Poachers Road

by John Brady

  Speckbauer turned back toward the fields and woods. Again he seemed to be deriving satisfaction from his slow, steady survey. Felix sensed that Speckbauer was waiting for a signal from him. Still, he turned his phone over again in his hand, waited.

  “Well?” Speckbauer said then.

  “Go on,” said Felix. “I’m listening.”

  “Thank you. At any rate, the British knew that there were Gendarmerie who shouldn’t be put under a magnifying glass – like your grandfather Kimmel, see? The Second Republic, the New Austria, woken up from its nightmare, needed experienced men in the places where, well, where the likes of your grandfather had experience.”

  “Experience?”

  “Smuggling. Maybe I should say trading. Okay: trading.Things were hard up here. The Russians came through here first. Christ, what didn’t they take? They weren’t alone in their visits.There were partisans, from up and down the Balkans. Slovenians, a lot of them.

  A lot of them came through from the DP camps there in Judenburg, and Graz.”

  Again, Felix thought of the maps he had pored over last night.

  For a moment he almost believed that Speckbauer knew about them, and was just baiting him here.

  “Well, once the pigs and petrol business was shall we say, normal, other activities went on. Can you imagine?”

  Felix nodded.

  “You had Eastern Europeans who knew their way around.

  Sure, they’d gone home but home was what? Flattened houses? And if you were on the wrong side, the losing side . . . ? So people had connections. Sure there were borders – ‘The Iron Curtain’ and all that. But this coming and going was nothing new here. ‘Business resumed.’ Your grandfather closed shop: good for him. He told his old contacts to get lost especially the ones up from Slovenia. Yes, he did his job. It says so right in his file.”

  Speckbauer waited for some reaction, but it was one that Felix would not offer.

  “It also says that your oma, your Oma Kimmel, was the one who seems to have calmed your Opa Kimmel’s fiery nature. She talked him down, sorted him out.”

  Felix stared back into his eyes. They had regained their flat, expressionless look.

  “She cushioned his fall again when he was asked about some goings-on later.”

  “So now my grandmother was a crook?”

  “Did I say that? Peter Kimmel was her husband, wasn’t he? In 1953, an informer said that Gendarme Kimmel, had not quite given up all of his ‘interests.’ That he looked the other way at the correct time, that there were things he didn’t want to know. Verstehst? A matter of not betraying those to whom he had loyalties.”

  “Is was hardly a crime to want to feed your family, to take care of them.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. Those two men turned up in the forest, and part of our job is to see if it’s connected with other events, present and past. Patterns, no?”

  Felix took a few steps toward the side of the storehouse. What had his father known of this? Was that why he had kept those maps, with the paths marked in?

  “Beautiful,” he heard Speckbauer say. “What views. I far preferred Geography to History. So much more definite.You were right or you were wrong.You?”

  Felix turned back to him.

  “Even if this were true, it’s all ancient.”

  “You said that already.What I’m saying is that this kind of thing still goes on. And those connections and loyalties last over time.”

  “You think my Opa Kimmel is wandering around the woods?

  Be serious. He can’t even walk ten steps without a cane.”

  “Normally I don’t dip into the sewer of pop psychology. But denial is big.”

  “You really think he knows something about the dead men in the forest?”

  Speckbauer hesitated before answering.

  “How come you don’t speak Slovenian?”

  “Because I’m Austrian.”

  “Did your parents?”

  “Same answer.”

  “Your grandmother Kimmel’s family is Slovenian.”

  “A hundred years ago, it was.”

  “There’s always been Slovenian all along here. Hapsburgs, Nazis sure they got bumped about. But not many left, really.They cleared some from DP camps in forty-six, and Tito killed them. Viktring Camp was a big one. Anyway, your grandfather can speak it.”

  “I never heard him speak it.”

  “Ask him then. It says so in his Gendarmerie records: ‘Working knowledge.’ You think he lied, to impress his employer?”

  “What employer would care?”

