He tried not to study the strange small jerks that Franzi made as he entered the restaurant. Speckbauer did nothing to indicate he had even noticed his partner enter.
“Zero,” said Franz.
“Aber gut,” Speckbauer grunted. “Good enough.”
Felix nodded as the glasses swivelled his way, but he couldn’t see the eyes. The glasses went back toward Speckbauer.
“Well?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Speckbauer. “I don’t think he gets it yet.”
Franzi turned to Felix again.
“I thought you were smart. Let’s not waste any more time.”
Felix sensed that Franz would not be sitting down, no matter how much longer they’d stay. It’d be too much for him getting up again, maybe. He heard Franzi breathe out impatiently.
“Damn it, Franzi, I hear you thinking, even.”
Speckbauer turned to Felix.
“Now we must close this information session. The ‘zero’ you heard is good news. It means that Franz and two other fine veteran plainclothes officers can report that no one is in your apartment.”
“What?” Felix managed.
“Why didn’t you hit him with this earlier?”
Speckbauer waved away Franzi’s question.
“You haven’t come to the correct conclusion, kid,” Franzi went on. “Drop it on him, Horst, for Christ’s sake.”
Speckbauer spoke in a quiet tone now.
“Are you getting it yet?”
Felix was thinking of a farmhouse ablaze, and a dark purple hole in a man’s forehead.
“I think so,” he was able to say. “I think I am.”
SIXTEEN
Giuliana was trying hard to sound like she wasn’t freaking.
“I can’t tell you any more at the moment,” Felix said, gently.
“It’s to do with that family, those two men they found?”
“It’s a precaution,” he said. “There’s probably nothing to it. I have to be careful.”
He told her he’d be on the platform waiting. That seemed to awaken something in her. He heard her breathing in short gasps then.
“What am I going to do, to take, though,” she said. “God, I can’t think. Where am I going to start? Jesus!”
“We’ll go to the apartment right away,” he said. “There’ll be somebody with us. We get your stuff and we go to your mom’s.”
“She’ll freak if she knows.”
“Well, don’t tell her, okay?”
“Where will you go? Your mom’s?”
“No. I’ll tell you later.”
The detective who had come up with Speckbauer was hanging around by the door, drinking one of Giuliana’s fruit drinks.
“Nice,” he said to Felix. “Nice place. Very artistic. You?”
“No.”
Felix went to the living room. Speckbauer was eyeing the goings on in the small sliver of Kurosistrassse that could be glimpsed between the poplars in front of the apartment block.
“Well,” he said. “How’d it go?”
“You can imagine.”
Felix looked around the living room. The laptop, he’d take for sure, right now. Giuliana could figure out what she’d want when she made it in this evening.
“Is Gebi getting the same attention?”
“No. Why, should he?”
“Well, he was at the farm too.”
Speckbauer seemed to ponder this information. From the kitchen, Felix heard the soft sigh of the fridge door opening.
“You want a Gosser, take one,” he called out.
“Good,” said Speckbauer. “If you’re not being sarcastic, that is.
Surveillance is no picnic. Christ, but you can get hemorrhoids like nobody’s business.”
Felix headed for the bedroom to pack some things.
“What did you discuss with Gebhart anyway?”
“When?”
“Last night. At his place.”
“Ask him, I should think.”
“I did.”
Felix stopped in the doorway and turned. Speckbauer turned away.
“Get some stuff,” he called out. “You’ve got five or six hours to kill before your girl shows up. After that, you and me are going spatzieren yes, taking to the hills.”
True to his word, Speckbauer got into a police Passat and took out two maps from a folder under the seat. There was a stale smell of peppermints in the car, but Felix had spotted the top of a small magenbitter bottle in the trunk as Speckbauer had cleaned space there for his bag. The hint of gastric trouble for Speckbauer pleased Felix a little.
“Am I at work now?”
“Work? Do you see a desk here?”
“Well, I think I should know the conditions here.”
“Okay. Yes you are on the job ‘ancillary officer.’”
“You guarantee I get back here, to the bahnhof, I mean, by seven?”
“I guarantee that. And you will guarantee that you will show me the ins and outs of the high country.”
“The maps?”
“But I want to follow your way too,” said Speckbauer. He tapped a forefinger on his forehead several times. “What way would a guy like yourself go, one who knows a bit about the area?”
“Take the Lendkai down and come back over the Schonaugurtel,” said Felix. “It’s not bad. Then there’s the A2. Get off at Gleisdorf. We’ll go by Weiz, and then up.”
Speckbauer nodded at the mass of the Schlossberg between the buildings.
“Is going that way worth it?”
“It looks long,” Felix replied. “But it’s quicker.”
Speckbauer nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “A good start. See, I knew you had it in you.”
When Felix finished his phone call, Speckbauer was already passing the station at Munzgrabenstrasse and accelerating down the link to the Graz Ost ramp onto the A2.
“That’s a little awkward,” said Speckbauer, himself thumbing his Handi.
SEVENTEEN
“You’ll pardon me, being so outspoken. but I couldn’t help but hear.”
“It’s my grandparents’ place,” said Felix. “It’ll be fine.”
“You know it well?”
“A fair bit.”
“Servus, Franzi,” said Speckbauer then. He held the phone tighter to his ear. “Yes. We are prospecting. The name of the woman who runs that pub again? The one in that hole in the hedge up by the Himmelfarbs?”
Felix began rummaging in his mind which place Speckbauer could mean.
Speckbauer finished the call with a grunt. How long had these two policemen known one another, he began to wonder.
Speckbauer didn’t signal when he changed traffic lanes. The needle ran quickly enough to 200 but he eased off. Through the blur of hedges and barriers that raced past, Felix spotted tractors at work often, their passage semaphored by circling gulls. Speckbauer hummed intermittently. It was a strange waltzy melody that stopped and started, and kept no proper time.
“Your colleague works 24/7 also?”
“Franzi? Christ, no. He is the laziest. Well, maybe I should not say that. When he is doing something that interests him, he is a goer.
It’s not like he doesn’t have the time.”
“Like yourself, perhaps?”
“How nicely you put your questions. You were well reared. Well, let me put it to you this way: Franzi and I are veterans of the same campaigns.”
Felix didn’t want to sound too inquisitive.
“But his wife is a bitch,” said Speckbauer. “But mine is, was, always sweet.”
He glanced over toward Felix.
“I’ve made many mistakes, let me tell you. But isn’t that how we have progress?”
The Gleisdorf junction was soon upon them. Speckbauer seemed to enjoy leaning hard into the curve, using the gears.
“Smaller screw-ups,” said Speckbauer. “That’s how we know we’re winning.”
“Winning?”
“Christ, this is an interview?”
He snorted once. They skirted Gleisdorf, and Speckbauer soon had them on the road up to Weiz, rocketing past a laggard lorry before a succession of blind bends.
“She couldn’t take the changes,” said Speckbauer.
“Your wife?”
“Franzi’s wife. To be fair, it wasn’t the injuries, the physical deformities, totally. No. But Franzi is hard to live with. Take my word for it. He always was. Me, I fell into my job. It went to my head. I fell in, and I couldn’t get out. The current took me. But my former wife is a wonderful woman.”