It took until four to get to Kitzbuhel proper. Felix didn’t want to flog the Polo to death to get there a half an hour early, especially with the rack and bike frame on top. It would be light until nine anyway, now.
Giuliana had dozed on and off for an hour after they’d hit the M1. He’d stopped to fill the tank just before Spittal, right off the autobahn. They had semmels and wurst not-bad cured ham and the buns were still warm and a few slices of Havarti in a bakery next to the Fina. They sat at a bench to eat them, just as the sun came out. He bought beer before they left.
They were soon amid thickening traffic that he guessed was Salzburg-bound, and he was glad to get off again at Bischofshofen.
He stayed on the main road after, rather than the slower and more scenic route that would have led them by St. Johann.
Giuliana put down a guidebook on Thailand. She looked at the sharp edges on the crests of the Kitzbuheler Alpen that had risen up steadily to their right.
“I can’t stop thinking about that,” she said. “What you did up there. It would give me nightmares for sure. The two, you know…?”
“Who knows,” he said. “You do what you have to. Mom will tell you how squeamish I was when I was a kid.”
Kitzbuhel was fairly cluttered already, with more tour buses than Felix expected. He let the Polo through the outer streets toward the zentrum, eyeing the Beemers and Audis and SUVs. A tour bus with a lot of Asians was jammed at the curve that led to the train station. Giuliana giggled as they inched by and looked up at the faces.
“Banzai!”
“How do you know they’re Japanese?”
“They look like rabbits.”
“Are you one of those racist cops who picks on Albanians and Nigerians, huh?”
“Ouch. Are you Red Brigades? Humour, please, liebchen.”
“Don’t ‘liebchen’ me. I’m not one of your Alpine maidens.”
He turned down the lane he had found the first year he’d come with the ski club in hochschule. They’d gotten drunk before going on the lift and nearly fell off.
He pulled in beside a cream Fiat with a German plate and a Munich crest on the window.
“That might be one of our guys,” he said. “See the rack?”
He looked over at Giuliana and looked around her face, at the faint glow of perspiration high on her forehead. The air conditioning in the Polo had failed a couple of years ago now. It wasn’t worth fixing.
He liked how her hair rattled out into a loose bundle as the breeze had tugged at it, mile after mile. She gave him a skeptical stare.
“What?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I know that look.”
“You do, uh?”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Last night.”
“Oh,” she said and batted at him. He laid his hand on her leg.
“I have X-ray vision,” he said. “They teach it at the Gendarmerie school.”
She smacked his hand and then opened the door.
“Stop it. Come on. Get the stuff.”
He took the bike frame down and laid it on the grass margin that ran along the front of the car park. He took out the wheels then, and the Velcroed pouch that held the tools.
Giuliana still kept her first rucksack from when she was a kid.
She had filled it with books and paper and fruit and nuts and God knows what else. He began strapping the wheels to the frame, paying a lot of care to where the spokes rested. Then he tested the weight of the package.
Giuliana chewed on an apple, looking off over the roofs toward the cable car lines that rose from the town up the slopes of the Hochkitzbuhel. A cable car was moving slowly at one of the steepest sections, a 70-degree length close to the top of the Streif. It was that sheer drop where skiers made their bones, where they could declare they had skied the Hahnenkamm, complete with the Mousetrap, the section that had ended so many Olympic hopes.
Felix thought about the trail up beyond the hotel there, the Ehrenbachhohe, over the ridges that led to Penglestein summit and on to Blaue Lacke.
He checked the glove compartment before settling the parking permit better on the dashboard. Giuliana checked the doors a second time while he loaded up his pack.
The streets were busy, with people standing around, moving in groups slowly down the sidewalks, pausing to look at the souvenirs and clothes. There were plenty milling about the steps to the Andreaskirche too. The cafes on Klostergasse were close to full. A deeply tanned man with designer stubble and unnaturally white teeth he liked to display, along with his bare feet in those Americanstyle moccasins, gave Felix the thumbs-up from behind a glass of beer.
“Sehr gut, mann!”
