Martin threw his cool new cordless headset aside, loudly rattled open his desk drawer, seized his old headset, plugged in it, and resumed dictating. His brain was formulating a hateful “na na” before he switched his train of thoughts back off to me in a tour de force of will.
Shit.
Without a ghost of a chance at influencing anything, it was suddenly much more boring for me to be present for the laborious genesis and composition of these reports. I was actually looking around for a more riveting form of light entertainment right when the tension in the room suddenly surged. Birgit had entered the room.
“Oh, hello,” Martin stammered when he saw her. “This is a surprise.”
Not a “nice” surprise, not “what a pleasure to see you,” no. Just a surprise. Way not charming.
“I, uh, I happened to be in the neighborhood…” Birgit said.
Apparently today was Big Lies Day. No one ever “just happens to be in the neighborhood” of the Institute for Forensic Medicine. There isn’t anything around it that would draw in random visitors. It’s surrounded by a cemetery and a multilane divided arterial with streetcar tracks down the middle. How bucolic.
“Yes,” Martin said, at last standing up, the cord to his old headset catching on some papers, which then tumbled onto the floor.
“Oh,” Birgit said, noticing the cord. Then her eyes moved over to the cordless one she had just given him, which in his irritation Martin had just tossed aside someplace an arm’s length away. “Someplace” in this case was among the mandarin orange peels on a paper towel at the corner of his desk—ready for the trash, as it were.
“I don’t think this was a good idea,” Birgit said with tears in her eyes, and then she turned and left.
Martin followed her, and the cord tightened across his throat, shifting the earpiece, which had always been too tight, so it slipped and jabbed his left eye. Martin freed himself from the hopelessly bent contraption and bolted after Birgit. I followed, inconspicuously.
Birgit was already running down the stairs at full speed, Martin and me in tow.
“Birgit,” Martin called. “It’s not how it looks.”
“I don’t care,” Birgit shouted back over her shoulder.
“I was getting some…interference on the cordless headset connection, and some other things going on this morning had already been annoying me, and I was in a rush, and that’s why I just quickly plugged the old corded one in again,” Martin erupted, a little out of breath.
“That’s fine, you can do your work however you want with whatever you want,” Birgit said. Her intonation was unambiguously bitchy. I hadn’t expected that from her at all, but her pain threshold had obviously been exceeded by this point.
They reached the main floor one right after the other. Birgit went through the glass door into the lobby, letting the door slam shut behind her, and Martin yanked it back open as though he wanted to rip it totally off its hinges.
To the left of us the elevator pinged.
“There’s that guy again!” I screamed, extremely agitated.
“What in blazes is wrong now?” Martin roared at the top of his voice.
Birgit swung around and glared at him in stunned horror.
“I didn’t mean…uh, not you…” Martin stammered. The guy from the elevator crossed the lobby and left the building.
“I’m going,” Birgit said. “And I’m not sure I ever want to see you again.”
Martin stood there thunderstruck, watching her as she left.
“The guy who was just in the corridor. The one who just left. I’ve seen him somewhere before!” I yelled again.
“Fuck off,” Martin thought.
“I can’t remember anymore when or where I’ve seen him. But it’s definitely—”
Important, is what I’d wanted to say, but I was interrupted.
“FUCK OFF,” Martin repeated more clearly, as though I hadn’t understood him correctly the first time.
“Just please go and ask at the reception desk who he was and what he wanted here,” I said.
“Go fuck yourself,” Martin replied, turning around. He slowly, deflatedly climbed the stairs back up to his office and resumed dictating his reports, but he was so unable to concentrate that half an hour later he packed up his stuff and drove home. I left him alone.
EIGHT
The afternoon was shitty enough, but the night bored me to death. I was wallowing in infinite self-pity, which reached a climax at the darkest hour of the night, around five in the morning. But if I was ever going to be redeemed from my unusual undead existence, then my murder was going to have to be solved; this was one thing I was totally sure of. So I had to swallow my resentment, my personal disappointments, and my self-pity and get Martin to keep going. I thought any hope of this seemed fairly gloomy after the disastrous events of the previous day, but I had to at least try. I waited for him at the Institute with the utmost impatience.
The look on his face shocked me deeply, and it actually should have forewarned me of what other nasty things the day had in store for us, but my mind was on other things. That may have had to do with the fact that a new body had been delivered shortly before Martin’s arrival.
Normally the transport casket is brought into the autopsy section, and then two assistants grasp the body, say “one, two, heave,” and lift the corpse onto one of the stainless-steel surfaces at the Institute.
Not so in this case. The transport casket arrived, and I hung back a bit as usual since even now looking at the faces of these dead people still depressed me. The assistants then opened the casket, caught their breaths, and then agreed on the sequence: “top first.” They didn’t even count down, instead saying only “heave ho,” and, presto, the torso was neatly unloaded down to the bottom rib on the rib cage, along with the head and arms. The hip and right leg came next, followed by the left leg last.
Of course a corpse doesn’t care how many pieces it gets delivered in, but this sight seriously shocked me, so I didn’t think to look at the face on the body until much later. Otherwise I would already have been completely beside myself in distress when Martin finally arrived.
He really looked like shit, too; there was no other way to say it. Bloodshot eyes, the bruise on his cheek had morphed into various darker shades of purple and yellowish green, and for the first time since I’d known him his hair wasn’t properly combed. His part was totally crooked. I was dismayed.
“Good morning, Martin,” I said.
Martin winced, but didn’t reply. He went into the break room, poured himself a coffee (!), sat down at his desk, and pulled the cord to his old dictation headset out of the computer. He flung the thing, cord and all, into the drawer, and put on his stylish new headset.
“If you dictate even one single letter into my computer, I will never utter another word to you again, I will bring in an exorcist, and I will spread the most nightmarish gay-sex stories about you,” he whispered, noiselessly.
Uh-oh, his tone had clearly sharpened—and yet, he was talking to me again. Sometimes you have to delight in the little things.
“I will be so good you’ll wonder what happened to your old friend Pascha,” I replied. A snort was his only response.
“Did you talk to Birgit?” I asked.
“That is none of your business,” Martin replied.