That’s where it stopped.
He rubbed hard at his eyes and focused a little on his breathing. This jumpy restlessness had been gnawing at him even before he’d stepped out of Speckbauer’s Passat and headed into the city proper. He had run a red light coming down Eggenbergerstrasse, and heard a shout from behind. Sometimes he was sure it was panic. Then later, when he tried to untangle it all, his thoughts dissolved in confusion.
He stared across at the traffic turning down Keplerstrasse toward the Mur, and the old city that began on its far bank, under the Schlossberg. Being used is one thing, he thought again, if it’s part of your job. Wasn’t that what a job was, especially if you were a cop under orders of your C.O.? But on that drive back along the A2 into Graz, Speckbauer had faltered in some way, and in spite of himself, he had revealed something. He had crossed a line, Felix was sure of it. Try as he might, he still couldn’t figure what that was, much less what it meant. The fog of suspicion settled around him again.
He was hungry and he was not. His body was telling him to just get going, to release the tension somehow. He felt alert, too alert, the way you were after you woke up suddenly in the night and were on your feet before you knew it. He found himself looking around every corner of the platform and back into the gallery of shops and the broad, open space above the escalator that gave way to the plate glass and the clock.
Fine, he told himself again: it was normal to be jittery after what had been happening. That’s how shock was, and you should-n’t ignore it, or make light of it. But why did everything seem so different, so suspect? There was that extra second that the shop attendant had looked at him; those CCTV cameras up over the escalators; the half-dozen teenagers with backpacks and headphones lounging on the floor under the clock.
He hadn’t been in the station more than a couple of times since it had been renovated as part of the City of Culture a few years back. There had been ski trains often enough in the high school days, and he and Lisi had been packed on to the Vienna train each winter when they were younger, to be met there by Kiti, a maiden aunt who worked in the university library.
A hatless, whistling OBB staff man eyed him, and as he drew close offered him a cautious “Gruss.” Graz was a friendly city, no?
Or more likely Gebi had been right. You could tell a cop whatever way he was dressed or acted, if you knew people at all. Felix lingered by the computer kiosk. He entered some places on the screen just to see the price of the tickets. There were three Nordic-looking backpackers at the ticket booth now, speaking bad German. A woman pushed an old man in a wheelchair. A porter was pushing a trolley half loaded with cardboard boxes. Felix watched him disappear around by the shops.
Speckbauer was back in his head: they’ll trust one of their own, had been Speckbauer’s rationale for getting him to drive around the hills. They’d know Felix Kimmel, right? And trust him, the logic went, as they’d known and trusted his father? And that stroll around the remains of the Himmelfarb home were sure as hell not part of the local scenery.
A train arrival was announced, and he looked up:
Murzzuschlag. Who cares?
Staring at the sign, however, Speckbauer was suddenly back in his mind. Him and that ogre he had as a partner, Franzi. And for a moment Felix imagined the inside of the car when it had been sprayed with the fuel. There would surely have been a millisecond before it went up in flames around him when Franzi would have known…
He cursed in a whisper, twice, and checked his watch again.
Late? He’d count to 10, and if it wasn’t announced at least, he’d skip downstairs and buy a sandwich he didn’t need from the SPAR.
He got to eight before the PA came on.
On his way to the platform, he took in the people who seemed to appear from nowhere, as usual when the train came, and the faint twanging sounds from the electric cables overhead as the train approached. The low burn of unease and resentment that had been around his chest like heartburn, or exhaustion, had dissolved and he felt his shoulders, or something at least, ease. He scanned the length of the train as the last metallic squeaks and ring of the coupling chains sounded and doors began to open.
TWENTY-FIVE
“It really is,” Giuliana whispered, and paused, and her hands began to flail about weakly for words. She left the rest unsaid.
She wouldn’t even look at him. Even with the light from the overhead in the cafe, he saw that her face still looked kind of chalky.
“It’s just… ” she tried again, and let that go too.
“Look,” he said. “Do you want a beer or something instead?”
She shook her head. She had left the biscuit on her plate. It looked like she’d be leaving most of the coffee behind too.
“I’m sorry,” he said and added it to his total. He had said sorry four times now that he could recall. “I never expected this.”
“It is just like, Jesus a movie,” she said, and a little gasp finished her words. “I’m waiting for, I don’t know, it to be over. Just pazzo crazy.”
She fixed him with a hard look now.
“I am so numb that I’m not even scared yet. How stupid is that?”
“It’d be just a precaution,” he said. “That’s all.”
“But Felix, listen: this is for someone else. Tell me that, can you? You’re starting out, you have a job, and it’s not this crazy, dangerous stuff. Right? You go into schools and talk to kids, you catch hooligans or something, get back stolen cars. Right?”
He nodded.
“Not all in one day.”
“Don’t try to be funny,” she said. He was momentarily glad to see she was moving out of the paralyzed state she seemed to have entered.
“Just don’t try to be a comedian, okay? Who is this guy you spent the day with, this big shot?”
“He’s a higher-up from HQ. A detective. He’s a ranking officer.
He seems to run his own show.”
“But I don’t get it. Are you changing jobs? Were you at work today? What?”
Felix sat back and stretched. He did not want to see the dark rings around her eyes again, the ones that had seemed to erupt when the colour left her cheeks a few minutes before.
“What do they say back at your post? The one you work with, Gebhart?”
“I think he’s telling me to stay back from this.”
“You think?”
“It’s hard to be sure what’s on Gebi’s mind sometimes. He doesn’t expose his feelings much.”
He heard her draw in a deep breath and she put her hands around the coffee cup.
“But your boss there, what’s his name? Sch…?”
“Schroek. He’s okayed the job. Gebi went to him, because he had to okay it.”
“But isn’t Schroek the guy you told me, he’s so low-key there that the place runs itself? Half-retired already? Does he have a clue what this is about?”
Felix didn’t have an answer. Still, he felt he had to offer something.
“It’s going to be fixed,” he said. “It’ll get settled, it’ll be okay.”
“How do you know this?”
“What can I tell you?”
“You can tell me we have a week together, and that we’re going to get in the car and drive to Italy and do what we said we were going to do. You could tell me that you stood up to them and said, ‘Look you idiots, I’m not trained in any of this, I haven’t a clue what’s going on, and you should leave me alone.’”
He looked down at her hands when they came to rest on the tabletop again.
“Well?”
He shook his head.
“What does that mean? ‘Let’s go to the beach’?”
“I’ve got to see the thing through,” he began and raised his hand to meet hers already coming up. “Just a bit longer but I’ll tell him I’m no use, I want out.”