Felix jerked his head away from the wall.He could remember deciding to rest it there, but only for a moment. The milky half-light softened the interior of the farmhouse and made the view from where Felix had slouched both mysterious and familiar. There was a glow at the edges of the hilltops which were framed by the kitchen window, but a handful of stars held out in the pale blue above.
Five-thirty. Berndt watched him with doleful eyes, his eyebrows shooting up and down but his head never stirring from its resting place on his paws. Felix switched off the yard light and threw on an old jacket. Slowly he opened the kitchen door and stepped into the yard. The birds were busy, and the cold tang of air that met his face revived him. He heard the pigs shuffling, one of them kicking a plank, and a grunt, as he made his way across the yard to the cars.
He slowed and even stopped several times on his way, but could not see traces of any visitor last night. Nothing had changed. In the distance he heard a cowbell clanking.
His phone went off.
“You’re not going for a little drive now, are you?” said Speckbauer.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a ditch. Freezing my ass off.”
“I can’t see you.”
“Then I’m doing my job. Look, stay there. And don’t walk around yet. Me and Franzi are going to do a bit of basic police work.”
“You’re leaving?”
“No. Now we have a bit of light, I want to give the place a lookover, from where your car is down to the road. We’ll see if there are signs of any company last night, any uninvited guests. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Meanwhile, wait,” said Speckbauer.
Felix heard his voice change. He seemed to be getting up.
“Now remember,” said Speckbauer. “Don’t phone anyone.
Right?”
“Who would I be phoning?”
“The local Gendarmerie, that’s who. We’re handling it.”
Speckbauer seemed to be waiting for a reply. Felix wondered if Speckbauer had guessed he’d have been thinking of Gebhart, or even Schroek.
“I understand.”
“Gut. Now can you get some coffee started or something? It’s only polite.”
“You’re coming down to the house after?”
“Of course we are. Franzi and I have a good spiel ready and we’ll come in off the road. We’ll be visiting to, let me see, ‘speak with you on a very pressing matter.’ If he asks, your grandfather.”
“He’s not stupid, you know.”
“Did I say he was?”
Felix closed the connection first. He looked through bleary eyes around the fields. Speckbauer must be near the orchard. As Felix stared at it, movement to his right made him turn. It was Franzi, the spook, looking pale and very cold. As he nodded, the sky, glowing lemon where they met the hills, glanced once off his glasses. Then he said something into his collar, turned away, and stepped back behind the firs.
Felix didn’t move, but pretended instead to savour the crisp air, the glory of a mountain sunrise. He was able to control his breathing, even if spots began to appear in front of his eyes. The problem he was focusing on however was that he didn’t trust his knees not to buckle the minute he began to stroll about the yard. He was putting his anger into preventing Speckbauer, wherever he was, from enjoying any sign of his shock.
It wasn’t the sight of Franzi shrouded under what looked like a hooded army poncho, with the reflected dawn on his glasses giving his face the look of an insect up close that had Felix now measuring out his breath and struggling to keep an appearance of composure. It was the glimpse of what Franzi’s hand was holding down by its strap. It was a sturmgewehr, the assault rifle that every Gendarmeriepost had, which was taken out only for drills and inspection. This one with a peculiarly large sight attached.
After a minute Felix made his way back to the kitchen and began to prepare drip coffee. He cursed aloud when he dropped the lid, but he trapped it quickly with his foot to stop it skittering on the floor. He stared at it before picking it up, as though it might have a life of its own there, and tried to clear his thoughts.
Gebi would be up already. He pulled out the phone but hesitated then, and gazed back out the window and up to the slopes. A flood of sunlight built up behind the hills was about to burst.
“We’re taking care of it,” Speckbauer had pronounced. And “we” were…
Someone was stirring upstairs. Now the dog was getting up himself, the lazy and contented old bag, plodding clumsily down through the kitchen. Felix closed the phone. He had enough to think about. He’d need a plan, a clear head, to sort out Speckbauer.
Felix’s grandfather clumped down the stairs half-sideways.
“I thought I heard someone.”
He stared at the kitchen window with a faraway look in his eyes.
