Poachers Road

by John Brady

  “Okay. But police science is not always by the book. It’s memory, like I told you before.Your mind plays tricks. When you retrace your steps up that track, you may remember things.”

  “Such as?”

  “A remark. A reaction. Maybe the boy pointed at some place.

  Or his father, the time you all went up.Your colleague, maybe?”

  “We went over our notes and statements pretty thoroughly.”

  “I hear you. But what I am saying is not a criticism. I’m not trying to catch anyone out. I’m working with evolution, you see? How the mind switches off certain departments, or how it notices things without the owner of the brain box realizing it. And when the lights go on again, sometimes things you did not notice, they come back.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  FELIXWAS SURE HE COULD SMELL A SOUR TANG IN THE AIR FROM a kilometre away. Ashes from the house, he supposed, or the scent of burned material, like what lingered after smouldering rubbish was turned to burn. There was nothing visible from the road, but as he turned into the lane he saw the three wreaths hung on the fence.

  There was a Gendarmerie Skoda in the farmyard. As Felix parked behind it he saw one of the Gendarmes put down the radio mouthpiece. He stepped out after Speckbauer who was already helloing them. He recognized neither man. He heard running water somewhere. He let his gaze drift around the yard and felt some spacey, acidic glow swelling in his chest. One of the policemen, a tall one who still had ferocious acne even in his thirties, shook hands.

  The four men stood, awkwardly and silently, surveying the blackened rubble. It had been saturated, and pools of dark oily water shone dully up between charred rafters and the dark spindly masses that Felix supposed were remnants of furniture. The old kachelofen stood like a dark gravestone in the middle of the destruction. Felix thought of the cat he had seen snoozing there, the cake Mrs. Himmelfarb had cut up and put on plates.

  “It was still smoking even this morning,” said the policeman with acne. “We thought we’d have to call in the feuerwehr to hose it again.”

  “‘Wood is a friend, wood is a foe,’” said Speckbauer.

  “The families are coming this afternoon,” said the other policeman, clearing his throat. “We just got word.”

  “Really?”

  “The man had a sister, and she is coming with her husband.

  From Passail, I believe. She, the lady, had three – a brother and two sisters, but has only a sister left. And that one is coming in also.”

  “Animals?” Speckbauer murmured. “Cows?”

  “Taken care of,” said the acned one.

  The stench began to seem almost visible to Felix, a cloud, or a fog that was permeating his clothes and even soaking his skin. The whitewashed stones that had fronted the old foundations of the house had only one or two places left that the smoke had not blackened. It only made things look worse. He shivered.

  “We’re going up to the other place,” said Speckbauer to the two. “Okay?”

  Glad as he was to leave the farmyard behind, Felix’s mind rebelled even more at the prospect of trudging up to where Hansi Himmelfarb had brought him such a short time ago.

  Speckbauer’s shoe slipped on a wet, grassy mound, and he swore under his breath as he put out a hand to steady himself.

  “Dolls, he called them, you said. Right?”

  “Yes,” Felix replied. “Dolls, sleeping.”

  He heard Speckbauer begin to wheeze with the exertions. This pleased him.

  “Did he have, maybe, little stories about these ‘dolls’?”

  “No. Not that I remember.”

  “Not a novel now, but.”

  Felix shook his head. Speckbauer stopped and turned to look back down over the farmyard. It was already half-hidden by the rise of ground in the field between. He turned back, breathing heavily, and looked beyond Felix.

  “Now the forest begins,” he said and resumed his slow trudging.

  Speckbauer stopped several times, looking around, and as they stopped at the track Speckbauer spent some time looking in both directions, slowly scanning the woods. He dropped to one knee and ran his hand over the pine needles.

  “Well they weren’t dropped by a frigging helicopter,” he said, standing. “Come on. It’s close, isn’t it?”

  Felix nodded toward the space between trees he remembered.

  “The site team had to carry their gear in here,” said Speckbauer. “So as not to mess up any impressions on the road there, or the track.Turns out they needn’t have bothered – there was nothing. Our old friend General Winter seems to have camped in the ground here for a long time.”

