The Pale House (21 page)

“My pleasure, Captain.”

“Should this man . . . what did you say his name was?”

smiled, and shook his head. “A neat approach, Captain. I appreciate your interest, but I will no more give you his name than you would give me the name of a German we wished to interview.”

Reinhardt inclined his head. It had been worth a try, but this
was evidently not Metzler to be caught out by a little verbal sleight of hand. “Should this man show up, I would appreciate the opportunity to ask him a few questions.”

“Of course, I make no promises, Captain Reinhardt, but I will see what can be arranged.”

A few more words—expressions of interest into the progress Reinhardt was making with the Feldjaeger case—and then
was indicating that Reinhardt was to be escorted out of the building, Langenkamp coming back to life, folding out from his corner. As they reached the front exit, the doors thumped open and Jansky stalked in, hands behind his back as if he were conducting an inspection, a second German at his heels carrying a large, red chest.

The two of them stopped dead, Jansky's martinet air simply sloughing away. Reinhardt watched Jansky's face go blank, then recognition come over it as he realized who he had in front of him.

“Major Jansky,”
said, coming to polite attention. He looked between the two of them. “It seems you already know Captain Reinhardt, of the Feldjaegerkorps?”

“We have met. Only earlier this morning. How do you do, Captain?”

“Well, Major, thank you.”

“What brings you to UstaÅ¡e headquarters?”

“Captain Reinhardt was inquiring into the whereabouts of one of our men.”

“Are you bringing the UstaÅ¡e into your inquiries now, Captain?”

“No,” said Reinhardt, quickly, seeing
about to speak. “This is in connection with those refugees I brought down from the mountains. The ones you saw me with.” The major nodded. “They've gone missing. An UstaÅ¡a at that checkpoint we met at may have had something to do with it.”

“I see,” murmured Jansky, his eyes steady on Reinhardt. “Captain
?”

“Of course, Major,” said the UstaÅ¡a. “Go straight up. Colonel
is waiting for you.”

“Reinhardt,” acknowledged Jansky.

“I met an acquaintance of yours. Judge Marcus Dreyer,” Reinhardt said.

Jansky's mouth straightened in a polite smile as he turned around. “How is he?”

“Interested in old cases, it would seem.”

Jansky's smile widened, as if he felt the ground under his feet firming. “Far be it from me to criticize our judicial brethren, but Dreyer has a . . . reputation. He wouldn't be after a little help, now, would he? Hmmm?” He smiled, broader still. “Or else, better hope you've nothing in your past you wouldn't want brought out into the light. Times like these, you never know who your friends are, but your enemies—you can usually tell them rather easily.” The smile folded back in on itself, back to that straight line. “I've always found that rather comforting. And as I often say, ‘All are not huntsmen who can blow the hunter's horn.' You might remind Dreyer of that when next you see him.”

With that Jansky strode off, hands clasped almost daintily behind his back, trailed by the other German who had entered with him. It was one of the two clerks from the penal battalion's office, Reinhardt realized, the one from the corner, almost hidden behind his rampart of paperwork. As the man walked past, he seemed to cringe away from Reinhardt, clutching his red chest close as he went by, something clinking inside it.

T
he sun was low in the west, a watery glow across the slate-gray sky, as Reinhardt sat in the barracks communications center, a shallow sheaf of papers at his elbow. They were all of the after-action reports Benfeld had been able to dredge up, going back a week. Reinhardt could find nothing in the dry prose of the reports resembling a pattern, or anything resembling any theory Reinhardt could devise. The front lines had been quiet, but it was the quiet before the storm. Everyone knew the Partisans were gathering, choosing their time, but with little to no armed conflict with the Partisans in the past week as well, even that angle of checking the reports, or looking for men lost or missing in action, was closed off.

There had been only sporadic contacts across the front line, no significant casualties, and no prisoners taken. There were reports of a handful of deserters and Reinhardt toyed with the idea of trying to match descriptions with the bodies, but he gave it up as unworkable. Instead he mused about the likelihood that those five bodies from the construction site could have come from different units and be mentioned in different after-action reports. In which case, he acknowledged to himself, it would be all but impossible to trace five different bodies through that paperwork with any hope of finding all of them in a cellar in a bombed-out neighborhood. Making matters worse, Benfeld's search of administration had found no sign of a Berthold or Seymer. There was one option, Reinhardt knew, though he had been reluctant to take it until now.

“Captain, sir. Your call has been placed.”

Reinhardt followed the signals operator through to a small room with a telephone. The receiver was already lying on the table. Picking it up, he heard the click of the operator, and then a distant hum on the line.

“Hello? Koenig?”

There was a silence.
“
Reinhardt?”

“It's me, Koenig.”

“What a pleasant surprise.”

“I'm glad you think so. How are you?”

“Well, thank you. Not much changed since the last time we met.”

“Well, it was dark then; you could have looked like anything,” said Reinhardt, forcing a little levity into his voice.

“Well, I suppose the blackout must be good for something. And yourself?”

“Very well, thank you. I am in Sarajevo.”

“Yes, so I understood.”

“Koenig, I wish this were a social call, but I have a favor to ask.”

