Poachers Road (42 page)

Felix shook his head.

“A policeman? A Gendarme? You guess the rest.”

Felix returned Gebhart’s gaze.

“I think I do, now.”

Gebhart held his forefinger to his head, and pulled back his thumb, and let it go.

“The way out,” he said. “For him. But not for me. Obviously.”

“They thought . . . ?”

Speckbauer nodded several times, slowly.

“So when you show up at the post, fresh out of Gendarmerie school, I think, well, so what. It’s a good post for it. But then I see your name. And I ask myself this: They’re putting this kid with me?

Whose father was . . . ? You don’t have to be crazy, or paranoid, I should say. So: got all that? Enough of it?”

“I had no idea.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Gebhart. “Don’t I know it. I didn’t either. That’s what happened to me. They gave up on me after a while, the Internals, but I know damned well my file was marked that day. I mean, what was my defence when they said I must have some idea what my partner was up to, that no one can be that stupid, or naïve, or . . . ? Now: forget this.You know enough now.”

Gebhart put the car in first gear. He peered over the banks that bordered this part of the road here.

“Listen,” said Felix. “Just go back. I never saw you.”

“Well now.You sound as out of it as I was then.”

“Really. I phoned you, and you turned me down. I’ll drop all this on Speckbauer, the maps, what I heard from my grandparents, all that.”

“Really?” said Gebhart, from some far place behind his squint.

“I’m over my head. Everything’s screwed up.”

Gebhart drew in a breath, held it, and let it out noisily.

“Interesting,” he murmured. “But the world has already spun on.”

“What does that mean?”

“I put in the search on this Fuchs guy.”

“So the system logged you.”

“The system logged me. Or Korschak, or whoever was in the post. It shouldn’t take them more than one half-second to figure out who.”

“‘Them,’” Felix muttered.

“Funny, isn’t it? ‘Them’ ‘Them’ is us, right?”

“Yes,” said Felix. “But are you sure you got the right Fuchs?”

“‘Equipment operator ‘seasonal operator’ in the forestry, the mill?”

“Red hair, beard?”

“No beard on his driver’s licence. Reddish, rusty maybe.”

“Equipment operator? The only time I met him, he was driving an old man to his card games, having a beer and jausen.”

“Slacker?”

“I don’t know, but probably. What’s his record?”

“Surprise: Herr Fuchs is not a criminal.”

“You’re joking.”

“This is not a joking day. Zero. Like I said. I go left here, right?”

The smoother section of road that Gebhart let the Golf onto soon resumed its steep climb, the clattery sound of the engine coming back to Felix from the banks that lined it here.

“What was the passport picture like?”

“He doesn’t have one. But the EU’s a big place to wander now, isn’t it? Anyone can get into a car and drive to, I don’t know, Paris, and no one has to know.”

“Married, family or anything?”

“Not married, in his thirties, does what he pleases. Sounds like a pretty good life to me. I’ll bet he has a killer CD collection and a garage full of decent tools.”

“And who knows,” Gebhart added after a few moments.

“Maybe he’ll turn out to be a half-decent fellow. So he drives some local geezers about a bit? Sounds like a good thing, one would say.

Families are busy these days, you know. So busy.”

Felix checked his watch.

“Well I phoned my Opa Kimmel. He’s not going out this afternoon, he said.”

“Is he used to you calling in on him?”

Felix shook his head.

“He has all his marbles?” Gebhart asked. “Or enough of them?”

“We’ll see,” was all Felix could come up with. “He can be a bit . . . remote.”

“You said the village,” said Gebhart. He pushed against his seat belt to look around at the church and houses receding in his mirror.

“It’s spread out,” said Felix. “Go up the hill here, and watch for tractors. It’s tight. It gets narrower further up.”

Gebhart weaved his head about to get a last look at the church tower in the side mirror before the car took the summit. The road began a gradual descent into a small valley that appeared to be the last before the mountains started behind.

“Is that your family church back there, the graveyard?”

“It is.”

Gebhart braked and then he geared down when the road entered a curving cut between banks. The first of the grass in the meadows here had established itself, and to Felix now seemed to almost hover above the fields in an almost luminous filament, more like baby hair than the hardy, thick grasses they’d be before the month was out.

“Well you won’t often see that,” Gebhart said. “Those masons know their stuff.”

“The masons?”

“That wall by the graveyard. The road was made later, or it sank or something?”

“I suppose.”

“You mean you don’t know, and you grew up hereabouts?”

Flattened cakes of mud from tractor wheels began to spread out more across the pavement. The rumbling coming up from the tires became more constant. Winter had chewed up the edges of the road in many places. Without planning to, Felix had been rehearsing how he’d approach his grandfather, how he’d persuade him to talk about his past. He could already imagine the distant gaze and the indifference in his eyes, the slow, steady enunciation of his words, each weighed.

Gebhart slowed for two potholes.

“Maybe we should have parachuted in.”

“Well you’ll have something to talk to my Opa Kimmel about then.”

“Parachutes? Potholes?”

“He wanted to be a paratrooper. ‘To land on Crete’ my dad told me once.”

“And did he ?”

“He was fourteen when that was going on.”

Gebhart changed into second for a steep section.

“All the wind and air up here maybe,” he murmured. “Gets into you, maybe?”

The Golf chugged through the section of road that ran almost through the Klamminger’s farmyard.

“What?” said Gebhart. “The one place we pass, and there’s no action here?”

There was fresh mud in the yard, clothes on the line.

