“The family packs up and leaves Potsdam in 1923 for Berlin. The head thought they’d gone to Lichterfelde. I sniffed around a bit more in Potsdam, but there was nothing more to find. So off I go, back into the city, and into the American sector. But it’s pretty much the same story. Records are a mess in the Lichterfelde town hall. Bombed out, and what’s not bombed and burned, the firemen doused. Anyway, long story short, and a pack of Luckies lighter, someone suggests I have a look at the municipal cadastre records. They weren’t in the main building, so they might’ve survived, and they had. A few Luckies lighter, and I find that the Leysers bought themselves a place in Lictherfelde-East, on Sedanstrasse. Place looking over the park.”
“Christ, that’s not all that far from Gothaerstrasse,” Reinhardt breathed.
“I know, right? You’ve been suspecting the Brits, but let’s face it, this Leyser has been misbehaving quite a bit in the Amis’ sector too. Anyway, I had a look. The place was bombed out. It’s a wreck. But someone’s spending time there. Most of the place is bashed up, and the roof’s full of holes, but there are a couple of rooms inside that are locked, and one of the locks looks newish. I didn’t touch anything, and I’m pretty sure the door with the new lock was rigged. Maybe not to blow, but rigged so someone’d know someone had been snooping. And round the back, on a rubble slide, I found rubbish. Bits and pieces. Tins, CARE packages, a stub of candle. Someone’s there, I reckon.”
“This makes no sense,” Reinhardt muttered. “If Leyser’s working for the British, what’s he doing . . . lurking . . . in his old family place in Lichterfelde and living off of CARE packages?”
“Time can do funny things, Father,” Friedrich murmured. His head was down, his eyes on his hands where they moved against each other. He glanced up, and Reinhardt flinched to see his eyes had clouded up again, that plague-ship rumor ghosting behind them. “It brought both of us back to where we lived with Mother.”
Reinhardt gave a tight smile, clasping his hand around the back of Friedrich’s neck. He thought of the way Leyser had trailed him around Berlin—a tramp pushing a handcart—and realized Leyser was doing more than just haunting his old home. He was blending in, as he was supposed to. BOALT was supposed to surreptitiously observe German reactions to the occupation. What better way to do it than as one of the occupied themselves, squatting in a ruin. Reinhardt glanced at Brauer, but his old friend shook his head.
“That’s it from me, Gregor.”
“That’s more than enough, Rudi. Thank you.” Reinhardt stroked his tongue through the gap in his teeth, a thrill of nervousness running through him. “There’s one more thing, Rudi. Now that I think of it. Do you think you could get back to Potsdam one more time? Here’s what I’m thinking . . .”
—
Later, in the night, Reinhardt rolled from his bed where he had not slept. He sat there a while, his back curved as his head hung down, straining at his neck. He went downstairs quietly, sat at the kitchen table under the bleached glow of the light, and folded open the papers he had.
He reread Markworth’s report, dry prose in English, into the unexplained deaths of Prellberg and Lütjens, found dead on a stretch of wasteland behind a barracks. They were never classed as murder, there being no evidence and the men seemed to have fought together. No one had been found for the deaths, much less fingered. The report did not mention the potential of the deaths having been murder. That would have made the murders an inside job. But perhaps the absence of such an accusation spoke louder than inclusion would. The German police had been notified, Reinhardt knew. Mrs. Dommes had inquired, and there had been no report of a murder, only of two deaths put down as accidental.
He flattened Bochmann’s letter out on the table and read it again.
Inspector—if you are reading this, it means that the worst I feared is coming to pass. I have not been completely open or honest with you, but believe me when I say that my desire to protect our association from your intrusion was not the same as any attempt to cover up for the murders of my comrades even if, to you, it may seem one and the same.
