The Pale House

by Luke McCallin

  “Then don’t forget it.”

  “God forbid I’d forget that,” snapped Reinhardt, still rocked by this news. “I mean, just look at all we’ve accomplished.”

  “Ah, Reinhardt,” sighed Koenig. “Still looking for that white horse.”

  “No,” snapped Reinhardt. “That horse bolted a long time ago.”

  “Then in the Feldjaegerkorps, you might just find it. Look for what you can do where you will be. And should one of us need you—or another comrade who thinks like us—then you will be able to help him.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Ah, Christ, Reinhardt.” Koenig removed his cap, running his hands over thin hair plastered wetly to his head. “What do I know? What do any of us know? I’m just a glorified administrator, pushing paper all day long. How did they find out about you, anyway?”

  “They told me the general recommended me.”

  Koenig snorted in the darkness. “That cunning old bastard.”

  “I suppose he thinks . . .” Reinhardt trailed off. He did not know what the general thought.

  “I suppose he thinks he’s doing you a favor. And maybe he is. Gets you away from here. Gets one more of us away from him.”

  “So. It’s over.”

  Koenig nodded his head. “It’s over for now. Here. We’re all done here, Reinhardt. Not that we ever did much. I suppose you have that much right.”

  “Attention!” A flashlight flickered on, sweeping across the hanging streaks of drizzle in the night air. “You two over there! What are you doing?”

  Reinhardt started, looking around. A Feldgendarmerie patrol had come to a stop next to them. “Talking, thank you.”

  The Feldgendarme lieutenant at the head of the patrol bristled at the affront he heard in Reinhardt’s tone. “What are you doing here, I said?”

  “Just talking, Lieutenant.”

  “About what? Sir?” the Feldgendarme said, coming close enough to see Reinhardt’s rank.

  Reinhardt looked back at him, squinting past the flat glare of the Feldgendarme’s flashlight, at the slant in the man’s eyes, at the harm this man could do, and saw himself, standing there looking back at someone like that Feldgendarme, and for a moment he grasped a sense of the possibilities that could open to him as a Feldjaeger. The possibilities Koenig had hinted at. He swallowed hard, his mind reaching after that sudden glimpse, and offered his transfer orders, making sure to pass them with his left hand. “About that.”

  The Feldgendarme’s flashlight fixed on the paper, reflected light casting his face into macabre relief. The light wavered, sought Reinhardt’s wrist, back to the paper. He handed it back to Reinhardt, straightened, and saluted.

  “Very sorry for disturbing you, sir. And . . . and good luck.”

  They watched the patrol walk away, and then Koenig extended his hand.

  “You are right. I should not stay. Who knows how that might have turned out?”

  “Yes. You were right, I suppose.” Reinhardt gave a small, tired smile to the darkness, shook Koenig’s hand. “It has been an honor.”

  “Apology accepted, Reinhardt,” Koenig replied, a smile in his voice, as they shook. “Do us proud. And don’t forget, this is not all that we are.”

  Reinhardt walked slowly down the canal’s embankment and thought of Sarajevo, of the long riverside walk there, the Ottoman bridges that arced over the froth-flecked rush of the Miljacka. He felt himself losing control, felt the sting of tears, and he could not tell whether it was fury or the sense of impotence that triggered them. His hand stole to his breast, to the Iron Cross pinned there. He gripped it until his hand hurt, his mind awhirl between the needling cold of a Viennese winter and the sodden chill of that French field where he had won it, and as the Cross’s edges bit into his fingers he contemplated, for the first time, getting rid of it.

  “This is not all that I am,” he whispered, echoing Koenig’s last words to him, their group’s motto. Every time he said it, he wanted to feel ridiculous, trite, but every time he did, he felt the truth of those words, and he realized then, truly, how angry he was. With himself. With everyone. Angry at what, he could barely articulate, standing there in the darkness with the hum of the water next to him, feeling more alone than he had felt in a very long time.

