by John Brady
Felix’s mother’s mobile went off, and she stepped away to answer it.
Edelbacher had spotted Schroek now, too. He let his eyes over to Felix’s mother. She was laughing about something in her phone conversation, and a small smile came over his face. Then he turned aside. The hand was up to the side of his mouth again, Felix saw.
“I know about the guys with the tattoos, you know,”
Edelbacher murmured.
When Felix said nothing, he leaned in again.
“The one up in the woods, the first one? Who came to meet the ‘mule’?”
Felix didn’t know what to say. He nodded.
“Your opa still says nothing, I hear,” Edelbacher said.
“That’s how he is.”
“But how else would Fuchs have, you know . . . ?”
Edelbacher left Felix to fill in the rest of his question.
“Ask Opa yourself, why don’t you?”
Edelbacher gave him a skeptical look.
“I don’t,” said Felix. “Whatever names he heard, they had pull still, didn’t they? Sons, grandsons, cousins – I don’t know. But they gave Fuchs enough cred for one episode anyway, didn’t they.”
He hoped that was enough for Edelbacher.
“Episode,” Edelbacher repeated. His frown eased, and he looked up blankly to the treetops. He shook his head once. Then he looked back quickly at Felix.
“Tell you what, Felix. Whatever else, Fuchs did the world a favour, in a way. Right?”
Felix momentarily stared into Edelbacher’s squid-like eyes.
Two Edelbachers, he thought, neither of them bearable. One the cop with the slides into cop-talk and the casual contempt that Felix wondered if he could ever get used to. The other Edelbacher a kind of a continuing adolescent, cunning enough to try to play a boyish awkwardness as a strength to Greti Kimmel.
“What about the Himmelfarbs?” he asked Edelbacher, before he turned to greet Schroek now almost upon them.
“Of course, of course, Felix,” he heard Edelbacher saying hurriedly, in a low voice nearby. “This is the worst, the absolute worst, what happened to that family.”
When he glanced over, Edelbacher was shaking his big, long, jaw-dominating horse head slowly and greviously.
“Lisi says good luck,” Felix’s mother said. “And if it doesn’t go well, she’ll help you get a job down at the assembly line at Magna.”
“Ha ha!”
Edelbacher gave another hearty laugh, and even slapped his knee.
“Oh sisters,” he said. “They do you in every time!”
Felix stood and introduced his mother formally to Schroek.
“We can use the side door to HQ, I believe” Edelbacher declared. “The room is right there, the hearing room.”
Felix looked toward the Gendarmerie kommando. The Gendarme posted by the barrier had been eyeing them since they’d arrived. Through the entrance Felix saw men jogging around the soccer fields.
A bus passed on Strassgangerstrasse, and in its wake Felix now saw three men were heading up the footpath toward the barrier.The sunglasses and the strange locomotion of one could only be Franzi.
A shorter, bearded man was talking animatedly to Speckbauer, swinging a lightly packed briefcase. A lawyer, he thought, or some kind of counsel, with a hand that went continuously up to adjust his rimless glasses.
Franzi began to slow. Felix thought of a battery-operated toy winding down. Speckbauer had noticed him now, too. A truck slowed between them then.When it had passed, the three men were stationary. Speckbauer waved off something that the man with the briefcase was saying, and he leaned in to Franzi.
“Is that them?” Edelbacher asked. “Heading for the SOKO too?”
“I believe it is.”
Schroek had been explaining something to Felix’s mother about how he’d heard the ranks would be rearranged when the amalgamation would finally start to happen.
Speckbauer was skipping across the street now.
“Well it looks like he’s headed over here,” said Edelbacher in a voice intended for the others to hear. Meaning he doesn’t know what to do, Felix realized.
The man with the briefcase was gesturing to Speckbauer now, and calling out.
“Oberst Schroek?” Edelbacher called out. “We have a situation here, I think.”
Schroek had seen what was going on. He finished his sentence about some of the ridiculous names he’d heard being floated for the new national, unified Austrian police.
