The low thrum of the engine, and the squeaks from the suspension as the car wallowed and even bucked on the mountain road only made the silence of the last 10 minutes of the journey to Festring more pronounced. In that uneasy quiet Felix soon decided that Speckbauer too was marinating in his own thoughts, maybe even as much as he was in his own. The difference was that Speckbauer was showing no signs of that steady and growing foreboding that had been growing in Felix’s mind. It had almost spilled over into dread at times, a dark swirl of images flaring and returning again, no matter how he tried to contain them.
It was almost a relief when the half-dozen houses of Festring came in sight, arriving abruptly after a bend, nestled in a valley whose bright green meadows had been hard-won from the hills.
Gasthaus Hiebler was a modest affair in the traditional style, with ambitious flowerboxes and what looked like a recent coat of paint.
Two cars were parked in a gravelled area to the side, one an Opel with fancy rims. The spring melt was not done with the land up here yet, and the soft, grassy banks of the ditches along the road outside were still saturated. Felix backed in, turned off the engine and held the keys up for Speckbauer.
“So,” said Speckbauer. “Except for that shitbox Opel there, we are in a time machine up here.”
Felix said nothing.
“This is going to be low key,” Speckbauer went on. “We want to know who was in this place when Karl Himmelfarb was in the other night. Who he might have told about the goings on at his farm. He played cards, had a beer, like always, gell?”
Felix nodded. Speckbauer still held the door handle, and stared at the gap where the door had opened a little, and where the cold air was flowing in.
“And my bet is they’ll know you, your name. Your father?”
And Speckbauer was out of the car with that fast, rolling exit that had him on his toes and stretching by the side of the car, the door shut behind him already. He nodded toward the door of the inn.
It was drawn back just as Felix prepared to push it open. A woman in her fifties with a housecoat took a step back.
“Servus,” Felix said.
“Gruss, und wilkommen.”
She had a business smile and grey eyes that reminded Felix of a bird. They fixed on Speckbauer, who had lingered several steps behind. She returned his greeting in the same high, musical accent she had Felix’s.
“Is the gasthaus open?”
“Of course,” she said, and she unclasped her hands to usher them in.
There was a heavy, brothy aroma in the air. Felix glanced at the empty dining room that was off to the left of the entrance.
“Fine day earlier,” she said.
“It’ll return,” said Felix.
How easily it had come out, he thought; how he didn’t even have to think about the reflexive reply he had heard so often from his grandparents.
“Kommen sie,” she said.
The stube even had a kachelofen, and it had been lighted. An old man was seated at a table, a walking stick beside him. He turned and smiled at Felix.
“Well, look what the day brings us,” he said.
“Gruss, Herr Hartmann,” said Felix. “A nice surprise to find you up here.”
He saw that the woman was eyeing Speckbauer.
“Wunderbar,” said Speckbauer and rubbed his hands briskly.
“Did I smell soup?”
There were playing cards spread out over the gingham cloth at the booth where Willi Hartmann sat.
“You are rambling, Felix, is it? Up for the air?”
“Actually not. My friend here is new to the area. He asked if I would show him the sights.”
“Marvellous,” said Speckbauer to Hartmann. “Splendid countryside.”
Hartmann looked from Speckbauer to Felix and back.
“It is that, sir.”
“May I buy you a krugl of beer, Herr Hartmann?”
“No, no, Felix. Ach, how like your father to have said that! No, thank you. I need but the one glass of beer to get wipsi now.”
Then he offered a weak smile.
“There are no prizes for old age, my friends. I should finish my game and go home for a nap.”
“Home is close then?” Speckabuer asked.
“Herr Hartmann lives in the same village as my grandparents,” said Felix. “St. Kristoff.”
“Six hundred and twenty years,” said Hartmann, with a wink.
“Not all mine of course. My family.”
Speckbauer trailed the woman to the bar.
“Soup and a bun would be great,” Felix heard him say. “Is that possible?”
She smiled, and this time Felix saw gold to both sides of her mouth.
“I am the boss,” she said. “So if it’s possible, I will tell you.”
