Poachers Road

by John Brady

  He hadn’t been in the station more than a couple of times since it had been renovated as part of the City of Culture a few years back. There had been ski trains often enough in the high school days, and he and Lisi had been packed on to the Vienna train each winter when they were younger, to be met there by Kiti, a maiden aunt who worked in the university library.

  A hatless, whistling ÖBB staff man eyed him, and as he drew close offered him a cautious “Grüss.” Graz was a friendly city, no?

  Or more likely Gebi had been right. You could tell a cop whatever way he was dressed or acted, if you knew people at all. Felix lingered by the computer kiosk. He entered some places on the screen just to see the price of the tickets. There were three Nordic-looking backpackers at the ticket booth now, speaking bad German. A woman pushed an old man in a wheelchair. A porter was pushing a trolley half loaded with cardboard boxes. Felix watched him disappear around by the shops.

  Speckbauer was back in his head: they’ll trust one of their own, had been Speckbauer’s rationale for getting him to drive around the hills. They’d know Felix Kimmel, right? And trust him, the logic went, as they’d known and trusted his father? And that stroll around the remains of the Himmelfarb home were sure as hell not part of the local scenery.

  A train arrival was announced, and he looked up:

  Mürzzuschlag. Who cares?

  Staring at the sign, however, Speckbauer was suddenly back in his mind. Him and that ogre he had as a partner, Franzi. And for a moment Felix imagined the inside of the car when it had been sprayed with the fuel. There would surely have been a millisecond before it went up in flames around him when Franzi would have known . . .

  He cursed in a whisper, twice, and checked his watch again.

  Late? He’d count to 10, and if it wasn’t announced at least, he’d skip downstairs and buy a sandwich he didn’t need from the SPAR.

  He got to eight before the PA came on.

  On his way to the platform, he took in the people who seemed to appear from nowhere, as usual when the train came, and the faint twanging sounds from the electric cables overhead as the train approached. The low burn of unease and resentment that had been around his chest like heartburn, or exhaustion, had dissolved and he felt his shoulders, or something at least, ease. He scanned the length of the train as the last metallic squeaks and ring of the coupling chains sounded and doors began to open.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “IT REALLY IS,” GIULIANA WHISPERED, AND PAUSED, AND HER hands began to flail about weakly for words. She left the rest unsaid.

  She wouldn’t even look at him. Even with the light from the overhead in the café, he saw that her face still looked kind of chalky.

  “It’s just . . . ” she tried again, and let that go too.

  “Look,” he said. “Do you want a beer or something instead?”

  She shook her head. She had left the biscuit on her plate. It looked like she’d be leaving most of the coffee behind too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said and added it to his total. He had said sorry four times now that he could recall. “I never expected this.”

  “It is just like, Jesus a movie,” she said, and a little gasp finished her words. “I’m waiting for, I don’t know, it to be over. Just pazzo crazy.”

  She fixed him with a hard look now.

  “I am so numb that I’m not even scared yet. How stupid is that?”

  “It’d be just a precaution,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “But Felix, listen: this is for someone else. Tell me that, can you? You’re starting out, you have a job, and it’s not this crazy, dangerous stuff. Right? You go into schools and talk to kids, you catch hooligans or something, get back stolen cars. Right?”

  He nodded.

  “Not all in one day.”

  “Don’t try to be funny,” she said. He was momentarily glad to see she was moving out of the paralyzed state she seemed to have entered.

  “Just don’t try to be a comedian, okay? Who is this guy you spent the day with, this big shot?”

  “He’s a higher-up from HQ. A detective. He’s a ranking officer.

  He seems to run his own show.”

  “But I don’t get it. Are you changing jobs? Were you at work today? What?”

  Felix sat back and stretched. He did not want to see the dark rings around her eyes again, the ones that had seemed to erupt when the colour left her cheeks a few minutes before.

  “What do they say back at your post? The one you work with, Gebhart?”

