In recent years, there’s been a lot of ballyhoo about the moon—crimes of passion and how the moon affects your haircut, your love life, and what have you. And how there are more car accidents when there’s a full moon, well, we’ve always known that.
Interesting, though, how these things we’ve always known always turn out to be wrong. Because statistics and that sort of thing have proven: actually fewer car accidents when there’s a full moon because the light’s better. And when you drive an ambulance you don’t even need statistics because your own experience has shown: moon, zero effect. Based on the number of calls, there are other things you’ve felt way more. Let me break it down for you: humidity, ja, high pressure weather system, ja, the Föhn winds, ja, moon, nein.
And the real triggers are in another class altogether, i.e. start of summer vacation, i.e. college rejection letters and teenage suicide, i.e. Danube Isle Fest with all its alcohol-poisoned cadavers. They’ve got nothing to do with a full moon.
But the fact that this year the Danube Isle Fest would fall on a full moon of all things, needless to say, double-threat. Because that way the politicians could blame everything on the full moon again.
And another thing that’s got nothing to do with the full moon. The fact that Brenner—after Angelika and Berti had bandaged up his rib, and he sent the two of them off to bed—couldn’t fall asleep.
“Hello?” Klara finally picked up after he’d let it ring at least ten times.
“Well, aren’t we up late,” Brenner said, taking the bull by the horns, as it were.
“Simon.” Klara breathed a sigh of relief.
“Nobody’s called me that in a long time,” Brenner said, because around EMTs, of course, only last names or nicknames, and Nicole had taken to calling him Brenni, terrible, but such things do happen in this life.
“Are you in one of your sentimental moods again?” She gave a big yawn, and still half-yawning, she said: “Allow me to console you. It’ll all get better after two a.m. Two was always when your sentimental moods peaked.”
“You seem to know your way around them pretty well.”
“I’ve often found myself up at night lately.”
Brenner thought his sentimental mood might be making advances on Klara.
But instead, Klara, rather unsentimental: “So, what do you want?”
“Back when we used to fight, you always thought a good deal of your logic.”
“Compared to yours, it was hardly an art.”
“You always said that music and logic activate the same part of the brain.”
Klara had to laugh. “I think neuroscientists have got a little farther in the meantime. They’d almost have to, judging from the logical development of my own life.”
“You can’t go claiming the opposite when it’s your logic that I need right now,” Brenner said.
“Why do I get the feeling you just need somebody to talk to?”
“Are talking and logic linked, too, I mean, brain-wise?”
“If you’re any example, then, no, not likely,” Klara said, laughing. “But you can come by sometime, and we can talk.”
“It’s just—it’d have to be now.”
“You never could wait,” Klara said, rubbing his nose in it. And frankly, that was a little unfair, because Brenner was actually a very patient person. Too patient, you might say.
But then, when he had to wait three whole minutes outside for a taxi, he nearly hit the roof. But then, the ride went fast, because never is there so little traffic in this city as at two-thirty in the morning.
And thank god, you’ve got to admit. Because as the black Mondeo and the red GTI flew past the taxi, there might’ve been a few deaths if there’d been any traffic.
“Those lunatics!” the taxi driver yelled. “They’re going to smash their own skulls on the next median!”
That was another cause of accidents that as an EMT you saw more prevalently of late. The kamikaze duel between the newly licensed rookie drivers. Because it’d become something of a fad the last couple of years for rookie drivers to race each other in their souped-up vehicles on the empty streets at night. I’m just saying, Golf GTI and tinted windows and spoilers and grills and personalized license plates and Red Bull and, and, and—the laminate’s still cooling on their driver’s licenses.
“Otherwise pretty quiet today, though,” Brenner said, hoping to calm the taxi driver down. Because for a moment he was afraid she might pursue the two lunatics.
“The night before Danube Isle Fest is always quiet.”
“People saving themselves for the big party.” Because Brenner, always a bit of a psychologist.
“But every day there are more and more kamikaze drivers,” the taxi driver said, shaking her head.
“Even though practically every day one of them gets laid up.”
“It doesn’t help.” The taxi driver thumped her steering wheel. “For every one that dies, there are three new ones to take his place. Like with moths, you might be able to kill one, but you can never kill the eggs.”
In Döbling, where Klara lived, it was so quiet that Brenner almost thought better of opening the garden gate. She sure didn’t pay for this house with what she made as a teacher, Brenner thought as she came out to greet him. Because needless to say, envy like that’s almost as tough to get rid of as all the kamikaze drivers.
