“Der kleine Kimmel nicht aus Himmel,” Opa had muttered later, with a hint of a mischief flickering around his mouth. The Kimmels didn’t arrive from the heavens.

“I miss Dad,” Lisi said, and she dabbed at her eyes. “I have to say it.”

Felix put his arm around her shoulder.

“Me too,” he said, and wondered.

She blew her nose and composed herself. Then she took an envelope from her pocket. She handed it to Felix.

“I want them back,” she said. “Scan them, if you want. They’re from Uncle Leo. He found them.”

Felix took out a few. Here was Dad hoisting him into the air by the water in Stubensee. A big hairy chest a Turk, Felix’s mother used to joke. There might have been some truth to it, due to a halfacknowledged illegitimacy back a hundred years or so. And there was the chain he always wore, that chain from his army days. His dad’s get-togethers with his former comrades from the battalion used to be riotous, but they’d toned down in recent years. Felix’s mother had been able to prevail on him to take her to a hotel on one of those weekends.

One year it had been just outside Klagenfurt, in the adjoining province, up in the mountains where his battalion had done many of its exercises. Dodl Korps, he called it the idiot corps, after some of the scrapes and blundering that several well-liked thick heads had led them into. There had been huntin’ and shootin’ reunions on the high plateaus over Sommersalm. One, a decade or more ago, resulted in three of the Dodl Korps, podgy middle-aged characters now to a man, being brought to hospital after the VW jeep one of them had painstakingly rebuilt had flipped. “On manoeuvres” his father had called it. Felix remembered him laughing every day for a week at the snapshots.

“Aber scheisse,” said Lisi, slowing. “Look who.”

Sure enough, here was Edelbacher. A tall man whose nickname had been Elli, for Elephant, Gendarmerie Major Richard Edelbacher always had some of the ungulate about him.