Poachers Road

by John Brady

  “Franz doesn’t cry. I suppose part of his job is to make others cry. But he cannot produce tears, or to be more accurate ‘express’ them. Is ‘express’ a doctor word, Franzi?”

  “I believe it is.”

  “Ah, so indeed. There was damage done there. The grafts cannot fix that apparently. And Franz has troubles putting out enough fluids there. Am I saying it right, Franzi?”

  “Most. Enough.”

  “I should practice more maybe. But the winter is hard on him, and the wind too.There are little bottles he applies quite often. I tell you all this Felix, so . . . ?”

  “So you can tell me something else, or ask me, afterwards?”

  Speckbauer made a gentle smile.

  “Sehr gut. Anyway. When they set Franz on fire they were hoping that that was the last of him. But they did not know our Franz.

  What’s the name of that fountain again, Franz?”

  “Mandusevac.”

  “And a filthy fountain it was. But right in a square, a main one too: they don’t care, you see. Jelacica, that’s the place, the square.

  We had a meeting there, didn’t we?”

  Franz nodded.

  “Well, Franz was out of the car and into that cesspool as fast as, well, as fast as Hermann Maier down that slalom. A hell of an achievement, I tell you. Better than any gold medal Klammer or any of those ski genius boys can pull off in Kitzbühel. The prize? Way better. Right, Franz?”

  Again Franz nodded.

  “He got to keep his eyesight. Well most of it.”

  “Which I guess makes it maybe a little ironic here,” Speckbauer went on. “He gets to see the face of the guy who did it to him.”

  “You mean yesterday?”

  “Franzi, you still think, you know?”

  “Hard to be sure,” said Franz. “Like the Chinaman said. You know?”

  “I don’t get it,” said Felix.

  “Right. It’s an old joke. A Chinese guy flies to Vienna. It’s his first time out of China, no? An ORF guy is there to interview him, you know: millions of tourists from China, billions of shillings what am I saying, Euro dancing in the brains of the Tourism Department. Are you with me?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Good enough. So the interviewer gets the camera on the Chinaman. He sticks a microphone under his nose oh, I didn’t tell you this Chinaman has been studying German since birth, did I? and asks the fateful question: ‘What are your first impressions of us Austrians?’ What do you think he said?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re thinking dirndl? Cowbells? Sacher torte, decent coffee?

  Strauss, maybe. Skiing? None of that Hitler crap, obviously. What do you think the guy said?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, this is what he said: ‘These Austrians, they all look the same to me.’”

  Speckbauer didn’t laugh. Nor did he smile. He remained intensely interested, it seemed to Felix, in a passing tractor that did not slow as it wheeled by the konditorei.

  After seconds passed with no response from Felix, Speckbauer leaned in.

  “What this means is that these two characters up in the woods could be any of them. ‘Them’? Well, we don’t really know ‘them.’

  ‘Them’ seems to start just southeast of here. Remember, before the Slovenes got into the EU club, when they had the border post?

  You rolled up to the border post and seeing all that Russianlooking alphabet starting just the far side of the barrier? The Cyrillic words . . . ?”

  He sat back and eyed Franz a moment.

  “But this much I do know. I want Franzi here to be able to use those eyes of his to see the face, or the faces of the men who sprayed the gasoline in the car and threw a match in on him. Verstehst? Got that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. And I don’t much care how we find them.”

  Speckbauer looked around the restaurant again, and stretched.

  Felix caught a glimpse of the pistol in its holster under Speckbauer’s arm as he arched.

  “More coffee?” he asked Felix.

  TWELVE

  GIULIANA WAS MARKING SOMETHING WHEN HE GOT IN. FELIX had driven back to the apartment by one of those freak journeys, a miracle where he couldn’t actually remember long stretches of the road. Nor could he remember what he had been thinking about. It unnerved him. It also made him aroused.

  “What the hell,” she said as his arms went around her.

  “Is it a bad time?”

  “It’s not that.”

