“And you know they’d found the woman that same evening?” asked Speckbauer. “Stephi Giesl, the barmaid from the pub in Weiz, and her car? It was up at that dumpy house of Fuchs. That’s how cold-blooded those guys are. And she thought she was going for a good time. Whether Fuchs knew what Dravnic had done to her or not, he surely knew he was a goner after he drove the guy up to your grandfather’s. You’re lucky he didn’t go right through you when he tried to make his break.”
“It felt like he did, I tell you.”
“He saved your arsch. He’d have thrown you, thrown anyone, to that guy even your grandfather, with that bullshit he tried.
‘Where are my diamonds?’ were the first words out of the guy’s mouth, according to what I was heard. Is that true?”
“Yes,” said Felix. “My opa thought it was a joke. But then he saw the gun, and the look on Fuchs’ face.”
“But he didn’t screw around when he put his sights on that Dravnic, did he,” said Speckbauer. “One shot. And the guy was even on the move, I heard.”
Their conversation ebbed as an old woman with a small dog went by them.
“How is the old boy anyway?” Speckbauer asked then.
“They kept him overnight, for blood pressure. They expected him to be in shock or something, traumatized. He seems to be fine though. He said these doctors were annoying, standing around asking him stupid questions. My mother’s been up a few times, me too.
Putting stuff together for him.”
“He’s moved already?”
“Yes. He’s famous now. ‘The marksman’ they call him. A lot of people talk to him about it. He says it drives him crazy. But I doubt it.”
From across the street, the man with the briefcase was waving.
Speckbauer watched him as though he were studying a new life form.
“You’d think it was a fire or something,” he murmured.
“You know what they’re going to say in there, don’t you.”
“The SOKO? Maybe. But it’s not the end of the world.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Should it? Did I do something wrong? If you want to know what bothers me, is that I’m missing bits of this whole thing. I just can’t quite wrap up how this went from a layabout like Fuchs and his pissy little gschaftl, to multiple murders. It starts with him driving illegals up to work in the woods for that other guy…”
“Maier.”
“Right if it was just that, or some petty crap around his drug hobby, then he could have kept going forever and probably never been caught.”
Felix nodded. Speckbauer went on in a slow, speculative tone.
“Fuchs,” he said. “Big plan, small brain. There he is in the woods, and those old stories when your grandfather and Hartmann get together, those stories going around in his fat head. So it starts in the woods. And one day he thinks: here are these illegals there breaking their backs for Maier. No doubt some of them have enough words to talk to him. He gets talking. He finds out one or more of them ‘know people’ back home, and that there are already networks and traffic coming through the area or near enough.”
“What you’ve been trying to nail down,” said Felix.
“And what your father might have found out something about too. But these guys in the woods want to make some serious money.
Who wouldn’t? And Fuchs, he thinks: they’re the same people in the old stories of smuggling he hears from your grandfather or Hartmann. Everyone’s on the take down there now, so why not get a piece of the action. Yes, a mastermind at work.”
“You know, we didn’t know anything about that stuff,” said Felix. “What my grandfather did in the schleiche, or going in and out of those DP camps. We heard stories about ‘the scarce times.’
But him running up and down into Yugoslavia then, we hadn’t a clue. It must have been dangerous.”
“Christ yes,” said Speckbauer. “Any DPs they sent back to Tito, he pretty well shot them all. To Tito, they were all Ustaschi, or Danube Germans, not real refugees or DPs. But your grandfather had contacts, a good bit of the language. And don’t kid yourself, there was money in it for him back then. I mean those guys weren’t saints, you know. It wasn’t about ‘the cause,’ I’ll bet. Not then.”
“I don’t know. Whatever he did, it was a cause for him, I’d say.”
“What? Nazi?”
“Maybe,” said Felix. “But probably not just that. He was helping people on his wife’s side, on their family’s side. To him they were Austrians, not Slovenians or they should be. Plus they hated communism too.”
Speckbauer returned to studying the gestures that the small man with the briefcase was making now. He made no effort to show he got the hint, even when the man began waving his watch arm at him.
“History biting us in the arsch,” he said.
“Look,” said Felix. “We’d better go.”
“Yeah,” said Speckbauer. “The bill arrives eventually. It always does. But I wish I’d had the full meal before the bill, that’s all.”
“The SOKO,” said Felix.
“Who cares about that crap,” said Speckbauer. “I probably know more than the team they put on it for the inquiry. But there are parts we’ll never get to.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“You don’t?” said Speckbauer. “Okay, ready? We. Don’t.
Really. Know.”
“You mean that?”
“I do.”
“This is how some cases end? Like nowhere?”
“Well I don’t know how Fuchs got them to go up into the forest that night. But I have my ideas.”
“Fuchs had had a con going, right?”
“Are you asking me?”
“Okay, I’m asking you.”
“Naturlich he had some scheme, Fuchs. But this Dravnic guy was no fool. I mean he lived the life down in Croatia. He’d done his share of that hellhound work they do to one another there. Seems to run in the family there. His own grandfather…?”
Speckbauer said something under his breath that contained the word lawyer and he made a slow wave back to the man with the briefcase.
“As for me,” he said. “Me, I think Fuchs wanted to be part of something big. Maybe he put an offer to them. Who knows move hot cars down from Germany, credit cards, counterfeit, women, drugs. I mean, at the very least, Fuchs can drive. Let’s say Fuchs is bragging. That he knows a lot about Dravnic and his people, and what they do. So Dravnic plays along, and says they’ll do a try. But Fuchs wants to play his own game. And when those two don’t show up back in wherever, and Dravnic sends word, well Fuchs throws up his hands, and says he hasn’t a clue what’s going on. When he last saw them they had all their fingers and toes. et cetera, et cetera.”
“They believed him?” Felix asked. “I can’t see that.”
“Did it matter whether they did or not? Whether they believed him or not, those guys want to protect their operation and their rep too. So whether he’s screwing them around or not, this Fuchs character knows a bit too much about them by now anyway.”
“But they had taken a pretty big chance on him,” said Felix.
“Had they really?” said Speckbauer. “They were keeping a tight hold on this. That’s why the other one, the runner, came to meet the mule coming down from Holland. Let’s say he was told to offer Fuchs some kind of a side deal when he showed. That was just to test his loyalty. But they also wanted to see how much Fuchs might have found out about them too.”
“You think they only planned to run one operation this way?”
“An experiment, probably, yes. Maybe they had found out about Fuchs’ drug hobby. That was enough. Or maybe they didn’t care. My bet is they never trusted him, but they knew right away when he contacted them, name-dropping from what he’d heard from the old guys, well, they knew they’d probably have to do something about him.”
“You think Fuchs realized any of this?”
“Well who was conning who, that night? I don’t know. I just don’t. Maybe Fuchs was just greedy. Me, I say his brain was fried.
But it looks like we all underestimated him that night anyway.”
Speckbauer stopped strolling. He faced Felix directly.