The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  “No one deserves what they got, Markworth. Being held down, and then asphyxiated?”

  Markworth shrugged as he finished his beer. “You remind me of Carlsen. We’d always argue about things like that.”

  “Sounds like I would’ve liked him.”

  Markworth smiled, a little lopsided grin as a couple of elderly Germans came down into the cellar and sat at the bar. “I’ll see what I can do for the center, and I’ll be up in Bad Oeynhausen directly. I’m due to rotate back in a couple of days anyway. What do you think about the murderer? This man Leyser?”

  “I don’t know it’s him. He’s just a name that’s come up in the investigation. He was in North Africa at the same time as the pilots being murdered, mentioned in some kind of incident in Tobruk, fighting with several of the pilots. After that, nothing. But that’s the thing. Nothing. He vanishes. Almost no trace of him in the WASt, but I know he survived the war. He was in the WASt not later than the beginning of last year.”

  “So? What does that tell you?”

  “That he’s alive. That he’s apparently working for the Allies. But how, I don’t know.”

  “What about Leyser the man?”

  Reinhardt pushed his beer glass with one finger. “He’s quite something. From what I can tell he’s . . . methodical. Patient. Clever. He’s efficient. He plans ahead. He’s manipulative. He’s a chameleon. He can be anyone, anywhere.”

  “Meaning?”

  “So far, I’ve found him impersonating some kind of British liaison officer in the WASt, and I’ve found him in a high-end hotel, and in a working-class neighborhood and, apparently, convincing von Vollmer to set up a veterans’ association and—again, if it’s him—he’s been operating a long time across the breadth of Germany.” Of Leyser’s visit to Meissner’s house—because Reinhardt was convinced it had been him—he said nothing.

  “Quite the character. What was he doing in the WASt?”

  “Removing all trace of his existence.”

  “Not all, obviously.” Reinhardt frowned. “You still found his name.”

  “In an obscure place. He coerced an archivist into redacting his records, but the man left one mention—in a list of prisoners for exchange between the British and the Germans—and there was another mention neither of them thought to look for in the logbook of the squadron in which all these pilots served.”

  “What’s next, then?”

  “I go into the Soviet zone to speak to this Gareis.”

  Markworth’s eyebrows lowered, and he tilted his head to one side. “But why the Soviet zone? Can’t this archivist help? And what about von Vollmer and his crowd? They met this Leyser character.”

  “Von Vollmer and Bochmann, his former executive officer, could describe him, but neither of them met Leyser during the war. The archivist could identify him, possibly, but there’s no proof the man he might identify is Leyser. There’s only Gareis, who actually met him during the war. Fought with him, actually. And I need to know what sparked this all off back then. Leyser is killing pilots, but I don’t know why. Gareis could tell me.”

  “Be careful, Reinhardt. It’s not so bad as it used to be out there, but still bad enough. If anything goes wrong, you’re on your own.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “There’s careful, and there’s cautious, Reinhardt,” Markworth said as he shrugged into his coat. “Be sure you know the difference when the time comes.”

  It was darker outside on the street, the sky a luminous line up above the crazed scrawl of rooftops and walls. “Don’t worry about Whelan, all right? I’ll smooth things over with him. He’s a good man. He used to be a High Court judge, so he’s a bit sensitive about his reputation. He probably feels you’ve slandered him or disrespected his authority.” Markworth took in a long breath, then held his hand out to Reinhardt. “I’m sorry I doubted you. Or misjudged you.”

  “It’s all right, Markworth,” Reinhardt replied, taken aback. He could not quite figure this man out. Blunt, outspoken, quietly competent, solid, and reassuring. All that, but there was a streak of danger in him, a ruthless aspect of his character, and Reinhardt realized that, in many ways, Markworth reminded him of himself. Maybe not now, and Reinhardt was not sure he had ever given off that air of solidity, but he remembered how cold and clinical he had been about life after the first war. Was that what Reinhardt saw in Markworth? Was that what called out to him?

