Speckbauer’s effortless transformation into a genial local only increased Felix’s confusion. Speckbauer was full of gentle wit, hinting at a subtle, almost pitiful mockery of the greater world outside the farmhouse, where unfortunates could only wish for such food, in such a house, with its family bonds, its mountain views all about, and its air. He ably followed and added to a conversation about farming, the recent May festival, Chinese food, the new turbo diesel engines, car theft in the cities, proverbs that no one used anymore.
Felix looked out at the steep, jumbled meadows and hills returned to their postcard green with the sun overhead, and a blue sky to bite down on the edges all about. He imagined someone out there, watching the place, just as Speckbauer and Franzi had been doing in those hours before dawn.
As the conversation swirled around him, things around him began to take on an unfamiliar look. It was as though there had been a different light or colour spread over it. Everything was moving under him, a slow subterranean drift, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what he wanted to do. He knew that panic wasn’t far off. He stood.
His oma’s smiling face turned up toward him and the talk stopped. Felix tried to smile back. He wouldn’t look over in Speckbauer’s direction.
“I’m falling asleep,” he said. “I better get some fresh air.”
He winked at his oma but it did not erase her look of concern.
Behind him he heard another chair being moved. His opa launched into something about a motorbike he’d had, one that took him through snowstorms. The opening door took the rest of the conversation. Felix paused near the bench and then headed across the farmyard.
“Hey,” came Speckbauer’s voice behind him.
Felix didn’t slow. He imagined breaking into a run.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Speckbauer called out. “You can’t back away now.”
Felix stopped and turned.
“I have to clear my head.”
Speckbauer shrugged.
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he said. “That’s the job, see?”
“You mean what you’ve got to do. Not me.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve had enough of this routine,” said Felix.
Speckbauer looked back at the farmhouse.
“You want me to betray my family.”
“‘Betray’?”
“Now you’re trying to tell me that my father was a bent cop?”
“Did I say that? Did I?”
“You don’t give a shit about anyone. There you are, in my grandparents’ kitchen, eating their food, yapping. With your ‘herrlich, Herr Nagl! wunderbar, Frau Nagl!’ Just because you’re up in the hills here, you don’t fool anyone”
“Not even your grandparents?”
“They’re humouring you. They let you think you’re fooling them.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Go back in and try more Rossegger on them. ‘Oh my forest home.. ’ Blah blah.”
“You don’t like the great Peter Rossegger?”
“He was a fascist. Him and his Brotherhood. Ancient history.”
“Maybe,” said Speckbauer. “But does it ruin his poetry though, this distaste he had for lesser peoples, the foreigners amongst us?”
“You probably believe that too, then. ‘Send them back,’ right?”
“Some, for sure. We have enough homegrown hoodlums here.”
Felix was at a loss for words.
“Two more we didn’t need,” Speckbauer added in a groan, mid-stretch.
“This is going nowhere,” said Felix. “I came out to make a telephone call.”
Speckbauer didn’t move off, but continued to eye Felix.
“You don’t want to know,” he said. “You just don’t. Now that is something.”
“I do know. I know I’m being used.”
“You don’t want to know about your grandfather. And, I guess, you won’t want to know about your father.”
Felix felt a surge of anger welling up again.
“Don’t bring that up again. You’re insulting my family. I’m phoning my C.O. They can fire me if they like.”
“Who’s going to sleep better tonight if you do? It doesn’t fix the problem.”
“You’re making the damned problem,” Felix retorted. “This is dangerous. This isn’t some game or strategy you do in your office, sticking pins in a map or something.”
“Well,” said Speckbauer. “Do I look like a pin-in-a-map cop?
Maybe I should be one then, so it wouldn’t upset your stereotype.
‘What you don’t know, won’t hurt you.’”
“Who knows what you’ll say next, that’s my take on it.”
“You’re not that stupid and that’s my take. And it would be a betrayal too. That doesn’t sit right with me.”
“But you want me to betray my own instead.”
Speckbauer glared back. After a few moments his eyes lost their focus.
“Okay,” he said. “I get it. I am a bit slow, but I finally get it. You win. Make your calls. And don’t worry — I’ll only say good things about all you’ve done on this. Really. We shouldn’t have taken you away from your holiday, Gendarme Kimmel. I’ll tell you what: I’ll put up signs. ‘Gendarme Kimmel doesn’t know anything.’ ‘And Gendarme Kimmel doesn’t want to find out either.’”
Felix stared at him. Speckbauer didn’t turn away from his long survey of the greens and the chill, spring brightness that was showering this part of Styria.
“He doesn’t want to know that his grandfather was a wannabe SS,” he went on. “That he did fine, thank you very much, in the hard times after the war.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“That his Opa Kimmel was the man to go to if you needed something, like petrol or parts or concrete, or even coffee and cigarettes?”
“Even if he did.”
Speckbauer turned away from the view.
“Is it still ‘ancient history’?” he snapped.
He glanced down at the phone in Felix’s hand.
“That grandfather of yours did his nod-and-wink routine for longer than just survival. Maybe you don’t want to know more.
Maybe you just want to carry on being very modern, a Unidropout-poser-MP3-European type of a guy. The new copper.”
Grim satisfaction leaked into Felix. He had drawn out the real Speckbauer at last.
“Been to Britain?” Speckbauer asked then, brightly. “England?”
“No.”
“A strange bunch, but fair, if you can forgive their beer. My point is, the British saw how capable your grandfather was. During the occupation? They were impressed. So they offered your Opa Kimmel a job. Where? In the Gendarmerie, of course.”
Speckbauer turned back toward the fields and woods. Again he seemed to be deriving satisfaction from his slow, steady survey. Felix sensed that Speckbauer was waiting for a signal from him. Still, he turned his phone over again in his hand, waited.
“Well?” Speckbauer said then.
“Go on,” said Felix. “I’m listening.”
“Thank you. At any rate, the British knew that there were Gendarmerie who shouldn’t be put under a magnifying glass — like your grandfather Kimmel, see? The Second Republic, the New Austria, woken up from its nightmare, needed experienced men in the places where, well, where the likes of your grandfather had experience.”
“Experience?”
“Smuggling. Maybe I should say trading. Okay: trading. Things were hard up here. The Russians came through here first. Christ, what didn’t they take? They weren’t alone in their visits. There were partisans, from up and down the Balkans. Slovenians, a lot of them.
A lot of them came through from the DP camps there in Judenburg, and Graz.”
Again, Felix thought of the maps he had pored over last night.
For a moment he almost believed that Speckbauer knew about them, and was just baiting him here.
“Well, once the pigs and petrol business was shall we say, normal, other activities went on. Can you imagine?”
Felix nodded.
“You had Eastern Europeans who knew their way around.
Sure, they’d gone home but home was what? Flattened houses? And if you were on the wrong side, the losing side…? So people had connections. Sure there were borders — ‘The Iron Curtain’ and all that. But this coming and going was nothing new here. ‘Business resumed.’ Your grandfather closed shop: good for him. He told his old contacts to get lost especially the ones up from Slovenia. Yes, he did his job. It says so right in his file.”