Then he turned to the dog.
“Have you let this old bag of bones out yet, Felix?”
“No.”
“Out you hound,” his grandfather growled at the dog. “You’ve had your charity.”
“I’ll take him out, Opa.”
“Hell, no. Let him go wander out there. Or he’ll end up like me when I don’t do a day’s work locked up in the joints.”
“The thing is, I’m expecting someone to drop by here.”
His grandfather turned to him.
“A visitor? Up here? At this hour? And why are you looking at me like that?”
“I can’t understand what you say, some of it.”
A rueful look crossed his grandfather’s face.
“It’s too early for all this hubbub. But if it’s a beautiful maiden you’re expecting, I’ll put my teeth in for that. Does the name start with a G?”
“I wish. It’s another policeman.”
Felix took in his grandfather’s skeptical look.
“Here? Our house? Visiting?”
“He phoned me. He’s on his way back from a job. He wants to stop by, and have a chat.”
The coffee burbled as it fed down through the filter. His grandfather tilted his head slightly and squinted.
“Why not,” he said. “If that’s the crazy time the man works.”
Felix watched him pour coffee, and place a small cookie on the saucer he’d be bringing upstairs for Oma Nagl. His grandfather yawned and headed back to the stairs. There he stopped, his foot on the first step, and looked over.
“Is this visit about last night, or something?”
Felix had prepared for the question, and even tried to rehearse an answer.
“Can I tell you later, Opa?”
Felix had a half-cup of coffee in him when he heard his grandfather’s voice upstairs again, speaking to Oma, and then her reply in a voice still clotted with sleep.
His grandfather paused at the bottom of the stairs, exchanged a look with him and shuffled on to prepare some breakfast. Felix watched him pause as he stooped and craned his neck to see into the fridge. He took out some rye bread to add to the buns on the table.
“Sure enough,” he said then, and stopped filling the kettle.
“Here’s someone now. Two men, a white VW.”
Felix got up.
“Opa I’m sorry to ask you this”
“You need to talk in private. I knew you’d ask.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank my arse. But I want to meet them first, look ’em in the eye. I want to give them The Look. You know what The Look is?”
Felix waited.
“It says: You’re in my house. These are the mountains, not some city street where putting on a suit makes you important. So mind your manners, Gendarmerie or not. And don’t try to put one over on this boy here. That’s what The Look says.”
“You’ll make them cry, Opa. Can you have that on your conscience?”
Opa Nagl was already reaching for a jacket. Felix decided not to follow him out, but to watch instead from the window.
He watched the circumspect exchange of nods and the few words out in the yard as his grandfather greeted Speckbauer. There was a wary handshake. Franzi stayed in the car, wisely enough, Felix thought, rearranging something, or pretending to. He couldn’t lipread at all, but before a minute had passed, his opa and Speckbauer had their backs to the house and were surveying the fields, each casting their arms up in the slow, appraising gestures of farmers.
They nodded a lot, keeping their gaze on the view.
Franzi emerged after a few minutes. He was in nondescript outdoorsy clothes, the poncho stowed away, no doubt, and he moved like a robot with the batteries about to go out. Felix watched his grandfather’s face for his reaction. It lasted an instant, the whatin-the-hell look, but it seemed to spur Opa Nagl into an overly friendly mode.
The door to the yard opened and his grandfather’s resonant voice and thick accent came pouring in. The winter, cattle, how he had ploughed some fields with a horse until ’67, the apple cider you could buy that would close your eyelids in five minutes flat it all filled the hall and seemed to get louder. The Oberstleutnant Horst Speckbauer now making his way into the Nagls’ kitchen spoke in the same gruff, detonating voice of the Styrian farmer. His greeting broke the spell.
“Servus, Felix.”
“Give these men breakfast in God’s name Felix,” said his grandfather. “They had night work, they tell me. I’ll go back up to the countess upstairs.”
Felix put mugs on the table and waited for his grandfather to finish putting things on the tray. Speckbauer seemed keen enough to keep a conversation about corn going.
From Franzi, there was nothing. Felix could only make out occasional eye movements through the tint on his glasses. In this light, the scar tissue didn’t stand out.
