John Brady - Poachers Road

“But… the agencies that are trying to… ”

“Yes? You are getting warm.”

“I think I get it.”

“Ach so. I don’t wish to be disloyal. But the good guys are never going to get anywhere unless we size down and let people use initiative.”

They crossed the first of the series of smaller hills on the route to Weiz, descending through broad curves to fields that had already gone green with the starting corn. The steeple of St. Ruprecht am Raab appeared over the flat farmland that ran to the base of the hills.

“Christ on his cross with the thieves,” whispered Speckbauer, jerking the wheel and correcting it an instant later. Felix looked behind at the farm lorry still reversing onto the road. A smell of manure entered the car and stayed.

“Fewer errors,” Speckbauer murmured. “That’s how it works.

Did I say that?”

He glanced over at Felix and then beyond him to the farmhouses.

“Even Franzi is beginning to be a believer.”

“Was he…?”

Speckbauer smiled and shook his head once.

“Ah, what a good choice I have made here. Permit me a little crowing now, as it reflects as well on you. You don’t see it? It’s that finesse you have, that way of insinuating yourself. ‘Getting under the radar’ my Yankee friends call it.”

“I don’t mean to pry.”

“Of course you don’t. But you’re a born diplomat. Very discreet. The ladies love it, I imagine. You will do well up in the hills for sure. Tell me, is it something you were taught, this diplomatic way?

Your mother, let me guess? Stop me if that is an impertinence.”

It was a dare Felix could not resist.

“My mother is quiet, they say.”

“‘They say.’ I like this. It is like you tell a story. ‘They say.’”

Felix said nothing.

“Have I offended you?”

“No.”

“Merely confused things? My apologies.”

Felix believed him. It took him aback to know it.

“I spend so much time with certain types of people, that, well you can see the results. Hell, have they moved Weiz, or what?”

“St. Ruprecht, then Weiz. Maybe four kilometres.”

“They say that spouses grow to resemble one another. Their clothes, their manner of speech. Have you noticed?”

“I suppose,” said Felix.

“Well, there’s Franz and me, a case in point.”

“Spouses?”

“Might as well be,” said Speckbauer. He moved his head from side to side, gazing into the distance. “We’re making a stop in Weiz before going up to hillbilly territory. G’scherter, isn’t that what the city people call mountain people, huh?”

“I’ve heard it used.”

“Ach, you surely have. You have a foot in both places. But what was I saying?”

“Spouse, you said.”

“Right. So, are you confused when I say spouse? No, I’m not gay. Franzi isn’t either, but we might as well be sometimes, I wonder. It’s funny. We share a place.”

“Live together, you mean?”

“A generational term hah. Yes and no. Franzi was unmanageable when he came home from the hospital. Very badly behaved indeed. I don’t think he’ll mind me telling you. Ach, I don’t care if he does. There, that proves it we are sort of married when we talk about one another like that.”

Across the fields, the higher hills and mountains began over the town’s red-tiled roofs. Forested slopes shifted and slid with the twists in the road, as the yellow walls and dome of the big church, the Weizberg, came into view. They passed a suburb, Preding.

“The wife left. I moved in. Franzi was a bear. I never left. I suppose I should,” he smiled slightly as he went on.

“But who could turn down a location like that place I ask you.

Know anyone else who has a parking garage, a roof garden, and a three-bedroom place on the Hofgasse, right in the middle of Graz?”

“That’s where you live?”

“Temporarily for three years temporarily. Movie stars would want it, uh? Franz inherited it, lucky bastard. That’s the way. The destiny thing, maybe.”

Speckbauer looked over until Felix met his eye.

“You believe in that, the destiny stuff?”

“No.”

Speckbauer smiled and tapped his fingers twice on the wheel.

“Good. Me neither. Arsch mit ohren, as they say. ‘An arse with ears.’ That’s destiny.”

Speckbauer showed no mercy at the roundabout in Neustadt coming into Weiz. He only slowed seriously when Gleisdorferstrasse where the B64 pinched small as it reached this thousand-year-old city closed on the Weiz Zentrum proper. He turned down a lane at Europa Allee and let the Passat coast in second over the cobbled surface to a small platz where there were a dozen diagonal spaces.

“We’re stopping here in Weiz?”

“Stimmt.”

Felix had been to and through Weiz many times, but since his teens, less and less. His father knew everyone there, as in other towns and dorfs all around, it had seemed. He remembered his father stopping the car once and parking it by the chemist’s just to walk back to the benches close to the rathaus at the top of the platz.

There he had talked and laughed with the elderly man he had spotted, for hours it had seemed.

It had only been a half-hour probably, but Felix remembered being summoned from the car by a wave from his father. His mother, ever the diplomat, usually bribed them with a few schillings for ice cream. She knew to expect these impromptu meetings. Often the older ones would do the ritual cheek pinching and hand squeezing. Often he remembered listening to accents so thick he had barely understood more than “family” or “healthy,” or “weather.”

“You seem to know your way around here,” Felix said.

Speckbauer’s eyebrows went up and down in lieu of a remark.

The Passat’s tires made a soft kiss and rebound off the edge of the footbath. He turned off the engine.

“Down that way,” he said.

He nodded toward a cobbled lane curling down between an old house and some newer buildings to the other side.

Felix closed the door behind him, and stretched.

Speckbauer took his time with something in the car. The trunk lid clicked and swung a little before settling again. Felix noted how Speckbauer was out of the seat, the door closing behind him, and at the back of the car in one easy, sort of curving motion.

“There’s a plan?”

“There’s always a plan.”

Speckbauer opened the trunk and cast about for something.

Felix saw plastic-wrapped files, a grey metal box in the centre of the trunk. Speckbauer picked up a newspaper and tucked it under his arm.

He looked over Felix’s chest.

“A T-shirt. What use is this? Next time, then.”

“Next time what?”

“Next time get a shirt you can put something on, or in. I can clip it or you can just drop it in a pocket. A kleine transmitter.”

He opened his hand to show something with a single earpiece and a slim cord attached.

“I like to listen in.”

“I don’t get this.”

“You are making a rest stop, on our little jaunt. Down that lane there is a place I want you to buy yourself a beer, or something. I will be at a cafe a bit down toward the zentrum.”

“Why am I doing this?”

“It’s your new job.”

“Just a beer?”

“Just one beer. It’s Saturday, remember? You can do these things. See, everyone’s out shopping today. You’re thirsty. You’re not so happy. Your wiebi, your annoying wife, has gone shopping and you know she’ll overspend. So… ”

“Why don’t you go in?”

“Because I am not stupid, that is why. They are not stupid either. Me, I look like a cop. I probably smell like a cop? You though, you’re nobody. Verstehst? Got that?”

“What am I supposed to see there?”