  He heard her voice change and she was pushing the papers and her empty cup away. He slid his hands under her T-shirt, and felt the dampness by her armpits.

  “Jesus,” she murmured. “You’re hardly in the door.”

  “Pretty close. Come on.”

  He covered her mouth with his, and felt her rising from the chair. Her breasts flattened against him and his hand traced her spine up and back to her hips, straining now against her track pants.

  “You want me so badly,” he whispered. “I just know it.”

  “You goof,” she said.

  His hand slid around her and pulled her into him. He felt her hips push back and she settled her crotch with a small movement against him. He thought of her ass, of how she was embarrassed in the beginning always but then gave way and stretched, with that cat smile, her eyes almost closed.

  She gave a little sigh and he felt her breath puff onto his ear.

  His fingers sought the parted flesh and slid over the hairs there, finding their way to her bone and the soft folds he sought.

  “You’re terrible,” she whispered. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “It’s called ‘We’re on holiday.’ And you made me do it.”

  “Me?”

  He raised his arms under the T-shirt and did too as he pulled it over her head.

  “No staring,” she whispered, but her eyes were almost closed already.

  “Will if I want.”

  His breath was coming out in short deep gusts now. She held her arms behind her head and opened her eyes.

  “Not fair,” she said. “You, you first.”

  He tried to keep his eyes on hers while he got his clothes off.

  He almost lost his balance with the first leg of his pants.

  “How long have you been walking around with that?”

  “With what?”

  She threw her arms down and lifted the band of his underpants. Then she dropped to one knee to draw them down. Before she had reached his knee, she had grabbed at him.

  “No,” he said, lying. “No.”

  He felt her teeth settle in, leave and settle in again.

  “No, Giuliana?”

  She lifted her head, and she slid back on the carpet and kicked off her pants. Her scent reached him and seemed to envelop him, and he stared at her bush as her legs went up, until the cleft appeared. She pulled the last leg off her foot and her hand reached for her crotch.

  “Is that what’s on your mind?”

  He tried to nod but the muscles in his neck were so tight that he shuddered instead. She was staring at him and the smile was gone. Her hips made a small, sliding movement.

  “Let me,” he said. It came out as a croak.

  “Let you what?” she whispered. “What should I let you do?”

  “Let me do it for you. Come on.”

  Her eyelids almost closed.

  “Tell me what you want to do.”

  He stepped out of his underpants, his penis giving a spasm. His belly contracted in a shiver. Her forefinger had disappeared, he saw.

  There was a roaring in his ears, like he was underwater.

  He got down on his knees. She reached a leg around him.

  “Let me.”

  “I haven’t had my shower,” she said.

  It was the old fake, and he’d guessed from the start that she’d say it. It was the same way she sa
id her ass was too big, or that her boobs wouldn’t ever go out on a topless beach. It was to dare herself, and him.

  He stilled her hand, drew it away. Her hair was like breath on his face, and the soft tissue that met his mouth seemed to dissolve.

  She sighed, and seemed to want to draw back. He pulled her more to him until at last he felt her hips begin to move, and to push gently against him.

  “You,” she said in a clear voice. “I want to.”

  He slowed, and raised his head. Her face was flushed and strange.

  “Lie,” she said, turning, and drew up her leg.

  “I don’t,” he tried.

  “I know I know,” she said, and she pushed against his chest.

  She was not tender now. She moved around a lot, tugging and releasing, only to use her tongue in the intervals.

  “You should stop,” he said again.

  When he felt it, he tried to pull her up.

  “Giuliana!”

  She pushed at him and then he was lost to the brushing of her hair on his belly. She worked harder, even when he cried out. He tried to sit up again, but then he let go and her mouth clasped around him, and he went still.

  Things cascaded through him, an avalanche, as the last tics got weaker. Guilt, some frantic wish he couldn’t pin down, and his senses exploding as everything raced through him, fled, and then crashed over him again.

  “Not fair,” he said weakly. “Not fair.”

  Then her face was over his. He felt her breasts drag across his chest. She looked at him with an expression that was almost a smile.

