The road crossed a river now and began to curl around the mountains. They were high enough for the forest to falter, but scattered clumps of smaller, tough pines had managed to root even on ridges close to the summits.
Speckbauer consulted his map again.
“We could have gone by Teichalm, I guess,” he said. “What’s up there? Aside from woods, bog, more woods?”
“A big inn, a gasthaus. Ski runs. A lake. A very cold lake.”
There were a few cars up here, more than Felix had expected.
Speckbauer craned his neck to see a couple with two children plodding near the woods across a marshy patch. All had rosy cheeks, and wet hair. The yellow rain jackets looked like aliens amidst the green.
“Wise choice,” said Speckbauer. “The yellow. Hunting season and so forth? I’m sure things have happened over the years up in these parts. Hunting accidents?”
Felix’s mind lingered on how Speckbauer said “accidents.”
“I suppose,” he said.
“The two men up in the woods by Himmelfarbs’ weren’t ‘accidents,’” said Speckbauer. “I don’t need an autopsy to figure that one out.”
“When will those results come back?”
“Some now, already. I should phone in soon. You know what toxicology is?”
“Of course.”
“Than you’ll know they take a long time. I have waited weeks for tests.”
“Content analysis too?”
“Well, good for you. What’s in the bauch, the belly, yes. Also what shape their organs are in. It helps to know. Teeth tell a lot. Hair too. Sure, the papers are full of DNA cases and all that, but all that environmental stuff has come on strong in the business the past few years. We’ll need it, I tell you.”
“Because they had nothing on them?”
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.”