The Pale House (32 page)

scooped up his dice and pulled aside an edge of curtain. He looked down into an inner courtyard, Reinhardt joining him at the window. Torches burned in stakes and from sconces, washing muddy orange light across mounded heaps stacked against two of the walls. Pairs of Ustaše moved across the dark ground with the lurching precision of men bearing heavy loads, their shadows flowing across the walls. As he squinted down, the low clouds flickered with silver light, and the shape of the courtyard stuttered, as though summoned reluctantly from the darkness. As thunder rumbled in its wake, Reinhardt's eyes struggled to make sense of what he had seen stenciled in the strobed light. Bodies, stacked like cordwood along the walls, the Ustaše heaving more of them atop those already there.

“Is it worth,” Reinhardt paused, pushing back on the nauseous anger he felt, “asking what any of them did?”

“No. You still don't get it, do you? Who they were alive is not as important as the message they sent dead. What they did? It's what they might have done. It's who they were. I suppose all that matters is they were people who entered this building and never left it. I gave them a chance, some of them. The least I could do. I offer them a gamble. They name a number”—he clattered the dice across the tabletop—“and if it comes up, away they go. If not, not. So, you see, Reinhardt, what happens to our enemies. This is no secret. Only, perhaps, the scale of it.”

“Do you think this can go on forever?”
frowned at him, Reinhardt thinking he would never have a better chance to challenge any of the Ustaše on what
had demanded of him. “There's nearly always a reckoning to be had,
. The war is turning. There's a new future coming, and it's not the future our leaders told us it would be. Wait, let me finish,” he said, as
made to interrupt him. “What will become of the UstaÅ¡e? What will become of you? You surely aren't going to wait here for the Partisans to wash over you, and you surely can't think you can hold them off anymore. So where will all those like you run to?”

“If you wore black, I'd have your tongue for those words,”
whispered, turning on Reinhardt, his dice crunched in his hand.

“But I don't wear black,
,” said Reinhardt, matching him step for step, but it was as if there were some kind of magnetism between them that kept them apart. Something almost physical, visceral, an inability to get close to each other. As if in touching, colliding, they would cancel each other out. “I wear gray. And even if the colors are not so different, you and I,
, we are poles apart, and so I'll say anything I damn well please to you.”

“Maybe I should still educate you further about the realities of this place. Come with me.”

shouldered open the door, thumping down the hallway, past the wretch chained to his radiator. He stopped outside a door, listening, one thick finger lifted theatrically to his lips as he turned to face Reinhardt. He opened the door, one heavy hand on Reinhardt's shoulder, pushing him in. Reinhardt's face twisted in disgust at the stench from inside. Urine and excrement and fear, and the iron catch of blood. He stopped, stepped back, and then
was up against him and there was nowhere to go but in.

There were two Ustaše in the room, and a man, a prisoner. A wooden baton rested on two tables that had been pushed quite close together. The baton ran behind the prisoner's knees, and the man himself was suspended upside down from it. The man was weeping, and choking on the blood and tears and mucus that flowered around his mouth and nose. With his hands tied behind his back, and his ankles tied to his wrists, he could do nothing about the state he was in, nor do anything against the blows an Ustaša was raining down on him with a rubber truncheon. The man's thighs and stomach were welted red, and the Ustaša was stripped to his shirtsleeves, sweat shining across his face. The floor beneath the pair of them was stained and dulled, the shine of blood freshly spilt atop a dull glaze of deeper red, almost brown, of older blood that had sunk into the room's floorboards.

The Ustaša paused in midstroke, the baton raised high.

“
Tko je ovo?
” the man panted, looking at Reinhardt framed in the doorway with
towering behind him.