Poachers Road ik-1

by John Brady

  “He’s out there on his own too long,” Hartmann went on.

  “He’ll have his own room now in the village. What could be better?”

  He nudged Fuchs.

  “Toni will help out when the time comes, right? Moving stuff?”

  Fuch’s lazy smile held. He looked at Felix but nodded toward Hartmann.

  “I saw that,” said Hartmann.

  Felix was reluctant to draw Hartmann back from the lightheartedness he seemed to be working to regain.

  “Herr Himmelfarb,” he said then. “And his card friends, you say, that evening?”

  Sure enough, Hartmann’s expression slid back. He turned toward his niece.

  “There were others earlier, weren’t there, Liesl?”

  Liesl nodded. Felix wondered if he should ask for names. He decided to wait.

  “Oh he looked worried,” she said. “Rings around his eyes.

  Tired-looking. Of course, he knew that we’d heard what had happened. I didn’t want to put talk on him about it though — if he didn’t bring it up himself, of course.”

  “A man would have to get out,” said Hartmann. “Just to get a wee break, even for an hour or two.”

  “But he talked about things?” Felix said. “What had gone on?”

  There was a small delay before Liesl answered.

  “Well, I think he was worried for his boy… wasn’t he, Willi?

  He was with your players here.”

  “Us old farts,” said Hartmann with a rueful look. “Yes. He said the boy was very… how can one say it, one doesn’t want to say ver-ruckt — crazy, like — let’s say strange. Agitated. No sleep, with all the comings and goings. The boy was excited, he wanted the thing to go on, you see. He didn’t understand.”

  “All the activity there?”

  “The Gendarmerie and so forth,” said Hartmann, and paused momentarily.

  “Those experts, the police experts,” he added.

  It was a signal that Speckbauer wouldn’t miss either, Felix knew. He looked over at Liesl again.

  “He was not keen to discuss private matters,” she said. “But he said something about how it would take ages for the boy to settle again. ‘He wants the police up there all the time now.’”

  “Karl did, himself?”

  “No, the boy, Hansi. The police were good to him, apparently, humouring the boy. Playing the siren and that, like a toy.”

  “That is how they found the two,” said Hartmann. “He said that Hansi liked one of the Gendarmerie so he brought him wandering up the woods, where he had his ‘dolls.’”

  “Dolls?”

  “That’s what the boy called them, he said: ‘dolls.’”

  No one seemed to want to keep the conversation going after Hartmann’s quiet and doleful remarks. For a while everyone seemed to withdraw into themselves. Felix took another swallow from his beer. Fuchs ran his hand slowly through his hair, but the effect was only to make him look even more the bewildered elf with even more hair askew. Liesl looked away through the window toward the faraway hills, and Hartmann sighed. The quiet was broken only by the sounds of Liesl’s occasional sniffle and a faint whistling that seemed to come from Fuch’s nose.

  Then Liesl shifted her feet.

  “So geht’s,” she said. “And so it goes. The bad things that happen to the good people. I hope there’ll be a big turnout for the funeral.”

  Both Hartmann and Fuchs nodded.

  “I am forgetting more and more,” said Hartmann then. “But now I remember. Yes! Poor Karl was clumsy, with his cup, wasn’t he, Liesl? He dropped it and it broke? His hands were shaking a bit. I asked him if there was somewhere he could get a break, him and Mrs.”

  “Haunted, he was,” said Liesl, and blew her nose in a delicate fluffing sound.

  After several moments, where Liesl looked away through the window toward the faraway hills, and Hartmann sighed, the talk slowly moved to goings on in the district. The winter had been long, as always; tourism last year had not been so great, but there were more people coming up to trek now. Would the Turks finally get their way now, and get a ticket to the EU? The price of a new VW was just stupid, and the quality was down anyway.