“Wunderbar,” said Speckbauer, shaking his head slowly in admiration as he found a chair. “And the air up here? Mein Gott! It takes years off my lungs to be up here.”
“If you’re that keen to stay Horst,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of jobs. I’ll pay you in that mountain air.”
Horst already, Felix repeated in his mind. So much for The Look. He put down a plate of bread on the table.
“Beautiful country,” Speckbauer repeated, his serene look setting a little as Opa Nagl’s footsteps clumping began to fade upstairs.
“This is what Rossegger meant.”
He turned to Felix.
“You have a motorcycle on the farm here?”
“No.”
“Do the local kids go where they want on theirs?”
“Not like this,” said Felix. “Why? Are there tracks out there?”
“There are indeed. They go off out to the road though.”
“Well he’d hardly just drive down the lane if he was, you know?”
“Right,” said Speckbauer, but in a tone that suggested to Felix that he believed the opposite. He sipped at his coffee again.
“Was there anything else out there?”
Speckbauer shook his head and took butter on his knife.
“Franzi found some dog shit, I believe.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” said Speckbauer. He slid the plate with two buttered buns across toward Franzi. Felix stole a glance at Franzi’s claw-like hand reaching for them. It put him in mind of a lizard that needs morning sun to wake up. He waited for Speckbauer to look up from stirring more sugar in his coffee.
“If my grandparents are in any danger, it’s my fault. It’s my fault because you put me up to this nonsense.”
Speckbauer glanced up from the next bun he was preparing.
He continued to stare at Speckbauer.
“Okay,” Speckbauer murmured. “Best you get that talk out of your system now.”
“It’s not just talk,” said Felix.
“Well I do. I see us as Gendarmerie together here,” said Speckbauer. “A team. But if you come up with that ‘nonsense’ talk, and that look on your face when you’re working with the Polizei after the amalgamation… Well, you won’t get much mercy then.
‘Nothing’s the same after the wedding.’ I’d say that’s an expression from up these parts too.”
He leaned over the table.
“Eh Franzi?” he said.
Franzi nodded.
“You’ll be using rank there, every hour of the day. The du and dich stuff from the basic decent Gendarmerie will be piss in the wind then. So keep it up while you can.”
“You said you’d explain things.”
Speckbauer tore off a piece of bread and began chewing.
“I bet you got a lousy sleep,” he said around his chews.
“Sleep? I am supposed to be on a week’s leave.”
“Could be worse,” said Speckbauer.
“Tell me how. A family died in a fire. It looks deliberate, and that’s murder?”
“Well,” said Speckbauer in the same quiet tone. “It would be that.”
“On top of the ones in the forest,” said Felix.
Speckbauer nodded.
“Now someone was snooping around here last night,” Felix went on. “So I don’t see how it could be worse.”
Speckbauer nodded again, and studied the piece of bun he was holding. Franzi was chewing slowly and methodically. To Felix, it began to sound like a metronome. The clicking and gulping sounds began to nauseate him.
“Well, am I the only one who gets this?”
“Gets…?”
“That they could be looking for me,” said Felix. “But you say ‘Don’t call in the local Gendarmes, they’ll just screw things up.’ I’m thinking: Someone’s trying to find me, or do a hell of a lot worse.
Am I getting through to you?”
Speckbauer glanced at Felix, and let out a sigh. Then he looked over at Franzi.
“‘Sons of bitches,’ I was expecting,” he said to him. “You, Franzi?”
“‘Bastards,’” Felix made out through the pause in Franzi’s chewing.
“Which of us is closest?” said Speckbauer to Felix. “‘Sons of bitches,’ or ‘bastards’?”
“Not funny,” said Felix. “I’m not going to be jerked around.
This is not right.”
“Absolutely,” said Speckbauer, and nodded vigorously. “You are right, again.”
That seemed to settle the matter for Speckbauer. He made a yawn and turned to his coffee again.
“So what are you proposing?” Felix asked.
Speckbauer eyed him again before sitting back and turning to Franzi.
“Any suggestions for Gendarme Kimmel here, Franzi? I’m too tired to think.”
