The July night before Felix was to attend the Sonderkommission at Strassgangerstrasse, he slept deeply: until 2 a.m. That was when he sat up, half in sleep and half awake, with a groan. Giuliana was off the pillow almost immediately.
“What’s wrong?”
He was sure she wasn’t awake when she had spoken.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Go back to sleep. It’s fine.”
He had already pivoted over to the side of the bed, and had his feet on the floor. He had woken up in the middle of the running dream. Like all the other times, he was instantly awake and ready to keep running. He looked at the rectangle of yellowed light cast up from the streetlights outside. Though the windows were open to cool the apartment after the heat of the day, the room still felt stuffy.
He couldn’t hear any traffic. He concentrated on his breathing, and felt around his ribs to the left side. Then he tried one deep breath.
There was pressure on the ribs, but it didn’t hurt. Slowly he raised both arms. There had not been any real jabs of pain for weeks now, but the stiffness was staying longer than he’d expected.
The glow from the window had turned her skin to bronze. He gazed at her breasts resting in shadows, and then at her navel. The planet, they called it, for no good reason. Maybe it had something to do with rings of Saturn, or something she’d said when they had started out together and she had been self-conscious about her full figure.
“Have you got pain?”
Her eyes were closed.
“No. Really. Back to sleep.”
He lay still and listened to her breathing. He had stopped being paranoid about every ache or feeling of tiredness, or even a wormy stomach. Concussion had different ways to show its effects, they kept telling him at the follow-up scans he had each Wednesday. So yet again they had detected no abnormalities, he reported to Giuliana. Except for what they had done those afternoons and nights of the week he had at home.
It seemed an age ago. Often he thought of the strange sex they’d had that night he’d gotten home from the hospital, with tensor bandages across his chest. Giuliana hadn’t figured it out either, she admitted, and refused to talk about it. Pagan love, they’d agreed to call it. She was the goddess astride him, demanding. It was as if she were trying to cure him of something, to draw out poison, to exorcise something. The week was almost compensation enough for their missed holiday.
He counted back the weeks and days. He still found himself doing that even when he was at work, even when Schroek was saying something to him, or when he and Gebi’s temp, a good-natured veteran named Fischbach, were on a patrol. Maybe it was the brain trying to fill in gaps by itself. But still he got that woolly feeling when he tried to remember details from the farmyard. He put it down to the concussion. There was no need for fancy theories of the unconscious, yet anyway. Even Schroek had understood that Felix wasn’t holding out on him. He had stopped asking him even casual questions about it.
Try as he might, the simple fact was that he could not remember everything. There was no point in feeling guilty, or frustrated about it, that neurologist told him. He had only to do his best with the investigation, to try to answer the million questions they’d thrown at him. But understand that this is what the brain did to protect itself. And be glad you have one that still works.
She murmured something and shifted her head on the pillow.
He raised his head, looked over at her. Then he reached across and put his arm around her waist, and drew her to him. Her scent began to soak into his head. He let his hand along her thigh. Her skin seemed suddenly hot.
“This is you getting well,” she muttered, and drew in a breath.
“Is it?”
“Medicine,” he said. “Yes.”
“What woke you?”
He stopped stroking. It wasn’t impatience he’d heard, he told himself; it was concern.
“The usual,” he said.
“The running one?”
He nodded. His hands seemed to have their own ideas. He felt them work over her hips.
“But nothing gets any clearer. There’s always talk, or words, but I don’t understand them.”
He heard her yawn. He focused on his hands now, and traced her hip bone.
“How long do you think before… you know… ”
It was what he’d hoped she wouldn’t say.
Did she mean “the talk” she had postponed? The evenings at Gebhart’s?
He thought about Gebhart reading the travel brochures he had his daughter gather for him. Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt. Soon then this would stop, as it had to, this sitting in Gebhart’s garden reading magazines together, and interrupting their long silences with a word from Gebhart about some foolishness in a furniture plan he was studying, or the quality of Opels these days, or something the doctor had said recently about one kidney being plenty.
