Poachers Road (6 page)

“Zentrale to Stefansdorf Ein.”

Korschak. By the book, always: never just Car One. Stefansdorf One, never Stefansdorf Two. It didn’t matter there was only one patrol car out at a time from the post, ever.

“Go ahead Zentrale.”

“Telephone call for you Gebi, you might want to consider it after your assignment. Local, not urgent.You want it, over?”

Gebhart frowned.

“Might as well, Zentrale. Over wait, give me a name first, and I’ll know.”

“Family Himmelfarb?”

“What about them? Over.”

“Will you be up his way today, he wants to know. Over.”

“What does that mean? A police matter?”

“He didn’t say. But you know him, his son, he said. Over.”

Gebhart hesitated.

“Look,” he said then. “I’ll phone him when we get back. Over?”

He shook his head as though bewildered, and replaced the mouthpiece. He sagged lower into the seat and looked out the side window. Felix stole a glance over. To see if there was any clue about what the message meant. There was none.

He drew into the lay-by that was in sight of a small scatter of older houses.

“Okay,” said Gebhart. He seemed to rouse himself from whatever had made him turn in on himself. He checked the laserpistole he had been holding and tugged the side of his green vest tighter.

“Let’s pinch a few hausfraus,” he said. “The little ones are in the school now, and the hubbie’s gone to work. This is the hour the entertaining starts.”

The raised eyebrow and the refusal to smile left Felix baffled.

“Entertainment?”

“And they’ll be speeding, let me tell you.”

Gebi Josef, or Seppi Gebhart wasn’t a cynic, Felix had come to conclude. He had wondered at first how a 41-year-old Gendarme had not moved up in all those years of service. He rarely mentioned his family, and it seemed that he kept work and home very distinct.

Felix had found out from Korschak who had muttered something about having smart daughters who gave him grief, a son who had some issues. “Issues?”

Out on the road now, he took up position beside Gebi, who had the pistole mounted and scanning quickly. He watched Gebi’s impassive face as the cars came by. None tripped the pistole limit.

There weren’t even any dives, those half-funny giveaways that showed the driver had been speeding.They must have been spotted.

“Don’t give up yet,” said Gebhart. “A few more minutes.You’ll see.”

Felix looked across the wet fields, his mind drifting. It was seldom lately that he’d found himself wondering whether some cynic, or maybe some old enemy of his father, had put him here in Stephansdorf, with Gebhart, as a joke. Maybe it was a test: prove you can work with anyone, Kimmel: we’ve been saving this one for you. Survive this, and you’ll do fine. Or had it been a kindly gesture in disguise, from someone in Postings who had read something into Felix’s CV, and his temperament, and engineered his posting here as a warning: this is what a stale cop looks like. Do you want to grow to be like this cop?

Then he heard the alarm go from the laserpistole.

“What did I tell you,” said Gebhart, and he raised his arm.

“Blonde, of course.”

Felix thought of the rasp of Giuliana’s skin on his knee, the way she pushed and arched, the way she muttered and even grunted at him when she was close to losing it. Parsley, he thought suddenly, and realized that he must have been thinking about this somewhere.

That was it: the scent of her was parsley.

SIX

F
ELIX DROVE THE PATROL CAR BACK.
H
E TURNED BY THE PLATZ
, and into the station yard.

It took time to get the gear out and tame the paperwork.

Gebhart had Nescafé and a bun with salami for his brotzeit, his morning break. He stood chewing and nodding slowly while he took a phone call. After it was over, Korschak talked to him about how if it wasn’t floods in some of the fields again this year, it’d be drought by July.

Felix thought about a sandwich but fell instead for something sweet. He took some lebkuchen from a package by the kettle.

Gebhart came over and poured a half cup of leftover water from the kettle into his mug, smelled it, and then drank it.

“Come with me,” he said. “A minor job. Let Manfred get the glory here.”

“Out to . . . ?”

“Die bauern,” said Gebhart. “Maybe you’ll learn something from it.”

