The Pale House (40 page)

“Did you get hold of the doctor?”

“Yes and no,” said Benfeld, busying himself with a handkerchief and the spill of his coffee. “He has been . . . busy.”

“Busy? Christ. Did you go and see him?”

“No, sir. No time.”

“The after-action reports? The ones I asked you about last night for the penal battalion?”

“Yes. Those I managed. At least some. There's nothing,” said Benfeld, as he searched for a place to put his sodden handkerchief.

Reinhardt swung his legs out over the bench and pushed himself to his feet, giving his knee a rub as he did so. “You let me know what you find out before the day's out, Frenchie, all right?”

“Is it still important, sir?”

Reinhardt paused, hearing the note that ran low beneath those few words. A tone that sounded almost pleading. “I mean, with all that's going on. The evacuation. Do we . . . should we still be working on this?”

“I thought you were keen for this? What's the matter?”

“Nothing, sir,” Benfeld replied, perhaps a little too quickly. “It's just that—I mean, it seems somehow . . . superfluous.”

“Superfluous?” Benfeld wilted under the pressure of Reinhardt's eyes but it was not anger in them, it was introspection, a withering inward gaze sharpened by the ever-narrowing wedge of time before him. Was that what it was? What it had become? Superfluous?

“Sir?” Reinhardt shook himself out, realizing he had been standing there with his mind elsewhere. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“Time and loose ends, Frenchie. Things we don't and do have a lot of.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So sort yourself out. You sure you're not sick?” Reinhardt asked as he left the room.

“I'm fine, sir.”

—

Like the days before, this one passed in a blur, but a blur with an iron edge. Men worked with the fervor of those who knew themselves condemned otherwise. Fights broke out in the train station, and the Feldjaeger were deployed into its halls to keep the peace. Ustaše units moved through the city in heavily laden cars and trucks. Many of their fighters were drunk, firing wildly into the air or across the façades of buildings, smashing and burning as if in some last frenzy against the city and its people. Heavy fighting erupted on the northern and eastern approaches to the city, Partisan brigades testing the mettle of the city's defenses. Shells landed sporadically in the city, mostly in and around the station and the sprawl of the barracks, but the German counterbattery fire was accurate enough to keep the incoming barrages down. That, or the Partisans had no wish to risk too much damage to the city. Not when they all but had it in the palms of their hands.

Coordinating security patrols, Reinhardt spent the day working with a dozen overstressed officers and NCOs on the details of the final pullout, trying to determine who would have the thankless task of being last out of the city. And always in the back of Reinhardt's exhausted mind was the meeting with Kostas. Somehow, he had to keep that, keep those shreds he had grasped with such difficulty from slipping away under the pressure of events. The possibility of maybe having to leave Sarajevo with none of this solved began to obsess him, and the hours ticked past, night falling across the increasingly beleaguered city, the rattle of gunfire coming from all around, it seemed. When it died away in one place, it started up somewhere else, and Reinhardt imagined
men slipping and raiding through the city, adding to the rising havoc.

It was perilously close to nine o'clock when Reinhardt was finally able to get away from the army's operations room, and he knew he would be late. Moving fast through the halls, he knew he was teetering on the edge, more tired than he could remember being in a long time. He scooped up a mug of soup from a tureen in the Feldjaeger operations room and made his way to Benfeld.

“Give me good news, Frenchie,” he said, hearing the peremptory tone in his voice, but too tired and too rushed to want to moderate it. “The names.”

“Actually, something. A reprimand, from your friend Captain Koenig. For wasting his time.”

“Koenig said that?”

“Yes, sir. He said his search found a couple of Bertholds and one Seymer, but none of them have ever served in the Balkans, and certainly not in a penal battalion.”

“What?”

“Perhaps the names were not accurate?”

“Check again.”

“But, sir . . .”

“Check it
again
, Benfeld.”

“With Captain Koenig?”

“If you have to, yes. Or someone else. I don't care. Did Koenig say anything else?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“
Nothing?
You're sure.” Reinhardt frowned, not sure if he could mention his request to Koenig to look into Jansky's background. His tongue stroked the gap in his teeth. “The doctor?”

“Nothing, sir. I couldn't get over there, and I tried calling, but it's hopeless. The hospital's in the middle of being evacuated. Roads are busy, or jammed.”

