John Brady - Poachers Road

“… she’s nice. She says it’s an addiction though, but she laughs. For now.”

“Addiction?”

“The whole business: the fitness thing, that’s okay, but twelvehour bike marathons up in the Alps?”

“Right. Is Peter hitting on you?”

“What? I’m in my room, looking out over the valley, reading.”

Speckbauer and his weirdo skin-graft sidekick ‘Franz’ returned to the forefront of Felix’s thoughts.

“And drinking wine.”

“… and thinking of…?”

“Of how much a genius Hesse really was.”

“That’s it? That’s all you’re thinking?”

“Basta it’s enough, isn’t it?”

Speckbauer had given him a mobile number. Maybe he’d go to a call box, phone him and hang up, just to annoy him. Herr Supercop Speckbauer, coming out from city to the lame-head trottels in Stefansdorf because, as everyone knew, the three Gendarmerie there couldn’t put their heads together enough to make heat.

“Listen, Felix. Go to bed.”

“I’m in the wrong part of Austria.”

“Go out and buy a teddy bear or something then.”

“You make sure you get on that train tomorrow, okay? I’ll pick you up in Graz and we’ll carry on our weekend. I’m sorry it screwed up.”

“Don’t be.”

“I thought it was over, that business.”

“I wish I were there, you know. But… ”

“If,” he began, and then let it go.

“If what?”

“It’s nothing.”

She waited “Tell me,” she said then.

“If he hadn’t have been, well, you know.”

“The boy you…?”

“‘Boy,’” said Felix. “Everyone calls him that. That was funny, sort of. But not anymore.”

“Felix, you’re upset. I’m worried about you.”

Stubbled faces, the blood gone black as the men’s hair, and the glitter from dead eyes visible where the eyelids were slightly parted.

“Go to your mom’s tonight, or Lisi, maybe?”

He returned to her.

“The cure would be worse than the problem,” he said.

He found a filler to wind up, and finished the conversation with a small private joke they had about how Giuliana lay when she slept.

Was he sure he didn’t want to come back up for the Saturday night, she asked. It wouldn’t be the same, he told her. Then he made sure he had the arrival time of the train back to Graz Hauptbanhof.

He shifted noodles from the freezer to the microwave. He ate them while he finished two cans of cheap lager in front of the TV.

Then he lay back on the couch and, rather than compose his thoughts as he’d hoped he’d know how, he conked out.

Felix’s furry mouth had been improved considerably by 10 minutes in the shower the next day at seven o’clock. He had had none of the ghastly dreams he’d expected. He put on a T-shirt and jeans; he didn’t bother shaving. Then he put away the debris from last night, and decided he’d get a croissant and a coffee at the Anker near the bridge. His mood had lifted, he was beginning to believe: there was a holiday to resume, for God’s sake.

He was pulling the door of the apartment shut when the phone went. He dithered for two rings and answered it.

“Well, I am glad to hear your voice,” said the caller.

“You are?”

“I am Horst Speckbauer. You may remember me from the other day?”

“Oberstleutnant Speckbauer.”

“You are not on duty I know, but I’d be much obliged if you could give me a bit of your time.”

“Well, is this really necessary? I’m supposed to be on holiday.”

Felix winced at the limp “supposed to be.”

“It is a matter of some importance. I think you will find it interesting, what I will tell you.”

“You will tell me?”

“I know you are concerned, and I wish to assist you. It is a tough thing that has happened, a very tough thing.”

Felix looked down at the notepad by the phone. A “tough thing” indeed: he was ready to yell that he never wanted to hear either Speckbauer or Gebi or any other cop calling something like this “tough” or “hard.” Cruel, was what it should be, and outrageous.

“You returned,” said Speckbauer. “Last night, was it?”

“A temporary visit, I am hoping, Oberstleutnant.”

“Please. I will come over to your place. Ten minutes?”

In the few moments before he replied, Felix understood that he’d made up his mind a long time ago: there’d never be another cop talking business where he and Giuliana lived. Gebhart had it right: you keep your family life private, shielded from this. He wouldn’t give Speckbauer the satisfaction of asking him how he’d gotten his home number, or how he’d known his movements.

“I’m going out for breakfast.”

“Great. Tell me where.”

“Keplerstrasse. There’s an Anker there.”

“Anker?”

“You know the bakery and restaurant chain? Just across the bridge.”

Felix looked out to the bike rack to make sure his city bike was still locked there. He checked he had his keys and his mobile. He considered taking a couple of aspirin. His headache was coming back, and he felt a tension starting in his shoulders and neck.

He took his time on the way to the bridge, trying with little success to relish how sprightly the people were in this green city now booming in late spring. What was wrong? There were even halter tops out, and few enough tourists. He had nothing against tourists, even though the European City of Culture Award a few years back had blown the place wide open.

It was more than just the tarted-up museums and galleries and exhibits and sandblasted facades, more even than the gigantic Art Island in the Mur that he’d watched going up, along with the enormous building on the bank beside it. Something had changed in this city, but he couldn’t say what. Maybe, as Giuliana had half joked last year at a party where everyone had shown up and drank far too much into the early hours, maybe Graz had been moved close to Berlin, and away from the East. Just the green mound at the heart of this old city, the Schlossberg, remained. Most times they forgot the “cave” beneath that they’d drilled out for the same City of Culture year, and installed computers and holograms and the like.

Felix still liked to walk up the steep paths of the Schlossberg. If nothing else, it was a workout of sorts. Once, just after he had started Uni, he had tried to run to the top, with some loony idea that he would race a group whom he had passed on their way to the funicular. He had had to walk about three-quarters of the way up near the beer garden with spots exploding before his eyes and his heart hammering. The last of his ascent had been strange, and unexpected. Maybe it had been his exhaustion, or the sharp, clear October sky, or more likely the absence of anyone else at such an hour, but he had felt he was far from the city then. It had felt like he was actually approaching the summit of some remote peak. The red roof tiles and the gentle curve of the River Mur that held in the old city centre so far below seemed new and unknown.

But what right did he think to imagine that it was “his” city at all, he thought, as he eyed the traffic on his way to turn up Wickenburg Gasse and head for the Kepler Bridge. It was Giuliana, daughter of an immigrant, who had struggled and succeeded, and had secured herself an enviable place right in the heart of the old city here, something he couldn’t have begun to imagine he’d have found. “Stowaway,” Giuliana had called him several times right after he had moved into her place. A joke, of course, and it had gone on for a while, part of the private language of sorts they came up with. Bedroom talk, silly anywhere else.

He locked his bike and got his order in before he turned at the creaky door’s opening and the surge of traffic noise.