Felix put his hat on the shelf and unlocked his drawer. Gebhart sat back.
“Greetings yourself, Professor. A spring in your step today.”
Felix winked at him.
“I’ll think of you while I am away.”
“Italy, you said?”
“I want to make a good impression on her family. Naturlich.”
“On a topless beach.”
“Funny you mention that.”
Felix nodded toward the closed door to the Bezirkinspektor’s office.
“Dieter is consulting,” said Gebhart in the same dry tone. “In regards to the investigation of the thefts of those containers up from outside the warehouses last week. The cigarette case.”
Gebhart had hinted that when Korschak, the other member of the post, went off on the training course to Vienna, they’d expect Felix to be Korschak’s replacement “temporarily.” Big changes on the horizon or not, Felix did not like the sound of that.
Korschak, the third member of the post, arrived with the huge bag that he used for his sports paraphernalia.
“Gruss, Gebi. Felix. Wie gehts?”
“So far so good, Manfred,” said Gebhart. “But you know Stefansdorf. All hell could break loose. You’re duty officer today, right?”
Korschak nodded and dumped the bag on the floor.
“What in the name of Christ and His Mother Mary is in the bag today?”
“Soccer,” Korschak said. “Pylons and things.”
“You’ll get that burglaries report done before you go? The one on Tirolergasse, last week?”
“For sure,” he said, and headed wisely, Felix believed to the klo.
“As for you, Felix,” said Gebhart, pushing back in the chair.
“You come with me.”
“Traffic detail?”
“Genau. What else? Today we make the highways safe. The spring has all our Schumacher wannabes out on the roads. We’re getting calls, and calls. Get the cases and gear, will you? I have to wrap up a thing from last night, the busted windows and puke over in Kleindorf, by the autobahn.”
“Again?”
“Yes, again. Soccer fans were from Carinthia. Wolfsberg.
Barbarians, of course.”
Felix knew that Gebi’s wife was from Wolfsberg.
“Coming home from a riot sorry, a soccer match in Hungary. The cops in Hungary don’t put up with crap so these guys were fairly itching to do something.”
“Wolfsberg? A long way from home, isn’t it?”
“Precisely. There is a lesson in everything, I tell you. You didn’t believe me at first, did you.”
“What’s the lesson here, Seppi?”
“The lesson, my young friend, is this: shit lands on our path, unpredictably. So be flexible.”
“Thank you.”
“If you ask me, it’s the bus driver should go up in the dock.
He’s the idiot got off the autobahn, so as the real idiots could start the trouble. ‘But they were going to go in the bus!’ he says.”
“Go, like, pee?”
“Oh it gets better. ‘It’s Number Two,’ says one fellow. ‘I can’t just go in the woods!’ Would this have anything to do with eating salami from the side of a road in Hungary, then unknown litres of beer? Rauschkugaclass="underline" a proper bunch of drunkards.”
Gebhart left any further lament for the stupidity of the general soccer-going, beer-swilling, bus-taking hooligans unsaid. He returned to the computer, where he pecked out a few words with that tentative, check-every-word style of one who distrusts the device. He saved with a flourish of the mouse and logged off.
Then he scanned what looked like court deposition forms, yanked open the drawer and slid them in, but not before checking something there already. Satisfied, he slammed the drawer shut and laid his meaty hands on his blotter. He watched Korschak head down the hallway to the kitchen, and then turned to Felix again.
“Is that too loud for you today?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“A change from yesterday, then. Let’s get ready.”
Gebhart took keys out of his pocket, fingered his way to the one for the armory, and then squinted up at Felix.
“Remember,” he said. “I really don’t want to hear about it if you’re not one hundred percent because of your, extracurricular, is that the word? This is a paramilitary service you’re in. That’s page two of the manual. Memorize it. You know where the Gendarmerie is from, right? When we had the Turks thinking they’d plunder our green valleys here?”
Felix nodded.
“Pack the gear. Make sure you get the proper tripod, that new one.”
Felix signed out his Glock first. He laid it on the cloth and then replaced each of the cartridges in the clip in turn, feeling the slightly oily smoothness of their tips as each clicked home. He checked the pistol’s action for the regulation six times. Then he inserted the clip, and safetied the pistol. He’d make sure that Gebi would see him loading the pistol later.
Next he replaced the cartridges in the spare, and slid the holster on his belt to just in front of his hip bone. The leather was still stiff and the button clasp on the cover took work to get thumbed down. The Kripo had had the American quick release for years now.
Banditti, Gebi called them.
“Load,” he said to Gebhart.
Gebi nodded and watched him draw one into the chamber, and put the safety back on.
He fastened his belt then, made sure the plastic restraints weren’t dangling at his back, and replaced the signing folder back on the shelf. He looked at the machine pistol locked behind the steel mesh to the side of the armoury safe. It had never been used, Gebi told him, in the seven years since he started here. The station had been staffed for five then. Gebi did the monthly commissioning, removing the gun’s movements from the other safe and inserting them.
Gebhart stepped out and around the corner, and rapped on the kitchen door.
“Fred, sign up,” he called out. “We’re going any minute.”
Felix headed for the equipment room, noted that it was only a minute off six o’clock now. He passed Korschak coming out. He took down the vests first, and then made sure he had the tripod that Gebi was so particular about. The laserpistole the radar gun was a pig on batteries. He took the second pack from the charger and slipped it into the bag that held the odds and ends.
He closed the case again, and parked it, along with the tripod and vests, by the door. Then he returned to the duty room.
“Rush hour until nine,” he heard Gebi say, to Korschak, he presumed. “We’ll probably do three spots, to keep ahead of the snitches.”
Gebhart took two hand sets from the charger.
The dawn was milky, with parchment and orange streaks still.
Gebi helped load the gear into the boot of the Opel, the second of the two patrol cars at the post. Felix had noticed the care Gebi showed in how he warmed the engine, and how he coaxed it up to 100 before backing off and muttering about “strain” and “transmission” and “clear the injectors.”
“Start over by Semmarach,” he said to Felix. “There’s a spot near a farmhouse there. You know it? You get the real headers tearing up there. They know they’re close to the autobahn.”
Felix checked the car radio with Korschak and gave him their destination.
“That Korschak,” said Gebhart, straining to look back at a bread van unloading.
“What about him?”
“I used to think he was one of those. You know? Don’t tell him.”
“Playing for the other team?”
“Yeah. Your bunch knows all about that, of course. Who am I to talk?”
“Do you mean people who live in Graz? People my age, or other gay men like me?”
“Very funny, Professor. I meant your generation. As if I cared whether a man is gay or not. Macht nichst.”
“It makes no odds to you at all?”
“You seem surprised. My generation is not allowed to be tolerant?”
The sky behind the hills was still glowing now, but a tiny sliver of moon remained over the last of the lights on the houses. It might be shirtsleeves by midday today yet.