Klara was normally dressed, though, I mean, not some god-awful millionairess’s leisure suit as the respectable address might’ve suggested. But more like she’d just got home from school. Because nowadays teachers can wear jeans, too, and with Klara it was completely justified, because still a terrific figure.
“You’re looking much better today,” Brenner said, and it really was his honest opinion.
“Two-thirty in the morning’s my best time,” Klara said, with a coy smile.
What Brenner would’ve liked most was just to start right in on his case. But needless to say, out of politeness, he asked about her health first. And as tends to happen when somebody doesn’t really want to say something, it ends up coming out too fast. “What came of the exam?” he asked before he was even through the door.
But Klara took her time showing him in and then offered him a place to sit in her living room before she said: “At my first exam six months ago, the doctor said my chances were ‘fifty-fifty.’ ”
“And in English, no less.”
“Yeah, these days doctors just don’t speak Latin anymore. Actually, he said it in German: Fünfzig Prozent. I just thought fifty-fifty sounded better.”
“Fifty-fifty, like two outlaws taking a fifty-fifty split after robbing a bank.”
“Exactly. As if there’s something to be won in any case. You know, when you’re sick, you’re constantly having to console healthy people.”
“Look who you’re talking to. The sick even have to console the ambulance drivers.”
“Would you like something to drink?”
“I’d like to know what the doctor said at this visit, not the one six months ago.”
“Whisky, maybe?”
“Unbelievable what lushes doctors are,” Brenner said in deliberate misunderstanding so that she’d finally come out with it.
“Ninety percent,” Klara was beaming.
“Alcohol?”
“Chance at recovery.”
“Then you’ll be out robbing banks again in no time,” Brenner said quickly. Even without the whisky, he really had to swallow a few times before he could get anything else out. “All that about two in the morning isn’t true, you know.”
“What about two in the morning?”
“You said on the phone that sentimental moods peak at two, and it all gets better from there.”
“And it does—only gradually. Not instantly, the way you men always imagine everything changing.”
“I see.”
“Out with it. What did you come here for?”
“I’ve had a relapse into some detective work. A murder. And I’m standing all of a millimeter away from the solution, and I can’t see it.”
“Maybe you need to take a step back so that you can see it.” Klara laughed. “I must sound like an old schoolmarm.”
“Easier said than done, taking a step back. You can only take a step back if you know what’s behind you.”
“Maybe it’d be best if you just tell me, so I can solve it all, just like that,” Klara said with a snap of her fingers.
“That’s roughly how I imagined it going, too.”
Then Brenner told her how Bimbo had been strangled with his own gold chain. And the story of Bimbo and Angelika Lanz in the Kellerstüberl the night before his murder. And how the police had arrested old Lanz.
“Well, it’s understandable,” Klara said.
“What about it’s understandable?”
“And what’s not understandable?”
“Why you’ve made it your concern.”
Then Brenner told her how, after the incident with the sandler, Junior tasked him with finding out whether Pro Med was tapping their radio. And he told her how Junior had implied that Brenner might be to blame for Bimbo’s murder. And how the Pro Meddlers had possibly murdered Bimbo out of retaliation for Brenner’s clumsy snooping.
“Pro Med would have to have some real skeletons in the closet to fight back with that kind of brutality, though,” Klara said, delighting in her own cleverness.
And so, Brenner just came out with the whole story, how the brother of the Pro Med chief had got shot just two weeks ago. And how his girlfriend had got shot along with him. And how it was Bimbo of all people who’d been the eyewitness to the deed.
“Now it’s getting complicated,” Klara said.
“That’s just the beginning. Because while I was off investigating Pro Med’s radio, the Pro Med chief was suspecting me of actually investigating him on account of his finances. And the police were suspecting him of being behind the deaths of both his brother and Bimbo.”
And then Brenner disclosed the story that Angelika had just told him a few hours earlier. How Irmi, who’d been accidentally shot, had been the girlfriend of Lungauer, whose eye accidentally got a spike driven into it by Bimbo of all people.
“Accidentally again,” Klara said.
“Accidentally Irmi and accidentally her boyfriend.”
“Do you mean, two accidentallys equals one deliberately?”
Brenner shrugged his shoulders. “Between the two of us, you’re the logician.”
