John Brady - Poachers Road

“Another big one?”

Felix was surprised to learn he had almost finished his beer.

“Hell no. That’d be mess in a big way. A real mess. Enough problems.”

“The weather is good. Can’t you sleep in your car a few weeks?”

At this the blonde glanced over, but she did not smile.

“Bist narrisch?” said Felix. “Are you nuts?”

The three men were installed again under the umbrellas by the door. The sunlight hit Felix hard, and he felt the effects of the beer now. Beyond a shoe shop was a restaurant with too many arches for decor. He scuffed his shoe once, misjudging the height of the step going in.

Speckbauer closed his phone when he saw him, and got up from the table.

“Come on,” he said. He slid out some coins on the table next to his cup.

“I’m ready for a snooze,” Felix said.

“You don’t get commendations for sleeping on the job, Gendarme. Let’s go. Can you drive or not?”

“Drive?”

“Car. You. Drive.”

“But I had a beer.”

“So? You’re not unconscious on one beer, are you? You know the area better than I do.”

Felix looked to meet Speckbauer’s eye, but he was already up, calling out a thanks to the waitress on his way to the door.

Felix’s beery brain registered surprise now in place of his annoyance at being asked to drive. For a middle-aged guy, a desk-cop even, this dandy moved quickly. But why did he want Felix to drive, especially after a beer? He wasn’t over the limit, but there had to be some calculation in Speckbauer’s request. Order, more like it.

Or a dare?

He noticed the newspaper curled under Speckbauer’s arm.

Unless he was drunk, it had Russian characters.

“You read Russian?”

“No.”

“What’s the newspaper?”

“Serbo-Croatian,” said Speckbauer. They walked on.

The questions kept piling up in Felix’s mind. Now he wanted to ask Speckbauer what the hell this meant, that he was reading a newspaper in that language. He also wanted Speckbauer to ask him about the bar he’d asked him to go into. It was hardly just to get rid of him so he could read the paper in peace, or catch up on phone calls. Now he had to drive?

“What do I do with the receipt from that place?”

“Give it to me,” said Speckbauer. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Do you want to know how I got on in there?”

“Well, I suppose. Did you talk to the barman? Older fellow, a bit overfriendly?”

“As a matter of fact I did.”

“And would you know your way around there if you went on a second visit?”

“I think so. It’s loud enough now, though. There were guys speaking, I don’t know, in there. They came into the klo when I was there.”

Speckbauer nodded and slowed. Then he stopped abruptly at a corner.

“You drive,” he said. “You know your way out? Down toward the bridge. It’ll get you up to Radmangasse.”

Felix remembered the main streets and many of the lanes in the zentrum at least, from wandering here as a kid. His mother would come in for shopping on Saturdays. He could not remember his father coming into Weiz on those trips. But there had been lots of Sundays when his father had taken him up into the forest, or on a radl, where they had to wheel the bikes uphill half the time. It petered out when the adolescent thing had hit, when Felix started wanting to be with his mates, go to the movies, hang out.

Speckbauer unlocked the passenger door with a key and sat in.

Odd there were no electric conveniences in this Passat, Felix thought. A crappy police model? Opening the driver’s side, he saw Speckbauer closing the glove box, and locking it.

“Geh’ma,” said Speckbauer. “What’s it they say? ‘Drobn auf da Alm?’”

Up on the mountain indeed, Felix thought. He stifled a beery belch.

“Do you mean Festring, that place with that gasthaus?”

“That’s the place,” said Speckbauer. “The metropolis of Festring. Population twenty-six, I believe. Blink and you’d miss it, no? A place called Gasthaus Hiebler. It is where Herr Himmelfarb used to go for his beer and card game. You know it?”

“Only to pass it. It’s a couple of houses near the road only. An oasis.”

“We’re going to stop off at the Himmelfarb place too,” said Speckbauer.

Felix noted the change in his voice when he spoke now.

“It’s something we need to do.”

Felix looked over.

“To jog the memory,” said Speckbauer. “It won’t be easy for you, I know.”

Then he shifted in his seat. His voice took on a strained cheerfulness.

“But let’s head through your area first. A little ramble.”

“My area?”

“St. Kristoff, isn’t it?”

“St. Kristoff? It’s off up the hills there, not on the way.”

“We’ll work our way from there over the back roads. The ones maybe nobody knows about except the chosen few. Like you?”

There was a different sound from the engine than Felix expected.

“It doesn’t say turbo on the back of this.”

“Why should it?” said Speckbauer. “Go easy with your right foot.”

Felix manoeuvred the Passat out from the narrow streets and lanes that made up the old part of Weiz and onto the Klammweg, the road that ran along the Weiz river.

“What was the objective of the visit to that bar anyway?”

“To familiarize yourself with it. Call it routine reconnaissance as well. But tell me, why are we going up to this Festring place?”

“You want to talk to the owner or whoever works there, to see who might have been there the same time Karl Himmelfarb was.”

“Okay, good. And why is that necessary?”

“Because he talked to others there. And that’s where people could have found out he was going to call us again.”

“… because of…?”

“Hansi wanted to tell us things, maybe. I don’t know.”

“You’re bothered,” said Speckbauer. He had spoken in a slow, considerate tone that Felix could not remember hearing before.

“Annoyed I’m talking like this?” he went on.

“Who wouldn’t be?”

Felix felt Speckbauer’s gaze on him. He didn’t look over.

“Okay,” said Speckbauer, finally. “There’s only one change to make to that.”

“How do you mean?”

“You said we’d talk or that I would talk. Not so. It will be you.”

Speckbauer had his hand up even as Felix formed words.

“You are local,” he said.

“But I live in Graz,” Felix said.

“They will know you maybe. One less barrier, don’t you see?

And look — if they don’t know you, they’ll have known your father.”

Felix took his foot off the accelerator. He looked over.

“My father? Why are you bringing him into this?”

“Is it beneath you or something? Be proud, I say. We need people to have confidence in us. To trust us. We must use everything we have.”

Felix bit back the words that rose to his mind. An uneasy quiet settled in the car. Speckbauer seemed more interested than ever in the occasional car that passed them now.

Felix left it in third passing the mill, the last piece of straight road before the Weizklamm, the deep, rocky ravine full of hairpin bends and towering overhangs a couple of kilometres away.

“Itchy foot?” Speckbauer murmured, without taking his eyes off the view. So do it then. But just for a bit.”

Felix’s annoyance evaporated when he floored the pedal. There was no lag. He felt his seat had been shoved hard from behind. The wind began to hiss at the small opening at the top of the window.

“Genug,” said Speckbauer. “You have a beer on the job, you do a Nikki Lauda. Feel better now?”

The mountains soon closed in on the road, and made it a steep, winding cut at the bottom of the gorge, its bare rockfaces hundreds of metres overhead holding back the light.