Poachers Road ik-1

by John Brady

  “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 cafe 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?”

  “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 toupe 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 unglucklich.”

  “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 narrisch?” 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 decor. 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?”

  “As a matter of fact I did.”

  “And would you know your way around there if you went on a second visit?”

  “I think so. It’s loud enough now, though. There were guys speaking, I don’t know, in there. They came into the klo when I was there.”

  Speckbauer nodded and slowed. Then he stopped abruptly at a corner.

  “You drive,” he said. “You know your way out? Down toward the bridge. It’ll get you up to Radmangasse.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Felix remembered the main streets and many of the lanes in the zentrum at least, from wandering here as a kid. His mother would come in for shopping on Saturdays. He could not remember his father coming into Weiz on those trips. But there had been lots of Sundays when his father had taken him up into the forest, or on a radl, where they had to wheel the bikes uphill half the time. It petered out when the adolescent thing had hit, when Felix started wanting to be with his mates, go to the movies, hang out.

  Speckbauer unlocked the passenger door with a key and sat in.

  Odd there were no electric conveniences in this Passat, Felix thought. A crappy police model? Opening the driver’s side, he saw Speckbauer closing the glove box, and locking it.

  “Geh’ma,” said Speckbauer. “What’s it they say? ‘Drobn auf da Alm?’”

  Up on the mountain indeed, Felix thought. He stifled a beery belch.

  “Do you mean Festring, that place with that gasthaus?”

  “That’s the place,” said Speckbauer. “The metropolis of Festring. Population twenty-six, I believe. Blink and you’d miss it, no? A place called Gasthaus Hiebler. It is where Herr Himmelfarb used to go for his beer and card game. You know it?”

  “Only to pass
it. It’s a couple of houses near the road only. An oasis.”

  “We’re going to stop off at the Himmelfarb place too,” said Speckbauer.

  Felix noted the change in his voice when he spoke now.

  “It’s something we need to do.”

  Felix looked over.

  “To jog the memory,” said Speckbauer. “It won’t be easy for you, I know.”

  Then he shifted in his seat. His voice took on a strained cheerfulness.

  “But let’s head through your area first. A little ramble.”

  “My area?”

  “St. Kristoff, isn’t it?”

  “St. Kristoff? It’s off up the hills there, not on the way.”

  “We’ll work our way from there over the back roads. The ones maybe nobody knows about except the chosen few. Like you?”

  There was a different sound from the engine than Felix expected.

  “It doesn’t say turbo on the back of this.”

  “Why should it?” said Speckbauer. “Go easy with your right foot.”

  Felix manoeuvred the Passat out from the narrow streets and lanes that made up the old part of Weiz and onto the Klammweg, the road that ran along the Weiz river.

  “What was the objective of the visit to that bar anyway?”

  “To familiarize yourself with it. Call it routine reconnaissance as well. But tell me, why are we going up to this Festring place?”

  “You want to talk to the owner or whoever works there, to see who might have been there the same time Karl Himmelfarb was.”

  “Okay, good. And why is that necessary?”

  “Because he talked to others there. And that’s where people could have found out he was going to call us again.”

  “… because of…?”

  “Hansi wanted to tell us things, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “You’re bothered,” said Speckbauer. He had spoken in a slow, considerate tone that Felix could not remember hearing before.

  “Annoyed I’m talking like this?” he went on.

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  Felix felt Speckbauer’s gaze on him. He didn’t look over.

  “Okay,” said Speckbauer, finally. “There’s only one change to make to that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You said we’d talk or that I would talk. Not so. It will be you.”