Hartmann moved in on the bench and motioned to Felix.
“Sit,” he said. “Sit. A nice service for your dad, wasn’t it? A good turnout, eh? Respect. Some things don’t change, even in this flyaway world.”
He eyed Speckbauer talking to the woman at the bar.
“My niece is married, you should tell him. Liesl, who runs the place.”
Felix smiled.
“I don’t think he’s up in the hills looking for a wife.”
Hartmann moved his leg again and grimaced. Liesl called out from the bar.
“Soup and jausen for you too, sir?”
Felix shook his head. He asked for beer instead.
Speckbauer returned to the booth. He leaned in to shake hands with Hartmann and then he slid into the bench opposite. He looked at the cards, the half-empty beer glasses.
“Am I taking someone’s place?”
“Macht nichts,” said Hartmann, with a small wave.
“My chauffeur — he’s in the klo.”
Hartmann’s eyes stayed on Speckbauer for several moments.
“You take your wild card-playing to teach them up here, Herr Hartmann?” Felix said.
“Little teaching they need up here,” Himmelfarb replied. “No.
I go on my rounds here. I am like the priest, you know? My niece married in here years ago. Her husband may own this place, but she is the boss, let me tell you. That’s the Hartmanns for you.”
“And what does the husband work at?” Speckbauer asked.
“This and that,” said Hartmann easily, as though he had been expecting it. “Takes care of the place, he’s handy. There are contracts for the woods, of course. There’s always something, isn’t there? Not like old times, I must say. Your opa could tell you about those, eh, Felix?”
Opa Kimmel, he meant, Felix realized. The eminence grise, was that the expression? The conversation lapsed. Felix looked around the room. It had been kept up, and it was clean, but it had a jaded feel to it. Maybe it was more a hobby, or a custom to keep it open, just to cover costs.
Footsteps and a cough came from the hall. A man appeared in the doorway, pausing when he saw the arrivals to nod.
“Servus alles.”
Felix returned the greeting, followed by Speckbauer.
The man was in his thirties, with tousled red-blond hair and two days’ growth of rust-coloured beard under the crinkly eyes.
There was an easygoing look to him, and he was more than amply padded.
“My chauffeur,” said Hartmann. “Fuchs, Anton Fuchs.”
“Toni,” said Fuchs shaking hands, his eye almost disappearing with his smile. He sat in slowly beside Speckbauer.
“I was telling Felix how I can’t win at cards here at all, Toni. In all the years I have tried.”
“No one can,” said Fuchs. His eyes almost disappeared with another smile again. “Liesl can beat anyone.”
“I hear my name taken in vain,” she called out, as she came through a doorway with a tray. She laid a platter of cold meats, and a half-dozen buns next to a bowl of thick yellowy soup. She raised the empty beer glass.
“Mahzeit,” she said. “Your health.”
Hartmann shook his head. Liesl stood back from the table with her hands on her hips.
“That’s not going to change,” said Hartmann, and he gathered the cards. “You have all the luck meant for me, Liesl.”
Fuchs chortled and had another drink from his glass. For a moment Felix thought of Hartmann’s artificial leg. Had he not considered himself lucky to have survived at all?
His eyes strayed to Hartmann’s wrinkled hands, shaking a little, as he packed away the cards.
“This is the best,” said Speckbauer, and spooned in more soup.
It only helped to make the quiet seem even stronger behind the ting of his spoon and the swallows.
“The work goes well, Felix?”
“So-so,” Felix said. “There is always something.”
“Oh come on now. Your dad would have been so proud of you, to see you in uniform there. So proud.”
He turned to Fuchs.
“Felix’s opa and I, we were kids together. I knew Felix’s father too. May God be good to him, as I know He is.”
“Family?” said Fuchs, his smile almost closing the heavy-lidded eyes again.
“Kimmel,” said Felix. “We started out in St. Kristoff.”
“The Kimmels followed us there,” said Hartmann. “Us Hartmanns. They knew a good thing up here in the hills. “ Hartmann stopped shuffling the cards, and put his head back.
