John Brady - Poachers Road

Gebhart hesitated.

“Look,” he said then. “I’ll phone him when we get back. Over?”

He shook his head as though bewildered, and replaced the mouthpiece. He sagged lower into the seat and looked out the side window. Felix stole a glance over. To see if there was any clue about what the message meant. There was none.

He drew into the lay-by that was in sight of a small scatter of older houses.

“Okay,” said Gebhart. He seemed to rouse himself from whatever had made him turn in on himself. He checked the laserpistole he had been holding and tugged the side of his green vest tighter.

“Let’s pinch a few hausfraus,” he said. “The little ones are in the school now, and the hubbie’s gone to work. This is the hour the entertaining starts.”

The raised eyebrow and the refusal to smile left Felix baffled.

“Entertainment?”

“And they’ll be speeding, let me tell you.”

Gebi Josef, or Seppi Gebhart wasn’t a cynic, Felix had come to conclude. He had wondered at first how a 41-year-old Gendarme had not moved up in all those years of service. He rarely mentioned his family, and it seemed that he kept work and home very distinct.

Felix had found out from Korschak who had muttered something about having smart daughters who gave him grief, a son who had some issues. “Issues?”

Out on the road now, he took up position beside Gebi, who had the pistole mounted and scanning quickly. He watched Gebi’s impassive face as the cars came by. None tripped the pistole limit.

There weren’t even any dives, those half-funny giveaways that showed the driver had been speeding. They must have been spotted.

“Don’t give up yet,” said Gebhart. “A few more minutes. You’ll see.”

Felix looked across the wet fields, his mind drifting. It was seldom lately that he’d found himself wondering whether some cynic, or maybe some old enemy of his father, had put him here in Stephansdorf, with Gebhart, as a joke. Maybe it was a test: prove you can work with anyone, Kimmel: we’ve been saving this one for you. Survive this, and you’ll do fine. Or had it been a kindly gesture in disguise, from someone in Postings who had read something into Felix’s CV, and his temperament, and engineered his posting here as a warning: this is what a stale cop looks like. Do you want to grow to be like this cop?

Then he heard the alarm go from the laserpistole.

“What did I tell you,” said Gebhart, and he raised his arm.

“Blonde, of course.”

Felix thought of the rasp of Giuliana’s skin on his knee, the way she pushed and arched, the way she muttered and even grunted at him when she was close to losing it. Parsley, he thought suddenly, and realized that he must have been thinking about this somewhere.

That was it: the scent of her was parsley.

Felix drove the patrol car back. He turned by the platz, and into the station yard.

It took time to get the gear out and tame the paperwork.

Gebhart had Nescafe and a bun with salami for his brotzeit, his morning break. He stood chewing and nodding slowly while he took a phone call. After it was over, Korschak talked to him about how if it wasn’t floods in some of the fields again this year, it’d be drought by July.

Felix thought about a sandwich but fell instead for something sweet. He took some lebkuchen from a package by the kettle.

Gebhart came over and poured a half cup of leftover water from the kettle into his mug, smelled it, and then drank it.

“Come with me,” he said. “A minor job. Let Manfred get the glory here.”

“Out to…?”

“Die bauern,” said Gebhart. “Maybe you’ll learn something from it.”

Felix waved his hand over the forms he had been collating and checking.

“They’ll keep. Geh’ma jetzt off we go.”

Gebhart drove. Felix could afford to enjoy this unexpected escape from an afternoon of paper, phones, and a small pile of inquiries for licences, criminal checks, and court preparation requests. He totted up the hours remaining before he had his freedom. It would be five hours to the beach, and as little time as possible with Giuliana’s relatives.

Gebhart coaxed the Opel over through hairpins with the gears more than brakes. They passed waterlogged ditches and bottlegreen fields exploding with growth. Soon they were in the hills, and there was no let-up. Still the road climbed, up beyond the last of the trees, until it slowly descended a little to patchy scrubland where the conifers took over again, hesitating it seemed many of them, in small, scruffy plantations on this high plateau.

“You know this area?”

Felix shook his head. Gebhart squinted up out of the windshield at the heights that came slowly closer as they wove through the curves.

“They’re a bit cracked up at these altitudes,” Gebhart said.

“Spinnt, as they say. You think it’s true?”

“‘Nothing personal’ here, right?”

He was glad to see a small grin eke out over Gebhart’s features.

The air was cool, with an edge to it. There were few cars. Gebhart slowed and stopped by the entrance to a mildly rutted road. He scrutinized the roof of the house that nestled behind a brake of trees there.

“A red roof on one of the barns” he muttered, and moved on “I thought…,” Felix began, but stopped awkwardly.

“That I know this area, or where we’re supposed to be going?

Well I don’t.”

“But a rough idea? Isn’t the person a, well someone you know?”

“I only met him a few times. In a place in town. He has a kid, I have a kid.”

Something in Gebhart’s tone drew a curtain down over further questions.

A half-dozen Simmentals clustered around a feeding cage at the corner of a half-hectare patch to the right.

“There’s a red roof,” said Felix.

“That’s the one,” said Gebhart, “I’ll bet. The big wooden gate too.”

There were pools on the laneway. It was hard to tell how deep they might be. Felix rolled down the window. The sun had gone in behind a fairly solid mass of clouds not long before. He heard water swish at the floor pan as Gebhart let the Opel down the lane.

“You said this was a bit out of the ordinary,” Felix tried.

Gebhart’s tongue had been flicking from side to side as the car wallowed gently and then rose out of the puddles.

“God’s country,” he said. “Die Heimat. Can you imagine Polizei coming up here? They’d be wiping their shoes every ten metres. Phoning for a translator.”

“Is it a criminal matter here, Gebi?”

Gebhart flicked him a glance, and made himself unnecessarily busy with the gears. The Opel bottomed out and shook itself up from a puddle.

There were reeds growing in the damp spots all about. A lone, thin wire that brought hydro from the road. Someone had taken great care with putting together stone walls near where the lane approached the farmyard. His mind rebelled at thinking how long it had taken to gather these rocks from the fields. By hand? And what could you grow up here anyway? A couple of the cattle looked up and toward the gently bouncing and now muddy police car. A sheepdog came trotting out to the laneway.

“Here’s the story,” Gebhart said. “Listen.”

Felix looked over.

“There’s a kid. But he’s not a kid, that’s the first thing. Just pretend he is.”

“Do you mean handicapped?”

The farmhouse came in sight beyond one of the walls. The wood had weathered into a grey but the whitewash on the bumpy stone walls was fresh. A collection of smaller buildings, some with fresh wooden shingles, took up a different side of the near rectangle that was the yard proper.

“Our job here is to humour this boy,” said Gebhart then. “Got that?”