  “I think he’s telling me to stay back from this.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s hard to be sure what’s on Gebi’s mind sometimes. He doesn’t expose his feelings much.”

  He heard her draw in a deep breath and she put her hands around the coffee cup.

  “But your boss there, what’s his name? Sch . . . ?”

  “Schroek. He’s okayed the job. Gebi went to him, because he had to okay it.”

  “But isn’t Schroek the guy you told me, he’s so low-key there that the place runs itself? Half-retired already? Does he have a clue what this is about?”

  Felix didn’t have an answer. Still, he felt he had to offer something.

  “It’s going to be fixed,” he said. “It’ll get settled, it’ll be okay.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “What can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me we have a week together, and that we’re going to get in the car and drive to Italy and do what we said we were going to do. You could tell me that you stood up to them and said, ‘Look you idiots, I’m not trained in any of this, I haven’t a clue what’s going on, and you should leave me alone.’”

  He looked down at her hands when they came to rest on the tabletop again.

  “Well?”

  He shook his head.

  “What does that mean? ‘Let’s go to the beach’?”

  “I’ve got to see the thing through,” he began and raised his hand to meet hers already coming up. “Just a bit longer but I’ll tell him I’m no use, I want out.”

  “Christ,” she said, and sagged in her chair. For a moment he thought she’d cry.

  “We’re stressed,” he said. “At least I am, I know.”

  “You can say that again. Understatement of the year I just can’t take it in yet. I really can’t.You’re actually telling me it’s a good idea to stay out of my of our apartment because . . . ?”

  All he could manage was a nod. He reached for her hands.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Come on where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “What? Where are we going to go this evening?”

  Her eyes had set into a hard look.

  “My grandparents’ place.”

  She took her fingers out of his grasp.

  “No way. I wouldn’t feel right. And don’t even say we’ll go to your mom’s, or your sister’s. It just wouldn’t be right.”

  He waited a few moments.

  “We could find a gasthaus somewhere then, a hotel even?”

  He heard her sigh.There was more than exasperation in it now.

  “Look,” she said. “This isn’t going to work. Are you listening to me?”

  “I am.You mean this apartment thing.”

  She waited until she had his eyes locked on hers.

  “I can’t do this, Felix. Do you understand that? Do you?”

  “It’ll only”

  “You’re not hearing me. It’s more than this.”

  “I’m getting time off instead,” he said. “And we can just hang around here, can’t we? It saves money, even, you see? It’s crappy but . . . ”

  He took her hands again. Her frown eased and he looked down at their hands.

  A tiny tremor brought his gaze to her face. He saw she was near tears.

  “It’ll blow over,” he said. “Really. Try not to worry. It’ll blow over.”

  “It’s just that things,” she began but paused
and drew in a fluttery breath before wiping her nose again. “We needed to talk anyway. I thought, when we were together, we’d be able to.”

  The foreboding flooded into his mind. He felt himself searching her face for clues.

  “Talk,” he said, quietly. “I never liked ‘talk.’That kind, anyway.”

  She had a stricken look now.

  “Don’t try to joke now, Felix. Please.”

  “What else can I do? Weren’t we going away for a few days?”

  “Look, we’ve been avoiding talking about it.”

  “It? What’s ‘it’?”

  “I don’t want us to talk like this. It’s been a long day.You probably slept lousy too.”

  “Maybe I’m beginning to get it,” he said. “Is it about this cop life? The crappy stuff?”

  She hesitated before answering.

  “We talked about that already.You forgot.”

  The coffee was an acid snake still worming its way through his gut.

  Then she sighed. He expected her to cry again, but she didn’t.

  “Felix. I don’t want you to be like the others. But that’s impossible, I see now. I’ve been thinking about it, trying not to think about it, running away from it, but it comes back. Now, with this horrible thing you’re involved in, I am thinking this is the start of it, and it’ll get worse.”