  The stakes and poles for the tent, along with the yellow perimeter tape, were gone. There were only tags on the trees now.

  Speckbauer didn’t hesitate but walked over to where the bodies had been. Felix’s stomach was almost lurching now. He was surprised and ashamed to feel the panic gnawing at his mind. He imagined turning, running down to the road, and not stopping the entire 30-odd kilometres back to Graz.

  Speckbauer was eyeing him.

  “He must have said something. The boy. Try to put yourself back there.”

  Felix tried not to think of his tight, aching stomach that seemed to have something moving slowly in it, and the strange taste beginning to make itself known at the back of his throat. He wanted badly to yell at Speckbauer, to tell him to stop calling Hansi Himmelfarb a boy.

  “Nothing,” he said instead. “Sorry.”

  “He was talking though?”

  “He was talking to himself, words that I couldn’t fit together.

  It made no sense.”

  “Words: a nursery rhyme, your notes said?”

  “It was like a nursery rhyme. He kept repeating himself, over and over again. Nonsense words.”

  Speckbauer looked into the forest. Felix was looking at his watch when Speckbauer turned. He nodded toward the track.

  “It’s only ten minutes,” he said to Felix. “No more.”

  Speckbauer slowed in places, looking around trees, and stepping between brambles. Twice he went down on his haunches to stare at the decayed leaves and pine needles.

  “I know the crew was up and down here a half-dozen times,” he said. “But don’t be surprised at what a cop nose can still find, even afterwards.”

  He looked up toward the crowns of the trees.

  “Planted, what, say thirty years?”

  “Looks about that to me,” said Felix. “Replanted, it would be, though.”

  Speckbauer gave him a keen glance.

  “Right,” he said. “Good. So this weg here, this track, it hasn’t been here forever, has it?”

  “Who knows? They come in every few years, and they thin out the lower branches.”

  “Why do you say that? Do you know this place?”

  “No. But I know a bit about woodland, how it’s managed.”

  Speckbauer slowed again, and he looked down near his feet, before walking on.

  “Deer?” he said. “There’s hunting still?”

  “It’s what people do around here.”

  They walked on, past the orange ribbons that had been attached to tree trunks. Felix was sure he could still smell the charred remains of the farmhouse, even up here. They rounded small clumps of bushes that already had brambles entwined in vigorous growth about them.

  “Nobody drove in here,” Speckbauer said. “And whoever these two turn out to be, they won’t be Martians either.”

  A monologue intended to be overheard, Felix decided. He said nothing. His mind felt muffled, and he was beginning to believe that he couldn’t hold the unease from becoming a dread that would make him want to just run back down to the car and drive like hell away from here. Every sound, even Speckbauer’s careful steps through the undergrowth, and the occasional bird call, seemed amplified. The trees looked different, looming, and even the sky felt too close.

  Speckbauer turned to him and raised an eyebrow. In the look Felix saw some sign that
Speckbauer knew it must be hard for a new one like Felix Kimmel to be part of a grisly event and to have seen things that many Gendarmes would not see in a career.

  “Sorry,” Felix heard himself say, meaning: he couldn’t remember anything else about that walk up here. He wasn’t about to tell Speckbauer how he still felt Hansi Himmelfarb’s big, soft hand grasping his at times. Nor would tell him that he saw Hansi’s mother in her scarf there just as he and Gebhart had come up to the farmhouse. No: no more than he wanted to admit to himself he saw still the death grin, and the liquid slit where the eyelashes of the dead man had parted slightly.

  TWENTY-THREE

  SPECKBAUER’S MOBILE WENT OFF AFTER THEY HAD COME IN OUT of the hills and were closing on Weiz.

  “There’s shitty coverage,” Speckbauer said to his caller. “That’s why.”

