Poachers Road

by John Brady

  “Franz.”

  “So you do know him. Looks like the devil sent him back up?”

  The light changed. Two elderly women came in the door. One was shaped like a question mark, and wore the green and grey loden. They were greeted and shown a table. Felix heard the hissing of the espresso machine pumping. He rubbed at his eyes.

  “You know, it’s about time I got out of this place anyway,” said Kurt. “Sure, there’s business. But the crowd is different in the last few years.Younger? Maybe I can’t keep up anymore.”

  Felix did not turn away from the window. Outside on the pavement, the woman reached into the pram, and smiling, began to lift out her baby. An older woman who had stopped and greeted her was making those goo-goo sounds that babies seemingly liked.

  “You feel sorry for me there, Mister Gendarme?”

  “Shut up,” said Felix, without turning from the window.

  As the baby was lifted from the pram, Felix saw that it had been crying. He watched the older woman start a little pantomime to distract it. The mom undid the baby’s hat. The short hair was orange and the sun caught it as the hat came off.The mother gently bobbed the redhead in her arms to soothe it.

  “Oh you’re going to do well,” he heard Kurt mutter. “You’re an arschloch to begin with.”

  Felix turned toward Kurt. He took into the pouchy, bleary eyes.

  Under his stubble the sallow skin lay like butter gone bad.

  “You ever see a big red-headed fellow in your pub?”

  “A red-headed guy? I don’t look at their hair, especially a guy.

  What, am I weird or something?”

  “Hair like that over there,” said Felix. He watched Kurt squint through the sun filled window toward the street.

  “Like that little one’s? You don’t see that often, do you. Maybe he’ll get a job as a clown when he grows up. Is that what you mean, have I seen any clowns in the stübe?”

  Felix kept up his stare.

  “This is ‘weird question day’?” Kurt added. “Why would I bother to remember something like that?”

  “Because it’s out of the ordinary. Think of a big guy, a beard to go with it.”

  “A beard? Like some big Kris Kringle?”

  “A big fellow, like I said.”

  Kurt’s eyes slipped out of focus. After a few moments a wry expression settled on his face. He shook his head and then began to slowly rub his eyes, and then his whole face with his hands. He stopped abruptly and let down his hands.

  “Well hell,” he said and smiled. “Funny how the mind works.

  ‘Red hair.’ ‘Guy.’ None of that means anything at first. But there was a big fellow coming in here, to the pub, every now and then.

  Stephi would know him, yes she had a laugh with him. Big, yes.

  But a beard? I don’t know about that.”

  “But a local guy? From the area, right?”

  “Who knows? But he had a helmet yes. He looked like one of those Hells Angels fellows that you see on the TV.”

  “And Stephi . . . ?”

  “Oh she’d have an eye for the likes of him. Yes, talk to her.

  Speck is probably doing a big thing for her right now. Beats me, truly.”

  “Is there a name on this guy?”

  “I don’t know. But she called him something, if I remember.

  No. Wait: something to do with how he looked. Ah, shit, I forget.”

  “Come on. ‘Giant?’ ‘Motorbike man’?”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Hells Angel?”

  “This is like I am drunk, this game. Maybe I just dreamed you and Speck have been talking to me, asking me weird questions. And now, this guess-a-word?”

  He lifted his hand to his forehead.

  “Maybe I have a fever.”

  Then his face froze and he stared at a point just over Felix’s head.

  “Wait! ‘Foxy,’ I think. Yes? Ah Christ, Stephi talks so much I have to ignore her a lot of the time. But she was laughing about it.

  ‘Foxy.’ I think. Who knows, but . . . ?”

  He put the knuckles of both hands together and winked.

  “No real name? Just to do with red hair?”

  Kurt sat back with a look of resigned understanding.

  “Really,” he said. “You guys are living on a different planet.”

  “What about Stephi?” Speckbauer asked as he slipped back into the booth.

  “What about her?”

