“I’m not interested in you, Kausch,” Reinhardt said. He looked at Noell, but the pilot was silent, seemingly folded in on himself.
“That is quite irrelevant. We take our leave of you now, but we will be in touch soon enough. Heil Hitler, Captain.”
Reinhardt stared, then snorted, a quick burst of disbelieving laughter.
“What is so funny?”
“I just remembered a joke. You must’ve heard it. Hitler and his driver are in his car, when a pig runs in front of it. The driver hits the pig. Kills it. ‘Go and find the owners, make reparation,’ the Führer says. The driver gets out. Hitler waits, and waits, and waits some more, until finally the driver comes back, stinking drunk. ‘What the hell happened to you, man?’ the Führer demands. ‘What on earth did you tell that farmer?’ The driver shrugs. ‘Nothing. I just said, ‘Heil Hitler, the swine is dead.’”
“Come. A word, please.” The former SS man took Reinhardt’s arm in a light but firm grip and turned him out toward the street. “It is important we understand each other. At Uhlandstrasse, there was a Soviet agent who tried to follow you into the station. We arranged that he missed the train, so our conversation was peaceful and not interrupted. It is important you know that, so you know our reach. What we can do. Then, there is this.” The blow to his ribs was an agonizing shock. He felt his arm twisted up behind him, higher, and he bent over from the pain, bent further, planting his legs wide to keep from falling, and someone kicked him in the groin. It felt like the blow had climbed up into his sternum, and he collapsed as if something inside him had been cut, but fingers wormed into his hair and ground his head against the cobbles.
“I warned you of respect, did I not?” Kausch whispered down at him from out of a haze of pain. “Remember this, Inspector. Captain Reinhardt. Your oath to the Führer was never rescinded. I hold claim to it. You will keep me informed of your inquiries, Captain Reinhardt. When I need you, I will call. If you do not come, I will find you. I will find you, and that woman you live with. That woman Meissner. A traitor’s wife. And that man who haunts your steps. Brauer, isn’t it? I will find them. And I will find your son, Captain Reinhardt. I will find Friedrich Reinhardt. Him, most of all. We know what he is, though he tries to hide it, worming his way into the confidence of men like us who never abandoned what we were. Men like him do not deserve to live, so I prefer to think of him as a boil. A festering little boil. Inconvenient, but tolerable. And we know where he is. So should you fail me, Captain Reinhardt, should you give me cause to regret letting you live, I will take your son to pieces before your very eyes. Do you doubt me, Captain Reinhardt? Do you doubt I will do these things as I have said them?”
Reinhardt did not doubt him, but could not have answered if his life depended upon it. At some point he realized he was alone, that they had gone, and he shambled onto his hands and knees. He lurched up to one knee, standing heavily against the wall. The world spun, and he vomited weakly, hearing and feeling it patter around his feet. His throat burned, his groin burned worse, his hand left grit across his mouth as he wiped his face.
“Filthy fucking drunk,” someone snarled from out of the dark. He heard the sound of quick footsteps, and then the scuffle of feet, as if two people struggled. Someone shouted something, a curse flung away into the night. Footsteps came closer, and someone stooped over him. Despite himself, he covered his head with his arm, but someone took his hand in theirs, and lifted him haltingly to his feet. He turned, and looked into Friedrich’s face.
36
“I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t,” Reinhardt whispered. He felt aghast at the way he must look, pinned almost immobile with shame, and the fear of what Friedrich might think. Like someone had run a needle through his mind, Reinhardt felt old memories tauten and quiver, threaded up out of the past. Old arguments with his son, the spiral into drunkenness to escape the insanity of those days, to avoid the creature Friedrich was becoming.
“I know,” Friedrich said. He steadied Reinhardt on his feet, brushing down his coat. “I saw it.”
“You saw it.”
Friedrich nodded, and before Reinhardt’s eyes he seemed to slump in on himself, as if he held himself crooked and bent, as if he held himself sideways from the world. Unclean, his stance cried. Outcast, it shrieked.