Gebhart’s take on things had not changed: It could have been a hell of a lot worse. Right after he’d gone to see him, Gebhart had been able to make some dry crack about things. Twenty-four years of normal, too normal, and now he got his 10 minutes of excitement and fame. Gebhart had not even known about it at the time, he admitted.
He pretended to feel a little cheated not to have witnessed all the fuss with the helicopter and the swarm of paramedics and police.
“How long?” he said. “As long as it takes, I suppose.”
Her rested his hand, and waited for sleep, hers or his.
After several minutes, she raised her head from the pillow.
“Is that your heart?”
“Yes,” he said. He felt her hand move up his leg.
“I see,” she said, in a sleepy voice, and her hand moved over him now. “You have ideas, don’t you.”
Later he listened as her breathing became whistley. She put her hand on the pillow under her cheek, and after clearing a strand of her hair away from her mouth, her breathing became almost inaudible. He no longer expected to sleep. It was useless trying.
Thoughts continued to roll through his mind, like those slow rollers he’d seen on that beach in Spain. Gebhart’s wife had glasses just like the daughter’s. She sat forward without apparent effort in the chair next to her husband’s bed at the hospital. On first meeting her, her eyes had seemed huge, even walleyed. It must have been the glasses.
She had known him right away the first time his visit coincided with hers. She had been there ahead of him, and sat waiting in the corridor outside for a nurse to do some procedure. It had been awkward. He had begun to believe that her steady gaze was proof of some special powers those big eyes of hers held. He felt he had to explain, to say how sorry he was. She had nodded slowly. She’d kept her gaze on the goings-on down at a nursing station.
“So wie so,” was all she said that first time.
He didn’t know whether it was sarcasm, or that she did not know what to say, where to begin. A doctor came along then and she began to question him about a shunt. A thing with trains, Felix thought, and realized that he should not be there, then. He heard her return his quiet goodbye, but felt her eyes on him as walked down the hallway.
But Gebhart must have gotten wind of it, and a couple of days later Felix’s evening visit coincided with hers.
“It looks good for me,” Gebhart said. “They put fish blood in me too so I’ll never feel the cold again. And I can pee like a drunkard. What can’t they do these days?”
After a pause that gave Felix a moment to see that this effort at light-heartedness had only raised a sardonic expression on Frau Gebhart’s face, Gebhart eyed him.
“But you, you look worse. How is that possible?”
Felix tried to make light of it. The cracked rib and the concussion were nothing really, he tried to persuade Gebhart, but yes, he did feel achy. Gebhart did not make any jokes about how Fuchs’ huge size had kept Felix alive, as well as flattened him. Nor did he ask about Dravnic, the man who had found his way to the farm that day. Felix supposed that Schroek told Gebhart all the news and the gossip, as it was the same newly energized C.O. Schroek who had daily tidbits for Felix also.
Speckbauer was apparently pushing paper in Graz, his field ‘excursions’ curtailed until the inquiry came up with its findings.
Schroek had also heard that Speckbauer had offered to resign.
Dravnic had even turned up on warrants from the European Court in The Hague. He had lived in Germany for nearly a decade before the civil war. It was not clear yet how Fuchs had first made contact with Dravnic’s people. Peter Kimmel had indeed known a Dario Dravnic in years gone by, but that was as far as he went with that.
Felix had heard from his mother or was it one of Lisi’s phone calls? that Opa Kimmel had told them to figure it out themselves.
And that was that.
“Well you have a good, thick Styrian head,” said Gebhart. “And you’re a stubborn bastard, aren’t you? Runs in the family, gell?
How’s that old opa of yours, ‘the marksman’?”
“He is enjoying the attention. But he pretends that he doesn’t.”
“Naturlich,” said Gebhart, with a sly grin and a wink at his wife that she ignored. “I hear he told them to arrest him if they want.
Quite a fellow.”
Felix nodded.
“It’s all Fuchs’ doing, he maintains. Take it or leave it.”
