EIGHT
When Felix awoke, he heard Giuliana’s breathing. There was a faint lisp at the beginning of each breath in, and now he felt it on his shoulder. The room came out of the darkness, and brought the shapes he knew and expected, the corners and bulks, the lines, light and dark. Felix let his eyes run along them many times and he listened to her breathing. Well, he had slept awhile anyway.
He had to think a minute to remember the big-shot detective’s name from the Kriminaldienst: S not Schmidt. It had two syllables. It was a real Austrian name: Speckbauer. Horst? Yes Horst.
How hard could it be to come up with a normal Austrian name like this, he wondered. It wouldn’t be that hard, unless your brain was scrambled by hours of interviewing, plodding, talking, writing, remembering, sorting out.
Speckbauer was a heavily moustached Oberstleutnant with hair running to grey. The rest of him was running to fat under the expensive suit that Gebi whispered they liked to wear. “They”:
Speckbauer and others, one a detective Engel who stood around a lot of the time, saying little, taking lots of digital shots and using a minicam.
Gebi had said he’d seen Speckbauer before somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. It certainly wasn’t on a visit to HQ down in Strassgangerstrasse, in a western suburb of Graz. It might have been a piece in the Gazette. He looked like a proper Bananenbiegers, Gebi had muttered. When Felix asked him later what exactly a banana bender was, or did, Gebhart only waved the question away.
Speckbauer had a quiet tone like he was attending a funeral.
Was there a weariness there, Felix had wondered, because he knew from long practice there were procedural questions he had to go through, but expected little from them? There were odd ones that Felix thought about afterwards: Did Hansi use any word except sleep? Can Hansi tell time? Did he make any other gestures? Did he point at places?
Felix had counted five police cars at one time, along with the wagon, and a big Mercedes commercial van that had two windows high up on one side. It was like a survey crew, with the markings and the tape and the screen they put up around the bodies. A generator had been started and flood lamps brought into the woods. Flashes went off every now and then. A movie set? A lot of guys in suits standing around, three one woman included in the white jumpsuits and hats, who later shed them (including, to Gebhart’s keen interest, the woman technician) like chrysalises at the back of the van.
Of course there had to be royalty from the Gendarmerie showing up. By two o’clock, it was Pommer, the Gendarmerie kommandant for the district, and his 2-I–C. He had called Gebhart Sepp and he had told Felix that he had done good work. The pat on the shoulder, the direct look, and tight smile had confused Felix. Gebi saved him with a cough: this was one of those rare times when a Gendarminspektor should salute, and do it parade-ground style.
Gendarmerie Kommandant Pommer returned the salute, much pleased, and perhaps even a bit surprised.
“Your father would be proud of you, Inspektor Kimmel.”
“He knows everyone, does Pommer,” he remembered Gebi telling him as the Gendarmerie Kommandant moved off.
“He knew my dad?”
“Everyone, I said. Now Pommer knows you. I’d better keep my eye on this Kimmel kid, I’ll bet he’s thinking. He’s no depp, is Professor Kimmel. At this rate, he’ll be Commissioner soon.”
He and Gebi had stayed until 5:30. He remembered being given soup, and bread, by Frau Himmelfarb, and eyeing Hansi holding hands with his father at the door out to the yard. Felix had stayed at the post to get his notes word-processed and filed into the database. Had to be done, Gebi had said, not without sighing a few curses. It was all too likely one or more of those detectives would go straight to GENDIS this evening for some detail or other. They worked whatever hours they had to, he’d explained.
Then Felix thought again about Speckbauer, and the slow lumbering way he moved about. His handshake, the “We’ll be in touch, Inspektor Kimmel” that had no real irony he could be sure of, had been delivered under his still, flat eyes. Kuhaugen, Felix’s Oma Nagl might call that look, cow’s eyes, resting on his for longer than felt normal.
He had phoned the garage and gotten his car back finally late in the evening, with a call to the guy’s home to get the key. His head was still spinning when he got to the apartment finally, and he felt some vague cloud of something had followed him in. At first he did not intend to tell Giuliana, but it didn’t take long. He remembered her not-impressed face as he downed three Gosser from the fridge as he talked.
Later he had wanted her ferociously. She was puzzled and slow and quiet, and he said he was sorry later, but she shushed him. He remembered her drowsy later on, her skin hot and damp everywhere and his own body dissolving into the sheets.
He rested his eyes on the drapes that mostly had the yellow glow from the platz below. A car no, a small truck or van to judge by how its diesel clattered went by. In a few hours he’d be sitting into his car and heading over to the post. They had to get the traffic safety thing started at the schools this week. It was to be his pleasure alone, Gebi had told him.
“Are you okay?”
She had been so quiet.
“Yes. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
He pulled the sheet over her shoulder and he kissed her neck.
There was that scent again, of vanilla and parsley carried to him from the bedwarmth that wafted up over him. She muttered something. He waited for her breathing to lapse into that steady measured sigh that would mean she was asleep again.
Sometimes he teased her when she couldn’t remember waking up in the night to go to the klo. The sight of her hips swaying and the swell of her bottom as she stumbled out, more sleepwalking than anything else, was more than he could bear by times. He stirred and the ache settled and grew. He glanced down at her. No, it wasn’t fair: tomorrow was a workday for her too.
He lay very still and tried staring at the patterns on the wallpaper. That trick had often worked when he was a kid. Giuliana was way off on that stuff, he decided. If they ever could decide where they were going to move, there’d be no wallpaper, retro chic or not.
He pretended to be drowsy then, but still his thoughts played on, roaming farther, sharpening, and leading him back again to the woods above that farm. No longer were those meadows and trees just a background, like a mental postcard, typical sights you knew as far back as you could remember and just took for granted. Was it the shock of coming on those two, or did everything change when you were a cop? Nothing could go back to the way it was.
He wondered about the Himmelfarbs. The boy the giant, he should start calling him might not leave the house for weeks now.
He remembered Himmelfarb muttering, and Gebhart’s ways of trying to calm him. Auslanders, he had said, with some vehemence that Gebi had taken to be panic. Had he said something about gypsies too, or was Felix imagining that? But many people that age, especially the likes of the Himmelfarbs who’d lived up in God’s country all their lives, would have mental furniture like that. It was no secret.
Felix moved his gaze to the ceiling. That didn’t help. The grey there became a screen for the images that swirled into his mind. He saw again the forensic team stooping, with those funny-looking white suits that almost glowed white against the trees, the camera flashes, the detective talking into a recorder of some kind. The big move had happened very late in the afternoon, getting the bodies into bags and carrying them to the wagon. They had not been asked to help. He had looked away. Gebhart, he knew, had not.
So why, Felix wondered, was he thinking of his own father now? Maybe it had been the memorial yesterday, or the photo of the roadside taferl the Association had built for their fellow officer. As his eyes moved about the ceiling, he remembered this man who was his father coming into the kitchen after his shift, proud to wear his uniform home, and smelling a little of what he’d later know was a liqueur brandy. He’d tickle and then grab him, and