  “Does she like ‘adventures,’ say? How she might leave for a couple of days with a new flame?”

  “Hmm. A pavement hostess, you’re trying to say?”

  “Did I say prostitute? No. I said ‘adventure.’”

  “Well yes, if you like,” said Kurt. “She is a person like that. And if she weren’t so damn good with the frigging spenders who keep me in business, well I’d have let her go on a permanent ‘adventure’ a long time ago.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE STREETS AND LANES OF WEIZ HAD BEEN TAKEN OVER BY the mid-morning people, as Felix had begun to think of them when he was – actually wasn’t attending his lectures back in Graz. The school would not break for lunch for an hour yet. Pensioners took their time, many of them meeting and greeting, speaking in the melodious accent that expressed politeness and a circumspect kind of humour. There were plenty of shops in Weiz, plenty of mothers and infants and babies, steady streams of cars, new most of them.

  The clouds were staying away and leaving a postcard sky above the town. The winter that had lingered here until recently seemed a distant, impossible event that had passed quickly, not the dreary, endless months that had lain over the place. The blossoms were out all over the backyard orchards. From somewhere over the next street were the sounds of a pneumatic drill, and the episodic whine and gnarl of saws, followed by the taps of at least two hammers and an occasional yell. A tractor turned into the car park for the supermarket.

  Speckbauer was trying to get a glimpse through the window blinds on Stephi’s apartment. He pushed the buzzer again, and held his head close to the door.

  “It’s working, all right.”

  Felix’s thoughts kept returning to the maps that now lay in that bag on the floor of his car. His father must have talked to Opa Kimmel when he took, or borrowed, the maps at least. And what had the old man told him?

  “Phone her number again,” said Speckbauer.

  Felix held up the piece of paper on which Speckbauer had taken Stephi’s number from Kurt. Six rings, and again, nothing.

  “It’s a bullshit number,” said Speckbauer. “‘I’m sure of it.’” He mimicked Kurt.

  “‘I have to phone her a lot ’cause she’s late.’”

  “Her car maybe?” suggested Felix.

  “Yeah, yeah. A Mazda 131. Look, take a stroll around there, see if it’s parked, okay? I’m going to make some calls here, see if I can move this damn Stephi.”

  “Blue?”

  “Blue-green,” said Speckbauer. “Old and crappy. Maybe she parks it away from here for vandals or something? Five, ten minutes.

  I’ll be here, okay?”

  Felix began with the car park for the Billa. He threaded his way through the shoppers’ cars, standing on tiptoe to see over a row, and tried to remember which lanes led off the streets nearby. Maybe the car was being repaired?

  He began to imagine this Stephi, cruising around somewhere, her arm dangling out the window and the blonde hair flying about, part of her ‘presentation’ to snare her date. No, he thought then:

  Speckbauer was right. If the guy was as sharp as Kurt had said, he’d have his own wheels.They’d hardly be an old box like a Mazda 131.

  His thoughts only grew stronger, and his attention on the cars kept on wavering. He had to make an effort to notice specifics. He imagined his father behind the wheel, whistling those stupid old waltzes and polkas, tapping the beat on the wheel: then the instant when he knew he couldn’t avoid the truck. Again, his father, studying the maps he h
ad gotten from his own father’s house.Wondering, noting the marks on them, trying to solve some puzzle that had him covering the back roads for weeks, or even longer, before the accident.

  The word echoed again in Felix’s mind. He stopped even trying to spot the makes on the row of cars ahead. Instead of the car park and the door to the supermarket, now he saw the steep sides of the klamm where his father’s car had been crushed, and the wooden taferl just inside the barrier wall.The Association wanted to replace it with a stone effort, a statue of St. Christopher, with the plaque under it. Felix’s mother did not.

  Accident. It felt like something had been spinning too fast in his mind but had now come loose, shredding his thoughts. He could sleep for a week, he realized. With Giuliana. And with all the bickering and digs past and forgotten, never to return. And somewhere far from here, far from Stefansdorf, and most of all far from anywhere Speckbauer was ever likely to turn up.