  Felix listened, saying little, and wondered what Speckbauer was making of it all here. Hayseeds, slow-in-the-heads up here in God’s country? Occasionally he’d glance over at Hartmann, at the liver spots on the back of his hands, and at the lines that the wind and sun and long winter’s cold had dug in from his eyes around almost to his ears. Berger Willi, yes, this ancient fellow had been mad for the hills and mountains since he was a child.

  He saw Speckbauer looking at his watch.

  He took out his wallet. Speckbauer’s hand was on his forearm before he could open it.

  “May I?” Speckbauer asked, looking around the faces. He had no takers.

  Felix followed Liesl over to the counter.

  “The card guys,” he began. “Are there a lot of them?”

  “They come in different days,” she said. “But the older ones are afternooners.”

  “Were there many the evening Karl Himmelfarb was in?”

  She stopped keying in numbers on the cash register and stared at a mirror behind the counter.

  “I’d have to think,” she said. “Berger Willi, of course — and Herr Kimmel, your opa. He is Peter, no? Fuchs, yes. There were others… Hans Prem; he’s in a chair now, a wheelchair. But his daughter has a van for that, yes… She stayed, but she didn’t play. Let me see.. Frank Schober, I think. He drives himself, still.”

  She frowned then, and turned from the mirror.

  “So you are Herr Kimmel’s grandson. Isn’t it strange we haven’t met.”

  “My opa is called Herr Kimmel, even here?”

  She gave him a quick glance.

  “Well that’s the way with some people, isn’t it? What odds, I say.

  But not like your father, I must say. Or you, I think?”

  “My father? You knew him, did you?”

  She looked toward the group at the booth again, but her eyes were not focused on them, Felix saw.

  “Only a while,” she said. “I was sorry to hear of, you know?”

  He nodded.

  “He used to come here?”

  “If I remember it was only for a short while,” she said. “Maybe a couple of years ago? But he dropped by a number of times there, in one week. That’s how I remember. Yes.”

  “Driving my opa, was it?”

  Again she frowned.

  “Well I don’t think so. But such a nice man to talk to. I am sorry if this is not good for you to hear this today.”

  Felix smiled.

  “He got around, as they say.”

  “Oh I knew he was a Gendarme right away,” she said. “Even without any uniform. But that made no difference. Great for a chat.

  It gets a bit isolated here after the season, you know. But he liked to know the news, no matter how small it would be from these parts.

  Yes. Always had time to listen. Curious about everything, yes.”

  She shrugged sympathetically and finished entering the numbers. The till opened as a receipt began issuing out with a scratching sound.

  “Yes,” she said, and began fingering some change from the leather purse. “It’s hard on the older ones up here, the ones who want to stay independent. So Fuchsi there, he does them a lot of good.”

  She settled on the coins she had chosen as the proper change.

  She stopped and counted and frowned again.

  “May I phone later, then?” he asked.

  “Phone?”

  “If you can recall who was here at the time Karl Himmelfarb made his visit?”

  “In and out,” she said. “Scraps. They can be quite comisch, these fellows, you know. Quite comical.”

  He returned her smile briefly.

  “If you can recall who was here at the time Karl Himmelfarb made his visit?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Speckbauer kep
t his window down for quite a while, only closing it when his mobile went off. The connection failed as he answered it. He studied the read-out.

  “Patchy up here,” he said. “No signal again.”

  Felix let the Passat find its own way down the hills now, biting a little hard into the tighter bends.

  “Well, they are true to a type,” Speckbauer said. “Up these parts? The ‘God help us’ and the cards. But damned good soup. You know, I’m beginning to think that country people are the same the world over.”

  Felix saw that he continued to stare at the read-out. Waiting for a coverage signal, he decided.

  “Gossipy too,” Speckbauer murmured, and looked up. “But how could you not tell people if something like that happened, right?”

  Felix didn’t understand what Speckbauer meant.

  “Two bodies turn up, you’re going to want to talk about that,” said Speckbauer. “Who could blame him?”

  “You mean Karl Himmelfarb?”

  “Well yes. I’ll bet what he told those geezers was all over the area in an hour.”

