Poachers Road

by John Brady

  Felix let himself sag into the seat more. He rested his eyes for several moments on the almost luminous greens of the nearby valleys, those exuberant bursts of growth that sprang up at the end of the long winters here, not 50 kilometres from the Bavarian border.

  The air growing cooler already. He found himself slipping into a mental rehearsal of what he would do with Giuliana out there in a sheltered spot. It’d be a grassy patch well in from the trails, and plenty of sun, and a breeze.

  Peter shifted in his seat.

  “What’s the news in Sleepyville,” he asked. “Your exciting gendarmerie post, with, what’s his name again, your guy?”

  “Gebhart.”

  Felix didn’t want to mention the bodies up near the Himmelfarb place.

  “The usual,” he said.

  “Well I tell you, up my way we’re action central since Easter.”

  “All of a sudden?”

  “Genau. I thought it was just spring madness, or something.

  But the old guys in the post say there’s something different this year.”

  Felix was still irritated at how Peter had landed a post in a big place like Liezen, while he had ended up in one-horse Stefansdorf.

  “Like?”

  Peter rested his elbows on his knees and nodded at Giuliana.

  “You’re not hearing any of this, Giuliana, right?”

  She glanced up from her intent study of her rucksack and shook her head.

  “Drugs. Big time in a garage there. And what a set up! The Nobel Prize, I tell you. Did you hear about it? And the shoot-out?”

  “I think so.”

  “One guy dead, two in hospital. Seven arrests, and we almost got a big one. Guess what language these guys don’t speak so well except one local, who used to do paperwork and meet landlords and that. Guess.”

  “Nicht sprach gut Deutsch?”

  “Wow. You’re going to end up in the KD yet, Felix. Guess the home countries now. Go on.”

  “Afghanistan?”

  “Not the drugs, man. The big shot. The one that got away.”

  “Local guy?”

  “Hell, Christ no. An ausländer. Why do you think I’m asking you? He’s a brute too by the way.You should hear some of the things they say about him.”

  Felix gave him the eye: maybe not.

  “He was one of those paratroopers from Bosnia. Just about the cream of the crop. No doubt he’s sitting pretty at some café back there now, planning his next effort.

  “Well, does he mountain bike?”

  Peter looked over at Giuliana too. She had a pasty look now, Felix saw.

  “Hey, Giuliana. All this fresh mountain air?”

  A look of panic flickered on her face as the gondola car clattered through a pylon.The steeper parts of the run were below them now. Felix watched the mountains rise up again through the roof windows as the car was drawn out of the pylon again.

  Peter began to hum and stroke his sideburns. Felix stayed still, only turning his head once to catch a glimpse of the tiny houses clustered around the Liebfrauenkirche far back in the town. For him, the sway and resonance of the car brought a kind of comfort.

  His father had been a hiker, and a vigorous one at that, striding ahead even when he and Lisi were small, pointing out everything with a stick.There must be things the body remembers, he thought, his eyes on Giuliana’s tight form perched on the edge of her seat, eyes determinedly locked on some part of the bike there. Yes, the coming down, leaning against his father, almost sleeping, proud of his day’s hiking, a kid and as close as they ever would be.

  His eyes left Giuliana then and rested several moments on Peter. The guy trained at something all year. If it wasn’t Nordic skiing, it was kayaking in someplace in the Czech Republic, and if it wasn’t mountain biking, it was taking a run at some Iron Man thing. He even skied in shorts here sometimes: “the ladies love it.”

  Weights, football, water polo, city marathons. Peter was going to leave nothing to chance in his campaign to get into the Alpini. From there, he assured Felix, it would be a hell of a lot easier to have a serious chance at his final goal: Kobra Squad. Even a provincial command Kobra, he claimed, because that was good enough.

  Felix eyed the tanned tree-trunk legs on his friend. He imagined their owner rappelling down from a helicopter in an avalanche, or pushing on through a blizzard towing a ridiculously huge sled of gear toward a plane crash. Or his blackened face peering down over the sights on one of the Uzis they were issued, and then leaping off a roof in those boots you could walk across a ceiling upside down with.

