Poachers Road

by John Brady

  He stopped at the H, and made it the all of the above.

  He decided to head downstairs. From the kitchen widow, he might catch a glimpse of the lights of Speckbauer’s car down the valley. He held the binoculars against his chest, and he tiptoed toward the door. His mind was already running to excuses for his oma or opa, if he woke them: I can’t sleep, I’m reading. I’m going to the klo.

  The door had a small squeak at the end of its travel. He stood in the threshold, listening for Berndt. Then he made his way to the stairs. He waited there for any sound from his grandparents. The sound of the clock from downstairs came to him, and the manifold smells of the house, something stale to do with the dog probably, his bed or food, and the ever-present soupy scent from the kitchen mixed with the smells of firewood, and dried herbs and ashes.

  He stopped on the landing.

  Kerosene?

  His heart pounded hard enough for him to wonder if wasn’t echoing through the house. He sniffed again, but it wasn’t there this time. He descended a few steps and waited. Nothing. Wasn’t there such a thing as smell hallucinations? He looked down the hall to the Berndt’s place by the kitchen door. Half-deaf or not, the dog’s head came up when Felix stepped off the stairs, a faint creak following him.

  “You know me, Berndt,” he whispered as loud as he dared.

  “Lass. Lie down.”

  The biscuits were in the usual place. The dog stayed in his basket and crunched on them. Felix crouched by him, looking through the doorways, trying to hear anything above the chewing and slobbering. He had a view out the kitchen window here, toward the road. There were no high beams from Speckbauer’s Passat snaking through the bends and darkness up to the village.

  He dropped to his knees after a while, and soon he had settled on the floor a short arm’s-length from the dog, with his back against the door jamb. He kept patting and stroking the dog, but paused several times, not a little surprised that he could now simply sit there like this, waiting.

  An ache began to make itself known above the tension that clawed at him steadily still. Though he couldn’t pin it down, Felix began to believe that it had something to do with the fact that he was a not kid anymore, a kid just sitting with the dog. It had been Olli in those years before Berndt, a supremely stupid but goodnatured dog that his grandfather hadn’t the heart to get rid of, but no different from this slob here: an uncomplicated presence, a beating heart, warmth.

  The ache grew in him. He remembered how his grandmother had told him so often he was truly his mother’s son, when she saw him with animals. Even now this old house seemed to breed contentment. The rare visits to his Opa Kimmel made him feel he was a kid again, but a kid being sent to the office. Was it possible that happiness left something of itself in the walls of this house? His father had been drawn to this place, and so much so that he had pretty well made it his home. With his eye on their teenaged daughter, he had still been able to relax here in the company of the Nagls, that elderly pair now sleeping above.

  Berndt gave a low grunt of contentment, and ran a wet tongue over Felix’s knuckles.

  “Enough is enough,” he whispered, but his hand seemed to be independent of him, and it had returned to rubbing the dog’s head.

  He looked at the darkness on the kitchen window again, but there were no car lights anywhere down the valley. He checked his phone again, and saw that there was still a signal. Then he went through the menu to be sure he had set it to vibrate.

  Thinking about Speckbauer driving through the darkness out there, he realized that he had forgotten something. Opa Kimmel had been up in Gasthaus Maier for cards too, along with Berger Willi Hartmann when Karl Himmelfarb had come by. No, he reflected, maybe forgotten wasn’t the right word. Maybe the word was hidden, hidden it from his thoughts so he wouldn’t have to do it. But it was either he talk to his grandfather first, or Speckbauer would find his own way to do it. He’d bring the maps too, and see what the old man would say about the marks on them.

  With that, Felix’s thoughts passed across the village and out to his Opa Kimmel’s farm. It was two kilometres from the Nagls’ house, out on its own, at the end of the road. Pfarrenord, they called it locally, but no one else would know it even had a name. Indeed it was the North Parish, and it always seemed windy and cooler there.