  “Did I make the worst mistake ever bringing you up there with those other cops? Is that what did it?”

  “No, no. Peter’s nice Andreas, the one from Klagenfurt?”

  “Andreas the cabbage?”

  “They are nice guys,” she said. “And no, nobody put the moves on me. It’s just that, well, you are in the circle or you are not.”

  “What circle?”

  “I’m not saying this right.”

  “You mean cops? There’s a wall there?”

  She returned his look but made no reply.

  “For Christ’s sake, Giuliana. Stuff like this never happens. Ask Gebi. It’s traffic, it’s domestics, or burglaries, and beer fights.”

  She said nothing. He felt like something had been decided already.

  “I need time to think,” she said.

  A closing line, Felix realized. Still, he wanted to rescue something from the day.

  “Jesus!” was all he managed, and he had not even intended to say it aloud.

  “Please, don’t get angry Felix. It’s me, my problem. Can we just leave here the banhof, I mean?”

  He moved in a daze around the table and out the doors in front of the station. He didn’t remember how noisy it had been here when he’d arrived.

  “I started,” he snapped at her when she put her hand on the straps of her carry-all. “I’ll finish carrying it. Okay?”

  When she put her arm in his, it felt like never before. He counted each step they walked to where he had parked.

  TWENTY-SIX

  BUT IT GOT A LITTLE BETTER, MUCH SOONER THAN FELIX HAD expected. They hugged in the car, and he even searched under her blouse. For a while he thought he could go all the way, right there in the street outside Giuliana’s mother’s building.

  She murmured something to him even as he kissed her, and she pushed him away gently and when he opened his eyes he saw how flushed she had become, and the film over her eyes, that lost look.

  It had him aching worse.

  “Phone me,” she said. “When you get there.”

  “How about every hour.”

  “I’m worried about you, Felix. I am.”

  “I have a mom already. What I want, what I need is”

  She put a finger to his lips.

  “Don’t let them, whoever they are, don’t do any more for those people.”

  For a few moments he didn’t know what she meant.

  He pretended to bite her finger. Her face soon turned sombre again.

  “Felix, it’s not just about this thing. It’s been there awhile. And tell me I am not abandoning you.”

  “Big word, ‘abandon.’ How long have you been thinking about this ‘talk’?”

  “I feel terrible about this, you going up there by yourself.”

  “Don’t. I spent summers there. They are easy. It’ll be a mini-holiday.” JOHN BRADY POACHER'S ROAD

  “Severe, isn’t that what you said? But they’re older, he is, your Opa Kimmel.”

  She put her hand out for the door latch.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Driving, I mean.”

  Felix drove on autopilot, his head swimming, and his thoughts beginning to clot and darken again. The words that Giuliana seemed to have left behind her in the car circled endlessly even as the spring air cannoned around from the open windows. It wasn’t helping, all this cool air. He couldn’t trap any of those words or phrases long enough to make any sense of what she had told him.

  All he remembered was her eyes glistening, and the faraway look, too often near to tears. There had to be someone else. But why would she wait until their time together to tell him? Nonsense.

  As if he weren’t in over his head already, with what had started with a drive in the hills with Gebhart only two days ago, when he had sat in the Himmelfarb kitchen eating home-made strudel. Two days? ‘A good day’s work’ Gebhart had called it, getting Hansi Himmelfarb out of the house at last? Off the deep end, for sure, he decided.

  He yelled out the window, a long, ragged screech.When he saw there were no cars behind him still, he did it again, until his throat hurt. It sort of worked, but only in that he had a burning throat that took his attention.Within a short time, he was ready to head up into the hills from the roundabout in Weiz, beginning to wonder how the hell he had gotten all this way and not paid attention to the driving.