“An arranged marriage, Frau Kimmel, where both parties must change their names but to what we do not yet know.”
“There’s a protocol here, I’m pretty sure,” said Edelbacher.
“An order of the tribunal, in fact?”
Schroek came over to Felix.
“You should not talk to this guy,” he murmured, and then cleared his throat. “It’s a big no-no.”
“Stimmt,” said Edelbacher. “This is highly improper. But I hear this Speckbauer is pushy, a law unto himself? I’ll have a word in his ear, set him straight, gell?”
Schroek said nothing, but continued to watch Speckbauer’s approach.
“Herr Oberstleutnant?” Edelbacher called out. Speckbauer came to a stop and settled a neutral gazer on Edelbacher.
“I am here to accompany Gendarme Kimmel to the tribunal. I am a friend of the family, a colleague of the Gendarme’s late father, God rest him.”
Speckbauer nodded.
“Oberst Schroek, commander of the post,” Edelbacher went on. “And Frau Kimmel.”
Speckbauer made a small bow.
“I must say Oberstleutnant, that contact with Gendarme Kimmel here is improper. I believe the interviewers for the Sonderkommission made that clear from the start?”
Speckbauer looked around at the faces, and then at his watch.
“That’ll shortly be history,” he said. “So why not say I am, say, twenty minutes early with the findings. There’ll be no harm done.”
“Nevertheless,” said Edelbacher, “The decisions have been made,” said Speckbauer.
“It was a directive, Herr Oberstleutnant,” said Edelbacher.
Speckbauer looked over at Schroek.
“Would that directive prevent me from telling the Oberst here that his Gendarme has helped to do good police work?”
“We know that already, I believe,” said Schroek.
Speckbauer’s eyes slipped out of focus. Felix had the notion that he might be counting to 10.
“The Oberstleutnant has a point, I believe,” Felix said.
Edelbacher and Schroek both changed feet at the same time.
Felix did not return his mother’s gaze.
“Felix?” said Edelbacher slowly.
Felix looked to Schroek who gave him a faint nod.
Felix heard Edelbacher’s aggrieved tone barely held to a murmur that soon faded in the noise of the traffic behind as he and Speckbauer strolled back down the footpath.
“Who exactly is that big depp?” Speckbauer asked. “So full of himself?”
“He worked with my dad.”
“Huh. I just came to tell you that you don’t need to worry.”
“The SOKO, you mean?”
“What else are we here for?”
Felix decided not to ask how Speckbauer could know that.
“Is anyone keeping you in the know about this stuff?”
Speckbauer asked then. “Fuchs, his drug paraphernalia, for example?”
“I heard, all right.”
“So it’s possible scheisse, it’s likely he was out of it, the night he went to Himmelfarbs. A fried brain.”
“That doesn’t help them,” said Felix. “Does it?”
Speckbauer gave him a hard look.
“You think you’re the only one wakes up thinking about them?”
Felix looked back at Schroek and Edelbacher.
“You go over to Gebhart’s still?” Speckbauer asked.
“A couple of times a week.”
“It’ll take time. He’s not a moaner. But I don’t have to worry about his wife taking a plank to me anymore.”
“Ach so,” said Speckbauer. He rubbed at the back of his neck as though searching for a new topic to go to.
“I mean what can you do about this whole thing,” he said in a low voice. “Say it was bad luck? Or something like, you never know what a druggie will do? Or that police science goes only so far?”
Felix looked across toward the HQ. Franzi was standing motionless there, his arms hanging loosely by his side. The man with the briefcase was pacing in a short tight pattern, talking into his cell.
“So there,” said Speckbauer. “Some stuff in this job, you couldn’t even make it up.”
“Franzi is still operational?” Felix asked.
“Franzi? Was he ever? Even before? I told him I’d been thinking of putting wheels on his shoes, like those kids you see.”
And that exhausted that topic. Edelbacher was tapping at his watch and closing one eye for Felix’s benefit. Felix nodded at him.
