‘Foxy.’ I think. Who knows, but…?”
He put the knuckles of both hands together and winked.
“No real name? Just to do with red hair?”
Kurt sat back with a look of resigned understanding.
“Really,” he said. “You guys are living on a different planet.”
“What about Stephi?” Speckbauer asked as he slipped back into the booth.
“What about her?”
“Does she like ‘adventures,’ say? How she might leave for a couple of days with a new flame?”
“Hmm. A pavement hostess, you’re trying to say?”
“Did I say prostitute? No. I said ‘adventure.’”
“Well yes, if you like,” said Kurt. “She is a person like that. And if she weren’t so damn good with the frigging spenders who keep me in business, well I’d have let her go on a permanent ‘adventure’ a long time ago.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
The streets and lanes of Weiz had been taken over by the mid-morning people, as Felix had begun to think of them when he was — actually wasn’t attending his lectures back in Graz. The school would not break for lunch for an hour yet. Pensioners took their time, many of them meeting and greeting, speaking in the melodious accent that expressed politeness and a circumspect kind of humour. There were plenty of shops in Weiz, plenty of mothers and infants and babies, steady streams of cars, new most of them.
The clouds were staying away and leaving a postcard sky above the town. The winter that had lingered here until recently seemed a distant, impossible event that had passed quickly, not the dreary, endless months that had lain over the place. The blossoms were out all over the backyard orchards. From somewhere over the next street were the sounds of a pneumatic drill, and the episodic whine and gnarl of saws, followed by the taps of at least two hammers and an occasional yell. A tractor turned into the car park for the supermarket.
Speckbauer was trying to get a glimpse through the window blinds on Stephi’s apartment. He pushed the buzzer again, and held his head close to the door.
“It’s working, all right.”
Felix’s thoughts kept returning to the maps that now lay in that bag on the floor of his car. His father must have talked to Opa Kimmel when he took, or borrowed, the maps at least. And what had the old man told him?
“Phone her number again,” said Speckbauer.
Felix held up the piece of paper on which Speckbauer had taken Stephi’s number from Kurt. Six rings, and again, nothing.
“It’s a bullshit number,” said Speckbauer. “‘I’m sure of it.’” He mimicked Kurt.
“‘I have to phone her a lot ’cause she’s late.’”
“Her car maybe?” suggested Felix.
“Yeah, yeah. A Mazda 131. Look, take a stroll around there, see if it’s parked, okay? I’m going to make some calls here, see if I can move this damn Stephi.”
“Blue?”
“Blue-green,” said Speckbauer. “Old and crappy. Maybe she parks it away from here for vandals or something? Five, ten minutes.
I’ll be here, okay?”
Felix began with the car park for the Billa. He threaded his way through the shoppers’ cars, standing on tiptoe to see over a row, and tried to remember which lanes led off the streets nearby. Maybe the car was being repaired?
He began to imagine this Stephi, cruising around somewhere, her arm dangling out the window and the blonde hair flying about, part of her ‘presentation’ to snare her date. No, he thought then:
Speckbauer was right. If the guy was as sharp as Kurt had said, he’d have his own wheels. They’d hardly be an old box like a Mazda 131.
His thoughts only grew stronger, and his attention on the cars kept on wavering. He had to make an effort to notice specifics. He imagined his father behind the wheel, whistling those stupid old waltzes and polkas, tapping the beat on the wheeclass="underline" then the instant when he knew he couldn’t avoid the truck. Again, his father, studying the maps he had gotten from his own father’s house. Wondering, noting the marks on them, trying to solve some puzzle that had him covering the back roads for weeks, or even longer, before the accident.
The word echoed again in Felix’s mind. He stopped even trying to spot the makes on the row of cars ahead. Instead of the car park and the door to the supermarket, now he saw the steep sides of the klamm where his father’s car had been crushed, and the wooden taferl just inside the barrier wall. The Association wanted to replace it with a stone effort, a statue of St. Christopher, with the plaque under it. Felix’s mother did not.
Accident. It felt like something had been spinning too fast in his mind but had now come loose, shredding his thoughts. He could sleep for a week, he realized. With Giuliana. And with all the bickering and digs past and forgotten, never to return. And somewhere far from here, far from Stefansdorf, and most of all far from anywhere Speckbauer was ever likely to turn up.
There had to be vacancies when the amalgamation happened.
He could even get a spot up near Salzburg, maybe, where he and Giuliana could make a fresh start there. Into his mind now came the view from the high mountain paths over Kitzbuehl, those twisting bike trails, and the immense purple mountains across the valleys so far below. So high, your breathing was up the minute you got on the bike, even.
The doors of the Billa slid open. An old woman emerged, pushing her trolley feebly. Her head was over at an angle, and she stopped to look around for a car. Had she forgotten where she was?
He should be helping the old girl, real work, instead of this cat and mouse game. But she began to move, sideways like a ship drifting, and as he watched her, his thoughts began sliding away again.
He was startled out of his blank daydream by words that suddenly formed in his head. A police matter, the maps were a police matter. What voice was in his head saying that, his police training, the so-called logical part of his brain? But there was something to that, he remembered now. It had been a joke at the Gendarmerie college right from when they had heard it used in the classes. ‘A police matter’ was the big, heavy phrase you had to learn to deploy if citizens got whiny, or uncooperative, or pissy. It was doubtless supposed to trigger some serious Austrian obedience reflex?
Again he looked back toward the laneway leading to where Speckbauer was on the phone still, scheming no doubt, while he kept a vigil for this Stephi. He should go to the car and bring the maps to Speckbauer and explain.
Then Felix swore under his breath. For what, he thought: so Speckbauer could worm his way like a spreading rot further into his family?
The old woman and her trolley had changed direction. She greeted him cautiously, in a thin reedy voice. Something about the moment the anxious look on the old woman’s face, his tired, crazed mind just giving up, the thought of how simple things should be with Giuliana something scattered Felix’s confusion then.
“Gruss,” he called back to her, gently, and smiled. He had decided something.
He turned his back to the lane where Speckbauer’s Passat was parked, and he opened his phone. He thumbed through to Gebhart’s mobile. For those few seconds before Gebhart’s voice came on, Felix looked over the rooftops at the green hilltops to the north and west. His mind was up by the streams that still ran hard over the rocky beds up there, and on to where the snow still lay on the higher mountains behind, like sheets blown off a clothesline into the shade under trees where the sun could not yet reach.
THIRTY-NINE
“Zero,” said Speckbauer.
He took a last look at the door to the apartment.
“Zero. You think she’d leave a key in some obvious spot, like any other citizen.”
“What now?”
Speckbauer looked at him.
“You’re keen, now, are you? Well that’s good. Okay, I’m expecting a call.”
“Concerning Stephi Giesl?”