The Pale House (58 page)

Ten names, Reinhardt thought. Ten Ustaše. Four of them were dead. Bunda, Labaš, Zulim, and
. That left six, and four were standing in front of him.

There were two more, somewhere.

Reinhardt walked slowly along the ranks, his eyes flowing over faces, and then he saw him. It was the man's eyes that gave him away, shifting back and forth between Reinhardt and something on the far side of the courtyard.

“You.” Reinhardt pointed. The man did not move. “You,” Reinhardt said, again. The night Bunda and
had brought Reinhardt to the Pale House, he was the one who had been torturing the prisoner.

“Sutko.”

The man swallowed and stepped out of the ranks.

“And you,” Reinhardt said, swiveling his arm at a second man, half hidden behind a soldier. The man jumped, went pale. He had been there with Sutko that same night. He had killed the prisoner on
orders as a demonstration to Reinhardt of the UstaÅ¡e's supposed power, and why they did not need to do their killing in secret. Reinhardt remembered the man's name. “Marin.”

Reinhardt ran his eyes over them. Tall, short, slim, fat, blond hair, dark hair.

Average men.

Hidden in plain sight.

Reinhardt nodded to the Feldjaeger, and the six Ustaše were taken away, back into the command post. He walked back to Jansky, standing there thin and broken in the middle of the courtyard.

“The dead ride quickly, it would seem, indeed.”

A
truck drove away from Zenica, away from the pallid town that clustered around the steelworks. The Bosna River flowed north as the truck went south, a placid river, wide, bottle green, thin streamers of mist hanging like a man's breath on a cold morning. The river was bounded on both sides by low hills that rolled up and away from the road, shrouded in trees that plucked and pinched at the skyline. There was a quality to the light, as if each branch and leaf of the thick forests that coated the hills had been picked out, shining and limned like the fine hair on a young girl's arm when the sun shines at the right angle.

Benfeld drove, the big Feldjaeger taciturn and unquestioning. Though Reinhardt's eyes watched the road unwind before him, his thoughts were back in the steelworks, in that office, hearing the thuds and groans from the other room where Lainer and his men had set about Jansky and Brandt. It was payback. Reinhardt understood that, although the man he had been—the man forged in police work, the man who had eschewed the child of the first war he had so recently been—would not have.

So he had sat and waited, smoked a cigarette and looked at a pile of ten
soldbuchs
, and the court-martial records he had found in the archives, but it was into himself he looked, into that rent that ran down within him, feeling the coiling within of something old and hoary, staring back into its eye as it rolled mad and bloodshot. It was there, gripping the rent inside him with mud-smeared fingers, as if it wanted to come out, but as if it were content to let him alone. As if what Reinhardt was doing satisfied its sense of right and wrong.

In the corner of the room, Scheller talked with a judge. Reinhardt had presented what he knew to him, the whole story, and the
soldbuchs
, and the files. The judge had clearly been panicked by the case, had wanted to take it as he would have wanted to grasp a shitty pole. Whether he would or not, Reinhardt found he did not care. His part was done. He had his hole in the wall, rubble about his feet, and enough light shining through for him to see something of the shape of the structure he had come across. He had no illusions he could do much more than he already had, and he wondered at the contentment this seemed to afford him.

—

“The
thrill
, Reinhardt,” Jansky had said, his words mumbled through his lacerated lips when Lainer had finally let him out, led him stumbling blind to a chair and dropped him into it. Jansky's face had been swollen almost beyond belief, and he had sat hunched over to the side. In the chair next to him, Lieutenant Brandt's eyes were bloodied shut, and they bracketed a nose that was crushed and misshapen. Jansky had smoked a cigarette through the last two fingers of his hand, the others swollen and broken. “Getting away with it. Herzog and Erdmann and the others can believe what they want. For me it was the challenge, the thrill. The money helped, of course.”

“Did you kill those three Feldjaeger?”

“Yes. Me and Brandt and Metzler.” He cocked his head to his cigarette, pecking at it with his broken lips like a bird at water, something strangely effete in his movements. “They found us up at the construction site. Bunda was with us, and a couple of his men.”

“That was where you killed those five soldiers?”

“Yes. We'd shot them there when we found out we couldn't go back to the forest, and left the bodies because even if we weren't working there anymore the site was still ours, and under our guard. We'd have come up quietly during the day to bring that house down on them. End of story. But Bunda was terrified of you and when we found we had to get rid of the bodies in the city, he was even more scared. He went berserk. You've never seen anything like what he did to those bodies. He smashed their faces in with his club, and then he dressed them in clothes he'd brought from the Pale House. He was like a boy playing with dolls.” Jansky giggled. “Playing dress-up, muttering to himself. But then two of his men kicked over that flare and it killed one of them—”

“LabaÅ¡?”

“LabaÅ¡.” Jansky nodded. “Burnt him to death. And then your Feldjaegers showed up. You know the rest.”

