Brenner and God (2 page)

But then he didn’t take the pills, naysaying not only doctors but drugs, too. And just when his girlfriend had left for good, and one day the refrigerator was completely empty, the kitchen cabinets bare, canned goods and so on, pasta, rice, every last bit, so only the pills were left—only then did he take the pills. And since then—like a new man! More positive! You might have noticed it earlier today, for example, when once again the pro-life soldiers of prayer had formed a standing guard in front of the clinic. And he’d barely been able to get past them with little Helena because they were pushing from the right and the left, rosaries and embryo photos shoved right under his nose like in holy Sicily. Now, before, this would’ve guaranteed his hand flying out, and those plastic embryos and rosary beads would’ve gone scattering. But because of the pills, much calmer. And with composure you get a lot farther.

He was already twisting things around in his head at the gas station, telling himself that a minor mistake like this can happen to anyone once. And anyway, for a two-year-old even the goings-on at a gas station are interesting. She can look out the window, there are people to watch, hoses, nozzles, disposable gloves, everything. Plus, one thing you can’t forget—those tizzying numbers, nothing’s more beautiful to a child’s soul.

So he slips out of the car as quickly as possible and closes the door behind him—you would’ve thought he was about to hold up the gas station—because he wants to prevent any fumes from wafting in to Helena. Because those noxious fumes, well, a little’s a lot for a child. Well, I don’t want to say absolutely harmful, but good, certainly not.
On second thought
, the driver says to himself—and here maybe the pills were already at work a little—
maybe a healthy child should be able to withstand a few fumes
.

While he gassed up, he made faces at Helena through the window. But to no effect; she just stared placidly back at him. And the chauffeur thought,
you see, Helena knows that at heart I’m not one to mug around
, so he assumed a normal expression, and get a load of this: then Helena smiled. You see what kind of understanding the two of them have? No wonder, when they spend so many hours together on the autobahn. Then came the window washing, though. You wouldn’t believe what kind of
Hello!
that was for Helena. The chauffeur actually got nervous that the alarm would go off, what with the child giggling and pedaling her legs in the car seat as the sponge ran over the windshield, and when he squeegeed the water off, she liked that even better. So the chauffeur declared to himself,
I will always gas up on the way
if she likes it so much
, and he even gave the clean passenger-side windows an extra wash, and the rear window, too, although by that point Helena wasn’t getting so much out of it anymore since she couldn’t turn around in her car seat.

Before he went into the shop to pay, he moved the car a few feet over to the side to where the air-pressure pump was and away from the fumes.

“I’ll bring you a chocolate bar,” he said as he got out of the car, because it was never
baby wanna bonbon?
or any of that other baby talk. Rather, the driver always insisted on correct German with Helena, out of principle. Chocolate wasn’t entirely correct though, because the Frau Doctor had in fact impressed upon him, “No chocolate, Herr Simon. Absolutely no sugar!”

Herr Simon had explained to her a thousand times that they were just baby teeth, only there for the time being, a second pair would grow in anyway, well, not a pair, but a second crew, as it were, and when that happened, then you could always say, less chocolate. Or just don’t bite all the way into it. The Frau Doctor always knew better, of course, even though it wasn’t like she was a dentist, and in a private moment, the chauffeur sometimes thought to himself,
with those abortions of hers, just think how many teeth will never even find accommodations
. But arguments are useless, since she even went on to claim that chocolate was bad for the rash on Helena’s hands. Otherwise, a downright nice woman. Nice, intelligent, perky figure, the works. The chauffeur even envied Kressdorf a little, but it was no mean-spirited envy, no I’d almost like to call it a positive envy, and that, too, must’ve been attributable to the pills. Because he said to himself,
why would a woman like the Frau Doctor seek someone like me when she can have someone
like Kressdorf?
Maybe he would have thought that before, too. But before, that same thought would have railed against the wife first, the husband second, himself third, and fourth, the world at large. And today we’re very much on the side of forgiveness, meaning,
Kressdorf: not such a bad guy
. Maybe the pills even exaggerated this positive perspective a bit, but one thing I should add: Kressdorf was always courteous with his chauffeur, never a crass word, never addressing him informally as
du
, but always respectfully as
Sie
and Herr Simon.

