The minutes seemed to hang there in the still air of the room. Felix wasn’t sleepy anymore. He was even able to lean his head against the window and not feel drowsy. The occasional sound came from the old house, but never even a tiny gurgle from the pipes for the heating. The system had been turned off, he was sure, by his grandfather, a man who placed his faith in the kachelofen, the massive stone and tile fireplace. Opa was still a guarder of schillings, or cents, or Euro as they had come to be. Windows flung open to cool air, and bedcovers back until midday were still the ways here.
If you couldn’t see your breath in the morning over the bedcover, well that meant it must be summer, right?
Felix toured the house in his mind again, seeing the kitchen door out, then back to the hall door that no one used. Down the hall his mind moved, like an arcade game, a PlayStation shooter, he thought. Except he had no shooter.
Again, he tried to quench the worry by letting his mind out over the twisting, narrow roads that led down from the mountains.
He thought of Speckbauer making his way up from the distant motorway, blasting by Weiz no doubt, and slowing only for the narrow roads that were the last parts of the journey. It was relief as much as embarrassment he was feeling. At least things were in motion, and he couldn’t stop them now. Hadn’t Speckbauer said it was okay? Well he’d throw it back at him if he was grumpy.
Giuliana, yes, again. He should text her, not sit there watching a farmyard in the middle of the night. With his thumb over the key pad, lust descended over him. Instead of the yard bathed in the garish light that had probably burned into his retina forever now, he was seeing her violin shape as she lay on her side. There was that stripe across her back last year where her swimsuit strap covered.
He’d get her to go over to the lake at Stubensee, and lie there again by the lakeside like last summer: half asleep, half soused with the Chianti that went down so well with the snack.
Then his heart leaped. Where had that thud come from? He sat up, and tilted his head, and listened. His gaze fixed on the bedroom door.
There was a lesser, longer, fart this time. Opa was probably not even awake. Felix smiled and for a moment his grandfather’s face came to him from the darkness near the door, his wink of glee lighting up the whole face of this 70-something-year-old kid. It was now 20 minutes since the phone call: 20 hours it might as well have been.
Was this what they meant in the drug-use lectures at the Gendarmerieschule, this half-crazy, half-panicky agitation that druggies got, a skin-crawling need to do something? He looked around the yard again. It was like a yellowed stage, a set for some weird movie. He began to imagine questions he’d put in the Dienstprufung, the final exam:
Describe the effects of crack on a user who hasn’t had any recently. Would it be: A) paranoid B) aggressive C) skin-crawling D) antsy E) panicking F) jumpy G) berserk…
He stopped at the H, and made it the all of the above.
He decided to head downstairs. From the kitchen widow, he might catch a glimpse of the lights of Speckbauer’s car down the valley. He held the binoculars against his chest, and he tiptoed toward the door. His mind was already running to excuses for his oma or opa, if he woke them: I can’t sleep, I’m reading. I’m going to the klo.
The door had a small squeak at the end of its travel. He stood in the threshold, listening for Berndt. Then he made his way to the stairs. He waited there for any sound from his grandparents. The sound of the clock from downstairs came to him, and the manifold smells of the house, something stale to do with the dog probably, his bed or food, and the ever-present soupy scent from the kitchen mixed with the smells of firewood, and dried herbs and ashes.
He stopped on the landing.
Kerosene?
His heart pounded hard enough for him to wonder if wasn’t echoing through the house. He sniffed again, but it wasn’t there this time. He descended a few steps and waited. Nothing. Wasn’t there such a thing as smell hallucinations? He looked down the hall to the Berndt’s place by the kitchen door. Half-deaf or not, the dog’s head came up when Felix stepped off the stairs, a faint creak following him.
“You know me, Berndt,” he whispered as loud as he dared.
“Lass. Lie down.”
The biscuits were in the usual place. The dog stayed in his basket and crunched on them. Felix crouched by him, looking through the doorways, trying to hear anything above the chewing and slobbering. He had a view out the kitchen window here, toward the road. There were no high beams from Speckbauer’s Passat snaking through the bends and darkness up to the village.
He dropped to his knees after a while, and soon he had settled on the floor a short arm’s-length from the dog, with his back against the door jamb. He kept patting and stroking the dog, but paused several times, not a little surprised that he could now simply sit there like this, waiting.
An ache began to make itself known above the tension that clawed at him steadily still. Though he couldn’t pin it down, Felix began to believe that it had something to do with the fact that he was a not kid anymore, a kid just sitting with the dog. It had been Olli in those years before Berndt, a supremely stupid but goodnatured dog that his grandfather hadn’t the heart to get rid of, but no different from this slob here: an uncomplicated presence, a beating heart, warmth.
The ache grew in him. He remembered how his grandmother had told him so often he was truly his mother’s son, when she saw him with animals. Even now this old house seemed to breed contentment. The rare visits to his Opa Kimmel made him feel he was a kid again, but a kid being sent to the office. Was it possible that happiness left something of itself in the walls of this house? His father had been drawn to this place, and so much so that he had pretty well made it his home. With his eye on their teenaged daughter, he had still been able to relax here in the company of the Nagls, that elderly pair now sleeping above.
Berndt gave a low grunt of contentment, and ran a wet tongue over Felix’s knuckles.
“Enough is enough,” he whispered, but his hand seemed to be independent of him, and it had returned to rubbing the dog’s head.
He looked at the darkness on the kitchen window again, but there were no car lights anywhere down the valley. He checked his phone again, and saw that there was still a signal. Then he went through the menu to be sure he had set it to vibrate.