“I think Gendarme Kimmel should not panic.”
“Easy for you to say,” said Speckbauer. “Put yourself in his boots.”
The man’s lips were slashes, Felix thought, bloodless. For a moment he imagined Franzi’s face on fire.
“Then he should go somewhere else.”
“What’s to happen to my grandparents then? I abandon them?”
“When you go, their troubles are over.”
Felix stared hard at the glasses. He could not be sure that Franzi was staring back.
“Look,” said Speckbauer. “We talked about this. Someone thinks the Himmelfarb boy told you something. Something that could drop someone in the shit.”
“You never said to me that there’s a local involvement in this,” said Felix.
“Is there? Why do you say that?”
Felix waited for Speckbauer to look over again.
“If doesn’t help to think I’m an idiot.”
“We don’t hold your university days against you. On the contrary.”
Felix had a few moments to consider things but he knew he’d come around again to what he had wanted to tell Speckbauer right away.
“You’ve been a good help so far, Kimmel,” Speckbauer went on.
“Don’t think that’s not appreciated. It will look good on you too.”
Felix put down his cup. He looked at the stain on the saucer for a moment.
“Okay,” he said, and stood up. “I’m going to do what I should have done before.”
“Which is?”
“Phone my C.O., or a bighead in Central Office. Ask to get you two off my back.”
“Sure about that, Kimmel?” Franzi asked.
“I’d be interested to know what they think about your project being out of hand.”
“‘Out of hand’?” said Speckbauer. “You’re being hard on us.
But I understand. It’s a shock to the system, all this. It’s hard for you.”
“I don’t give a shit. I just want to protect my family.”
“Your career,” said Speckbauer. “You hardly want to disgrace your family.”
“That doesn’t work. At least I’ll be able to get real police up here then.”
Speckbauer pushed his cup away.
“That would not be a wise plan,” he said. “It will complicate matters in ways you can’t imagine.”
“Are you going to phone my C.O. and get him to give me an order on that?”
Felix took the cordless phone from the wall. He thumbed through his mobile for a number he knew he had, one for Payroll.
They’d switch him from there.
Speckbauer rubbed at his nose and muttered something to Franzi. ‘The old ones,’ Felix heard. Franzi rose, Speckbauer didn’t.
“Look, Felix,” said Speckbauer. “I’m looking forward to meeting your grandparents when we get through this little chat. But for the moment I’d like them to stay where they are, so they do not overhear some things I need to tell you.”
Franzi had taken up a stiff-looking lean against the staircase.
“Don’t make that phone call now. Make it later, if you decide then. I won’t stop you.”
Berndt had taken a shine to Franzi, it seemed. Felix heard his murmurs to the dog and the sighs as Franzi stroked its head.
“Really,” said Speckbauer. “I’ll answer your questions. Please sit. Now, do you want to start, or will I?”
Felix sat slowly.
“Okay, I will. There are two dead men. We don’t know who they are yet. It looks like they are there a couple of weeks. One of them swallowed a diamond. He wrapped it in a condom. So, we are curious: A) was he carrying it back to wherever he came from for himself, maybe? Or… B) he knew he was in a tight spot. Okay so far?”
Felix nodded.
“Now. We are almost certain now that the Himmelfarb family was murdered.”
He paused, eyeing Felix for a reaction.
“That is not public knowledge. It will not become so until I decide. If you want to know, someone used an accelerant know what that is? inside the house. People who know such things are ninety percent sure it was paraffin. The house burned hot, all that old wood. Intense, I should say. So here is deliberate, calculated murder of people who someone supposed might know something about the two dead men. Will I stop now?”
Felix glanced down the hall. He was sure that Franzi was watching him.
“The person, or the people, who knew something about this are connected with the people who know something about those two men from the forest. Got that?”
“Maybe the same people,” said Felix. “Or person?”
“Exactly,” said Speckbauer. He tilted his cup to move coffee around. “It is not hard to suppose they’re one and the same, or that he is the one who has done everything. Verstehst?
“So far,” said Felix.
“Next, then. A more personal matter for you. And please, let your head into this more than your guts.”