  There had to be vacancies when the amalgamation happened.

  He could even get a spot up near Salzburg, maybe, where he and Giuliana could make a fresh start there. Into his mind now came the view from the high mountain paths over Kitzbüehl, those twisting bike trails, and the immense purple mountains across the valleys so far below. So high, your breathing was up the minute you got on the bike, even.

  The doors of the Billa slid open. An old woman emerged, pushing her trolley feebly. Her head was over at an angle, and she stopped to look around for a car. Had she forgotten where she was?

  He should be helping the old girl, real work, instead of this cat and mouse game. But she began to move, sideways like a ship drifting, and as he watched her, his thoughts began sliding away again.

  He was startled out of his blank daydream by words that suddenly formed in his head. A police matter, the maps were a police matter. What voice was in his head saying that, his police training, the so-called logical part of his brain? But there was something to that, he remembered now. It had been a joke at the Gendarmerie college right from when they had heard it used in the classes. ‘A police matter’ was the big, heavy phrase you had to learn to deploy if citizens got whiny, or uncooperative, or pissy. It was doubtless supposed to trigger some serious Austrian obedience reflex?

  Again he looked back toward the laneway leading to where Speckbauer was on the phone still, scheming no doubt, while he kept a vigil for this Stephi. He should go to the car and bring the maps to Speckbauer and explain.

  Then Felix swore under his breath. For what, he thought: so Speckbauer could worm his way like a spreading rot further into his family?

  The old woman and her trolley had changed direction. She greeted him cautiously, in a thin reedy voice. Something about the moment the anxious look on the old woman’s face, his tired, crazed mind just giving up, the thought of how simple things should be with Giuliana something scattered Felix’s confusion then.

  “Grüss,” he called back to her, gently, and smiled. He had decided something.

  He turned his back to the lane where Speckbauer’s Passat was parked, and he opened his phone. He thumbed through to Gebhart’s mobile. For those few seconds before Gebhart’s voice came on, Felix looked over the rooftops at the green hilltops to the north and west. His mind was up by the streams that still ran hard over the rocky beds up there, and on to where the snow still lay on the higher mountains behind, like sheets blown off a clothesline into the shade under trees where the sun could not yet reach.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “ZERO,” SAID SPECKBAUER.

  He took a last look at the door to the apartment.

  “Zero. You think she’d leave a key in some obvious spot, like any other citizen.”

  “What now?”

  Speckbauer looked at him.

  “You’re keen, now, are you? Well that’s good. Okay, I’m expecting a call.”

  “Concerning Stephi Giesl?”

  “She has some paper on her. I gave her a scan. EKIS shows her living an interesting life some years ago. Yes, she has her very own Strafregister.”

  “Fingerprints? What were her crimes?”

  “Her adventures were pretty well the same as Kurt’s. Isn’t that a coincidence? Well, except for a few items. Mainly her interest in drugs. Forging signatures on cheques is a bit primitive, I have to say.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Seven years. But that doesn’t mean it stopped, does it.”

  Speckbauer let his gaze travel around the car park.

  “I am hoping . . . ” Felix began.

  Speckbauer turned to him, with the now-familiar combination of cynicism and a cautious geniality.

  “. . . to get a bit of personal time,” said Felix.

  “You wish to absent yourself?”

  Felix looked blankly back, and he nodded.

  “Personal matters, I imagine?”

  “Exactly. But perhaps I can be of assistance at a later time.”

  “Be of assistance, eh well that would be good.”

  Felix was sure he was hearing sarcasm now but yet again Speckbauer’s easy smile confused him. Speckbauer turned back to his survey.

  “Yes,” he said, “It’ll take time. It always does.”

  “I will drop you back at my grandparents’ place then?”

  “You will,” Speckbauer replied, slowly and reflectively. “Thank you. By the way, have we resolved this concern you had earlier? Your grandparents, their safety?”