Otherwise, the KREBA chief had enemies, of course, more than enough. I don’t want to sugarcoat anything now just because. But if it’s about enemies, then it’s his wife who’s got him beat by a long shot. Because, a routine question,
do you have enemies?
As an abortion doctor you simply have a lot of people against you, it doesn’t work any other way. Which is why the two of them were so happy that their daughter was in such good hands with their new chauffeur. Otherwise, they could have just hired a regular driver. But with him being a former police officer, they simply felt safer.

That they’d been so angry with him about a bar of chocolate of all things can be explained only in psychological terms. All told, his blunder with the chocolate never even would’ve been exposed if it hadn’t been so plainly visible on the surveillance video. And when, as a parent, you look at something a hundred times, you play it a hundred times forward and backward, a hundred times over, you stop being able to see anything—except for a driver who can’t make up his mind between the different kinds of chocolate bars at a gas station. And then, all of a sudden, you see the chocolate as being the culprit.

It was an especially strange morning because something happened at the clinic, too. It began when the first patient on the morning’s scheduled surgeries turned out to be an old acquaintance. You’re going to say a male patient in an abortion clinic is a rare thing, but that’s not the case, because family planning’s a complete package, and vasectomies are performed there, too. Perfectly routine at a clinic like this.

As a matter of principle, Frau Doctor Kressdorf had great sympathy for the men who came in for vasectomies. Because men tend to leave everything else up to women, the vasectomy candidates were practically minor saints to her. However, the way she saw it, as a woman and as the director of the clinic, she was content to let the urologist perform the procedure. An exception was today’s candidate, who happened to have a thing for her. You should know, Detective Peinhaupt used to know the Frau Doctor a little, back when he was starting out as a patrol officer and would always get assigned to the anti-abortionists making a racket out in front of the clinic. Since he joined the Criminal Investigation Bureau, or CRIB for short, the smaller scuffles didn’t concern him anymore, and since the clinic started hiring its
own private security guards, it had gotten a little quieter on the street anyway. The demonstrators had limited themselves to praying their rosaries and weren’t accosting the patients anymore. You’ve got to picture this for yourself: to the right of the entrance is a rosary-praying anti-abortionist standing with a picture of an embryo, and to the left of the entrance—and every bit as imposing—is a bull-necked female security guard with her hair buzzed like a mowed lawn. And there between those two holy columns, the patients would get shooed through. Back when Peinhaupt was on patrol, Sykora once said to him, “pro-life versus pro-dyke,” because Sykora was always joking, and Peinhaupt had made a special note of this one, but when he tried telling it to Alpha II as if he’d just come up with it himself, he didn’t even crack a smile. But, okay, Alpha II was the kind of guy who couldn’t be coaxed out of his shell that easily. Maybe he would’ve loosened up more if on his last vacation he hadn’t been struck by that lightning.

It proved to be just a temporary lull for the police, because the ruckus on the street only managed to move inside the building. Believe it or not, the pro-lifers bought up, one by one, the offices surrounding the clinic. Main question: where did they get so much money from? And since the pro-lifers were the majority of the building’s tenants and tried every means of getting the clinic to terminate its lease, they racked up so many power outages that the police were right back in there for the long haul.

In theory, there wasn’t much the police could do about the building’s tenants, and Peinhaupt even joked to the Frau Doctor once that up against a guy like Knoll, only a hitman
could help. See, Knoll was the head of the pro-lifers. And it was Knoll, too, who’d scraped together the money for the property. He certainly didn’t earn it selling alarm systems at Sectec. He had the best connections, no question. Obviously the Frau Doctor hadn’t hired a hitman, but she did go to the newspapers when Knoll mounted surveillance cameras in the building’s lobby in order to intimidate her patients. And maybe there was a moment when she did regret not hiring a hitman, because the article broke on the same day that Knoll served her with legal papers and in the same week that a water pipe broke. Peinhaupt got put on it because the matter required the police, of course. And so it was, on this of all assignments, that the brochure fell into Peinhaupt’s hands. Like an advertisement that they didn’t just practice abortion but prevention, too—in other words, sterilization. So he said to his colleagues on the force,
I’d never have that done
. Emasculation and all. But among men, of course, the conversation immediately got steered in the direction of
when in Rome, well then what an attractive doctor
.

