The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  “Whelan,” Markworth said shortly. There was a crackle of tension between the Englishmen. “Just . . . let him speak.”

  “Fine. Speak, Inspector. Say something. Keep digging yourself a hole, do!”

  “Who is Boalt?” Reinhardt asked. Again, the words just seemed to rush up, spoken before he could even think of calling them back, or to order.

  Both the Englishmen stared at him.

  “I say what?” asked Whelan.

  “Boalt. I found his name when I was searching through the WASt.”

  “I’m afraid I do not know who Boalt is. Why would you think I do? Markworth, do you know?”

  Markworth shook his head slowly. But slowly, like him, or quick with his words, like Whelan, Reinhardt was sure they were both lying.

  “Who is Leyser?”

  “I have no idea,” Markworth said. He glanced at Whelan, and the big Englishman shook his head.

  “What is your relationship to von Vollmer?”

  “Cordial,” rasped Whelan, red-faced as he crunched his tumbler down.

  “Are you giving his association support of any kind?”

  “No.”

  “Are the British protecting one of their . . .”

  “No,” said Markworth. The word dropped into a silence between the three of them, but it was a silence that crackled.

  “Are the British involved in these . . . ?”

  “. . . you realize,” Markworth cut him off, “these are the kinds of questions that will get you in trouble faster than you can imagine, Reinhardt. That is, if you were to ask them. Which,” he glanced at Whelan, “you did not. Am I right?”

  Whelan’s jaw clenched, chin jutting like a bulldog’s, but he shook his head after a moment. “Leave, Reinhardt,” he grated. “Before things get worse for you than they are now. But rest assured, you have not heard the last of this.”

  40

  “Reinhardt! Wait.”

  Markworth caught up with him as Reinhardt walked shakily down the stairs. He was covered in a cold sweat, and he did not know what had just happened, nor really what he had tried to achieve.

  “Listen, don’t mind Whelan so much. He’s a bit sensitive. He’s a good enough sort, but he’s not cut out for the rough and tumble.”

  “And you are?” Reinhardt wished he could have called the words back, but Markworth seemed to pay them no offense.

  “If you like. More so than him, in any case. Listen, I once asked if you wanted a drink. How about now?”

  “I would like to,” Reinhardt sighed. He did. He needed one, and he liked Markworth, despite not wanting to. The Englishman felt solid. Dependable. “I’m sorry, though, I’ve no time.”

  “You do. You must. Just come with me. All right?”

  He followed Markworth down and out, the Englishman taking the stairs and then the floor in even, decisive steps. Even as he limped heavily, it was as if nothing would stop him, as if no obstacle would hold him back or sidetrack him. Reinhardt followed him down the clear paths along the centers of a tangle of streets behind the Kammergericht, between slides of rubble to a building that had been cracked open like an egg. There was a door that led down to an underground cellar. Inside was a low-ceilinged bar, all brick arches and even a few prints and paintings hanging on the wall. A massive wooden slab, thickly varnished, stretched along one side. A barman nodded to Markworth, who raised two fingers, and then pointed Reinhardt to a table under a narrow window crosshatched with metal bars.

  They sat quietly, smoking, until their drinks arrived, two tall glasses of clear gold liquid beneath a tier of foam. The barman nodded cordially to Markworth, resting a hand on his shoulder a moment. The Englishman knocked his glass against Reinhardt’s.

  “Life. The only blessing wickedness possesses,” he said, and drank deeply. The toast seemed misplaced coming from him. It sounded more like something a Russian would say, Reinhardt thought, remembering Skokov, as he drank as well. It was Berliner Weisse, he found to his surprise, properly mixed with caraway schnapps. He had not had anything like this in years, memories flooding back as the drink swelled the contours of his mouth and flowed down his throat.

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Markworth smiled.

  “A couple of Kassler’s pork ribs to go with it, and it would be perfect,” Reinhardt said with appreciation.

