The Bone Man Read Free Page B

sit.
    “Fried chicken?”
    It was the same waitress as earlier that afternoon. She recognized Brenner right away and took his order ahead of the others who’d been waiting much longer.
    “No, thanks,” Brenner said.
    “Or a pork knuckle? We’ve got good pork knuckles.”
    “For god’s sake, no.”
    “Or spare ribs with french fries?”
    “Just a beer,” Brenner said, and he must have looked pitiful because the waitress gave him an encouraging look and then brought him his beer right away—before she even took the others’ orders. She was wearing a red leather skirt, tight as a sausage casing. But,
the epitome of friendliness
, Brenner thought, and downed half his beer on the spot.
    By about nine, business had slowed down, and as the waitress placed his third beer in front of him, Brenner asked her, “Is the manager around?”
    “I haven’t seen the manager at all today.”
    “When does she come in, then?”
    “She must’ve already been in.”
    But the manager didn’t show up after his third beer, either, so he ended up eating a schnitzel. No appetite at all, but Brenner’s the kind of person who can’t go to sleep unless he’s had dinner. Sheer force of habit, but that’s people for you. For every person who can’t sleep on a full stomach, there’s another who can’t sleep unless it’s on a full stomach.
    So, down the hatch with the schnitzel, and another beer, too, and by ten Brenner was already back upstairs in the staff’s quarters, lying in his bed. Or maybe hammock would be a better word for it. But he was so tired now that nothing could’vedisturbed him, not even the incessant squeal of the bone-grinder.
    And let’s be honest, people make an unbelievable fuss about sleep these days. It’s got to be the best bed, everything organic, and absolute quiet, of course—the room gone through with a divining rod to see that the plumbing’s rerouted wholesale—just because people need to park their asses somewhere. Needless to say, no one could’ve dreamed of how soundly Brenner was sleeping tonight, what with half the Grill in his stomach.
    But the deeper you sleep, the harder it is to wake up. That’s the other side to this story.
    When the waitress cleared Brenner’s breakfast dishes the next morning, he had drunk his black coffee, but the rest he’d left. Butter and jam, all sealed up in their plastic capsules like you get everywhere today—might as well be landing on the moon. But it wasn’t the shrink-wrapped portions that bothered Brenner. No, he was just a grouch in the morning—the very model of one, in fact.
    The waitress, on the other hand, radiated an unusual cheerfulness: “Didn’t touch anything, eh? Would you have preferred cheese?”
    “No, no, it’s fine.”
    “Or cold cuts?
    “Cold cuts?”
    “Assorted sliced meats.”
    Brenner knew what cold cuts were, of course. But the very word reminded him of the bones, i.e. the whole story of why he was sitting here at all, and grumpily, he asked the waitress: “What’s with the manager?”
    “What do you mean, ‘what’s with the manager’?”
    “Where is she?”
    “The manager? She hasn’t come in yet.” The waitress smiled and tiptoed back to the kitchen with the breakfast dishes.
    It would’ve been fine by Brenner to just read the newspaper in peace. Because it’s always interesting to read the local news when you’re in a new place—because you get to read about problems that don’t concern you at all. And to be perfectly frank, there’s nothing more relaxing than that. Klöch’s victory in the Cup took up half the paper. And on the front page, a photo of the goalkeeper being paraded like royalty around the field. More than 3,500 spectators had been in attendance—and that’s in a town of only a thousand inhabitants.
    There wasn’t much else interesting in the paper, so Brenner was deliberating:
should I do the crossword puzzle now?
Because that had been a habit ever since his days as a traffic cop. A