Poachers Road

by John Brady

  They crossed the first of the series of smaller hills on the route to Weiz, descending through broad curves to fields that had already gone green with the starting corn. The steeple of St. Ruprecht am Raab appeared over the flat farmland that ran to the base of the hills.

  “Christ on his cross with the thieves,” whispered Speckbauer, jerking the wheel and correcting it an instant later. Felix looked behind at the farm lorry still reversing onto the road. A smell of manure entered the car and stayed.

  “Fewer errors,” Speckbauer murmured. “That’s how it works.

  Did I say that?”

  He glanced over at Felix and then beyond him to the farmhouses.

  “Even Franzi is beginning to be a believer.”

  “Was he . . . ?”

  Speckbauer smiled and shook his head once.

  “Ah, what a good choice I have made here. Permit me a little crowing now, as it reflects as well on you. You don’t see it? It’s that finesse you have, that way of insinuating yourself. ‘Getting under the radar’ my Yankee friends call it.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “Of course you don’t. But you’re a born diplomat. Very discreet.The ladies love it, I imagine.You will do well up in the hills for sure. Tell me, is it something you were taught, this diplomatic way?

  Your mother, let me guess? Stop me if that is an impertinence.”

  It was a dare Felix could not resist.

  “My mother is quiet, they say.”

  “‘They say.’ I like this. It is like you tell a story. ‘They say.’”

  Felix said nothing.

  “Have I offended you?”

  “No.”

  “Merely confused things? My apologies.”

  Felix believed him. It took him aback to know it.

  “I spend so much time with certain types of people, that, well you can see the results. Hell, have they moved Weiz, or what?”

  “St. Ruprecht, then Weiz. Maybe four kilometres.”

  “They say that spouses grow to resemble one another. Their clothes, their manner of speech. Have you noticed?”

  “I suppose,” said Felix.

  “Well, there’s Franz and me, a case in point.”

  “Spouses?”

  “Might as well be,” said Speckbauer. He moved his head from side to side, gazing into the distance. “We’re making a stop in Weiz before going up to hillbilly territory. G’scherter, isn’t that what the city people call mountain people, huh?”

  “I’ve heard it used.”

  “Ach, you surely have.You have a foot in both places. But what was I saying?”

  “Spouse, you said.”

  “Right. So, are you confused when I say spouse? No, I’m not gay. Franzi isn’t either, but we might as well be sometimes, I wonder. It’s funny. We share a place.”

  “Live together, you mean?”

  “A generational term hah.Yes and no. Franzi was unmanageable when he came home from the hospital. Very badly behaved indeed. I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you. Ach, I don’t care if he does. There, that proves it we are sort of married when we talk about one another like that.”

  Across the fields, the higher hills and mountains began over the town’s red-tiled roofs. Forested slopes shifted and slid with the twists in the road, as the yellow walls and dome of the big church, the Weizberg, came into view. They passed a suburb, Preding.

  “The wife left. I moved in. Franzi was a bear. I never left. I suppose I should,” he smiled slightly as he went on.

  “But who could turn down a location like that place I ask you.

  Know anyone else who has a parking garage, a roof garden, and a three-bedroom place on the Hofgasse, right in the middle of Graz?”

  “That’s where you live?”

  “Temporarily for three years temporarily. Movie stars would want it, uh? Franz inherited it, lucky bastard. That’s the way. The destiny thing, maybe.”

  Speckbauer looked over until Felix met his eye.

  “You believe in that, the destiny stuff?”

  “No.”

  Speckbauer smiled and tapped his fingers twice on the wheel.

  “Good. Me neither. Arsch mit ohren, as they say. ‘An arse with ears.’ That’s destiny.”

  Speckbauer showed no mercy at the roundabout in Neustadt coming into Weiz. He only slowed seriously when Gleisdorferstrasse where the B64 pinched small as it reached this thousand-year-old city closed on the Weiz Zentrum proper. He turned down a lane at Europa Allee and let the Passat coast in second over the cobbled surface to a small platz where there were a dozen diagonal spaces.