  Hurry up and wait, he thought, turning further in on himself. He had been doing a lot of that, lately. They all had. As much as he and the others—good men all, who believed they could do something worthy of what could be called “resistance”—had wanted to act, and as much as he tried to believe otherwise, he had accomplished nothing. None of them had, and it was so far away from where he had been that night on a Bosnian mountain when he had felt a new truth settle into him, filling all those places he had known were empty, and showing him that all those other places within he had never known had emptied out as well.

  How fast those possibilities had faded before the dead weight of the world, though, and how sharing his dreams with like-minded men only for nothing to come of them save furtive talk, tentative plans, and a creeping itch that someone was watching them had worn him down. What use was resistance that never declared itself, he asked himself, again? Not much good, he answered himself. Again. Despite all their talk about dissent, to opposition, to resistance, Reinhardt was powerfully aware he had failed to take the step he might have, and perhaps should have. And now, where before he had fancied life would sometimes catch on the frayed edges of his character, now he felt sanded down, slumped, like a candle that had all but burned itself out.

  He looked at the canal a long time as it unfurled before him, then up at the sparkle of rain out of the deep dark of the sky, and wondered how it had all come to this.

  SARAJEVO, LATE MARCH 1945

  On the trail of rumors of a band of deserters, the Feldjaeger came across the massacre toward the end of the afternoon. The valley lay hunched into a bitter wind, wet and raw with the promise of rain beneath a heavy sky of mottled, gray clouds. The little column of cars lurched down a muddy trail, through the earthen reek beneath the trees, and into a wide clearing. Forged iron-hard by the winter, the ground was heavy beneath their wheels, rutted, strewn with rocks and stones that turned the vehicles from their paths as they slid and slithered to a stop.

  In the front car, Reinhardt raised his hand and engines clattered still, the silence of the forest flowing in and over them. He stood up slowly, pulling his scarf down around his throat and resting his hands on the kubelwagen’s windshield. The clearing was wide, well more than a long stone’s throw across, sodden grass slumped this way and that across its trampled width. One side of the clearing, the downslope side, had been extensively logged, the forest pushed well back from an expanse of stumps and mud all tangled with broken branches and scattered foliage, and looking for all the world like what Reinhardt remembered of no-man’s-land. Three huts stood hard against the forest, little more than shacks, doors kicked in and rags hanging from the windows. A row of shapes were mounded on the grass, bodies, heaped one beside the other. Smoke dulled the sharp lines of the trees, rising up from somewhere behind the huts.

  A kubelwagen was parked by the shacks, four Feldjaeger gathered around it. One of them stepped forward as Reinhardt climbed out of his car. No salutes were exchanged. It was not just the fraternity within the Feldjaeger that limited it, but out here, where anyone could be looking at them, a salute was just another way of painting a target on your chest.

  “What do you have, Frenchie?” asked Reinhardt.

  “It’s not pretty,” answered Lieutenant Benfeld. A Franco-German from Alsace, he was a tall young man, taller than Reinhardt, very solid, hair cut close to the block of his head and his cheeks flushed red from the cold.

  “You think it’s them?”

  “Shall I show you?”

  Reinhardt turned to give an order to his sergeant, then nodded as Benfeld hitched the strap o
f his StG 44 assault rifle over his shoulder. An engine revved, and Reinhardt glanced back to see the Horch swing out of the line, trundling to one side with Sergeant Priller crouched behind the mounted machine gun that he began tracking across the clearing’s edge.

  Reinhardt followed Benfeld around the side of the huts to a roughly square-shaped expanse of ashen earth, bounded and studded with the warped and blackened stubs that were all that was left of the walls of a hut. Smoke curled up around the wood like flowing water, and heat shimmered the air, making ripples of the forest beyond. Three bodies lay across the middle of the hut, debris heaped around and across them. The bodies were charred black, the skulls twisted back and up and the mouths open in silent rictus, and the smell of burned meat and cloth was heavy in the air.

  Kneeling by the first body, Reinhardt gently placed his finger on the hole in the center of the skull’s forehead. He shifted the body over to look at the back of the head, spotting the smaller hole there, where a gun had been pressed up against the man’s head. A similar hole starred the bone of the second, and when he looked over at Benfeld, the other man nodded, his finger circling the forehead of the third.