“You sent Lieutenant Brandt to try to clear things up.”

“Waste of time, but we had to try. When he found out what Bunda had done, disfiguring those bodies and triggering all that mess,
was furious. He would have just put them in the Pale House, mixed them up in all the other bodies, but it was too late. Bunda had panicked, but then it got worse. Bunda sent Zulim to get those refugees, the ones you found, but that just made you more suspicious and you came looking for Zulim, so Bunda panicked again. Bye-bye Zulim. I mean,” said Jansky, drawing on his cigarette, “those two were virtually inseparable, but Bunda was unstoppable. He was so fucking scared.
is apoplectic at this point, and tried to make the best of it and throw you a false trail, but no good. Bunda. What a moron. Ironic, though, isn't it? That we should”—Jansky coughed, smoke splurting from his mouth as he winced in pain and squinted bloodied eyes at the judge—“that we should have been more careful listening to him. And been more careful with those
soldbuchs
. Zulim's and LabaÅ¡'s, when we got them back.”

The rest of it had come. Names, places, the genesis of the idea, starting when Jansky had been approached by Alexiou, offered money in exchange for being able to hide himself and his men in the ranks of a unit no one would think to look in. Then, as the penal battalion retreated shattered and broken through Montenegro, Herzog and Erdmann appeared to him one night, long speeches about the rightness of their cause, the need to preserve for the future. “I thought they were mad,” Jansky had said, carefully stubbing out his cigarette, one hand supporting his wrist. “And they were, but they weren't going to take no for an answer. They brought that doddering bemedaled old fool of a colonel—Pistorius, that one hacking his lungs up in the next room—and said he would provide the respectability needed to make sure disreputable things could happily take place.”

“To be managed by you,” Reinhardt had said.

“By yours truly.” Jansky had nodded. “Not that I had a choice. Herzog and Erdmann were nothing if not peruasive. And I was already halfway to their ideas anyway.” He spoke of how the two of them had revealed to Jansky their knowledge of his corruption, of his selling asylum to the highest bidder, and winding him tight to their cause with cords of his own making. That was a surprise, Reinhardt acknowledged, that Jansky had fallen into their clutches as well. He had always considered Jansky an instigator of the scheme, not a pawn in it, and in a way that was true. Herzog's and Erdmann's cabal had roped him in, but Jansky had played along willingly. The thrill of it, Reinhardt reminded himself.

The first victim had been killed in Montenegro, his life taken for an Albanian from the SS Skanderbeg Division. Two more had followed as Jansky and the cabal perfected their techniques, but the forgeries were always tricky, even after Erdmann found the forger, dredged up from who knew where.

“Their
names
?” Jansky had stuttered when Reinhardt interrupted him.

“Their names,” Reinhardt repeated. “The names of those men whose identities you took.”

Jansky's eyes drifted sideways, rolling and bloodshot. “I can't . . . Roesing? Roese . . . ? And . . . Kaubisch? I really can't . . . remember.” He trailed off at the look on Reinhardt's face, the fury boiling out of his eyes at the thought of those men simply erased from the earth.

Jansky talked on, and Dreyer reappeared, tried to resume his contact with him. “He was pitiful,” sniggered Jansky. “Thinking he had something on me, when it was the other way around.” The iron jaws of the cabal and the web of blackmail closed itself around Dreyer and reminded him of that one moment of weakness in Poland, and he found himself presiding over courts-martial, but selective ones, targeting a particular type of soldier, and at that time, as the army began to crumble, there was no lack of raw material for the cabal's scheme. “And then we came to Sarajevo, and the feelers went out to the UstaÅ¡e, and oh my, were there takers for it!” Jansky cackled, pointing at the
soldbuchs
.

The Ustaše had provided the photographer, getting rid of him at the end in the forest. But the Partisans were pressing harder and faster than anyone thought, and time was short. It had been Jansky's idea to use replacement
soldbuchs
, instead of trying to add forged entries to existing ones. It had been Jansky's idea as well to “steal” the defense plans so as to cause confusion and accelerate the city's evacuation, with the subsequent compromising of Colonel Wedel and the pressure on him to accept responsibility for the “theft.” It all came delivered in a mumbled monotone through broken lips except when Jansky laughed, remembering particularly ironic moments while, with one finger, he traced the pattern of the tabletop, his nail dipping into the whorls of the wood, sticking, moving on.

“Why these UstaÅ¡e? Why not others?”

Jansky shrugged. “I don't know. Herzog and Erdmann considered
to be worth something. In any case, there was no way they'd be able to shelter someone like
, even if they could've convinced him.
was worth it, I suppose, and he was the one who brought along the others. His henchmen. His clan. And of course, it helped that they paid. Handsomely. Money up front, or no
soldbuch
.” He giggled. “In any case, ten was about the right number.”