What I’m getting at is this: Felix, this is your big chance. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Big chance for what?”
“Look: you score big when you are the wounded hero. Pop the question.”
“Marriage?”
“I could use a party.”
“You’re a matchmaker now, Gebi?”
“Do it. Look, it’s the summer. I’m on leave a few weeks for sure, maybe months. I feel good but I’m not going to let on. You did good stuff, and you’re barely out of your diapers in the job.”
“Good stuff?” said Felix, and looked from Gebhart to his wife and back. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“Do I ever joke? Look, they’re going through with the Big One, have you forgotten? One big happy family, our decent, dependable, modest Gendarmerie will now share the playground with the big shots from the BP. And where will we be when the dust settles? Whatever about me, but you’re detective fast track.
Believe me.”
Felix said nothing. Movement on the building opposite drew his eye to the window again. Pigeons, big fat Graz pigeons, were landing on a roof.
“What did I tell you Frieda,” said Gebhart. “He still thinks he screwed up.”
She got up from the chair, and pushed it back to the wall.
“I must show up at some point,” she said. “We’re short, with all the holidays.”
Felix snuck a look at how she reached around her husband’s neck. She murmured something to him and kissed the top of his head. Then she gave a professional look-around to the bed and the drip, settling the bedclothes, and checking how the upper part of the bed was tilted. She tugged at her nurse’s uniform under her raincoat. She glanced at Felix before turning to her husband again.
“Servus, Felix,” she said, crisply. “When we get this depp home, you must visit.”
Felix remembered babbling some reply. Gebhart tried to let on he hadn’t noticed the awkwardness.
“Now,” he said when Felix sat down again. “It just takes a bit of time, see?”
Then he winked.
“Stay away from those farmer’s daughters from Carinthia.
They’ll whip you if you cross them.”
“Really?”
“No,” Gebhart retorted. “I’m making it up so you’ll quit worrying.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
Gebhart waved some irritating thought aside.
“There you go, you see? Is it your age that makes you think nothing happens without your permission or something? Don’t you get it yet? It’s just a shitty thing happened. It’s the way stuff happens. That’s it, that’s all of it. Sure, you can predict some stuff, and get out of the way of a lot of shit, but…?”
Felix looked at the Gebhart’s hands working the air.
“You’re doing the philosophy thing, Gebi.”
“Ach I’ll try to keep it simple. Ready? You put greedy people, stupid people, people who are bored, or do drugs, or drink all day, you put them near anything tempting, well you’re going to get trouble. Is that too hard for you?”
Felix nodded, just to have it over for now.
“So get out of here and work on that proposal, okay?”
On the tram back down to the city centre, Felix realized that he had forgotten the Croatian guy’s name. It unnerved him. Was it the concussion, he wondered, a sign that his brain still wasn’t right?
Getting worse, even? He could remember Fuchs’ heavy weight over him, crushing him into the farmyard cement. There was something of that in his dreams, he sensed, and he had awakened several times with the dread feeling of being held, or tied, or at least being unable to move.
He rubbed hard at his eyes, as if that would help stop the replaying that was still coming to him, in sleep and at unexpected moments. Fuchs’ murmurings, and that small jolt that he had thought was Fuchs trying to rise, but was a bullet that tore into his upper chest by his throat. A smell from something, a passing farm lorry on patrol last week, had brought back the nausea, and the feeling that something was flowing over the back of his hands there in the car.
D. He opened his eyes. The name started with a D. Gebi had said his name: Dal… Dov…
An old man was watching him from the seat opposite. He made no bones about his scrutiny either, taking the aged’s right to pry openly. Felix glared back into the rheumy, light-blue eyes, but the gaze didn’t waver. He got off two stops early, thinking of his grandfather’s slack face in shock that day, aware that he had killed a man and saved others. And Fuchs, was Felix’s last thought stepping down from the tram, trying to fight off the sour feeling that was surrounding him: Fuchs interred in the graveyard at St. Kristoff himself, his family plot not a hundred metres from the Kimmels’ own.
Giuliana whispered something. He opened his eyes. He was still here, in bed, and he hadn’t slept. She whispered something else in Italian: a table? Set the table? She swallowed slowly, and rubbed her nose and resumed her steady, slow breathing. He closed his eyes again. It was probably worse, he had decided, to try to stop the relentless orbit and roll of thoughts that crowded into his mind yet.
They only came back stronger. Lisi might be right, he knew, and some day he’d admit it: go to the shrink before it gets worse. Post-trauma is real.
Soon he heard the first birds, a scooter one street over, and the beginnings of sparse traffic. Then it was bright. He stared at the ceiling: the big day, finally 9:30 at Strassgangerstrasse, for the investigation report. But had he slept?
FORTY-TWO
Felix found parking on Wetzelsdorferstrasse.He was 20 steps along when he spotted Edelbacher’s car parked in sight of the gate into the Gendarmerie kommando that stood across the junction ahead, where Strassgangerstrasse started its run along under Buchkogel and the low hills that formed the western edge of Graz.
And sure enough, it was Felix’s mother sitting in the passenger seat.
Edelbacher had seen him from a distance in his mirror. It was his job, after all, Felix thought. Felix mustered a quasi-cheerful nod, and even a smile, for his mother now getting out onto the footpath.
Edelbacher was in full uniform, as always, and crisp and smart as the Gendarmes on the pamphlets Felix had been distributing all that week in the schools. His tan from the holiday looked overdone.
He thought of asking Edelbacher how he had gotten time off for this. What reason had he given, if any? Moral support for his friend’s son when the tribunal of inquiry released its findings today? Loyal and fatherly concern, in place of…?
Felix tried harder to stifle the aversion. He kissed his mother on the cheek, and braced himself for Edelbacher’s handshake.
“Felix,” said Edelbacher. “A good day ahead of us, no?”
“I hope so.”
“Hey, you look good! Those idiots in the Ministry should see what a Gendarme uniform can do. A crime to change our uniform, it is. A crime.”
Felix’s mother reached up to tuck some hair behind his ear.
“Yes,” Edelbacher went on. “Today will be a great day, the day those damned cowboys will get their feet burned.”
“You’re sleeping better?” Felix’s mother asked.
“Soon,” was all Felix could offer by way of a reply.
“And how is Giuliana?”
“She sends her best. She says it’s better she goes to work.”
Edelbacher chuckled.