Felix sniffed the air for signs of chemical happiness. He couldn’t manage even a fake smile.
“Have a nice day, man,” he replied.
A cluster of Asians with silly hats stood listening intently to a woman dressed up in a flowery Tyrolean dirndl, with the endless pigtails and the stout shoes. To round things out, a youth in lederhosen was explaining something in fluent Italian to two heavy-set, sweating women that Felix decided could only be nuns in civvies up from Rome. They listened, nodding gravely, and looked up the path of the cable cars above.
He bought the three-day pass and let the ticket seller eye how he had kitted up the bike. It was a slack time for ascents, apparently. They walked through the empty passageway toward the ramp.
“Well, now you have company,” Giuliana said. “Your playmate.”
Peter was the real mountain man. He had been loud and clomping from birth, Felix had concluded early on after their first meeting at the Gendarmerie intake in Graz. Schwartz Peter, they called him soon enough the joker of the pack. Felix had soon learned there was something behind the pose, however. The same Peter very ably rested a keen brain, and big ambitions behind the goofy pose. The same Peter Moser had already impressed the CO at his post in Graz that he should be training at the central Gendarmerie college in Modling.
“My God, Giuliana,” he called out in that deep Styrian voice, the bellen that Schwarzenegger had exported to the world. “I was hoping you’d bring someone decent this time.”
Peter gave Giuliana his trademark sweaty bear hug. Felix eyed the newish bike that Peter had brought with him.
“Scheisse der auf,” he said to Felix then. “You’re expecting this bunch of cheap metal of yours to keep you going across to Blauesee even?”
“I don’t need designer bikes, you big oaf.”
“Don’t you save any money down there in where-the-hell, Schweinwein?”
“Stefansdorf.”
“Or does this nice lady here take it from you?”
“He’s predictable,” said Giuliana. “If nothing else.”
“Damned right. We’re hitting the paths the minute we get out of this coffin on strings, huh? You too, Giuliana, has he converted you?”
“No heroics,” she said. “It’s just a recreation for me, not a way of life.”
“Some of my best friends are bookworms. Hey, what are you reading this time?”
They got the Kanada car on the gondola. They had to wait for a grizzled old man in traditional mountaineering gear complete with a new feather in his hat and a walking stick, and a woman Felix hoped was his daughter, to alight first.
Peter unburdened himself of a longish joke about a German and a Swiss and a Swede who got drunk in a stube in the nowhere end of Burgenland one dark winter night. Felix pretended to listen, all the while watching Giuliana trying not to freak, even a little, as the gondola began its traverse of the meadow and sheds below, the gentle glide that would become something altogether different after the next few pylons.
The joke over, Felix allowed a chuckle. Peter looked around the car, taking in the view of the clusters of houses and streets, the Pfarrkirche that made up Kitzbuhel. Across the town Kitzbuhelhorn, all two thousand metres of it, stood sharp against a deep blue sky. Up the valley beyond Aurach, the Hohe Tauern, the Alps proper, began. There were serious pockets of snow even midway up there yet. They joined, most of them, into solid caps clear against a lighter blue sky to the north.
Felix let himself sag into the seat more. He rested his eyes for several moments on the almost luminous greens of the nearby valleys, those exuberant bursts of growth that sprang up at the end of the long winters here, not 50 kilometres from the Bavarian border.
The air growing cooler already. He found himself slipping into a mental rehearsal of what he would do with Giuliana out there in a sheltered spot. It’d be a grassy patch well in from the trails, and plenty of sun, and a breeze.
Peter shifted in his seat.
“What’s the news in Sleepyville,” he asked. “Your exciting gendarmerie post, with, what’s his name again, your guy?”
“Gebhart.”
Felix didn’t want to mention the bodies up near the Himmelfarb place.
“The usual,” he said.
“Well I tell you, up my way we’re action central since Easter.”
“All of a sudden?”
“Genau. I thought it was just spring madness, or something.
But the old guys in the post say there’s something different this year.”
Felix was still irritated at how Peter had landed a post in a big place like Liezen, while he had ended up in one-horse Stefansdorf.
“Like?”