“‘In the green wood is my home Beside the stream no more to roam.’”
Speckbauer held his spoon away from his mouth.
“‘To farm and plough, to hunt the doe.
My land to guard against the foe.’”
Hartmann smiled, put down the cards and sat back.
“It’s not often these days that I meet a fan of our great poet, Peter Rossegger.”
Speckbauer finished the spoonful of soup.
“What Austrian could not be?” he said.
“Well, Felix,” said Hartmann, and cleared his throat. “You travel our backroads with scholars. A great blessing.”
Felix noticed the beer belly now as Fuchs settled into the booth. He exchanged a thin smile with him.
Then Hartmann sighed, and shook his head once. His expression turned sombre.
“Terrible thing, the Himmelfarbs,” he said. “Terrible.”
He seemed to be staring, unseeing, at something across the room. He sighed again.
“I heard you were there with the boy?”
Felix sensed Speckbauer had begun listening more intently.
“You heard that?”
Hartmann nodded.
“Karl knew your name,” he said. “Oh yes. You and another Gendarme, the one he phoned. A friend of his, maybe?”
“They had met over a family matter before,” said Felix. “But not me.”
“It was your father,” said Hartmann, and paused to clear his throat. “He knew your father. Like half the province, such a fine man — may angels guard him.”
“It was only by chance I was there really,” he said.
“I didn’t know Karl all that well,” Hartmann went on, his voice barely audible. Age seemed to have returned with a vengeance to his features, Felix thought. Liesl made her way across from a door that led to a big kitchen.
“Family Himmelfarb,” Hartmann said to her.
“My God,” she said and clasped a dishcloth to her chest.
“Terrible,” she murmured, and then blessed herself. “But ‘Straight to heaven go the honest and the innocent.’”
Felix caught Speckbauer’s eye as the spoon was taking the last of the soup toward his mouth. Poetry, right off the bat? Speckbauer might not be the cynic about rural piety like this, then.
“The boy — God forgive me,” said Hartmann. “My brain is rusty: but what was his name…?”
“Hans,” said Felix. “Hansi.”
“He was everything to them, that boy,” said Liesl, her voice quavering. “There was a problem when he was born, they say. None followed. But on they went, with just the boy. Such a terrible thing.
Tragisch.”
She took out a paper hanky.
“Karl visited here,” said Hartmann. A game of cards, a coffee.
Never alcohol. Right, Liesl?”
She was crying quietly now. She nodded.
“Not so long ago?” said Felix.
“He was here but a day before this happened,” said Hartmann.
He looked around the table with a slow, baleful stare, as though to find agreement.
Fuchs, whose head was down now also, studying the glass, nodded.
“A ‘friend of the house’?”
“Indeed,” said Liesl between sniffs. “For years… And such a dignified man. I can think of no other word. Oh, but he had a cross to bear!”
Several sobs escaped her. Hartmann’s veiny hand reached up.
Felix looked at the patterned brocade curtains by the windows, the folk art on the walls and behind the counter.
“Did you speak with him, Frau Hiebler?”
She nodded.
“The crops,” she said. “The spring. The government. But so polite!”
Felix could feel Speckbauer’s questions piling up unspoken, but he waited.
“Schnappsen,” Hartmann said. “He played only to be polite.
But I think he enjoyed himself. The way a quiet man would. And now look.”
“Indeed,” said Felix, and he turned to tousle-haired Fuchs.
“Did you?”
Fuchs shook his head.
“Working,” he said. “I only heard from the TV. Then a neighbour. That was after the other thing.”
“The other thing?”
“I thought they’d gotten it confused,” said Fuchs, “Or that I had. We all heard about what they found up there behind the farm.
The two, the two auslanders.”
“The poor man!” said Liesel, her eyes shining. “And his poor family!”
“He must have had a terrible shock,” said Hartmann.
“Did he talk about it all, when he was here?”
“Well, it was one of us, I think brought it up,” said Hartmann.
“If I’m remembering. Let me see, who was by… ”
Then Hartmann’s head went up, followed by the rest of him.
He stared, eyes wide at Felix.
