior had adopted the gesture from his old man.
But you see, with things like this, it’s all in the details. With the old man, maybe it’d looked statesmanlike. Brenner imagined his widespread hands touching only at the fingertips, while he read off some message like he was the Austrian chancellor.
With Junior, though, the opposite effect. Because he just looked like a bomber pilot in peak physical condition with a wedge for a mustache—or at least for as long as his head was bowed and he was looking up at you from below. But when you’ve got a cop-stache like his and you lift your head up, the person sitting across from you sees your mustache from below. Instead of smart mustachioed angles, all the sudden you’re seeing thousands of hair follicles like on a broom. And a mustache from below, needless to say, always a sign of weakness.
“Will you join me for a glass of cognac?”
“I’ve still got to drive today.”
Because A of all, Brenner had never drunk cognac before anyway, and B of all, trick question, of course.
“You won’t be driving much more today,” Junior said, glancing at his aviator’s watch, and then he conjured two glasses and a bottle of cognac atop his desk. He poured and held his glass out to Brenner’s for a toast: “Zum Wohl.”
Christ Almighty! There’s nothing worse than when your boss wants to fraternize with you. And you know for a fact that he’s trying to accomplish something by it, but he thinks you’re too stupid to notice.
“I heard that Pro Med pinched an unconscious man right out from under you at the train station the other day.”
“On account of the S-code, we didn’t drive lights-and-sirens. And by the time we got there, he was already gone.”
“You’re not at fault,” Junior said, interrupting Brenner’s defense. “But this whole issue with Pro Med’s getting worse and worse.”
“I’ve heard that something like this has happened a few times already.”
“Yes, it’s happening more and more that they’re stealing our injured right out from under us. Those are the methods of a robber baron.”
Brenner didn’t say anything to that.
“Now, I ask you, how is this possible?”
Junior looked up at the heavens and waited for a reply. But the heavens didn’t say anything. And Brenner didn’t say anything, either.
“You don’t want to say it, but you know that there’s only one explanation for this. You were, after all, a detective.”
Brenner didn’t say anything.
“Pro Med’s tapping our radio,” Junior said, snatching the answer right out from under him with an artfully furrowed brow.
Brenner had the feeling like he was expected to say something again now. But at the same time, his Latin teacher from Puntigam High appeared to him. “Si tacuisses, philosophus mantises!” the professor used to bark at every opportunity, roughly translated: Silence is golden. Because he used to have a good post at the Gestapo and now he was just a Latin teacher, making the window panes rattle all day long by demanding silence.
But Brenner had already said it—it’d just slipped out. Three times he’d remained silent and withheld the detective’s stock phrase. But the fourth time he took Junior’s bait with the story about the radio, and he said:
“Is there any proof?”
And you see, you should never overestimate a sign of weakness. Because Junior looked up at the heavens and, with a sympathetic mustache-smile, he said: “That’s what I’d like for you to find out, Brenner.”