by John Brady
“Traffic goes two ways. One way goes drugs, counterfeit.
Human beings. Weapons. Lousy, old-fashioned, lucrative cigarettes.
Other way goes payment.”
“But why are they up here? Nothing goes on up here.”
“It’s not coincidence. There’s some connection. That’s all I’m guessing.”
Speckbauer’s eyes took on an intensity, but the sun’s glare made his face sickly.
“I see three, maybe four, guys involved,” he said. “The two in the woods, one a fool and the other a lesser fool. The lesser fool thought he had an arrangement. The arrangement was with a local guy, or a pair of locals. Any more than that would have made our Horseman fellow suspicious. He wouldn’t have come up here.”
Speckbauer seemed to have used up all his words. He stared at a distant hillside, as though the patches of light and shade there held patterns he intended to read. Behind him, in the shed, Felix heard pigs snuffling and half-heartedly kicking against something.
“Last night’s visitor,” Felix started to say.
“You mean ‘the snooper’?” Speckbauer said without turning.
“That was someone from here. Some local. Someone wants to see if Gendarme Kimmel keeps his work papers in his car. They want to know what that boy told you, the Himmelfarb kid.”
Felix looked up at the window of the bedroom where he had spent the night. He imagined himself skipping upstairs to take the maps down to show Speckbauer, just to see the expression on his face. But no: this was something he had to do himself first after he confided in Gebhart. Gebi had been around; he had the lowdown on Speckbauer and Franzi, the fly-in cops with so much baggage. Gebi would understand.
“Maybe someone thinks,” Speckbauer went on, pausing at each word. “That the Himmelfarb boy wandered the forests at night.
Maybe he even saw the work done on the two. Who knows. But if it was someone who knows about the two dead guys, or the Himmelfarbs, there other things that are heavy on their minds, you can be sure.”
When Felix didn’t say anything, Speckbauer looked over at him.
“This is why I say ‘local,’” said Speckbauer. “For one thing, they are concerned that Mr. Horseman’s friends will be paying a call. Do they know who they’re dealing with, whoever did this?
They know enough, I think. Diamonds are an easy way to take payment. The other thing . . . well another time, perhaps, after we leave this lovely place.”
“What other thing?”
“Well it concerns you, Gendarme. Remember we talked about coincidences? Joked a little too? Is it coincidence that you, a son of Felix Kimmel, is involved here?”
Felix returned Speckbauer’s steady gaze.
“People want to believe the best of others, I find. Colleagues, friends. Family.” “Everyone except a certain type of detective.”
Speckbauer shrugged.
“And someone might wonder, well, why you joined the Gendarmerie. I mean, we have guys who didn’t finish high school.
When we’re one big happy family, the Polizei and us, you’ll be a cop in that new organization. A pretty far-sighted career plan, no?”
Felix bit back an answer.
“Your father, also a Gendarme, with a spotless record. Super guy. But the last few months before his accident, he’s wandering all over the place. He’s out of his area, on the road a lot. He’s having a beer here, a coffee there well, he’s everywhere. And why? Nobody knows. Was he looking for something, someplace? An investigation?
Bored? Now, Judenburg’s a fine place, but was he looking at his retirement package and thinking, Maria, this is going to be less than I hoped”
Felix’s hand had come up without his thinking.
“Shut up,” he said.
Speckbauer didn’t shift his eyes from Felix’s face. Felix let his hand down slowly. He glanced for an instant at where his hand had begun to twist Speckbauer’s collar. Then he turned away, spots bursting in front of his eyes.
The greens from the new shoots and grasses were of different tints, he noticed. Dawn had moved on to morning completely now.
“Anyway,” said Speckbauer. “I’ll finish. If I remember some of the report, there was mention of maps.Your father had them spread out all over the place. Old ones, too, your mother remembers.Your father had an intense interest in them, according to those statements. Very intense. And now, they are not to be found apparently.
Odd.”