  “Which means,” Felix began, and looked over at Speckbauer.

  “Yes,” said Speckbauer. “A great big frigging pallawatsch for anyone trying to track who knew what, and when.”

  He rubbed noisily at his nose.

  “Or what anyone might have decided to do with that information,” he added, almost in a groan, and put down his phone.

  “Whatever you said to that woman when you were talking to her, that Liesl,” he said, “you sure know how to make her cry.

  Jesus.”

  “I hardly said a word to her,” said Felix. “She couldn’t stop crying.”

  “You got nothing specific from her? Beyond the names, I mean, the geezers who come by for cards?”

  “No. She mentioned my father’s name, and she starts crying again. Too much.”

  “Well your family gets about,” said Speckbauer. “Was your grandfather always a card player?”

  Felix braked for the junction of the road leading over toward the Himmelfarbs’ farm.

  “Tell you the truth, I don’t really know.”

  “I get the impression you’re not that close.”

  Felix pushed his foot on the accelerator. Speckbauer seemed to take the hint.

  “This Hartmann,” he said then. “A game old rooster, isn’t he?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It’s all very well to meet once in a blue moon, but he’s not the most appealing fellow, I remember my dad saying.”

  “Is he senile or something?”

  “My mother says leave him be. He’s a character.”

  “Was that a fake leg I saw on him?”

  “The war. It saved his life, I suppose.”

  “Sixty something years he’s been bowling along on one leg?

  Quite an achievement. A friend of your family?”

  “Not really. But he shows up for every memorial. And mass.

  And funeral.”

  Speckbauer eyed the speedometer while he felt around in his jacket pocket for something.

  “Ach,” he said “I think I know the type. Your grandfather and him, they’re…?”

  “I don’t know,” said Felix. “Cards maybe, neighbours.”

  “Close enough, then.”

  “Living in the same area for six hundred years doesn’t make you close.”

  “Ah,” murmured Speckbauer, looking at something scribbled on a piece of paper before pocketing it again. “I hear a philosopher, do I?”

  “I have to keep up with the poetry guys.”

  “Rossegger? Christ, every kid learned that in school in my time.

  Didn’t you?”

  Felix geared down to overtake a van before the next series of bends.

  “Some. But they never told us much about his politics, did they.”

  “Don’t spoil it,” said Speckbauer. “How could a poet understand politics? How was he to know he’d be such a hit with the brownshirts a hundred years after? Him and, what’s the name of that outfit, that club he founded, the one they’re in still…?”

  “That who’s in?”

  “Oh come on — you’re the guy did the Uni thing. You should know. The Blauers, the FPOers, the Freedom Party — Haider and his mob.”

  “Sudmark, was it?”

  “Stimmt. ‘Only German spoken here in Styria — none of that Slovenian nonsense or the like. Out with the Yugos.’ Or whatever they used to call them back then.”

  “Too much history,” said Felix.

  “Huh,” said Speckbauer. “But you’ll have a word with your opa then? About who was there in that Hiebler place the other night?”

  “If you insist.”

  “Oh-oh. Is this a family issue I have stumbled in to?”

  Felix shrugged.

  “Tell me if you want, or not. But know that personal stuff doesn’t matter to me. I am objective. Would you prefer I ask him?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Let’s just say not everyone gets along as they might.”

  “Families,” said Speckbauer. “They’re work, sometimes. That’s a fact.”

  Speckbauer’s mobile went off again. The signal seemed to be holding here. He said a half-dozen “jas.” Only one of them was even faintly interrogative, to Felix’s ear. The Oberstleutnant’s tone changed quickly then. He barked a “when” and a “shit, is that the best they can do?” He sounded less dispirited than disdainful about whatever he was being told.

  “Franzi,” he said after he ended the call, and stifled a belch.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “‘What’s right?’ you should ask. He’s been chasing Pathology and the Ident. So far? Scheisslich: crap. But I had been hoping. I always hope.”