  “We’re stopping here in Weiz?”

  “Stimmt.”

  Felix had been to and through Weiz many times, but since his teens, less and less. His father knew everyone there, as in other towns and dorfs all around, it had seemed. He remembered his father stopping the car once and parking it by the chemist’s just to walk back to the benches close to the rathaus at the top of the platz.

  There he had talked and laughed with the elderly man he had spotted, for hours it had seemed.

  It had only been a half-hour probably, but Felix remembered being summoned from the car by a wave from his father. His mother, ever the diplomat, usually bribed them with a few schillings for ice cream. She knew to expect these impromptu meetings. Often the older ones would do the ritual cheek pinching and hand squeezing. Often he remembered listening to accents so thick he had barely understood more than “family” or “healthy,” or “weather.”

  “You seem to know your way around here,” Felix said.

  Speckbauer’s eyebrows went up and down in lieu of a remark.

  The Passat’s tires made a soft kiss and rebound off the edge of the footbath. He turned off the engine.

  “Down that way,” he said.

  He nodded toward a cobbled lane curling down between an old house and some newer buildings to the other side.

  Felix closed the door behind him, and stretched.

  Speckbauer took his time with something in the car. The trunk lid clicked and swung a little before settling again. Felix noted how Speckbauer was out of the seat, the door closing behind him, and at the back of the car in one easy, sort of curving motion.

  “There’s a plan?”

  “There’s always a plan.”

  Speckbauer opened the trunk and cast about for something.

  Felix saw plastic-wrapped files, a grey metal box in the centre of the trunk. Speckbauer picked up a newspaper and tucked it under his arm.

  He looked over Felix’s chest.

  “A T-shirt. What use is this? Next time, then.”

  “Next time what?”

  “Next time get a shirt you can put something on, or in. I can clip it or you can just drop it in a pocket. A kleine transmitter.”

  He opened his hand to show something with a single earpiece and a slim cord attached.

  “I like to listen in.”

  “I don’t get this.”

  “You are making a rest stop, on our little jaunt. Down that lane there is a place I want you to buy yourself a beer, or something. I will be at a café a bit down toward the zentrum.”

  “Why am I doing this?”

  “It’s your new job.”

  “Just a beer?”

  “Just one beer. It’s Saturday, remember? You can do these things. See, everyone’s out shopping today.You’re thirsty.You’re not so happy. Your wiebi, your annoying wife, has gone shopping and you know she’ll overspend. So . . . ”

  “Why don’t you go in?”

  “Because I am not stupid, that is why. They are not stupid either. Me, I look like a cop. I probably smell like a cop? You though, you’re nobody. Verstehst? Got that?”

  “What am I supposed to see there?”

  “Whatever you like. Go in, enjoy the beer. Grumble a little, if you like. But know the layout before you leave.You might be going back under different circumstances, and it should not be the first time. Ready?”

&
nbsp; “Ten, fifteen minutes?”

  “Sounds okay. Now put on your pissed-off face.You’re a hardworking guy over at, I don’t know, the Magna plant in Gleisdorf.

  Okay? You do car assembly or panels or something.You’re hungover.

  Swear if you must. Do you know how?”

  “I can manage that.”

  “Well, things are looking up, then. Look, I’ll leave and wander about a bit.Wait a minute and then go yourself. And don’t get lost.”

  Felix watched Speckbauer stroll down the lane. A Fiat Uno delivery van went by, then a two-stroke whiner 50cc Puch. He counted to 60, and studied the buildings around this small platz.

  Ahead of him was the only hof that had not been given plate-glass windows and chintzy cobbled treatment. Above the recessed arch, the row of old tall windows had been flung open. Some kind of operatic singing came from them. It seemed to stir the curtains a little as though one should see just how thick the old walls actually were.

