The Pale House

by Luke McCallin

  “Drop of this?” asked Dreyer, holding out a flask. From the edge of Dreyer’s breath, it was not his first but much as he was tempted, Reinhardt dared not. It was a weakness he dare not give in to as he once had, not so long ago. “No? You weren’t so averse up in Narvik!”

  “No. I wasn’t.” Despite his reserve, a smile cracked the corner of Reinhardt’s mouth.

  “That’s better!” Dreyer grinned. “Well, don’t mind if I do . . . ?” Dreyer took a long swallow, and his eyes were on Reinhardt when his head came down. “What’s been happening to you, Gregor? Last I heard, you were running Partisan counterintelligence down here. With the Abwehr.” Reinhardt nodded. “Wasn’t there something to do with a general? I heard you got a bit roughed up.”

  “That was sorted out,” he said, shrugging with his mouth.

  “What happened, though?” Dreyer put an ashtray on the table, heavy, amber-colored glass done in complicated curves and inlaid metal.

  Reinhardt sighed. “I was told to investigate a pair of murders. A general was implicated. He was killed. In action. But my investigation upset a lot of people. I got questioned about my role in events.”

  “Who did the questioning?”

  “Who didn’t?” Reinhardt snorted, a cynical edge to it he did not like but could not help. He ran his tongue around his teeth, probing that gap where the interrogators had knocked one out. “The army. Gestapo. The Ustaše wanted a go at me but didn’t get the chance.”

  “They thought there was more? To the general’s death?” Reinhardt nodded. “Was there?”

  “There’s always more,” said Reinhardt, looking away, out the window. Something did not feel right. Too many coincidences, perhaps. Or perhaps he was still too suspicious of things that seemed good, but were not. He took a hard pull on his cigarette, flaring it red. “But it wasn’t what they thought or wanted. They left me alone eventually. Reassigned me to an operational unit.”

  “And now here you are, again. A Feldjaeger, no less.”

  “It was a surprise to me, too.”

  “And tell me, what news of your son?”

  Reinhardt’s mouth tightened, and he gave a tight shake of his head, tapping his cigarette into the ashtray. “None. Nothing. Friedrich is presumed lost at Stalingrad.”

  “Ah, God, Reinhardt.” Dreyer’s hand came up to rest heavily on Reinhardt’s shoulder.

  Reinhardt nodded, paused, dragging the words out, wanting to ask, wanting to know, but not wanting to know too much. “What are you doing now? Last I heard you were in the USSR.”

  Dreyer nodded. “I was. With 2nd Panzer in Russia. Then 4th Army.”

  “I see you’ve been busy,” Reinhardt said, pointing at his throat, looking at Dreyer’s. “Not a lot of judges get to earn one of them.”

  “This?” Dreyer’s hand rose up to his Knight’s Cross. “This is what you get for . . . Never mind. Eastern Front. That’s all that matters.”

  “And now?”

  “War Crimes Bureau.”

  Reinhardt raised his eyebrows. “War Crimes Bureau?” he repeated.

  “For my sins,” muttered Dreyer, his eyes bright on Reinhardt as he tilted his head for another pull at his flask. “Nothing to say? People usually have something.”

  Reinhardt pointed at the flask. “I see you’re still collecting.”

  “What?”

  “You always did like that kind of thing.”

  “Art Deco?” Dreyer smiled, his eyes on the flask. It was a beautiful object, the lines tapered and flared, the mat of its body scrolled with lines of bright metal. “Yes, it’s a nice piece.”

  “That too,” said Reinhardt, pointing at the ashtray. “And your cigarette case and lighter. I’m surprised you still carry this stuff around with you.”

  Dreyer shrugged with his mouth as he stubbed his cigarette out. “We all have our little things, I suppose. Like that watch you always carried. What was it?”

  “A Williamson.”

  “I haven’t seen you with it.”

  Reinhardt shook his head. “The Gestapo smashed it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. It meant a lot to you, I remember.”

  “What brings you down here?” Reinhardt asked, prodding the conversation back on track.

