The Bone Man by Wolf Haas Read Free Book Online

sullen.
    “It’s really not that bad, two balls in the river,” the equipment manager yelled out again in encouragement, and he turned his back a little to the players so that they could see the sack full of balls better.
    The better the players saw the sack, though, the paler they turned. And not one of them said a word. Even the coach was quiet now, but the equipment manager just took that as a measure of success. That the coach didn’t lay into the players a second time, as is often the case in a thunderstorm. Nonetheless, Schorsch’s trick wasn’t quite working this time on the players—no way he could’ve failed to notice that now.
    “What’s up today?” he yells and swings the sack over his shoulder like Old St. Nick.
    “The bag,” Udo Sommerer says. He’d just moved up last season from the youth league to competition play, and why Udo of all people was the first to find his tongue again, I don’t know, either.
    “What about the bag?” Schorsch says, and sticks his cell phone into the elastic waistband of his sweat pants because he needs his other hand to untie the bag.
    “The bag!” two, three others are shouting now because the equipment manager still doesn’t see it.
    “What about the bag?” the equipment manager shouts back. He couldn’t see it, because the man doesn’t have eyes on his back.
    But then, all of the sudden, he felt something moist againsthis bare calf. Because, in the cold of the locker room overnight, the thirty-first ball had only made an undetectable stain. As the equipment manager dragged it through the afternoon heat, though, it began to bleed a little. And by the time the equipment manager got to the penalty box where the players were, the shape of a head was already showing through the burlap a little. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily compare Schorsch’s burlap sack with a shroud like they found down in Turin. But a little like that, just so you can picture it, how the nose and the eye sockets were imprinting themselves more and more clearly. And as the thirty-first ball started dripping down the bare calf of the equipment manager, he finally noticed it, too.
    And so, once again, you see how important it is for an equipment manager to always have a cell phone. Because fifteen minutes later, the Radkersburger Gendarmerie were already on the soccer field. And it didn’t even take an hour for the Graz police to get there, either.
    But the Graz police could’ve taken their sweet time because the Radkersburger Gendarmerie—highly competent. They didn’t leave any work left undone. The victim was clearly identified, because everybody—except for the young goalie—recognized the head. It belonged to FC Feldbach striker Ortovic, and just a few months earlier they’d lost to Feldbach, one to zero. Ironic twist of fate: it’d been a header by Ortovic of all things—off a corner kick in the seventy-sixth minute, and at the far corner of the goal, Ortovic had shot right up like a rocket. And now, a thing like this.
    By the time the Graz police showed up, the Radkersburger Gendarmerie had already searched the entire grounds, too. But no trace of Ortovic’s body. They didn’t even have to break intothe locker room because the window there’s always open so that it doesn’t get too dank. And that’s usually not a problem in Klöch. Nothing goes walking off on its own here. And walking off wasn’t the problem anyway. No, the problem was that something new had shown up.
    Not a single trace, either, the Klöch Gendarmerie reported to the Graz police. Then they searched a little more for fingerprints and footprints, but nothing much came of it.
    By five-thirty the whole nightmare was already over. The Radkersburger Gendarmerie returned to their posts down at the speed-trap by the north off-ramp. The police pathologist took Ortovic’s head with him for further examination. And Dreher, the criminologist’s assistant, was more than happy to be sent home by his boss, Kaspar