  Reinhardt put his hand on the corpse’s shoulder and pressed, tamping down a jolt of nausea as he did so. The skin felt hard, cracked and crisped like baked earth, and there was no give beneath the pressure. Nothing came off but a smear of ash that traced the whorl of his fingertip.

  “Slightly overdone, wouldn’t you say, sir?”

  Reinhardt ignored Benfeld’s macabre humor, pushed his fingers into a pile of ash, and watched the prints they left, figuring the hut had burned down no more than a few hours ago. He ran his eyes slowly around and over all he could see, looking for he knew not what, until he saw it. Twisted, coiled, blackened, a closely wound pile of . . . something. Not wood, or stone, or metal. Not flesh. He peered closer, lifting up what he had seen between thumb and forefinger.

  It was clothing, a piece of a sleeve. He frowned, squinting closer, feeling the weave of the cloth. He spiraled a finger through the ash, feeling something hard and firm. He pulled it out, whatever it was crackling, cracking. He went more slowly, blowing it as clean as he could of ash and filth. Some kind of stiff fabric, burned black.

  He looked across the corpses, then over at Benfeld.

  “What else did you find to call this in?”

  Benfeld gave a small smile. “This, sir,” he said, holding out something warped and blackened.

  It was roughly the size of his palm, twisted up at both ends.

  “If you ask me,” said Benfeld, “I’d say that was a piece of a German soldier’s tunic. There. See? The raised pattern? It looks like an epaulette.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Reinhardt, quietly.

  “And these,” Benfeld added, holding out his hand. He held a handful of buttons in his palm, burned black by the fire. Reinhardt picked one up between his fingertips, rubbing his thumb across it. The button was metal, the surface pebbled. Then another.

  “These two are strange, sir,” said Benfeld, pointing them out.

  Reinhardt picked them up, looking closely, rubbing away the covering of black ash. “This one has Roman numerals. And this one standard numbers.” He bounced them on his palm, looking at the lieutenant. “Interesting.”

  “That’s what I thought too, sir. The numbers denote infantry companies. The Roman numerals . . .”

  “. . . are for artillery batteries,” finished Reinhardt.

  “More than one unit, sir. Deserters. Almost certainly.”

  “Probably.” He turned in place, looking toward the other bodies. “What about them?”

  “Any of our business, sir?”

  “Won’t know until we look, will we?” answered Reinhardt. Benfeld still made Reinhardt nervous as there were two sides to him. A happy-go-lucky one, and a cold, focused one. It was the focused one that had won him an Iron Cross at Sebastopol, and the Knight’s Cross at Kursk, and it was that side that looked out now.

  Reinhardt turned away and walked over to the bodies, glad to put Benfeld’s eyes behind him, glad as well for the cold that held the smell of blood and waste down, somewhat. He stood and looked, his mouth bunched tight. There were maybe a dozen bodies there, lying faceup with bullet wounds across their torsos. They were, it seemed, of no particular type, other than they wore the rags and had the look of refugees. Their skin was etched with grime and chapped with cold, and their faces drawn long with hunger. Some had been old, some younger. A few had been men, more had been women, and there was one girl, barely into her adolescence, lying hunched into the body of an older man, maybe her father, as if in the last moments he had tried to shield her. Reinhardt looked at her a moment, hoping her end had come fast, and her killers had not taken their time with her.

  Reinhardt let out a long breath he had not realized he was holding and knelt by the body nearest him. He put a finger to the blood that had welled and spattered around the wounds in the chest. The blood was thick, but it was still liquid. He put the back of his hand to the neck, then squirmed and slid it under the clothes the body wore, feeling across the torso. He lifted one of the arms, moved it, bending it by the elbow, did the same to the next two, then duck-walked across to the next, repeating his examination. He shifted one of the bodies onto its side, then another, checking for signs of lividity, an indication as to when they might have been killed.

