“You’re like the others, Gebi. You’re suspicious of anyone who doesn’t talk soccer and drink Puntigamer, and trash people.”
“Have I finished? No I haven’t. So listen.”
Felix waited.
“Well? You think you know things? Let me tell you this, then.
Your father goes out and there’s a whisper about him yeah, I heard. And don’t look at me like that. You know part of why they’re getting rid of the Gendarmerie? Do you?”
“Money?” said Felix. “The EU?”
“No, and it’s not because they have to find jobs for the Customs guys now the Slovenians and the frigging Hungarians and the goddamned Czechs are EU. And it’s not just about saving money, or some asshole in Brussels or someplace, or 9/11 crap.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Do I have to spell it out for you? Deals corruption, whatever the fancy word is. Nobody admits it in public. But those guys know, they know how bad it is. It’s been going on awhile. There’s a wave of stuff coming through, since things went nuts in Yugoslavia.
It can’t fit under the carpet anymore, see? So, they suspect everybody, everything. Now, imagine how you look to that pair. A background like you have.”
“You’re serious, I think.”
“God, but you’re a depp sometimes. So frigging naive. It’s why I said that I didn’t trust you. And I still don’t. But not the way you think. I don’t think you’re bent, like some plan to get you to infiltrate the new police thing or rubbish like that. You’re not crook material. Believe me, I know. But I just don’t trust you. I don’t trust you not to land me in the crap with this stumbling around you’re at.
I lost both ways, see?”
“No.”
“For God’s sake… If I stay clear of you and your nonsense, and ignore those two puppet masters using you for bait or whatever they’re really doing up here well there’s my stupid conscience screwed. If you get done in, how the hell can I give those brilliant lectures to my kids about doing the right thing?”
The road came in sight. Gebhart slowed his car even more.
Felix felt it begin to sink a little, but Gebi kept it chugging steadily low in second gear.
“And if I get run over again… life has no improvement there, has it?”
“‘Run over?’ ‘Again’?”
“Yes, ‘again.’ They’re not going to do this again. Not to me.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Well,” said Gebhart, speaking now almost through clenched teeth. “So the moment of truth here arrives. Didn’t you ever wonder what the likes of me, a brilliant policeman, is doing behind the door in Stefansdorf?”
Felix saw that the anger had passed, and Gebhart’s sardonic tone had returned.
“Not really.”
“Well you should. I am a good policeman. It’s my career.”
“What do you want me to say?” Felix said. “I just thought, well Gebi, he has his security. Promotions happen. You like a quiet life maybe. ‘The landing strip,’ right?”
Gebhart brought the car to a slow stop near the entrance, checking for any sign of soft ground beneath. With the car idling, he rubbed at his nose and looked across at Felix.
“That’s what the old guys call it, sure. No. Me, I have other things, far more important. My kids, my family. You probably think that’s schmaltzy crap, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Bullshit. But anyway, I’ll tell you. Any other day I wouldn’t, but you are digging your own hole in the ground here. But when I’m done telling you, I don’t want to hear any questions, observations, comment. Got that?”
Felix nodded.
“Fifteen years ago, the Yugos started up again, right? It had been brewing. They have to murder one another every few years. I don’t care if that sounds bad. It’s true. It’s in their genes or something. But there’s shooting and killing and it only gets worse. You were still in diapers probably.”
“I was seven or eight, actually.”
“Seven,” said Gebhart, as through it were a joke. “Eight?
Anyway, I’m probably never going to talk to you, or to any cop, about this again.”
Felix looked up to the patches of sky between the conifers.
“Things move. Money, guns, drugs, any crime it all goes with war if you call that ‘war.’ And here we are, just in the EU. It’s only been a few years, but we’re next door to this crap. So a lot starts to happen. One thing leads to another. You see?”
“So far.”
“Here’s me then. I work with a guy, I won’t even say his name.
I’m friendly with him. I respect him. I socialize with him. You see the picture, what I am about to tell you?”
Felix shook his head.
“A policeman? A Gendarme? You guess the rest.”
Felix returned Gebhart’s gaze.
“I think I do, now.”
Gebhart held his forefinger to his head, and pulled back his thumb, and let it go.
“The way out,” he said. “For him. But not for me. Obviously.”
“They thought…?”
Speckbauer nodded several times, slowly.
“So when you show up at the post, fresh out of Gendarmerie school, I think, well, so what. It’s a good post for it. But then I see your name. And I ask myself this: They’re putting this kid with me?
Whose father was…? You don’t have to be crazy, or paranoid, I should say. So: got all that? Enough of it?”
“I had no idea.”
“Don’t I know it,” said Gebhart. “Don’t I know it. I didn’t either. That’s what happened to me. They gave up on me after a while, the Internals, but I know damned well my file was marked that day. I mean, what was my defence when they said I must have some idea what my partner was up to, that no one can be that stupid, or naive, or…? Now: forget this. You know enough now.”
Gebhart put the car in first gear. He peered over the banks that bordered this part of the road here.
“Listen,” said Felix. “Just go back. I never saw you.”
“Well now. You sound as out of it as I was then.”
“Really. I phoned you, and you turned me down. I’ll drop all this on Speckbauer, the maps, what I heard from my grandparents, all that.”
“Really?” said Gebhart, from some far place behind his squint.
“I’m over my head. Everything’s screwed up.”
Gebhart drew in a breath, held it, and let it out noisily.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “But the world has already spun on.”
“What does that mean?”
“I put in the search on this Fuchs guy.”
“So the system logged you.”
“The system logged me. Or Korschak, or whoever was in the post. It shouldn’t take them more than one half-second to figure out who.”
“‘Them,’” Felix muttered.
“Funny, isn’t it? ‘Them’ ‘Them’ is us, right?”
“Yes,” said Felix. “But are you sure you got the right Fuchs?”
“‘Equipment operator ‘seasonal operator’ in the forestry, the mill?”
“Red hair, beard?”
“No beard on his driver’s licence. Reddish, rusty maybe.”
“Equipment operator? The only time I met him, he was driving an old man to his card games, having a beer and jausen.”
“Slacker?”
“I don’t know, but probably. What’s his record?”
“Surprise: Herr Fuchs is not a criminal.”
“You’re joking.”
“This is not a joking day. Zero. Like I said. I go left here, right?”
The smoother section of road that Gebhart let the Golf onto soon resumed its steep climb, the clattery sound of the engine coming back to Felix from the banks that lined it here.
“What was the passport picture like?”
“He doesn’t have one. But the EU’s a big place to wander now, isn’t it? Anyone can get into a car and drive to, I don’t know, Paris, and no one has to know.”
“Married, family or anything?”
“Not married, in his thirties, does what he pleases. Sounds like a pretty good life to me. I’ll bet he has a killer CD collection and a garage full of decent tools.”
“And who knows,” Gebhart added after a few moments.
“Maybe he’ll turn out to be a half-decent fellow. So he drives some local geezers about a bit? Sounds like a good thing, one would say.