Poachers Road (9 page)

“He knows everyone, does Pommer,” he remembered Gebi telling him as the Gendarmerie Kommandant moved off.

“He knew my dad?”

“Everyone, I said. Now Pommer knows you. I’d better keep my eye on this Kimmel kid, I’ll bet he’s thinking. He’s no depp, is Professor Kimmel. At this rate, he’ll be Commissioner soon.”

He and Gebi had stayed until 5:30. He remembered being given soup, and bread, by Frau Himmelfarb, and eyeing Hansi holding hands with his father at the door out to the yard. Felix had stayed at the post to get his notes word-processed and filed into the database. Had to be done, Gebi had said, not without sighing a few curses. It was all too likely one or more of those detectives would go straight to GENDIS this evening for some detail or other. They worked whatever hours they had to, he’d explained.

Then Felix thought again about Speckbauer, and the slow lumbering way he moved about. His handshake, the “We’ll be in touch, Inspektor Kimmel” that had no real irony he could be sure of, had been delivered under his still, flat eyes. Kuhaugen, Felix’s Oma Nagl might call that look, cow’s eyes, resting on his for longer than felt normal.

He had phoned the garage and gotten his car back finally late in the evening, with a call to the guy’s home to get the key. His head was still spinning when he got to the apartment finally, and he felt some vague cloud of something had followed him in. At first he did not intend to tell Giuliana, but it didn’t take long. He remembered her not-impressed face as he downed three Gösser from the fridge as he talked.

Later he had wanted her ferociously. She was puzzled and slow and quiet, and he said he was sorry later, but she shushed him. He remembered her drowsy later on, her skin hot and damp everywhere and his own body dissolving into the sheets.

He rested his eyes on the drapes that mostly had the yellow glow from the platz below. A car no, a small truck or van to judge by how its diesel clattered went by. In a few hours he’d be sitting into his car and heading over to the post. They had to get the traffic safety thing started at the schools this week. It was to be his pleasure alone, Gebi had told him.

“Are you okay?”

She had been so quiet.

“Yes. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

He pulled the sheet over her shoulder and he kissed her neck.

There was that scent again, of vanilla and parsley carried to him from the bedwarmth that wafted up over him. She muttered something. He waited for her breathing to lapse into that steady measured sigh that would mean she was asleep again.

Sometimes he teased her when she couldn’t remember waking up in the night to go to the klo. The sight of her hips swaying and the swell of her bottom as she stumbled out, more sleepwalking than anything else, was more than he could bear by times. He stirred and the ache settled and grew. He glanced down at her. No, it wasn’t fair: tomorrow was a workday for her too.

He lay very still and tried staring at the patterns on the wallpaper. That trick had often worked when he was a kid. Giuliana was way off on that stuff, he decided. If they ever could decide where they were going to move, there’d be no wallpaper, retro chic or not.

He pretended to be drowsy then, but still his thoughts played on, roaming farther, sharpening, and leading him back again to the woods above that farm. No longer were those meadows and trees just a background, like a mental postcard, typical sights you knew as far back as you could remember and just took for granted. Was it the shock of coming on those two, or did everything change when you were a cop? Nothing could go back to the way it was.

He wondered about the Himmelfarbs. The boy the giant, he should start calling him might not leave the house for weeks now.

He remembered Himmelfarb muttering, and Gebhart’s ways of trying to calm him. Ausländers, he had said, with some vehemence that Gebi had taken to be panic. Had he said something about gypsies too, or was Felix imagining that? But many people that age, especially the likes of the Himmelfarbs who’d lived up in God’s country all their lives, would have mental furniture like that. It was no secret.

Felix moved his gaze to the ceiling. That didn’t help. The grey there became a screen for the images that swirled into his mind. He saw again the forensic team stooping, with those funny-looking white suits that almost glowed white against the trees, the camera flashes, the detective talking into a recorder of some kind. The big move had happened very late in the afternoon, getting the bodies into bags and carrying them to the wagon.They had not been asked to help. He had looked away. Gebhart, he knew, had not.

