“Christ,” she said, and sagged in her chair. For a moment he thought she’d cry.
“We’re stressed,” he said. “At least I am, I know.”
“You can say that again. Understatement of the year I just can’t take it in yet. I really can’t. You’re actually telling me it’s a good idea to stay out of my of our apartment because…?”
All he could manage was a nod. He reached for her hands.
“Come on,” he said.
“Come on where?”
“Anywhere.”
“What? Where are we going to go this evening?”
Her eyes had set into a hard look.
“My grandparents’ place.”
She took her fingers out of his grasp.
“No way. I wouldn’t feel right. And don’t even say we’ll go to your mom’s, or your sister’s. It just wouldn’t be right.”
He waited a few moments.
“We could find a gasthaus somewhere then, a hotel even?”
He heard her sigh. There was more than exasperation in it now.
“Look,” she said. “This isn’t going to work. Are you listening to me?”
“I am. You mean this apartment thing.”
She waited until she had his eyes locked on hers.
“I can’t do this, Felix. Do you understand that? Do you?”
“It’ll only”
“You’re not hearing me. It’s more than this.”
“I’m getting time off instead,” he said. “And we can just hang around here, can’t we? It saves money, even, you see? It’s crappy but … ”
He took her hands again. Her frown eased and he looked down at their hands.
A tiny tremor brought his gaze to her face. He saw she was near tears.
“It’ll blow over,” he said. “Really. Try not to worry. It’ll blow over.”
“It’s just that things,” she began but paused and drew in a fluttery breath before wiping her nose again. “We needed to talk anyway. I thought, when we were together, we’d be able to.”
The foreboding flooded into his mind. He felt himself searching her face for clues.
“Talk,” he said, quietly. “I never liked ‘talk.’That kind, anyway.”
She had a stricken look now.
“Don’t try to joke now, Felix. Please.”
“What else can I do? Weren’t we going away for a few days?”
“Look, we’ve been avoiding talking about it.”
“It? What’s ‘it’?”
“I don’t want us to talk like this. It’s been a long day. You probably slept lousy too.”
“Maybe I’m beginning to get it,” he said. “Is it about this cop life? The crappy stuff?”
She hesitated before answering.
“We talked about that already. You forgot.”
The coffee was an acid snake still worming its way through his gut.
Then she sighed. He expected her to cry again, but she didn’t.
“Felix. I don’t want you to be like the others. But that’s impossible, I see now. I’ve been thinking about it, trying not to think about it, running away from it, but it comes back. Now, with this horrible thing you’re involved in, I am thinking this is the start of it, and it’ll get worse.”
“Did I make the worst mistake ever bringing you up there with those other cops? Is that what did it?”
“No, no. Peter’s nice Andreas, the one from Klagenfurt?”
“Andreas the cabbage?”
“They are nice guys,” she said. “And no, nobody put the moves on me. It’s just that, well, you are in the circle or you are not.”
“What circle?”
“I’m not saying this right.”
“You mean cops? There’s a wall there?”
She returned his look but made no reply.
“For Christ’s sake, Giuliana. Stuff like this never happens. Ask Gebi. It’s traffic, it’s domestics, or burglaries, and beer fights.”
She said nothing. He felt like something had been decided already.
“I need time to think,” she said.
A closing line, Felix realized. Still, he wanted to rescue something from the day.
“Jesus!” was all he managed, and he had not even intended to say it aloud.
“Please, don’t get angry Felix. It’s me, my problem. Can we just leave here the banhof, I mean?”
He moved in a daze around the table and out the doors in front of the station. He didn’t remember how noisy it had been here when he’d arrived.
“I started,” he snapped at her when she put her hand on the straps of her carry-all. “I’ll finish carrying it. Okay?”
When she put her arm in his, it felt like never before. He counted each step they walked to where he had parked.
TWENTY-SIX
But it got a little better, much sooner than Felix had expected. They hugged in the car, and he even searched under her blouse. For a while he thought he could go all the way, right there in the street outside Giuliana’s mother’s building.
She murmured something to him even as he kissed her, and she pushed him away gently and when he opened his eyes he saw how flushed she had become, and the film over her eyes, that lost look.
It had him aching worse.
“Phone me,” she said. “When you get there.”
“How about every hour.”
“I’m worried about you, Felix. I am.”
“I have a mom already. What I want, what I need is”
She put a finger to his lips.
“Don’t let them, whoever they are, don’t do any more for those people.”
For a few moments he didn’t know what she meant.
He pretended to bite her finger. Her face soon turned sombre again.
“Felix, it’s not just about this thing. It’s been there awhile. And tell me I am not abandoning you.”
“Big word, ‘abandon.’ How long have you been thinking about this ‘talk’?”
“I feel terrible about this, you going up there by yourself.”
“Don’t. I spent summers there. They are easy. It’ll be a mini-holiday.” JOHN BRADY POACHER'S ROAD
“Severe, isn’t that what you said? But they’re older, he is, your Opa Kimmel.”
She put her hand out for the door latch.
“Be careful,” she said. “Driving, I mean.”
Felix drove on autopilot, his head swimming, and his thoughts beginning to clot and darken again. The words that Giuliana seemed to have left behind her in the car circled endlessly even as the spring air cannoned around from the open windows. It wasn’t helping, all this cool air. He couldn’t trap any of those words or phrases long enough to make any sense of what she had told him.
All he remembered was her eyes glistening, and the faraway look, too often near to tears. There had to be someone else. But why would she wait until their time together to tell him? Nonsense.
As if he weren’t in over his head already, with what had started with a drive in the hills with Gebhart only two days ago, when he had sat in the Himmelfarb kitchen eating home-made strudel. Two days? ‘A good day’s work’ Gebhart had called it, getting Hansi Himmelfarb out of the house at last? Off the deep end, for sure, he decided.
He yelled out the window, a long, ragged screech. When he saw there were no cars behind him still, he did it again, until his throat hurt. It sort of worked, but only in that he had a burning throat that took his attention. Within a short time, he was ready to head up into the hills from the roundabout in Weiz, beginning to wonder how the hell he had gotten all this way and not paid attention to the driving.
He earned two annoyed toots from drivers when he changed his mind at the roundabout and went the full way around, then back toward the supermarket. Oma Nagl was a sucker for blumen, any kind, but freesias most of all. Something would come of the end of this scheisslich day, with a cake, a dozen bottles of Puntigamer, and two city newspapers. Opa Nagl could laugh over them with gusto and regular quiet expressions of joyful malice that were entertaining to watch.
He found everything in the supermarket, including freesias that would have been better bought two days ago. The key in the trunk was tricky, and he stared at the reflections on the glass while he wiggled it. It wasn’t working. He stopped and left the key hanging, his eyes still on the evening sky reflected on the glass. He wasn’t overly surprised to feel an anger surging in him now.