Poachers Road (20 page)

“I’m a Northerner, but a real shitkicker nonetheless. My old man still farms – well, my brother does it actually – over near Linz.

Look, turnips are nothing new to me.”

Felix glanced over.

“Then you’ll know all about little villages, and why someone would want out.”

Felix geared down to slow the Passat, but it was still picking up speed. Another two bends and they’d be back out on the road that led up higher yet into the mountains.

“Ach, you have a point,” said Speckbauer. “There’s always more than meets the eye.”

“So they say.”

“A lot of things didn’t get talked about around my place. I found out only later, of course. Same for you?”

“Maybe so.”

“Really? For example, I had an uncle, and he was a real believer. All the way through.You know what I’m referring to when I say ‘believer’?”

“I think so.”

Speckbauer’s wan smile faded quickly.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I found out. He wasn’t just a conscript or even a volunteer. He was the whole bit. A zealot. But he got out alive. Talk about lucky, no?”

“For him,” said Felix.

“He was in the SS at age twenty. He was proud of it. I know, because I met these old guys at his funeral. I’d never seen them before, never heard of them. Strange thing, family, I began to realize. I liked him when he was alive. But after, a hard man to like.”

Felix pretended to be concentrating on the ditches that ran alongside now.

“A real jäger,” Speckbauer said. “He loved his hunting. I used to go with him.”

He shifted the map off his lap.

“And he did the other thing too, you can be sure. They go together.You know the saying, right?”

Felix shook his head.

“Maybe it’s only in the Tyrol. Wilderer und jäger sint brüder.

‘The hunter and the poacher are brothers.’ Hard times bring their own means, no?”

“I suppose.”

Speckbauer turned in his seat to look behind.

“You see that?”

“What?”

“That clearing, a path. Forestry access, you think?”

“Probably,” said Felix.

Speckbauer turned back.

“‘Wildererweg’ they called them back up in my place growing up. Poachers’ paths. Do they call them that here?”

“I think I have heard it. Older people though.”

“I wonder if that’s what they call that place up by Himmelfarbs.’”

Felix kept his eyes on the bend and the shadows under the trees there. Where the bodies were, he meant.

“Ach so,” said Speckbauer after a few moments, his tone changing to something almost cheerful. “No doubt we’ll find that out in due course. Hardly the most important detail of this, is it now?”

Felix nodded slowly once.

“Ever do any hunting?” Speckbauer asked as Felix let the Passat straighten out after the bend.

“I’ve done some. Shooting rabbits is as far as I went.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Not really.”

“Like deer?”

Felix nodded.

“Your father made no big deal of when you didn’t want to go on?”

“No. For my dad and his mates, well it sort of was part of growing up on a farm. But my mother was never happy with that stuff.

No antlers on the wall in our place.”

Speckbauer began to study the map again. Felix made sure that Speckbauer would notice him checking his watch.

Speckbauer didn’t look up from the map.

“Lots of time,” he murmured.

NINETEEN

T
HE ROAD CROSSED A RIVER NOW AND BEGAN TO CURL AROUND
the mountains. They were high enough for the forest to falter, but scattered clumps of smaller, tough pines had managed to root even on ridges close to the summits.

Speckbauer consulted his map again.

“We could have gone by Teichalm, I guess,” he said. “What’s up there? Aside from woods, bog, more woods?”

“A big inn, a gasthaus. Ski runs. A lake. A very cold lake.”

There were a few cars up here, more than Felix had expected.

Speckbauer craned his neck to see a couple with two children plodding near the woods across a marshy patch. All had rosy cheeks, and wet hair. The yellow rain jackets looked like aliens amidst the green.

“Wise choice,” said Speckbauer. “The yellow. Hunting season and so forth? I’m sure things have happened over the years up in these parts. Hunting accidents?”

Felix’s mind lingered on how Speckbauer said “accidents.”

“I suppose,” he said.

“The two men up in the woods by Himmelfarbs’ weren’t ‘accidents,’” said Speckbauer. “I don’t need an autopsy to figure that one out.”

“When will those results come back?”

“Some now, already. I should phone in soon. You know what toxicology is?”

“Of course.”

“Than you’ll know they take a long time. I have waited weeks for tests.”

“Content analysis too?”

“Well, good for you. What’s in the bauch, the belly, yes. Also what shape their organs are in. It helps to know.Teeth tell a lot. Hair too. Sure, the papers are full of DNA cases and all that, but all that environmental stuff has come on strong in the business the past few years. We’ll need it, I tell you.”

“Because they had nothing on them?”

Speckbauer frowned.

“You knew that? How?”

“I overheard.”

“Good for you, I suppose.”

“So you – so we – don’t know much yet.”

Speckbauer’s frown changed to a puzzled look.

“I like the ‘we’ there,” he said after a few moments. “But you’re right. We have no idea who they are. My guess is south of the border. But they had nothing – zero, truly – on them for ID. Wallet, money, smokes, watch – nothing. Anyway. Their photos have gone out to several jurisdictions by now. So, we wait.”

“Well, can you tell how long they were there?”

“A guess, again? To me, they are dead more than three days. It is high up there, cool enough. They were out of the sun.”

“That’s it, then? That’s all?”

The frown had returned to Speckbauer’s face, Felix saw.

“Well, what do you think,” he said.

“You want me to make a fool of myself, four months on the job?”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Speckbauer. “There’s a thing called ‘fresh eyes.’”

“Well, they didn’t fall like that, did they. They were put there.”

“Genau. Did you get a look at the one with the moustache?”

