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Authors: Wolf Haas

Brenner and God

BOOK: Brenner and God
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PRAISE FOR WOLF HAAS AND
BRENNER AND GOD
 

“Simon Brenner, the hero of Wolf Haas’ marvelous series of crime thrillers, is a wildly likable and original character—a delightful and unexpected hero to show up in this noble and enduring genre. That Brenner struggles his way—always humanistically, often humorously—through Haas’ acutely suspenseful narratives without the aid of a firearm, armed only with his smarts and sometimes fallible intuition, is a monumental plus.”

—JONATHAN DEMME, OSCAR-WINNING DIRECTOR OF
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

 


Brenner and God
is one of the cleverest—and most thoroughly enjoyable—mysteries that I’ve read in a long time. Wolf Haas is the real deal, and his arrival on the American book scene is long overdue.”

—CARL HIAASEN, AUTHOR OF
SICK PUPPY

 

“A must for crime fiction lovers with a sense of humor: In Simon Brenner, Wolf Haas has created a protagonist so real and believable that I sometimes wanted to tap him on the shoulder and point him in the right direction!”

—ANDREY KURKOV, AUTHOR OF
DEATH AND THE PENGUIN

 

“Drolly told by an unidentified yet surprisingly reliable narrator,
Brenner and God
is very funny, leavened throughout with a finely honed sense of the absurd.”

—LISA BRACKMANN
,
NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF
ROCK PAPER TIGER
AND
GETAWAY

 

“This quirkily funny kidnapping caper marks the first appearance in English of underdog sleuth Simon Brenner.… Austrian author Haas brings a wry sense of humor … American readers will look forward to seeing more of Herr Simon.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

 

“One of Germany’s most loved thriller writers: he’s celebrated by the literary critics and venerated by the readers.”

—JOACHIM KRONSBEIN
,
DER SPIEGEL

 

“This is great art, great fun.”

—JULIA SCHRÖDER
,
GERMANY RADIO

 

“The Simon Brenner books are among the funniest and best German speaking crime stories of recent years.”

—FOCUS

 

“Wolf Haas writes the funniest and cleverest mysteries.”


DIE WELT

 

“With his cunning and eloquent vernacular, Wolf Haas is the most important Austrian writer working today.”

—DER STANDARD

 

“He is highly entertaining … It’s as if he sits on Mount Everest looking down at other thriller writers.”

—FRANKFURTER RUNDSCHAU

 

BRENNER AND GOD
Originally published in German as
Brenner
und der liebe Gott
by Wolf Haas

 

© 2009 Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg

 

Translation © 2012 Annie Janusch

 

The translation of this book was supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture

 

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

 

www.mhpbooks.com

 

eISBN: 978-1-61219-114-0

 

        Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936538

 

v3.1

 
Contents
 
 
CHAPTER 1
 

My grandmother always used to say to me,
when you die, they’re gonna give that mouth of yours its own funeral
. So you see, a person can change. Because today I am the epitome of silence. And it’d take something out of the ordinary to get me started. The days when everything used to set me off are over. Listen, why should every bloodbath wind up in my pint of beer? Like I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s up to the boys to take care of. My motto, as it were.

Personally, I prefer to look on the positive side of life these days. Not just Murder He Wrote all the time, and who-got-who with a bullet, a knife, an extension cord, or what all else I don’t know. Me, I’m far more interested in the nice people now, the quiet ones, the normals, the ones who you’d say—they lead their regular lives, abide by the law, don’t mistake themselves for the good lord when they get up in the morning, just nice tidy lives. Propriety and all.

Look at Kressdorf’s chauffeur, for example. Kressdorf, Lion of Construction, surely you know his trucks with the green letters KREBA, short for
Kressdorf Bau
. They’ve done a lot of work in Munich, you may have seen it, here, here, and there. And then there’s this MegaLand we’re getting now. But this isn’t about Kressdorf, it’s about his chauffeur.
Because naturally a man like Kressdorf has got a chauffeur; he can’t drive himself everywhere, not a chance. Certainly not since he got married—the young bride in Vienna, the KREBA headquarters in Munich, and now a two-year-old child—simplest for them all to meet in the middle, say, in Kitzbühel. Because in Kitzbühel, of course, you’ve got the businesses, the contacts, you get the idea. For a child this can’t be good either, back and forth all the time, and I reckon Kressdorf’s daughter already thinks the autobahn is her nursery. But I have to admit she’s a nice kid. Not like kids today usually are—no please, no thank you, no hello, no good-bye. Then again, it’s a good thing they do behave like that, because at least that way you can tell them apart from the adults. It used to be more by size that you could tell—a small one was a child and a big one was an adult. But today the kids grow so fast that you can’t use size as a point of reference anymore—is that the chief physician striding out of the maternity ward, or is it the newborn itself? And even then it’s the exact opposite of how it used to be—rule of thumb, the less arrogant one’s the physician.