Thinking about Speckbauer driving through the darkness out there, he realized that he had forgotten something. Opa Kimmel had been up in Gasthaus Maier for cards too, along with Berger Willi Hartmann when Karl Himmelfarb had come by. No, he reflected, maybe forgotten wasn’t the right word. Maybe the word was hidden, hidden it from his thoughts so he wouldn’t have to do it. But it was either he talk to his grandfather first, or Speckbauer would find his own way to do it. He’d bring the maps too, and see what the old man would say about the marks on them.
With that, Felix’s thoughts passed across the village and out to his Opa Kimmel’s farm. It was two kilometres from the Nagls’ house, out on its own, at the end of the road. Pfarrenord, they called it locally, but no one else would know it even had a name. Indeed it was the North Parish, and it always seemed windy and cooler there.
The place where the hailstones break, he’d heard it referred to.
Opa Kimmel would be sleeping too. Or maybe he’d lying awake there himself though. Would he be thinking about the decision he’d made, to finally move into the village? There’d be regret no doubt, but a secret relief too, Felix guessed, something the old man would never admit to. No more than he’d admit that the solitude he always claimed he preferred had actually become loneliness. The simple facts of old age, the approach of illness and death, had thawed him out enough now. He’d let a relative persuade him that he’d be doing them a favour no, an honour, as Lisi had heard and dryly reported to Felix by coming to live in part of their house. There’d be a tidy rent, of course, but they meant well. Why shouldn’t his relatives make some money out of the arrangement?
Pfarrenord, he thought. His grandfather used to go on about eagles, how they made Pfarrenord their home. Maybe it was some effort to instill something in his grandson, now that his own son had escaped to live elsewhere. Eagles were defiant and proud, no doubt, models of independence and power. But as Felix grew, he had begun to sense something else lodged in those platitudes, and it gave him pause to consider them in a new light. He began to see them now as loaded with something else.
He soon picked up hints from the spines of the old books he remembered looking at on those rare, but interminable visits. One was The Realm of Eagles, he recalled, with lots of photos of planes and pilots and parachutes. Eagles on Crete, he remembered too, a fading paperback from a company Felix had never seen elsewhere.
He had looked through it several times, studied the photos of paratroops and planes, and groups of smiling young men. How different they had seemed from the studio photo that had always hung in the hall, the one with Felix’s own great-grandfather in his Austrian Army uniform from the First World War.
So maybe that was where the coldness came from then, that politics thing, that knot of circumstances no one could never untangle, and that no one talked about. Even though families up here had known one another for generations, you seldom spoke carelessly outside your own home.
Felix tried to remember the year of Oma Kimmel’s death. He remembered his father telling him that he had been 13 when his mother died. Was it just quack medicine that people believed when they said that stress brought on cancer? Surely Opa Kimmel wouldn’t have been surprised that his own son soon gravitated toward the Nagls, and that he found excuses to spend his time there.
It came to Felix then that he had not fully understood at all how his own parents had shielded him, and Lisi too, from the remote person who was their grandfather. Now he wondered if Oma Kimmel had spent her own life, and probably her health, protecting her son from the same cold presence.
The dog slid onto its side with a low wheeze of contentment.
Felix stopped rubbing its ears and stared instead at the faint liquid slit of its eyes. Sleeping, yes. He looked around the hall again. This house, he thought, where nothing was complicated and no one was appraising you. It was a refuge.
He was actually getting drowsy himself now. He let his eyes close, and Giuliana’s face came to him. He struggled to hang onto it as other thoughts edged in, even as it became her hurt look, the reproachful one when they’d had words. The “talk” she wanted: he’d been annoyed because he’d been thinking things were actually going okay. The new police force need people like him. Lots of things would open up for him in the new police force. Even Gebi had conceded that. He might even go back to Uni for evening courses, and maybe even get paid for it too. Next thing you’d know, there’d be the applications for the Alpines, or even the Cobra, and plainclothes jobs anywhere across Austria. Why not even think about international stuff too?
The vibrations from his phone startled him, and the dog’s eyes opened.
Speckbauer didn’t sound one bit drowsy.
“You’re doing okay?”
Felix didn’t know what to say. He patted the dog’s head again, but the eyes stayed open now, the ears up.
“I’m awake, for sure. Where are you?”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I don’t want to wake my grandparents. Are you on the road?”
“I’m outside, beyond the light there in the yard.”
“But I don’t see your car I didn’t see it coming up the valley.”
“You’re in the house?”
“Yes. I’m downstairs. I can come out.”
“Stay put,” said Speckbauer. “We’ll take care of things. Has there been anything since? Any noise or stuff?”
“No.”
“Good. This is what we’re doing, for the time being, so listen.
Me and Franzi are moving about out here, eyeballing the place.
We’re going to keep doing that for a while. Verstehst?”
“I get it, but what do I do?”
“What? You want me to sit beside you and hold your hand?”
“It’s dark, what can you see?”
“Pretty well anything I want to damned well see. Really, believe me, we’ve done this kind of work before.”
“If I may say, Herr Oberstleutnant, I think we should try to get things clear.”
“Nothing is clear,” said Speckbauer sharply. “Nix. So save it.
It’s just the work. We’re in the business of wading around in a big swamp. It’s called Der schein trugt, this area we work in: the land of Nothing-Is-Clear. Shitty, isn’t it, but that’s life.”
‘All is not how it looks,’ Felix thought.
Speckbauer didn’t say anything for several moments.
“How am I going to explain this to them?” Felix asked.
“Deal with it later. It’ll work out.”
“What should I be doing, though? There has to be something.”
“Know what I want from you right now? Go to bed. That’s it.
But here’s something to think about while you’re nodding off.
Anyone passing down the way here, this road, can see your car parked there in the yard. That’s not helpful.”