Felix shook his head. He wondered if this was Speckbauer being cynical. Surely he’d heard about him vomiting.

“Well, to me, he was the runner.”

“The runner?”

“He was on the move for sure when he was taken down.”

“The other one, with the, you know?”

“Right,” said Speckbauer. “The hole over his eye. He’s the one who didn’t know what hit him. There’s no blood up there, did you notice? Ever see a head wound? It bleeds like a pig.You can’t put a bullet neatly into a guy’s kopf in the middle of a fight. It was murder, natürlich – but one was execution. That’s why the second guy ran.”

“So they were shot somewhere, and then brought into the woods?”

Speckbauer nodded and looked out across the stretch of open country. It was wild grass and low bushes here, growths that had been hardly enough to survive, dwarfed and delayed here in the open.

“We are of like mind, so far,” he said. “But there’s no law says we can’t speculate, is there?”

“But if they are ausländers,” Felix started to say.

Speckbauer’s head jerked around, almost theatrically, to face him.

“If they are,” Felix repeated. “Then . . . ?”

“Right,” said Speckbauer, in a strange voice, half whisper, half sigh. “What the hell were these tschuschen doing up here in the hills? Isn’t that your question?”

Using the street word for anyone from Yugoslavia was a test, Felix thought immediately, a taunt. He concentrated on driving.

“Well, Christ and His Mother,” said Speckbauer in the same soft, almost bemused voice now. “Don’t stop now, Gendarme Kimmel.”

Felix changed for a bend that held a small pool of water by the ditch.

“Smuggling,” he said. “Sorry, ‘trafficking.’ And that’s why the Kripo is in, why you’re in.”

“Not bad,” said Speckbauer. “Remember I said accident, how shooting two people could hardly be an accident? I wasn’t being sarcastic. And I’ll tell you why: it’s because it was an accident in some way – a mistake, at least. ‘Irregular,’ let’s say.”

“It should not have happened, you mean? Wait – that sounds just blöd.”

“There’s been a slip up,” Speckbauer went on. “And that is the policeman’s friend. I worked many years ago with a fine fellow – actually he was an arschlocher to everyone – but he got his job done. He was my first C.O. when I went detective. I will not burden you with his name. But my point is this. As he would say, we do not need to be a genius here, Horst. We just need to find a mistake.”

“Who made this mistake, then?”

“Ah, you’ll give me heartburn with that one. What are they teaching guys like you about trafficking at that Gendarmerieschule these days?”

“Well, that it’s a big business. Drugs, guns, anything. People, women.”

“Okay. So trafficking is about articulated trucks on the autobahn, going hell for leather toward Frankfurt or Amsterdam. It’s trains, it’s plane cargo, five or ten kilometres up there. Depps with stuff in the frame of their car, or in their knickers. Now what?”

“Well, why would two men, ausländers, why would they be so far off the beaten track up here?”

“Congratulations,” said Speckbauer. “You are saying what I say to myself. It’s what I say to my fine colleagues in Graz. It’s what I say to certain persons on the phone from Vienna and places even more exotic than that lovely city. The answer is . . . ?”

Felix shrugged.

“The answer is . . . we don’t know. And that is why we are up here, believing that this is important, very important. The proof of that is what happened to the Himmelfarb family.”

TWENTY

T
HE LOW THRUM OF THE ENGINE, AND THE SQUEAKS FROM THE
suspension as the car wallowed and even bucked on the mountain road only made the silence of the last 10 minutes of the journey to Festring more pronounced. In that uneasy quiet Felix soon decided that Speckbauer too was marinating in his own thoughts, maybe even as much as he was in his own. The difference was that Speckbauer was showing no signs of that steady and growing foreboding that had been growing in Felix’s mind. It had almost spilled over into dread at times, a dark swirl of images flaring and returning again, no matter how he tried to contain them.

It was almost a relief when the half-dozen houses of Festring came in sight, arriving abruptly after a bend, nestled in a valley whose bright green meadows had been hard-won from the hills.

Gasthaus Hiebler was a modest affair in the traditional style, with ambitious flowerboxes and what looked like a recent coat of paint.

Two cars were parked in a gravelled area to the side, one an Opel with fancy rims.The spring melt was not done with the land up here yet, and the soft, grassy banks of the ditches along the road outside were still saturated. Felix backed in, turned off the engine and held the keys up for Speckbauer.

“So,” said Speckbauer. “Except for that shitbox Opel there, we are in a time machine up here.”

Felix said nothing.

“This is going to be low key,” Speckbauer went on. “We want to know who was in this place when Karl Himmelfarb was in the other night. Who he might have told about the goings on at his farm. He played cards, had a beer, like always, gell?”

Felix nodded. Speckbauer still held the door handle, and stared at the gap where the door had opened a little, and where the cold air was flowing in.

“And my bet is they’ll know you, your name.Your father?”

And Speckbauer was out of the car with that fast, rolling exit that had him on his toes and stretching by the side of the car, the door shut behind him already. He nodded toward the door of the inn.

It was drawn back just as Felix prepared to push it open. A woman in her fifties with a housecoat took a step back.

“Servus,” Felix said.

“Grüss, und wilkommen.”

She had a business smile and grey eyes that reminded Felix of a bird. They fixed on Speckbauer, who had lingered several steps behind. She returned his greeting in the same high, musical accent she had Felix’s.

“Is the gasthaus open?”

“Of course,” she said, and she unclasped her hands to usher them in.

There was a heavy, brothy aroma in the air. Felix glanced at the empty dining room that was off to the left of the entrance.

“Fine day earlier,” she said.