  His eyes moved slowly across the massacre. He looked at the bodies, trying to work out who they had been, but he could not even tell from their dress what their confession had been—Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim—which might have given some insight, however small, into who might have done this. His eyes passed slowly from body to body, as if he sought to give them some final measure of respect, or remembrance, something more than the blind stare of the slate-gray sky above. His gaze moved from body to body, face to face, coming to an elderly man with a goatee, passing on, then back. He looked at the man a moment longer, then stepped back, eyes tracking across the row, seeing how and where they had fallen. He stepped back farther still, looking left and right through the grass, until he came to a spot not far from the bodies that seemed more trampled. He moved sideways and knelt to worm his hands through the grass, his fingers finally closing around something cold and cylindrical.

  Steps whispered through the grass, and Reinhardt looked up as Benfeld stopped next to him. “Any of our business?” he asked, again.

  Reinhardt felt cold. Benfeld was hard, single-minded, a good soldier, but he was new to the Balkans, and he could not see what Reinhardt saw, nor understand the memories that surged suddenly across his mind.

  “Sir?” asked Benfeld. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I’m trying to . . . I’m wondering what happened, here, Lieutenant.”

  “Why?”

  “Professional curiosity.”

  “Professional . . .” Benfeld paused, his lips pursing as he looked around the clearing. “You can make more sense of this than a bunch of civvies in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “This may be depressingly familiar to you, Lieutenant. To all of us. But, fundamentally, this is a crime scene,” Reinhardt said. “As such, it has things to say.” Benfeld said nothing, although the question was writ large in his eyes. “I used to be a detective, Frenchie. Berlin Kriminalpolizei.” He watched the change in the way Benfeld looked at him. “It’s been a while,” he said, “but some things never change.”

  “Like?”

  “They’re not long dead, for starters,” Reinhardt replied, fishing through his pockets for his cigarettes. “A few hours, no more. And the one with the goatee is interesting.”

  “The what?” Benfeld’s eyes tracked across the bodies. “What’s with him?”

  “Look at him,” said Reinhardt, lighting a cigarette and tossing away the match.

  “An old man.”

&n
bsp; “The man’s cheeks are barely covered in stubble, and the goatee is thick and white. It’s looked after. The man shaved, recently. He took some care of himself. Can you imagine a man living up here who would try to keep a goatee in such conditions? And then look at his clothes. Quite different from the others. Worn, but not ragged. Dirty, but not filthy. Of a better cut and quality.” City clothes, he realized around a deep lungful of smoke, not the bundles of rags and wool the others wore. Reinhardt frowned, kneeling next to the body, looking closer. “He’s wearing a wristwatch. Which no one’s pinched, by the way. And his hands,” he continued, turning them over. “Soft. He’s no refugee. Or if he is, he hasn’t been one long. In any case, he’s most certainly not a peasant. He’s from the city.”

  Reinhardt stood up, pointing with both arms along a rough line that ran along the feet of the dead refugees. “See how they lie? Firing squad,” Reinhardt said. “Shell cases there. There. There,” he continued. “Those are just the ones I can spot.” He opened his hand, showing what he had picked up. “Nine-by-nineteen-millimeter. Parabellums.”

  “Anyone could have fired those bullets,” said Benfeld, shifting his hands on the strap of his assault rifle.

  “I didn’t say otherwise, Lieutenant,” said Reinhardt, a small smile on his face, taking another draw on his cigarette. “But the chances are those people were killed by bullets fired from an MP 40. More than one, I would think. I wonder, though . . .” he said.

  He walked back over to the three burned bodies, knelt by one of them, and, clamping his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, placed the shell casing against the hole in the back of its head, trying to see if it would fit. “Too big,” he muttered, squinting around the smoke that curled into his eyes. He took his pistol out of his holster, ejected the magazine, and removed one of the bullets, doing the same thing, twirling the shell into the hole, tamping down on a moment of squeamishness as he did so. The bullet fit much better. He tried on the other two as well. “Pistol shots, most likely,” he said, glancing over at Benfeld.