“That fucking doctor . . .” snarled Reinhardt, checking himself as he did so, seeing the consternation on Benfeld's face. He took a long breath and put a placatory hand on Benfeld's shoulder. “Nothing. I'm sorry.” He snatched a glance at his watch, then risked a long swallow of the soup. “I'll see you back here in an hour or so, and we'll pay a visit to the doctor.”

“Where are you going, sir?”

“I'm off shift,” Reinhardt said.

“I know, but the colonel would like to know, I'm sure. In case of emergency.”

Reinhardt laughed, a bitter quality to his mirth. “This whole thing's an emergency, Frenchie. I'm going into the city,” he said, relenting, picking up an StG 44 and checking its action. “I've an appointment to keep.”

There were no cars to be had, but on the edge of a screaming rage Reinhardt spotted a Feldjaeger patrol heading out and he hitched a ride with it as far as Zrinskoga Street, not far from police HQ, from where he could walk. Standing on the street almost alone, the town bathed under silvery light from a full moon, he hitched up the collar of his coat, checked all around, then walked fast north toward the Orthodox cathedral, a steady rattle of gunfire the only sound over the darkened city. Strossmayer Street ran along the back of it, totally in the shadow of the cathedral's towers and the pewter curve of its domes.

The address Alexiou had given him was next door to a tavern, one of the few that still catered to the city's people. Its doors and windows were shut tight, and the alley that ran down the side of it was very dark and narrow. Reinhardt shone a flashlight down it quickly, seeing nothing, and moved fast, banging his knee painfully on something as he went, hoping that Kostas had waited for him.

The Greeks' instructions had been to take the door at the end of the alley, which would take him up into a small apartment belonging to a family of Macedonian origin, thus trusted by Alexiou. Halfway down the alley, the door opened, and there was just enough light to show two men coming out. Reinhardt froze, then knelt slowly, listening.

The door shut and there was a whispered conversation, not a word of which Reinhardt could understand, but he knew from the intonation it was Albanian. A final exchange of words, and the men were coming toward him, and he had seconds to act. He laid the barrel of his assault rifle over his left forearm, angled the flashlight forward, and clicked it on, a sudden blaze of light that caught the two men cold. They blundered to a stop, hands coming up.

“Ku jeni?!”

Their hands were bloodred. Blood stained the front of their clothes and made dark stripes and spots across their faces, and a sudden cold rage coursed through Reinhardt.

The second one had a light and he turned it on, shining it back at Reinhardt.

“
Kopil!
” snarled the one in front, bringing a pistol out of his jacket.

Reinhardt fired two short bursts from his StG 44. The noise was blaringly loud in the confines of the alley. The men were flung back in a cloud of brick dust and spray of blood. Reinhardt clicked off the flashlight as shell casings bounced brassily onto the floor of the alley, moving as quietly as he could to a new position, and there he hunched down and waited, listening, trying to sink himself into the darkness. He had always been a patient man and knew that impatience had killed more soldiers than he liked to imagine. So he waited in the dark, letting his eyes adjust, listening hard. Unbidden, a memory came, of a mud-filled shell hole on the Western Front, his face ground into the viscous earth and his ears full of the hacking agony of a man who had not waited long enough for the gas to pass . . .

Reinhardt kept waiting, listening, trying to sink himself into the darkness, but eventually he drew a long breath, and it was followed immediately by a shiver, a trembling that shook him as he relaxed, slowly, the stress seeping out. A cold anger followed it, a flood of it gushing right through him from a hammering heart. He rose, wincing at the twinge from his knee, moving and feeling for the bodies. Still listening carefully, he clicked on the flashlight.

The two men were dead. He shone the light on their faces, recognizing neither of them. He swept the light up and down them. They were both dressed in baggy trousers and heavy sheepskin waistcoats worn over long, dark coats. Their cheeks were sunken beneath a scratch of stubble, and Reinhardt felt how lean they had both been as he ran hands across their clothes searching for something with which to identify them, all knobby joints and whipcord muscles.

On the first body, Reinhardt found nothing but two spare magazines for the small, blunt pistol the corpse still gripped in its hand. But on the second man, he found a knife, and felt something beneath the man's coat. He risked the flashlight a moment longer, finding a piece of paper wrapped around a leather packet. The paper was bloodied, and it had what looked like a list of names written on it.

He shoved it into his pocket with the pistol and switched off the flashlight, staring blindly up the alley, dreading what he would find up there. He opened the door carefully, risking another sweep with the flashlight, seeing a room at the end of a short hallway, lit by a steady glow from a lantern. He looked into what seemed to be a living room. The place was a mess: the table shoved to one side, chairs overturned, cups and plates and ashtrays scattered across the floor. There was a smear of blood on one wall, and Kostas lay beneath it, his shirtfront open and his chest covered in blood from a tangled lattice of wounds, not dissimilar to those that Kreuz had suffered.