  “The SS might,” said Speckbauer. “He was hoping, I imagine?”

  Felix refused to give him any satisfaction. He said nothing.

  “Ultimately unsuccessful,” Speckbauer resumed. “Not to be critical now, but by forty-four there was room in the SS ranks. But faking your age, a sixteen year old?”

  Speckbauer rubbed at his nose, and drew his coat around him.

  “Okay,” he said then. “Here is the end of this chapter. Your grandmother must have been one strong woman. Excuse me now if that sounds . . . impertinent. It was she who tried to put an end to all this ‘silliness.’ She made him clean up his act. He did settle down. I’m not saying she changed him or his opinions, or that. But she reintroduced him to civilian life, you could say. Normal life.”

  This time Felix could not resist.

  “You talk about all this like it’s some kind of play, or a movie or something. But your job is to lie and to con people, to get whatever you want, however you want.”

  Speckbauer sighed.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he said. “But let’s finish here on a good note.”

  “I don’t see how. You are doing a number on my family.”

  “Really? I’m going to suggest to you things that were not handed down father to son because of your grandmother. Oh, the usual stuff came down fine, I imagine. How to plant potatoes, screw in light bulbs, fix a bike, shoot a rabbit, but from what I gather, your grandmother did her best to protect her kids from the past.

  Whatever else had happened, this was a new generation. They wouldn’t be dragged into all that crap. Now there was a brave woman. Would to God all her generation had been like her.”

  Something about Speckbauer’s face, his relaxed gaze and quiet tone, cooled Felix’s anger a little.

  “What we don’t know,” he added in a murmur, “is if she succeeded.”

  “That makes zero sense to me,” Felix said.

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for it.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Your father.”

  “What about my father? Now you want to spread the bullshit to him?”

  A hint of humour flickered around Speckbauer’s eyes only. It faded quickly.

  “Franzi, that bastard, he’s always right,” he said. “Always. It’s uncanny. He made you right from the start. ‘Mark my words,’ he said. ‘That guy keeps a lid on things. But he could plant one on your nose too.’”

  “Is that in my file?”

  “Ach don’t be paranoid. Of course not.”

  “Well you make it easy for me to decide what to do here.”

  There was a breeze beginning, and the cool morning air stung his nose. Speckbauer looked back toward the house, and then he turned and began a slow walk out beyond the shed and toward the fields.

  “Your father had many, many acquaintances,” he said. “Good policemen often do. It’s their job to be able to find things out. How do you find things out? Through people. And your father was that kind of a guy, was he not? Sociable, outgoing.”

  Felix nodded.

  “Compared to his father anyway,” said Speckbauer. “He turned out the opposite, didn’t he, thanks to your grandmother, if I may say. But you hardly remember her, am I right? What were you, five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cancer?”

  “So I heard, later.”

  “Okay. Now, your father got about a lot.
He liked the outdoors, he grew up in the hills, all that. Right? Oh, and he had a knack for cars, perhaps from your grandfather? The old VWs, the Kübelwagens? ‘The thing’ we used to call them growing up. Christ the same air-cooled lump in them that the Beetles had.There were thousands dumped or abandoned after the war, did you know?”

  Felix’s thoughts went immediately to the snapshots of his father leaning against an overturned VW up in the woods somewhere.

  There he was, in his element, laughing along with his friends, big strapping guys off-duty too, out for a boys’ day in the woods.

  “Your father had a good knowledge of the area, I would say.

  Exceptionally good. I bet that your grandfather passed on a lot to him. ‘The lore’ I suppose you’d say.”

  Speckbauer tapped his forehead.

  “The maps in here,” he said. “Better than your satellites, I’d bet again. Can you imagine how valuable that was?”

  “You’re working up to some insinuation here.”

  “Which is?”

  “That my father was in some racket. Or that he looked the other way?”

  “I try to look at everything.”

  “That’s a ‘yes’ then.”

