Eternal Life Read Free Page A

anywhere, so Nemec tries to pin the blame on Brenner. Then, Brenner thinks it over and throws in the towel, by which I mean, his job.
    Nowadays when you’re forty-four and have spent nineteen of those years on the force, then, a thing like this, youthink it over, and I’ve really got to say, hats off, because, at that moment, he had no prospects of anything else.
    Then, Meierling calls him a few days later, you know, the boss of the Meierling Detective Agency. Obviously, Brenner was the ideal candidate because he knew the case. On the other hand, wasn’t the highest priority anyway now, let’s say, Brenner absolutely having to solve the case. Because it was primarily an insurance matter.
    As far as I know, it was more of a formality, you know, that somebody be present until the insurance matters were settled. And that can take years. So that the insurance company can later say, look, we did everything, nobody can blame us for anything, we even sent our own man after the police had long since gave up on the case.
    That he’d actually solve the case, well, at that point in time, nobody could’ve knew that at all.
    And today, I really do have to say, hats off to Brenner, because somebody else might not have managed it so easy. A somebody like Nemec might be quicker upstairs, and, on a different case, maybe he’s the better bet. But, be it as it may, it was here. The corpses in the lift, foreigners. No witness, no clues, no motive, no nothing! So, once again, Brenner was the right one.
    If you’d seen him looking the way he did in Zell, you wouldn’t have guessed that he was a private detective. Even though he was no undercover detective. Anybody who wanted to know, they got told—he was there on account of the lift scandal. How should I put it, though: he didn’t look like a detective.
    The strange thing is that he actually looked exactly like how you might picture a police officer or detective looking. That kind of fireplug type where the shoulders are practically broader than the legs are long. Not big but not small, and a real blockhead with two vertical ruts in his cheeks. And a red, scarred nose like a soccer player—what’s his name, quick, the one with the two brothers.
    But, I don’t think you would’ve taken him for a detective or a police officer. His aqua-blue eyes surely played a part in that. They’re always nervously roaming around, and in retrospect, it’s easy to say that it’s on account of him always observing everything so closely.
    But if you saw him like that, you probably would’ve just got the impression that he was worried. You’d occasionally see him here and there, on Fussballplatz or at the Feinschmeck Café, or at the Hirschenwirt. Or he’d just be milling around on Kirchplatz or taking a walk down to the lake. And because his face was so red, you could see from a ways away how those blue eyes of his were nervously roaming around. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t exactly the type to command respect. As a human being, sure, but not, let’s say, the way Nemec did.
    And that must’ve been it, too, why Nemec didn’t like him—there was just something about him that gave you the sense he didn’t belong there. Nemec made fun of it in public:
    “Don’t go looking like that with those Czech eyes of yours, Brenner!”
    Just a few days after Nemec took over the department, that happened. And to make matters worse, in front ofBrenner’s co-workers, Tunzinger and Schmeller, who got shot six months later during the bank robbery at the, the, the—now where was that again. Brenner wasn’t even aware that he somehow looked strange while he was doing it, and he had no clue what Nemec meant by Czech eyes.
    At first he suspected that Nemec possibly had some complex, on account of him having a Czech name. Maybe that’s why he made jokes about Czech eyes. Because Brenner had done a whole slew of training sessions in psychology on the force, especially his first years there.
    About that, you