  “The Ustaše,” Dreyer said, shortly, his eyes on Reinhardt. “There’s a feeling in Berlin, in some circles, that we should look into the more—shall we say—egregious activities of our allies. In expectation of certain . . . eventualities.” His eyes were heavy, probing. “You take my meaning, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t need to spell it out,” said Reinhardt, excitement building up.

  “Needless to say, there are those in the army command here who find that a waste of time. Not only a waste of time, but a betrayal, of the Ustaše, of our shared principles and ideologies.”

  “Erdmann?” Reinhardt guessed.

  Dreyer shrugged, picked up the ashtray, and walked back to his desk. “Erdmann possibly. The man’s a ferocious disciplinarian, for all he hides it behind that erudite exterior. Others are worse. I am not, shall we say, exactly the flavor of the day, here, and just about any investigative work is impossible with the current situation.” He lifted up a cardboard folder, extracting from it a piece of paper. “Your report. It interests me.”

  “Why would that be?” Reinhardt managed, quietly.

  “I’ve a strong feeling you came across something I’ve been looking into for a while, now.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Tell me about yesterday. In your own words.”

  Reinhardt nodded, thinking of a man with a goatee and a girl in her father’s arms, and a small space opening up inside, some small connection to a long-ago past. “We came across a massacre in the forest. Two sets of killings. A group of civilians, and three other bodies. I think they were soldiers, but I can’t be sure. The civilians had been shot while the other three had been shot, then burned.

  “Both sets were a cover-up, I think, with the civilians murdered because they saw or heard too much. I found three survivors. An elderly couple, and a boy. I can’t prove it now—if at all, really—but the Ustaše had something to do with it. I know they were up in that area, and then they seemed very concerned when I brought down the survivors. The area is close to where the Partisans now have full control, so whatever it was that took them up there, it was important, and whatever it was they did,” he said, remembering what the defense line commander had said about them being in a roaring good mood, “they were happy about it.”

  He stopped as Dreyer gave a tense little smile, barely a lift of the skin around his eyes, and held up a hand. Reinhardt breathed, aware and embarrassed he had been talking fast, intently, as he sometimes used to about a murder case, and he felt a high thrill unfolding deep inside. “Tell me about the Feldgendarme. The major.”

  “The Feldgendarme?” Dreyer nodded. Reinhardt’s mind floundered, lost down a different path. “What . . . what about him?”

  “You met him at that checkpoint. Run by the Ustaše. Tell me about him. How he seemed.”

  “How he seemed?”

  “How he seemed,” Dreyer agreed.

  Reinhardt frowned, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees. “Let me get something straight, Marcus. You are a war crimes judge. You are here . . .” He paused at Dreyer’s movement of his hand, a placatory palm raised to ward off who knew what evil. “You are here on Berlin’s orders, to examine certain allegations concerning the Ustaše, and you have read a report of mine that mentions them that is of interest to you, and you ask me to describe the behavior of a Feldgendarmerie major in an army penal battalion?”

  Dreyer nodded.

  Reinhardt sat back, crossed a leg, and shook another cigarette from his packet without offering one to Dreyer. He lit it, blew smoke to one side, and waited.

 
“The major’s name is Erwin Jansky. I first came across him in late 1941,” said Dreyer, eventually, his voice flat. “In Poland. Several times, in connection with black market affairs. Then rumors of weapons and ammunition being traded to local resistance fighters in return for treasures, artwork. Something like that. He turned up in an investigation into a Polish resistance massacre of German soldiers. Except, I’m pretty sure it was something else. It was the black market. A ‘business transaction’ that went very wrong. Someone covered it up, and whoever killed the Germans made it look like the Poles did it. A village was shot to death in reprisal for that one . . .

  “I almost had him, but nothing came of it. Like I said. He was clever. Witnesses disappeared, or retracted testimony. Units moved on and apart. The blame fell—rather conveniently, as I said—on local civilians.” Dreyer paused, swallowed, then continued. “I could never build a case against him. I lost sight of him. Then again, in Greece, last year, he resurfaced. It was the same sort of thing as Poland. This time there were rumors of a large sum of gold, bullion taken from the central bank. A cover-up that left many others dead. No direct proof. Again. But I’m sure he was in on it.”

