Speckbauer’s mobile went off after they had come in out of the hills and were closing on Weiz.
“There’s shitty coverage,” Speckbauer said to his caller. “That’s why.”
Franzi, Felix decided. That was unless Speckbauer spoke this way to everyone he worked with. It might just be possible, he decided, as he watched Speckbauer’s eyes fix on the dashboard. There was that still, blankness back as he listened. It was not just that common look of concentration. There was something of an impatience close to its limits, that he was about to go off. It had been in the air too, when he had been prowling the farm and the woods alongside him.
“A what?” said Speckbauer, as though he had been called a name.
Felix caught sight of houses across the flat farmland that surrounded the town. Grass so green as to be almost luminous patched the fields across the plain, and as cool as it still remained up in the mountains, there were plenty of shoots up already from the early corn. Brindled cows moved in slow motion, their udders swinging like full sacks across a patch of field by one farmhouse.
“Not a good time to be a joker Franzi,” he said. “Tell me you are being serious.”
The answer he received brought a snort of disbelief.
“How by? Tell me details. Don’t make me ask, you dummkopf.”
“Carats,” he said then almost immediately. “They measure them in carats. Any married man should know that, for the love of Christ.”
A few seconds elapsed, with Speckbauer rubbing his eyes now.
“Nothing on the damned system yet? Didn’t you query any diamond stuff through EKIS yet?”
Speckbauer grunted twice. Then he said, “Phone them again.
Call me,” and he closed the phone.
“Well,” he said. “We have nothing on the two identities. The preliminary says ‘Eastern Europe’ the way their fillings and teeth are done. But don’t mind that now: we have a peculiar item from a scan.”
“A scan?”
“They took a diamond out of the guts of one of them. Wrapped up in a condom. Not so strange as one might think. Do you get it?”
“Small? Easy to carry?”
“Right,” said Speckbauer. “A good way to carry a lot of money.
But this guy, and his mate, they were on their way home, I say.
Bringing home the loot. You think that diamond is a nice little keepsake from our own Jewelier Schulen, down at the Hauplatz there in Graz? Like hell, I say.”
Felix wheeled around the outskirts of Weiz and once outside the town, he fell back to thinking about Giuliana. He tried to imagine where the Salzburg train that she was aboard was now.
“Does that change anything?” Felix asked finally.
Speckbauer had been humming the same polka-sounding tune for kilometres now.
“The diamonds? Who knows.”
“I meant my situation.”
Speckbauer gave him a glance.
“Well you’re still going up to your grandparents’ place tonight?”
“Right.”
“You have your mobile, your Handi? Leave it on, and I can call you.”
“You haven’t answered the question though.”
“Didn’t I tell you I didn’t know? I should have added ‘yet’ maybe?”
“If the fire at Himmelfarbs’ was set on purpose… ”
Speckbauer waited for the rest of Felix’s sentence, but it did not come.
“Who knows where you’re staying tonight?”
“You do,” said Felix. “Giuliana does. I do. My grandparents do.”
“No one else? What about your mother, your family?”
“I’ll probably phone my mother tonight.”
“And may I ask, will Giuliana be at your grandparents’ place also?”
“I haven’t even thought that far. I’ll have enough to do trying to explain why we shouldn’t be staying in the apartment tonight.”
“She’ll freak?”
Felix looked over at Speckbauer.
“I would think so. Just like I’m freaking.”
“Are you?”
Now Felix gave Speckbauer a hard look.
“Well, okay then,” said Speckbauer. “But you’re doing a good job keeping it under wraps.”
“What if she says, ‘how long?’ What do I say to her? A day, a week?”
“Hasslich — an ugly question. I don’t have an answer for you.
But tell her it’s a precaution only. That might help?”
“Not much. I can see the reaction right now.”
“Best I can do,” said Speckbauer. “Or would you rather I’d said nothing to you?”
Felix’s anger wasn’t far off now. He studied the road ahead. In the distance the Magna plant had already appeared over the fields.
“Look,” said Speckbauer. “Let’s get a bit of perspective, can we? It’s common to use diamonds for criminal payoff.”
“To me, it says the people involved are used to this,” said Felix.
“Is that wrong?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You’re holding back.”
“I’m not,” said Speckbauer. “But a cop has to think, well: ‘Was that all?’”
“You mean more diamonds, or something?”
“Right. That’s the one the guy swallowed. Are there more? Were there more?”
“So: a big organization.”
“How can we know?” Speckbauer asked.
Felix had to wait until a long articulated truck had negotiated the bend ahead of them. It was hounded by two motorbikes and an impatient-looking man in a Mercedes 500-series coupe.
“Christ,” said Speckbauer when the Mercedes driver floored it, only a kilometre from the entrance onto the A2. “As long as he only kills himself, I don’t mind.”
Felix was about to ask him why he had changed the subject, but he realized it would get him nowhere.
“Where are you parked again?” asked Speckbauer as Felix slowed for the ramp onto the A2. “I forgot.”