The Pale House (22 page)

With lights out and his attention focused on the stage, Reinhardt slowly took off his coat, holding it folded over his arms. He gave up trying to understand the dialogue and was content to follow along with his eyes, his mind fastening on a word or phrase here and there. The audience clearly loved it, giggling, chuckling, and laughing uproariously as the characters skipped and stepped and shambled around their market. Merchants and mercenaries, an innkeeper and a man who ran a secondhand shop, a fancy lady, a beggar woman, the actors shouted and whispered and, from time to time, broke into song. The action was maniacal, the words came thick and fast in blurs of color and speech, heavy with what Reinhardt understood to be Sarajevo slang, and after a while he stopped watching the play and instead watched the audience, let himself relax into them.

There was a ripple in the row of people at the back. Reinhardt glanced to the side, seeing a man stepping cautiously into the darkened room. The man's head craned around, left, right, a tiptoe bob of his head as he looked forward, looking for space to stand, no doubt, what little light there was limning the edges of his heavy beard. Against the raucous action on the stage where a chicken and its feathers were the subject of intense and prolonged bargaining, the man began to sidle down the back row, murmuring apologies as he moved, eventually worming his way into a space between Reinhardt and another man.

“
Oprostite, komšija, žao mi je
,” the man apologized, somewhat breathlessly, to Reinhardt and his neighbor. Reinhardt said nothing, not understanding and not following the whispered conversation between the newcomer and the man who had originally been standing next to Reinhardt. He ignored them, soaking in the mood and atmosphere in the room. The play meant something to them, Reinhardt knew, wondering again about the ability of people to come up with things like this at times like these until he stopped wondering about it and just became part of it, until a thread of speech he understood very clearly darted out of the night, whispered straight into his ear.

“Captain Reinhardt.”

Reinhardt froze, then turned his head, slowly. He could not make out the features of the man next to him, only the glitter of his eyes from the lamps on the stage.

“Please come with me.”

Something hard was thrust into his ribs, and a hand scrabbled across his holster, unfastened the catch, and pulled his pistol out with a dull rasp of metal on leather.

“Quietly. You first. Now,” the man hissed.

Reinhardt stepped softly back along the row of people, feet slithering out of his way, and the man behind him whispering apologies, once exchanging some quiet joke with someone, until they came to the door to the foyer. Reinhardt opened it quietly as the man followed him out. A second man stood in the deep shadows by the closed front door, his face all but hidden in a scarf wrapped high around his neck. The two men exchanged glances, signals, the second man shaking his head as he glanced out at the street through rippled glass panes.

“This way,” the first man said, pointing him across the foyer, toward a narrow door behind what used to be a bar, the shelves empty of bottles. At a nod from the man, Reinhardt opened the door onto a small room, bare of furniture. A third man stood there. Tall, black-haired, a black coat hanging from broad shoulders, hands clasped one over the other in front of himself. It was the man Reinhardt had seen at the hospital, and at least one of the men he had been sure had followed him that morning.

“Hello, Simo,” said Reinhardt.

“Captain,” Simo replied, gravely, inclining his head.

“A bit dramatic all this, isn't it?”

“If it is, it would be the place for it, do you not think?”

Reinhardt smiled, but it all felt slippery, a hasty façade over the confusion he felt inside, a presage as if some great weight were about to settle around him. “Couldn't you have come to me in town? I gave you all enough of a chance earlier today to get close to me.”

“We are doing it now.”

“So? What is the meaning of this, Simo?”

“Somebody wants to see you.”

“You've done this to me before, you know. Lured me off, took me to meet someone. To meet Dr.
. You told me that it would be in my interest.”

“And it was, wasn't it?”

Reinhardt paused, sighed. “I suppose it was, yes. And just how is the good doctor?”

Simo inclined his head again, pursed his lips. “As well as can be expected, given the circumstances.”

“You know, if he wanted to see me, there must've been easier ways than this.”

“It is this way, Captain,” Simo said, opening a narrow door behind him that, until he moved, had been all but invisible.

Déjà vu swept over Reinhardt, memories of that house in Bentbaša where he had met
, gained the help and respect of a man who ought to have been his enemy, and begun his journey toward reconciliation with himself and his place in this war. But he had always known—
had always known, as well—that that reconciliation would mean different things to different people. That the further its implications traveled from Reinhardt, the more ways there would be to understand it. The truth of Reinhardt's reconciliation was not immutable, and the shape and strength of it would be tested beyond that door, Reinhardt knew, and he was suddenly terrified that he was not ready. That he had not been ready these past two years.

These thoughts scrambled across his mind as he ducked through the doorway, Simo in front of him, the man with the thick beard close behind. They walked up a cramped flight of stone steps, the walls flaked with concrete and plaster. At one point, a wave of laughter swept over them, a shrill of high-pitched voices beneath it, and Reinhardt realized they must be over the theater. Then it was gone, deadened as the walls thickened and the steps flattened into a confined corridor that turned, squeezing them one way, then another. The floor became wood, and the Partisans walked quietly, carefully, motioning Reinhardt to do the same. More voices could be heard around them, nothing distinct, and then Simo was climbing a ladder, metal rungs bolted to a brick wall, and Reinhardt went up after him, the bearded Partisan hard on his heels.

The ladder ended in a flat floor of heavy-beamed wood. Reinhardt placed his elbows, then palms, on the floor and shrugged himself up into the dark space. Only a skylight gave any illumination onto what sounded and felt like an attic, the air bone-cold and layered with dust and mold and damp. Simo loomed in front of him, a big hand coming up to stop Reinhardt where he was, the bearded Partisan standing behind him at the top of the ladder. Simo said something into the darkness and was answered. A pause, and there was a metal scrape, then a buttery spread of yellow light as a lantern was unshaded, the size of the attic swelling out of the dark even as the details of its shape leaned backward into deep shards of darkness.

The lantern stood on a small, round table. There was a pair of mismatched stools to either side of it, and a group of men stood on its far side. Standing on the other side of the light, they were hard to make out, but Reinhardt caught the glimpse of light on metal and the dull fittings of weapons held across chests. One of the men standing closer to the light than the others walked forward, stopping by one of the stools. He was not tall, but he was thickset, his head topped by a scrub of close-cut hair atop a broad forehead, his mouth narrow beneath a wide, flat nose.

He sat, indicating the other stool for Reinhardt. Simo moved to one side, and Reinhardt walked forward to the table and sat. The other man examined him, his eyes glittering beneath the heavy, bowed line of his brow. He leaned forward, the light fitting itself more closely across his face, and Reinhardt saw he was very young, not even thirty years old.

“Captain Reinhardt,” he said, finally. “Do you know who I am?”

“I can guess.” The man's eyes widened fractionally, inviting Reinhardt to continue. “You are Valter.”

The man nodded. “Vladimir
is my name. You are maybe only German to know that. I give you that, for trust. There must be trust between us, Captain,” he said, his German heavily accented, his face very calm.

“Trust?” Reinhardt worked a mouth gone very dry, his tongue stealing into that gap in his teeth. It was very cold, and he suppressed the urge to shiver. “Trust would presuppose at least a relationship between us.”

“A relationship we will have, Captain. You will do some things for me. I will trust you to do those things. You will trust me to give you some time to do them.”

“I am not sure I understand, Mr.
. Are you telling me you expect me to work for you?”

“You already work for me. For our cause.”

“That is not true.”

“How is not true? Did you not discuss this with Muamer
?”