  “None of them to be had, I’m afraid. It is hard to believe this place survived, but there you are. You are welcome anytime, Reinhardt, but keep the place quiet. I do not want half the Berlin Kripo leaning their elbows on the bar. Listen, I owe you some answers,” Markworth continued quietly, his German slow and measured. “About Carlsen. But first, a question. Something you said at the station before, when we saw each other last, and again just now in Whelan’s office, does not make sense to me. You said Carlsen was looking at the same things as Skokov?”

  “I found Carlsen had been in the WASt. Looking into information on the pilots being murdered. You didn’t know?”

  “I did not,” Markworth said, his face blank. He blinked his eyes, and his face cleared. “It explains . . . it maybe helps to explain some things.”

  “I hear that Carlsen spent time in East Berlin. Did you know that?” Markworth nodded. “Do you know what he was doing there?”

  “Intellectual diversion. That’s the way he put it.”

  “Do you know who he was talking to?”

  Markworth shook his head, his mouth turning down. “Not really. You think he met someone there involved in his death?”

  “I don’t know,” said Reinhardt, thinking about Skokov. “I don’t know enough about him.”

  “You asked me, the first day we met, at the police station, how I knew about Carlsen. How I was on his trail so fast. I told you, he was my friend. You know he worked in the ACC with Whelan on military affairs. He was a specialist in what they’re calling ‘international humanitarian law.’ It’s all the rage now. They’re busy signing treaties at this new United Nations, hoping new laws will stop wars like the one we just had ever happening again.”

  “That’s a worthy enough ambition, isn’t it?” Reinhardt murmured, taking another long drink.

  “Wishful thinking is what it is, Reinhardt. But Carlsen believed in it. I suppose he had to. Whelan told you Carlsen escaped to England, just before the war? His family were murdered in one of the camps. He could have let that define who he was, and who the Germans were, but he did not. He . . . he was able to get over and past it. He was fair and open. He took people for what they were. He . . .” Markworth paused, as if struggling for the right words. “He condemned where condemnation was merited. He believed passionately in the law. He was a better man than me in that way, given what he had had to endure. Mistrust within the British ranks, something worse than death from the Germans if he was caught, but he persevered. He had to show the British that not all Germans were SS or brutes, and he had to show the Germans that their conquerors were men of honor, who would not act like barbarians once the war was won, who would apportion blame to the individual and not tar the race with the stain of the Nazis. In short, he was an honorable man. His honor was something precious, but it was dangerous. It left him defenseless against those with less honor than him, or against those for whom honor had no place anymore,” Markworth said, sadly.

  “But he had two weaknesses, Reinhardt. Drink, and a need to rescue people. From themselves. From their circumstances. He found Gieb some time ago. She had survived the camp where his parents were killed, I think. Or something like that. She was perfect for him. Someone to be saved, even if she didn’t want saving. Or if people like Stresemann didn’t get in his way.”

  “Where did you and Carlsen meet?”

  “Here. We became good friends. You wouldn’t have thought it to see us. Me, I’m a bit of a thug, as you’ve no doubt guessed.” Markworth smiled to take the sting out of his own words. “Carlsen
was . . . a boy, really, despite what he had been through. He was . . . he always seemed a bit lost. Wide-eyed and blinking. He needed looking after, and more often than not I ended up doing it.”

  “Did he fight in the war?”

  “Holland and Germany.”

  “You?”

  “France. Then North Africa. Then up through Italy.”

  “What service?”

  “Take a look at me, Reinhardt,” Markworth grinned. “Compact. Solid. Don’t take up much space.”

  “Tanks?”

  Markworth lifted his glass. “First Armored.”

  “The Rhinos, correct?” Reinhardt asked, lifted his glass back. Markworth grinned and nodded.

  “That’s where I got the hand,” Markworth said, holding up his right hand and pointing at the scars along the side and over the back of his fist. “Too many hours spent next to an overheated cannon.”

  “And the limp?”

  “I tore the ligaments in my knee getting out of my tank after it was hit. End of my war, right there.”

