“Exactly.”
“I think he’s in prison,” Martin said.
“Not anymore,” Jellyfish said, apparently feeling super stoked because he finally knew something that might be of interest. “Good behavior and all that shit. He’s out. For the last two or three weeks or so.”
“Thank you,” Martin said, now pushing his way past the tub of lard to get into his car. I was quick to dart in, too, and looked back as Martin pulled out into traffic. My ex had clearly gone downhill, I thought. Her fat jellyfish just got blabbered down by a chubby little man in a duffle coat. Lame, Girl. Totally lame.
“You really kept on him,” I said, and Martin turned the steering wheel the wrong way, almost taking out a guy on his bike. In my view that wouldn’t have been a bad thing; bike riders in traffic are about as pleasant as boils in your armpit, but Martin would likely have viewed this differently.
“Oh God, you’re here?” he moaned. And when I say he moaned, then that’s what he did, because he didn’t say anything out loud but only thought it, and in your thoughts you can also moan a short phrase like that. I figured he didn’t have much of his eloquence left over. Maybe he had only a certain quantity available per day, and he had burned himself out between writing clever reports all day and now talking down the fat “I’ll save the honor of my disreputable girlfriend” dude.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with types like that,” Martin said. “Investigations are for the police.”
His voice was trembling a little, and the persuasiveness he had just been using to weave jargon and borrowed words into a delicate chain of language was flushed down the toilet. I vacillated between feeling irritated and sorry for him, though actually I was tending quite uncharacteristically toward feeling sorry, but in my situation that was not something I could really afford. If I were to pat his head and say everything will be OK and he didn’t have to talk to that nasty scumbag anymore, then my case would never be resolved; a murderer would continue to walk free and—even worse—Cologne’s alternative crowd would forever remember me as that floor gymnast who fell off the bridge totally drunk. So, stay firm, no feeling sorry.
“Weeping is for women, that’s why they both start with w,” I said—not very eloquent, I admit, but I’m also just starting to further my study of language. “So act like a man, and embrace challenge.”
Big words that I got out of some made-for-TV movie. Presumably a movie where all the heroes were wearing cowboy hats and never walked on foot but only rode horseback. But maybe also a movie where a totally regular citizen is under threat from some maniac, so for the first time in his life he rustles up his shotgun out of the sock drawer where it’s been since his grandfather handed it down to him, and he suddenly turns into an ice-cold killer. Totally Hollywood in any case, and thus an excellent guide for how to behave in my current situation, traveling within a millimeter per hour of the velocity prescribed by the posted speed limit, sitting inside a rolling trash can weaving through a snow-covered Cologne with a duffle-coated forensic pathologist at the wheel. High time that I find my way back to reality.
“The police have decided to leave my murder not only unpunished but also uninvestigated,” I said in a voice so chilling a Hollywood hero could not have been more ominous. “A human being with alcohol in his blood and the broken remains of a schnapps bottle in the pocket of his jacket apparently doesn’t deserve any further consideration.”
Of course I knew saying that stupid passive-aggressive stuff wasn’t fair, first to the system in general, and second—and especially—to Martin personally, but I was desperate and determined to tighten any screw I could reach. And the only thing in reach was Martin, who was now zigzagging through traffic like a monkey on a scooter under fire all because his cell phone had started ringing.
“Gänsewein.” He actually answered very nicely and courteously with his name—and he was following the moving-vehicle code to a T by using his hands-free device, to boot.
“Hi, it’s Gregor. We had talked about grabbing a beer. How about now?”
“Um, well, you know, I’m not feeling very well right now…”
“Is everything OK, Martin? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m not sick,” Martin said. His voice sounded like he had at least one bullet lodged in his diaphragm.
“Last night you were a bit off, too,” Gregor said, sounding him out. “You can tell me if something’s wrong. Is something not OK?”
“It’s green,” I interrupted, because the stoplight that had allowed him to stop and talk had since turned again.
“I know that it’s green,” Martin said out loud and irritated into the phone.
“What’s that?” Gregor asked back.
“Nothing, just the stoplight is green,” Martin replied. “So, everything is just fine with me, I’m just feeling a little wiped.”
Yikes, he got “wiped” from me—it actually didn’t belong in his vocabulary at all. Gregor pretended he hadn’t noticed anything. “Well then, maybe tomorrow…”
“Hold on!” I yelled, and Martin gasped in fright.
“What it is?” Gregor called, apparently highly alarmed by the frightened gasp. Presumably he suspected an accident or something.
“What about the SLR?” I asked.
“The SLR?” Martin echoed.
“What did you say?” Gregor asked.
“You wanted to ask him whether an SLR had been reported stolen,” I reminded Martin.
“Say, do you know if a Mercedes SLR was reported stolen last week?” Martin babbled obediently into his headset. He had apparently lost all will to argue with me.
“No idea,” Gregor answered. “Why are you interested in that?”
“Do me a favor and check, OK?” Martin asked in a voice underlain with deep exhaustion.
It was quiet on the line for a moment, and then Gregor asked Martin to wait for a second, and we could hear some mumbling in the background, and then he got back on the phone.
“No SLR has been reported stolen in Cologne. Not last week, not the week before, and not since. Tomorrow will you let me in on why you want to know that?”
“Yes, yes,” Martin answered, then mumbled another thank-you and hung up.
“You see?” I asked triumphantly. “People who have bodies in their trunks don’t report their cars ripped off.”
“Maybe the reason why no theft was reported was precisely because there was no theft,” Martin retorted.
“But…” I couldn’t fathom the new direction our conversation had suddenly taken.
“You told me about a theft and a body. Maybe one of the two is incorrect, maybe both are incorrect. In any case I still have no evidence to support your story.”
This whole discussion proved only one thing: that Martin was pretty clever.
We spent the rest of the ride in silence. Martin was driving like a robot, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t thinking anything. His brain was switched off. By contrast, I was mad. I was making an effort to pump all of the energy from my frustration into the convolutions of Martin’s brain, but I couldn’t tell if he noticed. He was on autopilot; maybe he was in shock.
He parked his “car” along a quiet side street, shut it off, and dragged his feet along the sidewalk. The door to another parked car opened, Martin took a frightened leap to the side but then relaxed a bit again as he recognized the person getting out.
“Birgit! What are you doing here?”
She beamed at him; I could only gape. Her naturally blond hair fell long and smooth and shiny over the fur collar of an orange-colored winter jacket, which, unfortunately, concealed her upper torso under a bulky mass of down. Her legs were inside black pinstriped pants that ran down to black high heels. Unless her jacket was covering up some monstrous deformity, the woman had to be pretty hot. Not quite as hot as her colleague, Katrin, but still. How had Martin landed this knockout?