Free The Bone Man by Wolf Haas Page B

imagine East Styria. It seemed like Brenner’s entire body had grown ears, every pore an ear—you’ve got to picture this for yourself—and so the music was getting inside of him everywhere.
    “Why so glum? You look like you just flunked your GED.”
    Suddenly, a redhead was standing beside Brenner—didn’t even see her come in. He was still miles away in his head and remembering how once, on the force, they’d sat an entire night on standby and not a single call came in. They played Mau-Mautill four in the morning, a schilling a point, when all of a sudden, Oberascher goes out to the evidence room and comes back in with the cocaine they’d confiscated the day before.
    And that’s the dangerous thing about that fiendish stuff—years later, you’ll often have some backlash like this, and out of nowhere, you’re being dragged back into that trip, middle of broad daylight, even though you haven’t taken any in years. And we even have a word for it here: flashback. English, you see, because that’s how horrible it must be if nobody dares say it in German.
    If there is such a thing! For Brenner it’d been, wait—thirteen, fourteen, no, fifteen years ago already, and now a flashback that practically had him clinging on by his toenails. And that’s why at this moment he said to himself: “I think Löschenkohl fried my chicken in coke today.”
    But the whore must have understood it in spite of the deafening music, or she could read lips, I don’t know. Anyway, she doubled over laughing, practically to her knees, and when she came back up, she giggled, “Chicken fried in cocaine! That’s a good one! What’s your name?”
    She was still shuddering with laughter, but Brenner wasn’t so dazed that he couldn’t tell she was just waiting for an opportunity to jiggle.
    Alas, she’d miscalculated. Because, exactly the opposite effect on Brenner. He smelled her pungent perfume, and it was over. Magic gone. All at once, sober as a stick again. You can have all the music and all the fog and all the flashbacks in the world, but when Brenner smelled that perfume, it was like flipping a switch. Suddenly, the chicken was coated in coarse breadcrumbs again.
    “Simon’s my name,” Brenner said, because he thought,
why should I use a fake name, I’m old enough to use my real name at a brothel
.
    “
Shy
mon!”
    “Simon.”
    “No! Shymon!” the whore shuddered with laughter again. “Because there’s no need for a man to be
shy
in a brothel.”
    “So what’s your name, then?” Brenner asked, because he was thinking:
if she’s this talkative already, can’t hurt, maybe I’ll get led to the right one
.
    “You Man! Me Angie!” Angie said. Because in every brothel there’s an Angie, and this was the Angie from the Borderline in Bad Radkersburg. And when Brenner looked a little confused, she tried it again, the other way around.
    “Me Angie!” she said and pointed at her breasts. Right, so she wasn’t wearing anything, maybe I should’ve added that. And then she clutched at Brenner’s chest and said, “You Man!”
    Brenner had to buy Angie a peewee of sparkling wine, and even though he was making an effort to keep up his end of the conversation, after only her second sip she asked with great concern, “Why so glum? You look like you just flunked your GED.”
    And truly, if it weren’t for the fact that this line of hers roiled him so much, Brenner might not have said just now, “How am I supposed to look when I see a pigsty like this?”
    By pigsty, though, he didn’t mean, in a moral sense, the brothel, but the table next to him. And I have to be fair here: everything else in the joint was
picobello
, meticulous, but the table right next to Brenner’s, it honestly looked as though pigs had been rooting there. Broken glasses, bottles overturned,cigarette butts all over the table and the floor—the only thing missing was someone puking.
    “Oh, that’s just Palfinger,” Angie said.
    “Who’s