Poachers Road (2 page)

“He looked familiar.”

“Really,” she said. “Did you just wash everything out of your head last night, or have you really
forgotten the people here? So soon?”

He said nothing.

“Bad enough that they are going to destroy the forest, but it has to be that idiot Maier doing it. Manfred . . . ?”

“Ah, him. Freddie.”

“It’s not his fault he’s got that face. But he was dumb. Now he drives a Beemer, a new one. Maybe you’ll catch him speeding in it. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

“Natürlich.”

“Well,” Lisi said after several moments, “I’m not superstitious. But you’d wonder. Wouldn’t you?”

Felix nodded.

He let his gaze up the hill. Screened by the growth of conifers above the grassy verge was the hilltop village of St. Kristoff am Offenegg. It was well above them yet, with its ancient, baroque church and graveyard perched tightly on the hilltop, and a clutch of houses huddled just below. There were long views from the steps of the church, Felix knew, across the valleys and hills to the south, toward Slovenia. He and Lisi had 20 minutes to reach the village, and that church, where the anniversary service for Felix’s father, also a Gendarme in the Austrian police, was due to begin.

Maybe that bird knew something, Felix thought. But it had gone, with its prize. He had listed bird watching on his application to join the Gendarmerie. It had been his own joke, the only sly response he could come up with that particular day to his mother’s gentle, persistent nagging. She had brought the application form to him one evening a few weeks after he had come back from his trip. She had photocopies ready: birth, driver’s licence, and, of course, the sorry record of his undergraduate academics up until he had elected not to continue after second year.

His mother had also prepared the ground, using the contacts she had kept up with the friends and colleagues of her late husband in the Gendarmerie. That was her way, and it worked. Today it would work again, of course. For the second year, it was now the expected duty of Felix Kimmel Junior Felix the Second to take care of his grandfather Kimmel for the memorial service, and to manage the old goat. It meant sitting next to him at the service without appearing too solicitous. It also meant that Felix should be a buffer between his mother’s family and what was left of his father’s.

“Is Opa Kimmel . . . ?” he began, but soon lost the thread of how he could phrase his question.

Lisi gave him a knowing look.

“Is he coming to the restaurant afterwards?” she asked. “Is that it?”

“Exactly.”

“Relax,” she said. “You know how he is. That’ll never change.”

It took the lumber truck another minute to make it out onto the road and to begin its trip down to the mill in Weiz. Through the open window of his sister’s Opel, Felix heard the crunch and the hiss of brakes as Maier prepared for the trip down. He gave a big wave as he passed. All of that family had that same lantern jaw, Felix remembered now, the jutting chin of the underbiter.

Lisi said something under her breath, but she managed a smile and a half-hearted wave to Maier. She let go of the handbrake, revved as she let the clutch in, and resumed the slow, winding climb up toward the village. There awaiting them would be their extended family, neighbours from the old house, and friends of their father.

Felix kept his window open. His eyes still hurt when he moved them. He rubbed at them but stopped when he heard a strange ticking from them.

“Ironic anyway,” Lisi said.

He looked over at her. She was seven years older, but to Felix she seemed middle-aged already, this 29-year-old teacher.The famous 29.

“The lumber truck,” he repeated. “I get it. Ironic, yes.”

Could she just not talk, for a minute anyway? He turned back toward the patches of view across the valley that were beginning to appear more and more between the trees. He wanted to believe it was the altitude making this hangover worse. He stared at a gap, and hoped that would beat back the images that were now coming to his mind.

It was the second year now since Felix Kimmel Senior had been killed in a collision with a lumber truck on the Weizklamm. His duties had been those of Abteilungsinspektor, department chief inspector, in the Judenburg district. In the tribute speech at his funeral it was pointed out that he had been looking in on his aged father, Peter, a widower who lived alone up here. Speed had been a factor, as the phrase went.

But Felix had had a glimpse of a Scene photo of his father’s Audi. It had been during a class exercise at the Gendarmerieschule on how to use EKIS, the police database. Felix Senior’s car had been accordioned and pulverized by its long fall down off the road. Felix had also learned about the booze in the car.

His mother had been angry when he’d told her about it, a rare thing indeed between them. Why was it necessary to dig into that? Whom would it help, to know this? Her anger quickly had turned on what worried her now her very own son. Could he not just give this a try? A couple of years only? Couldn’t he see that joining up now was perfect timing? The Interior Ministry was sticking to its plan to do the unthinkable, to amalgamate the Gendarmerie and the Polizei.Things would really be opening up.They would be looking for people who had a few years of Uni. The old days were gone, forever. He could even finish his degree at night, yes!

Guilt works, mother guilt best of all. Felix had finished his course, passed his Dienstprüfung exam, and received his posting. He did not ask how or why he got a posting to Stefansdorf, a sleepy village near enough to Graz that he could hold on to his social life.

But his friendships from Uni had become awkward acquaintances, and rare phone calls. Seven months travelling from beaches in Spain to a squat in Copenhagen had not really settled him much. Giuliana had remained constant, however, but lately there had been something in the air there too. He did not want to think about that.

The woods ended. Ahead of them the narrow, winding ribbon of road twisted around another hairpin before its final run into the village.

“You won’t want to hear this,” said Lisi, “but I’ll say it anyway. You look good in that uniform.”

She glanced over after he made no reply.

“You lost your brain in some pub, some stübe, the night before Dad’s memorial?”

“It wasn’t that much,” he said. “Maybe it was an unconscious thing anyway.”

“Don’t try that Freudian crap on me. I’ve read it, you know.”

She left the car in second now. He began to think, dimly, if anyone had studied the effects of high mountain air on a hangover. Frische luft, his oma his mother’s mother called it. Frische luft macht frisches herz! Fresh air makes the heart anew!