  He made his way down the lane then, Karl Rennergasse, filing along with an irregular line of shoppers with kids and a pram. Built for older times and the passage of but one wagon, the lane filled up with sounds, echoing them. After 50 metres, he heard the bass thumping of a system further down the lane, where it opened out a little for proper sidewalks and a clutch of shops.

  It was the English group, Fleetwood Mac, an oldie remixed, and it was just plain loud. It was coming from a place called Zero Point Joe’s. Two umbrellas took up the small slice of pavement by the open doors. A waitress with high-tied very blonde hair was putting down big glasses of beer for three men at one of the tables. She gave him a quick once-over and a perfunctory smile. One of the three men, a dark-haired guy with a designer beard and showing off some bodybuilding with his T-shirt, said something close to her ear.

  It took Felix a few moments to see properly indoors. He went to the bar. It was empty except for a washed-outlooking guy at the far end with hair that might as well have a signpost sticking out of it a toupé lives here! and a white playboy shirt open three buttons to display God knows what, beyond the gold chain.

  But the barman was a cheerful enough fellow, moving down the far side of his thirties, Felix guessed. He seemed to have a twitchy manner.

  “Beer,” said Felix, feeling it was a shout. “Puntigamer.”

  “Glockl or schweigel?”

  “Whatever size gives a man amnesia.”

  “Big glass for the big words,” the barman shouted back.

  Felix half sat on a stool.

  “And the big wife,” he said.

  He looked around at the pods of seats, the raised floor, and speakers that began to the left of the bar. He returned a nod to the middle-aged playboy. Apparently, he who didn’t know that he looked like a complete loser, was now thumbing something into a small mobile.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Come back at nine tonight and see,” said the barman. “It fairly hops.”

  Felix paid and made a meal of the first two draughts of the beer. He let his eyes move around the place again, looking for the exit lights and the toilets.

  “Is it working?”

  Felix looked back. The barman was lighting a covert cigarette now.

  “The amnesia recipe?”

  “It frigging better,” said Felix. “Christ, that woman spends.You know?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Wise man: sehr klug. If you do, better get a second shift to pay for it, gell?”

  The bartender kept up his smile. He’d surely been doing the pub confessional for long enough. Humouring arschlochers and grumblers was surely an art in the job.

  “You could win the Lotto.”

  “No way, man,” Felix said and shook his head. “My middle name is unglücklich.”

  “Well, you’re not alone,” said the barman, “Mr. Unlucky.” He flicked his eyes once toward the playboy, who was now speaking passionately into the mobile.

  “You local?”

  “Uh uh,” said Felix. “But I work nearby.”

  “Gleisdorf?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “The car plant? Magna?”

  Felix took another swallow of beer. The bartender was amused at the reception Felix gave his apparent clairvoyance.

  “Tool and die?”

  “I wish,” said Felix. “I’m on the line.”

  The bartender nodded and took a surreptitious drag from his cigarette.

  “Lots of guys here,” said the bartender and batted away the smoke. “But hey, it pays. Nicht war?”

  “Geh scheissen,” said Felix. “Take a crap. Never enough.”

  The bartender shrugged.

  “I did it for a while,” he said. “But you’ve got to hand it to Stronach. Goes to Canada with his arse out of his pants, and now look. Billions.You know his wife’s people still live in town here, the mother and all?”

  The song changed to a jittery techno that had Felix’s fillings almost moving around. This was what kids in Weiz thought was so cool, even still?

  “The toilets?”

  The bartender pointed at a green light in the dimness beyond the pods of seats.

  Felix took his time. He couldn’t see any CCTV cameras. That meant nothing these days: you could fit them in a pinhead. He spotted two fire exits, so there must be alleys to both. There was a metal-clad double door at the end of the short passageway where the toilets were. Deliveries, he decided.To give the place its due, the klo was well done, well kept. There were two narrow barred and frosted windows high in the wall over the single cubicle.

  He stood at the urinal, and felt the effect of the beer already.

