right in the middle of Graz?”
“That’s where you live?”
“Temporarily for three years temporarily. Movie stars would want it, uh? Franz inherited it, lucky bastard. That’s the way. The destiny thing, maybe.”
Speckbauer looked over until Felix met his eye.
“You believe in that, the destiny stuff?”
“No.”
Speckbauer smiled and tapped his fingers twice on the wheel.
“Good. Me neither. Arsch mit ohren, as they say. ‘An arse with ears.’ That’s destiny.”
Speckbauer showed no mercy at the roundabout in Neustadt coming into Weiz. He only slowed seriously when Gleisdorferstrasse where the B64 pinched small as it reached this thousand-year-old city closed on the Weiz Zentrum proper. He turned down a lane at Europa Allee and let the Passat coast in second over the cobbled surface to a small platz where there were a dozen diagonal spaces.
“We’re stopping here in Weiz?”
“Stimmt.”
Felix had been to and through Weiz many times, but since his teens, less and less. His father knew everyone there, as in other towns and dorfs all around, it had seemed. He remembered his father stopping the car once and parking it by the chemist’s just to walk back to the benches close to the rathaus at the top of the platz.
There he had talked and laughed with the elderly man he had spotted, for hours it had seemed.
It had only been a half-hour probably, but Felix remembered being summoned from the car by a wave from his father. His mother, ever the diplomat, usually bribed them with a few schillings for ice cream. She knew to expect these impromptu meetings. Often the older ones would do the ritual cheek pinching and hand squeezing. Often he remembered listening to accents so thick he had barely understood more than “family” or “healthy,” or “weather.”
“You seem to know your way around here,” Felix said.
Speckbauer’s eyebrows went up and down in lieu of a remark.
The Passat’s tires made a soft kiss and rebound off the edge of the footbath. He turned off the engine.
“Down that way,” he said.
He nodded toward a cobbled lane curling down between an old house and some newer buildings to the other side.
Felix closed the door behind him, and stretched.
Speckbauer took his time with something in the car. The trunk lid clicked and swung a little before settling again. Felix noted how Speckbauer was out of the seat, the door closing behind him, and at the back of the car in one easy, sort of curving motion.
“There’s a plan?”
“There’s always a plan.”
Speckbauer opened the trunk and cast about for something.
Felix saw plastic-wrapped files, a grey metal box in the centre of the trunk. Speckbauer picked up a newspaper and tucked it under his arm.
He looked over Felix’s chest.
“A T-shirt. What use is this? Next time, then.”
“Next time what?”
“Next time get a shirt you can put something on, or in. I can clip it or you can just drop it in a pocket. A kleine transmitter.”
He opened his hand to show something with a single earpiece and a slim cord attached.
“I like to listen in.”
“I don’t get this.”
“You are making a rest stop, on our little jaunt. Down that lane there is a place I want you to buy yourself a beer, or something. I will be at a cafe a bit down toward the zentrum.”
“Why am I doing this?”
“It’s your new job.”
“Just a beer?”
“Just one beer. It’s Saturday, remember? You can do these things. See, everyone’s out shopping today. You’re thirsty. You’re not so happy. Your wiebi, your annoying wife, has gone shopping and you know she’ll overspend. So… ”
“Why don’t you go in?”
“Because I am not stupid, that is why. They are not stupid either. Me, I look like a cop. I probably smell like a cop? You though, you’re nobody. Verstehst? Got that?”
“What am I supposed to see there?”
“Whatever you like. Go in, enjoy the beer. Grumble a little, if you like. But know the layout before you leave. You might be going back under different circumstances, and it should not be the first time. Ready?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes?”
“Sounds okay. Now put on your pissed-off face. You’re a hardworking guy over at, I don’t know, the Magna plant in Gleisdorf.
Okay? You do car assembly or panels or something. You’re hungover.
Swear if you must. Do you know how?”
“I can manage that.”
“Well, things are looking up, then. Look, I’ll leave and wander about a bit. Wait a minute and then go yourself. And don’t get lost.”
Felix watched Speckbauer stroll down the lane. A Fiat Uno delivery van went by, then a two-stroke whiner 50cc Puch. He counted to 60, and studied the buildings around this small platz.
Ahead of him was the only hof that had not been given plate-glass windows and chintzy cobbled treatment. Above the recessed arch, the row of old tall windows had been flung open. Some kind of operatic singing came from them. It seemed to stir the curtains a little as though one should see just how thick the old walls actually were.
He made his way down the lane then, Karl Rennergasse, filing along with an irregular line of shoppers with kids and a pram. Built for older times and the passage of but one wagon, the lane filled up with sounds, echoing them. After 50 metres, he heard the bass thumping of a system further down the lane, where it opened out a little for proper sidewalks and a clutch of shops.
It was the English group, Fleetwood Mac, an oldie remixed, and it was just plain loud. It was coming from a place called Zero Point Joe’s. Two umbrellas took up the small slice of pavement by the open doors. A waitress with high-tied very blonde hair was putting down big glasses of beer for three men at one of the tables. She gave him a quick once-over and a perfunctory smile. One of the three men, a dark-haired guy with a designer beard and showing off some bodybuilding with his T-shirt, said something close to her ear.
It took Felix a few moments to see properly indoors. He went to the bar. It was empty except for a washed- outlooking guy at the far end with hair that might as well have a signpost sticking out of it a toupe lives here! and a white playboy shirt open three buttons to display God knows what, beyond the gold chain.
But the barman was a cheerful enough fellow, moving down the far side of his thirties, Felix guessed. He seemed to have a twitchy manner.
“Beer,” said Felix, feeling it was a shout. “Puntigamer.”
“Glockl or schweigel?”
“Whatever size gives a man amnesia.”
“Big glass for the big words,” the barman shouted back.
Felix half sat on a stool.
“And the big wife,” he said.
He looked around at the pods of seats, the raised floor, and speakers that began to the left of the bar. He returned a nod to the middle-aged playboy. Apparently, he who didn’t know that he looked like a complete loser, was now thumbing something into a small mobile.
“Where is everyone?”