  “Still no idea who they are?”

  Speckbauer shook his head.

  “‘Cheap shoes, from the East. ’Wasn’t that what Himmelfarb said?”

  When Felix made no reply, Speckbauer glanced over.

  “You’re really not looking forward to this visit are you?”

  “I don’t see what purpose it’ll serve.”

  “Okay. But police science is not always by the book. It’s memory, like I told you before. Your mind plays tricks. When you retrace your steps up that track, you may remember things.”

  “Such as?”

  “A remark. A reaction. Maybe the boy pointed at some place.

  Or his father, the time you all went up. Your colleague, maybe?”

  “We went over our notes and statements pretty thoroughly.”

  “I hear you. But what I am saying is not a criticism. I’m not trying to catch anyone out. I’m working with evolution, you see? How the mind switches off certain departments, or how it notices things without the owner of the brain box realizing it. And when the lights go on again, sometimes things you did not notice, they come back.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Felix was sure he could smell a sour tang in the air from a kilometre away. Ashes from the house, he supposed, or the scent of burned material, like what lingered after smouldering rubbish was turned to burn. There was nothing visible from the road, but as he turned into the lane he saw the three wreaths hung on the fence.

  There was a Gendarmerie Skoda in the farmyard. As Felix parked behind it he saw one of the Gendarmes put down the radio mouthpiece. He stepped out after Speckbauer who was already helloing them. He recognized neither man. He heard running water somewhere. He let his gaze drift around the yard and felt some spacey, acidic glow swelling in his chest. One of the policemen, a tall one who still had ferocious acne even in his thirties, shook hands.

  The four men stood, awkwardly and silently, surveying the blackened rubble. It had been saturated, and pools of dark oily water shone dully up between charred rafters and the dark spindly masses that Felix supposed were remnants of furniture. The old kachelofen stood like a dark gravestone in the middle of the destruction. Felix thought of
the cat he had seen snoozing there, the cake Mrs. Himmelfarb had cut up and put on plates.

  “It was still smoking even this morning,” said the policeman with acne. “We thought we’d have to call in the feuerwehr to hose it again.”

  “‘Wood is a friend, wood is a foe,’” said Speckbauer.

  “The families are coming this afternoon,” said the other policeman, clearing his throat. “We just got word.”

  “Really?”

  “The man had a sister, and she is coming with her husband.

  From Passail, I believe. She, the lady, had three — a brother and two sisters, but has only a sister left. And that one is coming in also.”

  “Animals?” Speckbauer murmured. “Cows?”

  “Taken care of,” said the acned one.

  The stench began to seem almost visible to Felix, a cloud, or a fog that was permeating his clothes and even soaking his skin. The whitewashed stones that had fronted the old foundations of the house had only one or two places left that the smoke had not blackened. It only made things look worse. He shivered.

  “We’re going up to the other place,” said Speckbauer to the two. “Okay?”

  Glad as he was to leave the farmyard behind, Felix’s mind rebelled even more at the prospect of trudging up to where Hansi Himmelfarb had brought him such a short time ago.

  Speckbauer’s shoe slipped on a wet, grassy mound, and he swore under his breath as he put out a hand to steady himself.

  “Dolls, he called them, you said. Right?”

  “Yes,” Felix replied. “Dolls, sleeping.”

  He heard Speckbauer begin to wheeze with the exertions. This pleased him.

  “Did he have, maybe, little stories about these ‘dolls’?”

  “No. Not that I remember.”

  “Not a novel now, but.”

  Felix shook his head. Speckbauer stopped and turned to look back down over the farmyard. It was already half-hidden by the rise of ground in the field between. He turned back, breathing heavily, and looked beyond Felix.

  “Now the forest begins,” he said and resumed his slow trudging.

  Speckbauer stopped several times, looking around, and as they stopped at the track Speckbauer spent some time looking in both directions, slowly scanning the woods. He dropped to one knee and ran his hand over the pine needles.