John Brady - Poachers Road

In a moment his mind was on a slalom, with everything almost over the edge, rushing at him. Why had he turned off the ringer?

Hansi Himmelfarb holding the kitten in the farmhouse kitchen. The way Speckbauer’s comments always had a ring of not quite sarcasm. Sitting with those two detectives in the restaurant yesterday in a weird conversation.

He sent the message scrolling again. Something fastened and closed tighter in his chest and he gasped. He had to think, but he couldn’t. He saw his own hands turn the phone over. He stared at it, and read the logos and indentations on the back. Battery, he thought, his mind skittering, serial number. Had he snapped?

“Busted?”

It was Peter. Felix looked up at him. The light, the views over the valleys and mountains, even Peter’s face all seemed to have changed.

“Is it broken?”

“No.”

Peter shrugged and half smiled. Felix looked out the window at the clearing below where they creaked and swung upwards. There were no maniacs hiking it up today, straining and sweating every step to the top of the mountain.

He looked at his feet. He didn’t know what to do.

“What’s going on in there?”

It was Giuliana. The strain on her face was easing. He was suddenly overwhelmed by gratitude that she was there, present, alive, and still trying to beat her nerves about heights and cable cars, just to humour him.

“Something’s wrong?”

Peter would find out eventually, one way or another, he decided.

“Gebi texted me,” he said and cleared his throat. “Remember the incident up at the farm, the Himmelfarb family?”

“How could I forget?” Giuliana said.

Felix saw that Peter wasn’t even pretending that he was not all ears.

“Gebi said, well, he texted that… something happened. A fire.

They’re dead.”

Volkswagen Polos Felix’s mother’s seven-year-old model Polo will top out at 180. On a good day, as Gebi might say. With the fohn behind you, that warm winter breeze, or a tornado maybe, going down the side of a wall.

Felix wavered at 150, imagining a cloud of black smoke, a serious clank and grind and one good big metallic bang, and then only the decision of what scrap yard he’d send it to.

Still he pushed it. He wanted something, anything, to seize his attention and hold it, so he could not think. He got the eye several times from drivers rolling along nicely at 130, in cars that could do twice that. He came through Schladming after he got off the A10, and he was barrelling down the A9 an hour later. The lights were on a half-hour before he got to the outskirts of Graz.

He phoned Giuliana after he got off the autobahn. She had settled into the hotel. No, she hadn’t been “checking out” the other guys, the dozen or so off-duty Gendarmerie guys who had shown up for the trekking. And no, she wasn’t really fooled by this lame humour. Peter wouldn’t put the moves, sober or wipsi, she told him.

She had her books, they had their bikes and, later, their beer. And yes, she had a lift down to the bahn tomorrow and a ticket, if she changed her mind. And no, it was no problem. She wanted at least one night up on the mountain, with Felix or without.

He picked up some buns and milk before he let himself into the apartment. He waited until he had eaten half of the buns and cheese before phoning the post. Korschak told him Gebhart had left a message at the end of his shift. Korschak’s tone conveyed something to Felix as he recited Gebhart’s home phone number. It was not resentment, Felix decided, or annoyance that Gebhart had conceded a valuable invitation to the new recruit, but perhaps the smallest trace of awe.

“So Felix,” said Korschak. “Look at you. You are hardly in the door here but you get to talk to Gebi and at the Gebhart residence too, I might add.”

“Is it really that big a deal?”

“Is the Pope Catholic? Gebi never mixes home with work.

Never. Even Dieter is scared to phone him at home. You, my friend, are special.”

Felix couldn’t remember hearing that tone of sly humour from the friendly enough but starchy, by-the-book careerist Korschak before. He had recited the phone number in a slow, portentous tone.

“So phone him,” Korschak added, “Something on account of a boy? You’ll know, he said.”

Felix put down the phone, and sat back. He decided again that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, or should do.

He examined his hands. He had walked hand in hand with Hansi Himmelfarb, gotten the butt of half-serious jokes about it.

What would the fire that killed the Himmelfarbs have done to that hand?

Gebhart answered the door himself.

Felix had been around the area before, up and down the myriad roads and lanes that functioned as roads in this hinterland area just outside Graz. Trust Gebhart, he thought, to live on a road that still looked out over farms and woods and held the pungent scent of manure in the air. The nearest neighbour was 200 metres away.

A new Skoda was parked next to Gebi’s down-at-heel Fiat.

“Pretty heroic driving,” said Gebhart. “What are you looking at?”

“Sorry.”

“You think I sleep in my uniform, do you?”

A face, a woman’s, appeared from a doorway behind.

“My wife.”

“Delighted,” said Felix.

“Don’t be too delighted,” said Gebhart. “She’s a nurse in the emerg.”

“How do you work with this crusty old krot?” Mrs. Gebhart asked.

Gebi led him into a parlour. A very tall girl with her father’s nose, and a book, and rimless glasses stirred under a cupola of light and slowly stood.

“Claudia, this is Felix. He is a Gendarme.”

The kid was a gangly 12 or 13 Felix saw, with that mix of open curiosity and reserve peculiar to the age.

“He’s just like daddy. More of an action man you might think, my dear bookworm.”

JOHN BRADY POACHER'S ROAD “De I’m happy to meet you, Fraulein.”

“He bikes around goat tracks in the mountains near Kitzbuhel for recreation,” said Gebhardt. “Something you might consider, my dear?”

She rolled her eyes and held her book to her chest and walked out. Gebi held the door before closing it.

“Beer? Coffee?”

“No. No thanks.”

“Well I’m going to have a Puntigamer. You should. It’s the only beer, really.”

Gebi gave him a considered look.

“Look. Don’t be a clown. Have one. Nobody comes to my house from work. Consider yourself a movie star or something.”

Felix looked around the pictures while he waited for Gebhart to return. There was one from the 1980s, it looked like, to go by the cars, with a young, trim Josef Gebhart. Yes; minus 10 or 15 kilo, that was him standing with fellow officers against a Gendarmerie car high up somewhere, with snow in the background. There was a snapshot from long before that, a man standing in the open door of a VW Beetle. He looked like Gebhart. Men, unshaven, in white camouflage gear, eyes squinting in the blazing sun, again up in the snow somewhere.

Gebhart brought only the bottles. He sat in an old armchair.

Felix took a longer swig of the bottle than he had planned. Gebhart kept up his baleful gaze.

“You drove like a goddamned madman back here, anyway,” he said.

“I felt I should come back. Now, I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. But coming right off your precious week’s leave, that is something. That pushed my buttons enough to actually allow you to enter…” Gebhart made a desultory wave of his arm around the room, “the Gebhart sanctuary.”

“Pretty exclusive, I hear.”

“Damn right it is. You’re going to have to come up with something good to justify me giving in to my kleine herz over this.”