“You heard it as well,” Reinhardt said, his voice quivering. Friedrich nodded again. Reinhardt straightened up around the sickening pain in his groin, feeling the chill night air grate agonizingly over his sweat-drenched skin. “What are you doing here, Friedrich?”
“I was waiting. I was hoping you might come this way.”
“If you heard it, then you can tell me. Kausch. Who is he? And how does he know your . . . How does he know my son’s name?”
“I don’t know how he knows my name. But I know what he is, and he knows what I am.”
“And what are you, Friedrich?”
“I am a traitor, Father.”
Reinhardt leaned back against the wall. His head was awhirl at the currents swirling round him. The murderer and his motivations, the Allies, the Soviets, these German “patriots” . . . He was struggling before to make sense of this, and now it was worse. Perhaps because he was in so much pain and he was tired, and he was far more than rattled by what had just happened, he looked at Friedrich.
“Are you spying on me for these Nazis?” Friedrich shook his head. “Are you spying on me for Skokov?” Friedrich made to shake his head again, but he stopped. “Well, at least you don’t deny knowing who he is.”
“I know who he is.”
“Kausch told me he wants me to help him find who is killing their friends. He told me to keep him informed, otherwise he said they’d kill you.” Reinhardt took a long breath, clenching his teeth to slice the cold night air between them. He kept back what Brauer had told him earlier that day, although it seemed an age ago now. “What would you like to tell me, Friedrich?”
“I would tell you I was once like them, Father. You knew me. You saw me.”
“And now you’re different.”
Reinhardt had not meant to sound so harsh, and he would have called his words back if he could. Friedrich seemed to turn even more sideways. Outcast, unclean, his being seemed to cry. Friedrich knelt to pick up the bicycle.
“Now I’m different. Two years on the Eastern Front and three in a prisoner-of-war camp will change a man, Father. Even the most obtuse, even the most bellicose. Even,” Friedrich sighed, “the most misguided.”
“Oh, God, Friedrich.” The air seemed to go out of Reinhardt, as if it had been sucked out, leaving him empty, a husk, leaving him anchored only by the pain in his ribs and groin.
“Shall we walk? When I was captured at Stalingrad, during my interrogation, I was identified as a potential collaborator. I was questioned by a number of men, all of them very civilized. Not at all the image of the subhuman Slav we were told to expect. The last man to interrogate me . . . well, I began to see things in a different light. I came to understand it is not such a leap as I would have imagined, between Nazism and Communism.” Reinhardt walked slowly, one hand on the bicycle as Friedrich pushed it, and talked quietly, but inside he wanted to protest. It was a leap, he knew. Or at least, he wanted to believe. The two were not the same—could not be—even if it was sometimes easy to make that comparison, given the architecture of repression they had both built around themselves. Besides which, when Reinhardt thought about it, those to whom he had cleaved during the war when he had sought himself and the man he used to be—the Partisans Begović and Simo, even the ruthless Perić and Suzana Vukić—had all been Communist. Carolin, his wife, had been one. He himself never had been, favoring what he had preferred to think of as a pragmatic disinterest more properly suited to a life of service. But he viewed that belief now with the appropriate scorn of one who knows that much of what had happened these last years happened because people like him had preferred disinterest
to engagement, self-important isolation to activism.
“At first, it was about survival,” Friedrich continued, “but then I came to believe in this new cause. I joined a group called the League of German Officers. I found a sense of familiarity. There was a sense of brotherhood, German officers fighting together against a regime that had misused them. We conducted anti-Nazi propaganda and other things. We were despised, of course. Most prisoners would have nothing to do with us. The Nazis were strong in the camps. They kept their own form of discipline. Traitors or turncoats were often murdered.
“When the war ended, I came back to Germany with the Red Army. My tasks were to work with returning veterans. To see what they were thinking. To plant ideas. To monitor and report. But seeing what the Soviets were doing in East Berlin, and across the Germany they occupy—the rape, the plunder, the oppression—I found myself falling back into disillusion, and now I do not know where I stand anymore.