  But a faint chill began to settle in his chest, and his thoughts fastened on the Himmelfarbs. It was the shock maybe, this? Maybe it was pity, or remorse or something, being ratcheted up in his subconscious to anxiety, or worse. Some part of his mind, a defence mechanism, had been holding fear at bay, ever since things had fallen apart in that cable gondola yesterday. Yesterday was a decade ago.

  “Some week off,” he murmured.

  As though it had been waiting for this moment, an image of Speckbauer’s face came to him then. It was his expression at that moment when it had finally sunk in with Felix: they don’t know that the Himmelfarb kid hasn’t told you something, do they? Felix felt that panic not far off now: “‘They?’” he muttered. “Who”

  The door rocked open behind him. A man made a short, mocking laugh, and another voice said something in a questioning voice, like a taunt. What the hell language was it? Guys from the hilltops, so drunk that you couldn’t even get beyond their accents? The vulnerable feeling overtook him. He tried to stop the flow of pee, turning a little as the two men came around the washbasins.

  “Servus,” he said.

  One of the men had spotted him immediately he’d come around the half-partition, and gave him a nod. End of conversation.

  The quiet as they went to the urinal made the music from the pub seem even louder. Felix finished and zipped. He did not stop by the basin.

  A well-turned-out man in his forties and a woman considerably younger than him were at the bar now. Felix gave them a cursory nod, and began to make up stories in his head to explain them.

  Daughter: no. Friend: hardly. A randsteinpflanze, a pavement hostess?

  He was able to get a quick look at her when the bartender laid down their drinks with an ostentatious flourish. Her roots were dark, that much he knew about girls and their hair anyway, and there was plenty of support applied the lashes and earrings, the makeup. Not a big-boned maiden that would top the list for desirable among farmers’ sons up in the wilds of a hill village like Brandlucken. No, a dieter; a shopper.

  “Another big one?”

  Felix was surprised to learn he had almost finished his beer.

  “Hell no. That’d be mess in a big way. A real mess. Enough problems.”

  “The weather is good. Can’t you sleep in your car a few weeks?”

  At
this the blonde glanced over, but she did not smile.

  “Bist närrisch?” said Felix. “Are you nuts?”

  The three men were installed again under the umbrellas by the door. The sunlight hit Felix hard, and he felt the effects of the beer now. Beyond a shoe shop was a restaurant with too many arches for décor. He scuffed his shoe once, misjudging the height of the step going in.

  Speckbauer closed his phone when he saw him, and got up from the table.

  “Come on,” he said. He slid out some coins on the table next to his cup.

  “I’m ready for a snooze,” Felix said.

  “You don’t get commendations for sleeping on the job, Gendarme. Let’s go. Can you drive or not?”

  “Drive?”

  “Car.You. Drive.”

  “But I had a beer.”

  “So? You’re not unconscious on one beer, are you? You know the area better than I do.”

  Felix looked to meet Speckbauer’s eye, but he was already up, calling out a thanks to the waitress on his way to the door.

  Felix’s beery brain registered surprise now in place of his annoyance at being asked to drive. For a middle-aged guy, a desk-cop even, this dandy moved quickly. But why did he want Felix to drive, especially after a beer? He wasn’t over the limit, but there had to be some calculation in Speckbauer’s request. Order, more like it.

  Or a dare?

  He noticed the newspaper curled under Speckbauer’s arm.

  Unless he was drunk, it had Russian characters.

  “You read Russian?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the newspaper?”

  “Serbo-Croatian,” said Speckbauer. They walked on.

  The questions kept piling up in Felix’s mind. Now he wanted to ask Speckbauer what the hell this meant, that he was reading a newspaper in that language. He also wanted Speckbauer to ask him about the bar he’d asked him to go into. It was hardly just to get rid of him so he could read the paper in peace, or catch up on phone calls. Now he had to drive?

  “What do I do with the receipt from that place?”

  “Give it to me,” said Speckbauer. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Do you want to know how I got on in there?”

  “Well, I suppose. Did you talk to the barman? Older fellow, a bit overfriendly?”