  The place where the hailstones break, he’d heard it referred to.

  Opa Kimmel would be sleeping too. Or maybe he’d lying awake there himself though. Would he be thinking about the decision he’d made, to finally move into the village? There’d be regret no doubt, but a secret relief too, Felix guessed, something the old man would never admit to. No more than he’d admit that the solitude he always claimed he preferred had actually become loneliness. The simple facts of old age, the approach of illness and death, had thawed him out enough now. He’d let a relative persuade him that he’d be doing them a favour no, an honour, as Lisi had heard and dryly reported to Felix by coming to live in part of their house. There’d be a tidy rent, of course, but they meant well.Why shouldn’t his relatives make some money out of the arrangement?

  Pfarrenord, he thought. His grandfather used to go on about eagles, how they made Pfarrenord their home. Maybe it was some effort to instill something in his grandson, now that his own son had escaped to live elsewhere. Eagles were defiant and proud, no doubt, models of independence and power. But as Felix grew, he had begun to sense something else lodged in those platitudes, and it gave him pause to consider them in a new light. He began to see them now as loaded with something else.

  He soon picked up hints from the spines of the old books he remembered looking at on those rare, but interminable visits. One was The Realm of Eagles, he recalled, with lots of photos of planes and pilots and parachutes. Eagles on Crete, he remembered too, a fading paperback from a company Felix had never seen elsewhere.

  He had looked through it several times, studied the photos of paratroops and planes, and groups of smiling young men. How different they had seemed from the studio photo that had always hung in the hall, the one with Felix’s own great-grandfather in his Austrian Army uniform from the First World War.

  So maybe that was where the coldness came from then, that politics thing, that knot of circumstances no one could never untangle, and that no one talked about. Even though families up here had known one another for generations, you seldom spoke carelessly outside your own home.

  Felix tried to remember the year of Oma Kimmel’s death. He remembered his father telling him that he had been 13 when his mother died. Was it just quack medicine that people believed when they said that stress brought on cancer? Surely Opa Kimmel wouldn’t have been surprised that his own son soon gravitated toward the Nagls, and that he found excuses to spend his time there.

  It came to Felix then that he had not fully understood at all how his own parents had shielded him, and Lisi too, from the remote person who was their grandfather. Now he wondered if Oma Kimmel had spent her own life, and probably her health, protecting her son from the same cold presence.

  The dog slid onto its side with a low wheeze of contentment.

  Felix stopped rubbing its ears and stared instead at the faint liquid slit of its eyes. Sleeping, yes. He looked around the hall again. This house, he thought, where nothing was complicated and no one was appraising you. It was a refuge.

  He was actually getting drowsy himself now. He let his eyes close, and Giuliana’s face came to him. He struggled to hang onto it as other thoughts edged in, even as it became her hurt look, the reproachful one when they’d had words.The “talk” she wanted: he’d been annoyed because he’d been thinking things were actually going okay. The new police force need people like him. Lots of things would open up for him in the new police force. Even Gebi had conceded that. He might even go back to Uni for evening courses, and maybe even get paid for it too. Next thing you’d know, there’d be the applications for the Alpines, or even the Cobra, and plainclothes jobs anywhere across Austria. Why not even think a
bout international stuff too?

  The vibrations from his phone startled him, and the dog’s eyes opened.

  Speckbauer didn’t sound one bit drowsy.

  “You’re doing okay?”

  Felix didn’t know what to say. He patted the dog’s head again, but the eyes stayed open now, the ears up.

  “I’m awake, for sure. Where are you?”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I don’t want to wake my grandparents. Are you on the road?”

  “I’m outside, beyond the light there in the yard.”

  “But I don’t see your car I didn’t see it coming up the valley.”

  “You’re in the house?”

  “Yes. I’m downstairs. I can come out.”

  “Stay put,” said Speckbauer. “We’ll take care of things. Has there been anything since? Any noise or stuff?”

  “No.”