  “I have a bad knee too,” Reinhardt said suddenly. “First war. British spade.” Why had he suddenly offered that up?

  Markworth winced in sympathy. “Here’s to dodgy knees then, and the men they carry.”

  They drank. “Now what are you doing?”

  “His Majesty’s Service, Reinhardt.”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Does that not sound grand enough?” Markworth grinned again. “I am a liaison officer between Bad Oeynhausen and the British staff in the Kammergericht and in Berlin. I make sure the uniforms and the civilians talk to each other.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Markworth raised his eyebrows over his beer as he drank. “Place called Northwood. Near London.”

  “Where’d your German come from?”

  “Here and there. A few holidays when I was a boy. A few years at university reading German philosophy. A year in Heidelberg. What? What?”

  “Sorry,” smiled Reinhardt. “You just don’t seem the philosophizing type.”

  “You know, I hear that a lot.”

  “‘Life, the only blessing wickedness possesses.’”

  “You studied the classics?”

  “My father. He was partial to Schiller.”

  “Your turn then.”

  “I was in North Africa too.”

  Markworth nodded as he drank. “I know. Tell me something I don’t. What kind of war did you have?”

  There was something in Markworth’s eyes, some challenge to the truth. If he knew about North Africa, he likely knew Reinhardt had been an Abwehr officer, and a Feldjäeger. That was not what the Englishman was pushing at. “There was a time I didn’t know what kind of war I was having. I only knew, it wasn’t my war. I kept telling myself that. And I tried to do the least I could to get through it. It wasn’t that war held secrets for me. I’d fought on the Eastern Front and been a stormtrooper in the first war. You didn’t fight in that one?” Markworth shook his head “That was a bad one. But it seemed . . . honest? Does that make sense? It doesn’t always make sense to me. But this one . . . I’d never seen . . . never imagined . . . anything like it. I saw the camps around Munich. Christ, what we did, I’ll never understand it as long as I live . . .” he whispered.

  “And from what I know now, what I saw and heard was as nothing compared to what was going on in the East.” Markworth listened expressionlessly, but attentively. “Come 1943, and after tours in Norway and France, and Yugoslavia and North Africa, I was on the edge of suicide, in complete despair at what my life had come to, when I was given a lifeline. I was back in Yugoslavia, in Sarajevo. A German officer and a journalist, a woman, had been murdered. I was asked to investigate.”

  He talked on, of his redemption in his own eyes in a forest on a Bosnian mountain, his determination to make this war his. Reinhardt kept talking, and the years of frustration rolled by, until Sarajevo came back, and he heard rumors of Germans going missing and stumbled across a conspiracy to save something from the war’s ruin. He talked of how he had dismantled an escape route for Ustaše and other German collaborators. He talked of Partisans, of the city of Sarajevo in the folds of its encircling hills, of his abiding love and respect for that benighted land of Yugoslavia. But of the love he had found himself, of the memory of Suzana Vukić’s ash-blonde hair and the determined tilt to her eyes, he kept to himself.

  “We call them ‘ratlines’ now,” Markworth said, wiping a glitter of beer from his lip. “You took apart a ratline . . . Bloody well done, sir.”

  A second round of molles arrived, and Reinhardt talked on. It felt liberating, somehow, to talk. To get so much out. He had talked with no one of the whole experience of the war since it ended. Collingridge knew some, Brauer knew more, Mrs. Meissner knew a little. No one knew all of it, and it was not that Reinhardt was baring his soul to Markworth, but he felt he had found someone to whom he could talk.

  “The German resistance,” Markworth said, when the words tailed off, seemingly of their own accord, and Reinhardt found he felt good. Lighter, freer than he had in a long time. Markworth twisted his mouth into his beer. “You have to wish and wonder why there weren’t more of them.”

  “People were scared, Markworth. It’s lonely stepping out of line. The odds are terribly stacked against you. And there’s that feeling, that question, that tomorrow, maybe the day after, things will get better.”