“Well, how’s Giuli then.”

This was conciliatory, he knew, but still he felt like asking her how her boyfriend Karl was, or Superbore, as he called him. Still as exciting as cold Baïschel? The thought of that sliced meat lying cold in its greasy sauce made his mouth taste chalky and sour.

“She’s fine.”

A lie, he wondered: a white lie? Maybe it was a hope, more than a statement of fact. No: she was fine. Truly. She’d get over it. “It” was this thing that neither of them wanted to put a name on. If it had a name, it might be “commitment” or something like that. “The future,” maybe “our future,” to be precise.

“It was nice of her to come to the blessing.”

For a moment, Felix did not understand.

“She knows a lot about that stuff,” said Lisi. “I didn’t realize.”

“Religion?”

“Not religion exactly: taferls and things.”

Felix got it now. His sister meant the roadside monument to his father. It was a hand-carved one of Jesus on the cross, paid for by the Association. A local carpenter had made it, not “an artist.” As with so many other of these traditional shrines and statues, it stood by the roadside where the accident had happened.

“So tell me about your boys’ night out. Where do cops go to unwind?”

“There’s no one at the post I want to unwind with. It was Viktor and a few guys.”

She grasped the wheel with both hands and turned to him.

“Watch the road, will you,” he said.

“‘Viktor and a few guys’? Jesus, Felix.”

“I don’t see them that often anymore.”

He steeled himself for her to say: since you dropped out, and they didn’t.

“We all know the Gendarmerie are more ‘relaxed’ than the Polizei.”

She had spoken in the slow tone of a teacher delivering a gem of wisdom. “But associating with Viktor and those other professional students? Really.”

“Who says I can’t?”

She laughed a teacher’s laugh.

“Oh I get it,” she said. “You’re undercover infiltrating them now. Good work.”

He glanced over and saw that her mouth was set to fire another comment his way. Instead, her attention was taken by an older man standing next to a Skoda parked half in the ditch. He was unloading fence wire from a trailer.

She waved and he smiled.

“You know everybody still,” said Felix.

“He was a friend of Dad’s.”

Who wasn’t, Felix almost said. Even the poor truck driver that Felix Senior had clipped, sending himself down the gorge in the Weizklamm, battering and flattening it with every crunching slam, end over end, until it stopped a hundred-odd metres . . .

“Are you going to throw up?”

“It’s okay,” he said.

He could feel her disapproval like a mantle of cold air over him. He tried harder to keep the images from returning. The driver, yes: a hulking, big, wall-eyed guy, full of regret and awkwardness and apology, had come to the funeral, Felix remembered, and had shed tears. Apparently he’d met Felix Senior before, and this had made him feel even worse.

“Anyway,” she said, and gave his uniform a quick once-over. “You’ll make a fine impression at the service. Really. I’m not being sarcastic. I mean it.”

He followed the line of the wall that enclosed the church and graveyard. The grounds within had risen over the centuries, and the wall had been raised to match it as though it were a dam, or a dike, in rising waters. When Giuliana had visited the village first and walked down the lane here, it had freaked her out to be walking at the same height as the coffins on the far side of the wall.

“I think I see Mom’s car,” Lisi said.

Felix spotted the yellow Polo parked near Gasthaus Ederer. There were a half-dozen others there too. He didn’t see any Gendarmerie patrol cars. This was good.

Lisi looked at her watch, and she let the car down the narrow gasse, the lane that led to the side of the church. She turned the wheel sharply for an unexpected space next to a Nissan. Felix tried to ignore the sudden listing in his intestines. To distract himself while she straightened the car out, he looked out at a slice of view by the end of the wall. It was one of so many walls, and lanes, and views of distant mountains and valleys, that he’d known so well in this village where he’d grown up. It had also been a place he couldn’t wait to get out of, and go to the city.

“Damn,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Look: it’s Opa’s car, I think. We’re late.”

“He still drives?”

“It looks like his ancient heap,” she said.

They stepped out. Felix tugged at his uniform and looked at the cars jammed into the confines of the lanes.

“No tellerkappe, Inspektor?”

Felix knew earlier on that he had left the traditional Gendarmerie duty cap in his own car, his mother’s old Polo, that was going to be fixed by this evening. The getaway car: it had to be ready and reliable for his and Giuliana’s week down in Italy the big escape, they’d taken to calling it.

As for the Inspektor bit, he let himself believe that Lisi hadn’t meant it sarcastically. It was the correct term, of course, but he’d never get used to it. It just sounded too self-important. He preferred the old names: Gendarme, or Grenzgendarme, the term for a probationary policeman in this old rural Austrian police.

And then Felix felt the first relief from his crushing hangover at the thought of their week ahead. It would be his first break for nearly a year. He still wasn’t sure how he had managed to stick it out in Gendarmerieschule.

“No,” he said. He even managed a smile for his elder sister. “Forgot it.”

Somebody was playing the church organ, quiet and slow. It was likely his mother would cry. A dignified crier, he would have to say of her. If he had to sing, he’d need a week to get over what it’d do to the tender remainders of his brain not ruined with the hangover.

He took a deep breath and looked over the valley below. Some of the early-morning haze still clung to the deeper valleys far off. It was probably a 50-kilometre view he had to the south. How come he didn’t know exactly, and he a native son? And there were more still behind that light, faded horizon. Das grune Herz von Öesterreich: The Green Heart of Austria.

Something moved around in his guts again. He should try to walk off a bit before going in the churchyard gates. Down by the war memorials with their ever fresh bouquets and meticulous plantings, where there always seemed to be at least one candle lit, his child’s eyes had run along the names, the families of the soldiers, ever since he could remember.