  “Let me,” he said.

  But as he reached for her, she was up.

  “We’re not finished,” he called out.

  He heard a tap running.

  “Be quiet,” she said. “I know. I can’t just get off like that. Not now.”

  He listened to the tap water, heard it divert and splash.

  When she came back there were water drops on her breasts.

  She knelt on the bed and sat back on her legs.

  “Let me,” he said. “I want to.”

  She smiled now, and it reminded him of how he’d seen a blindman smile.

  “I know,” she murmured and let herself be pushed back. “You are so spoiled, kiddie, so spoiled.”

  THIRTEEN

  IT TOOK UNTIL FOUR TO GET TO KITZBÜHEL PROPER. FELIX didn’t want to flog the Polo to death to get there a half an hour early, especially with the rack and bike frame on top. It would be light until nine anyway, now.

  Giuliana had dozed on and off for an hour after they’d hit the M1. He’d stopped to fill the tank just before Spittal, right off the autobahn. They had semmels and wurst not-bad cured ham and the buns were still warm and a few slices of Havarti in a bakery next to the Fina. They sat at a bench to eat them, just as the sun came out. He bought beer before they left.

  They were soon amid thickening traffic that he guessed was Salzburg-bound, and he was glad to get off again at Bischofshofen.

  He stayed on the main road after, rather than the slower and more scenic route that would have led them by St. Johann.

  Giuliana put down a guidebook on Thailand. She looked at the sharp edges on the crests of the Kitzbüheler Alpen that had risen up steadily to their right.

  “I can’t stop thinking about that,” she said. “What you did up there. It would give me nightmares for sure.The two, you know . . . ?”

  “Who knows,” he said. “You do what you have to. Mom will tell you how squeamish I was when I was a kid.”

  Kitzbühel was fairly cluttered already, with more tour buses than Felix expected. He let the Polo through the outer streets toward the zentrum, eyeing the Beemers and Audis and SUVs. A tour bus with a lot of Asians was jammed at the curve that led to the train station. Giuliana giggled as they inched by and looked up at the faces.

  “Banzai!”

  “How do you know they’re Japanese?”

  “They look like rabbits.”

  “Are you one of those racist cops who picks on Albanians and Nigerians, huh?”

  “Ouch. Are you Red Brigades? Humour, please, liebchen.”

  “Don’t ‘liebchen’ me. I’m not one of your Alpine maidens.”

  He turned down the lane he had found the first year he’d come with the ski club in hochschule. They’d gotten drunk before going on the lift and nearly fell off.

  He pulled in beside a cream Fiat with a German plate and a Munich crest on the window.

  “That might be one of our guys,” he said. “See the rack?”

  He looked over at Giuliana and looked around her face, at the faint glow of perspiration high on her forehead. The air conditioning in the Polo had failed a couple of years ago now. It wasn’t worth fixing.

  He liked how her hair rattled out into a loose bundle as the breeze had tugged at it, mile after mile. She gave him a skeptical stare.

  “What?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I know that look.”

  “You do, uh?”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Last night.”

  “Oh,” she said and batted at him. He laid his hand on her leg.

  “I have X-ray vision,” he said. “They teach it at the Gendarmerie school.”

  She smacked his hand and then opened the door.

  “Stop it. Come on. Get the stuff.”

  He took the bike frame down and laid it on the grass margin that ran along the front of the car park. He took out the wheels then, and the Velcroed pouch that held the tools.

  Giuliana still kept her first rucksack from when she was a kid.

  She had filled it with books and paper and fruit and nuts and God knows what else. He began strapping the wheels to the frame, paying a lot of care to where the spokes rested. Then he tested the weight of the package.

  Giuliana chewed on an apple, looking off over the roofs toward the cable car lines that rose from the town up the slopes of the Hochkitzbühel. A cable car was moving slowly at one of the steepest sections, a 70-degree length close to the top of the Streif. It was that sheer drop where skiers made their bones, where they could declare they had skied the Hahnenkamm, complete with the Mousetrap, the section that had ended so many Olympic hopes.

