Poachers Road

by John Brady

  “Sleep?”

  “Forget sleep. Think marriage. Two marriages, if you count Franzi’s. But in his case it was different. His missus didn’t want to be a nurse to the freak that came home from the hospital. She’d signed on for glamour, you see? Franzi was quite the performer, yes.

  But in my case, I was an adulterer, not the common kind. No this wasn’t soap opera stuff. It was that I became obsessed with my work after, after our ‘holiday’ in Zagreb.”

  “You and him?”

  “Yeah. We share a place. No, we’re not gay. ‘Adjusting to circumstances.’ It’s about money, and convenience. Franzi’s antics are over, I think. His grafts are getting better every year. He hasn’t wrecked every stick of furniture for a year. Punching windows has definitely fallen off. That’s progress.”

  Felix glanced over at Franzi.

  “So now you chase these people, but only inside Austria? For the Gendarmerie?”

  “What did you learn in training? Who do you work for?”

  “‘The Austrian people.’”

  “The fact is you work for the Interior Ministry. So do we. Yes, Franzi and I, we still chase bad guys. Our bad guys are not the usual gallery, the low-lifes you’ll find in Graz, or Vienna, say. We are allowed to be particular. But most of our housecleaning goes on in Graz. God decided on the eighth day the day that no one knows about to situate Graz close to the lunatics to the south, the east.

  Know any history? ‘Balkans’ . . . ?”

  “A bit. A guy, a student, Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand, Austrian bigwig.”

  “Twenty million died with three bullets,” said Speckbauer.

  “Look over Hitler’s shoulder and point at the same cause. War reparations, did they teach you that . . . ?”

  “I can’t remember being taught about it, but I know about them.”

  “Good. Anyway, back to Graz. Franzi and I work with a section of the Criminal Police.Yes, we’re on loan to the Kripo. Actually, our original supervisors couldn’t wait to ship us out when things went to hell. Imagine that trafficking, smuggling thing is a big pipe, a big sewer pipe that comes from down there. Well, if we were plumbers, our expertise is in the steady leak. A lot of the officials down there in Croatia are on the take. You know that? The smart ones are the smilers who never get their hands dirty, of course.

  Who’s to say one of them didn’t give the nod for whoever tried to torch Franzi that night? Well he didn’t end up wearing his wooden pyjamas in the end, as you can see.”

  Speckbauer’s voice trailed off then, and he returned to studying the tabletop. Franzi’s breath was whistling in his nose. Maybe he was asleep after all.

  When Speckbauer looked up again, Felix could not decide if it was a smile or a sneer on his face.

  “I am not a betting man,” Speckbauer murmured. “But I will chase any chance I can find, any chance, to find my way to the one who tipped off those people that day.”

  The eyes bored into Felix’s now, even as Speckbauer nodded slowly, twice.

  “No matter where they are.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  TO FELIX, IT SEEMED THAT THE LULL THAT FOLLOWED LASTED for many minutes. He was dimly aware of Franzi’s slow movement, and re-settling, and a belief that the three men were listening to the morning sounds of distant birdsong, and the occasional creak from the beams in the old house.

  It was Speckbauer who spoke first.

  “Does that help, at all?”

  ”A little, I suppose.”

  “‘Pull a thread, you get a coat.’ So it sort of pains me to admit that I am not on top of this. It’s embarrassing. And it makes me angry, as you can see.You might ask why.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Because we, the great experts, are useless here. It’s like starting from scratch.”

  “Oh this is where I come in,” said Felix. “You think because I grew up around here that this gives you some kind of a head start?

  Better yet, get a probationer, a guy will be too awed to ask questions, a guy who’ll do what he’s told?”

  Speckbauer continued to frown at the table. It was as if he was trying to absorb a new threat in a game of chess there, one that only he could see.

  “I can tell you are impressed,” he said. “But I will finish. Back to the two in the forest hell, it’s always the forest, isn’t it, in the old stories? I know it’s a stupid thing I keep repeating. These two men should not have been there. I have a theory, and I will tell it to you.

