“What did I tell you,” said Gebhart, and he raised his arm.
“Blonde, of course.”
Felix thought of the rasp of Giuliana’s skin on his knee, the way she pushed and arched, the way she muttered and even grunted at him when she was close to losing it. Parsley, he thought suddenly, and realized that he must have been thinking about this somewhere.
That was it: the scent of her was parsley.
SIX
Felix drove the patrol car back. He turned by the platz, and into the station yard.
It took time to get the gear out and tame the paperwork.
Gebhart had Nescafe and a bun with salami for his brotzeit, his morning break. He stood chewing and nodding slowly while he took a phone call. After it was over, Korschak talked to him about how if it wasn’t floods in some of the fields again this year, it’d be drought by July.
Felix thought about a sandwich but fell instead for something sweet. He took some lebkuchen from a package by the kettle.
Gebhart came over and poured a half cup of leftover water from the kettle into his mug, smelled it, and then drank it.
“Come with me,” he said. “A minor job. Let Manfred get the glory here.”
“Out to…?”
“Die bauern,” said Gebhart. “Maybe you’ll learn something from it.”
Felix waved his hand over the forms he had been collating and checking.
“They’ll keep. Geh’ma jetzt off we go.”
Gebhart drove. Felix could afford to enjoy this unexpected escape from an afternoon of paper, phones, and a small pile of inquiries for licences, criminal checks, and court preparation requests. He totted up the hours remaining before he had his freedom. It would be five hours to the beach, and as little time as possible with Giuliana’s relatives.
Gebhart coaxed the Opel over through hairpins with the gears more than brakes. They passed waterlogged ditches and bottlegreen fields exploding with growth. Soon they were in the hills, and there was no let-up. Still the road climbed, up beyond the last of the trees, until it slowly descended a little to patchy scrubland where the conifers took over again, hesitating it seemed many of them, in small, scruffy plantations on this high plateau.