The Pale House (13 page)

The trucks from the penal battalion were drawn up to the side of the street. The backs of men mounded the canvas sides of their load beds, there was a low mutter of voices, and he realized he had seen those trucks yesterday, stopped in front of the Ustaše checkpoint.

“Kreuz?
Kreuz?
Are you bloody wandering about, again?”

A shape was coming up the street, flashlight stabbing the darkness between the trucks. The light tilted around, blinding him.

“Ah, sorry, Captain.” The shape resolved into a Feldgendarme sergeant, a red triangle patch sewn on his sleeve. “Like keeping track of a flock of chickens with this lot.”

“There's no one here, Sergeant.”

“Right, sir. With your permission?”

“Carry on, Sergeant.”

Reinhardt continued his slow walk into the darkness, his mind still tilted around that realization of the power he wielded, and the fear he had always felt inside whenever he came anywhere near anything like it. Once, long ago, he had known something similar, reveled in the respect and fear a stormtrooper's reputation afforded him, but he had left that man behind, and had never wanted to be him again.

Just for a moment, he felt something deep inside, a sudden serpentlike coiling. As if something old and hoary had turned over, giving him a glimpse of a darker nature, mud-smeared and with the mad rolling eye of an animal gone wild. He shivered, conscious of himself in a way he had not been for a long time. He turned back up toward the lights, and for the first time in a long time his thoughts bent into the future, alert and alive, like a hound that had caught an elusive scent, and a feeling coursing through him that the hunt was afoot.

S
tanding on
Street outside the hospital under a low, overcast sky, Reinhardt took a last pull on his cigarette, then flicked the butt away. He pushed the smoke out, washing his tongue around his mouth and wishing for something to drink. The night had been very long, and he had gotten no sleep. The dim morning light illuminated nothing, least of all the confused jumble in his mind. He took a last, long breath of cold air and walked up the steps, past a cluster of medical orderlies and nurses all smoking under the entrance's portico. From the snatches of conversation he heard before it all died away at his approach, they were locals. Most of them averted their eyes, but one of them looked hard at him before looking suddenly away as Reinhardt pushed open the wooden doors, their squeak and squeal following him into the hospital's lobby, where he slowed, thinking of those orderlies, the way that one who had looked back seemed suddenly familiar. Something in the way he had been standing, in the set of his eyes. He was about to go back outside when he saw Benfeld waiting for him, the Feldjaeger leaning back against the wall with his arms folded and eyes closed. As Reinhardt hesitated, Benfeld's eyes slit open, then widened as he straightened.

“What do you have, then, Frenchie?” Reinhardt asked, still of two minds about going back outside to find that orderly.

“The bodies got here, all right. Finding a doctor was something else. I had to swing some weight to get done what you wanted done,” he said, stifling a yawn, and murmuring an apology as he did so. He indicated an orderly waiting nearby. “He'll take us to the doctor. How did it go up there after I left?”

“About as confusing as I thought it might.”
, the inspector, had taken a look at the bodies in the basement, made no notes, asked no questions, and had then left the house to conduct a series of halfhearted interviews with the people living in and around the street. Between the inspector's German, which was poor, and Reinhardt's stumbling Serbo-Croat, they had made slow headway. No one really wanted to talk, which Reinhardt could understand, but not accept. Toward the end the interviews had resembled interrogations, with
shouting and Reinhardt pushing and prodding, but all it had elicited them was a confused picture of a quiet night shattered by gunfire, then more silence. Some had said they heard a car, others a truck. Some said the killers spoke German, others were not sure. From most they got tears or protestations or just dumb insolence. The one thing they got from all of them was fear. They were frightened of Reinhardt, of his uniform, but they were more scared of
and the threat that lurked in his shadow, the fear of the Ustaše. That, above all.

At the end of it all, pooling what information they had, they had constructed a rough timeline of what had happened. At around three in the morning, everyone had been woken by a muffled explosion. Some had said it was more of a hissing sound. Witnesses had reported a bright light and the sounds of men cursing, which must have been the incendiary flare the killers had accidentally triggered. Then silence. Like good survivors, they had all hidden, hoping for whatever storm it was to pass over. Most had stayed hidden, but one person said she had heard the Feldjaeger's vehicle climbing the street, reporting quite accurately the sound a
kubelwagen
's engine made in low gear. Then there was gunfire, a lot of it, and a handful of people had heard hurried footsteps. There had been voices, most agreed, but no one could or would agree on what had been said, nor even what language. Shortly after the gunshots, another vehicle had driven away.

“Nothing more than we could have guessed for ourselves, really,” Reinhardt said, summing it up. “Shall we?” he asked, pointing to the orderly, still thinking that one of those who had been standing outside had seemed familiar to him. Benfeld nodded and the orderly crushed his cigarette under his heel and muttered, “Follow me.” He led them into a maze of corridors, Reinhardt feeling, remembering, how much he hated hospitals. The sight and smell of them, the way they seemed to be eerily quiet, or shatteringly noisy, never anything in between. This one was noisy. Shouts and calls, a clatter of doors, and somewhere, someone was screaming as the orderly led them down several flights of stairs into the basements. The air became cooler, the sounds of their footsteps echoing back hard from the bare concrete walls and running ahead of them like heralds.

