The Pale House (23 page)

“No.
No.
We never talked about me working for you. I was—” Reinhardt paused, suddenly, desperately afraid, filmed with sweat despite the cold. “
understood. It was my choice. My . . . path to find and follow.”

“Pretty words, Captain.”

“Then ask him. He will tell you.”

“Fine words but of no use to me, now. You are here. I have need of you.”
was implacable, holding up a hand, a tight shake of his head behind it, stemming any counter from Reinhardt. “Only listen, Captain, and understand. You will leave here. I have no wish for killing you. But you will work for me. Must I make clear the . . .” He paused, searching for the word, his eyes drifting away, then back. “Must I make clear the implications to you? The wrong word at the wrong time.”

“You are blackmailing me?”
cocked his head. “Threatening me.”

“I am,”
said, simply. “I am also offering you choice to act, and opportunity to act. Have you not been looking for this? Why else would you walk around so evidently in the old town, today? Why else would you let Simo see you at the hospital?”

“I will not betray anyone to you,” said Reinhardt, shaken by how close
words had come to the core of his own dilemma of how and when to actually do something about what he felt and believed in.

“Fine words again, Captain. Betrayal is never easy,”
acknowledged. “But stop first to think. Some things and some people are worth betraying. You do not think? Of course they are. You would not be here, otherwise. But do not worry. I will not ask you for betrayal. Only listen, now, to what I have to ask to you.”

“I will listen. Do you smoke? I have cigarettes.”
nodded, and Reinhardt carefully took his cigarettes from his pocket. He lit two, passed one to
. The Partisan drew deeply on it, nodded appreciatively, then leaned forward slowly.

“So, Captain. Tell me. Where are the UstaÅ¡e all going?”

“T
his war is coming to an end,”
said. “A new peace is coming. In that new peace, there will not be room for the divisions of the past. We will be one people. One united people.”
paused, drawing on his cigarette, then flicked ash on the floor. “There will not be place for the UstaÅ¡e in that world. They will be wiped out. This is necessary.

“There can be no place of retreat for them. No place for them to run to. To regroup. To come back and haunt us. There can be no place of exile for them, like Italy before the war, or Spain, now. There can be no more assassinations by the UstaÅ¡e, like that of the king in Marseille. I have no illusions, Captain. Those we cannot kill on the battlefield, those we cannot capture and kill off it, they will run. We will not catch them all, and I care little for the little fishes. It is the big fishes I want. Them, they cannot be allowed to get away. They must pay for what they have done. And they must pay for who they have been. Am I making sense to you?”

Reinhardt nodded.
was implacable in the way he talked, his voice hypnotic in its slow, precise diction. He kept his head low down on those big shoulders, and his eyes focused just a fraction below Reinhardt's, as if they were skewed, ever so slightly, at a place just out of touch with this world. Like
,
was a man of the future, compelled to live in the present.

“Not long ago, maybe a month ago, we began to hear rumors. There were divisions in the UstaÅ¡e. About whether to stay here and fight, or to leave, to regroup. And there were discussions about other plans. Longer plans. Plans that looked beyond the here, and the tomorrow, and the week next, and looked more to the future. The kind of plans we were afraid of.

“About a week ago, three UstaÅ¡e vanished. These three are not three of those we would consider as little fishes. They are big ones. Very big. We do not know where they went. We do know that
—him, you know, of course—was furious about this. There was almost a purge of the Pale House, but he was convinced to stop that by his superiors in Zagreb.

“At the same time those three vanished, we noticed someone at the Pale House. This person was coming and going. He drove a car, and wore a uniform, and both were of your army, but he was not the UstaÅ¡e liaison officer, Langenkamp. Him we know of. We wondered who he was, this man. He was no officer. He came at night, always. We followed him, but could not follow him back to where he came from. So we decided to stop him. We stopped his car, and took him. Unfortunately, he did not tell us much, but he told us some interesting things. Although he drove a German car and wore a German uniform, he was not a German. He was Shiptar. An Albanian. He had a tattoo, here, on his shoulder. An Albanian eagle, and the letters
SSVT
. They mean ‘
Shqipëria Shqiptarëve, Vdekje Tradhëtarëvet
.' ‘Albania for the Albanians, Death to the Traitors.' The man was a member of Balli Kombëtar. You know of Balli Kombëtar?”

“Albanian nationalists, and anti-Communists. Many of them fought with the Italians, then the Germans, in Albania, and some of them fought in the SS Skanderbeg Division.”
inclined his head, almost the only movement he seemed to make. “What did this man say to you?”

“He said little. Not much of it made sense, and we were rushed with him. He was not strong enough for the questioning. We did not want to alert the UstaÅ¡e. So we put him back in his car, we made things look like a car crash, and left everything.”

“What uniform was he wearing? Can you describe it?”

“German,” said
, his brows lowering again.

“What rank, or insignia?”
frowned, looking at Simo. “There had to be something,” Reinhardt insisted.

“A patch. A red triangle,” Simo said, and
nodded. “On the shoulder.”