He liked how her hair rattled out into a loose bundle as the breeze had tugged at it, mile after mile. She gave him a skeptical stare.
“What?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I know that look.”
“You do, uh?”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Last night.”
“Oh,” she said and batted at him. He laid his hand on her leg.
“I have X-ray vision,” he said. “They teach it at the Gendarmerie school.”
She smacked his hand and then opened the door.
“Stop it. Come on. Get the stuff.”
He took the bike frame down and laid it on the grass margin that ran along the front of the car park. He took out the wheels then, and the Velcroed pouch that held the tools.
Giuliana still kept her first rucksack from when she was a kid.
She had filled it with books and paper and fruit and nuts and God knows what else. He began strapping the wheels to the frame, paying a lot of care to where the spokes rested. Then he tested the weight of the package.
Giuliana chewed on an apple, looking off over the roofs toward the cable car lines that rose from the town up the slopes of the Hochkitzbuhel. A cable car was moving slowly at one of the steepest sections, a 70-degree length close to the top of the Streif. It was that sheer drop where skiers made their bones, where they could declare they had skied the Hahnenkamm, complete with the Mousetrap, the section that had ended so many Olympic hopes.
Felix thought about the trail up beyond the hotel there, the Ehrenbachhohe, over the ridges that led to Penglestein summit and on to Blaue Lacke.
He checked the glove compartment before settling the parking permit better on the dashboard. Giuliana checked the doors a second time while he loaded up his pack.
The streets were busy, with people standing around, moving in groups slowly down the sidewalks, pausing to look at the souvenirs and clothes. There were plenty milling about the steps to the Andreaskirche too. The cafes on Klostergasse were close to full. A deeply tanned man with designer stubble and unnaturally white teeth he liked to display, along with his bare feet in those Americanstyle moccasins, gave Felix the thumbs-up from behind a glass of beer.
“Sehr gut, mann!”
Felix sniffed the air for signs of chemical happiness. He couldn’t manage even a fake smile.
“Have a nice day, man,” he replied.
A cluster of Asians with silly hats stood listening intently to a woman dressed up in a flowery Tyrolean dirndl, with the endless pigtails and the stout shoes. To round things out, a youth in lederhosen was explaining something in fluent Italian to two heavy-set, sweating women that Felix decided could only be nuns in civvies up from Rome. They listened, nodding gravely, and looked up the path of the cable cars above.
He bought the three-day pass and let the ticket seller eye how he had kitted up the bike. It was a slack time for ascents, apparently. They walked through the empty passageway toward the ramp.
“Well, now you have company,” Giuliana said. “Your playmate.”
Peter was the real mountain man. He had been loud and clomping from birth, Felix had concluded early on after their first meeting at the Gendarmerie intake in Graz. Schwartz Peter, they called him soon enough the joker of the pack. Felix had soon learned there was something behind the pose, however. The same Peter very ably rested a keen brain, and big ambitions behind the goofy pose. The same Peter Moser had already impressed the CO at his post in Graz that he should be training at the central Gendarmerie college in Modling.
“My God, Giuliana,” he called out in that deep Styrian voice, the bellen that Schwarzenegger had exported to the world. “I was hoping you’d bring someone decent this time.”
Peter gave Giuliana his trademark sweaty bear hug. Felix eyed the newish bike that Peter had brought with him.
“Scheisse der auf,” he said to Felix then. “You’re expecting this bunch of cheap metal of yours to keep you going across to Blauesee even?”
“I don’t need designer bikes, you big oaf.”
“Don’t you save any money down there in where-the-hell, Schweinwein?”
“Stefansdorf.”
“Or does this nice lady here take it from you?”
“He’s predictable,” said Giuliana. “If nothing else.”
“Damned right. We’re hitting the paths the minute we get out of this coffin on strings, huh? You too, Giuliana, has he converted you?”
“No heroics,” she said. “It’s just a recreation for me, not a way of life.”
“Some of my best friends are bookworms. Hey, what are you reading this time?”
They got the Kanada car on the gondola. They had to wait for a grizzled old man in traditional mountaineering gear complete with a new feather in his hat and a walking stick, and a woman Felix hoped was his daughter, to alight first.
Peter unburdened himself of a longish joke about a German and a Swiss and a Swede who got drunk in a stube in the nowhere end of Burgenland one dark winter night. Felix pretended to listen, all the while watching Giuliana trying not to freak, even a little, as the gondola began its traverse of the meadow and sheds below, the gentle glide that would become something altogether different after the next few pylons.
The joke over, Felix allowed a chuckle. Peter looked around the car, taking in the view of the clusters of houses and streets, the Pfarrkirche that made up Kitzbuhel. Across the town Kitzbuhelhorn, all two thousand metres of it, stood sharp against a deep blue sky. Up the valley beyond Aurach, the Hohe Tauern, the Alps proper, began. There were serious pockets of snow even midway up there yet. They joined, most of them, into solid caps clear against a lighter blue sky to the north.
Felix let himself sag into the seat more. He rested his eyes for several moments on the almost luminous greens of the nearby valleys, those exuberant bursts of growth that sprang up at the end of the long winters here, not 50 kilometres from the Bavarian border.
The air growing cooler already. He found himself slipping into a mental rehearsal of what he would do with Giuliana out there in a sheltered spot. It’d be a grassy patch well in from the trails, and plenty of sun, and a breeze.
Peter shifted in his seat.
“What’s the news in Sleepyville,” he asked. “Your exciting gendarmerie post, with, what’s his name again, your guy?”
“Gebhart.”
Felix didn’t want to mention the bodies up near the Himmelfarb place.
“The usual,” he said.
“Well I tell you, up my way we’re action central since Easter.”
“All of a sudden?”
“Genau. I thought it was just spring madness, or something.
But the old guys in the post say there’s something different this year.”
Felix was still irritated at how Peter had landed a post in a big place like Liezen, while he had ended up in one-horse Stefansdorf.
“Like?”
Peter rested his elbows on his knees and nodded at Giuliana.
“You’re not hearing any of this, Giuliana, right?”
She glanced up from her intent study of her rucksack and shook her head.
“Drugs. Big time in a garage there. And what a set up! The Nobel Prize, I tell you. Did you hear about it? And the shoot-out?”
“I think so.”
“One guy dead, two in hospital. Seven arrests, and we almost got a big one. Guess what language these guys don’t speak so well except one local, who used to do paperwork and meet landlords and that. Guess.”
“Nicht sprach gut Deutsch?”
“Wow. You’re going to end up in the KD yet, Felix. Guess the home countries now. Go on.”
“Afghanistan?”
“Not the drugs, man. The big shot. The one that got away.”
“Local guy?”
“Hell, Christ no. An auslander. Why do you think I’m asking you? He’s a brute too by the way. You should hear some of the things they say about him.”
Felix gave him the eye: maybe not.
“He was one of those paratroopers from Bosnia. Just about the cream of the crop. No doubt he’s sitting pretty at some cafe back there now, planning his next effort.