or abandoned after the war, did you know?”
Felix’s thoughts went immediately to the snapshots of his father leaning against an overturned VW up in the woods somewhere.
There he was, in his element, laughing along with his friends, big strapping guys off-duty too, out for a boys’ day in the woods.
“Your father had a good knowledge of the area, I would say.
Exceptionally good. I bet that your grandfather passed on a lot to him. ‘The lore’ I suppose you’d say.”
Speckbauer tapped his forehead.
“The maps in here,” he said. “Better than your satellites, I’d bet again. Can you imagine how valuable that was?”
“You’re working up to some insinuation here.”
“Which is?”
“That my father was in some racket. Or that he looked the other way?”
“I try to look at everything.”
“That’s a ‘yes’ then.”
“It’s an ‘I don’t know.’”
“I don’t believe you.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here. Nor would you.”
“You think I’m in on something,” said Felix. “That’s it.”
“Others may think that.”
“‘Others’ who?”
“I’m not going to get into that. Let’s conclude here. Your father was out and about even more than he usually was in those few weeks. Before his passing, I mean.”
“Right,” said Felix. “I think I’m beginning to get it now.”
“Go on, then.”
“How come a Gendarme drives an Audi? How much did he have to drink?”
“We know it was a used car. Your father was not drunk.”
“Well, thank you for that. I suppose I should be grateful or something?”
“Look, we don’t know where he was that afternoon. He was no stranger to a bite to eat and a krugl of beer up in Eagle’s Nest or wherever, but that’s where the trail ended. He was supposed to be on duty at the time, at his post in Judenburg. You knew that?”
“I found out about it later. People are polite. They didn’t want him to look bad.”
“Sure,” said Speckbauer. “People are polite. They didn’t want him to look bad. But he’d been doing this a lot.”
“So he was under suspicion?”
“No. Not then. Later and it was a bunch of unexplained things, open questions. It was not suspicion.”
“But for you?”
“I’m curious, that’s all. That’s why I pulled the file and read it.
Stuff comes across my desk. I’m like a guy with Alzheimer’s. Sometimes it makes sense, like a big jigsaw. ‘Two men, apparently Slavic/Balkan background, dead in the woods up in Hohe Arschloch, Styria.’ ‘A junkie overdosed in an apartment in Graz with a new quality of heroin.’ ‘A clown gets fired from a crappy factory job in Furstenfeld. Now he gets back at his employer who caught him drinking in the klo fifty times. He phones “anonymously,” says illegals come in at night in the factory, cleaning up.’ All that.”
“How does this come up here? What does this have to do with me?”
“It depends on how you view things,” said Speckbauer. He stopped and looked around. “And speaking of viewing things… ”
He pointed toward a mountain, and glanced at Felix.
“Jacobsberg,” Felix said. Speckbauer pivoted at pointed at another.
“Oberlach.”
“And if I went over the top of it?”
“You’re up on Sommersalm, by the river. It’d take a day.”
“Trails?”
“One only. There are awkward parts.”
Speckbauer kept looking about, but had no more questions.
“Did I pass?”
Speckbauer smiled tightly and resumed his walk. At the edge of the field there was a drainage cut. The ground to both sides was waterlogged and dark with the run-off.
“I was talking about coincidences,” he went on. “Now to superstitious people, or paranoids, there are no coincidences. But me, I am not like that. Well not during daylight hours anyway. What I mean is this: we Franzi and me see the daily ‘news’ we call it and note it. So, we think: two dead guys. From down south there in gangland? In the middle of nowhere? A new departure, a new group? Right by, well, within fifty kilometres anyway, of big towns like Weiz and Gleisdorf, all those new factories?”
Felix took mental note of how deftly Speckbauer stepped over the drainage cut.
“So there we are in our lair there in Strassgangerstrasse,”
Speckbauer went on. “And naturally we ask ‘What else has gone on here in the recent past in this neck of the woods?’ There is your father, his passing. And then, there is a copy of your notes as officer on scene, you and Gebhart. Kimmel One, Kimmel Two. This is a coincidence?”
Speckbauer stopped then and swore, and he shook his head. He drew out his mobile from his pocket.
“No wonder I’m feeling odd. I left it switched off. Christ and His mother.”
Felix took a few steps into the field. Speckbauer had stopped and looked down at the wet soil oozing around the edges of his shoes. Felix’s head was not clearing. He tried to imagine what his grandparents could be talking to Franzi about.
“There are lots of black spots up here, right?” he heard Speckbauer mutter. “And the signal you get here is piddly enough, isn’t it?”
He turned when he heard Speckbauer’s words trail off.
Speckbauer was squinting at the screen. He tilted it against the morning sun that was still slicing the valleys into shadow and glare.
“Excuse me, a text.”
Felix watched him thumb through the message again. For a moment then Speckbauer’s eyes rested on the stones that had been embedded into the side of the cut.
“Well,” he said. “Now that focuses the mind. Yes. Now I am awake.”
“What? Is it about the situation here?”
“Perhaps. It’s a message about something in the first pathology notes. They’re being transcribed, but someone there was smart enough to fire an email to our office.”
“Identities?”
Speckbauer shook his head, and tapped his phone gently in a slow rhythm on his chin. He was soon lost in thought and turned to rubbing his phone over the bristles.
“You know something about the two?”
Speckbauer blinked as though rudely awoken.
“No. Yes. A horseman.”
He looked at the phone again.
“There is a mark,” he said. “No, what am I saying? A tattoo on one. In an armpit more or less. It’s sort of half ragged there, but it’s something.”
Felix shielded his eyes from the sun. His eyes were beginning to burn now from the flood of light and sleeplessness.
“VK,” said Speckbauer. “They’re out of Croatia. Well the one with the mark is. It’s actually a spur, this mark. ‘Vatreni Konji.’ Call them Crazy Horses. It’s got something to do with hunters’ horses, I don’t know exactly. But the exact translation doesn’t work for me.
‘Spirited Horses?’ No: crazy is proper. You won’t understand.”
