The Pale House (9 page)

“It is and it isn't, Reinhardt. I'm relying on you to make sure we navigate these waters. Which means, I want you focused, here. In fact, get yourself off. I want your after-action report on your patrol on my desk before midnight. Then get some sleep. You're on duty as of oh six hundred tomorrow morning.”

F
or most of that following morning, Reinhardt's time was devoted to operational details of the Feldjaeger's deployment, liaising with the army commanders in charge of the ongoing evacuation. The Feldjaeger were deployed in the train station for the most part, where their reputation preceded them and where trouble had died away considerably since their arrival. They had been perceived as being so successful that calls had come in for their presence from several other areas where soldiers were billeted or barracked, and where tension was rising high as men's thoughts bent ever more sharply toward their seat on the train, and when it would be.

Dealing with those requests, rotating the Feldjaeger in and out for rest, was tricky but rewarding, and Reinhardt found his knowledge of Sarajevo coming back in useful as he directed Feldjaeger units around the city, and further afield, into the rear areas and out along the roads leading west and north toward Visoko and Zenica. All the while, twisting across his mind, the forest, three burned bodies, a corpse with a goatee, and a young girl in her father's arms. And behind all of them, the Ustaše. Bunda at the checkpoint, the primeval size of the man, the fear he engendered. Reinhardt found himself stroking the gap in his teeth, then clenched his jaw in anger.

“There's a judge wants to see you.”

Reinhardt started, looking up and around from the duty roster he was correcting, then getting to his feet. Colonel Scheller stood behind him, a slip of paper in his hand. He waved Reinhardt back into his seat, and hooked a chair and sat down himself.

“A judge?”

“Judge's name is Dreyer.”

Reinhardt frowned. “
Dreyer?
Marcus Dreyer?”

“And you know this Dreyer how?”

“If it's the same Dreyer, then he and I go a long way back. We served in the same unit together in the first war, then he became a judge in Berlin when I was a policeman. I lost sight of him in the late 1930s; then we were posted together to Norway. Turns out he had quit the judiciary and gone back into the army.” Dreyer had been a good friend to the police, and a good friend to Reinhardt himself. The two of them had come under the same kinds of pressure from Germany's new masters, to conform, to adapt, to toe the line. Dreyer had given in before Reinhardt, if what Reinhardt had done to stay in the police longer could be countenanced as resistance. “I lost touch with him again after that. I'd heard he was in Russia. What's this about anyway, sir? Why does he want to see me?”

“Apparently, he's read your report from yesterday, and he wants to talk to you about it.” Scheller stopped, chewing his lower lip, lowering his head to look at the paper held in his thick fingers. For all his formidable size and energy, Scheller was desperately tired. Major Hassler had been killed in Montenegro and not replaced, and although Reinhardt had covered some of the major's workload, much of it had still fallen on Scheller.

“Yesterday's report?” Reinhardt frowned.

Scheller shrugged. “You'll find out. Get going, Reinhardt. Take my car and driver.”

Reinhardt wound his way back through the hallways, through the scrum of men and swirl of noise and back out into the cold. Mercifully, Scheller's car had a hard top and sides, and was thus warm. The driver trundled it past the lines of waiting troops, through the weaving streams of smoke from their fires, and then the car was pulling up at the State House, the old Austro-Hungarian building. Hurrying out, past the salutes of sentries on duty and through the echoing foyer, Reinhardt remembered coming here to speak with Captain Thallberg of the secret field police, back when he was investigating Marija
and Stefan Hendel's murders.

Following directions upstairs, past the old secret field police offices, he came to the section occupied by the army's judicial service. He paused, hesitating, feeling for a moment like an interloper, or worse, like a penitent. He shook himself out of it and pushed the door open, stepping tall into the office, and finding it empty. There was a murmur of voices from across it, from down a short corridor that ended in a half-open door, a harsh quality to them as if men were arguing. He walked up to it and knocked. The voices cut off, a stentorian “
Come!
” echoing from the other side.

The office was unlike any other judge's office Reinhardt had been in during his police career. No shelves of rich and paneled wood filled with legal tomes, no carpet, no leather armchairs and shaded lamps. This office was cold, spare: a desk, a couple of mismatched hard chairs, a gramophone in one corner standing next to a camp bed that had been hastily made and with a prodigious dip in the mattress. And rising from behind the desk, a man with a smile creasing a look of surprise off his face. He was big and bluff, breasting across the room like a galleon under sail.

“Gregor?
Gregor!
By God, it is you, man!”

“Marcus. Major Dreyer, sir.” Reinhardt took the other man's hand, acknowledging his rank. He smiled back, but it was a sudden nervousness he felt more than any pleasure at seeing what was indeed an old friend.

“Bloody
hell
, Gregor! I'd heard you were here, but had no . . . idea, this was . . .” He stopped, his hand gesturing at the Feldjaegerkorps gorget around Reinhardt's throat.

“You get used to it, sir.”

The other man in the room cleared his throat, a polite smile on his face as he looked between them. He was a tall, thin man in a well-tailored uniform, a pair of spectacles held in long fingers, like a pianist's. The man had a smooth head of silver-white hair, two spots of color on his cheeks, and an expression of erudite surprise and query on his face as he looked at Reinhardt, head to toe.

Dreyer turned, an arm extending to include him. “My manners, I do apologize. Reinhardt, this is Judge Felix Erdmann. A redoubtable jurist and my superior here.”

“How do you do, Captain,” said Erdmann.

“How do you do, sir. I am sorry for interrupting, only there was no one in the outer office.”