One day last year, in late July, a man came to me. This man did not say who he was or whom he represented. Although he was fluent in German, he was with the Allies. With the British, we suspected, because of the way he talked, and what he said. The man sympathized with the plight of Germany, with Germans, with German soldiers. The man said they had to avoid the past, of a situation where Germany was left humiliated, beaten and downtrodden, left revanchist and embittered. The man said that Germans like us had friends among the Allies. That their friends needed to know the tenor of feeling in Germany, that they needed to know what was the mood and spirit among Germans, especially Germans of the caliber of the traditional soldier class.
The man identified himself as Leyser, and he said the Allies—meaning the Western Allies—would look away if von Vollmer and I decided to begin trying to organize things among veterans. He hinted, rather than said outright, that other agents like himself were working elsewhere. He talked to us of our war, the war in the air, in words guaranteed to stir our emotions. And what of the pilots now, Leyser asked? Those knights of the air, how are they adapting to life on the ground, their wings clipped? Summon them, Leyser said. Summon them quietly. Take their measure. Gather information. Bring them together, finally, and speak to them of the future, that it will not always be like this for them, that one day their sacrifices will be remembered, and they will have an honorable place in German society once more. Not only that, Leyser said, but our rights would be returned and, the most alluring of all, the day might still come when Germans would stand with the Western Allies against the Soviet threat.
Leyser was a persuasive man, of middle age. His hair and mustache were dark. He was small, intense, reclusive and secretive, but with charm. He gave von Vollmer and me suggestions, but left us to our own devices, and so the two of us began to work to find all those who had served together. We kept Leyser informed, meeting him from time to time, but more often posting messages to a particular address. If we needed him, which once we did, having run into trouble with the French authorities who had taken a suspicion to our activities, we could write to him at the same address. A day later, two at most, he would appear, and invariably our problems would disappear.
I now realize that Leyser was none other than the Brandenburger my squadron almost killed back in North Africa. I never met the man, and if I knew his name, I had forgotten it, but I remember the incident now. What you said triggered my memory. Leyser has, somehow, returned from the dead within whose ranks we assumed he stood.
You have a copy of the association’s records. I beseech you to use it with care and tact. The men in it are guilty of nothing more than a desire for solidarity, and those who may have been guilty of something more, Leyser has taken care of in his own way. I include as well the address we used to contact Leyser at. I do not know how useful it will be, now, but it is the only way I know of getting in touch with him.
For myself, I must try to leave Berlin, and I ask you not to look for me. I have done nothing wrong, other than to try and help my fellow comrades.
Yours most sincerely,
Heinrich Bochmann
The address was none other than that of the house in Sedanstrasse that Brauer had found. Reinhardt sat there a long while at the table, thinking, remembering, playing words and conversations over and over in his mind. Impressions. Connections. New and old. Friedrich breathed heavily in the other room. Reinhardt’s thoughts refined themselves as he listened to his son sleeping, paring themselves down, becoming options, avenues for action, choices that were hard, others that might be easier.
There was so much uncertainty left in this case, but he felt a narrowing of options and possibilities. There was a gamble to be played, a careful one. Because there were questions of right and wrong at stake, but there was something else.
Something deeper, more primal.<
br />
What a family should do for itself.
What a father owed to his son.
—
The sun was barely up as he left the house, just a banked fire across the eastern horizon that flushed the tops of the steepled clouds above Berlin. He made his way to Neukölln, to the apartment where it had all begun. The building was quiet, only a murmur of voices on the second floor as a mother hushed a crying child. Noell’s apartment was as he had seen it last, only a few days ago. He walked through it, stopping in the kitchen to look at the sink and the one tap, as he remembered. The cloth was still there, caked dry where it was folded over the curve of the pipe.
He stood in the apartment some time. He felt lonely, and he felt absurd, and he felt scared. He left, walking back down, past Ochs’s rooms and across the street into the ruins opposite. He found a piece of masonry to sit upon, laid a few cigarettes on what was left of a mantelpiece, and sat facing the corner, smoking, waiting. A soft scuffle announced them, a foot dragging across dust or rubble. Someone breathed not far away, another just behind him. Reinhardt’s back prickled, the skin of his neck seeming to crinkle from the pressure of unseen eyes, but he forced himself to stay still, to not turn around from his corner. Then the breathing was gone, the shuffle of little feet, too, but he sensed he was not alone. He finished his cigarette, twisting the butt into a piled drift of litter.
