“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? Rauschkugal: 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.