John Brady - Poachers Road

“Those new bookmarks with the ‘cool’ website? The T-shirt prize?”

Felix almost grinned at how Gebhart did the air quotes for “cool.” Again, Felix nodded.

“Well, bugger off then.”

Gebhart yawned and sighed.

“Didn’t you sleep?”

“I slept like a Christian, in case you need to know. But in the Coliseum.”

Felix waited until Gebhart looked up from the paper.

“What is it? You have a question?”

“Have you done stuff like that before? Yesterday, I mean.”

“No.”

“Nothing like this? Never?”

Gebhart seemed to gather his thoughts by staring at his desk.

“You mean scare-the-hell-out-of-yourself stuff, or just things you see? Car accidents? Factory accidents?”

“I suppose.”

“There was one thing comparable maybe,” Gebhart said. “But I was in the army. Yes, I was keen, after National Service even. I took five years in it. You’d learn things, you know? Straightened me out actually. The service, it bred fellowship, you know? No, I don’t mean mountain rescue camp or the trekking or the rest of it. Maybe we knew who the enemy was, then.”

Felix zipped up the bag.

“Ach, you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

“What enemy, the Russians?”

A look of irritation crossed Gebhart’s face.

“What’s with all the Q amp; A today? Go do your duties.”

“My dad said it was partly the whole Eastern Bloc thing, to be ready at least, if they came in. But that’s been gone for years.”

“Oh, I get it. The sun rises in the west now? The official line is we need Uni boys, more computer jockeys, more foreign languages.

Well let me tell you something. Maybe we were a bit rough around the edges, or we didn’t use the dictionary much, but, boy, you knew where you stood. Yes, we got things done. And no, that wasn’t ancient times.”

“Was it in the army, or in the Gendarmerie?”

“The thing that happened? It was the army. It was a winter exercise. Winterwerk, we used to call it. They gave us a lot of gear, and we had a hell of a lot of lugging to do. It was up high, you know, with a load of heavy snow. Anyway. A heavy machine gun went off on a guy. Seven or eight rounds, just like that. Everyone was bone tired, see? Sleeping in the goddamned snow. It was careless. But it was bad, I tell you.”

He looked down at the nylon carry-all that they called the School Bag.

“Four hit him. And that’s the nearest I’ve been in my life. It’s not like TV.”

He stretched again.

“I had nightmares, for a while, then.”

Then Gebhart jerked his head up.

“No more yammering,” he declared. “Scram, will you? You’ve got stuff to do.”

Leaving, Felix caught a glimpse of Schroek’s stone face as he listened to the reporter ask some questions. It was a look that he had seen on other cops too, part of the buttoned-up look that cops seemed to pick up with their uniforms and wore when they were not amongst their own.

But it was Giuliana’s face that rose up in his mind again as he crossed the yard. This time tomorrow they’d be leaving, maybe on the road already. He’d be practising his Italian, but it wouldn’t be serious for long. It was almost a year since that Night They’d Never Forget, a terrible evening of arguing and shouting and tears that had quickly become The Night They Never Mentioned Since. The closest they had come was “that other time… ” or “we don’t want to go there again… ”

It had been a stressful time for her, with evaluations and things.

Felix himself had been grouchy, full of doubts and aversions to the training at the Gendarmerieschule, and the future he could imagine in the job. The bottles of wine hadn’t helped. Maybe he’d brought it on unconsciously. Maybe she had?

He winced as he sat into the patrol car, remembering.

“Can you commit to anything?” she had yelled. “Anyone?”

Commitment: did the word haunt everyone these days?

It was true: he had been whining, and he had been whining because he was covering up something, even from himself. She sure had hit a nerve when she yelled that he was faking it.

Faking? All his moaning: how this had all been rigged by his mother, and that he should have known it; how he’d signed up at a time of guilt and bad judgment, when he was broke and unsure, and the dates had gone by for readmission to repeat the year; that many others in his class were stand-offish because he’d gone beyond a Matura. Others in the class hadn’t even finished that far in school.

Felix had never found out, and never tried to find out, for sure if some of the trainees had heard about his father. And he had to admit that he too would have wondered about this Kimmel guy and if someone hadn’t greased the way for the poor widow Kimmel’s young lad to join up the Gendarmerie.

Faking, most definitely. The simple fact was that he didn’t mind the training at all. The complex fact however was something that Giuliana had latched onto right away in that rousing, bitter fight. It was that he complained because he was beginning to enjoy the demands made of him, its impositions and schedules, its rules and habits. He just couldn’t admit it to himself.

He checked his walkie-talkie and then the car radio. Korschak okayed him and reminded him to speak slowly. Ha ha. He pulled out of the yard, mentally plotting his way to the school again, and scanned the platz and the corner by Gasthaus Weber as he coasted by. He returned a small wave from the geezer who usually hung around on the bench there.

That was the thing with Giuliana, he’d understood: she said it right out. Always.

It was as if she could reach right in and say exactly the thing he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, put into words. She had learned that growing up, he was sure. Her father had walked out when she was four. Her mom had been a waitress, a cleaner, and some kind of higher up at the old folks place in Weiz. Too proud to go back to some place near Milan, the mom had stayed and made a new life, that of a single mom, with an Italian accent that could only remind all she met in the small town where they had been stranded that she was from an inferior society. You didn’t get many chances with a background like that.

Felix got by the lights near the schule and was soon in sight of the huge chestnut trees that hid much of the library across from the school. He began to add up the years people spent in schools of one kind or another. He thought of Vikki, a perpetual student in the making. If he was up at all, he was maybe in some cafe in Graz. He was probably chatting up a girl. Now that the spring was here, he might even be up on the Schlossberg at that cafe near the top, looking for unattached female tourists of a certain age.

It would be only later in the day that his friend would be arguing in that mocking way he had about how people were addicted to work, or how Austrians were boring, dutiful. Cowed that was his word. That required beer, probably at the Parkhaus in the evening, the restaurant in the city park that had just been rebuilt and had returned to popularity, pretty well instantly, with the melange of bohemians, disguised civil servants, artsies that Graz brought together with ease. As long as someone was paying for the beer, of course.

Felix found himself smiling at the thought as he drove along.

Vikki would always be okay for a night on the town, even if Felix had paid for most of the beer again. Would he ever tell Vikki how he had hiked up a half a kilometre hand in hand with a retarded kid?

That he counted that as part of his day’s work, the “Nice job” that Gebhart had called it? Probably not.

He parked near the library and took the carry-all and the case with the projector out of the back of the patrol car. Already there were faces in one of the windows upstairs.