Again he thought back to what Gebhart had told him.
“Look,” Felix said, and prepared to get up. “I’ll go.”
“Finish your beer. Don’t waste it.”
“Why am I here? I just feel bad about it. Maybe I’m going nuts?”
Gebhart nodded.
“Could be,” he said. “Do you want some advice?”
“Can I try a sample first?”
“Sure. It’s not hard. A) Don’t drive that scheisse of a car you have at supersonic speed anymore.”
“B?”
“There isn’t a B. But if there was, it’d be this: go back to your holiday. Don’t heat up your brain over this stuff. You’re shocked.
That’s a nice, normal human reaction. But your best place is you know. Just for the record, did anyone ask you to drive all the way back here, without your girl too?”
“She’s taking the train down tomorrow,” said Felix. “It’s just not the same; I don’t want to go back now.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Well, the trekking thing was only for the weekend. Italy, still. I hope.”
They fell silent again. Felix heard the TV through the walls.
“Paraffin,” he said after a while.
“Gossip. I heard one of them say it, but that’s all.”
Felix took another mouthful of beer.
“Why are you avoiding this, Gebi?”
“Avoiding what? Avoiding making a depp out of myself, jumping to conclusions?”
“You’re not suspicious, not even a bisschen, the tiniest bit?”
“Look,” said Gebhart. “Give them a day or two. What if it’s just an accident? There’s the father, Himmelfarb, and he’s not sleeping because the kid is up all night. There’s a word for that, I think.”
“‘Sleep deprived.’”
“Right. So wait for a preliminary, I think they call it. Nothing’s instant in the job, even for the PlayStation generation.”
“I feel a lecture coming on.”
Gebhart took a long drink and sighed.
“It’s like your mutti always told you: Morgen kommt besser.”
“‘It’ll be better in the morning?’ My mom never said that.”
“Listen to you. You are like our resident bookworm in there.
Whatever I say, she is always ‘But,’ or ‘No,’ or ‘You haven’t a clue.’”
“Did I say those things?”
“You don’t have to. What’s behind the look, or the words is:
‘You’re a dummy. No, you know zip because you’re not online or glued to your mobile. Geezer.’”
“What century were you born in, Gebi?”
“This is how you repay hospitality? Beer?”
Felix was sure he saw a flicker of humour on Gebhart’s face.
“What century? Well I sometimes wonder. Come now, you don’t want to hear my philosophy, if you can call it that.”
“‘Go home, get some sleep and tomorrow we’ll see.’”
“Exactly.”
Felix’s gaze strayed to the photos again, and his mind wandered to questions he’d someday ask Gebhart.
“A fine bunch, huh?”
Felix broke his gaze on the pictures.
“Guys you worked with?”
“Genau. Some times we had, I tell you. By God they could enjoy themselves, these fellows.”
“Not you?”
Gebhart hesitated before replying.
“Things you do,” he said, and shrugged. “At certain times in your life.”
FIFTEEN
Giuliana had a sleepy voice. Her replies were slow and yawny.
“You’re reading, aren’t you,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know you. Because you get into something and you don’t stop until it’s finished. What is it, are you back to those old bores like Hesse?”
“He’s not an old bore. Everyone should read him again.”
“I’d rather be tearing your clothes off and reading your skin, and watching your face as you come.”
“My my,” she said, and he knew she was smiling. “You’ll have to tie your hands behind your back when you go to sleep tonight.”
He slouched back further in the sofa.
He felt himself putting the conversation on automatic while his thoughts wandered.
“You went out for a walk at least?”
“Yes, the guilt got to me. I met up with a wife of one of your mountain guys. She’s not into the crazy biking and…”
He listened, but he was thinking about what fire would do to an old house like the Himmelfarbs’. It would have been an inferno in minutes. But Gebi was right: what farmer wouldn’t keep paraffin around for getting a blaze going on a heap of weeds or rubbish, or even running a heater to keep the chill off newborns in the shed.
“… she’s nice. She says it’s an addiction though, but she laughs. For now.”
“Addiction?”
“The whole business: the fitness thing, that’s okay, but twelvehour bike marathons up in the Alps?”
“Right. Is Peter hitting on you?”
“What? I’m in my room, looking out over the valley, reading.”
Speckbauer and his weirdo skin-graft sidekick ‘Franz’ returned to the forefront of Felix’s thoughts.
“And drinking wine.”
“… and thinking of…?”
“Of how much a genius Hesse really was.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re thinking?”
“Basta it’s enough, isn’t it?”
Speckbauer had given him a mobile number. Maybe he’d go to a call box, phone him and hang up, just to annoy him. Herr Supercop Speckbauer, coming out from city to the lame-head trottels in Stefansdorf because, as everyone knew, the three Gendarmerie there couldn’t put their heads together enough to make heat.
“Listen, Felix. Go to bed.”
“I’m in the wrong part of Austria.”
“Go out and buy a teddy bear or something then.”
“You make sure you get on that train tomorrow, okay? I’ll pick you up in Graz and we’ll carry on our weekend. I’m sorry it screwed up.”
“Don’t be.”
“I thought it was over, that business.”
“I wish I were there, you know. But… ”
“If,” he began, and then let it go.