“Not at all, Captain.” Erdmann smiled. “I gather this is a happy reunion, Dreyer?”

“Very much so,” said Dreyer, grinning at Reinhardt. “The captain and I go way back. We were in the first war together. He must've saved my life half a dozen times. And then he did it again in 1940, up in Norway. Pulled me off a sinking ship at Narvik after the British had destroyed it.”

“My goodness!”

“And we were colleagues in Berlin when the war ended.”

“Oh, really?” Erdmann's head tilted toward Reinhardt inquisitively. “You are a lawyer?”

“I was a policeman, sir.”

“A policeman? Of what, exactly?”

“A detective.”

“Indeed?”

“Reinhardt was one of the Alex's best.” Dreyer grinned, proudly. “Fancy meeting him here!”

“Indeed,” murmured Erdmann, again, a faint smile on his face as he brushed the frames of his spectacles across his lips.

“Sir, I wonder whether you might give the captain and me a few minutes to reminisce?”

“But of course, Dreyer. Of course,” said Erdmann. He glanced at his wristwatch, an elegant bend of his arm. “Let us pick this up again on the hour? In my office? A pleasure to meet you, Captain.”

The door clicked shut behind Erdmann, and Dreyer ushered Reinhardt over to a pair of mismatched chairs. “Tell me. What's been happening to you? And for God's sake, drop the ‘sir'!”

Reinhardt looked Dreyer over, from the dark green piping on his rank to the Knight's Cross at his throat, the Winter Campaign medal slanting red across his tunic.

“Cigarette?” Dreyer held out a metal cigarette case, its body lacquered silver and ivory, and he lit Reinhardt's cigarette with a matching lighter. Dreyer smiled as he saw Reinhardt's eyes on it. “The contents aren't quite up to scratch,” he murmured, as he lit his own cigarette. “Damn things are all paper and precious little tobacco.”

Reinhardt watched Dreyer's head tilt forward and down to the flame of his lighter. His eyes caught on the deep lines etched into the judge's face, the red veins that forked in broken tributaries across his nose. As Dreyer's eyes opened, Reinhardt's darted elsewhere, focusing furtively on his own cigarette, then lifting, following the smoke he blew at the ceiling.

“Drop of this?” asked Dreyer, holding out a flask. From the edge of Dreyer's breath, it was not his first but much as he was tempted, Reinhardt dared not. It was a weakness he dare not give in to as he once had, not so long ago. “No? You weren't so averse up in Narvik!”

“No. I wasn't.” Despite his reserve, a smile cracked the corner of Reinhardt's mouth.

“That's better!” Dreyer grinned. “Well, don't mind if I do . . . ?” Dreyer took a long swallow, and his eyes were on Reinhardt when his head came down. “What's been happening to you, Gregor? Last I heard, you were running Partisan counterintelligence down here. With the Abwehr.” Reinhardt nodded. “Wasn't there something to do with a general? I heard you got a bit roughed up.”

“That was sorted out,” he said, shrugging with his mouth.

“What happened, though?” Dreyer put an ashtray on the table, heavy, amber-colored glass done in complicated curves and inlaid metal.

Reinhardt sighed. “I was told to investigate a pair of murders. A general was implicated. He was killed. In action. But my investigation upset a lot of people. I got questioned about my role in events.”

“Who did the questioning?”

“Who didn't?” Reinhardt snorted, a cynical edge to it he did not like but could not help. He ran his tongue around his teeth, probing that gap where the interrogators had knocked one out. “The army. Gestapo. The UstaÅ¡e wanted a go at me but didn't get the chance.”

“They thought there was more? To the general's death?” Reinhardt nodded. “Was there?”

“There's always more,” said Reinhardt, looking away, out the window. Something did not feel right. Too many coincidences, perhaps. Or perhaps he was still too suspicious of things that seemed good, but were not. He took a hard pull on his cigarette, flaring it red. “But it wasn't what they thought or wanted. They left me alone eventually. Reassigned me to an operational unit.”

“And now here you are, again. A Feldjaeger, no less.”

“It was a surprise to me, too.”

“And tell me, what news of your son?”

Reinhardt's mouth tightened, and he gave a tight shake of his head, tapping his cigarette into the ashtray. “None. Nothing. Friedrich is presumed lost at Stalingrad.”

“Ah, God, Reinhardt.” Dreyer's hand came up to rest heavily on Reinhardt's shoulder.

Reinhardt nodded, paused, dragging the words out, wanting to ask, wanting to know, but not wanting to know too much. “What are you doing now? Last I heard you were in the USSR.”

Dreyer nodded. “I was. With 2nd Panzer in Russia. Then 4th Army.”

“I see you've been busy,” Reinhardt said, pointing at his throat, looking at Dreyer's. “Not a lot of judges get to earn one of them.”

“This?” Dreyer's hand rose up to his Knight's Cross. “This is what you get for . . . Never mind. Eastern Front. That's all that matters.”

“And now?”

“War Crimes Bureau.”

Reinhardt raised his eyebrows. “War Crimes Bureau?” he repeated.

“For my sins,” muttered Dreyer, his eyes bright on Reinhardt as he tilted his head for another pull at his flask. “Nothing to say? People usually have something.”

Reinhardt pointed at the flask. “I see you're still collecting.”

“What?”

“You always did like that kind of thing.”

“Art Deco?” Dreyer smiled, his eyes on the flask. It was a beautiful object, the lines tapered and flared, the mat of its body scrolled with lines of bright metal. “Yes, it's a nice piece.”

“That too,” said Reinhardt, pointing at the ashtray. “And your cigarette case and lighter. I'm surprised you still carry this stuff around with you.”