  These two were trying to conduct business that their bosses would not have known about, and would not have been too happy about.”

  “A side deal.”

  “You’re getting it. But greed is always greed. It never ends.You can never predict how far it’ll go, how greedy people will get. It is the strangest thing. So these two were not ambushed, let us say, by people outside their normal course of business. They were disposed of ‘taken care of.’ That’s because they did something stupid.

  Something against the rules, this gschäftl, this little effort.”

  He looked up abruptly from the tabletop.

  “Stanzen, as the gangsters call it,” he said. “‘Fired.’ ‘Let go.’”

  Morning sunlight was carving its way high up into the woods.

  The deeper greens gave way to glowing patches made almost phosphorescent from the sun’s slanting rays.

  “These people didn’t belong up here,” Speckbauer went on. “I don’t mean racist crap. I mean they broke some rule. They came up here for someone, or something. Now, you spoke about trust earlier on.Your grandparents are ‘trusting people.’”

  “They are you see for yourself. Why bring that up?”

  “Trust? Ah, your generation what am I talking about? My generation. Nobody trusts. Look where it got us not so long ago, right? We were poisoned by our own.”

  Speckbauer looked around the kitchen.

  “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “I do,” Felix said, cautiously. “I think.”

  “What I am blathering on about here is an open secret. About how everything went to scheisse sixty years ago. So things were bad for years after the war. All this guilt and silence, on top of all the missing men. There was rape. No one talks about that. Fires, murder. Wondering if Stalin was going to pull something. But things picked up, and moved on. Today we are polite members of the EU.

  Pretty good, eh? Soon we’ll have our brothers, the Turks. No more Austrian nightmares then. We’ll all sleep soundly.”

  Felix said nothing. Shafts of sunlight had broken through the treetops and were tearing into the window now, as steadily as a brightening orange glare.

  “Different story here in God’s country, huh. Anybody talk to you about that?”

  “No.”

  “There’s my point right there, then. You probably never asked either. Let me tell you, in those years you found whatever you could and you did whatever you did to survive.You went back in time, to what worked before. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ‘Fall back,’ they say in the army.”

  “I don’t see the point of this talk.”

  “My point was that this is how humans work under pressure.

  They go back to old ways. So when you were short of something or you wanted something, you found the ways that worked. The line between criminality and the law was gone. You knew the wegs and paths of the forest.You knew where you could stay, or rest, or wait.

  In fact, if you were a man, one of the lucky ones that survived the Eastern Front or labour camps, you found your way back here. And you soon got the picture. You were on your own. ‘They’ had won.

  But you had your bits of farm, maybe an animal or two. And you had your training, didn’t you?”

  “You mean army?”

  “Natürlich. After a few years soldiering you’d be ten times better at bringing home a rabbit, or a deer.”

  “I suppose.”

  “By and by, you needed things, and you got things. You swapped,
and you bartered, and you shared. And you did without too. But if you weren’t an idiot, you saw how others had done it during the war while you were away getting your arse shot off for your leader. Now you wanted something better than turnips. So, what do you say?”

  Felix waited until Speckbauer had finished his stretch and yawn.

  “But that was fifty years ago. More. It’s ancient history.”

  “Hah,” said Speckbauer. “I won.” He repeated it again, louder for Franzi.“I’ll buy you a beer with my winnings, Franzi.

  Puntigamer or Gösser?”

  “Yes,” said Franzi. Had he been dozing, standing there by the kachelofen?

  Speckbauer turned back to Felix.

  “I bet myself five Euro you’d come up with the ‘It’s history’ bit.”

  Felix heard footsteps upstairs and the tones of his grandfather resonating down to him through the floorboards. Franzi stood away from the kachelofen and slowly tilted his head up to where a door was opening.

  “Ask your opa how they got gasoline then,” said Speckbauer.

