FOURTEEN
Gebhart answered the door himself.
Felix had been around the area before, up and down the myriad roads and lanes that functioned as roads in this hinterland area just outside Graz. Trust Gebhart, he thought, to live on a road that still looked out over farms and woods and held the pungent scent of manure in the air. The nearest neighbour was 200 metres away.
A new Skoda was parked next to Gebi’s down-at-heel Fiat.
“Pretty heroic driving,” said Gebhart. “What are you looking at?”
“Sorry.”
“You think I sleep in my uniform, do you?”
A face, a woman’s, appeared from a doorway behind.
“My wife.”
“Delighted,” said Felix.
“Don’t be too delighted,” said Gebhart. “She’s a nurse in the emerg.”
“How do you work with this crusty old krot?” Mrs. Gebhart asked.
Gebi led him into a parlour. A very tall girl with her father’s nose, and a book, and rimless glasses stirred under a cupola of light and slowly stood.
“Claudia, this is Felix. He is a Gendarme.”
The kid was a gangly 12 or 13 Felix saw, with that mix of open curiosity and reserve peculiar to the age.
“He’s just like daddy. More of an action man you might think, my dear bookworm.”
JOHN BRADY POACHER'S ROAD “De I’m happy to meet you, Fraulein.”
“He bikes around goat tracks in the mountains near Kitzbuhel for recreation,” said Gebhardt. “Something you might consider, my dear?”
She rolled her eyes and held her book to her chest and walked out. Gebi held the door before closing it.
“Beer? Coffee?”
“No. No thanks.”
“Well I’m going to have a Puntigamer. You should. It’s the only beer, really.”
Gebi gave him a considered look.
“Look. Don’t be a clown. Have one. Nobody comes to my house from work. Consider yourself a movie star or something.”
Felix looked around the pictures while he waited for Gebhart to return. There was one from the 1980s, it looked like, to go by the cars, with a young, trim Josef Gebhart. Yes; minus 10 or 15 kilo, that was him standing with fellow officers against a Gendarmerie car high up somewhere, with snow in the background. There was a snapshot from long before that, a man standing in the open door of a VW Beetle. He looked like Gebhart. Men, unshaven, in white camouflage gear, eyes squinting in the blazing sun, again up in the snow somewhere.
Gebhart brought only the bottles. He sat in an old armchair.
Felix took a longer swig of the bottle than he had planned. Gebhart kept up his baleful gaze.
“You drove like a goddamned madman back here, anyway,” he said.
“I felt I should come back. Now, I don’t know.”
“That’s okay. But coming right off your precious week’s leave, that is something. That pushed my buttons enough to actually allow you to enter…” Gebhart made a desultory wave of his arm around the room, “the Gebhart sanctuary.”
“Pretty exclusive, I hear.”
“Damn right it is. You’re going to have to come up with something good to justify me giving in to my kleine herz over this.”
Felix gave him the eye.
“Well? You broke up with your girl?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let me make a guess. But before I do, let me tell you something. I could kick myself for telling you about that phone call, you know. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay,” said Felix. “I’d have found out anyway. And I would have been annoyed you hadn’t told me.”
Gebhart gave a small nod. He took a swig of beer and held it in his mouth before swallowing it.
“Well yes,” he said. “It was a message for you after all. But if I’d known you’d be flying down at top speed from the far side of the country, well I’d have waited.”
“Wah wah,” Felix murmured, and shook his head.
“Don’t start that what-if stuff, you hear?”
“I can’t help it. Maybe he would have told me then, if I’d not been so”
“Stop that, I said. Are you listening to me at all?”
Felix nodded.
“How can you know?” Gebhart said. “And even still, what’s ‘a secret’ for the likes of him? It could be anything. You don’t know.
Nobody knows.”
Felix thought again about asking Gebhart his son’s name. If his Down’s was severe. If Gebhart knew a lot about that sort of thing.
Of course he must, he upbraided himself. He looked up from the bottle he had been cradling in his hands.
“But why would he not tell his own parents? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me about it,” said Gebhart. “Isn’t that what I’m saying to you here? Whatever he wanted to tell you, this ‘secret,’ well they’re wily enough, those Down’s kids. They want what they want. So it was nothing really, believe me.”
“But,” Felix said. “It’s just so… what happened. It’s so.. I can’t say what.”
“Hard, isn’t it?”
“That kid, I mean, the son. An only child. And now this?”
Felix’s gaze drifted over the photos again. Gebhart said nothing.
“You said ‘suspicious,’” said Felix. “Did you mean it?”
“Yes, I meant it. The word I got from the fire brigade guy up there, old hand, Dorner’s his name, yes said something started it.
I think he even said he thought paraffin. That’s just blather for now, until we hear from their experts. And show me a farm where they don’t keep paraffin or gasoline, anyway.”
“How come no one got out, or woke up?”
Something changed in Gebhart’s expression.
“You’re asking the wrong cop there, kid. Me and Korschak got there pretty damned quick, just the same time the feuerwehr were coming in. The place was an inferno. That I know. The arson guys showed up after a couple of hours, along with some forensics. They went through what they could.”
Gebhart shrugged.
“I don’t know. I did perimeter for a while, talked to a few neighbours. Then a car with two uniforms came from Graz to take over the site. They, er, got them out, the remains, before I left. So they’re getting the P.M. done.”
“How did it happen?”
“The fire? I don’t know.”
He held up his bottle to study the label.
“But I think your mind is working overtime here.”
“You think it was deliberate?”
Gebhart put down the bottle.
“I try not to think about it.”
Felix watched him turn the bottle slowly on the surface of the table. Then he looked at the pictures on the wall. A minute passed.
He noticed skis, mountain rescue gear, a helicopter in the background in one of the pictures now.
