The Pale House (60 page)

“Franjo Sutko,” he grated, looking at the one who had collapsed to the ground. “Bozidar
. Tomislav Dubreta. Zvonimir Saulan. Nikola Marin.” They flinched away from him though he did not move. “And Ante
.” Simo nodded to his men, and each of the UstaÅ¡e were bracketed by Partisans and marched away. Only
delayed, digging his weight into the ground, his eyes on Reinhardt.

“You know what they will do to us. You know.”

“I know,” Reinhardt replied.

“You will let them?”

“I will.”

“This is on your head.”

“I know,” said Reinhardt.

“On your head,”
shouted over his shoulder as they dragged him away.
“Your head.”

“A last time I must thank you, Captain,” said Simo, exchanging his cane to his left hand to offer his right. “To your future, Reinhardt. May it . . . may it be the one you deserve,” the big Partisan finished. He glanced between Reinhardt and
, settled his cane back into his right hand, and limped away.

“Let us walk a little,”
said softly. His heart in his throat, Reinhardt matched her steps over to the side of the road, where she turned to look up at him.

“Are you all right, Suzana?” he asked. She nodded, ducked her head a moment, then smiled up at him, but it was tight, strained, and they both knew her healing would be a time in coming. “You look different,” Reinhardt said. “But it looks right.”

“Different times, now, Gregor,” she said, simply. Neither of them moved, until Reinhardt's hand came up, brushing up her arm to her shoulder. Her hand came up and covered his. “Your hand. How is it?”

“Fine.”

She ran her fingers over the swelling and bruising that mottled his wrist. “I . . . I told
about you.”

“I know.”

“I thought you could help us.”

“I did. You were right.”

“Was it real, Gregor? That moment we had. I am afraid it . . . it was not.”

“I never used you, Suzana,” he said, feeling it come out in a rush. “Neven, and the Partisans. I knew. But it was you I wanted.”

“It was real,” she said, an affirmation that seemed to lift her free of something.

He took her hand, raised it to his lips. “If we had that freedom, you and I . . .”

“It could have worked,” she whispered, her fingers light against his cheek. “You could . . . you could come back with me.”

“You have a city and a country to rebuild. You could not do it with me. It would color you.”

“I don't care.”

“You would come to care.”

“Maybe when this is all over . . .”

Reinhardt gave a wan smile. “If we deserve it.” She smiled as well, remembering their conversation that night. Only memories abide, and the first cut was the one that went deepest. But a clean cut was the best kind, and he kissed her eyes, feeling the salt of her tears. “May you find the happiness you deserve,” he whispered against the curve of her brow.

He turned and walked away, feeling as if his heart were stretching out behind him.

THE SAVA RIVER, NORTHERN BOSNIA, MID-APRIL 1945

D
awn came with the Sava River shrouded in thick fog, and the world was pale and faint. Men appeared through it like apparitions, looming silent and insubstantial like beings only partially imagined. Along the surface of the river, the fog was so thick Reinhardt almost imagined that, were his heart light enough, he could step out and walk on it, and let it carry him somewhere else.

By the bridge, where they had pulled over, the Feldjaeger had started a fire. Reinhardt stood close to the blaze, watching the orange light slide over the scrollwork on Dreyer's flask as he tilted it to the fire. He looked up to see a company of Cossacks in German uniforms loom out of the fog as though called that instant from some other realm, a column of horsemen stepping slowly over the fields and onto the metaled road that led up to the bridge. One of them, a young man with broad cheekbones and eyes of flinty blue, leaned out of the saddle and spat as he saw Reinhardt. Riding close behind him, a Cossack sergeant—a
starshiy
with a magnificent curled mustache—cuffed the trooper hard on the back of the neck, let loose a stream of expletives in Russian, and nodded an apology at Reinhardt as he rode past, the horses clattering onto the bridge, many laden with women and children. Reinhardt watched them go, a people in exile, the ground shifting daily under their hopes and aspirations. There could be no future for them that was not grim, that would not end in blood and tears and betrayal.

Although the land was tilting slowly toward spring, frost still crusted the creases of the land a thick, shiny white, but where the horses had passed the frosty ground had turned to one trodden into slippery chunks and mud. Cars, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, tanks, half-tracks, everything and anything that could roll had been scooped up. The German retreat had passed over the land like a rake, uprooting all before and behind it while beside the road men marched and walked, emerging and vanishing from the mist. Somewhere, maybe south, maybe east, where the Russians were, artillery rumbled like distant wheels on a wooden deck.

The traffic on the road lifted, lessened, and then there was nothing, the only sound the steady hiss of the river beneath its veil of mist. The radio crackled with orders, and the Feldjaeger stirred themselves to move. Benfeld pulled a Horch up next to him, and Reinhardt stood a last moment by the fire, on the edge of its heat, then tossed the flask into the broken tangle of branches and coals. Feeling as if a weight had been lifted, he climbed into the car, his men boarding their own vehicles, chivvying the men they had rounded up—stragglers, the lost, the dazed, one or two certain deserters—into the trucks. All was silent, the men turned in on themselves, on the weights they bore that seemed to pulse the only truths worth conceiving. That they were still alive. That they had survived another night, with another day to come.

The car rocked over the bridge, past the engineers laying their demolition charges, and a curious sensation grew in him, a push-pull as if the land behind him were reaching in and tugging at a tight knot of memories, and pulled one out in particular. Two years ago, a molten sun setting across the knuckled mountains, and the realization that the truth one saw within was as important as, more important than what others thought. He had misled himself since that night, thinking he was owed more. Owed recognition, thanks, the chance to participate in something grander and greater than him. But that was not the way life worked. He knew it then, and he knew it now, but he had forgotten it along the way, too obsessed with his own survival while cradling his hurts and injuries, real and imagined.

And even if it beat to its own rhythm, in and out of time, a broken heart still beat. A body still moved. Responsibilities had to be met. Benfeld bumped the car onto the northern bank, into Croatia, the small column of Feldjaeger merging into a broken flow of men and vehicles, all moving west. Its verges strewn with the wrack and ruin of an army in retreat, the road paralleled the river before drawing away across fields where water threaded pewter lines across the sodden ground. The road wound its way up the crest of a long, low hill, and at the top, Reinhardt looked back, just once. The sun had risen higher, and the fog and mist had begun to thin and shred, vanishing like a receding tide and exposing the plain that had lain beneath. The land on the southern side of the river was flat, not the mountains he was used to, a hummocked horizon of hills and mounds that thrust up like islands, jutting like peninsulas across the soft spread of the mist. Against a far horizon, where no seam showed between land and sky, the sun flared and flattened up as if stricken, sucked up into the white sky in a flare of light that washed across the clouds.

The car crested the hill, pointed its nose north, and Bosnia was gone.