  So, was it envy, Felix still asked himself, that made him return to wondering if Peter really was fooling himself about his Kommando prospects? Maybe no one had told him. Or maybe he was in denial, as they say: he was just too damned big. A giant really, more like the great export Arnold than the trim endurance-built acrobat types that Gebhart had heard were sought for specialist squads in the Gendarmerie.

  Another pylon arrived, with the few seconds slowing, followed by the rumbling and the sharp tug as it was pulled through. He heard Giuliana catch her breath. Almost there, he wanted to say to her, but knew she wouldn’t like his pity, especially in front of Peter.

  He sat forward slowly to look to the wood cut far below. He felt something move along his calf then, half guessed what it was his damned Handi and made a grab for it. It hit the floor of the gondola with a dull hollow thump.

  Even Peter started.

  “Jesus,” said Giuliana and flinched as the car swayed a little from her jump.

  Felix picked up the phone. It was still on.There was a text message waiting.

  “You are a very religious woman,” said Peter. “I like that. Is it just around Felix here?”

  Giuliana did a first-class eyeball roll and returned to studying her knapsack on the floor in front of her. Felix thumbed through the menu and watched the text appear.

  In a moment his mind was on a slalom, with everything almost over the edge, rushing at him. Why had he turned off the ringer?

  Hansi Himmelfarb holding the kitten in the farmhouse kitchen.The way Speckbauer’s comments always had a ring of not quite sarcasm. Sitting with those two detectives in the restaurant yesterday in a weird conversation.

  He sent the message scrolling again. Something fastened and closed tighter in his chest and he gasped. He had to think, but he couldn’t. He saw his own hands turn the phone over. He stared at it, and read the logos and indentations on the back. Battery, he thought, his mind skittering, serial number. Had he snapped?

  “Busted?”

  It was Peter. Felix looked up at him. The light, the views over the valleys and mountains, even Peter’s face all seemed to have changed.

  “Is it broken?”

  “No.”

  Peter shrugged and half smiled. Felix looked out the window at the clearing below where they creaked and swung upwards. There were no maniacs hiking it up today, straining and sweating every step to the top of the mountain.

  He looked at his feet. He didn’t know what to do.

  “What’s going on in there?”

  It was Giuliana. The strain on her face was easing. He was suddenly overwhelmed by gratitude that she was there, present, alive, and still trying to beat her nerves about heights and cable cars, just to humour him.

  “Something’s wrong?”

  Peter would find out eventually, one way or another, he decided.

  “Gebi texted me,” he said and cleared his throat. “Remember the incident up at the farm, the Himmelfarb family?”

  “How could I forget?” Giuliana said.

  Felix saw that Peter wasn’t even pretending that he was not all ears.

  “Gebi said, well, he texted that . . . something happened. A fire.

  They’re dead.”

  Volkswagen Polos Felix’s mother’s seven-year-old model Polo will top out at 180. On a good day, as Gebi might say.With the föhn behind you, that warm winter breeze, or a tornado maybe, going down
the side of a wall.

  Felix wavered at 150, imagining a cloud of black smoke, a serious clank and grind and one good big metallic bang, and then only the decision of what scrap yard he’d send it to.

  Still he pushed it. He wanted something, anything, to seize his attention and hold it, so he could not think. He got the eye several times from drivers rolling along nicely at 130, in cars that could do twice that. He came through Schladming after he got off the A10, and he was barrelling down the A9 an hour later.The lights were on a half-hour before he got to the outskirts of Graz.

  He phoned Giuliana after he got off the autobahn. She had settled into the hotel. No, she hadn’t been “checking out” the other guys, the dozen or so off-duty Gendarmerie guys who had shown up for the trekking. And no, she wasn’t really fooled by this lame humour. Peter wouldn’t put the moves, sober or wipsi, she told him.

