“Well, how’s Giuli then.”

This was conciliatory, he knew, but still he felt like asking her how her boyfriend Karl was, or Superbore, as he called him. Still as exciting as cold Baischel? The thought of that sliced meat lying cold in its greasy sauce made his mouth taste chalky and sour.

“She’s fine.”

A lie, he wondered: a white lie? Maybe it was a hope, more than a statement of fact. No: she was fine. Truly. She’d get over it. “It” was this thing that neither of them wanted to put a name on. If it had a name, it might be “commitment” or something like that. “The future,” maybe “our future,” to be precise.

“It was nice of her to come to the blessing.”

For a moment, Felix did not understand.

“She knows a lot about that stuff,” said Lisi. “I didn’t realize.”

“Religion?”

“Not religion exactly: taferls and things.”

Felix got it now. His sister meant the roadside monument to his father. It was a hand-carved one of Jesus on the cross, paid for by the Association. A local carpenter had made it, not “an artist.” As with so many other of these traditional shrines and statues, it stood by the roadside where the accident had happened.

“So tell me about your boys’ night out. Where do cops go to unwind?”

“There’s no one at the post I want to unwind with. It was Viktor and a few guys.”

She grasped the wheel with both hands and turned to him.

“Watch the road, will you,” he said.

“‘Viktor and a few guys’? Jesus, Felix.”

“I don’t see them that often anymore.”

He steeled himself for her to say: since you dropped out, and they didn’t.

“We all know the Gendarmerie are more ‘relaxed’ than the Polizei.”

She had spoken in the slow tone of a teacher delivering a gem of wisdom. “But associating with Viktor and those other professional students? Really.”