  “You’ll be in touch? Especially if you hear more about this infamous British connection?” Markworth asked, as an American staff car came to a stop, and an officer with a colonel’s insignia stepped out onto the pavement, followed by a statuesque blonde. The officer looked the two of them up and down, as if expecting some kind of greeting or acknowledgment. The blonde and Reinhardt pegged each other for German immediately, and she studiously ignored him. Markworth and Reinhardt exchanged glances as they went past, down into the beer cellar.

  “Fraternization, eh?” Reinhardt mused.

  “One rule for some, another for others,” Markworth said, and if he recognized the irony in the situation—that here, an American colonel had just taken a German woman into a bar while Carlsen had gotten himself killed trying to do his best for a broken-down prostitute—he said nothing.

  Reinhardt nodded. “Markworth,” he said. Markworth paused as he made to walk away. “You said Carlsen felt compelled to rescue people from themselves.” Markworth nodded. “Did he feel that with you? Was he compelled to rescue you from something?”

  Markworth looked at him, then gave a tight smile and simply turned away, turning up the collar of his coat as he limped back up the road.

  —

  From the cellar, Reinhardt headed north, picking up Potsdamstrasse and the U-bahn station at Bulowstrasse. At Gleisdreieck he changed to the B line and rode the train to Hallesches Tor. He walked slowly through the ruined circle of Belle Allianz Platz, intending to head toward the place he used to live with Carolin, but his steps drew him more toward the Landwehr. He walked along its length, hearing it whisper quietly between its sculpted banks, the water backing and gurgling here and there where rock and stone had fallen down into it and disturbed the tranquillity of its flow. He smoked a cigarette, looking down into the canal. The water glistened past, a swirled invitation, but to what he did not know.

  Reinhardt tossed the butt into the canal and walked the little way to the ruins of his apartment. He was not sure why he felt the need to come. Perhaps it was the sense, the risk, he might never be back. Markworth was right. The Soviet zone was not a safe place for a German man, but he knew he needed to go. Either that, or bring Gareis here, to Berlin, but he did not know how much time that might take, or if it would be possible, or even if he wanted to leave the arrangements for that in Skokov’s hands.

  At the entrance to the building, he flicked on his flashlight, the light breaking and angling across the wreckage inside. He found his little spot and sat, rubbing his knee, emptying his mind, calming himself. He sat there a long while, just letting himself be. One or two people hurried down the street. In the darkness someone laughed, and a wheel crunched through patches of rubble and grit as a man pushed a small barrow.

  He did not feel as calm as he had hoped, that sense of peace eluding him. It felt like it had those few times he had felt watched, those few times when he knew, now, that Friedrich had been there. He ran the flashlight’s beam around, thinking perhaps that Leena or one of her children might have followed him here, but saw nothing.

  Eventually he stirred himself, and made his careful way back to the street, skipping awkwardly over the rubble and hurting his knee, and heading back toward the U-bahn. There was almost no light, and the city was quiet, only a soft crunch of wheels behind him. He glanced back, seeing a man pushing a barrow. He walked on a few more steps, and then felt a flood of cold come surging up and through him, drenching him with a sudden gush of perspirat
ion.

  He stopped dead in the street.

  Behind him, the wheels ran, then stopped as well.

  Reinhardt turned.

  He could not make the man out, clearly. He wore a flat cap, what looked like a quilted jacket, ill-fitting trousers. Of the face, Reinhardt could make out nothing, but he could feel the eyes, staring hard at him out of the dark, and something more. A crackle of recognition.

  The man straightened up. He seemed to change, become larger, and the street seemed to dim, the man’s outline silhouetted in darkness. Reinhardt was suddenly very scared, his mouth dry as a bone, but he managed to work one word out of it as the man took a step toward him, his arms straight by his sides.

  “Leyser?”

  The man stopped. The pressure of those eyes increased.

  Leyser—it had to be him, Reinhardt thought—took another step forward, another. He walked stiffly, as though he went through each movement with great care, Reinhardt noted, remembering the description the children had given him that very first night. Reinhardt felt rooted to the spot, pinned there by a will not his own. The man came closer and, remembering it suddenly, Reinhardt switched on his flashlight and aimed it at the man.