The pause was slower, Koenig now reassured it was Reinhardt by the exchange of what they sincerely hoped were innocuous-sounding phrases. They were anything but and were in actuality their resistance cell's codes to reassure members that the person calling was not doing so under duress.

“Of course, anything I can do.”

“I am trying to trace two soldiers. Their names have turned up in an investigation ongoing down here.”

“What is it you think I can do?”

“Are you still on the staff of the Vienna Garrison?”

“Yes.”

“I am hoping you can check army administration records up there for me, as you have access to personnel records from across the Balkans.”

“I can try. What are the names and units?”

“I only have surnames. Berthold and Seymer,” Reinhardt replied, spelling out the names. “They were both serving a sentence in the 999th
Balkans Field Punishment Battalion.”

“A penal battalion?”
came Koenig's surprised reaction.

“Yes. And, one more thing. Anything you can find out about a Feldgendarmerie Major. Erwin Jansky. Currently assigned to the 999th.”

“What sort of things?”

“Deployments. Service history.” Reinhardt paused. “Disciplinary record.”

There was a pause.
“How soon do you need this?”

“Soon, Koenig.”

“How can I reach you?”

“Through the switchboard here at the Kosovo Polje barracks. You can also leave a message for me with Lieutenant Benfeld, Feldjaegerkorps.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Koenig. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

He sat there a moment after he replaced the receiver, embarrassed at the stilted edge to the end of their conversation. He would have liked to share more with Koenig, just as he would have liked to ask after the others in Vienna, but the risks were too great for that. Instead, he glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly time. He walked back through the barracks, taking it slowly, pushing his mind past the scrum of activity in its halls, ignoring the men bundled in blankets along the corners of walls for want of beds. In the Feldjaeger operations room, he scrawled a note on his conversation with Koenig for Benfeld, then left for the car pool, where a
kubelwagen
was waiting for him. He gave the driver
directions, then slumped into its bucket seat as the
kubelwagen
shuddered its way around onto the long curve of Kvaternik Street.

“This is it, sir,” said the driver.

Reinhardt started up out of his thoughts, if the confusing echo within his mind could be called such, the cold clenching tight and stabbing through his knee as he looked up and around. The car was parked in front of a pair of battered wooden doors standing open. Next to them was a handwritten sign on a large sheet of paper.
Posla
, it read. He frowned, trying to translate it as people walked past him and into the building. The happenings in the market? The doings of the bazaar . . . ?

It was a theater.

Reinhardt looked up and down the street. The sky hung heavy over the city, the smell of rain stronger, and the street faded away fast into the gloom. Leaving instructions for the driver to wait, Reinhardt walked up the steps and into a small foyer, packed with an eddying shuffle, a flow of people moving toward a tall set of doors in the opposite wall. Standing to one side, her ash-blond hair bright under a cluster of candles,
laughed with a tall man, his gray hair awry and a red scarf thrown dramatically over one shoulder. The man looked askance at Reinhardt as he came in, sliding to one side to get out of the way of the people pushing in behind him, but
smile came easily, naturally, as she came up to him, her hands extended.

“Captain. I'm so glad you could come.”

“A play, Ms.
?” he asked, as he tucked his cap under his arm and folded her hands into his own.

“Call me Suzana, please,” she said, nodding and smiling, looking back and around. It was a theater, or what passed for one. There was a burst of laughter from farther inside, and a warm glow, like candlelight.

“Come,” she said. She stepped back, their arms coming up straight between them, and he gave in and followed her. “I must greet some more people and I had arranged to help. Please, go through. Go in. Enjoy it. Wait for me here afterward?” She smiled again, and then slipped away.

Reinhardt paused to strip the gorget from around his throat, sliding it into his pocket, and only then passed on into a large room with a low ceiling. The place was stifling in the dim light, braziers burning in each corner, and the room was packed with people—men, women, even a few children—sitting on rows of benches and lining the walls. Up at the front of the room was a stage, what seemed to be planks of wood raised up on something hidden behind a heavy, red drape. Reinhardt shuffled to the side as someone came in behind him, then smiled apologetically as he squeezed into a space between two men. Only one of them glanced at him, a flat, disinterested gaze. He leaned back against the wall, taking his weight off his left foot, and waited.

Eventually, as happens in crowds sometimes, a hush started to descend. People stopped talking, straightened, looked around and over their shoulders. A man came in to dim the lanterns and candles burning along the walls. Another man stepped out onto the stage, the man from the entrance with the red scarf, the boards creaking under his weight. He smiled out at the crowd, opened his arms to welcome them, and began to speak.

Reinhardt lost the details quite quickly. The man spoke fast, with an accent, but Reinhardt managed to follow the gist of it as the man thanked them for coming and explained something about the need to pause and remember other times. He was applauded off after a few minutes, and the play began as a woman in an Ottoman costume and bent under a heavy load shuffled onto the stage, followed by a man in what seemed to be an absurdly small waistcoat and oversized turban with a pair of slippers the tips of which curled up almost to his knees. The audience laughed as other characters appeared left and right in all kinds of dress, and began to set up what looked like a marketplace.