  Reinhardt sat and listened to Dreyer’s flat tone, and thought about those refugees up in the forest, and pictured a Polish village in flames, a gyre of crows above it.

  “If you’ve no proof, why do you think it’s him?”

  Dreyer nodded, his eyes down. “It . . . I had a witness. In Poland. And again in Greece. But they were killed. And . . . Jansky . . . he had, he has, a way . . . of talking to you. Of needling you with the truth that only you and he know.”

  “And that is?”

  “That he gets away with murder. This is why, I ask, Gregor, what did you see?”

  “Did he seem like someone who had just committed murder?”

  Dreyer’s eyes squinted in frustration and he shook his head. “Yes. No. How did Jansky seem, to you?”

  “I was a policeman long enough to recognize a leading question from a jurist, Marcus,” Reinhardt replied. He reached back and took the ashtray from Dreyer’s desk, gritting the cigarette out. “Tell me straight out what it is you suspect. Or what it is you want.”

  Dreyer had the grace to smile. “Touché, Gregor.” He looked elsewhere, and his mouth moved once or twice before he seemed able to summon up the words he was looking for. “It is hard to actually say what I suspect.”

  “We are friends, Marcus. I won’t mock you,” said Reinhardt. He looked at Dreyer, saw how his eyes were heavy, as if worn down by the weight of something seen and unable to forget.

  “Help me, Gregor.” Dreyer loomed suddenly close to Reinhardt, as if searching for something, and Reinhardt found himself leaning backward away from him, searching for a way past the heft of Dreyer’s presence.

  “Catch Jansky?” Dreyer nodded. “At what? What do you have on him? What evidence?”

  “I know. I don’t . . . Threads, Gregor. Pull hard enough . . .”

  “It might unravel. I know, Marcus. It’s worked in the past. But the past is not here.”

  “Please, Gregor . . .”

  “Marcus, it’s not that I don’t want to help you, but how can I?”

  “Please, Gregor.”

  “I can’t help you. This isn’t Berlin, my friend.”

  Dreyer’s eyes swiveled up heavily. “What does that mean?”

  “It means we no longer have those luxuries of law, or process, or procedure to guide and protect us. It means we are out on an edge, Marcus, and we survive by balancing upon it. I can’t . . . I can’t see how sacrificing that edge can help. For what cause? For a Feldgendarme who may or may not be corrupt?” Reinhardt shook his head, though it pained him to do it, to see his friend pushed so far down, and his words only helping him to push him further. “Be realistic,” he said, pausing before the sudden, stark expression of need in Dreyer’s face. “What is it you’re not telling me? Marcus?”

  Dreyer’s face twisted, a twitch pulling the side of his mouth down, as if a word weighed so heavily in there. “I’ve been after Jansky a long time. I’ve been . . . ridiculed, shall we say, for my interest in Jansky. But I know . . . I know . . . he’s as guilty as sin.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Marcus. But—”

  “It’s hard to trust people, Gregor. Trust them with what you know. Or think. I thought . . . I want to trust you.”

  How to say this? Reinhardt struggled. How to argue a point you do not believe, he thought, sadly, remembering his conversation with Benfeld up in the forest. Murder was murder, was it not? Dreyer believed this Jansky might have had something to do with it. He saw smoke, and there might be a fire, but there were so many fires, now. The whole world ablaze, and where did Dreyer’s flame fit in that vast conflagration? Sometimes, it was just best to cut things short, and so he rose to his feet. “I’m sorry. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the resources. I don’t have the . . .” Authority. He bit the word back, but they both heard it, that wretched symbol of the world they both inhabited. Reinhardt sighed, looking away, eyes running blindly into the corner of the room, and seeing instead a logged-out swath of forest, seeing it fading away.

  Dreyer’s head lowered to his chest, and he seemed to fold in on himself. Reinhardt left him there, pinned by whatever weight bestrode his mind, and walked back out through the offices, past an orderly who rose to his feet, past the open door to Erdmann’s office, where the judge glanced up from a sheaf of papers, and back outside, pulling the winter down inside as far as he could.