So I was just saying, the maternity ward. Kressdorf’s wife was a doctor who had her own practice, a small clinic in an office suite right downtown. A good doctor, but unfortunately a lot of problems lately with the churchgoers in front of the building, by which I mean demonstrators. They were against abortion because that was just their conviction, it shouldn’t exist, a thousand reasons, the good lord, the virgin Mary and, and,
and
.

It’s lucky the driver was such a robust man, because there were some days when a lankier driver would’ve been
a lost cause. He had to smuggle the doctor’s baby past those rosary-slinging rowdies like a stadium security guard who narrowly saves the referee from the lynch mob.

Now, the father’s under a great deal of stress because with contractors there’s always stress, and so of course the kid’s got stress, too. Because today when you have two parents who don’t have any time, but who do have three hundred miles of autobahn between them, then as their child, you can never escape the autobahn completely. And so you can’t be angry with the child if she appoints her driver as her guardian. Believe it or not, the Kressdorf kid’s first word—not “Mama,” not “Papa”—“Driver.” But that was at least six months ago because, in the meantime, little Helena has already started chattering so much from her car seat that the driver barely has use for the radio anymore. And above all she’s good at understanding. Herr Simon’s had the feeling that this child understands him better than most adults he’s had anything to do with in his life. He can tell Helena the most difficult things, problems, all of it, and that two-year-old girl in the backseat understands. In return, she gives him a full report, every detail down to the hair, when he picks her up from her nanny, and Herr Simon, always the attentive listener. There was simply a kindred connection between them. Like-minded souls: understatement.

Overall, Herr Simon was quite content with his new life, which is a way of saying, he hadn’t always been a chauffeur. He’d tried out different professions—more than fifty, in fact—before he found his thing. Whereas others his age were already thinking about retirement and pensions, Herr Simon was only just beginning a regular professional life.
First, the five hours from Vienna to Munich, then back five hours from Munich to Vienna, sometimes with the mother in tow, rarely with the father, but always with the amiable kid who understood him so well. Unless you were born to be a chauffeur, you can hardly imagine how much it suited him. And one thing you can’t forget: Kressdorf didn’t pay badly. Plagued by a guilty conscience over his child, he compensated the chauffeur exceedingly well. Or maybe it wasn’t so much a guilty conscience as it was basic concern for the kid. There was never a riotous crowd in front of the abortion clinic, but somehow that silent threat from the church-types was even more menacing, because there’s nothing worse than a sighing aggressor. A well-known fact: behind every mass murderer there’s a mass sigher.

The Frau Doctor was thrilled about her dependable driver. That he took his job seriously goes without saying. If there was even the slightest noise somewhere, a squeal from the air-conditioning, or a faint streak left by the windshield wiper, or if a floor mat wasn’t placed just so—it would have been unthinkable for him to subject the child to such a thing. Sure, he could’ve just said, Helena can’t see the floor mat from her car seat anyway, but no, as a matter of principle, everything was always
picobello
, meticulous.

So, the chauffeur gets annoyed at himself for having forgotten to gas up yesterday just because it’s never happened to him before. Five minutes into the drive out of Vienna, he glances at the gas gauge, and believe it or not, he didn’t gas up last night, i.e., nothing but vapors to coast on for 190 kilometers!

Then again, maybe this was on account of the pills.
Because not all the effects were positive. A certain absentmindedness.
It’s possible the pills caused this
, the chauffeur thought, while keeping an eye out for the next gas station. He actually gave a great deal of thought to the effects of the pills. On the one hand, he wasn’t sleeping so well anymore, but on the other, he was doing better since they’d been prescribed to him—where you find yourself saying,
the sun is shining a little brighter for me today
. You should know, there wasn’t much wrong with him before, especially since he’d left his last girlfriend. Although in the woman’s defense I should add—and, frankly, I think she left him—that she’d been at her wits’ end with him. And it was his girlfriend who’d managed to get him to even go to the doctor, because all his life Herr Simon had been a crank about doctors.

BOOK: Brenner and God
13.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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