Speckbauer gave him a teacher’s look, to see if he were paying attention.
“We are beginning to suspect,” he said slowly, “that someone considers you have knowledge about the former matter. The two in the woods, what started this.”
“Someone thinks Hansi Himmelfarb told me something?”
“Right. Maybe just or a hint, a clue. Something that will lead to them.”
“‘Them’? You seem pretty sure.”
Speckbauer sat back.
“Really? And why do you say that?”
Felix nodded in Franzi’s direction.
“Your job is not about any single criminal.”
“Ah,” said Speckbauer. “You put it so well. And you’re right.
We leave petty criminals to the hardworking men in uniform, the real backbone of the Gendarmerie.”
“Is that what we are considered?”
“Absolutely: the backbone, the foundation.”
“Not a bunch of clowns working with the dummies up here, in the hills?”
“Now really,” said Speckbauer. “You know that’s a myth.”
Felix’s irritation was cresting.
“Look,” he said. “My grandparents are trusting people. They thought my dad was the greatest. They think I am half-sainted too now because I’m ‘following in his footsteps,’ or something.”
“And you are,” Speckbauer offered.
“My point is they have to be told what’s going on here. They’re probably up there saying to one another how nice it is that Felix’s colleagues are dropping by, and how important his work is and…
It’s all crap. Something has to get done. Right now.”
Speckbauer seemed to think about Felix’s words. He sighed and shifted a little.
“Maria,” he muttered. He stopped rubbing at his eyes and looked at Franzi.
“Didn’t I tell you,” he said. Franzi said nothing but made a small shrug. Felix imagined his grandparents upstairs, listening.
“Okay,” said Speckbauer then. “I’ll get to the point here. It’ll save you all these theatrics. You wonder, don’t you, why Franzi and I are up here. ‘Where’s everyone else?’ you wonder. ‘If these two coppers are the real thing, they would pull out all the stops and have police crawling all over the area.’ Right?”
Felix waited for him to continue.
“Back to the dead men in the forest. Remember I said they shouldn’t be there?”
Felix nodded.
“That sounds stupid, no? I mean, they’re not there by choice.
It wasn’t just their mistake being there. No. A mistake was made by whoever shot them. Someone did something unplanned. ‘Off the radar.’ ‘Freelance,’ you could say.”
“You believe a local killed them, then.”
“I don’t know,” said Speckbauer. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know how a local could get those two, two strangers, into the woods like that.”
“They walked,” said Speckbauer. “That’s how.”
“Voluntarily?”
“They trusted who they were with,” said Speckbauer. “They knew him, or they knew them. My bet is that one of them was getting a bit suspicious. The one with the diamond in his guts.”
“You think he just swallowed it up there on that track?”
“No. Of course not. It wouldn’t have made its way to where they found it. ‘An hour’ is what those lab rats told me, the pathology people. But one of the two was suspicious for a while.”
“It’s not getting any clearer.”
“How do you gain a person’s trust? Answer me that.”
“Trust?” said Felix. “I don’t know. Help them some way?”
“Let’s say you’re a foreigner.”
Felix’s annoyance and his clouded thoughts suddenly evaporated.
“Language.”
“Right. You speak the language. That’s a start. A few words, at least.”
“Well, you know Serbo-Croatian,” said Felix.
“Badly,” said Speckbauer quickly. “I think I have a mental block against it.”
Then his eyes settled, unfocused, on the table.
“And it has held me back, held us back, I must say, that lack of follow-up. I stopped being able to assimilate my learning in SerboCroatian some time ago. It was the day my colleague became a human fireball. It was on a shitty little side street in a shithole city in the former-shitty-Yugoslavia. Got that?”
His gaze went to the window. His fingers began to drum slowly on the table top.
“What were you doing in Yugoslavia? The Gendarmerie doesn’t do that stuff.”
“Did I say we were Gendarmerie then? Imagine for a moment that there are far-seeing people who run things in the Interior Ministry. Let’s say they realize that to beat these guys, you have to be as flexible as they are — the bad guys, I mean. You’d be smart enough not to broadcast what you’re doing, in a law-abiding social democracy like Austria.”