“Shit,” muttered Reinhardt. He turned his head to the ceiling and felt his face go, just for a second, into an agonized twitch. It felt like the stress of a battlefield, the visceral need to hunch down and away from the enemy, but knowing only movement would save you. Stop and you die, he knew, but that moonlit city was a haunted tangle of shadows and threats and he did not want to go out there.

He laid the assault rifle on the table, its grip toward him, and put the papers he had taken from the Albanian on the table. The paper was a list of ten names, all men. Next to each name was a series of six-digit numbers, no series alike. He unwrapped the leather packet, nose wrinkling at the ammoniac smell it gave off. Inside were
soldbuchs
—soldiers' pay books—three of them, the size of his hand. He looked at the top one, at its dun cover with its black eagle and swastika and heavy Gothic lettering, and wondered where on earth Kreuz had found such valuable documents.

He flicked open the first one. The place where the
soldbuch
's owner's photograph ought to have been was empty. There was only the incomplete roundel of a stamp across the inside page, which once would have run across the picture. The book was not blank, though. It had belonged to a Sergeant Heinrich Keppel. Reinhardt flicked quickly through the pages, past the handwritten lines and faded stamps that recorded where and when Keppel had served, the injuries he had sustained, decorations received, punishments meted out. He paged quickly through the other two. They both had photographs and were filled in. From the quick glance he gave them, both seemed normal.

A fusillade of shots from somewhere outside snapped him around, pulling the assault rifle off the table. He needed to find time to think, and he needed somewhere safe.

Somewhere to think, and somewhere to be safe. His mind lurched back and forth between the two, and then steadied as he knew where he needed to go.

T
he door cracked open to his knock with a long sliver of golden light. A shape passed across it, paused. He felt eyes upon him. The door opened wider, and Suzana
stared out at him, past him. She pushed her gaze into the darkness of the stairwell, then back to him.

“What do you want, Captain?” she asked, softly, almost whispering.

“I'm sorry,” he managed, struck by the piercing glitter of her eyes. “I need . . . I need someone to talk to.” She said nothing, and it was the pressure of her eyes that pulled it out of him. “I'm in trouble. I need some . . . somewhere to think.”

“Did anyone see you come up here?”

“No one, I think.”

She nodded, finally, opened the door wider, and kept her eyes down as Reinhardt came inside. She shut the door and brushed past him. “This way, then,” she said, leading him farther inside, the robe she was wearing fluttering out behind her. The place was dark, with two doors opening off the hallway into shadow, and lit only by the wavering light of the candle she carried. It smelled clean but like so much of the city, the smells of damp and waste and refuse were there, inescapable. She ushered him into what passed for a living room: a sofa with a blanket folded on the back, and a pair of mismatched chairs drawn up under a table. An iron woodstove in the little kitchen adjacent gave off a ruddy warmth that helped take the chill off the air.

“Sit down, Captain,” she said, before picking up the candle and walking out of the room, the light flowing out with her. Reinhardt shrugged out of his coat, stood the StG 44 in a corner, and lifted his gorget over his head. He put it carefully on the table, looking at it, then sat on the couch. As the light ran down the walls after her, he saw they were lined with bags and boxes, sheets draped over what he took to be furniture, pictures stacked against each other in a corner. They were belongings from another life, maybe from that big house up on the other side of the valley, the house where he and Padelin had interviewed her in a room with silver-framed photographs on a grand piano about the death of her daughter. There had been flowers, and an old dog. God, it was a lifetime ago.

He heard a clink of glass, and light washed across the walls as
came back into the living room. She put a bowl of water, a cloth, and two glasses on the table before fetching a bottle from a cupboard, which she placed on the table as well, and the candle next to it. He shifted to one end of the couch as she sat next to him, drawing her robe tight and curling her feet up under her. The light in the room shifted as the candle flame steadied, shadows deepening, lengthening, then shortening, steadying. Her hair was down, as long as he remembered it from two years ago. It glowed in the candlelight.

“You should wash.”

He looked at his hands, saw they were smeared with blood, dark crescents of it beneath his nails, whorled into his fingertips, caked and cracked across the backs of his knuckles. He soaked the cloth, wrung it out, then wiped his hands. He moved slowly, pressing hard, clouding the water when he rinsed the cloth out and taking it to his neck when she gestured to her own, and only when she nodded did he put it down.