“Your mother okay?”
“She is now,” said Felix. “But she freaked.”
“And the lady . . . ”
Giuliana he meant, Felix realized.
“It’s hard to say. But we’ll see.”
“Ah. She wants you out of harm’s way, let me guess. Back to Uni? ‘Grow up’?’
“You seem to have some experience there.”
“Maybe I do. But it’ll come good for you, no?”
“You decide,” said Felix. “It’s hard to bounce back from stuff like, ‘Next time you’ll be the one shot, idiot.’”
“Ouch,” said Speckbauer. “Does she say it in Italian? The hands going like a kung fu movie?”
Felix gave him a glance and then returned to studying Franzi.
He was like a statue. The man on the phone seemed to buzz around him.
“Why did you park your car off road there that day?”
Speckbauer asked. “In the woods?”
“Well I had a notion that you had some way of telling where the car was.Your gizmos in the trunk of that Passat. The GPS?”
“Did you find it?”
“Find what?”
“I get the point,” said Speckbauer.
“You’re forgetting that I was on your desk as a ‘strange coincidence,’ are you?”
“Nothing personal,” said Speckbauer. “I have a job to do.”
“So you assumed the worst.”
“There’s no polite way to say this,” said Speckbauer, quietly.
“But if your father had told anyone what he’d been doing, it would have been a hell of a lot different. He had copped on to something.”
“You make it sound like a plot.”
“You did yourself no favour by me when you ditched your car in the woods, you know. How do you think that looked to us?”
“I was just going to talk to my grandfather. I had to find out for myself first.”
“Like father, like son, you go your own way first?”
“Do you think my grandfather would have talked to anyone else? You don’t know him then. I brought Gebi up as witness. Isn’t that enough?”
“Come on.You know by now there’s nothing on your father.”
“There was always a question though, in your mind.”
“An accident it stays. That logging truck had nothing to do with Fuchs, or Maier. Or any of that.”
Schroek was now signalling to Felix. Speckbauer pretended not to notice, but Felix turned and began walking toward the entrance to the Gendarmerie kommando.
“And you know they’d found the woman that same evening?” asked Speckbauer. “Stephi Giesl, the barmaid from the pub in Weiz, and her car? It was up at that dumpy house of Fuchs. That’s how cold-blooded those guys are. And she thought she was going for a good time. Whether Fuchs knew what Dravnic had done to her or not, he surely knew he was a goner after he drove the guy up to your grandfather’s. You’re lucky he didn’t go right through you when he tried to make his break.”
“It felt like he did, I tell you.”
“He saved your arsch. He’d have thrown you, thrown anyone, to that guy even your grandfather, with that bullshit he tried.
‘Where are my diamonds?’ were the first words out of the guy’s mouth, according to what I was heard. Is that true?”
“Yes,” said Felix. “My opa thought it was a joke. But then he saw the gun, and the look on Fuchs’ face.”
“But he didn’t screw around when he put his sights on that Dravnic, did he,” said Speckbauer. “One shot. And the guy was even on the move, I heard.”
Their conversation ebbed as an old woman with a small dog went by them.
“How is the old boy anyway?” Speckbauer asked then.
“They kept him overnight, for blood pressure. They expected him to be in shock or something, traumatized. He seems to be fine though. He said these doctors were annoying, standing around asking him stupid questions. My mother’s been up a few times, me too.
Putting stuff together for him.”
“He’s moved already?”
“Yes. He’s famous now. ‘The marksman’ they call him. A lot of people talk to him about it. He says it drives him crazy. But I doubt it.”
From across the street, the man with the briefcase was waving.
Speckbauer watched him as though he were studying a new life form.
“You’d think it was a fire or something,” he murmured.
“You know what they’re going to say in there, don’t you.”
