John Brady - Poachers Road

“Sleep?”

“Forget sleep. Think marriage. Two marriages, if you count Franzi’s. But in his case it was different. His missus didn’t want to be a nurse to the freak that came home from the hospital. She’d signed on for glamour, you see? Franzi was quite the performer, yes.

But in my case, I was an adulterer, not the common kind. No this wasn’t soap opera stuff. It was that I became obsessed with my work after, after our ‘holiday’ in Zagreb.”

“You and him?”

“Yeah. We share a place. No, we’re not gay. ‘Adjusting to circumstances.’ It’s about money, and convenience. Franzi’s antics are over, I think. His grafts are getting better every year. He hasn’t wrecked every stick of furniture for a year. Punching windows has definitely fallen off. That’s progress.”

Felix glanced over at Franzi.

“So now you chase these people, but only inside Austria? For the Gendarmerie?”

“What did you learn in training? Who do you work for?”

“‘The Austrian people.’”

“The fact is you work for the Interior Ministry. So do we. Yes, Franzi and I, we still chase bad guys. Our bad guys are not the usual gallery, the low-lifes you’ll find in Graz, or Vienna, say. We are allowed to be particular. But most of our housecleaning goes on in Graz. God decided on the eighth day the day that no one knows about to situate Graz close to the lunatics to the south, the east.

Know any history? ‘Balkans’…?”

“A bit. A guy, a student, Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand, Austrian bigwig.”

“Twenty million died with three bullets,” said Speckbauer.

“Look over Hitler’s shoulder and point at the same cause. War reparations, did they teach you that…?”

“I can’t remember being taught about it, but I know about them.”

“Good. Anyway, back to Graz. Franzi and I work with a section of the Criminal Police. Yes, we’re on loan to the Kripo. Actually, our original supervisors couldn’t wait to ship us out when things went to hell. Imagine that trafficking, smuggling thing is a big pipe, a big sewer pipe that comes from down there. Well, if we were plumbers, our expertise is in the steady leak. A lot of the officials down there in Croatia are on the take. You know that? The smart ones are the smilers who never get their hands dirty, of course.

Who’s to say one of them didn’t give the nod for whoever tried to torch Franzi that night? Well he didn’t end up wearing his wooden pyjamas in the end, as you can see.”

Speckbauer’s voice trailed off then, and he returned to studying the tabletop. Franzi’s breath was whistling in his nose. Maybe he was asleep after all.

When Speckbauer looked up again, Felix could not decide if it was a smile or a sneer on his face.

“I am not a betting man,” Speckbauer murmured. “But I will chase any chance I can find, any chance, to find my way to the one who tipped off those people that day.”

The eyes bored into Felix’s now, even as Speckbauer nodded slowly, twice.

“No matter where they are.”

To Felix, it seemed that the lull that followed lasted for many minutes. He was dimly aware of Franzi’s slow movement, and re-settling, and a belief that the three men were listening to the morning sounds of distant birdsong, and the occasional creak from the beams in the old house.

It was Speckbauer who spoke first.

“Does that help, at all?”

”A little, I suppose.”

“‘Pull a thread, you get a coat.’ So it sort of pains me to admit that I am not on top of this. It’s embarrassing. And it makes me angry, as you can see. You might ask why.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Because we, the great experts, are useless here. It’s like starting from scratch.”

“Oh this is where I come in,” said Felix. “You think because I grew up around here that this gives you some kind of a head start?

Better yet, get a probationer, a guy will be too awed to ask questions, a guy who’ll do what he’s told?”

Speckbauer continued to frown at the table. It was as if he was trying to absorb a new threat in a game of chess there, one that only he could see.

“I can tell you are impressed,” he said. “But I will finish. Back to the two in the forest hell, it’s always the forest, isn’t it, in the old stories? I know it’s a stupid thing I keep repeating. These two men should not have been there. I have a theory, and I will tell it to you.

These two were trying to conduct business that their bosses would not have known about, and would not have been too happy about.”

“A side deal.”

“You’re getting it. But greed is always greed. It never ends. You can never predict how far it’ll go, how greedy people will get. It is the strangest thing. So these two were not ambushed, let us say, by people outside their normal course of business. They were disposed of ‘taken care of.’ That’s because they did something stupid.

Something against the rules, this gschaftl, this little effort.”

He looked up abruptly from the tabletop.

“Stanzen, as the gangsters call it,” he said. “‘Fired.’ ‘Let go.’”

Morning sunlight was carving its way high up into the woods.

The deeper greens gave way to glowing patches made almost phosphorescent from the sun’s slanting rays.

“These people didn’t belong up here,” Speckbauer went on. “I don’t mean racist crap. I mean they broke some rule. They came up here for someone, or something. Now, you spoke about trust earlier on. Your grandparents are ‘trusting people.’”

“They are you see for yourself. Why bring that up?”

“Trust? Ah, your generation what am I talking about? My generation. Nobody trusts. Look where it got us not so long ago, right? We were poisoned by our own.”

Speckbauer looked around the kitchen.

“You know what I’m talking about?”

“I do,” Felix said, cautiously. “I think.”

“What I am blathering on about here is an open secret. About how everything went to scheisse sixty years ago. So things were bad for years after the war. All this guilt and silence, on top of all the missing men. There was rape. No one talks about that. Fires, murder. Wondering if Stalin was going to pull something. But things picked up, and moved on. Today we are polite members of the EU.

Pretty good, eh? Soon we’ll have our brothers, the Turks. No more Austrian nightmares then. We’ll all sleep soundly.”

Felix said nothing. Shafts of sunlight had broken through the treetops and were tearing into the window now, as steadily as a brightening orange glare.

“Different story here in God’s country, huh. Anybody talk to you about that?”

“No.”

“There’s my point right there, then. You probably never asked either. Let me tell you, in those years you found whatever you could and you did whatever you did to survive. You went back in time, to what worked before. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ‘Fall back,’ they say in the army.”

“I don’t see the point of this talk.”

“My point was that this is how humans work under pressure.

They go back to old ways. So when you were short of something or you wanted something, you found the ways that worked. The line between criminality and the law was gone. You knew the wegs and paths of the forest. You knew where you could stay, or rest, or wait.

In fact, if you were a man, one of the lucky ones that survived the Eastern Front or labour camps, you found your way back here. And you soon got the picture. You were on your own. ‘They’ had won.

But you had your bits of farm, maybe an animal or two. And you had your training, didn’t you?”

“You mean army?”

“Naturlich. After a few years soldiering you’d be ten times better at bringing home a rabbit, or a deer.”