  “It’s an ‘I don’t know.’”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here. Nor would you.”

  “You think I’m in on something,” said Felix. “That’s it.”

  “Others may think that.”

  “‘Others’ who?”

  “I’m not going to get into that. Let’s conclude here.Your father was out and about even more than he usually was in those few weeks. Before his passing, I mean.”

  “Right,” said Felix. “I think I’m beginning to get it now.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “How come a Gendarme drives an Audi? How much did he have to drink?”

  “We know it was a used car.Your father was not drunk.”

  “Well, thank you for that. I suppose I should be grateful or something?”

  “Look, we don’t know where he was that afternoon. He was no stranger to a bite to eat and a krügl of beer up in Eagle’s Nest or wherever, but that’s where the trail ended. He was supposed to be on duty at the time, at his post in Judenburg.You knew that?”

  “I found out about it later. People are polite. They didn’t want him to look bad.”

  “Sure,” said Speckbauer. “People are polite. They didn’t want him to look bad. But he’d been doing this a lot.”

  “So he was under suspicion?”

  “No. Not then. Later and it was a bunch of unexplained things, open questions. It was not suspicion.”

  “But for you?”

  “I’m curious, that’s all. That’s why I pulled the file and read it.

  Stuff comes across my desk. I’m like a guy with Alzheimer’s. Sometimes it makes sense, like a big jigsaw. ‘Two men, apparently Slavic/Balkan background, dead in the woods up in Hohe Arschloch, Styria.’ ‘A junkie overdosed in an apartment in Graz with a new quality of heroin.’ ‘A clown gets fired from a crappy factory job in Furstenfeld. Now he gets back at his employer who caught him drinking in the klo fifty times. He phones “anonymously,” says illegals come in at night in the factory, cleaning up.’ All that.”

  “How does this come up here? What does this have to do with me?”

  “It depends on how you view things,” said Speckbauer. He stopped and looked around. “And speaking of viewing things . . . ”

  He pointed toward a mountain, and glanced at Felix.

  “Jacobsberg,” Felix said. Speckbauer pivoted at pointed at another.

  “Oberlach.”

  “And if I went over the top of it?”

  “You’re up on Sommersalm, by the river. It’d take a day.”

  “Trails?”

  “One only. There are awkward parts.”

  Speckbauer kept looking about, but had no more questions.

  “Did I pass?”

  Speckbauer smiled tightly and resumed his walk. At the edge of the field there was a drainage cut. The ground to both sides was waterlogged and dark with the run-off.

  “I was talking about coincidences,” he went on. “Now to superstitious people, or paranoids, there are no coincidences. But me, I am not like that. Well not during daylight hours anyway. What I mean is this: we Franzi and me see the daily ‘news’ we call it and note it. So, we think: two dead guys. From down south there in gangland? In the middle of nowhere? A new departure, a new group? Right by, well, within fifty kilometres anyway, of big towns like Weiz and Gleisdorf, all those new factories?”

  Felix took mental note of how deftly Speckbauer stepped over the drainage cut.

  “So there we are in our lair there in Strassgangerstrasse,”

  Speckbauer went on. “And naturally we ask ‘What else has gone on here in the recent past in this neck of the woods?’ There is your father, his passing. And then, there is a copy of your notes as officer on scene, you and Gebhart. Kimmel One, Kimmel Two. This is a coincidence?”

  Speckbauer stopped then and swore, and he shook his head. He drew out his mobile from his pocket.

  “No wonder I’m feeling odd. I left it switched off. Christ and His mother.”

  Felix took a few steps into the field. Speckbauer had stopped and looked down at the wet soil oozing around the edges of his shoes. Felix’s head was not clearing. He tried to imagine what his grandparents could be talking to Franzi about.

  “There are lots of black spots up here, right?” he heard Speckbauer mutter. “And the signal you get here is piddly enough, isn’t it?”

  He turned when he heard Speckbauer’s words trail off.