  “I think so.Yes, I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

  “You are very protective of them.”

  Felix said nothing. Speckbauer seemed to shake himself free of some preoccupation.

  “Family indeed. Family carries us on the road of life. Isn’t that the expression? The parents carry the baby, and then the baby carries the parent.”

  Felix nodded. Speckbauer widened his eyes. Then he shook his head, as though to clear it of nonsense.

  “Too much coffee,” he said. “And this beautiful corner of Austria has had an effect on me. No doubt that’s obvious enough.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Okay,” said Speckbauer. “I hear you. You want some time to yourself this day.”

  Felix started up the Polo. He waited for Speckbauer to wrestle his way into the seat belt. While he waited, he imagined that at this same time Sepp Gebhart, a puzzled but protective Gebhart, would be halfway along the road to St. Kristoff to see what the hell his colleague Kimmel’s strange request in that phone call really meant.

  It was a tough act back at his grandparents’ house. Felix heard an irony in everything Speckbauer said now. Even Franzi’s tinted glasses now seemed to mask more accusing, or more suspicious eyes.

  Felix’s grandmother was soon over her disappointment that Felix and his fine colleagues were not able to delay for a lunch a proper farmer’s meal. Speckbauer was at his most expansive, and his face held an expression of gentle regret and solicitude.

  “Another time you must, then,” Oma Nagl rallied.

  As Felix expected, she had a master back-up plan. He was not surprised to see the tart appearing, and then being displayed before being covered in foil and placed in a plastic bag. The sausage was almost too much for master actor Speckbauer. There was some winking and a guffaw exchanged between Speckbauer and Opa Nagl when Felix’s grandfather mentioned something about a secret ingredient in this home-made sausage that one of his neighbours made every year.

  Ritual protestations followed about paying a proper price for something that in the city would be a great and treasured delicacy.

  Refusals were loud and firm. Speckbauer was ready with keen protests, even slipping in the accented expressions that Felix had thought were only for Styrians up here in the hills. ‘The baker must at least have his flour!’ ‘How can there be a beautiful house without paying for good timber?!’ All pertained to Speckbauer needing to know both his grandparents’ favourite tipples.

  It was left to Felix to intervene. He mentioned a brandy, and waited out his grandfather�
��s protests. And then, finally, the two policemen were sitting in the Passat. With his grandparents waving and even calling out, they drove off, but not before Speckbauer mimicked a phone to his ear while nodding at Felix.

  “Such an interesting fellow,” said Oma Nagl. “What he knows about plants and crops, and farming. For a policeman, too.”

  Felix watched the Passat coast over the small rise before it gained the road proper.

  “And he learned it all late enough,” she said and made a final wave.

  “After his injury.”

  “Did he tell you about it?”

  “My God,” said his oma and put her knuckles to her breast as though in prayer.

  “That husband I have. He blunders into everything, like a child. He has no shame. ‘What happened to you?’ he says, right out of the blue. Franzi had been telling us about wrens, can you imagine?”

  “It was obvious,” his grandfather interrupted. “People are silly.

  Naturally I was curious. Wouldn’t anyone be? So I asked.”

  “You should have said nothing.”

  “Why? People must talk. It is healthy.”

  Felix’s grandmother leaned to one side.

  “There they go, anyway.”

  “I will be back,” said Felix.

  “My God but you have a crazy life, kid. Running about . . . !”

  “I will phone you.”

  “No need. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Just in case.”

  His grandfather made a face at him.

  “But if anyone is looking for me, tell them I have gone. It doesn’t matter who, even if they say they’re friends.”

  His grandfather made a shushing sound. Then he scratched his head and said something about ‘the world.’”

  His grandmother held him at arm’s-length. She fixed him with a keen stare.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No, Oma.”

  “Really?”

  “Truly. I’m just tired. Really tired.”

  “You would tell me, eh? Your mother is faraway, so you come to me, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s with that plank Edelbacher,” his grandfather muttered.