The Pale House (17 page)

“Captain Reinhardt. My daughter,” said
. “You said . . . you would tell me.”

“What is it you want to know?” said Reinhardt.

walked on for a few paces. “You know, Captain, they blamed you for the failure of the investigation into Marija's murder.”

“The UstaÅ¡e?”

nodded. “I do not believe them. I mean, I did wonder, at first. But now . . .” She looked at him. “You seemed to be an honorable man. I did not think you did what they say.”

“Cooperated with the Partisans? In bed with the Communists? Sabotaged the police's work? You mean all that?”

“
‘
And all that,' as you say,” she smiled, and he smiled as well. “I do not believe it. But there is something unsaid between us, Captain. How it really happened. They never told me, they only told me you got in the way.”

“Well.” He hesitated, his tongue pushing at that gap in his teeth. “They were right, I suppose. In a way.” She looked at him, waiting for him to go on. “The UstaÅ¡e were not really interested in finding who killed Marija. They were more interested in finding a convenient outcome, and perhaps to kill two birds with one stone. So they wanted to . . . assuage the political pressure they were under to find someone, anyone, to accuse. And they saw the opportunity to strike what they perceived as a blow to the Partisans, to the Communists. So they arrested someone they said was a Communist agent, and they tortured him into confessing.”

“They said you were involved in his death?”

“The agent's? No. That was the work of someone else. A police doctor, who was also a Partisan. He put that poor man out of his misery. And also, I suppose, got rid of a security problem. Also two birds with one stone . . .” He trailed off.

“And you? In the middle of all that . . . ?”

“Me? I was . . .” How to explain it to her? “I was . . . I was lonely. In despair at the pass my life had come to and for what I had done, and not done. I despaired realizing how far you could stray from yourself when all you do is try to survive. And I saw in Marija's investigation a chance to do something right. To do the right thing. For myself. But also for her. She deserved the truth. Not some warped version of it. So did the man killed with her, one of our officers. And I suppose my path led at right angles across the UstaÅ¡e's. I followed my investigation but ruined theirs.”

“And? Who killed her?”

“Not the Partisans. Or the Communists. Although God knows they both wanted her dead. It was a German officer. He did it out of loyalty to his superior, with whom she was having an affair. Marija had found out this officer was a Jew and was going to expose him. She took . . . pleasure in detailing what she was going to do. This officer . . . Are you sure you want to hear this, Mrs.
?” She nodded, tight-lipped. “He thought he had beaten her to death, but when he sent his subordinate back to clear things up, the subordinate found her alive, and he was the one who stabbed her to death. Out of panic, at what she might do. And because he was terrified of her.”

“You found him? This man?”

“I did. His superior killed him. Then he himself was killed in action.”

“My God,” she whispered, looking down into the water. “Poor Marija . . .”

Reinhardt said nothing, remembering the things he had learned about Marija
, the passions that had driven her, that had driven the things she had done.

“They gave her a hero's funeral, you know. I got a medal. A husband given to the cause, and a daughter . . .” Her voice hitched. “UstaÅ¡e royalty, they call me. But they were just using her, weren't they? They never really bothered to find out what happened.” She stared across the water, allowing the wind to sting at the tears that welled up in her eyes. “We were so different, her and I . . .” She trailed off, swallowed, and pushed at the tears with the tips of her fingers. “She was a monster, wasn't she? Just like my husband. But they weren't always. You have to remember that. There was once a time . . .” She stopped, her voice seizing up, and she sobbed quietly, her shoulders rounding around her grief.

“It's the regrets, isn't it?” she said. It did not sound like a question to Reinhardt, and so he stayed quiet, watching her. “Not being able to say good-bye. Holding on to a last image. Wondering if it was the wrong one. You have those regrets, Captain? Of things left unsaid. Undone.”

He did not know what it was about this woman, what effect she had on him, but unbidden a memory surged up, and he could only observe as if from afar the way it felt natural to share something he had held private for so long. “Carolin, my wife, died of cancer. At the end, when she was in the hospital, I would come to her each night. I would hold her hand while she lay dying and talk to her. Sometimes she would smile, perhaps manage a few words. Sometimes she slept.” He thought he might keep his voice steady if, somehow, he imagined it belonging to someone else. “But the morning she died, I was . . . sleeping. My head was there on her bed. When I woke up, her hand was on my shoulder. She had woken before she died, seen me, and always, ever since, I've wondered . . . Did she maybe try to talk to me? I had always wanted to be there for her, and instead I slept right next to her as she died. I had been working the night before. I was tired. And . . . I had been drinking . . .”
was looking back at him, her eyes very bright and blue in the pale of her face. “It was the only way to face my work. And I think to myself, the last thing my wife saw,” he whispered, forcing the words, wanting them out, “was her . . .
drunk
 . . . of a husband snoring at her bedside.”

He stopped. He had never told anyone of this. Not Brauer, his friend and partner in the Kripo of some twenty years. Nor, as much as he should have, his son Friedrich, estranged, lost to him, now, a corpse somewhere on the Eastern Front. He looked down at
as she wiped a tear away. His throat felt raw, as if someone else had been using it. Which, in a way, was true.

“You know, a gentleman should not reminisce about his past loves in front of another woman.”

“I'm sorry.”

She laughed, sniffed back more tears, and he smiled to see her as she fussed through her pockets. “No. It's me. I should not make light of such things.” She blew her nose on the handkerchief she managed to find at last, and then she took his arm in hers, and it felt natural there as they walked. “Now, you are here again. The same man? Or different?”

“Different. The same. Full circle. Back to where I was two years ago. Alone. Surviving,” he said, staring up at the slate glower of the sky, weighing what he had said. They walked on, and then she paused, looking back across the river at a clutch of vehicles parked in front of a villa with a white façade. UstaÅ¡e stood around the cars, talking, smoking, or wandering up and down the rows of people, women, mostly, outside the house.

“What is that place?”

“That is the Pale House,” she answered. He looked down at her, and she turned her head toward him, although her eyes remained fastened on the house. “Maks
headquarters,” she continued, her eyes coming around to meet his. “It is a terrible place. Come away. Please.”