  Leyser froze, one arm coming up to shield his face. Finding the strength somewhere deep inside, Reinhardt took one step toward him.

  The man backed away.

  Reinhardt managed another step, a third, and Brauer stepped out of the night behind the man. Leyser froze a moment, then swiveled his stance so he had both of them in his sight.

  “Leyser?” Reinhardt croaked.

  There was the echo of footsteps, and a laugh floated out of the dark. A couple walked into the street, arm in arm. Leyser turned and simply walked away, leaning into his stride, and the quilting on his jacket lengthening and folding into the night. Brauer took a step toward him, but Leyser suddenly shifted low, his weight skimming over the road, and he seemed to slide inside Brauer’s sudden desperate attempt to ward him off. Leyser’s shoulders curved, contracted, and Reinhardt saw Leyser’s elbow scythe across Brauer’s face, heard the second blow he struck into Brauer’s chest. Reinhardt cried out as his friend cannoned backward, sprawling legs and arms akimbo, and his head rattling on the street.

  Reinhardt shouted again, pushed past the pain in his knee. Behind him, the woman laughed again, the sound incongruous in this street of ruins, cutting across the feral nature of this confrontation. Reinhardt shambled past Brauer’s body, his eyes desperate for any sign he lived, and there was an abrupt dislocation as his mind wrenched up a memory . . .

  —

  . . . . of dashing across No-Man’s Land, men falling left and right, but stopping for none of them. A friend plowed into the ground ahead, arcing around the bow of his agony. His friend’s face contorted into a bloodied wail as he clawed a hand across Reinhardt’s leg but he shook him off, hurling himself on, always on, his body hunched into the storm of iron as if into a blast of wind and rain . . .

  —

  . . . but although he pushed himself as hard as he could, Leyser was just that little bit quicker. Reinhardt cursed himself, cursed his knee, but it availed him nothing, and when the man ghosted away up a slide of rubble and over the top, Reinhardt’s light wavering behind him, Reinhardt knew he could not follow. He stayed down on the street, pushing his eyes into the darkness, but Leyser was gone.

  PART FOUR

  All Guilt Avenged

  41

  TUESDAY

  Two days later, and Reinhardt was on a train moving painfully out of Schlesischer Station in Friedrichshain. Reinhardt remembered Schlesischer as one of the more dangerous parts of Berlin for a policeman, firmly under the control of the city’s organized crime. Even the Nazis had pretty much left it alone, trusting the criminal gangs to keep order, and essentially leaving them to make whatever profits they wanted, in whatever way they had wanted. Drinking, gambling, prostitution, drugs, racketeering . . . It had all gone on here, and if half the police had turned a blind eye, the other half had been on the take.

  Reinhardt found a seat on a bench by a window and stared out as Berlin crumbled slowly away as the train moved east. It trundled through Köpenick, where Reinhardt had been born in 1898 and where he had grown up. It had been a small town then, on the outskirts of Berlin, but time and the city’s expansion had seen it incorporated, and it was just one more stretch of gouged cityscape now, the houses perhaps a little quainter, a little older. Somewhere out there, he knew, as the train passed through the station without stopping, was his father’s house. He had not been to Köpenick in years, in longer than he could remember, and he had no idea in what state that old house was in. He felt a pang of sudden nostalgia for his father’s library, the smell of books and cigars, of long, genteel discussions with his father and his father’s friends, professors and teachers all.

  But the fondness was followed swiftly by bitterness at the memory of his father fading away in his library after he was sacked from the university, hounded out because he dared speak up about the ludicrousness of the laws this new Germany was passing, at the treatment of Jews among the students and professors. How quickly his father found himself alone, ridiculed and friendless, how fast a life of respect came to nothing, and how empty that library became. It killed him, eventually, Reinhardt knew, his father dying of a broken heart, and perhaps his son’s parallel descent into loneliness and ostracization had sped him on his way.

