John Brady - Poachers Road

Opa Kimmel would be sleeping too. Or maybe he’d lying awake there himself though. Would he be thinking about the decision he’d made, to finally move into the village? There’d be regret no doubt, but a secret relief too, Felix guessed, something the old man would never admit to. No more than he’d admit that the solitude he always claimed he preferred had actually become loneliness. The simple facts of old age, the approach of illness and death, had thawed him out enough now. He’d let a relative persuade him that he’d be doing them a favour no, an honour, as Lisi had heard and dryly reported to Felix by coming to live in part of their house. There’d be a tidy rent, of course, but they meant well. Why shouldn’t his relatives make some money out of the arrangement?

Pfarrenord, he thought. His grandfather used to go on about eagles, how they made Pfarrenord their home. Maybe it was some effort to instill something in his grandson, now that his own son had escaped to live elsewhere. Eagles were defiant and proud, no doubt, models of independence and power. But as Felix grew, he had begun to sense something else lodged in those platitudes, and it gave him pause to consider them in a new light. He began to see them now as loaded with something else.

He soon picked up hints from the spines of the old books he remembered looking at on those rare, but interminable visits. One was The Realm of Eagles, he recalled, with lots of photos of planes and pilots and parachutes. Eagles on Crete, he remembered too, a fading paperback from a company Felix had never seen elsewhere.

He had looked through it several times, studied the photos of paratroops and planes, and groups of smiling young men. How different they had seemed from the studio photo that had always hung in the hall, the one with Felix’s own great-grandfather in his Austrian Army uniform from the First World War.

So maybe that was where the coldness came from then, that politics thing, that knot of circumstances no one could never untangle, and that no one talked about. Even though families up here had known one another for generations, you seldom spoke carelessly outside your own home.

Felix tried to remember the year of Oma Kimmel’s death. He remembered his father telling him that he had been 13 when his mother died. Was it just quack medicine that people believed when they said that stress brought on cancer? Surely Opa Kimmel wouldn’t have been surprised that his own son soon gravitated toward the Nagls, and that he found excuses to spend his time there.

It came to Felix then that he had not fully understood at all how his own parents had shielded him, and Lisi too, from the remote person who was their grandfather. Now he wondered if Oma Kimmel had spent her own life, and probably her health, protecting her son from the same cold presence.

The dog slid onto its side with a low wheeze of contentment.

Felix stopped rubbing its ears and stared instead at the faint liquid slit of its eyes. Sleeping, yes. He looked around the hall again. This house, he thought, where nothing was complicated and no one was appraising you. It was a refuge.

He was actually getting drowsy himself now. He let his eyes close, and Giuliana’s face came to him. He struggled to hang onto it as other thoughts edged in, even as it became her hurt look, the reproachful one when they’d had words. The “talk” she wanted: he’d been annoyed because he’d been thinking things were actually going okay. The new police force need people like him. Lots of things would open up for him in the new police force. Even Gebi had conceded that. He might even go back to Uni for evening courses, and maybe even get paid for it too. Next thing you’d know, there’d be the applications for the Alpines, or even the Cobra, and plainclothes jobs anywhere across Austria. Why not even think about international stuff too?

The vibrations from his phone startled him, and the dog’s eyes opened.

Speckbauer didn’t sound one bit drowsy.

“You’re doing okay?”

Felix didn’t know what to say. He patted the dog’s head again, but the eyes stayed open now, the ears up.

“I’m awake, for sure. Where are you?”

“Why are you whispering?”

“I don’t want to wake my grandparents. Are you on the road?”

“I’m outside, beyond the light there in the yard.”

“But I don’t see your car I didn’t see it coming up the valley.”

“You’re in the house?”

“Yes. I’m downstairs. I can come out.”

“Stay put,” said Speckbauer. “We’ll take care of things. Has there been anything since? Any noise or stuff?”

“No.”

“Good. This is what we’re doing, for the time being, so listen.

Me and Franzi are moving about out here, eyeballing the place.

We’re going to keep doing that for a while. Verstehst?”

“I get it, but what do I do?”

“What? You want me to sit beside you and hold your hand?”

“It’s dark, what can you see?”

“Pretty well anything I want to damned well see. Really, believe me, we’ve done this kind of work before.”

“If I may say, Herr Oberstleutnant, I think we should try to get things clear.”

“Nothing is clear,” said Speckbauer sharply. “Nix. So save it.

It’s just the work. We’re in the business of wading around in a big swamp. It’s called Der schein trugt, this area we work in: the land of Nothing-Is-Clear. Shitty, isn’t it, but that’s life.”

‘All is not how it looks,’ Felix thought.

Speckbauer didn’t say anything for several moments.

“How am I going to explain this to them?” Felix asked.

“Deal with it later. It’ll work out.”

“What should I be doing, though? There has to be something.”

“Know what I want from you right now? Go to bed. That’s it.

But here’s something to think about while you’re nodding off.

Anyone passing down the way here, this road, can see your car parked there in the yard. That’s not helpful.”

Felix jerked his head away from the wall.He could remember deciding to rest it there, but only for a moment. The milky half-light softened the interior of the farmhouse and made the view from where Felix had slouched both mysterious and familiar. There was a glow at the edges of the hilltops which were framed by the kitchen window, but a handful of stars held out in the pale blue above.

Five-thirty. Berndt watched him with doleful eyes, his eyebrows shooting up and down but his head never stirring from its resting place on his paws. Felix switched off the yard light and threw on an old jacket. Slowly he opened the kitchen door and stepped into the yard. The birds were busy, and the cold tang of air that met his face revived him. He heard the pigs shuffling, one of them kicking a plank, and a grunt, as he made his way across the yard to the cars.

He slowed and even stopped several times on his way, but could not see traces of any visitor last night. Nothing had changed. In the distance he heard a cowbell clanking.

His phone went off.

“You’re not going for a little drive now, are you?” said Speckbauer.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in a ditch. Freezing my ass off.”

“I can’t see you.”

“Then I’m doing my job. Look, stay there. And don’t walk around yet. Me and Franzi are going to do a bit of basic police work.”

“You’re leaving?”

“No. Now we have a bit of light, I want to give the place a lookover, from where your car is down to the road. We’ll see if there are signs of any company last night, any uninvited guests. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Meanwhile, wait,” said Speckbauer.

Felix heard his voice change. He seemed to be getting up.

“Now remember,” said Speckbauer. “Don’t phone anyone.