Instead he just pulled out the photo that Knoll had given him. “Was this your underage patient?”
The Frau Doctor looked at Brenner as if he were Knoll himself.
“Do you know where she lives?” Brenner asked smoothly.
“Where did you get that photo?”
Brenner shook his head. “Surely you have her address somewhere.”
“You really don’t get it! I don’t want you to find this girl. This isn’t about her.”
“So where does she live?”
Approximately one centimeter before a jingling streetcar crossed the tracks, the doctor yanked on the steering wheel and came to a stop at an empty taxi stand in the adjacent lane. She gave Brenner a look as if to say, the entire conversation had just been sadistic foreplay leading up to this second when she was going to eat him alive, the man who’d managed to misplace her child.
“I get it, you don’t want to put your patient in a difficult position. That it’s purely about Knoll for you. But the direct route doesn’t always get you anywhere,” Brenner explained to her, and shocked himself by how consistent this was with the truth according to Knoll. “Often it’s only through the detours. Our professions aren’t so different on this score. Doctors ask, too, whether you have cold toes at night when you go to them because of a headache. And those are opposite ends of the body.”
“Which you don’t know everything about.”
“That the head’s on the opposite end of the body than the toes, even non-doctors know that.”
But the next moment nearly saw Brenner and the Frau Doctor become Vienna’s latest criminal case. Because a furious taxi driver pounded on the windshield, and if Brenner hadn’t immediately locked the doors from the passenger seat, everything would have been over, guaranteed. He suddenly had an inkling of what Knoll’s last seconds must have been like, because unfortunately the passenger-side window was open a crack, and the atmosphere inside the car changed because of the killer cabbie, as if the entire car were sinking into a cesspit.
Interesting, though: the attack was good for the conversation, because as they drove off in a hurry, their conversation popped back into gear.
“I don’t know the girl’s address. I don’t keep any records of my crimes.”
“And she doesn’t have a name, either?”
“I only really know her first name. And even that she told me in an immigrant’s Viennese. How the kids talk who are born here but speak another language at home.”
“Oida! Oida! Oida! Oida! Go shit I say!” Brenner thought he could impress the Frau Doctor with how well he could imitate this throat malady. Maybe elicit a small smile in the midst of a desperate situation.
“You do that very well,” she said, but not with a smile; no, so coolly that despite the 77-degree weather, the windshield-washing fluid would’ve frozen, guaranteed, had he not just refilled the antifreeze a few days ago. Under better circumstances an even wittier reply would have come to him. But stricken as he was, he only heard hurtfulness in her remark. He only detected from it that she counted him among them, her staff; that he was the sort who, right from the outset, never had a chance in his life with someone like the Frau Doctor, because of education, because of age, because of manners, because of language, because of money, because of everything.
“And her first name was probably fake, too,” she continued. One thing you can’t forget: for her, the remark had been no big deal. She really did have other concerns. “Maybe it was just a nickname: Sunny.”
“Probably short for Susanna,” Brenner said, because he couldn’t help but think of the Susanna who’d once won the grand prize at the Linzer police department’s Christmas raffle, believe it or not, a ski weekend in Hintersoder for two, and no one was allowed to call her Susi-only Sunny.
“Short for Susanna,” the doctor replied, “I don’t think so. Susanna isn’t a particularly common name among immigrant girls. I think it’s more likely English.”
And Brenner, with particularly good pronunciation, “The sunny side of the street.” Not sung, of course, just spoken.
“Sunny side,” the doctor repeated pensively, as though she had to think about what it could possibly mean.
“I once paid for a young woman’s abortion, too,” Brenner began, hoping that with this story he’d get somewhere with the Frau Doctor yet. “In my police academy days. Her name was Hansi, short for Johanna.”
“Aha.”
“It was still illegal at the time, so she drove all the way to Amsterdam. I paid for all of it. Train, hotel, abortion.”
“And you went with her?”
“No, I didn’t have enough money. Two train tickets, then staying overnight, plus meals on top of that. But in hindsight I have to say, it would’ve been cheaper if I had gone. Because she changed her mind in Amsterdam.”
“She discovered herself with drugs instead.”
“Not drugs, exactly-hashish. And after a fun week she returned without the abortion.”
“So you’re a father?”
“Was.”
The doctor looked at him with utter sympathy, and Brenner saw the old Frau Doctor in her again, the one who was always personable and friendly.
“Two years she let me pay alimony, but then the finance director in Graz married her. She was the type that men chased after. Although to be honest, I have to say, I only liked her from the side. But the finance director took her nonetheless.”
“Maybe he liked her from the front, too.”
“No, I meant he married her in spite of the kid. And after the wedding she admitted that the child hadn’t been mine at all, but another classmate’s from the police academy. He probably paid for the abortion, too. But the alimony, only me, because my classmate died on the Matterhorn before the child was born.”
Seventy-four hours after her daughter’s disappearance, the Frau Doctor began to cry because of this story. Brenner apologized for mentioning his classmate’s death. But she said it was okay, her nerves were just fried, and really she should be the one to apologize for burdening him with her story. And you see, that’s another similarity between the medical profession and the detective profession. Because just like patients will often change their minds in the waiting room, my tooth doesn’t hurt after all, so too did Helena’s mother lose her courage, and instead of wanting any more help from Brenner, she just wanted to be rid of him as soon as possible.
Brenner felt so sorry for her that up until the moment when he got out of the car, he’d been considering whether to betray every shred of common detective sense and tell her that Knoll was dead. And you see, that was exactly the wrong question. Because really he should have been asking himself why her voice changed so suddenly, why she revoked her trust in him when he told her the story about the police academy. If he’d just tugged on these flimsy strings, the entire solution probably would have presented itself, and five people wouldn’t have had to die.
But maybe the time simply wasn’t ripe yet, seventy-four hours after the disappearance. Because one thing you can’t forget: the Zone of Transparency doesn’t tear open until the fifth day, i.e., one hundred hours, at the very earliest.
CHAPTER 15
Between the seventy-fourth and the eighty-eighth hours, Brenner did some first-rate investigative work that was never fully appreciated afterward. It all got overshadowed by the next day’s madness. Obviously, with a development like this, the detail work gets lost. The carpenter can’t bid personal farewell to every wood shaving with a thank-you speech for the top-notch collaboration, and once a crime really gets escalating, when a murder is paid a visit by its little children, the subsequent murders, then a detective can’t be praised for everything that he did right.
But because everyone glossed right over it, I’d like to at least touch on it briefly. I have to say, it was brilliant how Brenner spearheaded the search for the Yugo-girl. For Sunny. He achieved peak detective form there, and there’s only one thing to be said: hats off.