  “Or someone else will take care of it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “There’s that too.”

  “The famous German eleventh commandment,” Markworth murmured.

  “‘One must always take that view of a matter which the good Lord commands,’” Reinhardt quoted. He had not heard that one in a long time, but the good Lord had too often in German history been a king or some other despot.

  They drank in silence.

  “What happened to us, Reinhardt? What were we thinking to let things get so out of hand?”

  “‘Us,’ Markworth?” Reinhardt asked, wondering if he had misheard.

  “‘Us,’ Reinhardt. People. Germans and Englishmen. Americans and Frenchmen. Poles and Russians. The whole sorry damn lot of us. Human beings. Apes clothed in velvet. I’m led to believe we were and still are all in it together. At least, that’s what Carlsen used to say. That’s why he put such hopes in his laws and treaties and his United Nations.”

  “I don’t know what happened to us, Markworth. ‘Us’ is too big a word, I think. I know what happened to me. I was afraid. And I kept hoping someone else would take care of things. And someone did, except it was not the right person.”

  “And so here we all are . . .” Markworth said, peering into his glass as if for inspiration.

  Reinhardt said nothing, reluctant even to move. He felt stilled with an unexpected shame, as if his very skin had shrunk around the taut lines of his bones.

  “It bothers me, Reinhardt,” Markworth said, after a moment. “That we may have pressured the police to look in the wrong places, and for the wrong people. When it seems to me we should have been supporting you.” Reinhardt stayed quiet. “I was sure it was because of Stresemann. The man was a . . . toe rag,” Markworth spat, in English.

  Reinhardt blinked. “Markworth, how do you know all this?”

  “I told you,” Markworth answered, an irritated toss to his head. “Carlsen was my friend. I looked after him as well as I could. He came across Stresemann through Gieb. Are you sure the same man killed Carlsen and all these others? I want to believe it, if only because I want Carlsen’s killer found.”

  “It’s the same man, I know it.”

  “Not a group?”

  Reinhardt thought of Kausch and his men, discarded the thought. They would not be so precise, those men, nor so consistent. Besides, they were trapped in Berlin. They could not have that r
each, to leave bodies all across the length of Germany.

  “You’re sure . . . you’re sure the same man is doing the killing?”

  “They’re being killed the same way. But I believe there’s only one man. Murder is an intimate business. Killers hardly ever work together.”

  “Except in wartime.”

  Reinhardt lifted his glass in acknowledgment. “Except in wartime.”

  “And you seem to be saying there’s a North African connection to these murders.”

  “All the pilots murdered have, so far as I can tell, one thing in common. They served at the same time in North Africa. And several of them were involved in some kind of incident involving a soldier called Leyser.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Not much, is it?”

  “It’s a damn sight more than your colleagues ever came up with following up on Stresemann,” Markworth muttered darkly. “So how can I help, Reinhardt? I’m going to be honest, I’m concerned about these rumors of British involvement. I won’t get in your way. I won’t hide what I find, but I’ll want to control that aspect. You understand? You want me to follow up in Bad Oeynhausen? Or with these veterans? The ones who seem to have started it in the first place? What do you think of their story? Someone, allegedly a Brit, convinces them to set up a veterans’ association by harking back to past wrongdoings? Bit of a tall tale, isn’t it?”

  “There’s just enough truth in it to be plausible. But listen,” Reinhardt said, sliding his beer glass to one side, sifting through the barrage of questions Markworth had fired at him. “If you really want to help, you can do two things. You can indeed get in touch with Bad Oeynhausen and find out what you can there. And can you try to get into the Berlin Document Center? There’s no way they’ll let someone like me in. I pretty much know what that experimental unit was doing, but I need to know who was in it.”

  “Why?”

  “For starters, they may be in danger, Markworth.”

  Markworth pursed his mouth into his beer and murmured something, some expletive in English. “What’s it to me, Reinhardt? Sounds like some of these men deserved what they got.”