“What am I saying, Meine Gott, I am losing my marbles! Your opa was here! Yes! Of course he was! Speak up there, Toni! You brought him, for heaven’s sake.”
Fuchs nodded bashfully, and scratched at his head.
“Toni here is not one much to blow his trumpet,” said Liesl.
“‘The chauffeur.’”
“You drive people?” Felix said to Fuchs.
“Well, only if they can’t find someone,” he said.
“Now Toni,” said Hartmann, his voice back. “No one is accusing you of being a saint, but come on now!”
He looked to Felix again.
“Toni drives us old geezers about sometimes — yes, don’t be modest now, Toni! We aren’t safe behind the wheel, you see. So Toni steps in. When he can, of course.”
Fuchs gave a shrug, and waved away the compliments.
“And helps out,” Liesl added. “With something they can’t do themselves.”
“Oh yes,” said Hartmann. “Fix a window — ask Toni. Move furniture — ask Toni.”
Fuchs shook his head gently, and scratched it again.
“Lose at cards — ask Toni,” he said quietly. He had not looked up.
The smile returned to Hartmann’s face for several moments.
“Well, have you seen your opa since the memorial?”
“No,” said Felix.
“I think it’s a good decision, no?” Hartmann asked. Felix didn’t get it.
“Moving,” said Hartmann. “It’s hard, but it’s the right thing to do, for him.”
“I daresay,” said Felix.
“He’s out there on his own too long,” Hartmann went on.
“He’ll have his own room now in the village. What could be better?”
He nudged Fuchs.
“Toni will help out when the time comes, right? Moving stuff?”
Fuch’s lazy smile held. He looked at Felix but nodded toward Hartmann.
“I saw that,” said Hartmann.
Felix was reluctant to draw Hartmann back from the lightheartedness he seemed to be working to regain.
“Herr Himmelfarb,” he said then. “And his card friends, you say, that evening?”
Sure enough, Hartmann’s expression slid back. He turned toward his niece.
“There were others earlier, weren’t there, Liesl?”
Liesl nodded. Felix wondered if he should ask for names. He decided to wait.
“Oh he looked worried,” she said. “Rings around his eyes.
Tired-looking. Of course, he knew that we’d heard what had happened. I didn’t want to put talk on him about it though — if he didn’t bring it up himself, of course.”
“A man would have to get out,” said Hartmann. “Just to get a wee break, even for an hour or two.”
“But he talked about things?” Felix said. “What had gone on?”
There was a small delay before Liesl answered.
“Well, I think he was worried for his boy… wasn’t he, Willi?
He was with your players here.”
“Us old farts,” said Hartmann with a rueful look. “Yes. He said the boy was very… how can one say it, one doesn’t want to say ver-ruckt — crazy, like — let’s say strange. Agitated. No sleep, with all the comings and goings. The boy was excited, he wanted the thing to go on, you see. He didn’t understand.”
“All the activity there?”
“The Gendarmerie and so forth,” said Hartmann, and paused momentarily.
“Those experts, the police experts,” he added.
It was a signal that Speckbauer wouldn’t miss either, Felix knew. He looked over at Liesl again.
“He was not keen to discuss private matters,” she said. “But he said something about how it would take ages for the boy to settle again. ‘He wants the police up there all the time now.’”
“Karl did, himself?”
“No, the boy, Hansi. The police were good to him, apparently, humouring the boy. Playing the siren and that, like a toy.”
“That is how they found the two,” said Hartmann. “He said that Hansi liked one of the Gendarmerie so he brought him wandering up the woods, where he had his ‘dolls.’”
“Dolls?”
“That’s what the boy called them, he said: ‘dolls.’”
No one seemed to want to keep the conversation going after Hartmann’s quiet and doleful remarks. For a while everyone seemed to withdraw into themselves. Felix took another swallow from his beer. Fuchs ran his hand slowly through his hair, but the effect was only to make him look even more the bewildered elf with even more hair askew. Liesl looked away through the window toward the faraway hills, and Hartmann sighed. The quiet was broken only by the sounds of Liesl’s occasional sniffle and a faint whistling that seemed to come from Fuch’s nose.
