The Bone Man Read Free

the day of the Olympic Downhill, he had to break into a hotel staffer’s room. There was a street-level lobby that took you from the main road that runs through the town of Hallein directly to the staffer’s room. More like a laundry room, where the waiter from the Kino Bar had been put up.
    A few people were standing in front of an electronics store on the other side of the street because the Olympic Downhill event was being broadcast on the color TV screens in the window display. And maybe that’s why Brenner and his colleague didn’t get the door open for so long, because they kept looking over at the Olympic coverage.
    Even now, Brenner could still remember how his colleague had once torn his uniform jacket on a piece of sheet metal. Then, a few years later, he ordered a Filipina from a catalog who only weighed forty kilos. Brenner didn’t know his name anymore. But the stench that they were met with when they finally got the door open—never in his life would he forget that. Even though the waiter from the Kino Bar had only beendead two days. And outside, people were celebrating, because the Austrian had finished with the best time, unbelievable, how a couple of people can make that kind of commotion.
    But as old man Löschenkohl held the door open to Brenner’s room in the staff’s quarters above the restaurant, believe it or not, Brenner was struck by the exact same bestial stench.
Maybe it’d been the musty socks and sweaty waiter’s shirts back in Hallein, and less so the decomposing
, Brenner thought, and threw open the window.
    As he craned his neck out the window, he heard a squealing sound like a cement mixer, so loud that he whipped right back around and said to old man Löschenkohl: “That walk-in freezer of yours makes quite a racket.”
    “The freezer’s on the other side of the house, in the addition. The most state-of-the-art walk-in freezer in all of Styria. Million-dollar investment. The interest on it just about eats me up. But you won’t hear a peep out of it, because the whole thing’s a computer, amazing.”
    Brenner didn’t say anything to this, which made it all the easier to hear the squealing.
    “What you’re hearing is the bone-grinder. You’re apt to hear it a bit. But what’s worse are the birds in the morning.”
    “I believe it.”
    “Now that it’s spring they’re making an awful racket. That’s something I can’t do anything about. But if you’ll be needing anything else,” Löschenkohl said.
    “No, I don’t need anything.”
    Brenner was glad when the old man finally disappeared. He positioned himself at the window and took a moment to think in peace. He had two options. Either window closed andthe stench. Or window open and the piercing squeal of the bone-grinder.
    Or a third possibility, of course—up and out of there.
    These days, though, if you want to skip out, you’ve got to do it right away. On the spot immediately. Because habit is a dog, and the next day something will come up, and the day after that you’ve already gotten a little used to it. And Brenner knew all about that. But the chicken had settled so heavily in his stomach that he decided:
I’ll take a walk to digest
. And, of course, the walk calmed him right back down.
    Maybe it was the warmth of the springtime sun, or maybe the idyllic country road, where a car would only drive by every five minutes. Or maybe it was just the green hills, because green’s supposed to soothe the nerves, or so it’s said. Maybe in the precincts where the police have green uniforms, the officers are less aggressive than in the places where they have other uniforms. And the people are more peaceable when they have green police officers. Whether the police suffer less abuse, you see—now, that’d be interesting.
    Brenner couldn’t have cared less. He hadn’t worn a uniform in fifteen years. And it’d been a year since he’d even been a cop at all. So, he’s walking through the Styrian vineyards now and