John Brady - Poachers Road

“She doesn’t have an ailing stepfather?”

“Christ, how do I know? The rules these days, you can’t ask or say a damned thing. You know that, right?”

Speckbauer looked down at the small notepad. Felix returned Kurt’s guileless look.

“Stephi’s from where?” Speckbauer asked.

“She’s from Weiz, born and bred.”

“Her family here?”

“Uh-uh. It busted up years ago. She has as sister, over in Carinthia, I think.”

“She knows the area, though.”

“I suppose.”

“Friends, people she’s in touch with?”

Kurt shrugged.

Speckbauer gave him a glare.

“Wait here will you,” he said to Felix. “So Kurt doesn’t go for another jog. I want to make a call.”

He looked down at the display on his mobile and scowled.

Then he slid out of the booth and went out the door to the street.

There was a laneway to the side of the restaurant, Felix remembered.

Kurt was rubbing his bottom lip slowly with his thumbnail.

Speckbauer’s departure seemed to have calmed him a little. He kept staring across the table at Felix.

“Will you quit that?”

“Am I being rude? Sorry. I just waited to see what a fool looked like.”

“Are you trying to be an idiot with me?”

“How long are you a copper?”

“Long enough. Shut up, why don’t you.”

“Well that’s a change. The other wants me to talk, but you say shut up.”

Felix watched a mother with a pram wait for a traffic light.

“He’ll toss you on the pile eventually,” said Kurt. “You know?”

When Felix made no reply, he went on.

“You’ll graduate. But you’ll be okay. I mean, what’s he got on you, except your own I better be careful, I suppose your own youth.”

“And you?” Felix murmured, watching the cars slowing now.

“You go back to jail or something nice like that?”

“Who knows? No doubt he’ll make a few phone calls. That’s his specialty. Have you met his ghost?”

A van braked hard in the street outside. The woman pushing the pram hesitated. She gave the driver a hard look, and then continued pushing the pram across.

“The spook. He freaks me out. Fritz, what’s his name, Hans?”

“Franz.”

“So you do know him. Looks like the devil sent him back up?”

The light changed. Two elderly women came in the door. One was shaped like a question mark, and wore the green and grey loden. They were greeted and shown a table. Felix heard the hissing of the espresso machine pumping. He rubbed at his eyes.

“You know, it’s about time I got out of this place anyway,” said Kurt. “Sure, there’s business. But the crowd is different in the last few years. Younger? Maybe I can’t keep up anymore.”

Felix did not turn away from the window. Outside on the pavement, the woman reached into the pram, and smiling, began to lift out her baby. An older woman who had stopped and greeted her was making those goo-goo sounds that babies seemingly liked.

“You feel sorry for me there, Mister Gendarme?”

“Shut up,” said Felix, without turning from the window.

As the baby was lifted from the pram, Felix saw that it had been crying. He watched the older woman start a little pantomime to distract it. The mom undid the baby’s hat. The short hair was orange and the sun caught it as the hat came off. The mother gently bobbed the redhead in her arms to soothe it.

“Oh you’re going to do well,” he heard Kurt mutter. “You’re an arschloch to begin with.”

Felix turned toward Kurt. He took into the pouchy, bleary eyes.

Under his stubble the sallow skin lay like butter gone bad.

“You ever see a big red-headed fellow in your pub?”

“A red-headed guy? I don’t look at their hair, especially a guy.

What, am I weird or something?”

“Hair like that over there,” said Felix. He watched Kurt squint through the sun filled window toward the street.

“Like that little one’s? You don’t see that often, do you. Maybe he’ll get a job as a clown when he grows up. Is that what you mean, have I seen any clowns in the stube?”

Felix kept up his stare.

“This is ‘weird question day’?” Kurt added. “Why would I bother to remember something like that?”

“Because it’s out of the ordinary. Think of a big guy, a beard to go with it.”

“A beard? Like some big Kris Kringle?”

“A big fellow, like I said.”

Kurt’s eyes slipped out of focus. After a few moments a wry expression settled on his face. He shook his head and then began to slowly rub his eyes, and then his whole face with his hands. He stopped abruptly and let down his hands.

“Well hell,” he said and smiled. “Funny how the mind works.

‘Red hair.’ ‘Guy.’ None of that means anything at first. But there was a big fellow coming in here, to the pub, every now and then.

Stephi would know him, yes she had a laugh with him. Big, yes.

But a beard? I don’t know about that.”

“But a local guy? From the area, right?”

“Who knows? But he had a helmet yes. He looked like one of those Hells Angels fellows that you see on the TV.”

“And Stephi…?”

“Oh she’d have an eye for the likes of him. Yes, talk to her.

Speck is probably doing a big thing for her right now. Beats me, truly.”

“Is there a name on this guy?”

“I don’t know. But she called him something, if I remember.

No. Wait: something to do with how he looked. Ah, shit, I forget.”

“Come on. ‘Giant?’ ‘Motorbike man’?”

“You’re funny.”

“Hells Angel?”

“This is like I am drunk, this game. Maybe I just dreamed you and Speck have been talking to me, asking me weird questions. And now, this guess-a-word?”

He lifted his hand to his forehead.

“Maybe I have a fever.”

Then his face froze and he stared at a point just over Felix’s head.

“Wait! ‘Foxy,’ I think. Yes? Ah Christ, Stephi talks so much I have to ignore her a lot of the time. But she was laughing about it.

‘Foxy.’ I think. Who knows, but…?”

He put the knuckles of both hands together and winked.

“No real name? Just to do with red hair?”

Kurt sat back with a look of resigned understanding.

“Really,” he said. “You guys are living on a different planet.”

“What about Stephi?” Speckbauer asked as he slipped back into the booth.

“What about her?”

“Does she like ‘adventures,’ say? How she might leave for a couple of days with a new flame?”

“Hmm. A pavement hostess, you’re trying to say?”

“Did I say prostitute? No. I said ‘adventure.’”

“Well yes, if you like,” said Kurt. “She is a person like that. And if she weren’t so damn good with the frigging spenders who keep me in business, well I’d have let her go on a permanent ‘adventure’ a long time ago.”

The streets and lanes of Weiz had been taken over by the mid-morning people, as Felix had begun to think of them when he was — actually wasn’t attending his lectures back in Graz. The school would not break for lunch for an hour yet. Pensioners took their time, many of them meeting and greeting, speaking in the melodious accent that expressed politeness and a circumspect kind of humour. There were plenty of shops in Weiz, plenty of mothers and infants and babies, steady streams of cars, new most of them.

The clouds were staying away and leaving a postcard sky above the town. The winter that had lingered here until recently seemed a distant, impossible event that had passed quickly, not the dreary, endless months that had lain over the place. The blossoms were out all over the backyard orchards. From somewhere over the next street were the sounds of a pneumatic drill, and the episodic whine and gnarl of saws, followed by the taps of at least two hammers and an occasional yell. A tractor turned into the car park for the supermarket.