Reinhardt began to shake, and did not know if it was the sight of her, or the stress, or both, but he did not even try to control it, and did not care that she saw. He heard the clink of the bottle, a liquid whisper as she poured, and then her fingers brushed his as she put a glass into his hand. His hand shook, and a little of what was in the glass slopped over his knuckle. He put his other hand over the wrist that held the glass, clamped down hard, and concentrated on himself here, now. On the drink. On the woman next to him, her eyes fixed on him.

Outside, close by, a gun fired. One shot, two, a burst. Someone shouted. Moving carefully, he brought the glass slowly to his mouth, breathed in. It was slivovitz. Plum brandy. He tilted the glass, wet his lips with it. The slivovitz burned, filling his mouth with warmth. He swallowed, sighed, and carefully put the glass back on his lap. He wanted it. More than he realized, but drink was not a weakness he intended to indulge again. Not after so long away from it. Not now. Not here. Not with her.

“Reinhardt, why are you here?” Reinhardt pulled his eyes from the glass and looked at
where she sat, staring at him, the one side of her face golden in the candle's wavering light. Her eyes were steady on his, pinpoints deep inside them from the flame. “What do you want?”

“Someone tried to kill me tonight,” he managed, finally.

“But you defended yourself,” she said, a statement as much as it was a question.

Reinhardt smiled, a bitter twist to it.

stared back at him, uncertainty writ large across her face. “Who were they?”

“No idea,” Reinhardt replied, shortly. “None.” He looked up, past the candle flame, pushing his eyes into the dark corners of the room, into the black rectangle of the doorway. “There were two of them in a house where I was supposed to meet someone.”

“You killed them.”

“I killed them.” He lifted the glass and drank again, deeper this time, and she drank with him.

“What do you want, Reinhardt?” she asked, again.

“I'm scared. I need somewhere. To think. To be with someone who knows nothing of this.”

“Nothing of what?”

“Of any of this. Of killing. Or murder.”

“You think that, Reinhardt? Really? Of me?” He looked at her, confused. “Such are the times. Such is the place,” she said, gesturing at the window, the city beyond it. “Such are the people we share it with. That I shared it with,” she finished. Her mouth tightened, and she looked away and lifted the glass and drank. There was a glitter of light on her mouth as she passed her tongue across her lips. She looked back at him, and seemed to see something that stirred her. “What?” she asked, light rippling up her hair. “Do I shock you, Reinhardt? Do I? Don't you remember to whom I was married?”

“I remember,” said Reinhardt.

“Well, then . . .” she said, trailing off.

“I don't . . . know . . . anymore . . . I don't know what sort of man I am.” He sipped from the glass again, deeper still. “I used to have a good idea. But not anymore.”

“What did you used to be, then?” asked
.

“I used to be a killer. As a soldier, in the first war. A good one, by any standards you chose to measure it. But then that war ended, and that man no longer had a place in my life. In any life. Too much passion. Too much darkness. Too much anger and ability and not enough direction. Too much to regret . . .” He looked through the candle again far away at himself lying side by side in that trench with the Englishman as he passed him the watch, then dying with his head slumped on Reinhardt's shoulder. “I used to thrive on all that . . . passion and . . . and respect—because we were respected, we stormtroopers—and then it was all taken away. It was all for nothing, it seemed. The war ended. We all went our different ways. Some found the Freikorps, and some the Reds. Some found a bottle and never crawled back out. Some just vanished. And Christ knows there must have been some who just went back to being normal, but I don't know how they would have managed that. I found the police. Or maybe the police found me.”

Or maybe, a tinge of bitterness souring the edge of his thoughts, even back then he was being moved, a piece on a board. “And I came to love it. To need the control, the discipline, it implied and imposed. You had to think your way through trouble. You can laugh,” he said, not that she was. Her eyes were steady on him, her face blank. “You can laugh that someone ever had such an idea of police work. But I did. It was what I needed. And I only once lifted a hand to a suspect. At the very end.”

He stopped, looking at the glass and knowing it was so easy to just put it down, which was why he upended it into his mouth, wincing at the bite it left across the back of his throat. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply in through his nose, following the flow of warmth as it spread inside. Then he opened them, leaned forward, and poured a second glass. He glanced at
, and she looked at him, then knocked hers back as well, holding it out for him to fill.