Poachers Road (46 page)

“I hope he likes jogging, your Schroek.”

Felix stopped and turned to watch.

“We have time,” he said. “Let’s wait a bit for him. He’s not used to Graz parking, I imagine.”

“Is anybody?” said Edelbacher.

Felix took in the quick grin and the raised eyebrows. He halfexpected a whinny to erupt from the long face. His mother was studying the mass of leaves on the chestnut trees nearby. Edelbacher leaned in close to Felix, and put his hand up to the side of his mouth. Felix caught a whiff of the peppermint breath and the tangy aftershave.

“Take it from me,” he whispered. “The SOKO is only good for you. I know. Not to let the cat out of the bag here, but you need have no worries. Are you worried?”

Felix managed a momentary meeting of eyes.

“Not really,” he said.

“Look,” Edelbacher said. “I’m passing on what I heard the other day.”

Felix saw the wink, felt the pat on his upper arm.

“This is a big deal, an internal inquiry,” said Edelbacher, apparently for them both. “I mean I hear people saying, well what kind of a police service will this new marriage produce if we have stuff like these things going on? This thing goes deep, oh yes. You may not know it yet, but those Croatian guys, well that gang at least, are, well, I should not say it.”

Again he put his hand to his mouth.

“Virus,” Felix heard in the whisper. “They are like a virus in all of Europe.”

“How are Oma and Opa?” Felix asked his mother.

She smiled.

“You should phone them. They want your autograph. Opa has been buying two newspapers every day.”

“They complain there’s nothing on the TV news, or the radio, don’t they Gretl?”

She nodded.

“They couldn’t care less about the other stuff,” said Felix’s mother. “The goings on with Maier, and the others down at the factories. The police are checking all over.”

“All the assembly plants now,” said Edelbacher. “Not just the woodlots, but janitors, domestics, cooks even everything. They were organized, you’ve got to hand them that.”

“Lisi was shocked,” Felix’s mother went on. “I told her she must have had a soft spot for Maier, to be so shocked. She nearly took a fit on me.”

Edelbacher scratched the back of his head and made a short guffaw.

“You know him,” he said to Felix then. “That family? Maier?”

“Not really. I know he has a fancy Beemer, and stuff.”

“Oh, ‘and stuff’ indeed,” said Edelbacher, and guffawed again.

“But don’t bring it up with her yet,” Felix’s mother said after a few moments. “She’s having a time of it with her fellow lately.”

She made a face and mouthed something at him, twice. A depressive.

“Well all I can say,” said Edelbacher, and paused to stretched his back, “all I can say is that that fellow must have thought everyone was as stupid, or as greedy, as he was. Right, Felix?”

“Hard to say.”

Edelbacher came out of his stretch and into a slight stoop. He spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone.

“Honestly. He must have seen a movie, or something, Fuchs.

Hey, am I upsetting you saying that, saying his name?”

Felix shook his head. Edelbacher leaned in closer yet.

“Okay. But I mean, think about it. He drives these fellows around for Maier, and even works a bit in the woods himself when he is not feeling lazy. One of his many parts, let’s say. But trying to get up the food chain like that . . . ? All the way up to the big boys, the nasty ones? What was he thinking, that he could take their stuff, their diamonds, for heaven’s sake, and just go down there on Herrengasse, and sell them to some fine model behind the counter? Hah!”

Edelbacher swayed back for effect, and gave Felix the expert’s wide-eyed disdain for such foolishness.

“This is drugs you’re dealing with, up and down to Amsterdam and God knows where else. Did he think he could just stand in front of that and get some of it? Like: ‘They take drugs up on the autobahn, and they take stolen diamonds back, so I will catch that on the way back. After all, I know these guys! I’ll come up with some story that’ll get their attention, they’ll drop by, and that’ll be that.

Simple as that: I am a genius!’”

Edelbacher gave him another tap on the arm, and he stood back for Felix to nod his agreement with such superior reasoning and insight.

“I heard the ‘I am a genius’ part,” said Felix’s mother. “At least they’re clean jokes you are telling there, so?”

“Oh there’s no doubt,” Edelbacher said, with a short, strangely polite laugh.

Felix spotted Schroek now, far off and walking fast, tugging at his uniform.

“It’s just about human nature, Gretl, really. How crazy people can be. Only a policeman knows – and I don’t care what they call a policeman after we merge. Gendarme, officer, ‘hey you’ even it doesn’t matter.”

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.”

“When’s he coming back? The kidney . . . ?”

“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.