Peter rested his elbows on his knees and nodded at Giuliana.
“You’re not hearing any of this, Giuliana, right?”
She glanced up from her intent study of her rucksack and shook her head.
“Drugs. Big time in a garage there. And what a set up! The Nobel Prize, I tell you. Did you hear about it? And the shoot-out?”
“I think so.”
“One guy dead, two in hospital. Seven arrests, and we almost got a big one. Guess what language these guys don’t speak so well except one local, who used to do paperwork and meet landlords and that. Guess.”
“Nicht sprach gut Deutsch?”
“Wow. You’re going to end up in the KD yet, Felix. Guess the home countries now. Go on.”
“Afghanistan?”
“Not the drugs, man. The big shot. The one that got away.”
“Local guy?”
“Hell, Christ no. An auslander. Why do you think I’m asking you? He’s a brute too by the way. You should hear some of the things they say about him.”
Felix gave him the eye: maybe not.
“He was one of those paratroopers from Bosnia. Just about the cream of the crop. No doubt he’s sitting pretty at some cafe back there now, planning his next effort.
“Well, does he mountain bike?”
Peter looked over at Giuliana too. She had a pasty look now, Felix saw.
“Hey, Giuliana. All this fresh mountain air?”
A look of panic flickered on her face as the gondola car clattered through a pylon. The steeper parts of the run were below them now. Felix watched the mountains rise up again through the roof windows as the car was drawn out of the pylon again.
Peter began to hum and stroke his sideburns. Felix stayed still, only turning his head once to catch a glimpse of the tiny houses clustered around the Liebfrauenkirche far back in the town. For him, the sway and resonance of the car brought a kind of comfort.
His father had been a hiker, and a vigorous one at that, striding ahead even when he and Lisi were small, pointing out everything with a stick. There must be things the body remembers, he thought, his eyes on Giuliana’s tight form perched on the edge of her seat, eyes determinedly locked on some part of the bike there. Yes, the coming down, leaning against his father, almost sleeping, proud of his day’s hiking, a kid and as close as they ever would be.
His eyes left Giuliana then and rested several moments on Peter. The guy trained at something all year. If it wasn’t Nordic skiing, it was kayaking in someplace in the Czech Republic, and if it wasn’t mountain biking, it was taking a run at some Iron Man thing. He even skied in shorts here sometimes: “the ladies love it.”
Weights, football, water polo, city marathons. Peter was going to leave nothing to chance in his campaign to get into the Alpini. From there, he assured Felix, it would be a hell of a lot easier to have a serious chance at his final goal: Kobra Squad. Even a provincial command Kobra, he claimed, because that was good enough.
Felix eyed the tanned tree-trunk legs on his friend. He imagined their owner rappelling down from a helicopter in an avalanche, or pushing on through a blizzard towing a ridiculously huge sled of gear toward a plane crash. Or his blackened face peering down over the sights on one of the Uzis they were issued, and then leaping off a roof in those boots you could walk across a ceiling upside down with.
So, was it envy, Felix still asked himself, that made him return to wondering if Peter really was fooling himself about his Kommando prospects? Maybe no one had told him. Or maybe he was in denial, as they say: he was just too damned big. A giant really, more like the great export Arnold than the trim endurance-built acrobat types that Gebhart had heard were sought for specialist squads in the Gendarmerie.
Another pylon arrived, with the few seconds slowing, followed by the rumbling and the sharp tug as it was pulled through. He heard Giuliana catch her breath. Almost there, he wanted to say to her, but knew she wouldn’t like his pity, especially in front of Peter.
He sat forward slowly to look to the wood cut far below. He felt something move along his calf then, half guessed what it was his damned Handi and made a grab for it. It hit the floor of the gondola with a dull hollow thump.
Even Peter started.
“Jesus,” said Giuliana and flinched as the car swayed a little from her jump.
Felix picked up the phone. It was still on. There was a text message waiting.
“You are a very religious woman,” said Peter. “I like that. Is it just around Felix here?”
Giuliana did a first-class eyeball roll and returned to studying her knapsack on the floor in front of her. Felix thumbed through the menu and watched the text appear.
