John Brady - Poachers Road

When he glanced over, Edelbacher was shaking his big, long, jaw-dominating horse head slowly and greviously.

“Lisi says good luck,” Felix’s mother said. “And if it doesn’t go well, she’ll help you get a job down at the assembly line at Magna.”

“Ha ha!”

Edelbacher gave another hearty laugh, and even slapped his knee.

“Oh sisters,” he said. “They do you in every time!”

Felix stood and introduced his mother formally to Schroek.

“We can use the side door to HQ, I believe” Edelbacher declared. “The room is right there, the hearing room.”

Felix looked toward the Gendarmerie kommando. The Gendarme posted by the barrier had been eyeing them since they’d arrived. Through the entrance Felix saw men jogging around the soccer fields.

A bus passed on Strassgangerstrasse, and in its wake Felix now saw three men were heading up the footpath toward the barrier. The sunglasses and the strange locomotion of one could only be Franzi.

A shorter, bearded man was talking animatedly to Speckbauer, swinging a lightly packed briefcase. A lawyer, he thought, or some kind of counsel, with a hand that went continuously up to adjust his rimless glasses.

Franzi began to slow. Felix thought of a battery-operated toy winding down. Speckbauer had noticed him now, too. A truck slowed between them then. When it had passed, the three men were stationary. Speckbauer waved off something that the man with the briefcase was saying, and he leaned in to Franzi.

“Is that them?” Edelbacher asked. “Heading for the SOKO too?”

“I believe it is.”

Schroek had been explaining something to Felix’s mother about how he’d heard the ranks would be rearranged when the amalgamation would finally start to happen.

Speckbauer was skipping across the street now.

“Well it looks like he’s headed over here,” said Edelbacher in a voice intended for the others to hear. Meaning he doesn’t know what to do, Felix realized.

The man with the briefcase was gesturing to Speckbauer now, and calling out.

“Oberst Schroek?” Edelbacher called out. “We have a situation here, I think.”

Schroek had seen what was going on. He finished his sentence about some of the ridiculous names he’d heard being floated for the new national, unified Austrian police.

“An arranged marriage, Frau Kimmel, where both parties must change their names but to what we do not yet know.”

“There’s a protocol here, I’m pretty sure,” said Edelbacher.

“An order of the tribunal, in fact?”

Schroek came over to Felix.

“You should not talk to this guy,” he murmured, and then cleared his throat. “It’s a big no-no.”

“Stimmt,” said Edelbacher. “This is highly improper. But I hear this Speckbauer is pushy, a law unto himself? I’ll have a word in his ear, set him straight, gell?”

Schroek said nothing, but continued to watch Speckbauer’s approach.

“Herr Oberstleutnant?” Edelbacher called out. Speckbauer came to a stop and settled a neutral gazer on Edelbacher.

“I am here to accompany Gendarme Kimmel to the tribunal. I am a friend of the family, a colleague of the Gendarme’s late father, God rest him.”

Speckbauer nodded.

“Oberst Schroek, commander of the post,” Edelbacher went on. “And Frau Kimmel.”

Speckbauer made a small bow.

“I must say Oberstleutnant, that contact with Gendarme Kimmel here is improper. I believe the interviewers for the Sonderkommission made that clear from the start?”

Speckbauer looked around at the faces, and then at his watch.

“That’ll shortly be history,” he said. “So why not say I am, say, twenty minutes early with the findings. There’ll be no harm done.”

“Nevertheless,” said Edelbacher, “The decisions have been made,” said Speckbauer.

“It was a directive, Herr Oberstleutnant,” said Edelbacher.

Speckbauer looked over at Schroek.

“Would that directive prevent me from telling the Oberst here that his Gendarme has helped to do good police work?”

“We know that already, I believe,” said Schroek.

Speckbauer’s eyes slipped out of focus. Felix had the notion that he might be counting to 10.

“The Oberstleutnant has a point, I believe,” Felix said.

Edelbacher and Schroek both changed feet at the same time.

Felix did not return his mother’s gaze.

“Felix?” said Edelbacher slowly.

Felix looked to Schroek who gave him a faint nod.

Felix heard Edelbacher’s aggrieved tone barely held to a murmur that soon faded in the noise of the traffic behind as he and Speckbauer strolled back down the footpath.

“Who exactly is that big depp?” Speckbauer asked. “So full of himself?”

“He worked with my dad.”

“Huh. I just came to tell you that you don’t need to worry.”

“The SOKO, you mean?”

“What else are we here for?”

Felix decided not to ask how Speckbauer could know that.

“Is anyone keeping you in the know about this stuff?”

Speckbauer asked then. “Fuchs, his drug paraphernalia, for example?”

“I heard, all right.”

“So it’s possible scheisse, it’s likely he was out of it, the night he went to Himmelfarbs. A fried brain.”

“That doesn’t help them,” said Felix. “Does it?”

Speckbauer gave him a hard look.

“You think you’re the only one wakes up thinking about them?”

Felix looked back at Schroek and Edelbacher.

“You go over to Gebhart’s still?” Speckbauer asked.

“A couple of times a week.”

“When’s he coming back? The kidney…?”

“It’ll take time. He’s not a moaner. But I don’t have to worry about his wife taking a plank to me anymore.”

“Ach so,” said Speckbauer. He rubbed at the back of his neck as though searching for a new topic to go to.

“I mean what can you do about this whole thing,” he said in a low voice. “Say it was bad luck? Or something like, you never know what a druggie will do? Or that police science goes only so far?”

Felix looked across toward the HQ. Franzi was standing motionless there, his arms hanging loosely by his side. The man with the briefcase was pacing in a short tight pattern, talking into his cell.

“So there,” said Speckbauer. “Some stuff in this job, you couldn’t even make it up.”

“Franzi is still operational?” Felix asked.

“Franzi? Was he ever? Even before? I told him I’d been thinking of putting wheels on his shoes, like those kids you see.”

And that exhausted that topic. Edelbacher was tapping at his watch and closing one eye for Felix’s benefit. Felix nodded at him.

“Your mother okay?”

“She is now,” said Felix. “But she freaked.”

“And the lady… ”

Giuliana he meant, Felix realized.

“It’s hard to say. But we’ll see.”

“Ah. She wants you out of harm’s way, let me guess. Back to Uni? ‘Grow up’?’

“You seem to have some experience there.”

“Maybe I do. But it’ll come good for you, no?”

“You decide,” said Felix. “It’s hard to bounce back from stuff like, ‘Next time you’ll be the one shot, idiot.’”

“Ouch,” said Speckbauer. “Does she say it in Italian? The hands going like a kung fu movie?”

Felix gave him a glance and then returned to studying Franzi.

He was like a statue. The man on the phone seemed to buzz around him.

“Why did you park your car off road there that day?”

Speckbauer asked. “In the woods?”

“Well I had a notion that you had some way of telling where the car was. Your gizmos in the trunk of that Passat. The GPS?”

“Did you find it?”

“Find what?”

“I get the point,” said Speckbauer.