“And she was certain she recognized the woman from the pictures in the paper?” Gregor asked. I couldn’t hear the answer.
“Does she know her name?”
Brief pause.
“Too bad. Oh well. Still, it’s a starting point at least. I’ll head over there now.”
He hung up, said hi to Birgit, who was apparently on her way out, as he walked past her to take the elevator to Martin’s floor. Martin was sitting at his computer, dictating words that aroused him, such as “multiple perforations of the lung” and “a strikingly well-defined margin resulting from the use of a dull tool causing separation at the root of the penis.” I turned my attention to other things. More beautiful things. Katrin, who was watering the ferns. I fawned around her a bit, but of course she didn’t notice me. Really too bad. It could’ve been so nice going out on a double date. Martin and Birgit, me and Katrin.
Martin had stopped describing what were apparently the fatal results of some real-life telenovela, so I turned my attention to him and Gregor to get my hands, as it were, on the latest information. But first Gregor subjected his friend to a highly embarrassing interrogation.
“What the hell happened to you?” was the opening line.
“It’s not that bad,” Martin said, heroically.
Poser. Yesterday he was crying his eyes out, and now today he was pretending he was an American soldier whose kneecaps can get shot to smithereens without a wince or whimper.
“Yeah, I can tell…” Gregor said. “Geez, your head slips off your pillow and hits the mattress, and this is how you come to work!”
Martin smiled ruefully. “I guess we’ve known for some time that hard mattresses are definitely not as healthy as people used to assume. Maybe I should buy myself a new one.”
Birgit’s visit seemed to have cheered him up dramatically; now he was even making little jokes at his own expense.
Gregor didn’t smile. “I hope you filed a report with the police.”
Martin shook his head. “Against the mattress?”
He was going to carry this number mercilessly through to the curtain; I wouldn’t have thought him capable of that.
“We’ve got some leads on that anonymous woman,” Gregor said. “I’m telling you this so you’ll stop sniffing around on your own and getting yourself all clobbered up.”
“Who is she?” Martin asked.
Gregor shook his head.
“Does your information match my, uh, research?” Martin added.
“No comment.”
“Man, Gregor. We’ve talked about cases before; we’re a good team,” Martin said.
He looked disappointed or sad; I couldn’t interpret his hangdog look exactly.
“Yes, we’re a good team, as long as you stick to your autopsy tools and your brain—and stop using your fists.”
Martin didn’t say anything.
“I only want to protect you,” Gregor said. “First off, so you quit taking a couple blows to the jaw every day, and, second, so you avoid stress on the job. I mean real stress. You do know that the district attorney will kick you in your coroner’s ass if you interfere with official police business by conducting your own investigation and withholding information. You’re still part of the criminal prosecution, after all. You could lose your job.”
That hit the mark. Martin grew pale as a ghost.
“In addition, you seem to have a penchant for picking fights with people who don’t wear kid gloves. If what you’ve told me is true, then there have already been two murders in this case, and they’re somehow connected. Do you think people like that will balk at murdering some piddly little coroner?”
Martin slumped in his chair.
Gregor laid his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Think about what I’ve said, and go to the movies, or ask Birgit out to dinner, or some other innocuous activity to get your mind off things.”
Martin nodded weakly, and Gregor gave him another friendly pat on the shoulder before leaving.
“Well that’s some news!” I said.
Martin winced. “Were you listening in?”
“Of course,” I said, in a good mood.
“Then you understand that Gregor didn’t actually cough up the information we need. I can’t do anything more.”
Ha, he can’t seriously believe he can get out of this whole business that easily, can he?
“The witness who recognized the photo in the paper of your lovely body is named Ekaterina Something and lives only a couple of steps away from the club where we talked to that bouncer,” I said. No—I cheered.
“How do you know that?” Martin asked, devoid of enthusiasm.
I told him about the advance information I had. He hesitated.
“The witness is totally harmless; she won’t do anything to us. We’ll just go over there and ask her about everything she knows about the dead woman,” I said.
“How do you know that she’s harmless?” Martin asked with clearly discernible doubt.
“Because she reported it to the police herself,” I said. God, you had to explain everything to him.
“I’ll give her a call,” Martin said.
“Good idea,” I said. “Look her up in the phone book under Ekaterina Something.”
Martin didn’t say anything.
“Tonight we’ll drive past her place on the way home,” I decided. Basta.
Martin went back to his work and turned on the mic, which he sets to PAUSE when he’s not currently dictating anything. He had not agreed, but he hadn’t shot me down, either. So in high spirits I repeated the word that Italians use to close a discussion: basta.
On Martin’s screen the word basta appeared. We both stared at it for a few seconds. Speechless.
“Where did that come from?” Martin asked aloud.
“From me,” I answered.
Both of those sentences appeared on screen, as well.
We stared again.
“Say something else,” Martin thought.
Nothing happened on the screen.
“How does the headset connect to the computer?” I asked.
That question was written out, too.
“Infrared port? Or Bluetooth? Or is that the same thing?” Martin thought, but he didn’t speak it aloud. No reaction.
“Cool,” I thought, and that word appeared in neat black letters.
“I like this kind of connection,” I said. “That’s exactly what I was looking for with the TVs, so I can turn them on myself when they’re on standby.”
Again the sentence was written, but instead of standby the words sand fly appeared on the screen.
“Hey,” I yelled. “What happened there?”
“Unless you pronounce things very clearly, the program will misunderstand a word now and again,” Martin explained.
“That may happen with you, but I don’t mumble when I’m thinking,” I said.
Martin didn’t answer. He was still shocked. But then hope suddenly starting blossoming within him.
“Now there’s a way for you to make yourself noticeable,” he said. “You can prove to Gregor and the others that you exist.”
I had to think about that for a moment. Big time. I said as much to Martin, who couldn’t understand my hesitation at all. I didn’t feel like discussing it with him now, and I receded into my thoughts.
Should I have been happy? Presumably. But at the moment I was confused. This new communication option was a little bit like online chat. Online chat is so fucked up you can’t even imagine. People who don’t even know each other meet in a chat room on the Internet and tell each other the most intimate details of their lives. Their most secret desires, their violent fantasies, their sexual preferences. Suicidal thoughts, proposals of marriage, insults: everything is blown out into the world for anyone to read. How much sicker can human beings get, actually? And how much further from reality? They fucking feel like they they’re among friends in their cozy little chat rooms—but in reality they know only the ridiculous nicknames of the psychos otherwise floating around in there with them. It could be your neighbor outing himself as a serial murderer, or your own mother offering to blow you off. There is nothing human about any of it. You can’t form an image of the person behind the name; all you see are letters and numbers, and you react with compassion, anger, or horror. And I should become one of them? Some invisible ghost communicating via computer screen? I imagined complimenting Katrin and then the sentence “you’ve got awesome tits” appearing. Or better yet, appearing with a small error: “you’ve got awesome nits.” Would you be into that? That’s what I’m saying. So for now I decided to stay clear of Martin’s computer whenever he had his new headset switched on. I felt shitty enough without a body; I didn’t need to end up with my voice and feelings slaughtered in some jumble of letters, too.