“What d’you want, bull?”
“Hello, Leena. I want to thank you and your boys for what you did for me. It was very useful.”
There was silence. “You’re welcome,” Leena said, after a while.
“Can I ask for your help again, Leena?” Reinhardt took the silence for assent. “I need to find that man. The one who should be wearing black. Can you find him for me again, do you think?”
“What d’you want with him?”
“I need to take care of him once and for all. So he can’t hurt you anymore.”
The silence was longer this time, so long, he thought they had left. He strained his ears to hear something, anything, catching only the hollow scrape of the wind through the ruins until he felt her back, again.
“You promise to put him away?”
“I promise, Leena.”
“We know where he is, bull. We’ll take you to him.”
—
There was no one in Ganz’s office with him when Reinhardt knocked and went in, ostensibly to deliver his daily progress report. Ganz looked up from some paperwork, his pudgy face lit from beneath by a small table lamp. The long curve of his mustache glittered as he blinked, his eyes yellow and watery, and Reinhardt was reminded, again, of how old Ganz was.
“So, what do you have to say for yourself today, Reinhardt?” Ganz asked, his head already back down at what he was doing as Reinhardt walked across his narrow office.
“You and I have never liked each other, Ganz, that’s no secret.” Ganz’s eyes flickered up from his desk at Reinhardt’s opening. “Right from the beginning. I thought you were one of those heavy-handed old-timers. You were free with your fists and stick when you were in Vice. Fingers in half the pies in Berlin, but you got your man more often than not, and then you turned into a heavy-hander for the Nazis before retiring.”
Ganz leaned back in his chair and gave a soft belch. “Well, this conversation started on a light footing.”
“I need to tell you something about my investigation. I’m going out on a limb with you, but I think it’s worth it. The Allies have their own games to play in our affairs. This investigation’s no different. The other day, when Whelan and Markworth were hauling me over the coals after von Vollmer complained to them, I got the feeling you stood up for me. Or at least you stood up for some kind of integrity in what we’re trying to do. That we can come out of this with some sense of achievement.”
“‘We’ as in ‘we Germans,’ Reinhardt?” Ganz seemed amused.
“If you wish.”
“I’m never quite sure if you are a German, Reinhardt, or if you even think you are one yourself. So what exactly is it you’re trying to say?”
“I’m appealing to a sense of pride in you, Ganz.”
“I’d have thought you’d do better to appeal to my sense of opportunity.”
“That, too.” Reinhardt swallowed, tongue stroking the gap in his teeth. “But you keep saying how frustrated you are with the police of today. And you’ve told me several times that”—Reinhardt stopped, always embarrassed to speak of himself—“that I get my man, more often than not too.”
“I’m listening.”
“We both know we owe our positions here to the occupiers. The Americans put me back on the force. They found you here already, but you must be doing something right because they let you stay. I need to know, Ganz, what your relationship is to the Allies.”
“Why’s that so important?”
“Was it you who told them about Carlsen? I’ve always wondered how it was they got hold of that information so fast.”
“Get to the point, Reinhardt.”
“I need to play them a tricky hand, Ganz. I want at least to take a stab at getting my man, and getting him in front of German justice instead of Allied expediency.”
“Perhaps I’m a man of integrity, Reinhardt. Or do you hold the conceit that you are the only such man left on the force? In Berlin, perhaps? Possibly in all of Germany?” Reinhardt said nothing. “Did you know, when the Ivans took Berlin, they uprooted the force. Changed nearly every man. Thousands and thousands of new coppers. Half of them didn’t know their arse from their elbow. And did you know that within a few months, before the Amis and the Brits arrived, most of those thousands had gone? Nearly twelve thousand cops out of a force of about fifteen thousand. Gone. Retired. Scarpered. Buggered off. What does that tell you about the force? What does that tell you about the state of the city and the way its occupiers treated it?”