The orderly indicated a door, muttered, “Wait in there, please,” and was gone. Opening the door onto a gust of cold air, Reinhardt saw it was a morgue, and one in much demand. A row of steel cabinets squared the wall on one side, but bodies were stacked on the floor and on tables around the room. Reinhardt spotted the five bodies from the house, one on a dissection table, the other four laid out close together on the floor, all naked.

“They haven't been autopsied? Why not?”

“Sir, it was all I could do to get a doctor to look at them. Anything more . . .” Benfeld shook his head, his lips tightening up. “You may have better luck than me.”

Despite the cold, there was a faint miasma in the air, of rot crossed with something chemical, and Reinhardt and Benfeld both lit cigarettes at the same time. They looked at each other self-consciously a moment, and then Benfeld gave a sheepish grin. Reinhardt smiled back, shifting his weight onto his right leg. His left knee was very sore, a night spent running around having done it no favors.

“Pretty awful place,” Benfeld said, quietly. The bodies might have agreed, thought Reinhardt, immediately hating the thought. Morgues did that to you. Made you think inane things, like imparting thoughts and feelings to the dead. He walked over to the bodies, looking at them in proper light for the first time. The bone-pale pallor of their skin made their wounds stand out so much more. The mutilations to the faces were awful to look at, matted red and slivered with white where teeth and bone showed.

“Where are the clothes?” Benfeld pointed to a heap on a table. “Anything?”

Benfeld shook his head as he walked over to them and pulled a threadbare cardigan off the top of the pile. “Only this. There's half a name tag on it. Looks like ‘Kapet . . .' something-or-other. Rest of the name's gone. The rest of the clothing gives us nothing, except it's pretty obvious none of it was theirs.”

The door banged open and a doctor walked in, a young-looking man in a white coat spotted and smeared with blood, and a stethoscope around his neck. He glowered at Benfeld, then turned bloodshot eyes on Reinhardt.

“You're the captain?” Reinhardt nodded. “You know your lieutenant here was making an absolute bloody nuisance of himself all morning? Well, it's bloody outrageous. We've enough trouble keeping the living alive without worrying about what might or might not have happened to the dead.”

Reinhardt offered the man a cigarette. He looked desperately tired, his eyes circled in gray.

“Did the lieutenant tell you what happened? That three of my men were murdered last night close to where these bodies—those five there—were found?”

“And I should care about those three men why?”

“No particular reason,” said Reinhardt, leaning forward to light the man's cigarette. “But this investigation is important, Doctor.”

“Important enough to pull me away from other duties?”

“The longer you argue, the longer you'll be away,” said Reinhardt, not unsympathetically. He recognized the man's protests for the form they were, and knowing the doctor needed to protest he was happy enough to give him the time to get it off his chest.

The doctor walked over to the body on the table, then ran a cursory eye over those on the floor. He pursed his lips as he looked up at Reinhardt. “You really needed an examination of these men? It's pretty bloody obvious what killed them.”

“I know what killed them, Doctor. Dr. . . . ?”

“Henke,” said the doctor.

“I know they were shot first, then mutilated, Dr. Henke. I want the best idea of who they were.”

“Who they
were
?” Reinhardt nodded. “Were they even soldiers?”

Reinhardt shrugged. “I don't know. My guess—”

“Well, if they weren't soldiers it's not my business,” interrupted Henke. He sucked his cigarette red, then stubbed it out in a jar. “Why the hell didn't you have them taken up to the city hospital?”

“Doctor, please. I have my reasons.”

“Next time, give them to someone who gives a shit, Captain. Preferably to someone who has had more than two hours' sleep in three days.”

“Doctor . . .”

“Not to someone who may need to operate at any moment, and can't afford a mistake no matter how tired he may be.”

“I understand, Doctor.”

“I wonder.”

“I needed this done by someone I could trust. That good enough?”

“Flattery, Captain?” asked Henke. He blinked slowly, as if he could push his exhaustion down and away, then nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Give me another cigarette, and we'll see what we can see.”

Squinting around the smoke spiraling up into his eye, Henke picked up a clipboard and ran a finger down a page of scrawled notes. “Very well,” he breathed out around a long puff of smoke, looking at the bodies and back to his notes. “Much of a muchness, really. Five men, all between the ages of thirty-five and forty years of age, I'd say. Average height. Except for him,” Henke said, pointing at the tallest of the corpses. “Six foot three inches, that one. Weight. More or less average for estimated age and height, although none of them would have tipped any scales. Not exactly malnourished, but they weren't high on the hog when they were alive. They were in generally acceptable health. Acceptable for this time and place, of course. Signs of vitamin deficiency on the nails. Lack of calcium. Teeth in generally poor shape. A couple of them had some dentistry done at some point. Prewar stuff. Quite good work.