“I think I do, now.”
Gebhart held his forefinger to his head, and pulled back his thumb, and let it go.
“The way out,” he said. “For him. But not for me. Obviously.”
“They thought…?”
Speckbauer nodded several times, slowly.
“So when you show up at the post, fresh out of Gendarmerie school, I think, well, so what. It’s a good post for it. But then I see your name. And I ask myself this: They’re putting this kid with me?
Whose father was…? You don’t have to be crazy, or paranoid, I should say. So: got all that? Enough of it?”
“I had no idea.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Gebhart. “Don’t I know it. I didn’t either. That’s what happened to me. They gave up on me after a while, the Internals, but I know damned well my file was marked that day. I mean, what was my defence when they said I must have some idea what my partner was up to, that no one can be that stupid, or naive, or…? Now: forget this. You know enough now.”
Gebhart put the car in first gear. He peered over the banks that bordered this part of the road here.
“Listen,” said Felix. “Just go back. I never saw you.”
“Well now. You sound as out of it as I was then.”
“Really. I phoned you, and you turned me down. I’ll drop all this on Speckbauer, the maps, what I heard from my grandparents, all that.”
“Really?” said Gebhart, from some far place behind his squint.
“I’m over my head. Everything’s screwed up.”
Gebhart drew in a breath, held it, and let it out noisily.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “But the world has already spun on.”
“What does that mean?”
“I put in the search on this Fuchs guy.”
“So the system logged you.”
“The system logged me. Or Korschak, or whoever was in the post. It shouldn’t take them more than one half-second to figure out who.”
“‘Them,’” Felix muttered.
“Funny, isn’t it? ‘Them’ ‘Them’ is us, right?”
“Yes,” said Felix. “But are you sure you got the right Fuchs?”
“‘Equipment operator ‘seasonal operator’ in the forestry, the mill?”
“Red hair, beard?”
“No beard on his driver’s licence. Reddish, rusty maybe.”
“Equipment operator? The only time I met him, he was driving an old man to his card games, having a beer and jausen.”
“Slacker?”
“I don’t know, but probably. What’s his record?”
“Surprise: Herr Fuchs is not a criminal.”
“You’re joking.”
“This is not a joking day. Zero. Like I said. I go left here, right?”
The smoother section of road that Gebhart let the Golf onto soon resumed its steep climb, the clattery sound of the engine coming back to Felix from the banks that lined it here.
“What was the passport picture like?”
“He doesn’t have one. But the EU’s a big place to wander now, isn’t it? Anyone can get into a car and drive to, I don’t know, Paris, and no one has to know.”
“Married, family or anything?”
“Not married, in his thirties, does what he pleases. Sounds like a pretty good life to me. I’ll bet he has a killer CD collection and a garage full of decent tools.”
“And who knows,” Gebhart added after a few moments.
“Maybe he’ll turn out to be a half-decent fellow. So he drives some local geezers about a bit? Sounds like a good thing, one would say.
Families are busy these days, you know. So busy.”
Felix checked his watch.
“Well I phoned my Opa Kimmel. He’s not going out this afternoon, he said.”
“Is he used to you calling in on him?”
Felix shook his head.
“He has all his marbles?” Gebhart asked. “Or enough of them?”
“We’ll see,” was all Felix could come up with. “He can be a bit.. remote.”
“You said the village,” said Gebhart. He pushed against his seat belt to look around at the church and houses receding in his mirror.
“It’s spread out,” said Felix. “Go up the hill here, and watch for tractors. It’s tight. It gets narrower further up.”
Gebhart weaved his head about to get a last look at the church tower in the side mirror before the car took the summit. The road began a gradual descent into a small valley that appeared to be the last before the mountains started behind.
“Is that your family church back there, the graveyard?”
“It is.”
Gebhart braked and then he geared down when the road entered a curving cut between banks. The first of the grass in the meadows here had established itself, and to Felix now seemed to almost hover above the fields in an almost luminous filament, more like baby hair than the hardy, thick grasses they’d be before the month was out.
“Well you won’t often see that,” Gebhart said. “Those masons know their stuff.”
“The masons?”
“That wall by the graveyard. The road was made later, or it sank or something?”
“I suppose.”
“You mean you don’t know, and you grew up hereabouts?”
Flattened cakes of mud from tractor wheels began to spread out more across the pavement. The rumbling coming up from the tires became more constant. Winter had chewed up the edges of the road in many places. Without planning to, Felix had been rehearsing how he’d approach his grandfather, how he’d persuade him to talk about his past. He could already imagine the distant gaze and the indifference in his eyes, the slow, steady enunciation of his words, each weighed.
Gebhart slowed for two potholes.
“Maybe we should have parachuted in.”
“Well you’ll have something to talk to my Opa Kimmel about then.”
“Parachutes? Potholes?”
“He wanted to be a paratrooper. ‘To land on Crete’ my dad told me once.”
“And did he?”
“He was fourteen when that was going on.”
Gebhart changed into second for a steep section.
“All the wind and air up here maybe,” he murmured. “Gets into you, maybe?”
The Golf chugged through the section of road that ran almost through the Klamminger’s farmyard.
“What?” said Gebhart. “The one place we pass, and there’s no action here?”
There was fresh mud in the yard, clothes on the line.
Something about the turn in the road, or the drumming of the muddy roadway, had awakened something in Felix. He thought of his Grandfather Kimmel, that upright way he sat in the church pew, as though he were in a trance.
“Talk about out of the way,” Gebhart went on. “Is he a hermit or something?”
When Felix didn’t answer, Gebhart looked over.