“Several days ago, I was summoned to Karlshorst. I thought . . . I thought my time had come. But I met an MGB agent.”
“Skokov.”
“Skokov. Somehow he had put two and two together and connected us. He knew of me. He knew what I had done in Russia. He knew . . . many things. He knew of my . . . pilgrimages to our old house. He told me to observe you. To keep an eye on you. But I do not believe he has any motivation beyond moving me as a piece on the board.”
“And in moving you, he moves me,” Reinhardt said, a bitter tinge to his words. “He has a hold on me.”
“Father, how to say this? I’m trapped, I want to come home, but I no longer know where home is. So yes, I’m being used against you. It is the price to pay for being set free by the Ivans. If I try to leave them, they will either catch me again, or they will ensure my collaborationist past and . . . and other . . . and other things will be revealed.”
The father in Reinhardt reeled at what his son was telling him. He knew what I had done in Russia. The father in him yearned to comfort and succor Friedrich, but the policeman in him would not let the father be. Other things . . . The policeman in him heard the words, and searched beneath them for deeper, hidden meanings. The policeman in him heard Friedrich and heard a confession. He heard self-justification, even obfuscation, and when the car pulled up next to him, he was not surprised to see a window go down and for Skokov’s teeth to glint up at him from the shadowed interior.
“Captain. Please join me.” Reinhardt looked to Skokov, back to his son, indecision engraved in his stance. “Do not worry about your son, Captain. Please. Join me.” The driver stepped out, holding the door open.
“This is a nice setup, Major,” Reinhardt said. The inside of the car was warm, fragrant with a smell of oiled leather.
“This? You like this? It’s a Mercedes.”
“Using my son against me.”
“A good workman will use whatever tools he has to hand, Captain. Now,” Skokov said, casting a glance at Friedrich standing forlorn outside, like a beggar at a crossroads, “tell me about the WASt. What did you find out?”
“I found out you’ve been in there, looking for the same things as me.”
“Of course you did,” Skokov said dismissively. “I would have been surprised if you had not. Except you came to that same mysterious file by a different route than me, and I had given up that file as a lost cause until recently. Until someone began killing people connected to it.”
“What is so important to you in that file?”
“That’s no concern of yours. Just tell me what you’ve found out.”
“That file concerns some kind of test unit. It was working on secret experiments for the air force.”
“I know that, Captain, but how is it that you do?” Skokov said, and there was a steel slither to his voice.
“I learned this today from someone who worked on issues related to it. I learned Noell was transferred to it in April 1943, together with another officer called Gareis and an officer called Prellberg.”
“And where are these two, now?”
“Gareis was killed in action.” Reinhardt was not sure why he said it when he knew it was not true, but the words were spoken before he could call them back. He continued, faster than he would have liked. “And it seems Prellberg might be dead, too. He died after the war.”
“Murdered?” Skokov looked askance at Reinhardt, that sunken side of his mouth a darker patch on his face, as if he had heard something in his voice.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”
Skokov grunted, his lips moving against his teeth. Reinhardt watched him carefully, knowing he had held back everything he had just learned from Noell, not least that Noell was still alive. And he had kept back what he had learned from the lab technician in the Luftwaffe-Lazarett. But, as Skokov did not seem interested in what exactly the secret unit had done, he assumed Skokov already knew.
“Where did this Prellberg die?”
“Bad Oeynhausen.”
Skokov grunted again, staring out of the window. With the tip of one finger, he stroked the rippled scar tissue around his mouth. “There were other pilots who went to this unit?”
“None from the same squadron as Noell, Prellberg, and Gareis. The British admitted Carlsen was half-German, and did special work for them. As you said. He was also looking for some kind of information in the WASt. He examined the same file as you did about two weeks ago.”
Every line of Skokov’s body went taut as he turned back to look at Reinhardt. Skokov’s eyes gleamed as he seemed to take Reinhardt’s measure. “Very well. Keep at it, Captain. Keep me informed.” He rapped on the window, and the driver opened Reinhardt’s door.
“My son, Major.” That was all Reinhardt could manage.
