soon he’d have Felix doing “the plane,” spinning at arm’s-length, the big hands on his ankles like a vice. Laughing, but being a bit scared too, the room flying by him.
NINE
“You slept at all?”
Felix wondered if he should surprise Gebi by telling him that young guys always slept well because they got laid.
“Medium,” he said.
Gebhart came over with a sheaf of papers. He separated them, and laid them out on the counter next to the armoury safe.
“Come here. You’re involved here, okay.”
Felix saw the first was a print out of the statements he’d filed on the computer last night. Another was a list of the changes for the court appearance of the burglary gang they’d caught up to back after Christmas. There were lists of the grundschules for the public safety visits.
Gebhart tapped his finger on the list of schools.
“This will be a decent change today. You’ll get a giggle out of this anyway,” he said. “The small kids actually will put up their hands to ask your permission to go ludeln. You better be wide awake for that. Actually, I learned you should ask the teacher if the kids have been to the klo first.”
“What, they get agitated or something?”
“Too true they do. They get scared some of them. They’ll stare at you. You’ll be taking reflective armbands or something, but they’ll be staring at you like you’re God, not hearing a word you say.”
“As if they ever do,” said Korschak from the far side of the cabinets.
“Fred,” Gebhart called out. “You have the biggest ears. I’m going to miss them.”
Felix looked down the list. He didn’t recognize any of the teachers’ names.
“The rumours will be flying today, I tell you,” Gebhart said, and nodded toward Schroek’s office. Felix looked up from the list.
Gebhart had a printout of notes from yesterday.
“You heard Himmelfarb?” Gebhart went on, scanning the paragraphs. “He went though the whole list, I think. Did he actually say Russians at one point, even?”
“I don’t think so. If he did, I didn’t hear him. Did you?”
Gebhart stared at some point beyond Felix’s head.
“Huh,” he said. “I wonder if there was any sleep at Himmelfarbs’ last night.”
He looked to Felix then for corroboration, but his eye was taken by whatever he saw through the blinds on the glass that opened out to the public office. A short man with Gandhi glasses and a Gandhi hairdo had stepped in.
“Shit,” said Gebhart. “Already.”
He walked to the doorway.
“The Kontrolinspektor is on the phone,” he called out.
Felix watched the man’s reaction. A smile, a glance at his wristwatch, a hand holding a small device.
“Keep him waiting,” said Gebhart when he came back. “Do him good.”
“Who is he?”
“A scribbler, from the Kleine.”
“A reporter? The Kleine…?”
“Correct. What, you don’t read the Kleine Zeitung? Everyone else in the province does. But this one has got the foreign angle already, no doubt. Now you forget about that side of things, okay?
That was yesterday. You’ve done your paperwork, and it’s moved on.
And remember: don’t talk to any reporter or media type. Schroek does that stuff.”
Felix nodded.
“You’re set up for the morning anyway, okay?”
“I think so.”
“Bike safety video? Armbands?”
“Got it, and the posters.”
“Those new bookmarks with the ‘cool’ website? The T-shirt prize?”
Felix almost grinned at how Gebhart did the air quotes for “cool.” Again, Felix nodded.
“Well, bugger off then.”
Gebhart yawned and sighed.
“Didn’t you sleep?”
“I slept like a Christian, in case you need to know. But in the Coliseum.”
Felix waited until Gebhart looked up from the paper.
“What is it? You have a question?”
“Have you done stuff like that before? Yesterday, I mean.”
“No.”
“Nothing like this? Never?”
Gebhart seemed to gather his thoughts by staring at his desk.
“You mean scare-the-hell-out-of-yourself stuff, or just things you see? Car accidents? Factory accidents?”
“I suppose.”
“There was one thing comparable maybe,” Gebhart said. “But I was in the army. Yes, I was keen, after National Service even. I took five years in it. You’d learn things, you know? Straightened me out actually. The service, it bred fellowship, you know? No, I don’t mean mountain rescue camp or the trekking or the rest of it. Maybe we knew who the enemy was, then.”
Felix zipped up the bag.
“Ach, you wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“What enemy, the Russians?”
A look of irritation crossed Gebhart’s face.
“What’s with all the Q amp; A today? Go do your duties.”
“My dad said it was partly the whole Eastern Bloc thing, to be ready at least, if they came in. But that’s been gone for years.”
“Oh, I get it. The sun rises in the west now? The official line is we need Uni boys, more computer jockeys, more foreign languages.
Well let me tell you something. Maybe we were a bit rough around the edges, or we didn’t use the dictionary much, but, boy, you knew where you stood. Yes, we got things done. And no, that wasn’t ancient times.”
“Was it in the army, or in the Gendarmerie?”
“The thing that happened? It was the army. It was a winter exercise. Winterwerk, we used to call it. They gave us a lot of gear, and we had a hell of a lot of lugging to do. It was up high, you know, with a load of heavy snow. Anyway. A heavy machine gun went off on a guy. Seven or eight rounds, just like that. Everyone was bone tired, see? Sleeping in the goddamned snow. It was careless. But it was bad, I tell you.”
He looked down at the nylon carry-all that they called the School Bag.
“Four hit him. And that’s the nearest I’ve been in my life. It’s not like TV.”
He stretched again.
“I had nightmares, for a while, then.”
Then Gebhart jerked his head up.
“No more yammering,” he declared. “Scram, will you? You’ve got stuff to do.”
Leaving, Felix caught a glimpse of Schroek’s stone face as he listened to the reporter ask some questions. It was a look that he had seen on other cops too, part of the buttoned-up look that cops seemed to pick up with their uniforms and wore when they were not amongst their own.
