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, naturlich — 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 auslanders,” 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 blod.”
“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, auslanders, 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
The 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.
“Gruss, und wilkommen.”
She had a business smile and grey eyes that reminded Felix of a bird. They fixed on Speckbauer, who had