If Ganz wanted an answer from Reinhardt, he gave no sign, only plowing on. “Now, what I thought when the Ivans came looking for me after they took the city, that’s my business. Or maybe I went looking for them. Maybe I took a look at the state of the city and thought I ought to do something about it. Maybe I was just bored. You never liked me? Well, I never liked you either. You were always a crusader for something or other. No one in Vice liked you. But then, there weren’t many of us in Vice who had much time for you lot in the murder squad. But I will say this for you, Reinhardt; you’re a good policeman, and a better detective. Most of what I’ve got to work with now as cops are dumber than a basket of bread. You tell me you are closing in on your man, I believe it. You say you need my help, I say . . . You can trust me. As far as you can throw me.” Ganz leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head as if he were relaxing, but there was a challenge in his eyes. “And I say if you want to pull the wool over the Allies’ eyes, you’d better make it a good effort. Because if it goes wrong, you know that I’ll feed you to them, a piece at a time, if it’ll save me and assuage them. If I’m one thing, Reinhardt, I’m a survivor.”
—
“Noell had a brother?” Collingridge’s face darkened, flattened, lightened in quick succession. “A brother? Reinhardt. You . . . you goddam sonofabitch! You’ve been keeping secrets? From your friends? You krafty Kraut, you!”
“It seemed the right thing to do,” Reinhardt answered, relieved.
“So you really think this’ll work, Reinhardt?” Collingridge asked, as he lit cigarettes for them both.
“It must. There’s a mole in the police, feeding information to the Soviets . . . ”
“A mole? Really? Throw a rock. In any direction. You’ll hit one.”
“And we have to be careful with the British,” Reinhardt continued. “Leyser is working for them. They’re bound up in this. My guess is Leyser’s identity will embarrass them. They’re going to want to cover things up, or at least control what
comes out, like BOALT.”
Collingridge grunted. “BOALT. That Skokov’s got some pretty good contacts. I didn’t know anything about it.”
Collingridge fell silent, but as much as Reinhardt still liked him, he was not duped by Collingridge’s offer of help. He knew the Americans would get something out of this.
“Ganz is one of yours, isn’t he?”
The American said nothing, pinching a shred of tobacco off his lip. He nodded, eventually. “Sort of. The Soviets dragged him out of retirement. We left him there. They don’t seem to know that back before the war, after he retired he became a sort of private investigator. He had good contacts. He did some work for some American companies in the late 1930s. Good work, actually. He reached out to us when we arrived in Berlin.”
“To let you know he was willing to keep playing both sides. It’s what he does best.”
Collingridge shrugged. “To each his own, Reinhardt. I don’t talk to him much, if that helps, and when he does talk, he talks to my boss. For all his . . . his . . . hard-ass exterior,” Collingridge said, stumbling into English when his German would not suffice, “he’s not that bad. He’s got his own thing going, I don’t deny it. We can’t all be broken angels like you.”
Reinhardt’s chin bunched as his tongue stole into the gap in his teeth. “I suppose I deserved that. Thank you, in any case, for agreeing to help me.”
“This works, you’re going to be even more unpopular than you are now.”
“After this, I think I’m finished in Berlin’s police,” Reinhardt murmured. “I’m all done, unless you find me somewhere else. Some cushy job in the American zone, somewhere. No?” Reinhardt smiled to take the sting out of his mockery.
“God, Reinhardt, you can be a bit dreary at times. Just . . . don’t get too far ahead of yourself, all right?”
“I need to be a father, again, David. I don’t think I can do that here, and I don’t think I can do it the right way. I can’t . . . I need to trust my son. I need to trust that he’ll learn to trust me. Otherwise . . . otherwise, he’s just another suspect I’ve got to break down. But he’s not a suspect,” he whispered, twisting out his cigarette. “He’s my son.”
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