Free Morgue Drawer Four by Jutta Profijt Page A

leather seat like a good boy.
    “What did you do with your old Polo?” he asked.
    Totally unreal: this question was so unbelievably wrong at this point in time. When someone shows off their new car for you, then you ask how many horse the thing has under its hood, if the suspension is lowered, how many watts the system serves up, and if the maximum speed shown on the speedometer is correct. You don’t ask what you did with your old car. And then just a Polo! Is there anything more trivial in life than the whereabouts of an old Polo?
    “I sold it,” Birgit mumbled. “I’ve always wanted to have one of these.”
    “Mmm hmm,” was all Martin could contribute. I suspect he still didn’t get what “one of these” actually meant. A BMW 3-Series convertible from the early 1980s, tiptop condition, grey exterior, red leather interior. Yeah, red! A totally awesome chick magnet. But Martin was sitting on the soft leather like a stuffed dummy, staring straight ahead, making an effort to smile and finally nodding.
    “Nice,” he said.
    “Martin!” I screamed. “The thing is not ‘nice,’ it’s kickass fresh.”
    “Kickass fresh,” Martin repeated.
    Birgit’s grin widened. “You think?”
    That’s how you talk to chicks!
    “Yes,” Martin said. He was acting like he’d downed a whole box of psychiatric meds.
    “I’m glad,” Birgit cheered. “Should we go for a little spin?”
    Martin shook his head. “Please don’t be mad, but I’m not doing that well today. I’ve got a headache.” Goodness gracious me, dear Martin was out of sorts!
    “Another time, then,” Birgit said, softening her tone.
    There was a short pause.
    “Do you want to come up?” Martin asked.
    I was amazed. That was even better, of course. Instead of adrenalin in the car, right to testosterone in the love nest. I was experiencing excited anticipation, but I kept my mouth shut.
    “Sure.”
    We got out of the car, climbed up to the third floor, and walked into Martin’s apartment. Birgit apparently knew her way around, and Martin disappeared into the kitchen.
    “Would you like some tea?” he called.
    “Please.”
    What planet had I landed on? You drink tea when you’re sick. I mean, really sick. Really suffering. Puking and the runs and all that. And the first thing that you try is actually Coke, everyone knows that. But when the cholera or whatever causes such messy business has been sticking around for a while, then you switch to tea. In the face of death, and definitely not together with a chick on your couch before you get down to business. But, please, I was familiarizing myself with an entirely new world, here. A parallel universe. I was actually excited to see how things would proceed.
    Martin steeped loose-leaf tea, which he had to fuss with to measure out and fill into an environmentally friendly reusable tea filter and then dispose of in the compostable-waste container. I wondered what humanity had actually invented the teabag for.
    I left Martin back in the kitchen and made my way to Birgit in the living room. When I entered the room, I had a massive shock. Fine, I wasn’t really expecting Martin to hang his walls full of titty calendars, but what I found here totally shocked me. There were city maps hanging everywhere. Yeah, we encountered that already, do you remember? His colleague Jochen and the city map? So here’s where that thread finds its resolution: Martin collects city maps. Old ones and up-to-date ones. The old ones were hung behind glass on his walls. I know I personally have always wanted to see what the streets of Cologne’s medieval downtown used to be called, like, three hundred years ago. It’s totally amazingly interesting, don’t you think?
    Birgit studied Cologne, Nürnberg, and Berlin—maybe she was learning a couple of street names by heart so that she could chat about them with Martin after he came back in. But maybe she was also wondering what was up with his oddball hobby, I couldn’t tell.