“What?”
“Are you going to work for me?”
“That would look great to the Frau Doctor,” Brenner said helplessly, and gestured to the waitress for the bill.
“Enough already!” Knoll yelled, a bit frazzled, and turned his cell phone off in mid-ring. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he sighed, “but you can’t imagine what kind of an uproar my people are in. They’re being called kidnappers and murderers in broad daylight.”
“At least they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.”
Brenner simply couldn’t resist that one. But Knoll dismissed it as if it were nothing. “You’re an ex-cop, you know the first thing that gets asked after a crime: who’s profiting from it?”
“I’m wondering how you know that I used to be a cop.”
Because, so it goes. Brenner was fairly certain at first that Knoll wasn’t behind the kidnapping. And this attempt to breed suspicion made Brenner mistrustful all over again.
Knoll just looked at him sympathetically, though. “You wonder why I know something about your past, but you’re confident that I would go and kidnap a child?”
“You threatened the Frau Doctor that you’d take her child away.”
Knoll hesitated a moment, and then his seductive smile climbed from deep within him and stopped just before reaching his lips. “A threat made without any witnesses can be easily refuted. But I want to be frank with you. I think you’re a good person. Truly, it happened in a moment of anger. I said something to Frau Doctor Kressdorf that one shouldn’t say. But I said it differently. I didn’t say anything about myself. I asked her whether she wasn’t afraid that the good lord, from whom she’d taken so many children, might take her child away, too, some day.”
“It’s the same thing,” Brenner protested.
At that moment, several of the screens hopped from snooker to dog racing.
“Good lord!” Knoll said once more. “Not to me. First of all, I’m no kidnapper, and second, I’m not stupid.”
“And the good lord is stupid, or what?”
When they were suspended in slow motion, you could see how the muscular bodies of the dogs deformed out of sheer centrifugal force. Their flews were blown straight back and almost didn’t catch up with their heads, their saliva flew with the bets into the sand, and Brenner wished that time would stand still in this lovely twilight created by the rainy day and the flat screens, because he had the feeling that there was no stopping now, and that everything had already been decided long before the first dog crossed the finish line.
“Listen to me: this kidnapping doesn’t benefit me in any way.”
“Unless the kidnappers don’t make contact, and the Frau Doctor shuts down the clinic because it’s her last hope for her child to turn up again.”
By all appearances, Brenner spoke objectively. His eyes were glued to the screen and his words clung to his sense of reason. But the worm had worked its way in, he noticed it right away. Because the suspicion aroused by Knoll began to nag at him.
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Knoll said. “It used to look like we’d be the ones who’d shut down under public pressure and have to leave.”
Brenner nodded in order to act like he was listening to Knoll. To his arguments. But he was only really listening to the worm that nagged at him.
“Up till now the kidnapping’s only helped the clinic,” Knoll blathered on. “Police protection round the clock. Public opinion wholeheartedly against us.”
But while the dogs crawled breakneck around the bend and somersaulted over each other in slow motion, as if that in itself were the contest, Brenner could only think about what Knoll had said before. About the good lord. The good lord might have personally taken Helena. And a terrible fear took hold of Brenner that he might possibly have an almighty thug as an opponent.
“They just want to delay my terminating their lease. Until their new Super Practice in MegaLand is finished,” Knoll said.
“Why MegaLand?” Like a track-standing cyclist trying to maintain his balance, who, at the last moment before falling over, rescues himself with the push of a pedal, Brenner rescued himself back into the conversation again. “It’s going to be a recreational park. Golf course, swimming pool, shops, movie theater, that kind of thing.”
“Haven’t you ever noticed how private practices are popping up in retail centers these days? The dental clinic in the train station, the cosmetic surgeon at the mall.”
“Sure, I’ve noticed the dental clinic.”
“And an abortion between shopping and bowling at MegaLand, it all fits smartly together. Baby Be Gone in designer ambience. With a ten-percent-off coupon for the next time.”
Brenner was almost relieved to see Knoll’s eyes light up with zeal now. Suddenly, he was back on familiar turf with the pro-life boss. Unbelievable, though, how easily a fanatic like that can rattle you when you’re feeling weak and running around with an enormous amount of guilt.
“ Baby Be Gone. You’re pretty cynical.”
“I’m not cynical. The people responsible for such a thing are cynical. Mega-Abortion-Land, financed by a million children’s deaths.”
“Alright, that’s enough.” Things were slowly turning sour for Brenner.
“Something like this has to be professionally branded so that it sells. Mega-Abortion-Land,” Knoll said with that amused look again. “Maybe I should go into business with them and sell them the name.” He was getting carried away by vanity now, and Brenner hoped he might make a decisive slip. “At her new super clinic in MegaLand she’ll have to triple her earnings in order to recoup the costs. But I don’t want to bother you with our fanaticism.”
Knoll pronounced “fanaticism” as if he’d had some kind of tainted alphabet soup for breakfast that only had quotation marks in it, which were gurgling up inside him at this very moment. “Or might I still convince an old workhorse like you of the miracle of life?”
“I’ve even looked at the brochures that your people hand out in front of the clinic. Nature sure puts on a show.”
“A show!” Knoll repeated, scornfully.
Brenner had drawn out the word “show” in order to provoke Knoll. “Miracle” would have worked, too, because back when the brochure fell into his hands, he’d thought to himself: hats off to nature. It wasn’t new to him, of course, what happens behind the scenes during those nine months, but a while indeed since he’d first applied himself to the subject back home in Puntigam, and at that time, of course, he’d only been interested in the procreative part, or better yet, on preventing new life.
“It’s only at a certain age that you can fully appreciate nature,” Brenner formulated, a compromise, as it were. “It’s true, though: your fanatic views do nothing for me. I saw too many fully grown deaths when I was on the force-you can’t be looking out for a bunch of cells, too.”
“So when does life begin for you, if I may ask?”
Brenner wanted to steer the conversation gradually in another direction, but he had to give Knoll a quick answer. “Where I’m from, in Puntigam-”
“You’re from Puntigam? Where the beer’s from?”
You see, that really got Knoll smiling, he was happy to actually meet someone from Puntigam.
“Exactly. In Puntigam, there was an old saying that children were told. Before you were born, you were just flying around with the gnats.”
“I know that one, too. You were just flying around with the gnats. We used to say that as children, too.”
“That’s a good enough explanation for me,” Brenner said. “That you fly with the gnats before-and maybe you fly with the gnats again afterward, too. I think it’s a good solution. For logistical reasons alone. That’s why I don’t understand why you’d waste this short stopover arguing about life. When you consider how short the time is compared to the gnats’ time.”
“You have that worked out quite comfortably. And otherwise, there’s nothing else that interests you about life?”
“I’m interested in what you want from me.”
“I want you to find the girl for me.”