“The SOKO? Maybe. But it’s not the end of the world.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Should it? Did I do something wrong? If you want to know what bothers me, is that I’m missing bits of this whole thing. I just can’t quite wrap up how this went from a layabout like Fuchs and his pissy little gschäftl, to multiple murders. It starts with him driving illegals up to work in the woods for that other guy . . .”
“Maier.”
“Right if it was just that, or some petty crap around his drug hobby, then he could have kept going forever and probably never been caught.”
Felix nodded. Speckbauer went on in a slow, speculative tone.
“Fuchs,” he said. “Big plan, small brain. There he is in the woods, and those old stories when your grandfather and Hartmann get together, those stories going around in his fat head. So it starts in the woods. And one day he thinks: here are these illegals there breaking their backs for Maier. No doubt some of them have enough words to talk to him. He gets talking. He finds out one or more of them ‘know people’ back home, and that there are already networks and traffic coming through the area or near enough.”
“What you’ve been trying to nail down,” said Felix.
“And what your father might have found out something about too. But these guys in the woods want to make some serious money.
Who wouldn’t? And Fuchs, he thinks: they’re the same people in the old stories of smuggling he hears from your grandfather or Hartmann. Everyone’s on the take down there now, so why not get a piece of the action.Yes, a mastermind at work.”
“You know, we didn’t know anything about that stuff,” said Felix. “What my grandfather did in the schleiche, or going in and out of those DP camps. We heard stories about ‘the scarce times.’
But him running up and down into Yugoslavia then, we hadn’t a clue. It must have been dangerous.”
“Christ yes,” said Speckbauer. “Any DPs they sent back to Tito, he pretty well shot them all. To Tito, they were all Ustaschi, or Danube Germans, not real refugees or DPs. But your grandfather had contacts, a good bit of the language. And don’t kid yourself, there was money in it for him back then. I mean those guys weren’t saints, you know. It wasn’t about ‘the cause,’ I’ll bet. Not then.”
“I don’t know.Whatever he did, it was a cause for him, I’d say.”<
br />
“What? Nazi?”
“Maybe,” said Felix. “But probably not just that. He was helping people on his wife’s side, on their family’s side.To him they were Austrians, not Slovenians or they should be. Plus they hated communism too.”
Speckbauer returned to studying the gestures that the small man with the briefcase was making now. He made no effort to show he got the hint, even when the man began waving his watch arm at him.
“History biting us in the arsch,” he said.
“Look,” said Felix. “We’d better go.”
“Yeah,” said Speckbauer. “The bill arrives eventually. It always does. But I wish I’d had the full meal before the bill, that’s all.”
“The SOKO,” said Felix.
“Who cares about that crap,” said Speckbauer. “I probably know more than the team they put on it for the inquiry. But there are parts we’ll never get to.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“You don’t?” said Speckbauer. “Okay, ready? We. Don’t.
Really. Know.”
“You mean that?”
“I do.”
“This is how some cases end? Like nowhere?”
“Well I don’t know how Fuchs got them to go up into the forest that night. But I have my ideas.”
“Fuchs had had a con going, right?”
“Are you asking me?”
“Okay, I’m asking you.”
“Natürlich he had some scheme, Fuchs. But this Dravnic guy was no fool. I mean he lived the life down in Croatia. He’d done his share of that hellhound work they do to one another there. Seems to run in the family there. His own grandfather . . . ?”
Speckbauer said something under his breath that contained the word lawyer and he made a slow wave back to the man with the briefcase.
“As for me,” he said. “Me, I think Fuchs wanted to be part of something big. Maybe he put an offer to them. Who knows move hot cars down from Germany, credit cards, counterfeit, women, drugs. I mean, at the very least, Fuchs can drive. Let’s say Fuchs is bragging. That he knows a lot about Dravnic and his people, and what they do. So Dravnic plays along, and says they’ll do a try. But Fuchs wants to play his own game. And when those two don’t show up back in wherever, and Dravnic sends word, well Fuchs throws up his hands, and says he hasn’t a clue what’s going on. When he last saw them they had all their fingers and toes. et cetera, et cetera.”