Speckbauer’s words seemed to come from far off now. He waited for Felix to look his way before turning back toward the farmhouse. He made a flinty smile.
“Too much talk. It doesn’t settle anything.”
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Felix began. He let the rest of his words go.
“It didn’t happen. Stress? You should see Franzi in action.
Jesus: a maniac.”
He looked over.
“Don’t worry, it’s no big secret. Franzi walloped me so hard I was seeing spaceships with little green men, not just stars. It was a medication thing. He had a lot of pain. Apparently he was sleepwalking.”
“Sleepwalking,” said Felix, numbly. The tiredness had suddenly landed on his shoulders like a dead weight.
“A perfect excuse. ‘Re-enacting’ said the shrink. ‘You mean he’s going to keep doing it?’ I ask. ‘We don’t know.’ ‘I should tie him up? Lock him in? Wear a helmet?’ They don’t have the answers for post-trauma. I sleep with one eye open. Look, I need to use a land phone.”
THIRTY-FIVE
FELIX FELT NO MORE AWAKE AFTER A THIRD CUP OF COFFEE, BUT at least now, with the thought of Gebhart’s wary gaze, he had some kind of direction to follow.
Occasionally he heard Speckbauer’s voice from the hall. Along with a tone of disbelief, or impatience, or both, but there was more often a steady metronomic ‘Ja’ that Speckbauer seemed to employ to speed up a conversation.
“Mein Gött but he is a different man on the phone,” Felix’s oma whispered. She nodded toward her husband. “I thought I’d heard them all from the count here.”
“I keep reinforcements,” said Felix’s opa. “Don’t worry. For when I am too feeble to chase you about.”
“And he is speaking foreign too.”
“It’ll be a hell of a phone bill,” said his grandfather.
“He will pay,” Felix heard himself say.
“They will pay,” said his grandfather. “The state.”
“He writes a lot of things down,” said Oma Nagl behind her hand.
“The Franzi is a character I can tell you, Felix,” added Opa Nagl, also with his hand to the side of his mouth. “He went out to see the pigs. To talk to them, he said. Where do you find such people? You were a bit wild, natürlich. But these are special.”
Felix made a greater effort to appear relaxed.
“An accident with chemicals,” his grandfather whispered. “Lieber Gött imagine the pain. He must be very dedicated to go on.”
Felix realized he had been thinking of the pair, this odd couple of cops, in the same apartment. One, damaged and close to blowing his lid all the time, the other, an amiable pro on the outside but really, as cunning as they come, and impossible to read. But even Speckbauer could not quite cover up the signs that he was also full of some kind of a ferocity. Maybe he was just as messed up in his head as the other.
“‘Kripo,’” his grandmother repeated, softly. “Kriminal Polizei.
It’s like those police shows on the TV.”
“Shows?” his grandfather said, almost indignantly. “The American dreck that half the country watches? But Felix: this has to be good for you, no? They see you work, they see how settled you are now . . . ”
Opa Nagl paused, with an awkward smile.
“When your people, our good old Gendarmerie that we know so well, our fellows – or boys when your team gets together with the Polizei, boy, that’ll be the perfect situation for you. Unbeatable, I say.”
Oma Nagl put her hand over his.
“You have it good, thank God,” she said to Felix.
“Do you know if you’ll keep the uniform though?” asked his grandfather. “The tellerkappe? Christ, if that goes, all is lost.”
“Lieber Gött,” said Oma Nagl. “Why is a little beret like that important? The tradition? Ask the boy about promotions and suchlike.”
“It is important. A symbol is important to ordinary people. I mean, when I see a Gendarme, and there he is under that cap, I can relax.Yes! I know I am dealing with a normal fellow. But Lord Jesus, when I see the Polizei there in Graz, I do not relax. No.”
“It’s just city life,” whispered Oma Nagl. “Bus conductor uniforms scare you.”
Felix’s grandfather gave his wife a long look.
“You,” he said. “You are the same. Remember on the TV the other night? The early news, the seven-thirty?”