  Franzi, Felix decided. That was unless Speckbauer spoke this way to everyone he worked with. It might just be possible, he decided, as he watched Speckbauer’s eyes fix on the dashboard. There was that still, blankness back as he listened. It was not just that common look of concentration. There was something of an impatience close to its limits, that he was about to go off. It had been in the air too, when he had been prowling the farm and the woods alongside him.

  “A what?” said Speckbauer, as though he had been called a name.

  Felix caught sight of houses across the flat farmland that surrounded the town. Grass so green as to be almost luminous patched the fields across the plain, and as cool as it still remained up in the mountains, there were plenty of shoots up already from the early corn. Brindled cows moved in slow motion, their udders swinging like full sacks across a patch of field by one farmhouse.

  “Not a good time to be a joker Franzi,” he said. “Tell me you are being serious.”

  The answer he received brought a snort of disbelief.

  “How by? Tell me details. Don’t make me ask, you dummkopf.”

  “Carats,” he said then almost immediately. “They measure them in carats. Any married man should know that, for the love of Christ.”

  A few seconds elapsed, with Speckbauer rubbing his eyes now.

  “Nothing on the damned system yet? Didn’t you query any diamond stuff through EKIS yet?”

  Speckbauer grunted twice. Then he said, “Phone them again.

  Call me,” and he closed the phone.

  “Well,” he said. “We have nothing on the two identities.The preliminary says ‘Eastern Europe’ the way their fillings and teeth are done. But don’t mind that now: we have a peculiar item from a scan.”

  “A scan?”

  “They took a diamond out of the guts of one of them.Wrapped up in a condom. Not so strange as one might think. Do you get it?”

  “Small? Easy to carry?”

  “Right,” said Speckbauer. “A good way to carry a lot of money.

  But this guy, and his mate, they were on their way home, I say.

  Bringing home the loot.You think that diamond is a nice little keepsake from our own Jewelier Schulen, down at the Hauplatz there in Graz? Like hell, I say.”

  Felix wheeled around the outskirts of Weiz and once outside the town, he fell back to thinking about Giuliana. He tried to imagine where the Salzburg train that she was aboard was now.

  “Does that change anything?” Felix asked finally.

  Speckbauer had been humming the same polka-sounding tune for kilometres now.

  “The diamonds? Who knows.”

  “I meant my situation.”

  Speckbauer gave him a glance.

  “Well you’re still going up to your grandparents’ place tonight?”

  “Right.”

  “You have your mobile, your Handi? Leave it on, and I can call you.”

  “You haven’t answered the question though.”

  “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t know? I should have added ‘yet’ maybe?”

  “If the fire at Himmelfarbs’ was set on purpose . . . ”

  Speckbauer waited for the rest of Felix’s sentence, but it did not come.

  “Who knows where you’re staying tonight?”

  “You do,” said Felix. “Giuliana does. I do. My grandparents do.”

  “No one else? What about your mother, your family?”

  “I’ll probably phone my mother tonight.”

  “And may I ask, will Giuliana be at your grandparents’ place also?”

  “I haven’t even thought that far. I’ll have enough to do trying to explain why we shouldn’t be staying in the apartment tonight.”

  “She’ll freak?”

  Felix looked over at Speckbauer.

  “I would think so. Just like I’m freaking.”

  “Are you?”

  Now Felix gave Speckbauer a hard look.

  “Well, okay then,” said Speckbauer. “But you’re doing a good job keeping it under wraps.”

  “What if she says, ‘how long?’ What do I say to her? A day, a week?”

  “Hässlich – an ugly question. I don’t have an answer for you.

  But tell her it’s a precaution only. That might help?”

  “Not much. I can see the reaction right now.”

  “Best I can do,” said Speckbauer. “Or would you rather I’d said nothing to you?”

  Felix’s anger wasn’t far off now. He studied the road ahead. In the distance the Magna plant had already appeared over the fields.

  “Look,” said Speckbauer. “Let’s get a bit of perspective, can we? It’s common to use diamonds for criminal payoff.”

  “To me, it says the people involved are used to this,” said Felix.