“You believe him I mean I know he’s your opa but do you?”
“Actually I do. Fuchs rummaged all through his stuff.”
“Some friend of the aged,” said Speckbauer. “That old pistol, your opa didn’t even know it was missing?”
“He says no. But now he sees why Fuchs was full of questions about old times, and what he did all those years back.”
“What, he thought Fuchs was studying folklore or something?
Collecting stories, or folk tales, another Peter Rossegger?”
Felix shrugged.
“I think he was glad of the company, that’s all. A chance to talk.
Being alone?”
Gebhart sighed and stretched out his arms.
“Christ but you can wither in here for not doing something,” he groaned. “Are you back to doing your bike stuff yet?”
“Not as much as I’d like, but yes.”
“Come on now. You’re the kind of guy needs activity like that, for energy.”
“I’ll do some more maybe after this week.”
“Well Schroek is Mr. Energy, let me tell you,” Gebhart went on. “He wants to look good with this. He prowls the post like the captain of a ship now, I hear. But, my God, he is nosy, and a gossip, as ever.”
He nodded in the direction of his wife.
“You cleared him out of here one evening, schatzi?”
“I did,” she said. “He was wearing us out.”
“Like another interrogation, I tell you,” said Gebhart. “‘Did he shoot Fuchs first?’ ‘Didn’t he say anything?’ ‘How close was the old man when he put him down with the rifle?’”
Gebhart rolled his eyes and looked down at the carpentry magazines his wife had brought.
“Those two,” he said then, and his face had lost its ease when he looked up from the magazines. “The two James Bonds…?”
“Nix,” said Felix. “The gag order until the investigation reports.”
“‘Must not communicate,’” Gebhart said with a top-heavy irony. “As if they did any, when they were stringing you along. And who would want to talk to those two anyway, the mess they made?”
Felix was aware that Gebhart’s wife was scrutinizing him. He looked to her with a polite smile, but her eyes darted away.
“I forgot to ask you, you know,” said Gebhart. “My brain is on holiday in here. Look, did you see those two show up back at the farm?”
“No. But the place was kind of crazy, with the helicopter and the cars.”
Gebhart smiled.
“That part was funny at least,” he said. “Thinking about them pushing the car into the field to get by. By the way, has the garage phoned? Is it ready?”
“They did,” she said. “They had to replace the handle, they said. And something that winds the window, from inside.”
“That beauty better be perfect,” Gebhart declared. “Or I’ll sue the depp who broke the window and I want it washed after being shoved into that field. That car was taken care of, let me tell you. No BP is going to disrespect that car, smashing a window like that.
Hell, no. Maybe I’ll ask Schroek to look into it. He likes that kind of thing. Then he can take credit for that too.”
“Credit?” said Gebhart’s wife, shifting in the chair, and regaining an even more erect posture. “Let him try. That man…”
Gebhart exchanged a glance with Felix.
“You know,” he said, in a different tone, “the psychology bunch found that married men live longer?”
“They take their wife’s portions,” she said quickly. She fixed her superpower eyes on Felix for a moment.
“Nurses like me have enough nonsense at work,” she said.
“However,” said Gebhart breezily. “I have a point to make here.
What I’m getting at is this: Felix, this is your big chance. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Big chance for what?”
“Look: you score big when you are the wounded hero. Pop the question.”
“Marriage?”
“I could use a party.”
“You’re a matchmaker now, Gebi?”
“Do it. Look, it’s the summer. I’m on leave a few weeks for sure, maybe months. I feel good but I’m not going to let on. You did good stuff, and you’re barely out of your diapers in the job.”
“Good stuff?” said Felix, and looked from Gebhart to his wife and back. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“Do I ever joke? Look, they’re going through with the Big One, have you forgotten? One big happy family, our decent, dependable, modest Gendarmerie will now share the playground with the big shots from the BP. And where will we be when the dust settles? Whatever about me, but you’re detective fast track.
Believe me.”