Felix waved his hand over the forms he had been collating and checking.

“They’ll keep. Geh’ma jetzt off we go.”

Gebhart drove. Felix could afford to enjoy this unexpected escape from an afternoon of paper, phones, and a small pile of inquiries for licences, criminal checks, and court preparation requests. He totted up the hours remaining before he had his freedom. It would be five hours to the beach, and as little time as possible with Giuliana’s relatives.

Gebhart coaxed the Opel over through hairpins with the gears more than brakes. They passed waterlogged ditches and bottlegreen fields exploding with growth. Soon they were in the hills, and there was no let-up. Still the road climbed, up beyond the last of the trees, until it slowly descended a little to patchy scrubland where the conifers took over again, hesitating it seemed many of them, in small, scruffy plantations on this high plateau.

“You know this area?”

Felix shook his head. Gebhart squinted up out of the windshield at the heights that came slowly closer as they wove through the curves.

“They’re a bit cracked up at these altitudes,” Gebhart said.

“Spinnt, as they say.You think it’s true?”

“‘Nothing personal’ here, right?”

He was glad to see a small grin eke out over Gebhart’s features.

The air was cool, with an edge to it. There were few cars. Gebhart slowed and stopped by the entrance to a mildly rutted road. He scrutinized the roof of the house that nestled behind a brake of trees there.

“A red roof on one of the barns” he muttered, and moved on “I thought . . . ,” Felix began, but stopped awkwardly.

“That I know this area, or where we’re supposed to be going?

Well I don’t.”

“But a rough idea? Isn’t the person a, well someone you know?”

“I only met him a few times. In a place in town. He has a kid, I have a kid.”

Something in Gebhart’s tone drew a curtain down over further questions.

A half-dozen Simmentals clustered around a feeding cage at the corner of a half-hectare patch to the right.

“There’s a red roof,” said Felix.

“That’s the one,” said Gebhart, “I’ll bet.The big wooden gate too.”

There were pools on the laneway. It was hard to tell how deep they might be. Felix rolled down the window. The sun had gone in behind a fairly solid mass of clouds not long before. He heard water swish at the floor pan as Gebhart let the Opel down the lane.

“You said this was a bit out of the ordinary,” Felix tried.

Gebhart’s tongue had been flicking from side to side as the car wallowed gently and then rose out of the puddles.

“God’s country,” he said. “Die Heimat. Can you imagine Polizei coming up here? They’d be wiping their shoes every ten metres. Phoning for a translator.”

“Is it a criminal matter here, Gebi?”

Gebhart flicked him a glance, and made himself unnecessarily busy with the gears. The Opel bottomed out and shook itself up from a puddle.

There were reeds growing in the damp spots all about. A lone, thin wire that brought hydro from the road. Someone had taken great care with putting together stone walls near where the lane approached the farmyard. His mind rebelled at thinking how long it had taken to gather these rocks from the fields. By hand? And what could you grow up here anyway? A couple of the cattle looked up and toward the gently bouncing and now muddy police car. A sheepdog came trotting out to the laneway.

“Here’s the story,” Gebhart said. “Listen.”

Felix looked over.

“There’s a kid. But he’s not a kid, that’s the first thing. Just pretend he is.”

“Do you mean handicapped?”

The farmhouse came in sight beyond one of the walls. The wood had weathered into a grey but the whitewash on the bumpy stone walls was fresh. A collection of smaller buildings, some with fresh wooden shingles, took up a different side of the near rectangle that was the yard proper.

“Our job here is to humour this boy,” said Gebhart then. “Got that?”

A woman was walking slowly from the door of the farmhouse, her headscarf and floral housecoat reminding Felix of somewhere in Yugoslavia, or somewhere east.

“So he’s not going to make a ton of sense, this boy.”

“You want to interview him?”

“Interview? I want you to just, what do your bunch say now?

‘Hang with him’? Just listen. Let him relax.”

“Should I give him a massage maybe?”

“That’s good, Professor. Now: you’ve had your fun.”

“But what’s he got for us?”