  She had her books, they had their bikes and, later, their beer. And yes, she had a lift down to the bahn tomorrow and a ticket, if she changed her mind. And no, it was no problem. She wanted at least one night up on the mountain, with Felix or without.

  He picked up some buns and milk before he let himself into the apartment. He waited until he had eaten half of the buns and cheese before phoning the post. Korschak told him Gebhart had left a message at the end of his shift. Korschak’s tone conveyed something to Felix as he recited Gebhart’s home phone number. It was not resentment, Felix decided, or annoyance that Gebhart had conceded a valuable invitation to the new recruit, but perhaps the smallest trace of awe.

  “So Felix,” said Korschak. “Look at you. You are hardly in the door here but you get to talk to Gebi and at the Gebhart residence too, I might add.”

  “Is it really that big a deal?”

  “Is the Pope Catholic? Gebi never mixes home with work.

  Never. Even Dieter is scared to phone him at home.You, my friend, are special.”

  Felix couldn’t remember hearing that tone of sly humour from the friendly enough but starchy, by-the-book careerist Korschak before. He had recited the phone number in a slow, portentous tone.

  “So phone him,” Korschak added, “Something on account of a boy? You’ll know, he said.”

  Felix put down the phone, and sat back. He decided again that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, or should do.

  He examined his hands. He had walked hand in hand with Hansi Himmelfarb, gotten the butt of half-serious jokes about it.

  What would the fire that killed the Himmelfarbs have done to that hand?

  FOURTEEN

  GEBHART ANSWERED THE DOOR HIMSELF.

  Felix had been around the area before, up and down the myriad roads and lanes that functioned as roads in this hinterland area just outside Graz. Trust Gebhart, he thought, to live on a road that still looked out over farms and woods and held the pungent scent of manure in the air. The nearest neighbour was 200 metres away.

  A new Skoda was parked next to Gebi’s down-at-heel Fiat.

  “Pretty heroic driving,” said Gebhart. “What are you looking at?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You think I sleep in my uniform, do you?”

  A face, a woman’s, appeared from a doorway behind.

  “My wife.”

  “Delighted,” said Felix.

  “Don’t be too delighted,” said Gebhart. “She’s a nurse in the emerg.”

  “How do you work with this crusty old krot?” Mrs. Gebhart asked.

  Gebi led him into a parlour. A very tall girl with her father’s nose, and a book, and rimless glasses stirred under a cupola of light and slowly stood.

  “Claudia, this is Felix. He is a Gendarme.”

  The kid was a gangly 12 or 13 Felix saw, with that mix of open curiosity and reserve peculiar to the age.

  “He’s just like daddy. More of an action man you might think, my dear bookworm.”

  JOHN BRADY POACHER'S ROAD “De I’m happy to meet you, Fraulein.”

  “He bikes around goat tracks in the mountains near Kitzbühel for recreation,” said Gebhardt. “Something you might consider, my dear?”

  She rolled her eyes and held her book to her chest and walked out. Gebi held the door before closing it.

  “Beer? Coffee?”

  “No. No thanks.”

  “Well I’m going to have a Puntigamer.You should. It’s the only beer, really.”

  Gebi gave him a considered look.

  “Look. Don’t be a clown. Have one. Nobody comes to my house from work. Consider yourself a movie star or something.”

  Felix looked around the pictures while he waited for Gebhart to return.There was one from the 1980s, it looked like, to go by the cars, with a young, trim Josef Gebhart. Yes; minus 10 or 15 kilo, that was him standing with fellow officers against a Gendarmerie car high up somewhere, with snow in the background.There was a snapshot from long before that, a man standing in the open door of a VW Beetle. He looked like Gebhart. Men, unshaven, in white camouflage gear, eyes squinting in the blazing sun, again up in the snow somewhere.

  Gebhart brought only the bottles. He sat in an old armchair.