“How long ago?”
“Six years in August. ‘James Bond’ came home. And he never went back.”
“So you were some kind of, I don’t know, agent then?”
Speckbauer almost grinned, but the effect was merely a grimace.
“Yes. A bad one.”
“And now?”
“And now I am sitting here in the lovely mountains of my native Austria, ‘never more to roam,’ as our great poet of river and forest Rossegger would say. Where things should be much simpler.”
Felix did not know what to say.
“Anyway. This shouldn’t concern you. Back to the not-sosimple matter at hand here. Apparently you want a battalion of Gendarmerie to guard your grandparents.”
“Don’t make a joke out of it.”
“It certainly would make a joke out of things if you had your wish. Think for a moment. Not many people know you’re here. That was part of the idea, remember.”
It did seem like an age ago, Felix thought.
“Well what happened? Passing along the road out there, someone anyone would look over and see your car. So: that brings us back to the ‘local,’ doesn’t it? That’s why I wanted you in on this, or at least available. The extra edge: local. You.”
“I didn’t get any James Bond training,” Felix said.
Something seemed to have given way in Speckbauer’s voice now when he spoke.
“Let me tell you something,” he went on. “This from a guy who did get the ‘James Bond’ training. It isn’t foolproof. Sure, I have the badge, the hardware, and we were given room to be, shall I say ‘flexible’ but you don’t know what it takes away.”
“Sleep?”
“Forget sleep. Think marriage. Two marriages, if you count Franzi’s. But in his case it was different. His missus didn’t want to be a nurse to the freak that came home from the hospital. She’d signed on for glamour, you see? Franzi was quite the performer, yes.
But in my case, I was an adulterer, not the common kind. No this wasn’t soap opera stuff. It was that I became obsessed with my work after, after our ‘holiday’ in Zagreb.”
“You and him?”
“Yeah. We share a place. No, we’re not gay. ‘Adjusting to circumstances.’ It’s about money, and convenience. Franzi’s antics are over, I think. His grafts are getting better every year. He hasn’t wrecked every stick of furniture for a year. Punching windows has definitely fallen off. That’s progress.”
Felix glanced over at Franzi.
“So now you chase these people, but only inside Austria? For the Gendarmerie?”
“What did you learn in training? Who do you work for?”
“‘The Austrian people.’”
“The fact is you work for the Interior Ministry. So do we. Yes, Franzi and I, we still chase bad guys. Our bad guys are not the usual gallery, the low-lifes you’ll find in Graz, or Vienna, say. We are allowed to be particular. But most of our housecleaning goes on in Graz. God decided on the eighth day the day that no one knows about to situate Graz close to the lunatics to the south, the east.
Know any history? ‘Balkans’…?”
“A bit. A guy, a student, Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand, Austrian bigwig.”
“Twenty million died with three bullets,” said Speckbauer.
“Look over Hitler’s shoulder and point at the same cause. War reparations, did they teach you that…?”
“I can’t remember being taught about it, but I know about them.”
“Good. Anyway, back to Graz. Franzi and I work with a section of the Criminal Police. Yes, we’re on loan to the Kripo. Actually, our original supervisors couldn’t wait to ship us out when things went to hell. Imagine that trafficking, smuggling thing is a big pipe, a big sewer pipe that comes from down there. Well, if we were plumbers, our expertise is in the steady leak. A lot of the officials down there in Croatia are on the take. You know that? The smart ones are the smilers who never get their hands dirty, of course.
Who’s to say one of them didn’t give the nod for whoever tried to torch Franzi that night? Well he didn’t end up wearing his wooden pyjamas in the end, as you can see.”
Speckbauer’s voice trailed off then, and he returned to studying the tabletop. Franzi’s breath was whistling in his nose. Maybe he was asleep after all.
When Speckbauer looked up again, Felix could not decide if it was a smile or a sneer on his face.
“I am not a betting man,” Speckbauer murmured. “But I will chase any chance I can find, any chance, to find my way to the one who tipped off those people that day.”
The eyes bored into Felix’s now, even as Speckbauer nodded slowly, twice.
“No matter where they are.”