  No, Reinhardt thought, as the train nosed on into the countryside beneath clouds smeared, like spilled milk, across the blue bowl of the sky, he no longer cared. That life he had had was so far gone, it may as well have been on the other side of the world. Instead, he filled his eyes with green as the train moved on. The countryside was copsed and wooded, trees cleared by the clean sweep of fields and meadows, but amid the seemingly pristine verdure, every small village bore its scars and ruins, its tumbled walls and its holed roofs with their patchwork braces of blackened timbers. He sat and watched a world that was not all shattered stone and rubble, and wondered that he had not thought to miss something as small as a stretch of meadow that was not given over to growing vegetables. Within the smashed confines of the city, he had lost track of time, of the passage of the seasons. He only knew when it got cold, when it got colder, when finally it warmed a little. There was nothing else to help pin the mind to the passage of time beyond Berlin.

  He let his mind drift back instead to what he had done these past two days. Brauer had survived Leyser’s attack, although he moved painfully, his sternum a huge, mottled bruise, swearing he had never been hit so hard in his life. He had not had a good look at Leyser either. Brauer only remembered the fixed glitter of Leyser’s eyes, and a firm line of mustache amidst a riot of stubble. Brauer was also on the move, gone these past two days to Potsdam to follow up on the information that Leyser had been born there. Reinhardt had hoped to have talked to him before his trip into the Soviet zone, but there was no sign of him and he could only hope he had not come to grief. Reinhardt could have used the police there for his inquiries, but he knew anything he asked for would make it back to Skokov, and he had no wish to give the Russian more information than he had to. So Brauer had gone, armed with a carton of Lucky Strikes and an enthusiasm for a bit of investigative work. Reinhardt had rarely seen Brauer so happy in a long while, joking that if this jaunt—as he had put it—worked out, he might set himself up in private practice.

  After an hour or so trundling through the countryside, the train stopped at a small village, a provincial station, with a stationmaster’s house and a bullet-holed sign hanging from a chain. One or two other people climbed down with him, the platform becoming for a moment a swirl of people and baggage moving toward the exit from the station. Reinhardt paused to breathe deeply of the chill, fresh air, and was suddenly conscious of the city’s dust on his trousers and shoes. He flapped it off, watching the people who had left the train bunch up at
the exit. Reinhardt felt a quiver run through them as they filtered slowly out, a murmur, a susurration that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Something was wrong, but he did not know what, nor did anyone else on the platform with him until it was his turn to pass out into the street.

  A Soviet truck was parked across the road, a squad of soldiers in it and standing around it. And on the pavement, right outside the station, stood Skokov.

  The major smiled as Reinhardt walked out.

  “Reinhardt!” he said jovially, the scarring about his mouth slipping across the taut line of his smile. “Fancy meeting you here!”

  Reinhardt said nothing, surprised, and yet not.

  “What? Did you think your request for a pass would not reach me? Of course it would. But I do appreciate your attempt to be open and transparent, Captain. It does you credit, although all you had to do was ask me for help.”

  “I was sure your contacts would be good enough, Major. I just did not expect to find you out here, yourself.”

  “Indeed. Let me see the pass, please.”

  Reinhardt handed it over, and Skokov passed it without looking to another officer, a lieutenant, if Reinhardt knew his Soviet ranks well enough. The lieutenant read the pass carefully, then handed it to two local policemen. Two militiamen, Reinhardt corrected himself, remembering how the Soviets had renamed the police in their zone. The two men lowered their heads over the paper, looking up at him with heavy, hostile eyes, and then handed it back.

  “Haracho,” the lieutenant said, nodding to Skokov.

  “All is in order, it seems,” Skokov said. He tucked the pass into the pocket of his tunic. “I shall look after this for you, if you don’t mind.” If he noticed Reinhardt’s eyes fasten on the pass as it disappeared into Skokov’s pocket, as if yearning toward a last chance at salvation, he said nothing. “Where are we going, Captain?”