Poachers Road (17 page)

“What did you discuss with Gebhart anyway?”

“When?”

“Last night. At his place.”

“Ask him, I should think.”

“I did.”

Felix stopped in the doorway and turned. Speckbauer turned away.

“Get some stuff,” he called out. “You’ve got five or six hours to kill before your girl shows up. After that, you and me are going spatzieren yes, taking to the hills.”

True to his word, Speckbauer got into a police Passat and took out two maps from a folder under the seat. There was a stale smell of peppermints in the car, but Felix had spotted the top of a small magenbitter bottle in the trunk as Speckbauer had cleaned space there for his bag. The hint of gastric trouble for Speckbauer pleased Felix a little.

“Am I at work now?”

“Work? Do you see a desk here?”

“Well, I think I should know the conditions here.”

“Okay.Yes you are on the job ‘ancillary officer.’”

“You guarantee I get back here, to the bahnhof, I mean, by seven?”

“I guarantee that. And you will guarantee that you will show me the ins and outs of the high country.”

“The maps?”

“But I want to follow your way too,” said Speckbauer. He tapped a forefinger on his forehead several times. “What way would a guy like yourself go, one who knows a bit about the area?”

“Take the Lendkai down and come back over the Schönaügurtel,” said Felix. “It’s not bad. Then there’s the A2. Get off at Gleisdorf. We’ll go by Weiz, and then up.”

Speckbauer nodded at the mass of the Schlossberg between the buildings.

“Is going that way worth it?”

“It looks long,” Felix replied. “But it’s quicker.”

Speckbauer nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “A good start. See, I knew you had it in you.”

When Felix finished his phone call, Speckbauer was already passing the station at Münzgrabenstrasse and accelerating down the link to the Graz Ost ramp onto the A2.

“That’s a little awkward,” said Speckbauer, himself thumbing his Handi.

SEVENTEEN

“Y
OU’LL PARDON ME, BEING SO OUTSPOKEN. BUT
I
COULDN’T
help but hear.”

“It’s my grandparents’ place,” said Felix. “It’ll be fine.”

“You know it well?”

“A fair bit.”

“Servus, Franzi,” said Speckbauer then. He held the phone tighter to his ear. “Yes. We are prospecting. The name of the woman who runs that pub again? The one in that hole in the hedge up by the Himmelfarbs?”

Felix began rummaging in his mind which place Speckbauer could mean.

Speckbauer finished the call with a grunt. How long had these two policemen known one another, he began to wonder.

Speckbauer didn’t signal when he changed traffic lanes. The needle ran quickly enough to 200 but he eased off. Through the blur of hedges and barriers that raced past, Felix spotted tractors at work often, their passage semaphored by circling gulls. Speckbauer hummed intermittently. It was a strange waltzy melody that stopped and started, and kept no proper time.

“Your colleague works 24/7 also?”

“Franzi? Christ, no. He is the laziest. Well, maybe I should not say that. When he is doing something that interests him, he is a goer.

It’s not like he doesn’t have the time.”

“Like yourself, perhaps?”

“How nicely you put your questions.You were well reared.Well, let me put it to you this way: Franzi and I are veterans of the same campaigns.”

Felix didn’t want to sound too inquisitive.

“But his wife is a bitch,” said Speckbauer. “But mine is, was, always sweet.”

He glanced over toward Felix.

“I’ve made many mistakes, let me tell you. But isn’t that how we have progress?”

The Gleisdorf junction was soon upon them. Speckbauer seemed to enjoy leaning hard into the curve, using the gears.

“Smaller screw-ups,” said Speckbauer. “That’s how we know we’re winning.”

“Winning?”

“Christ, this is an interview?”

He snorted once. They skirted Gleisdorf, and Speckbauer soon had them on the road up to Weiz, rocketing past a laggard lorry before a succession of blind bends.

“She couldn’t take the changes,” said Speckbauer.

“Your wife?”

“Franzi’s wife. To be fair, it wasn’t the injuries, the physical deformities, totally. No. But Franzi is hard to live with. Take my word for it. He always was. Me, I fell into my job. It went to my head. I fell in, and I couldn’t get out. The current took me. But my former wife is a wonderful woman.”

“I’m sorry to hear of that.”

“That she is wonderful?”

“You know what I mean. Perhaps I should not have said anything.”

“‘Herr Obersleutnant,’” said Speckbauer. “You forgot, that time.”

“Well, what am I supposed to call you? Are you my C.O. or not?

I have never done this kind of work.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Call me the devil if you wish. And no I’m not your C.O. You are seconded temporarily. Do you know what that means, seconded?”

“I think so.”

“Being as you are Felix the Second . . . ?”

Felix kept his eyes on the hedgerows.