The distaste had returned to Gebhart’s voice now.

“Are you listening to me at all? Don’t they teach listening at Gendarmerieschule anymore?”

“Gebi, you’re not telling me things.That’s why I’m asking you.”

“What do you think police work is? You ask, they answer, everybody goes home?”

Felix’s reply was interrupted by the car’s lurch deeper into a puddle. The Opel’s shocks bottomed out on it, and the car rolled back a little.

“Jesus and Mary,” said Gebhart, and quickly put it into first.

Felix heard the water move under the car. He looked down to see if any had come in.

A Mitsubishi four-wheeler was parked near a tractor. Gebi parked near what looked like a storehouse and yanked up the handbrake. The woman had already called the dog and was holding its collar as she led it away.

“Put on your hat,” said Gebhart. “And spare me the look, will you? Remember. Number one: your job is to listen. Number two: everything goes slow up here. Slow and polite and serious. People like this don’t call the Gendarmerie just for the heck of it.”

The woman pulled the door of a shed behind her, and tied it up with a loop of rope. Felix still saw the snout in a gap at the bottom. She folded her arms, and returned Gebhart’s quiet greeting.

“Grüss Gött.”

Felix noted the high-pitched accent. He did not want to stare at her lined face. She waited for Felix to come around from his side of the Opel. There was stiff leathery feel to her hand.

“You are close to heaven here, Frau Himmelfarb” said Gebhart. “Thank God.”

She nodded, but did not smile. Felix wondered if she even got the lousy pun: Himmelfarb the colour of heaven. She was probably shy more than slow-witted, he decided. Who wouldn’t be, living up here. Except for the four-wheel pickup, this was a place out of time. He adjusted his beret and took in a narrow piece of a view that had not been visible from the laneway in.To the side of a barn, there was a prospect clear over the hills toward Carinthia.

Frau Himmelfarb had high cheekbones and the ruddy face he’d seen in travel books, belonging to peasants in Andalusia and Bavaria and Holland and the Crimea and pretty well anywhere else east of China. Her husband appeared from a shed then. Stocky with hooded eyes that suggested Hungarian or peoples farther east in the family tree somewhere. He was a little shorter than the missus. He took off his hat, with its depleted feather and one small metal pin, and scratched at his forehead as he came over.

Gebhart was right, Felix had to admit. These people wanted their police to be people they took their hats off to. And this bandylegged farmer who had the same rolling walk as Opa Nagl, the same deep-set eyes topped by wiry, grey eyebrows he didn’t trim. The same delta of minute veins on his cheeks, more so on his nose, from a life in the open. All the bone buttons were intact on the faded green lapels of his lodenjanker, the traditional Styrian jacket that stubbornly found its way into each generation’s wardrobe. A hand like a swollen ham hock extended to shake Gebhart’s, and then Felix’s hand.

Introductions made, Gebhart fell easily into a slow and polite parade of pleasantries and chitchat. Wild mushrooms, a passion of many yet, were first.

“They’ll be whoppers,” said Gebhart. “The snow stayed so late.”

Himmelfarb did a lot of nodding and made gentle, noncommittal flicks of his head, but said very little. Wild mushrooms were not to be discussed with those who might come back later looking for such delicacies. Felix and Frau Himmelfarb waited. The talk came to cattle, and mad cows.

Finally, in a lull after a comment about dangers to the hoofs for cattle up here, Frau Himmelfarb came to life: would the gentlemen like coffee? Gebhart said he did not wish to put her to any trouble.

It was none, according to her, of course.

“Then most certainly, gnädige frau,” said Gebhart. “A kindness indeed.”

Felix followed them into the kitchen. The scent of ashes and a fainter scent of the ham, or sausage, that hung somewhere being cured, came to him as he reached the door. Felix began to recall pieces of something his father had related a long time back, about when he was a small kid visiting relatives. Yes: they actually had spoons and knives tied to the table, these ancient relatives, in the old style, where you wiped them with a fetzen, a rag, when you were finished.