John Brady - Poachers Road

Right?”

“Who would I be phoning?”

“The local Gendarmerie, that’s who. We’re handling it.”

Speckbauer seemed to be waiting for a reply. Felix wondered if Speckbauer had guessed he’d have been thinking of Gebhart, or even Schroek.

“I understand.”

“Gut. Now can you get some coffee started or something? It’s only polite.”

“You’re coming down to the house after?”

“Of course we are. Franzi and I have a good spiel ready and we’ll come in off the road. We’ll be visiting to, let me see, ‘speak with you on a very pressing matter.’ If he asks, your grandfather.”

“He’s not stupid, you know.”

“Did I say he was?”

Felix closed the connection first. He looked through bleary eyes around the fields. Speckbauer must be near the orchard. As Felix stared at it, movement to his right made him turn. It was Franzi, the spook, looking pale and very cold. As he nodded, the sky, glowing lemon where they met the hills, glanced once off his glasses. Then he said something into his collar, turned away, and stepped back behind the firs.

Felix didn’t move, but pretended instead to savour the crisp air, the glory of a mountain sunrise. He was able to control his breathing, even if spots began to appear in front of his eyes. The problem he was focusing on however was that he didn’t trust his knees not to buckle the minute he began to stroll about the yard. He was putting his anger into preventing Speckbauer, wherever he was, from enjoying any sign of his shock.

It wasn’t the sight of Franzi shrouded under what looked like a hooded army poncho, with the reflected dawn on his glasses giving his face the look of an insect up close that had Felix now measuring out his breath and struggling to keep an appearance of composure. It was the glimpse of what Franzi’s hand was holding down by its strap. It was a sturmgewehr, the assault rifle that every Gendarmeriepost had, which was taken out only for drills and inspection. This one with a peculiarly large sight attached.

After a minute Felix made his way back to the kitchen and began to prepare drip coffee. He cursed aloud when he dropped the lid, but he trapped it quickly with his foot to stop it skittering on the floor. He stared at it before picking it up, as though it might have a life of its own there, and tried to clear his thoughts.

Gebi would be up already. He pulled out the phone but hesitated then, and gazed back out the window and up to the slopes. A flood of sunlight built up behind the hills was about to burst.

“We’re taking care of it,” Speckbauer had pronounced. And “we” were…

Someone was stirring upstairs. Now the dog was getting up himself, the lazy and contented old bag, plodding clumsily down through the kitchen. Felix closed the phone. He had enough to think about. He’d need a plan, a clear head, to sort out Speckbauer.

Felix’s grandfather clumped down the stairs half-sideways.

“I thought I heard someone.”

He stared at the kitchen window with a faraway look in his eyes.

Then he turned to the dog.

“Have you let this old bag of bones out yet, Felix?”

“No.”

“Out you hound,” his grandfather growled at the dog. “You’ve had your charity.”

“I’ll take him out, Opa.”

“Hell, no. Let him go wander out there. Or he’ll end up like me when I don’t do a day’s work locked up in the joints.”

“The thing is, I’m expecting someone to drop by here.”

His grandfather turned to him.

“A visitor? Up here? At this hour? And why are you looking at me like that?”

“I can’t understand what you say, some of it.”

A rueful look crossed his grandfather’s face.

“It’s too early for all this hubbub. But if it’s a beautiful maiden you’re expecting, I’ll put my teeth in for that. Does the name start with a G?”

“I wish. It’s another policeman.”

Felix took in his grandfather’s skeptical look.

“Here? Our house? Visiting?”

“He phoned me. He’s on his way back from a job. He wants to stop by, and have a chat.”

The coffee burbled as it fed down through the filter. His grandfather tilted his head slightly and squinted.

“Why not,” he said. “If that’s the crazy time the man works.”

Felix watched him pour coffee, and place a small cookie on the saucer he’d be bringing upstairs for Oma Nagl. His grandfather yawned and headed back to the stairs. There he stopped, his foot on the first step, and looked over.

“Is this visit about last night, or something?”

Felix had prepared for the question, and even tried to rehearse an answer.

“Can I tell you later, Opa?”

Felix had a half-cup of coffee in him when he heard his grandfather’s voice upstairs again, speaking to Oma, and then her reply in a voice still clotted with sleep.

His grandfather paused at the bottom of the stairs, exchanged a look with him and shuffled on to prepare some breakfast. Felix watched him pause as he stooped and craned his neck to see into the fridge. He took out some rye bread to add to the buns on the table.

“Sure enough,” he said then, and stopped filling the kettle.

“Here’s someone now. Two men, a white VW.”

Felix got up.

“Opa I’m sorry to ask you this”

“You need to talk in private. I knew you’d ask.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank my arse. But I want to meet them first, look ’em in the eye. I want to give them The Look. You know what The Look is?”

Felix waited.

“It says: You’re in my house. These are the mountains, not some city street where putting on a suit makes you important. So mind your manners, Gendarmerie or not. And don’t try to put one over on this boy here. That’s what The Look says.”

“You’ll make them cry, Opa. Can you have that on your conscience?”

Opa Nagl was already reaching for a jacket. Felix decided not to follow him out, but to watch instead from the window.

He watched the circumspect exchange of nods and the few words out in the yard as his grandfather greeted Speckbauer. There was a wary handshake. Franzi stayed in the car, wisely enough, Felix thought, rearranging something, or pretending to. He couldn’t lipread at all, but before a minute had passed, his opa and Speckbauer had their backs to the house and were surveying the fields, each casting their arms up in the slow, appraising gestures of farmers.

They nodded a lot, keeping their gaze on the view.

Franzi emerged after a few minutes. He was in nondescript outdoorsy clothes, the poncho stowed away, no doubt, and he moved like a robot with the batteries about to go out. Felix watched his grandfather’s face for his reaction. It lasted an instant, the whatin-the-hell look, but it seemed to spur Opa Nagl into an overly friendly mode.

The door to the yard opened and his grandfather’s resonant voice and thick accent came pouring in. The winter, cattle, how he had ploughed some fields with a horse until ’67, the apple cider you could buy that would close your eyelids in five minutes flat it all filled the hall and seemed to get louder. The Oberstleutnant Horst Speckbauer now making his way into the Nagls’ kitchen spoke in the same gruff, detonating voice of the Styrian farmer. His greeting broke the spell.

“Servus, Felix.”

“Give these men breakfast in God’s name Felix,” said his grandfather. “They had night work, they tell me. I’ll go back up to the countess upstairs.”

Felix put mugs on the table and waited for his grandfather to finish putting things on the tray. Speckbauer seemed keen enough to keep a conversation about corn going.

From Franzi, there was nothing. Felix could only make out occasional eye movements through the tint on his glasses. In this light, the scar tissue didn’t stand out.