Something about the turn in the road, or the drumming of the muddy roadway, had awakened something in Felix. He thought of his Grandfather Kimmel, that upright way he sat in the church pew, as though he were in a trance.

“Talk about out of the way,” Gebhart went on. “Is he a hermit or something?”

When Felix didn’t answer, Gebhart looked over.

“Second thoughts?” he asked.

“No. I’m thinking. Keep going.”

Felix opened the window. There was a sharp edge to the air up here. Gebhart sighed and reached for his mobile.

“Christ,” he muttered. “Nothing now. I had one bar back in the village.”

Felix pointed to a line of electricity poles and the ragged clump of conifers, a windbreak, where it ended.

“You’ll see the roof in a minute,” he said.

“Where is everybody?” asked Gebhart. “Doesn’t everyone here depend on their neighbours?”

He glanced over.

“Let me guess,” he said to Felix then: “‘That’s another story?’”

“You said it, Gebi.”

“Does this place have a name?”

“It’s called Pfarrenord,” Felix said, looking back down the valley.

“Is everyone here holy or something, this ‘parish’ thing?”

“It’s a local name. Not the name on a map. It’s windy here.

Colder, people say. So someone came up with ‘The North Parish.’”

Gebhart sighed and rubbed his nose.

“Watch, there’s a bend here.”

The road twisted at the spot Felix had fallen off his new bike all those years ago. He remembered having a tantrum, and his mother had soothed him. Later, when he’d brought it up in some argument as to why he had to visit his grandfather at all, she’d told him that anxiety did strange things to a kid. It was something to get over, she’d said; something to build on.

“So tell me,” said Gebhart. “How are you going to get things going here? This ‘little chat’?”

“We’ll see how it goes, I suppose.”

“Which page of the manual is that see-how-it-goes technique on?”

Felix was suddenly glad of Gebhart’s breezy sarcasm.

He turned to him.

“Maybe it’s changed since you last looked at it. Back in nineteen-eighty-nothing.”

“Listen to you. You spend a couple of days with suits from Strassgangerstrasse, and now you’re a thick-head like them. Well done, Mr. Know-It-All.”

Felix studied the cloud shadows that now lay over much of the forest cover on the hills about.

“So now you know what I think about your new friends,” said Gebhart.

“They didn’t fool me,” he said. “Completely, anyway.”

“Richtig? But you’re still going to unload that stuff on them, aren’t you? Those maps and documents you were talking about?”

“Soon.”

“‘Soon’? Cheeky.”

“I’ll decide after I hear my opa.”

Gebhart looked over.

“Well you know those two are not sitting on their hands,” he said. “I’ll bet they’re knocking on that guy’s door already, Fuchs.”

“And that’s why I want to be here first.”

“We, Gendarme, we. Remember that, will you? I’m wearing a big bull’s eye on my arsch here for these couple of hours.”

“Gebi”

“Don’t tell me how you appreciate it. That only makes me worry more. The clock is ticking. Ninety minutes, and I’m back in my uniform at work, at the post.”

“Watch for water on the road up ahead. Sometimes you get a pool here before the warm weather.”

Gebhart left the Golf in second, pulling up the hill at a steady rate, the poles passing slowly.

“Scheisse,” said Gebhart with quiet malice, placing his foot over the brake pedal. “You were right.”

The pool of water seemed to run for 20 or more metres on the road.

“Deep, do you think well look.”

Gebhart brought the Golf to a stop slowly. An Opel blocked the road beyond the pool. Its back wheels were still in the water.

“There’s your answer,” Gebhart said. “That guy tried to plough through.”

He moved the gearshift from side to side in neutral.

“Is that your opa’s jalopy?”

A rally stripe with some kind of blue sparkly stuff ran across the top of the back window.

Felix heard Gebhart stroking his bottom lip.

“The alloy wheels I could forgive,” Gebhart murmured. “But Maria, the Michael Schumacher stuff tacked on there? Your opa’s hardly a Rock 100 FM man, is he?”

Felix couldn’t be sure of another sticker, but two he recognized.

“The plate’s local,” said Gebhart.

“Yamaha,” Felix murmured.

Gebhart stopped playing with the gearshift. He looked over, his eyebrows raised.

“Herr Red-head? Our person of interest? Mr. Fuchs up here on a visit?”

Felix shrugged.

“How very damned convenient,” said Gebhart. “Ran it through here, stalled it.”

He put the car in reverse.

“What are you doing?”

“You think I’m going to just park it on this cow path? I’m going to turn it around. And you’re going to help me.”

Felix stood by the entrance to the field.

“Make damned sure my wheels don’t get stuck when I back it in there,” Gebhart called out. “Or you’ll pull this car out yourself.”

The earth sucked at Felix’s shoes as he took another step back.

The diesel smoke from Gebhart’s car seemed to settle around his face, like gnats. He slapped the roof when he saw the wet ridge of mud begin to form to the side of the tire.

Gebhart took his time making the 50-point turn. Felix watched his hands and arms work the wheel, but he did not make out any words in Gebhart’s steady, philosophical-sounding muttering.

Gebhart stepped out of the car eventually, testing the margins of the road to both sides. Felix was listening to the breeze that was coming over the fields here, suddenly quiet after the Golf’s engine was finally off.

“I’m locking it,” said Gebhart. “This is the end of the road, after your opa’s place, right?”

Felix nodded. He thought he had heard something on the breeze. Maybe a bird, or the faint whistle and sough from the stirring blades of new grass. He looked toward the trees that surrounded three sides of the house again, and caught a glimpse of the roof.

There was no smoke from the chimney.