In truth, Peinhaupt had entirely different reasons for a vasectomy—four, in fact, very good and very expensive reasons. Because one thing you can’t forget: as a young investigator with only a few years of service behind him, he was just scraping by, netting two thousand euros, and then the bonus pay on top of it, i.e., danger, weekends, nights. And an unplanned child would have him paying roughly 340 euros. That had Peinhaupt calculating everything all over again while he was lying there on the operating table, waiting for the procedure. Because you’re going to have some doubts in a situation like this. Now, he didn’t jump up and run, but
he did calculate the approximate price of his four children. Because it varies, depending on the age.

First for little Sandra he paid 320 euros, to the hairstylist in the Salzgries district who always said she had an IUD when the detective came by on his beat, and then one day that IUD was called Sandra. And for Benjamin it was also 320, but only for one more year, because he was already in kindergarten, and even though his mother was a kindergarten teacher, lowering the alimony didn’t figure into the calculation, so it was the full 320 for little Benjamin. At the time, Peinhaupt had sworn
Benjamin and not another one after him
, magic of the name Benjamin, as it were. Then came the twins, 360 euros each, because no group discount for twins, and so you come to exactly 340 euros times four, Peinhaupt calculated, as he slowly began to wonder why they’d left him waiting so long on the operating table. It’s not exactly comfortable, either: first they get you to lie down—no one wants to lie there so exposed on the table—and then they disappear and leave you all alone. Please.

Four times 340 is 1,360, Peinhaupt calculated, which, subtracted from his net pay, left him with not even 700 euros. He would barely be getting by if it wasn’t for the money he got paid under the table for serving court summonses. For the anesthesiologist’s part, he could now take his time, because at 1,360, all doubt had been removed. He asked himself where the doctors had been this whole time. They finished prepping him for the procedure a few minutes ago, and then the light in the operating room went out. A minute later it came back on, but still no one had turned up. It occurred to him that he might have been lying under this harsh light for
half an hour already waiting for the surgery, without a doctor anywhere in sight.
Is it possible they put me under already? Maybe I only dreamed that the lights went out briefly while they were prepping me, and the emergency generator started up
. Typical operation dream. You should know that Peinhaupt had declined the local anesthetic, and the Frau Doctor had said she suspected as much—fearful of even minor procedures, men tend to ask for general anesthesia.
It’s not possible that the surgical team got scared off just because the power went out
, Peinhaupt thought,
it’s all just a hysterical dream, and I’m already long under. And it’s just my unconsciousness protesting against my most important body part’s vitality getting snuffed out, hence the dream that the light went out
.

Suddenly Peinhaupt felt certain that everything must already be over. That he was just waking up in post-op, i.e., after a lucid nightmare. Because nothing else was possible, every other explanation was unthinkable. Peinhaupt could have been persuaded that it was the blade of the scalpel that was for holding and the handle for making the incision. The anesthesiologist must have really numbed him into a nightmare!
This just can’t be real
, Peinhaupt decided.

Watch closely, Peinhaupt’s lying there on the operating table nicely prepped like an inverse Adam, where the fig leaf is draped over his whole body except for where the fig leaf would cover Adam, when finally the door swings open, but it’s not the anesthesiologist who opens the door, and it’s not the urologist who comes in after him.

“Hey, Peinhaupt!”

And it wasn’t even Frau Doctor Kressdorf who yelled out in shock, “Hey, Peinhaupt!” Whether you believe it or
not. His two ex-colleagues Sykora and Zand. Zand, Erich! And Sykora! His old patrol buddies, walking through the door, completely dumbfounded and gawking at the exposed patient on the operating table, and they don’t even laugh. In fact, Zand, Erich and Sykora seem petrified until Zand, Erich finally says, “Hey, Peinhaupt, what are you doing here?!”