“Your son’s fate rests on the outcome of this investigation, Captain.” Skokov glanced past him to where Friedrich stood. “To be honest, he is something of a disappointment. We had high hopes for him, but he holds none for himself. As a tool, he has few uses now.”
“I want him back.”
“The future is a gift that never quite arrives, Captain.” Skokov pursed his mouth. “You can have him, should I have a satisfactory conclusion to your inquiries.”
“What exactly do you want, Major? What did this secret unit do?”
“That would be for me to know and you to find out. Get out now, and send your son in, please.”
Reinhardt and Friedrich faced each other a moment on the street beneath the flat gaze of the Soviet driver. He raised a hand hesitantly, wanting to touch his son, to reassure him in some small way, and Friedrich seemed to see it, pushing the bicycle at him so he was forced to take it. He made to sidle past, but Reinhardt reached out. Friedrich’s body arched away. Outcast, he seemed to cry. Unclean. Reinhardt caught his arm and pulled him tight.
“I don’t know what’s happened. But I will do what I have to, to make you safe. I promise.”
“Make no promises, Father,” Friedrich whispered. “Sometimes you have to keep them.” And with that, he was gone into the car, sucked down into its gloom with the door slamming shut. Reinhardt’s reflection quivered before him in the windowpane, steadied, stilled, then was shaken apart again as the driver started the engine and drove away. Reinhardt watched it go, watched the flare of its brake lights as it paused at a corner, turned, and was gone.
37
SATURDAY
It rained overnight. The rain had the benefit of keeping the dust down, but it made the atmosphere heavy and muggy, the air cut and lined with the stench of sewage and waste. The sky was a luminous, milky gray, a flat sheet with nothing to hang one’s eyes on, and the streets were blotted gunmetal gray with water that puddled in darkened pools or seeped foully out from under the ruins.
Reinhardt arrived later than he would have wanted at the station the next morning, a Saturday. He had slept badly, curled around his pain, arriving to find
Bochmann already at the police station and ensconced with Mrs. Dommes. If there was a silver lining to anything, it was finding that the two of them had already gone through Bochmann’s lists and the list of names she was to call. Dommes had obviously found something of a kindred spirit in Bochmann, who looked decidedly worried as he clutched a cardboard folder to his chest with spidery fingers.
“Mr. Bochmann has made my life a great deal easier, Inspector,” Mrs. Dommes said, bright as a button, and bestowed a positively warm glance upon Bochmann. “I understand Prellberg is dead. Thurner was never found. Remember his prewar address was in Stettin, and that’s now in Poland. That only leaves Hauck and Osterkamp, and according to Mr. Bochmann they seem to have passed away. So there’s not much left to do it seems, Inspector.” Dommes finished, frowning at him. “Are you well, Gregor?”
Reinhardt blinked at her use of his first name. He had not even realized that she knew it. “Quite well, Mrs. Dommes, thank you. Mr. Bochmann. Perhaps you will come with me?”
He took Bochmann out of the station and through the little park, the ground wet and heavy from the rain and from the blocked drains that flooded half of it, over to a small café behind the Magistrates’ Court. Reinhardt sat Bochmann down, ordered two coffees, then pinned him with his eyes, and if his voice was a little harsher than usual, he felt the situation merited it. “Out with it, Bochmann.”
“I went over the registry again last night. After we finished.” Bochmann’s eyes were muddy with apparent distress. “Both Hauck and Osterkamp . . . I believe they may . . . they may have been murdered.” Reinhardt said nothing, only waited for him to go on, not dropping his eyes, not even when the waiter brought their two mugs. “For Hauck, I see my records show he died in April 1946.” He fiddled with papers. “See. Here. There’s a letter from a neighbor. Hauck was killed when his house collapsed. The house had been damaged during the war. And there had been any number of Americans or whoever billeted in it. It was a mess.” Reinhardt looked at him, saying nothing, waiting. “Osterkamp. He died in July. See. Another letter. From his wife. He died . . . he died . . . See. There.” Bochmann seemed manic as he stabbed at the paper with his finger.
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