Felix said nothing. Movement on the building opposite drew his eye to the window again. Pigeons, big fat Graz pigeons, were landing on a roof.
“What did I tell you Frieda,” said Gebhart. “He still thinks he screwed up.”
She got up from the chair, and pushed it back to the wall.
“I must show up at some point,” she said. “We’re short, with all the holidays.”
Felix snuck a look at how she reached around her husband’s neck. She murmured something to him and kissed the top of his head. Then she gave a professional look-around to the bed and the drip, settling the bedclothes, and checking how the upper part of the bed was tilted. She tugged at her nurse’s uniform under her raincoat. She glanced at Felix before turning to her husband again.
“Servus, Felix,” she said, crisply. “When we get this depp home, you must visit.”
Felix remembered babbling some reply. Gebhart tried to let on he hadn’t noticed the awkwardness.
“Now,” he said when Felix sat down again. “It just takes a bit of time, see?”
Then he winked.
“Stay away from those farmer’s daughters from Carinthia.
They’ll whip you if you cross them.”
“Really?”
“No,” Gebhart retorted. “I’m making it up so you’ll quit worrying.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
Gebhart waved some irritating thought aside.
“There you go, you see? Is it your age that makes you think nothing happens without your permission or something? Don’t you get it yet? It’s just a shitty thing happened. It’s the way stuff happens. That’s it, that’s all of it. Sure, you can predict some stuff, and get out of the way of a lot of shit, but…?”
Felix looked at the Gebhart’s hands working the air.
“You’re doing the philosophy thing, Gebi.”
“Ach I’ll try to keep it simple. Ready? You put greedy people, stupid people, people who are bored, or do drugs, or drink all day, you put them near anything tempting, well you’re going to get trouble. Is that too hard for you?”
Felix nodded, just to have it over for now.
“So get out of here and work on that proposal, okay?”
On the tram back down to the city centre, Felix realized that he had forgotten the Croatian guy’s name. It unnerved him. Was it the concussion, he wondered, a sign that his brain still wasn’t right?
Getting worse, even? He could remember Fuchs’ heavy weight over him, crushing him into the farmyard cement. There was something of that in his dreams, he sensed, and he had awakened several times with the dread feeling of being held, or tied, or at least being unable to move.
He rubbed hard at his eyes, as if that would help stop the replaying that was still coming to him, in sleep and at unexpected moments. Fuchs’ murmurings, and that small jolt that he had thought was Fuchs trying to rise, but was a bullet that tore into his upper chest by his throat. A smell from something, a passing farm lorry on patrol last week, had brought back the nausea, and the feeling that something was flowing over the back of his hands there in the car.
D. He opened his eyes. The name started with a D. Gebi had said his name: Dal… Dov…
An old man was watching him from the seat opposite. He made no bones about his scrutiny either, taking the aged’s right to pry openly. Felix glared back into the rheumy, light-blue eyes, but the gaze didn’t waver. He got off two stops early, thinking of his grandfather’s slack face in shock that day, aware that he had killed a man and saved others. And Fuchs, was Felix’s last thought stepping down from the tram, trying to fight off the sour feeling that was surrounding him: Fuchs interred in the graveyard at St. Kristoff himself, his family plot not a hundred metres from the Kimmels’ own.
Giuliana whispered something. He opened his eyes. He was still here, in bed, and he hadn’t slept. She whispered something else in Italian: a table? Set the table? She swallowed slowly, and rubbed her nose and resumed her steady, slow breathing. He closed his eyes again. It was probably worse, he had decided, to try to stop the relentless orbit and roll of thoughts that crowded into his mind yet.
They only came back stronger. Lisi might be right, he knew, and some day he’d admit it: go to the shrink before it gets worse. Post-trauma is real.
Soon he heard the first birds, a scooter one street over, and the beginnings of sparse traffic. Then it was bright. He stared at the ceiling: the big day, finally 9:30 at Strassgangerstrasse, for the investigation report. But had he slept?