“So there’s Fuchs that night, in my mind. He just steps out of the car, leans over the roof maybe with a flashlight to sight the guy surprise. Poof: Mr. Diamond, the mule, gets one in the head before you know it. Then he has the second guy down, the runner, in no time. With your grandfather’s Luger.”
“Not his,” Felix felt obliged to say. “He got it from someone’s brother years ago, a war thing.”
“But so very well taken care of,” Speckbauer went on. “In fine condition.”
“He’d forgotten about it being in the house. Fuchs just went about taking stuff.”
Speckbauer’s skeptical expression left his face more slowly than it had come.
“There’s a charge on him for that, I know,” he said. “But they’ll slap that away when it comes up. On account of his, what do you want to call it, his marksmanship.”
“I don’t think he cares,” said Felix.
Edelbacher and Felix’s mother, and Schroek, had reached the entrance to the Gendarmerie kommando.
“Look,” said Speckbauer. “Time’s up. You’re in line for a pat on the head.”
“What about you and Franzi?”
“Macht nichts,” he said. “Who cares. It’s probably me they want, I would say.”
With that he shrugged, and turned back to the others. Felix watched him for a few moments. Then he nodded at Franzi. He received no gesture in return. There was a cursory, tight-lipped nod from the man with the briefcase who was waiting for Speckbauer.
“Really,” he heard Edelbacher say then, beside him. “Those guys.”
Felix’s mother and Schroek continued talking with deceptive earnestness about some home-made remedy for arthritis one could find up in the mountains.
Edelbacher slipped over to walk beside him.
“Felix, you’ve got to learn,” he said. “There are rules, you know, important rules.”
“Thanks,” Felix said, and did nothing to conceal the acid tone.
“But my father told me that many times in the past. So I know.”
Felix imagined little shockwaves rippling out from his sarcasm.
He didn’t care that his mother had picked up on it too.
The Gendarme at the barrier was already waiting for them, but before presenting his photocard, Felix glanced back. Franzi still looked like a robot awaiting a push. The man with the briefcase was making some emphatic point to Speckbauer.
It might have had something to do with Speckbauer’s vacant gaze, Felix thought. It seemed to be on something faraway, aimed perhaps at the trees so sharply defined now by the July morning’s sunshine.
Felix remembered then that the weather was forecast to continue as it had for several days now, to boil the pavements here in Graz, as the saying went, and also glare down on the rest of a large area that stretched far to the south, and to the east.