  Speckbauer was squinting at the screen. He tilted it against the morning sun that was still slicing the valleys into shadow and glare.

  “Excuse me, a text.”

  Felix watched him thumb through the message again. For a moment then Speckbauer’s eyes rested on the stones that had been embedded into the side of the cut.

  “Well,” he said. “Now that focuses the mind. Yes. Now I am awake.”

  “What? Is it about the situation here?”

  “Perhaps. It’s a message about something in the first pathology notes. They’re being transcribed, but someone there was smart enough to fire an email to our office.”

  “Identities?”

  Speckbauer shook his head, and tapped his phone gently in a slow rhythm on his chin. He was soon lost in thought and turned to rubbing his phone over the bristles.

  “You know something about the two?”

  Speckbauer blinked as though rudely awoken.

  “No.Yes. A horseman.”

  He looked at the phone again.

  “There is a mark,” he said. “No, what am I saying? A tattoo on one. In an armpit more or less. It’s sort of half ragged there, but it’s something.”

  Felix shielded his eyes from the sun. His eyes were beginning to burn now from the flood of light and sleeplessness.

  “VK,” said Speckbauer. “They’re out of Croatia. Well the one with the mark is. It’s actually a spur, this mark. ‘Vatreni Konji.’ Call them Crazy Horses. It’s got something to do with hunters’ horses, I don’t know exactly. But the exact translation doesn’t work for me.

  ‘Spirited Horses?’ No: crazy is proper.You won’t understand.”

  “Give me the short version.”

  “The ‘runner’ the one with the four bullet holes was midthirties. He had a tattoo. That puts him as a member, or a hangeron of some degree, of a bunch of ex-soldiers, bandits, and the like.

  He would be no stranger to crime, I say. We have a chance of putting a name on him, with army records in Croatia. It’ll take time.”

  Speckbauer pursed his lips and then blew them loose.

  “I put in a call to The Hague, to see if there’s a file on him.”

  “The Hague? A war criminal?”

  “It’s possible. There were guys like that, one picked up in V
ienna two years ago. Then, some arrest, or bodies, in Germany.

  But one of them up here? It changes things.”

  Speckbauer turned on his heels and concentrated on a sharp block of light thrown up by the sun on the wall of the house.

  “So,” he said, and nodded at Felix’s mobile. “You still want to phone Gebhart, and get him to sort all this out?”

  Felix shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Speckbauer then. “These horsemen guys are big on revenge, and grudges. They make it their business to set an example. And they don’t accept business losses. So, if our guy in the woods was carrying something of value, they are the type to want to get it back. And put away whoever interfered in their operation.”

  Felix’s mind lurched, and a cold feeling descended on him again.

  “The other guy has a diamond in his guts,” Speckbauer murmured. “And a hole in the back of his head. A clean shot, a surprise.

  But Mr. Horseman guy had a chance to run or jump or try something. There’s no lab test telling me he fired a gun. Say Mr.

  Horseman has been accompanying Mr. Diamond, but that he is no friend to him. And say he has a deal with a third party arranged for Mr. Diamond to get taken care of . . . ?”

  “A third party who knew his way around the area.”

  “A person who had his own scheme,” said Speckbauer, nodding. He seemed to be mesmerized by the stripes of hard light across the yard now. Then he wrinkled his nose and his brows lifted. He pointed his index finger to his ear, and made a popping sound.

  “‘Kill the two foreigners,’ let’s call the plan,” he said. “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t take the diamond out of the first guy’s guts, though.”

  “Ah, Gendarme Kimmel. He doesn’t know about diamonds in the guy’s guts. And I think he is quite content with what he did get.”

  “Other diamonds,” said Felix. “Cash maybe.”

  “I agree. And all that was supposed to be on its way to . . . ?”

  Felix hesitated. Then he nodded towards the hills to the north.

  “Wrong direction, I say.”

  “I give up then. Christ, I’m a Gendarme in Stefansdorf. What do I know?”