So why, Felix wondered, was he thinking of his own father now? Maybe it had been the memorial yesterday, or the photo of the roadside taferl the Association had built for their fellow officer. As his eyes moved about the ceiling, he remembered this man who was his father coming into the kitchen after his shift, proud to wear his uniform home, and smelling a little of what he’d later know was a liqueur brandy. He’d tickle and then grab him, and soon he’d have Felix doing “the plane,” spinning at arm’s-length, the big hands on his ankles like a vice. Laughing, but being a bit scared too, the room flying by him.

NINE

“Y
OU SLEPT AT ALL
?”

Felix wondered if he should surprise Gebi by telling him that young guys always slept well because they got laid.

“Medium,” he said.

Gebhart came over with a sheaf of papers. He separated them, and laid them out on the counter next to the armoury safe.

“Come here.You’re involved here, okay.”

Felix saw the first was a print out of the statements he’d filed on the computer last night. Another was a list of the changes for the court appearance of the burglary gang they’d caught up to back after Christmas. There were lists of the grundschules for the public safety visits.

Gebhart tapped his finger on the list of schools.

“This will be a decent change today. You’ll get a giggle out of this anyway,” he said. “The small kids actually will put up their hands to ask your permission to go ludeln.You better be wide awake for that. Actually, I learned you should ask the teacher if the kids have been to the klo first.”

“What, they get agitated or something?”

“Too true they do. They get scared some of them. They’ll stare at you.You’ll be taking reflective armbands or something, but they’ll be staring at you like you’re God, not hearing a word you say.”

“As if they ever do,” said Korschak from the far side of the cabinets.

“Fred,” Gebhart called out. “You have the biggest ears. I’m going to miss them.”

Felix looked down the list. He didn’t recognize any of the teachers’ names.

“The rumours will be flying today, I tell you,” Gebhart said, and nodded toward Schroek’s office. Felix looked up from the list.

Gebhart had a printout of notes from yesterday.

“You heard Himmelfarb?” Gebhart went on, scanning the paragraphs. “He went though the whole list, I think. Did he actually say Russians at one point, even?”

“I don’t think so. If he did, I didn’t hear him. Did you?”

Gebhart stared at some point beyond Felix’s head.

“Huh,” he said. “I wonder if there was any sleep at Himmelfarbs’ last night.”

He looked to Felix then for corroboration, but his eye was taken by whatever he saw through the blinds on the glass that opened out to the public office. A short man with Gandhi glasses and a Gandhi hairdo had stepped in.

“Shit,” said Gebhart. “Already.”

He walked to the doorway.

“The Kontrolinspektor is on the phone,” he called out.

Felix watched the man’s reaction. A smile, a glance at his wristwatch, a hand holding a small device.

“Keep him waiting,” said Gebhart when he came back. “Do him good.”

“Who is he?”

“A scribbler, from the
Kleine
.”

“A reporter? The
Kleine
. . . ?”

“Correct. What, you don’t read the
Kleine Zeitung
? Everyone else in the province does. But this one has got the foreign angle already, no doubt. Now you forget about that side of things, okay?

That was yesterday.You’ve done your paperwork, and it’s moved on.

And remember: don’t talk to any reporter or media type. Schroek does that stuff.”

Felix nodded.

“You’re set up for the morning anyway, okay?”

“I think so.”

“Bike safety video? Armbands?”

“Got it, and the posters.”

“Those new bookmarks with the ‘cool’ website? The T-shirt prize?”

Felix almost grinned at how Gebhart did the air quotes for “cool.” Again, Felix nodded.

“Well, bugger off then.”

Gebhart yawned and sighed.

“Didn’t you sleep?”

“I slept like a Christian, in case you need to know. But in the Coliseum.”