  Felix thought about the trail up beyond the hotel there, the Ehrenbachhöhe, over the ridges that led to Penglestein summit and on to Blaue Lacke.

  He checked the glove compartment before settling the parking permit better on the dashboard. Giuliana checked the doors a second time while he loaded up his pack.

  The streets were busy, with people standing around, moving in groups slowly down the sidewalks, pausing to look at the souvenirs and clothes. There were plenty milling about the steps to the Andreaskirche too. The cafés on Klostergasse were close to full. A deeply tanned man with designer stubble and unnaturally white teeth he liked to display, along with his bare feet in those Americanstyle moccasins, gave Felix the thumbs-up from behind a glass of beer.

  “Sehr gut, mann!”

  Felix sniffed the air for signs of chemical happiness. He couldn’t manage even a fake smile.

  “Have a nice day, man,” he replied.

  A cluster of Asians with silly hats stood listening intently to a woman dressed up in a flowery Tyrolean dirndl, with the endless pigtails and the stout shoes. To round things out, a youth in lederhosen was explaining something in fluent Italian to two heavy-set, sweating women that Felix decided could only be nuns in civvies up from Rome. They listened, nodding gravely, and looked up the path of the cable cars above.

  He bought the three-day pass and let the ticket seller eye how he had kitted up the bike. It was a slack time for ascents, apparently. They walked through the empty passageway toward the ramp.

  “Well, now you have company,” Giuliana said. “Your playmate.”

  Peter was the real mountain man. He had been loud and clomping from birth, Felix had concluded early on after their first meeting at the Gendarmerie inta
ke in Graz. Schwartz Peter, they called him soon enough the joker of the pack. Felix had soon learned there was something behind the pose, however. The same Peter very ably rested a keen brain, and big ambitions behind the goofy pose.The same Peter Moser had already impressed the CO at his post in Graz that he should be training at the central Gendarmerie college in Mödling.

  “My God, Giuliana,” he called out in that deep Styrian voice, the bellen that Schwarzenegger had exported to the world. “I was hoping you’d bring someone decent this time.”

  Peter gave Giuliana his trademark sweaty bear hug. Felix eyed the newish bike that Peter had brought with him.

  “Scheisse der auf,” he said to Felix then. “You’re expecting this bunch of cheap metal of yours to keep you going across to Blauesee even?”

  “I don’t need designer bikes, you big oaf.”

  “Don’t you save any money down there in where-the-hell, Schweinwein?”

  “Stefansdorf.”

  “Or does this nice lady here take it from you?”

  “He’s predictable,” said Giuliana. “If nothing else.”

  “Damned right. We’re hitting the paths the minute we get out of this coffin on strings, huh? You too, Giuliana, has he converted you?”

  “No heroics,” she said. “It’s just a recreation for me, not a way of life.”

  “Some of my best friends are bookworms. Hey, what are you reading this time?”

  They got the Kanada car on the gondola. They had to wait for a grizzled old man in traditional mountaineering gear complete with a new feather in his hat and a walking stick, and a woman Felix hoped was his daughter, to alight first.

  Peter unburdened himself of a longish joke about a German and a Swiss and a Swede who got drunk in a stübe in the nowhere end of Burgenland one dark winter night. Felix pretended to listen, all the while watching Giuliana trying not to freak, even a little, as the gondola began its traverse of the meadow and sheds below, the gentle glide that would become something altogether different after the next few pylons.

  The joke over, Felix allowed a chuckle. Peter looked around the car, taking in the view of the clusters of houses and streets, the Pfarrkirche that made up Kitzbühel. Across the town Kitzbühelhorn, all two thousand metres of it, stood sharp against a deep blue sky. Up the valley beyond Aurach, the Höhe Tauern, the Alps proper, began. There were serious pockets of snow even midway up there yet. They joined, most of them, into solid caps clear against a lighter blue sky to the north.