Anyways, Martin was prattling out his endless reports, and the computer was diligently taking everything down. Impressive technology. Of course, a proper soccer match would’ve held my attention more, and longer, but no one seemed to be using a computer for anything even remotely interesting in this office building. No softcore porn on the Internet, no hot chats with anonymous representatives of large religious communities, and no gambling. Not even harmless things like flight simulators or car racing. Just reports, reports, reports. So I soon lost interest and started cruising around the offices aimlessly, wiling away the time and finding my passive existence somewhat bleak. Sure, I was able to take a look around in the women’s bathroom and stare at the women’s panties without them noticing anything. I practiced going through the wall a bit and was happy about the slight tickle I felt when I whooshed through the wall into the break room and landed in the microwave. But I couldn’t get a cup of coffee for myself—which, due to the tight spatial situation in front of the coffee machine, could’ve been pretty interesting at times. Specifically, if some piece of skirt were standing in this corner of the break room, there would basically be no way to avoid a full body check. The break room’s interior designer must have been a pretty clever guy. Anyways, I’d have enjoyed squeezing past some lab coat booty in front of the coffee machine, but then I remembered: no body, no check. No luck!
Slowly the offices emptied out, and I peeked in on Martin again; at some point he also powered down his computer, grabbed his duffle coat, and made his way to the basement. With me quickly in tow. After we got downstairs I pretended I’d spent the whole day like a good boy in my morgue drawer and I was now extremely happy that someone had finally come to visit me. Martin fell for it.
“Martin,” I said in a tone I hoped sounded trustworthy and serious, the way the news anchors on public television like to come off. “Now, finally, we really have to get cracking with our investigation, otherwise all our leads will be cold, and the truth about my murder will never come out.”
I was proud of the seriousness of my statements and my absolutely professional diction. Of course, I was also just as proud of my self-control, because I’d actually spent a long time coming up with that until phrases such as “lazy pigs,” “boil-ridden, rat-assed murderers,” and the like stopped occurring to me.
Martin hemmed and hawed, writhing like an earthworm in between the blades of someone’s garden shears.
“I’m not entirely certain whether…” His nicely pre-formulated sentence construction ended there, but since I could read the pulses from his brain clearly, I detected the rest of what he had wanted to say among the unraveling streams of thought: he didn’t believe a single word in my entire story.
“Martin, where’s the problem?” I asked, still under self-control and proud of it. I even used his name—did you notice?—because whenever you address someone by name, then you establish a certain connection with him. I learned that from a movie once.
“All investigations point toward your death being an accident. No one saw anyone push you.”
“Martin,” I said again. “Whether or not someone sees something doesn’t matter. Look, if I weren’t such a thorough person I wouldn’t have seen the body in the trunk, either.”
“What body?” Martin asked. “In what trunk?”
Now I totally wasn’t expecting that. In my mind’s eye—the only eye I still have—I quickly ran back through our previous conversations and realized I hadn’t told Martin anything at all about stealing the car or the body in the trunk! I remedied that now as fast as I could.
Martin seemed totally distraught.
“OK, you see,” I said, trying to get him back on track, “I discovered this body in the trunk only by accident.”
Martin just couldn’t grasp what I was trying to tell him. Oh my God, sometimes academics are really slow on the uptake.
I explained it again, enunciating clearly. “The body was in the trunk. I happened to look in there and find her. But the body would still have been in there if I hadn’t checked. Then no one would have seen her, but she would still have been there.”
Now I thought I had expressed myself quite clearly, but Martin was still hemming and hawing: “But if there was in fact a body, it would have had to turn up at some point here at the Institute.”
I don’t know what was wrong with Martin, but apparently he enjoyed having brain farts the minute anything even remotely had to do with me. I tried to explain it to him in simpler words.
“If your mother died, would you pack her into your trunk?” I asked.
“Of course not. She wouldn’t even fit in there,” he replied.
“But you wouldn’t try to, either, right?” I asked with the patience of a saint (finally I know where that expression comes from—if only I still had adrenalin in my arteries…).
“No.”
“What would you do?”
“Call the mortuary.”
“AH HA!” We were slowly getting somewhere.
“So what do you think?” I continued, choosing my words carefully. “What might the reason be for someone to stash a body in the trunk of a car?”
“Her death hasn’t been reported,” he said after thinking a bit.
“Exactly!” I was relieved. He had managed to get there on his own. “And for what purpose does one stick an unreported dead body into the trunk of an automobile?”
“To take her somewhere and bury her in a shallow grave,” Martin whispered.
Unfathomable. The man deals with unnatural deaths day in and day out, sees bodies that would make any other normal person’s stomach and whatever else turn, but when it comes to imagining why such bodies end up on his autopsy table in the first place, he goes all wobbly-kneed.
“Exactly,” I said, praising him. “The body may never turn up; that is exactly why the whole trunk procedure is used.”
“Hmm.”
“Also interesting is the question of where the car ended up.”
“The car?”
We could have easily turned this conversation into a sitcom. Guaranteed to be a hit.
“That kind of car costs a half million euros. If it gets stolen, you report it to the insurance company, right?”
“I would certainly assume so.”
Ah ha, we were again achieving complete sentences. Good.
“So, find out whether anyone has reported that kind of car stolen,” I suggested.
“And if not?” Martin asked.
“Then it’s because it had a body in the trunk, and people prefer to avoid mentioning that kind of thing on the incident report forms for the insurance.”
He was not a hundred percent convinced, but I was sure he would look into it. And then he would finally start helping me solve my murder with a bit more conviction and verve. At least, I hoped so.
I considered riding home with him, but I decided to stay and try my luck with the TVs again. I’d hung out during the day for a while in the conference room while they were playing a video presentation, and I thought I could sense some of those waves. Maybe I could figure out how to get the TV to turn on. I accompanied Martin to the door and then made my way upstairs.
THREE
I’d hardly started making my way toward the TV when I heard a distant shriek for help. OK, fine—at first I wasn’t sure if it really was a shriek for help or if some wave rushing through the area had upset my thoughts. After all, if you believe the people wearing aluminum-foil helmets, there are millions of radio, television, and of course cell phone signals flitting through the air all the time, so the likelihood that I might fly through one of those waves at some point and be able to interpret it was more than probable. At least, I thought so. Science wasn’t really my kind of thing in school, but I had always liked the experiments with loud bangs, big whooshes, or bad smells. Although ultimately the question of why the bangs, whooshes, or smells occur always really irritated me.