Felix waited until Gebhart looked up from the paper.

“What is it? You have a question?”

“Have you done stuff like that before? Yesterday, I mean.”

“No.”

“Nothing like this? Never?”

Gebhart seemed to gather his thoughts by staring at his desk.

“You mean scare-the-hell-out-of-yourself stuff, or just things you see? Car accidents? Factory accidents?”

“I suppose.”

“There was one thing comparable maybe,” Gebhart said. “But I was in the army.Yes, I was keen, after National Service even. I took five years in it. You’d learn things, you know? Straightened me out actually.The service, it bred fellowship, you know? No, I don’t mean mountain rescue camp or the trekking or the rest of it. Maybe we knew who the enemy was, then.”

Felix zipped up the bag.

“Ach, you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

“What enemy, the Russians?”

A look of irritation crossed Gebhart’s face.

“What’s with all the Q & A today? Go do your duties.”

“My dad said it was partly the whole Eastern Bloc thing, to be ready at least, if they came in. But that’s been gone for years.”

“Oh, I get it. The sun rises in the west now? The official line is we need Uni boys, more computer jockeys, more foreign languages.

Well let me tell you something. Maybe we were a bit rough around the edges, or we didn’t use the dictionary much, but, boy, you knew where you stood. Yes, we got things done. And no, that wasn’t ancient times.”

“Was it in the army, or in the Gendarmerie?”

“The thing that happened? It was the army. It was a winter exercise. Winterwerk, we used to call it. They gave us a lot of gear, and we had a hell of a lot of lugging to do. It was up high, you know, with a load of heavy snow. Anyway. A heavy machine gun went off on a guy. Seven or eight rounds, just like that. Everyone was bone tired, see? Sleeping in the goddamned snow. It was careless. But it was bad, I tell you.”

He looked down at the nylon carry-all that they called the School Bag.

“Four hit him. And that’s the nearest I’ve been in my life. It’s not like TV.”

He stretched again.

“I had nightmares, for a while, then.”

Then Gebhart jerked his head up.

“No more yammering,” he declared. “Scram, will you? You’ve got stuff to do.”

Leaving, Felix caught a glimpse of Schroek’s stone face as he listened to the reporter ask some questions. It was a look that he had seen on other cops too, part of the buttoned-up look that cops seemed to pick up with their uniforms and wore when they were not amongst their own.

But it was Giuliana’s face that rose up in his mind again as he crossed the yard. This time tomorrow they’d be leaving, maybe on the road already. He’d be practising his Italian, but it wouldn’t be serious for long. It was almost a year since that Night They’d Never Forget, a terrible evening of arguing and shouting and tears that had quickly become The Night They Never Mentioned Since. The closest they had come was “that other time . . . ” or “we don’t want to go there again . . . ”

It had been a stressful time for her, with evaluations and things.

Felix himself had been grouchy, full of doubts and aversions to the training at the Gendarmerieschule, and the future he could imagine in the job. The bottles of wine hadn’t helped. Maybe he’d brought it on unconsciously. Maybe she had?

He winced as he sat into the patrol car, remembering.

“Can you commit to anything?” she had yelled. “Anyone?”

Commitment: did the word haunt everyone these days?

It was true: he had been whining, and he had been whining because he was covering up something, even from himself. She sure had hit a nerve when she yelled that he was faking it.

Faking? All his moaning: how this had all been rigged by his mother, and that he should have known it; how he’d signed up at a time of guilt and bad judgment, when he was broke and unsure, and the dates had gone by for readmission to repeat the year; that many others in his class were stand-offish because he’d gone beyond a Matura. Others in the class hadn’t even finished that far in school.

Felix had never found out, and never tried to find out, for sure if some of the trainees had heard about his father. And he had to admit that he too would have wondered about this Kimmel guy and if someone hadn’t greased the way for the poor widow Kimmel’s young lad to join up the Gendarmerie.