“Well, purely in logical terms, two accidents don’t necessarily indicate intent. But purely in intuitive terms …”
“Can you imagine,” Brenner said, interrupting her intuitive silence, “if the bullet was actually meant for the seemingly innocent bystander?”
“And all Stenzl had to do was move his head like so, and voilà, the motive’s covered up? But what would that mean, then?”
“Exactly. That’s what I’m asking you for. You know I’ve always had a hard time when it comes to concentrating.”
“Would you like some coffee?”
Because old superstition, coffee’s good for the concentration. And the opposite’s true, too. That I can personally attest to.
But the truth is never that simple, yet another important rule. People often come along and curry favor by claiming that the truth is simple. But, take note, the truth is complicated.
As far as coffee goes, for example, what’s true is that drinking coffee is lethal for your concentration. Making coffee, on the other hand, staggeringly good for your concentration. There are so many little handles involved in making a cup of coffee, and that’s the best concentration aid that there is in this world. Because if you don’t drink coffee, generally speaking, you’re not making coffee, either, and you see, there it is: the truth.
Now don’t go thinking that the truth occurred to Klara as she made coffee for the two of them, like some kind of reacquaintance gift to Brenner—or to celebrate her ninety-percent chance at recovery, ta-da, your culprit.
But as they were standing there in the kitchen, and Klara was getting the coffee going, all the sudden she asked: “What’s that you’re whistling?”
“Was I whistling?”
The way she smiled at Brenner gave him goose bumps, which, after a certain stage of manhood, is actually quite unpleasant when you factor in feelings and all. And then she said: “You always did have that habit. I only had to think of the lyrics that went to the tune you were whistling, and I’d know exactly where your shoe was pinching you.”
“Did I do that back in Puntigam, too?”
Klara puckered her lips. Brenner was thinking she was about to give him one of those obliging aren’t-you-precious kisses on the cheek. But instead she just whistled.
“What are you whistling?” he asked. At first he didn’t recognize it because, naturally, she whistled the melody so correctly that it was almost unrecognizable.
And now Klara softly began to sing, her voice a little strained from the treatments: “Come, sweet cross.”
“Come, sweet death,” Brenner corrected her.
But Klara went and fetched a cassette and played it for him, and needless to say: Come, sweet cross. As it turns out, Brenner listened to way too much Jimi Hendrix in his youth and not nearly enough St. Matthew’s Passion.
“You once put that on a tape for me.”
“I know,” Klara smiled.
“And ever since I saw you the other day, the melody hasn’t left my head. When I learned how ill you are—it gave me such a scare. I even tore my apartment upside down looking for that tape.”
“You’d be searching a long time,” Klara grinned. “This is that cassette.” She pointed at the stereo.
Because there are certain things in our lives, which we often work out in such a way that they won’t be as painful as the unadulterated truth. It’s only human, really. Only problem: as time goes by, we actually start to believe in the adulterated version.
Needless to say, after nearly three decades, it came back to Brenner now. That he hadn’t left Klara because of Miss Bazongas. No, Klara had kicked him to the curb. After he’d left behind at her house for the third time the cassette she’d made for him. Which she’d gone to painstaking effort for weeks to put together for him. Because it was a recording of her singing in her choir.
Because to Brenner, Klara’s delusions about Bach had always just been a matter of pretense, i.e. let’s go listen to the St. Matthew’s Passion in my room.
“It’s not the complete St. Matthew’s Passion anyway,” Klara explained. “At the time we only sang selections from it, of course. On ‘O Sacred Head Sore Wounded,’ we even sang all the verses of the medieval poem that aren’t even part of the St. Matthew’s Passion.”
This interested Brenner less now. On the other hand, generous of Klara to divert so elegantly from their awkward history.
When the coffee was ready, Brenner said: “Your Bach’s not going to help me find the murderer, either. And I’ve only got about fourteen hours. Because, by that point, they will have found the Pro Meddlers in the basement of the Golden Heart, and when they do, I’ll be counting my lucky stars they don’t beat me to death with their dicerolling fists.”
“You know what being sick has made me realize?”
“And here I thought you’d be the last sick person to have any realizations,” Brenner said, acting a little crass. “You wouldn’t believe it. When you drive an ambulance, practically all you meet’s philosophers who’ve realized something. How is it that as long as a person’s healthy, he never gets around to thinking?”
“And here I thought you were the person who wanted to find a murderer,” Klara said, getting him back.