“Those police talking in Vienna?” she asked.
“You said something about them. You did! ‘Too many police uniforms in one place,’ I think you said or ‘too much uniform’?”
“Ach, don’t be silly. With you it is your conscience, what little is left, and the naughty things of your youth. Or it’s just political you think uniforms are for the bad times, for trouble.”
Opa Nagl’s face took on a contented expression. He eyed Felix.
“This is Mrs. Law and Order, a woman who liked a wild one, once upon a time?”
“You were a naughty kid, Opa?”
“Of course I”
Oma Nagl held up her hand. She tilted her head to hear Speckbauer’s voice growing louder in the hall.Words were clear now.
“Jesus and Mary,” Felix heard, as Speckbauer’s irritation broke over something. He watched his grandparents’ eyes grow bigger.
“For Christ’s sake, what’s the goddamned delay? This is the digital age!”
A soft smile settled on his grandfather’s face now.
“Army,” he whispered. “Must have been. Listen to all that bad language.”
“Damn it, Martin! Step on it, will you? We need to move on this!”
Oma Nagl rolled her eyes. Her husband shook his head, half in admiration.
“Ah we were all a bit naughty then,” he said. It took a moment for Felix’s addled brain to pick up the thread.
“Those little Puch motorbikes we’d ‘borrow.’ Beer of course.
Practical jokes. All fun. But those days, who knows.”
“They all want cars, now, the kids,” Oma Nagl added. “For you-know-what.”
“Nature studies.”
“You don’t miss those annoying whiny two-strokes though,” his grandfather added. “The Japs beat them into the ground with their motorbikes. Just like their little rice cookers beat up NSU and Audi and Merc and”
“Rice cookers is not polite thing to say these days,” said Oma Nagl.
“Rudolf Diesel is a saint,” he retorted. “No rice cooked in a diesel engine, girl.”
“Not so many motorbikes now?” Felix asked.
“Right. But older guys like them still I think, a few anyways.
‘The old days’ kind of thing perhaps. They’ll come back, I tell you.”
“Ach,” said Oma Nagl, and brushed away his opinion. “They are still dangerous. Even with grown men on them. Not dangerous to me, no, I am in a car, but what chance do you have? Remember that crackpot there, not long back? There were still patches of snow even, and he comes out of nowhere. A madman.”
“Yes,” said Felix’s opa. “I remember that. Like a pirate or something. It was on the bend down the far side of the church. He must have been bottled to be out in the cold like that. Big red face no, a beard on him. A Viking or something.”
“A red beard? Red hair?”
“I suppose. He had goggles. Like a Scotsman, I thought later.
Like I was saying, he must have been pretty well drunk to drive like that . . . ”
The conversation ebbed. Felix’s mind kept backpedalling, spiralling, coming up empty. He made a long, aching stretch.
Yawning, he missed half of his opa’s words.
“God, that guy Speckbauer knows them all,” he said.
“He will surely apologize,” said Oma Nagl. “He must be under a lot of pressure but I still think he is a gentleman underneath. It’s his manner. He’s not a city type.”
Opa Nagl groaned.
“Like he never did any mischief, this Horst? Right, Felix?”
Oma Nagl waved away her husband’s observation.
“Right Felix? A man should have mischief, no?”
Felix rubbed more at his eyes.
“Every road in life should have its scenic routes. The autobahn is direct and fast of course, but it is on the byroads up in God’s country that one can savour real life.”
“Mein Gött, will you listen to that,” said Oma Nagl.
“Rossegger has come back from the dead.”
Felix eyed the shy smile his grandfather had now, the turning motion he made with his finger as though winding up a toy.
Oma Nagl began filling the sink. Felix took in the wooden table where they sat. It was hundreds of years old. His gaze wandered from chair to kacheloffen, back over the geraniums on the window sill, and then to the cats’ dishes licked clean next to a pair of boots.
Nothing should change here, he felt.