  “Sir. Sir! Wake up, sir.”

  Reinhardt dragged himself out of sleep, blinking up at the ceiling . . .

  “What?” he asked, through a gummed-up mouth, turning to see who had woken him up. A Feldjaeger corporal stood by the camp bed.

  “Colonel Scheller’s orders, sir. You’re to report to him in operations, immediately.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Reinhardt, sliding his legs over the side of the bed. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s been a shooting. Two of our men are dead, a third wounded.”

  Working the sleep from his mouth, Reinhardt walked quickly through the halls of the barracks, back to operations, following the Feldjaeger corporal. By his watch, it was just past three thirty in the morning, and the corridors were quiet. He had been asleep no more than a couple of hours after finishing his shift, and his head felt jagged, full of broken glass.

  Scheller was finishing up a telephone call when Reinhardt arrived. He handed over a piece of paper. “That address. Now. There’s a Feldgendarmerie car waiting for you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “One of our patrols got shot up. I want to know who and why. Soon as you can.”

  “Who called it in?” Reinhardt scanned the address. Somewhere in Logavina. He walked quickly to Scheller’s map, confirming his memory that it was one of the old Ottoman neighborhoods on the north side of the city, quite high up.

  “Feldgendarmerie. They heard the shots.”

  “What were our men doing up in Logavina?” He frowned, the jagged edges inside his head shifting, smoothing, as he came awake.

  “Ask Lainer. He had the patrol schedule.”

  “He’s there?”

  “He should be. And so should you. Move!”

  Reinhardt ran through the barracks, back out to the courtyard. A kubelwagen was waiting with its engine running, a Feldgendarme behind the wheel, and Benfeld smoking a cigarette. The lieutenant crushed the butt out as Reinhardt came out, and opened the back door of the kubelwagen.

  “Mind if I come?”

  Reinhardt shrugged as he ducked into the car. “If you’ve nothing better to do, by all means.”

  Benfeld grinned and skipped around to the passenger seat, looking none the worse for wear after the day he must have had. The driver gunned the engine, and the vehicle took off fast, ou
t of the barracks and back toward the city. The front end skipping across the cobbled ice around the Town Hall, the kubelwagen hauled itself up Sagrdzije Street, then onto Logavina, working higher into Sarajevo’s fringes, up to the street the colonel had identified, slowing as it came to a Feldgendarmerie checkpoint thrown across the road. Beyond it, a couple more vehicles, including an ambulance, were parked. Lights bobbed up and down, the glare from flashlights as men moved around a kubelwagen immobilized with its back left corner against a wall, pointing up the hill, a stone’s throw beyond the Feldgendarmerie checkpoint. One or two lanterns were held by, it seemed, civilians, who stood huddled and shivering against the side of the road under the guard of a pair of Feldgendarmes.

  Reinhardt left the car behind, walking quickly up past the checkpoint, pointing to his armband as a couple of them made a move to stop him. He recognized Lainer’s silhouette against the lights, the tall Feldjaeger standing stock-still, his hands gripped behind his back. He turned as Reinhardt came up alongside him, nodding.

  “Good. I’m glad you’re here. This is a fucking zoo. Maybe you can start to make sense of all this.”

  Reinhardt looked at the car, at the man moving around it, at the ambulance, medics shifting the surviving Feldjaeger onto a stretcher.

  “This is a crime scene, Lainer,” he said, for the second time in two days. “Scheller asked me to take care of this. So I’ll take care of it. Agreed on that?” Lainer’s jaw bunched, but Reinhardt knew it was just the stress. “Very well. Then just trust me.” The other captain nodded, and he seemed to deflate a little, as if shedding a burden.

  Reinhardt stepped forward, made his voice as deep as it could. “All you men, stop what you are doing. Immediately. IMMEDIATELY!” There was stillness, and one or two flashlights swung toward him. “All flashlights, aimed at the ground, thank you.” He took a step forward. “My name is Captain Reinhardt, Feldjaegerkorps. As of this minute, I am taking over command of this situation. With the exception of the medics, anyone who is not called Reinhardt, please come and stand behind me. Now, please. NOW!”