Eternal Life by Wolf Haas Read Free Book Online Page B

left leg off, so now he’s retired and still works a little at the kiosk.
    He makes a good sausage on a bun, Brenner was thinking when he heard Andi say:
    “Should I tell you who put those two Americans in the lift?”
    But Brenner just wanted to eat his sausage in peace now and gave Andi no reply. He just looked through Andi, straight through to the curling practically. But Andi wouldn’t give it a rest:
    “There are only two in question. Either Gschwentner or Vergolder.”
    “This is the second time you’ve said that now,” Brenner says, without looking away from the curling.
    “The preacher don’t preach twice,” Andi says.
    “So be it.”
    “But I’m no preacher. I’m a gas station attendant. And only a gas station attendant can know what I know.”
    “What do you know, then?” Brenner asks now, but he’s still watching the curling. But that was just what it seemed like. Because out of the corner of his eye, he’s observing how the handless Frau drinks her beer.
    She simply wedges the beer glass between her forearm-stumps, and that’s how she drinks, but not what you’re thinking, cautiously, or, as far as I’m concerned, unappetizingly. No, just like you’d have thought, perfectly normal for a person to drink like that. And smoked, too, at the same time. Because she was a smoker, and not just a few. Practically with her wrists. And interesting. This was the first time in months that Brenner was tempted to smoke again, too.
    Brenner realized now that this couldn’t be the first time that the woman had come here. Without asking any questions, Gruntner Schorsch placed a second empty beer glass on this wooden ledge that went around the kiosk. And on top of the empty beer glass he put an ashtray, and so the handless Frau was able to set her cigarette down right from her mouth without any problem. Needless to say, couldn’t have been any easier.
    It struck Brenner as being somewhat strange now, the one only had one leg, the other no hands, but that’s the way it was.
    “I know there are only two people in all of Zell that comeinto question with a crime like this,” Andi just wouldn’t let up and was wagging his finger in front of Brenner’s face now like a know-it-all.
    “Vergolder and Gschwentner,” Brenner answered.
    “That’s exactly right,” Andi the Fox said, praising him, “but why?”
    “Yeah, exactly. Why exactly?”
    “Because out of everybody in Zell, the two of them are the only ones that have never given a single schilling’s tip.”
    But at that moment, the handless Frau turned to Andi. And that really took Brenner by surprise now. That the two of them knew each other.
    “Lorenz is getting out today,” she says.
    “Out today, back in tomorrow,” Andi says.
    “I’m picking him up,” Handless says.
    “The ambulance picks him up. Then we pick him up. Then they pick him back up. Then we pick him back up, then—”
    “Are you with me?” Handless says, because this blabber of Andi’s, well, she wasn’t having it one bit.
    “Do you mean, do I understand what you’re saying, or am I going where you’re driving to: nuthouse!”
    Handless had these thick glasses, the type that was fashionable in the seventies. And thick glasses like that, well, you don’t see much of her face. Just her eyes, and those were twice as big as normal, because she must’ve been horribly farsighted.
    With these enormous eyes of hers, she looks at Brenner now and asks him if maybe he’d like to come along. She says:
    “I have to pick up my friend Lorenz Antretter from the hospital. He’s being released today.”
    Now, Lorenz, that’s Vergolder’s nephew. And it was Lorenz, too, who’d provided Vergolder with his alibi for the night of the murder. Brenner tried to hide his surprise, though.
    “You’re here on your own anyway, walking,” Handless says.
    Of course, you couldn’t not hear Brenner’s amazement now when he said:
    “But, can you drive a car?”

CHAPTER 5
    Now, to pick up