“Yes,” his grandfather murmured, an ear cocked again to the more subdued tones of Speckbauer’s voice in the hall yet. “One must make one’s own map for a full life.”
“Opa, I want to ask you something about this.”
“Advice? Of course.You have come to the right man.”
“No not joking. It’s about maps.”
“You need one? I think we have some. Oh, I know. It’s that stuff from the shed. I forgot. Yes, your dad asked me about them, I remember.”
“They were his, weren’t they?”
“No. That’s the thing, I remember now. I think he said he got them up at his father’s place. The old house.”
There was something in the way his grandfather said it, ‘the old house,’ that stayed with Felix.
“He dug them up, I think. Not literally. They were up there somewhere. But they’re old, aren’t they? They’re not antiques, I don’t think. Are they? No.”
Felix’s mind went back to the map with the marks on it.
“They were not his?”
“No. They were his father’s. Or the father collected maps or something. And that’s what sort of struck me then, when he left them here. He said he’d be back to look at them later, that he didn’t have time. “ “Later?”
“Well, we know what that meant,” said Opa Nagl. “Maybe it’s funny now, but I was thinking at the time that your grandfather, the old bas, well I thought he might come to the house here and accuse me of stealing them or something.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes.That’s the way he is, the way he was. God forgive me.”
Felix said nothing, and for a few moments imagined his father driving off from the farmyard here in a hurry, waving as he went out of sight.
“Your dad left them here in a big plastic bag somewhere. He said he wanted to show them to me. He said he had some questions about them for me. Sometime.”
“May God and his angels be good to him,” said Felix’s grandmother softly, in the quiet that followed.
Speckbauer’s voice was barely audible now. Felix saw that his oma seemed to be distracted in her dishwashing.
Felix heard the receiver being returned to its cradle in the hall.
Pages were turned, and Speckbauer cleared his throat. Then he was in the open doorway after a polite single tap on the door.
“Many thanks,” he said. “Most helpful. I have left something under the phone to cover the call.”
“Not necessary,” said Opa Nagl, a little too quickly.
“Still,” said Speckbauer with a show of reluctance.
“Really. Graz is nothing these days.”
But again I thank you.”
“Ah, Graz is not enough for you fellows,” said Opa Nagl. “See Felix? Stick with these guys and you’ll go places.”
Speckbauer offered a noncommittal smile. Felix wondered if he’d pretend he wasn’t picking up the signal from his wily, inquisitive opa.
“Vienna,” Speckbauer murmured. “Big shots my eye. They can be as slow as anywhere else.”
“Coffee?” from his grandmother.
“No thank you, Frau Nagl. But how kind. We must do a little work.”
He nodded at Felix.
“If I may use the klo before we leave?”
Felix waited until he heard the door close. He stood slowly.
“Opa.Was Opa Kimmel much for ‘mischief,’ the kind you were on about there?”
Felix’s grandfather made a grimace that was half bewilderment, half suspicion.
“You have strange questions in your head today.”
“A good fellow then,” said Felix.
“Don’t kid yourself,” said his opa sharply. “We kept out of his way. Such a
“Walter!”
Felix looked over at his oma. How rarely she said her husband’s first name, he realized. A dish poised in her hand with suds sliding down, she stared at her husband.
“I know,” said Felix’s opa, with a dismissive gesture of his hand.
“I know.”
Water running in the pipes made Felix’s grandmother turn back.
“Oops,” she said then. “I forgot! I must put proper towels there.”
She wiped her hands as she scurried across the floor, and down the hall.
“Tell me now,” said Felix. “About Opa Kimmel.”
“No way! We are related, Felix. It’s not proper. Your oma is right, damn her. Of course I don’t mean that. God help my clumsy words.”
“Political?”
“Christ no that’s easy enough in Austria, boy. No. Don’t you know what he was up to, the SS thing?”
“I know they found his age. Something about a fake name.”
“But he was the man of the house at sixteen. His father?”
“Stalingrad, I heard.”