  “Good. This is what we’re doing, for the time being, so listen.

  Me and Franzi are moving about out here, eyeballing the place.

  We’re going to keep doing that for a while. Verstehst?”

  “I get it, but what do I do?”

  “What? You want me to sit beside you and hold your hand?”

  “It’s dark, what can you see?”

  “Pretty well anything I want to damned well see. Really, believe me, we’ve done this kind of work before.”

  “If I may say, Herr Oberstleutnant, I think we should try to get things clear.”

  “Nothing is clear,” said Speckbauer sharply. “Nix. So save it.

  It’s just the work. We’re in the business of wading around in a big swamp. It’s called Der schein trügt, this area we work in: the land of Nothing-Is-Clear. Shitty, isn’t it, but that’s life.”

  ‘All is not how it looks,’ Felix thought.

  Speckbauer didn’t say anything for several moments.

  “How am I going to explain this to them?” Felix asked.

  “Deal with it later. It’ll work out.”

  “What should I be doing, though? There has to be something.”

  “Know what I want from you right now? Go to bed. That’s it.

  But here’s something to think about while you’re nodding off.

  Anyone passing down the way here, this road, can see your car parked there in the yard. That’s not helpful.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  FELIX JERKED HIS HEAD AWAY FROM THE WALL. HE COULD remember deciding to rest it there, but only for a moment.The milky half-light softened the interior of the farmhouse and made the view from where Felix had slouched both mysterious and familiar. There was a glow at the edges of the hilltops which were framed by the kitchen window, but a handful of stars held out in the pale blue above.

  Five-thirty. Berndt watched him with doleful eyes, his eyebrows shooting up and down but his head never stirring from its resting place on his paws. Felix switched off the yard light and threw on an old jacket. Slowly he opened the kitchen door and stepped into the yard. The birds were busy, and the cold tang of air that met his face revived him. He heard the pigs shuffling, one of them kicking a plank, and a grunt, as he made his way across the yard to the cars.

  He slowed and even stopped several times on his way, but could not see traces of any visitor last night. Nothing had changed. In the distance he heard a cowbell clanking.

  His phone went off.

  “You’re not going for a little drive now, are you?” said Speckbauer.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in a ditch. Freezing my ass off.”

  “I can’t see you.”

  “Then I’m doing my job. Look, stay there. And don’t walk around yet. Me and Franzi are going to do a bit of basic police work.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “No. Now we have a bit of light, I want to give the place a lookover, from where your car is down to the road. We’ll see if there are signs of any company last night, any uninvited guests. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Meanwhile, wait,” said Speckbauer.

  Felix heard his voice change. He seemed to be getting up.

  “Now remember,” said Speckbauer. “Don’t phone anyone.

  Right?”

  “Who would I be phoning?”

  “The local Gendarmerie, that’s who. We’re handling it.”

  Speckbauer seemed to be waiting for a reply. Felix wondered if Speckbauer had guessed he’d have been thinking of Gebhart, or even Schroek.

  “I understand.”

  “Gut. Now can you get some coffee started or something? It’s only polite.”

  “You’re coming down to the house after?”

  “Of course we are. Franzi and I have a good spiel ready and we’ll come in off the road.We’ll be visiting to, let me see, ‘speak with you on a very pressing matter.’ If he asks, your grandfather.”

  “He’s not stupid, you know.”

  “Did I say he was?”

  Felix closed the connection first. He looked through bleary eyes around the fields. Speckbauer must be near the orchard. As Felix stared at it, movement to his right made him turn. It was Franzi, the spook, looking pale and very cold. As he nodded, the sky, glowing lemon where they met the hills, glanced once off his glasses. Then he said something into his collar, turned away, and stepped back behind the firs.

  Felix didn’t move, but pretended instead to savour the crisp air, the glory of a mountain sunrise. He was able to control his breathing, even if spots began to appear in front of his eyes. The problem he was focusing on however was that he didn’t trust his knees not to buckle the minute he began to stroll about the yard. He was putting his anger into preventing Speckbauer, wherever he was, from enjoying any sign of his shock.