  “Medicine. Pesticide. Spare parts. Cement. Bullets even, to take down a deer. Or will I ask him?”

  “Leave them alone,” said Felix, rising.

  “Grüss an alle,” came the greeting from the head of the stairs.

  “Hello everyone. I am back, with news of the duchess above. She will join us shortly.”

  Speckbauer smiled.

  “I’ve got to tell them something,” Felix whispered. “The Gendarmerie–”

  “Shut up with that,” Speckbauer snapped. “I told you: we need time.”

  Felix’s grandfather called out again. By the squeaks he knew so well, Felix could imagine him pausing halfway on the landing.

  “Here we are, Herr Nagl,” Speckbauer called out. His accent and tone had changed instantly again, Felix realized. “The rabbit is skinned and cooking in the pot.”

  “Ah a master hunter,” Opa Nagl called out, chuckling. “Quick work, my friends.”

  Felix was stunned at how quickly Speckbauer could switch to the friendly son-of-the-soil here again. Felix waved back at the pantomime appearance of his opa peering around the end of the wall from the bottom of the stairs. Speckbauer leaned toward him.

  “Before you decide; two things. Listening?”

  Felix nodded.

  “When did your grandfather leave the Gendarmerie?

  Speckbauer whispered.

  “Gendarmerie? He wasn’t one.”

  “Your Opa Kimmel, I’m talking about, not your opa here.”

  “He wasn’t either”

  “He certainly was. It lasted nineteen months. They let him walk, too. That’s how strong it was then.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The second question is this: what was your father doing the day he passed?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  LATER, IN THE GIDDY GOODWILL THAT FILLED THE KITCHEN after his grandparents had arrived, Felix’s thoughts dangled, spinning endlessly, only to race up to some precipice where they vanished. Several times in this sunlit kitchen where Oma Nagl bustled about he believed he was dreaming, or in a fever.

  Oma was delighted with guests, keen to spoil them with more food and coffee, and even schnapps. Almost flirtatious with Speckbauer, she treated Franzi like a very old man, constantly asking if he wanted more of anything, giving him a routine smile to show he was included in spite of his silence. Felix eyed him occasionally making the slow, minute stretches that seemed to be his routine in all his waking hours.

  Speckbauer’s effortless transformation into a genial local only increased Felix’s confusion. Speckbauer was full of gentle wit, hinting at a subtle, almost pitiful mockery of the greater world outside the farmhouse, where unfortunates could only wish for such food, in such a house, with its family bonds, its mountain views all about, and its air. He ably followed and added to a conversation about farming, the recent May festival, Chinese food, the new turbo diesel engines, car theft in the cities, proverbs that no one used anymore.

  Felix looked out at the steep, jumbled meadows and hills returned to their postcard green with the sun overhead, and a blue sky to bite down on the edges all about. He imagined someone out there, watching the place, just as Speckbauer and Franzi had been doing in those hours before dawn.

  As the conversation swirled around him, things around him began to take on an unfamiliar look. It was as though there had been a different light or colour spread over it. Everything was moving under him, a slow subterranean drift, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what he wanted to do. He knew that panic wasn’t far off. He stood.

  His oma’s smiling face turned up toward him and the talk stopped. Felix tried to smile back. He wouldn’t look over in Speckbauer’s direction.

  “I’m falling asleep,” he said. “I better get some fresh air.”

  He winked at his oma but it did not erase her look of concern.

  Behind him he heard another chair being moved. His opa launched into something about a motorbike he’d had, one that took him through snowstorms. The opening door took the rest of the conversation. Felix paused near the bench and then headed across the farmyard.

  “Hey,” came Speckbauer’s voice behind him.

  Felix didn’t slow. He imagined breaking into a run.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Speckbauer called out. “You can’t back away now.”

  Felix stopped and turned.

  “I have to clear my head.”

  Speckbauer shrugged.

  “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he said. “That’s the job, see?”

  “You mean what you’ve got to do. Not me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve had enough of this routine,” said Felix.

