The Pale House (57 page)

“Gentlemen,” Scheller called. “Roll call.”

Reinhardt stepped forward in front of the men, running his eyes across them, looking for those faces he knew would be there, knowing he would only be able to recognize one of them. He took the sheet of paper the colonel had written.

“Corporal George Abler,” Reinhardt called. “Abler?”

He stared around at the faces of the men, dumb and blank.

“Sergeant Carl Benirschke. Benirschke?”

Something. A shift in the way some men stood. He looked at Jansky. The major blinked back at him and shrugged, his lip twitching up in a sardonic twist.

“The dead ride quickly, Reinhardt.”

Something clicked inside, and Reinhardt found himself quoting from some distant memory that unfolded itself like the page of a book, a stanza from Burger's poem,
Lenore
.

“
‘
Dost hear the bell with its sullen swell,

As it rumbles out eleven?

Look forth! look forth! the moon shines bright:

We and the dead ride fast by night.'”

And the memory folded itself shut again. “You're not the only one who can trot out the classics when he feels like it, Major. Care to remind me how it ends? It ends in death, does it not?” Jansky went pale and swallowed. Reinhardt turned his back on him.

“Private Otto Berthold.”

“Private Werner Janowetz.”

“What the hell is this?”

The shout had come from the ranks. Reinhardt did not try to find who it was, hoping, wanting the conversation and confusion to spread, to get the men to lance the cancer that lurked within them themselves.

“Private Christian Seymer.”

“Is this a fucking joke?” More men took up the call.

“Why would it be a joke?” Reinhardt pointed at one of the men who had shouted.

“Because they're fucking
dead
, that's why.”

“Is that right?” Reinhardt called out, a ragged chorus of assent coming back at him.

“Fucking
Partisans
killed 'em.”

“Vanished in the forest.”

“Is that right?” Reinhardt challenged them, again.

“Fucking right,
hero stealer
.”

“
Goddamn chain dog
.”

Reinhardt turned his eyes across the ranks of men, their mood wretched and cracked, turned his eyes until he found them, the hiwis huddled in a tight mass in a corner of the courtyard. He walked toward them slowly, feeling the weight of the men's attention shift with him. He looked across the hiwis, seeing how they stood stock-still, none of the movement or agitation of the others. He looked across them until he saw him.

“Sergeant Jürgen Sedlazcek.”

There was silence, as the men realized this was no game, and there was an edge to the quiet, as if they scented blood.

“Sergeant Jürgen Sedlazcek,” Reinhardt called again, holding the man with his eyes. Sedlazcek's trial transcript had noted he had been very big. The man did not move until Reinhardt indicated to a pair of Feldjaeger, and they hauled the man out of the ranks. Big, fleshy, an old uniform devoid of insignia stretched taught over his height and weight, and a black belt bowing under a vast spread of gut. “Sergeant Jürgen Sedlazcek,” Reinhardt said, looking up into the flat eyes of UstaÅ¡e colonel Ante
. “Point out the others to me, please.”

“Fuck off.”

“I know Zulim is dead,” Reinhardt said, holding up Abler's
soldbuch
. “Bunda got rid of him, on your orders, probably. He had drawn too much attention to himself.”

swore something under his breath. “Fucking Bunda. What a fucking bull.”

“Yes, he was, rather. He tended to overreact with predictable regularity. He was the one who smashed in the faces of those five prisoners, I'm guessing, probably in a panic when you heard I was around. Overkill, if you'll excuse the term. Doing that just drew attention to the fact they had no faces, and so of course I wondered why. Still, if you send a butcher to do a tailor's work, that's what you get.”

“Go to hell.”

“Bunda's dead, too.”

“You're lying.”

went pale as Reinhardt took Bunda's
soldbuch
from his pocket, held it up.

“I watched Suzana
rip his balls off, and I left him to bleed his life out.”

“What?”

Reinhardt held up
soldbuch
. Then Labaš's.

“Point out the others, please.”

“No.”

“Bozidar
. Tomislav Dubreta. Zvonimir Saulan.”
blinked. “Do it quick, or I'll tell the men what you've done, and watch them rip you all to pieces.”

Reinhardt watched the play of frustration on
face, and then he turned and called something out. Three men stepped out of the lines, joining
. Reinhardt was about to speak when he saw something in
eyes, some glitter of a secret suppressed.