  “Is that wrong?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “You’re holding back.”

  “I’m not,” said Speckbauer. “But a cop has to think, well: ‘Was that all?’”

  “You mean more diamonds, or something?”

  “Right.That’s the one the guy swallowed. Are there more? Were there more?”

  “So: a big organization.”

  “How can we know?” Speckbauer asked.

  Felix had to wait until a long articulated truck had negotiated the bend ahead of them. It was hounded by two motorbikes and an impatient-looking man in a Mercedes 500-series coupe.

  “Christ,” said Speckbauer when the Mercedes driver floored it, only a kilometre from the entrance onto the A2. “As long as he only kills himself, I don’t mind.”

  Felix was about to ask him why he had changed the subject, but he realized it would get him nowhere.

  “Where are you parked again?” asked Speckbauer as Felix slowed for the ramp onto the A2. “I forgot.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FELIX WALKED BACK TO THE TOP OF THE ESCALATORS AND looked out the plate glass to where he had parked the Polo in the yard that fronted the station on Bahnhofgürtel. Ten minutes early.

  There wasn’t much going on at the Hauptbahnhof. Wagons were being shunted in the yards far off, but even with the local services, there were long stretches between the trains.

  It wasn’t going to go well, of that he was quite sure. He was sure in a hopeless, almost calm way. Already he could imagine Giuliana’s face, how she sat back when she heard something ridiculous. He had tried to come up with phrases that might be an easy way to say things, or would lead into it gently. “It,” he thought grimly, and let some of them stagger through his thoughts in all their wretched uselessness:

  Giuliana, something like this has never happened before, and probably never will again. Giuliana, I could never have predicted this. Giuliana, I would have run the other way if I had known any of this was going to happen. But . . . ? But I feel I have to stay and help out – yes, even a new nobody-Gendarme.

  He turned and walked back down the hall, the words and phrases following him and still muttering like gargoyles in his ear:

  Giuliana, it is possible that the Himmelfarbs’ place was – may have been – set on fire deliberately. Possible. . . ?! And yes, Giuliana, that would mean murder. An
d yes again, it’s incredible, and it only belongs on TV shows or somewhere else. And, try to understand, my love, it’s maybe possible – again, just maybe – that someone thinks I know something which I really don’t because Hansi didn’t tell me anything, anything that made sense, but he, or they, don’t know that. And if he or they are so crazy or vicious or paranoid to do that to the Himmelfarbs, they might . . .

  That’s where it stopped.

  He rubbed hard at his eyes and focused a little on his breathing. This jumpy restlessness had been gnawing at him even before he’d stepped out of Speckbauer’s Passat and headed into the city proper. He had run a red light coming down Eggenbergerstrasse, and heard a shout from behind. Sometimes he was sure it was panic. Then later, when he tried to untangle it all, his thoughts dissolved in confusion.

  He stared across at the traffic turning down Keplerstrasse toward the Mur, and the old city that began on its far bank, under the Schlossberg. Being used is one thing, he thought again, if it’s part of your job. Wasn’t that what a job was, especially if you were a cop under orders of your C.O.? But on that drive back along the A2 into Graz, Speckbauer had faltered in some way, and in spite of himself, he had revealed something. He had crossed a line, Felix was sure of it.Try as he might, he still couldn’t figure what that was, much less what it meant. The fog of suspicion settled around him again.

  He was hungry and he was not. His body was telling him to just get going, to release the tension somehow. He felt alert, too alert, the way you were after you woke up suddenly in the night and were on your feet before you knew it. He found himself looking around every corner of the platform and back into the gallery of shops and the broad, open space above the escalator that gave way to the plate glass and the clock.

  Fine, he told himself again: it was normal to be jittery after what had been happening. That’s how shock was, and you should-n’t ignore it, or make light of it. But why did everything seem so different, so suspect? There was that extra second that the shop attendant had looked at him; those CCTV cameras up over the escalators; the half-dozen teenagers with backpacks and headphones lounging on the floor under the clock.