“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.”
“Give me the short version.”
“The ‘runner’ the one with the four bullet holes was midthirties. He had a tattoo. That puts him as a member, or a hangeron of some degree, of a bunch of ex-soldiers, bandits, and the like.
He would be no stranger to crime, I say. We have a chance of putting a name on him, with army records in Croatia. It’ll take time.”
Speckbauer pursed his lips and then blew them loose.
“I put in a call to The Hague, to see if there’s a file on him.”
“The Hague? A war criminal?”
“It’s possible. There were guys like that, one picked up in Vienna two years ago. Then, some arrest, or bodies, in Germany.
But one of them up here? It changes things.”
Speckbauer turned on his heels and concentrated on a sharp block of light thrown up by the sun on the wall of the house.
“So,” he said, and nodded at Felix’s mobile. “You still want to phone Gebhart, and get him to sort all this out?”
Felix shrugged.
“I’ll tell you,” said Speckbauer then. “These horsemen guys are big on revenge, and grudges. They make it their business to set an example. And they don’t accept business losses. So, if our guy in the woods was carrying something of value, they are the type to want to get it back. And put away whoever interfered in their operation.”
Felix’s mind lurched, and a cold feeling descended on him again.
“The other guy has a diamond in his guts,” Speckbauer murmured. “And a hole in the back of his head. A clean shot, a surprise.
But Mr. Horseman guy had a chance to run or jump or try something. There’s no lab test telling me he fired a gun. Say Mr.
Horseman has been accompanying Mr. Diamond, but that he is no friend to him. And say he has a deal with a third party arranged for Mr. Diamond to get taken care of…?”
“A third party who knew his way around the area.”
“A person who had his own scheme,” said Speckbauer, nodding. He seemed to be mesmerized by the stripes of hard light across the yard now. Then he wrinkled his nose and his brows lifted. He pointed his index finger to his ear, and made a popping sound.
“‘Kill the two foreigners,’ let’s call the plan,” he said. “Yes.”
“He doesn’t take the diamond out of the first guy’s guts, though.”
“Ah, Gendarme Kimmel. He doesn’t know about diamonds in the guy’s guts. And I think he is quite content with what he did get.”
“Other diamonds,” said Felix. “Cash maybe.”
“I agree. And all that was supposed to be on its way to…?”
Felix hesitated. Then he nodded towards the hills to the north.
“Wrong direction, I say.”
“I give up then. Christ, I’m a Gendarme in Stefansdorf. What do I know?”
“Traffic goes two ways. One way goes drugs, counterfeit.
Human beings. Weapons. Lousy, old-fashioned, lucrative cigarettes.
Other way goes payment.”