Then Liesl shifted her feet.
“So geht’s,” she said. “And so it goes. The bad things that happen to the good people. I hope there’ll be a big turnout for the funeral.”
Both Hartmann and Fuchs nodded.
“I am forgetting more and more,” said Hartmann then. “But now I remember. Yes! Poor Karl was clumsy, with his cup, wasn’t he, Liesl? He dropped it and it broke? His hands were shaking a bit. I asked him if there was somewhere he could get a break, him and Mrs.”
“Haunted, he was,” said Liesl, and blew her nose in a delicate fluffing sound.
After several moments, where Liesl looked away through the window toward the faraway hills, and Hartmann sighed, the talk slowly moved to goings on in the district. The winter had been long, as always; tourism last year had not been so great, but there were more people coming up to trek now. Would the Turks finally get their way now, and get a ticket to the EU? The price of a new VW was just stupid, and the quality was down anyway.
Felix listened, saying little, and wondered what Speckbauer was making of it all here. Hayseeds, slow-in-the-heads up here in God’s country? Occasionally he’d glance over at Hartmann, at the liver spots on the back of his hands, and at the lines that the wind and sun and long winter’s cold had dug in from his eyes around almost to his ears. Berger Willi, yes, this ancient fellow had been mad for the hills and mountains since he was a child.
He saw Speckbauer looking at his watch.
He took out his wallet. Speckbauer’s hand was on his forearm before he could open it.
“May I?” Speckbauer asked, looking around the faces. He had no takers.
Felix followed Liesl over to the counter.
“The card guys,” he began. “Are there a lot of them?”
“They come in different days,” she said. “But the older ones are afternooners.”
“Were there many the evening Karl Himmelfarb was in?”
She stopped keying in numbers on the cash register and stared at a mirror behind the counter.
“I’d have to think,” she said. “Berger Willi, of course — and Herr Kimmel, your opa. He is Peter, no? Fuchs, yes. There were others… Hans Prem; he’s in a chair now, a wheelchair. But his daughter has a van for that, yes… She stayed, but she didn’t play. Let me see.. Frank Schober, I think. He drives himself, still.”
She frowned then, and turned from the mirror.
“So you are Herr Kimmel’s grandson. Isn’t it strange we haven’t met.”
“My opa is called Herr Kimmel, even here?”
She gave him a quick glance.
“Well that’s the way with some people, isn’t it? What odds, I say.
But not like your father, I must say. Or you, I think?”
“My father? You knew him, did you?”
She looked toward the group at the booth again, but her eyes were not focused on them, Felix saw.
“Only a while,” she said. “I was sorry to hear of, you know?”
He nodded.
“He used to come here?”
“If I remember it was only for a short while,” she said. “Maybe a couple of years ago? But he dropped by a number of times there, in one week. That’s how I remember. Yes.”
“Driving my opa, was it?”
Again she frowned.
“Well I don’t think so. But such a nice man to talk to. I am sorry if this is not good for you to hear this today.”
Felix smiled.
“He got around, as they say.”
“Oh I knew he was a Gendarme right away,” she said. “Even without any uniform. But that made no difference. Great for a chat.
It gets a bit isolated here after the season, you know. But he liked to know the news, no matter how small it would be from these parts.
Yes. Always had time to listen. Curious about everything, yes.”
She shrugged sympathetically and finished entering the numbers. The till opened as a receipt began issuing out with a scratching sound.
“Yes,” she said, and began fingering some change from the leather purse. “It’s hard on the older ones up here, the ones who want to stay independent. So Fuchsi there, he does them a lot of good.”
She settled on the coins she had chosen as the proper change.
She stopped and counted and frowned again.
“May I phone later, then?” he asked.
“Phone?”
“If you can recall who was here at the time Karl Himmelfarb made his visit?”
“In and out,” she said. “Scraps. They can be quite comisch, these fellows, you know. Quite comical.”
He returned her smile briefly.
“If you can recall who was here at the time Karl Himmelfarb made his visit?”