In a moment his mind was on a slalom, with everything almost over the edge, rushing at him. Why had he turned off the ringer?
Hansi Himmelfarb holding the kitten in the farmhouse kitchen. The way Speckbauer’s comments always had a ring of not quite sarcasm. Sitting with those two detectives in the restaurant yesterday in a weird conversation.
He sent the message scrolling again. Something fastened and closed tighter in his chest and he gasped. He had to think, but he couldn’t. He saw his own hands turn the phone over. He stared at it, and read the logos and indentations on the back. Battery, he thought, his mind skittering, serial number. Had he snapped?
“Busted?”
It was Peter. Felix looked up at him. The light, the views over the valleys and mountains, even Peter’s face all seemed to have changed.
“Is it broken?”
“No.”
Peter shrugged and half smiled. Felix looked out the window at the clearing below where they creaked and swung upwards. There were no maniacs hiking it up today, straining and sweating every step to the top of the mountain.
He looked at his feet. He didn’t know what to do.
“What’s going on in there?”
It was Giuliana. The strain on her face was easing. He was suddenly overwhelmed by gratitude that she was there, present, alive, and still trying to beat her nerves about heights and cable cars, just to humour him.
“Something’s wrong?”
Peter would find out eventually, one way or another, he decided.
“Gebi texted me,” he said and cleared his throat. “Remember the incident up at the farm, the Himmelfarb family?”
“How could I forget?” Giuliana said.
Felix saw that Peter wasn’t even pretending that he was not all ears.
“Gebi said, well, he texted that… something happened. A fire.
They’re dead.”
Volkswagen Polos Felix’s mother’s seven-year-old model Polo will top out at 180. On a good day, as Gebi might say. With the fohn behind you, that warm winter breeze, or a tornado maybe, going down the side of a wall.
Felix wavered at 150, imagining a cloud of black smoke, a serious clank and grind and one good big metallic bang, and then only the decision of what scrap yard he’d send it to.
Still he pushed it. He wanted something, anything, to seize his attention and hold it, so he could not think. He got the eye several times from drivers rolling along nicely at 130, in cars that could do twice that. He came through Schladming after he got off the A10, and he was barrelling down the A9 an hour later. The lights were on a half-hour before he got to the outskirts of Graz.
He phoned Giuliana after he got off the autobahn. She had settled into the hotel. No, she hadn’t been “checking out” the other guys, the dozen or so off-duty Gendarmerie guys who had shown up for the trekking. And no, she wasn’t really fooled by this lame humour. Peter wouldn’t put the moves, sober or wipsi, she told him.
She had her books, they had their bikes and, later, their beer. And yes, she had a lift down to the bahn tomorrow and a ticket, if she changed her mind. And no, it was no problem. She wanted at least one night up on the mountain, with Felix or without.
He picked up some buns and milk before he let himself into the apartment. He waited until he had eaten half of the buns and cheese before phoning the post. Korschak told him Gebhart had left a message at the end of his shift. Korschak’s tone conveyed something to Felix as he recited Gebhart’s home phone number. It was not resentment, Felix decided, or annoyance that Gebhart had conceded a valuable invitation to the new recruit, but perhaps the smallest trace of awe.
“So Felix,” said Korschak. “Look at you. You are hardly in the door here but you get to talk to Gebi and at the Gebhart residence too, I might add.”
“Is it really that big a deal?”
“Is the Pope Catholic? Gebi never mixes home with work.
Never. Even Dieter is scared to phone him at home. You, my friend, are special.”
Felix couldn’t remember hearing that tone of sly humour from the friendly enough but starchy, by-the-book careerist Korschak before. He had recited the phone number in a slow, portentous tone.
“So phone him,” Korschak added, “Something on account of a boy? You’ll know, he said.”
Felix put down the phone, and sat back. He decided again that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, or should do.
He examined his hands. He had walked hand in hand with Hansi Himmelfarb, gotten the butt of half-serious jokes about it.
What would the fire that killed the Himmelfarbs have done to that hand?