“You’re not offended, I hope.Your father’s good name travelled on down to you, I understand?”

Felix shrugged. He wondered if it had been Gebhart’s doing, letting slip the nickname that was so rarely used now.

“Well, what was I saying . . . We try to stay flexible. It is no use dropping some big shots on something like this. We need locals, locals’ knowledge.Wissenschaft is what it is, yes: the lessons of ecology need to be applied to Euro-crime.”

Felix looked over.

“You like that Euro-crime bit?” Speckbauer asked.

“Is that what’s going on?”

“You may get to see a bit of the inside of a very frigging big, complicated, messy federal investigation. What am I saying ‘Federal’? I should be precise: transnational. You may be the only probationary cop in our country so privileged. There’s destiny for you.You are working with the Vatican.”

“The Vatican?”

“It’s an expression. No, it’s not about fellows rappelling from helicopters. In our world we adapt. We go small and quiet. Think small mammals in the dinosaur world. Who survived?”

“And who are the dinosaurs?”

“I will tell you who they are not: Serbian gangsters are not.

Albanian Mafia are not either. They are the rodents. Rodents are smart.”

“But . . . the agencies that are trying to . . . ”

“Yes? You are getting warm.”

“I think I get it.”

“Ach so. I don’t wish to be disloyal. But the good guys are never going to get anywhere unless we size down and let people use initiative.”

They crossed the first of the series of smaller hills on the route to Weiz, descending through broad curves to fields that had already gone green with the starting corn. The steeple of St. Ruprecht am Raab appeared over the flat farmland that ran to the base of the hills.

“Christ on his cross with the thieves,” whispered Speckbauer, jerking the wheel and correcting it an instant later. Felix looked behind at the farm lorry still reversing onto the road. A smell of manure entered the car and stayed.

“Fewer errors,” Speckbauer murmured. “That’s how it works.

Did I say that?”

He glanced over at Felix and then beyond him to the farmhouses.

“Even Franzi is beginning to be a believer.”

“Was he . . . ?”

Speckbauer smiled and shook his head once.

“Ah, what a good choice I have made here. Permit me a little crowing now, as it reflects as well on you. You don’t see it? It’s that finesse you have, that way of insinuating yourself. ‘Getting under the radar’ my Yankee friends call it.”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“Of course you don’t. But you’re a born diplomat. Very discreet.The ladies love it, I imagine.You will do well up in the hills for sure. Tell me, is it something you were taught, this diplomatic way?

Your mother, let me guess? Stop me if that is an impertinence.”

It was a dare Felix could not resist.

“My mother is quiet, they say.”

“‘They say.’ I like this. It is like you tell a story. ‘They say.’”

Felix said nothing.

“Have I offended you?”

“No.”

“Merely confused things? My apologies.”

Felix believed him. It took him aback to know it.

“I spend so much time with certain types of people, that, well you can see the results. Hell, have they moved Weiz, or what?”

“St. Ruprecht, then Weiz. Maybe four kilometres.”

“They say that spouses grow to resemble one another. Their clothes, their manner of speech. Have you noticed?”

“I suppose,” said Felix.

“Well, there’s Franz and me, a case in point.”

“Spouses?”

“Might as well be,” said Speckbauer. He moved his head from side to side, gazing into the distance. “We’re making a stop in Weiz before going up to hillbilly territory. G’scherter, isn’t that what the city people call mountain people, huh?”

“I’ve heard it used.”

“Ach, you surely have.You have a foot in both places. But what was I saying?”

“Spouse, you said.”

“Right. So, are you confused when I say spouse? No, I’m not gay. Franzi isn’t either, but we might as well be sometimes, I wonder. It’s funny. We share a place.”

“Live together, you mean?”

“A generational term hah.Yes and no. Franzi was unmanageable when he came home from the hospital. Very badly behaved indeed. I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you. Ach, I don’t care if he does. There, that proves it we are sort of married when we talk about one another like that.”

Across the fields, the higher hills and mountains began over the town’s red-tiled roofs. Forested slopes shifted and slid with the twists in the road, as the yellow walls and dome of the big church, the Weizberg, came into view. They passed a suburb, Preding.

“The wife left. I moved in. Franzi was a bear. I never left. I suppose I should,” he smiled slightly as he went on.

“But who could turn down a location like that place I ask you.

Know anyone else who has a parking garage, a roof garden, and a three-bedroom place on the Hofgasse, right in the middle of Graz?”

“That’s where you live?”

“Temporarily for three years temporarily. Movie stars would want it, uh? Franz inherited it, lucky bastard. That’s the way. The destiny thing, maybe.”

Speckbauer looked over until Felix met his eye.

“You believe in that, the destiny stuff?”

“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.