  Speckbauer looked back at the farmhouse.

  “You want me to betray my family.”

  “‘Betray’?”

  “Now you’re trying to tell me that my father was a bent cop?”

  “Did I say that? Did I?”

  “You don’t give a shit about anyone. There you are, in my grandparents’ kitchen, eating their food, yapping. With your ‘herrlich, Herr Nagl!, wunderbar, Frau Nagl!’ Just because you’re up in the hills here, you don’t fool anyone”

  “Not even your grandparents?”

  “They’re humouring you. They let you think you’re fooling them.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Go back in and try more Rossegger on them. ‘Oh my forest home . . .’ Blah blah.”

  “You don’t like the great Peter Rossegger?”

  “He was a fascist. Him and his Brotherhood. Ancient history.”

  “Maybe,” said Speckbauer. “But does it ruin his poetry though, this distaste he had for lesser peoples, the foreigners amongst us?”

  “You probably believe that too, then. ‘Send them back,’ right?”

  “Some, for sure. We have enough homegrown hoodlums here.”

  Felix was at a loss for words.

  “Two more we didn’t need,” Speckbauer added in a groan, mid-stretch.

  “This is going nowhere,” said Felix. “I came out to make a telephone call.”

  Speckbauer didn’t move off, but continued to eye Felix.

  “You don’t want to know,” he said. “You just don’t. Now that is something.”

  “I do know. I know I’m being used.”

  “You don’t want to know about your grandfather. And, I guess, you won’t want to know about your father.”

  Felix felt a surge of anger welling up again.

  “Don’t bring that up again. You’re insulting my family. I’m phoning my C.O. They can fire me if they like.”

  “Who’s going to sleep better tonight if you do? It doesn’t fix the problem.”

  “You’re making the damned problem,” Felix retorted. “This is dangerous. This isn’t some game or strategy you do in your office, sticking pins in a map or something.”

  “We
ll,” said Speckbauer. “Do I look like a pin-in-a-map cop?

  Maybe I should be one then, so it wouldn’t upset your stereotype.

  ‘What you don’t know, won’t hurt you.’”

  “Who knows what you’ll say next, that’s my take on it.”

  “You’re not that stupid and that’s my take. And it would be a betrayal too. That doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “But you want me to betray my own instead.”

  Speckbauer glared back. After a few moments his eyes lost their focus.

  “Okay,” he said. “I get it. I am a bit slow, but I finally get it.You win. Make your calls. And don’t worry – I’ll only say good things about all you’ve done on this. Really. We shouldn’t have taken you away from your holiday, Gendarme Kimmel. I’ll tell you what: I’ll put up signs. ‘Gendarme Kimmel doesn’t know anything.’ ‘And Gendarme Kimmel doesn’t want to find out either.’”

  Felix stared at him. Speckbauer didn’t turn away from his long survey of the greens and the chill, spring brightness that was showering this part of Styria.

  “He doesn’t want to know that his grandfather was a wannabe SS,” he went on. “That he did fine, thank you very much, in the hard times after the war.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “That his Opa Kimmel was the man to go to if you needed something, like petrol or parts or concrete, or even coffee and cigarettes?”

  “Even if he did.”

  Speckbauer turned away from the view.

  “Is it still ‘ancient history’?” he snapped.

  He glanced down at the phone in Felix’s hand.

  “That grandfather of yours did his nod-and-wink routine for longer than just survival. Maybe you don’t want to know more.

  Maybe you just want to carry on being very modern, a Unidropout-poser-MP3-European type of a guy. The new copper.”

  Grim satisfaction leaked into Felix. He had drawn out the real Speckbauer at last.

  “Been to Britain?” Speckbauer asked then, brightly. “England?”

  “No.”

  “A strange bunch, but fair, if you can forgive their beer. My point is, the British saw how capable your grandfather was. During the occupation? They were impressed. So they offered your Opa Kimmel a job. Where? In the Gendarmerie, of course.”