  It wasn’t the sight of Franzi shrouded under what looked like a hooded army poncho, with the reflected dawn on his glasses giving his face the look of an insect up close that had Felix now measuring out his breath and struggling to keep an appearance of composure. It was the glimpse of what Franzi’s hand was holding down by its strap. It was a sturmgewehr, the assault rifle that every Gendarmeriepost had, which was taken out only for drills and inspection. This one with a peculiarly large sight attached.

  After a minute Felix made his way back to the kitchen and began to prepare drip coffee. He cursed aloud when he dropped the lid, but he trapped it quickly with his foot to stop it skittering on the floor. He stared at it before picking it up, as though it might have a life of its own there, and tried to clear his thoughts.

  Gebi would be up already. He pulled out the phone but hesitated then, and gazed back out the window and up to the slopes. A flood of sunlight built up behind the hills was about to burst.

  “We’re taking care of it,” Speckbauer had pronounced. And “we”

  were . . .

  Someone was stirring upstairs. Now the dog was getting up himself, the lazy and contented old bag, plodding clumsily down through the kitchen. Felix closed the phone. He had enough to think about. He’d need a plan, a clear head, to sort out Speckbauer.

  Felix’s grandfather clumped down the stairs half-sideways.

  “I thought I heard someone.”

  He stared at the kitchen window with a faraway look in his eyes.

  Then he turned to the dog.

  “Have you let this old bag of bones out yet, Felix?”

  “No.”

  “Out you hound,” his grandfather growled at the dog. “You’ve had your charity.”

  “I’ll take him out, Opa.”

  “Hell, no. Let him go wander out there. Or he’ll end up like me when I don’t do a day’s work locked up in the joints.”

  “The thing is, I’m expecting someone to drop by here.”

  His grandfather turned to him.

  “A visitor? Up here? At this hour? And why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I can’t understand what you say, some of it.”

  A rueful look crossed his grandfather’s face.

  “I
t’s too early for all this hubbub. But if it’s a beautiful maiden you’re expecting, I’ll put my teeth in for that. Does the name start with a G?”

  “I wish. It’s another policeman.”

  Felix took in his grandfather’s skeptical look.

  “Here? Our house? Visiting?”

  “He phoned me. He’s on his way back from a job. He wants to stop by, and have a chat.”

  The coffee burbled as it fed down through the filter. His grandfather tilted his head slightly and squinted.

  “Why not,” he said. “If that’s the crazy time the man works.”

  Felix watched him pour coffee, and place a small cookie on the saucer he’d be bringing upstairs for Oma Nagl. His grandfather yawned and headed back to the stairs.There he stopped, his foot on the first step, and looked over.

  “Is this visit about last night, or something?”

  Felix had prepared for the question, and even tried to rehearse an answer.

  “Can I tell you later, Opa?”

  Felix had a half-cup of coffee in him when he heard his grandfather’s voice upstairs again, speaking to Oma, and then her reply in a voice still clotted with sleep.

  His grandfather paused at the bottom of the stairs, exchanged a look with him and shuffled on to prepare some breakfast. Felix watched him pause as he stooped and craned his neck to see into the fridge. He took out some rye bread to add to the buns on the table.

  “Sure enough,” he said then, and stopped filling the kettle.

  “Here’s someone now. Two men, a white VW.”

  Felix got up.

  “Opa I’m sorry to ask you this”

  “You need to talk in private. I knew you’d ask.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank my arse. But I want to meet them first, look ’em in the eye. I want to give them The Look. You know what The Look is?”

  Felix waited.

  “It says:You’re in my house.These are the mountains, not some city street where putting on a suit makes you important. So mind your manners, Gendarmerie or not. And don’t try to put one over on this boy here. That’s what The Look says.”