Felix was reluctant to draw Hartmann back from the lightheartedness he seemed to be working to regain.
“Herr Himmelfarb,” he said then. “And his card friends, you say, that evening?”
Sure enough, Hartmann’s expression slid back. He turned toward his niece.
“There were others earlier, weren’t there, Liesl?”
Liesl nodded. Felix wondered if he should ask for names. He decided to wait.
“Oh he looked worried,” she said. “Rings around his eyes.
Tired-looking. Of course, he knew that we’d heard what had happened. I didn’t want to put talk on him about it though — if he didn’t bring it up himself, of course.”
“A man would have to get out,” said Hartmann. “Just to get a wee break, even for an hour or two.”
“But he talked about things?” Felix said. “What had gone on?”
There was a small delay before Liesl answered.
“Well, I think he was worried for his boy… wasn’t he, Willi?
He was with your players here.”
“Us old farts,” said Hartmann with a rueful look. “Yes. He said the boy was very… how can one say it, one doesn’t want to say ver-ruckt — crazy, like — let’s say strange. Agitated. No sleep, with all the comings and goings. The boy was excited, he wanted the thing to go on, you see. He didn’t understand.”
“All the activity there?”
“The Gendarmerie and so forth,” said Hartmann, and paused momentarily.
“Those experts, the police experts,” he added.
It was a signal that Speckbauer wouldn’t miss either, Felix knew. He looked over at Liesl again.
“He was not keen to discuss private matters,” she said. “But he said something about how it would take ages for the boy to settle again. ‘He wants the police up there all the time now.’”
“Karl did, himself?”
“No, the boy, Hansi. The police were good to him, apparently, humouring the boy. Playing the siren and that, like a toy.”
“That is how they found the two,” said Hartmann. “He said that Hansi liked one of the Gendarmerie so he brought him wandering up the woods, where he had his ‘dolls.’”
“Dolls?”
“That’s what the boy called them, he said: ‘dolls.’”
No one seemed to want to keep the conversation going after Hartmann’s quiet and doleful remarks. For a while everyone seemed to withdraw into themselves. Felix took another swallow from his beer. Fuchs ran his hand slowly through his hair, but the effect was only to make him look even more the bewildered elf with even more hair askew. Liesl looked away through the window toward the faraway hills, and Hartmann sighed. The quiet was broken only by the sounds of Liesl’s occasional sniffle and a faint whistling that seemed to come from Fuch’s nose.
Then Liesl shifted her feet.
“So geht’s,” she said. “And so it goes. The bad things that happen to the good people. I hope there’ll be a big turnout for the funeral.”
Both Hartmann and Fuchs nodded.
“I am forgetting more and more,” said Hartmann then. “But now I remember. Yes! Poor Karl was clumsy, with his cup, wasn’t he, Liesl? He dropped it and it broke? His hands were shaking a bit. I asked him if there was somewhere he could get a break, him and Mrs.”
“Haunted, he was,” said Liesl, and blew her nose in a delicate fluffing sound.
After several moments, where Liesl looked away through the window toward the faraway hills, and Hartmann sighed, the talk slowly moved to goings on in the district. The winter had been long, as always; tourism last year had not been so great, but there were more people coming up to trek now. Would the Turks finally get their way now, and get a ticket to the EU? The price of a new VW was just stupid, and the quality was down anyway.
Felix listened, saying little, and wondered what Speckbauer was making of it all here. Hayseeds, slow-in- the-heads up here in God’s country? Occasionally he’d glance over at Hartmann, at the liver spots on the back of his hands, and at the lines that the wind and sun and long winter’s cold had dug in from his eyes around almost to his ears. Berger Willi, yes, this ancient fellow had been mad for the hills and mountains since he was a child.
He saw Speckbauer looking at his watch.
He took out his wallet. Speckbauer’s hand was on his forearm before he could open it.
“May I?” Speckbauer asked, looking around the faces. He had no takers.
Felix followed Liesl over to the counter.
“The card guys,” he began. “Are there a lot of them?”
“They come in different days,” she said. “But the older ones are afternooners.”
“Were there many the evening Karl Himmelfarb was in?”
She stopped keying in numbers on the cash register and stared at a mirror behind the counter.
“I’d have to think,” she said. “Berger Willi, of course — and Herr Kimmel, your opa. He is Peter, no? Fuchs, yes. There were others… Hans Prem; he’s in a chair now, a wheelchair. But his daughter has a van for that, yes… She stayed, but she didn’t play. Let me see.. Frank Schober, I think. He drives himself, still.”
She frowned then, and turned from the mirror.
“So you are Herr Kimmel’s grandson. Isn’t it strange we haven’t met.”
“My opa is called Herr Kimmel, even here?”
She gave him a quick glance.
“Well that’s the way with some people, isn’t it? What odds, I say.
But not like your father, I must say. Or you, I think?”
“My father? You knew him, did you?”
She looked toward the group at the booth again, but her eyes were not focused on them, Felix saw.
“Only a while,” she said. “I was sorry to hear of, you know?”
He nodded.
“He used to come here?”
“If I remember it was only for a short while,” she said. “Maybe a couple of years ago? But he dropped by a number of times there, in one week. That’s how I remember. Yes.”
“Driving my opa, was it?”
Again she frowned.
“Well I don’t think so. But such a nice man to talk to. I am sorry if this is not good for you to hear this today.”
Felix smiled.
“He got around, as they say.”
“Oh I knew he was a Gendarme right away,” she said. “Even without any uniform. But that made no difference. Great for a chat.
It gets a bit isolated here after the season, you know. But he liked to know the news, no matter how small it would be from these parts.
Yes. Always had time to listen. Curious about everything, yes.”
She shrugged sympathetically and finished entering the numbers. The till opened as a receipt began issuing out with a scratching sound.
“Yes,” she said, and began fingering some change from the leather purse. “It’s hard on the older ones up here, the ones who want to stay independent. So Fuchsi there, he does them a lot of good.”
She settled on the coins she had chosen as the proper change.
She stopped and counted and frowned again.
“May I phone later, then?” he asked.
“Phone?”
“If you can recall who was here at the time Karl Himmelfarb made his visit?”
“In and out,” she said. “Scraps. They can be quite comisch, these fellows, you know. Quite comical.”
He returned her smile briefly.
“If you can recall who was here at the time Karl Himmelfarb made his visit?”