She poured two cups of coffee, and they took them back into the living room.
“When the doctor told me about my fifty percent, I gave that number a great deal of thought. Fifty percent. Half. Really quite simple. I remembered a game that I’d made up back when I was still in high school.”
“You came up with this when you were in high school? How’d that go? In life we’re often deceiving ourselves fifty percent of the time or something?”
“That sounds about right for high school. It’s really only during puberty that you’d come up with stuff like that.”
“Or when you revisit puberty at three in the morning.”
“Back then, I often found it to be the case that the people I didn’t like at first were the very ones who ended up becoming my best friends later. And other people who struck me straightaway as—”
“I’d rather not know right now which category I fell under.”
“I became convinced at the time,” she said, ignoring him, “that, at the end of the day, fifty percent of the decisions we make turn out to be just plain wrong. But if only it were fifty-one percent, then basically it’d be wiser for you to always do the opposite of what initially seems right to you.”
“And why haven’t you adhered to this?”
“Why indeed? It was the first illuminating decision that I didn’t allow myself to adhere to even though I wanted to.”
“Life gets complicated.”
“Well, life won’t let itself be tricked. You’ve just got to muddle through all the crap it slings at you.”
You see, a few sips of coffee and already their concentration’s shot to hell. Nevertheless, Brenner and Klara took a stab at the fifty-percent theory, applying it to the murder case and adopting the overall-least-right opposite solution. But they didn’t get much beyond the possibility of Stenzl, in an unparalleled acrobatic feat, nailing himself with a bullet to his own neck.
As Brenner was finally making his way to the door, Klara said: “It’s already dawn.”
“Don’t remind me,” Brenner grumbled.
In parting she gave him one of those obliging aren’t-you-precious kisses on the cheek after all. Which pressed on his rib a little in the process, but at least it helped Brenner not to get too sentimental.
Their parting words, however, could’ve just as easily been kept to themselves, as far as Brenner was concerned: “What ever happened to that nice Jason King mustache of yours?”
And be honest: after all these years, would you like to be reminded of a blond Jason King mustache? Because to tell you the truth, he would’ve impressed even his colleagues at the Rapid Response with that one. But I say, let’s forget about it. After thirty years, even a blond Jason King mustache has got to exceed some statute of limitations.
Brenner decided to walk home, even though it took him nearly an hour. He felt like he wasn’t going to get any sleep now anyway. And so a walk home at the break of day, well, there’s something to be said for that, too.
“Don’t remind me,” he said, half to himself, half to the pale full moon.
But before anything could dawn on Brenner, two people would have to die first.
It’s often said that the city of Vienna is a particularly good place to die. And I don’t doubt that. Me personally, though, I happen to think Vienna is a particularly good place to go for a walk. Especially in these parts of the city, where it’s a bit hilly. That way, you can take turns, straining this muscle first, then that one, so you don’t get tired as fast as you do when it’s flat.
And needless to say, it was pleasant for Brenner to be walking along Döblinger’s hilly streets at four-thirty in the morning. It almost seemed to him as if the magnificent houses were the ones walking past him, and he was a little surprised that in this fair climate should grow such thorny people as Frau Rupprechter.
Forty-five minutes later, he arrived back at his apartment, his legs sore, his head thrumming, and his rib aching.
He would’ve liked to take a shower, but with the bandage around his chest, no sooner did he turn the faucet on than he’d already given up. Just washed up a little, had a bite of breakfast, and by seven, he was sitting back in the crew room. Within moments, the alarm bell was going off, and somehow it all seemed perfectly normal to him.
And I don’t know how the human brain functions here, either, if coming into contact with related elements actually does have an enhancing effect. Just like it’s rumored time and again that boxers dope up with bull’s blood and long distance runners with reindeer blood. Or if that, too, is just full-moon talk.
Two eighteen-year-old kamikaze racers with the vanity plates POLE I and ELVIS I had staged a duel in the middle of three lanes of commuter traffic on the stretch from Westbahnhof to Schlachthausgasse. The black Audi Quattro didn’t come any closer to crossing the finish line than the red Alfa. Because first the Audi Quattro with the license plate Elvis I skidded out into the Gaudenzdorf median and then the red Alfa plowed full-speed into the Quattro.
Unbelievable, though! As Brenner was cleaning the brains of the two eighteen-year-olds off of the median, suddenly, something in his own brain stirred.