  He earned two annoyed toots from drivers when he changed his mind at the roundabout and went the full way around, then back toward the supermarket. Oma Nagl was a sucker for blumen, any kind, but freesias most of all. Something would come of the end of this scheisslich day, with a cake, a dozen bottles of Puntigamer, and two city newspapers. Opa Nagl could laugh over them with gusto and regular quiet expressions of joyful malice that were entertaining to watch.

  He found everything in the supermarket, including freesias that would have been better bought two days ago. The key in the trunk was tricky, and he stared at the reflections on the glass while he wiggled it. It wasn’t working. He stopped and left the key hanging, his eyes still on the evening sky reflected on the glass. He wasn’t overly surprised to feel an anger surging in him now.

  So Giuliana had noticed changes in him. Sure, it was possible.

  Everybody did the denial thing, and he’d be the first to admit it. But somehow decided it was better to wait until their holiday to have a “talk”? Well for the love of Jesus, as Gebhart might say in pious, controlled exasperation. So she had noticed something, changes he had not. Well why hadn’t she said something earlier? With the running jokes about the insensitive males, and womanly intuition, or inspiration or whatever they wanted to call it? She had given up, was why, she held out no hope. Was that fair?

  He tried again and the key turned. He loaded in the beer and the cake and the newspapers and slammed the hatch shut.What had he done so wrong anyway? Before he knew it, Felix had reclined his seat and was reaching over the back seat to get at the beer. He gave the parked cars a quick once-over, opened one with the penknife he kept in the glove compartment, and took a long, long draught of warm beer. It was just fine. He held it down on the floor as a shopper pushed a trolley close by.

  On his second, shorter drink from the bottle, he saw it was snobbery, Giuliana’s thing that had come out of nowhere tonight.

  Or a day late, he had learned. She didn’t want her boyfriend being a cop; she wanted the fun-loving-student-headed-for-respectability back, the one she had started with two years ago. And maybe she was right. She had graduated and was teaching already. He had worn out some shoes and lost brain cells drifting around Europe and working for the year. Pretty simple decision for her then, no? />
  With the bottle emptying on his fifth or sixth sip, it was all coming together. It was like one of the accordions that always showed up at a Maifest outside the church walls in St. Kristoff, when the beer started to flow finally, but the wrong notes, or no notes at all, were coming out of it. He shook the bottle to be sure it was really empty. So fast? He slid it under the seat, and wondered if this was how going mad actually started.Yes, maybe this was what if felt like to go over the edge. He stared at the top of the steering wheel, a gassy burp escaping between his lips and the giddiness starting in his head. He’d make it, he knew, up to St. Kristoff and his grandparents’ place. The guilt at drinking one bottle of beer here in a car park wouldn’t cripple him.

  Parts of the steering wheel were worn smooth. He ran his hand along from axle to axle. Giuliana was right.

  He ran his fingers around the whole wheel now, and felt the parts that had received little wear. His father had driven this car as little as possible: it dies on the hills, he had said? Yes. And, you’d nearly have to get out and push it up to the village, was another.

  He had shut things out. So? Couldn’t she understand that he’d had to shut things out? Hadn’t he even told her once, a year afterwards, that he couldn’t stop thinking what his father’s last moments had been like, maybe that second or two it was still in the air, spiralling down to the rocks? Maybe it had all just brought out something maternal in her, or a pity, and he had been too dumb to spot it growing, until now, even she knew it wasn’t enough to get over what he had become.

  The scent of the freesias was winning out over his beery breath.

  He remembered what the woman wrapping them had said. Any other day it might have been funny.

  “Your liebchen will love these,” she had told him in accented German she had not grown up with. “After freesias comes diamonds, the engagement. Ever heard that?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  BERNDT, THE NAGLS’ ANCIENT WEIMARANER, WAS NEITHER SO blind nor deaf that he did not know Felix. Little enough of the dog could wag now. He did not try to get into the car when Felix opened the door, but was content to stand there and receive attentions. The lumps on the joints of his hind legs looked bigger than Felix remembered. Berndt didn’t push for more pats when Felix stopped.