  Felix took a longer swig of the bottle than he had planned. Gebhart kept up his baleful gaze.

  “You drove like a goddamned madman back here, anyway,” he said.

  “I felt I should come back. Now, I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay. But coming right off your precious week’s leave, that is something.That pushed my buttons enough to actually allow you to enter . . .” Gebhart made a desultory wave of his arm around the room, “the Gebhart sanctuary.”

  “Pretty exclusive, I hear.”

  “Damn right it is.You’re going to have to come up with something good to justify me giving in to my kleine herz over this.”

  Felix gave him the eye.

  “Well? You broke up with your girl?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Let me make a guess. But before I do, let me tell you something. I could kick myself for telling you about that phone call, you know. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s okay,” said Felix. “I’d have found out anyway. And I would have been annoyed you hadn’t told me.”

  Gebhart gave a small nod. He took a swig of beer and held it in his mouth before swallowing it.

  “Well yes,” he said. “It was a message for you after all. But if I’d known you’d be flying down at top speed from the far side of the country, well I’d have waited.”

  “Wah wah,” Felix murmured, and shook his head.

  “Don’t start that what-if stuff, you hear?”

  “I can’t help it. Maybe he would have told me then, if I’d not been so”

  “Stop that, I said. Are you listening to me at all?”

  Felix nodded.

  “How can you know?” Gebhart said. “And even still, what’s ‘a secret’ for the likes of him? It could be anything. You don’t know.

  Nobody knows.”

  Felix thought again about asking Gebhart his son’s name. If his Down’s was severe. If Gebhart knew a lot about that sort of thing.

  Of course he must, he upbraided himself. He looked up from the bottle he had been cradling in his hands.

  “But why would he not tell his own parents? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Gebhart. “Isn’t that what I’m saying to you here? Whatever he wanted to tell you, this ‘secret,’ well they’re wily enough, those Down’s kids. They want what they want. So it was nothing really, believe me.”

  “But,” Felix said. “It’s just so . . . what happened. It’s so . . . I can’t say what.”

  “Hard, isn’t it?”

  “That kid, I mean, the son. An only child. And now this?”

  Felix’s gaze drifted over the photos again. Gebhart said nothing.

  “You said ‘suspicious,’” said Felix. “Did you mean it?”

  “Yes, I meant it. The word I got from the fire brigade guy up there, old hand, Dorner’s his name, yes said somethi
ng started it.

  I think he even said he thought paraffin. That’s just blather for now, until we hear from their experts. And show me a farm where they don’t keep paraffin or gasoline, anyway.”

  “How come no one got out, or woke up?”

  Something changed in Gebhart’s expression.

  “You’re asking the wrong cop there, kid. Me and Korschak got there pretty damned quick, just the same time the feuerwehr were coming in. The place was an inferno. That I know. The arson guys showed up after a couple of hours, along with some forensics. They went through what they could.”

  Gebhart shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I did perimeter for a while, talked to a few neighbours. Then a car with two uniforms came from Graz to take over the site. They, er, got them out, the remains, before I left. So they’re getting the P.M. done.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “The fire? I don’t know.”

  He held up his bottle to study the label.

  “But I think your mind is working overtime here.”

  “You think it was deliberate?”

  Gebhart put down the bottle.

  “I try not to think about it.”

  Felix watched him turn the bottle slowly on the surface of the table. Then he looked at the pictures on the wall. A minute passed.

  He noticed skis, mountain rescue gear, a helicopter in the background in one of the pictures now.

  Again he thought back to what Gebhart had told him.

  “Look,” Felix said, and prepared to get up. “I’ll go.”

  “Finish your beer. Don’t waste it.”

  “Why am I here? I just feel bad about it. Maybe I’m going nuts?”

  Gebhart nodded.

  “Could be,” he said. “Do you want some advice?”

  “Can I try a sample first?”

  “Sure. It’s not hard. A) Don’t drive that scheisse of a car you have at supersonic speed anymore.”

  “B?”