Anyways, I focused my attention on what I thought I had heard, and in fact I heard the shriek again. Clearly a shriek for help. From Martin. Uh-oh, foul mischance!
I raced to the door that he had disappeared through and flashed through it as well without even looking for the crack or keyhole first. An ice-cold hurricane-force wind was whistling through the front courtyard—at least that’s how it seemed to me. I was afraid. Afraid that the wind would just sweep me away somewhere I’d be all alone. Afraid I might even be blown apart and no longer exist—just like that, poof, Pascha’s gone. Afraid of losing the rest of my wretched existence. I clung to my life, although it wasn’t a real one anymore.
Martin was apparently also afraid, because although I couldn’t hear him anymore I was receiving signals from him, and they were sheer terror. I whizzed in the direction I was getting the signals from, to the shoulder of the road where only a single wannabe car was parked: Martin’s ugly little trash can. The lighting here wasn’t the best; behind me was the Institute for Forensic Medicine and right next to that was Melaten Cemetery, a gruesome setting that might have sent a shiver down my spine if I had still had a back. Instead I focused on keeping all the molecules or whatever I was made of together and not letting myself be blown apart or away so I could make it to Martin, who was being pressed onto his car by a not very tall but extremely obese man.
“I’ll cut your ugly pig ears off if you show up at my woman’s place again asking stupid questions about that little chicken shit, got it?” the guy was just telling Martin.
Of course, it wasn’t a real yes/no question—no one in that situation would answer no, and Martin didn’t, either. He just nodded.
“Good. Then let’s have a nice little chat, man to man, about what kind of shit you were trying to pull off at her place.”
The guy was still leaning on the trash can car, and Martin was wedged in between it and him. He didn’t look like he wanted to have a nice, man-to-man chat; he looked more like he really wanted to smash in the face of someone he considered cowardly and weaker than him, but I kept that observation to myself.
“I’m here,” I said. “Stay cool, he’s not going to do anything to you.”
“Ha ha,” Martin countered. “So he’s just playing around?”
I was impressed. Having a sense of humor in a situation like this was evidence of a certain toughness that Martin otherwise seemed to totally lack. But maybe he was just slowly cracking up.
“If he’d wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead,” I said to console him, but Martin’s brain waves weren’t calming down. To the contrary. Maybe I shouldn’t have said the D-word out loud.
“What were you doing at my little lady’s place?” the guy asked. His voice was so hoarse I was certain he’d expire from lung cancer long before his statistical life expectancy, but we didn’t have time to wait for that.
“Bend his ears in your finest medical-doctorese and make clear to him that you were at Nina’s as part of an official visit,” I suggested. “Once he realizes you’re a cop, he’ll piss himself.”
“I performed the postmortem on the body of Sascha Lerchenberg and in doing so was not able to resolve a few questions sufficiently,” Martin began with all the authority he could muster. It was already quite a show; I was amazed. The response by the fat jellyfish was direct and unambiguous. He stood up straight, thereby releasing Martin’s constrained body, and even took a step backward. Martin straightened his shoulders, which did not really look all that impressive in a duffle coat, and raised his chin.
“Body butchers don’t do investigations,” the jellyfish said in a tone I knew well. He was going to the trouble to sound self-confident and superior, but there was doubt there. I could hear it in him. Still, I was amazed that Nina had apparently noted both Martin’s name and his mention of the Institute for Forensic Medicine, and the jellyfish seemed stupefied that the name and profession weren’t a bluff. He tried not to let on about his surprise and accordingly kept jabbing his finger into Martin’s chest when he spoke. But Martin pushed his hand away.
“Systemically inherent situational constraints have resulted with progressively increasing frequency in much more active involvement by forensic pathologists in the investigative work of our colleagues in criminal investigation units.”
I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him correctly. Martin had unleashed the full, unmitigated linguistic power of his medical education. Cool.
“But…” the jellyfish tried to blabber in between, but my forensic pathology adviser kept going right on at him, interlocuting as trenchantly as he cut.
“Multidisciplinary competencies have long formed part of the professional profile in academic environments, and this trend has been steadily gaining in relevance. Investigative teams today no longer consist solely of narrow-minded specialists. But if you have a problem with the management of the case-oriented knowledge here, you can file a complaint with the oversight board.”
Wow! And he came up with that without even having to look anything up in a Latin dictionary. Point to Martin, but apparently he didn’t quite know how to bring the matter to a victorious conclusion, because the jellyfish was still standing in front of him exuding aggression.
At first I kept my trap shut because I didn’t really understand this situation. In my world an argument runs like this: two people one-up each other, the register of discourse declines a step with each additional utterance, and when there aren’t any variations left of “rat-fucked elephant-cock-sucker,” you duke it out. The version we had going here wasn’t bad, either. I just couldn’t predict what would come next. Jellyfish apparently didn’t either: his crest began to deflate, if you’d like to phrase it poetically. And with that, Martin became master of the situation. Just by droning on! I think this was the very moment when my slow learning process with language truly began. After all, verbal communication was the only thing I still had going for me in my current form of existence. I couldn’t ram my knee into someone’s crotch, pick up a chick, or take part in any of the beautiful, purely physical forms of expression at all anymore. Language was the only thing I had left, and that’s why I urgently needed to elevate this form of expression in myself above the three-hundred-word threshold that I had sunken into in recent years. Well, at the time I still lacked any epically broad awareness of all this, so please keep reading.
I’ll omit the abundantly brainless “ums” and “hmms” that Jellyfish uttered—ultimately I don’t want to bore you, and they didn’t contribute much to the progress of the negotiation anyway.
“Your turn,” I said at some point to Martin, who did not appear to have gotten that he was in charge.
“Let’s get out of here,” Martin thought, trying to go around the car to the driver’s side. However, that was too abrupt for Jellyfish; he hadn’t yet processed what Martin had said. He took another step forward.
“If you’re looking for someone who had a burning hatred for Pascha, sir, then you should probably talk to Pablo,” Jellyfish said. He’d managed to find his way to a new, more civilized mode of discourse after all, even addressing Martin as “sir.”
“Your intended did mention that name,” Martin said, and I swear on every beer I’ve ever downed that he actually said intended. “Is he that dealer?”
Actually all Martin wanted was to get away, but he’s just so polite and doesn’t interrupt a conversation midway through. Even if he’s chatting with a small-time criminal who has just threatened to cut off his little pig ears.