The Pale House

by Luke McCallin

  Somehow, he found himself back in the almost-empty Feldjaeger operations room. He checked his watch. Despite all that had happened, it was still early morning, not even five o’clock. On a table in front of him was the little stack of soldbuchs, and the sheet of paper. He had not even realized he had taken them out, and he leafed again through the little books, from tan cover to tan cover, over and past the entries in neat little hands that told the stories, to those who knew how to read them properly, of the soldiers’ lives these books had belonged to. Some of it Reinhardt could read and understand, but he was sure there was something wrong in them; he was just not able to pick up on what it might be.

  From outside the building came a roll of gunfire, starting slow, then picking up. Dull thuds of artillery rang bass counterpoint through it all. Men in the operations room exchanged looks, put their heads back down. Reinhardt sat and listened, but although the gunfire slackened, it did not stop, coming from the north, again.

  Reinhardt felt himself sinking, as if he were starting to collapse inward into himself, and he knew he had to move before the world sped up to the rhythm of that gunfire and left no room for him. He knew he held one of the keys in his hands, but he needed someone to unlock it for him.

  Despite the early hour, the barracks halls were as full as ever with the hustle of men and the bellow of orders. In the main operations room he found the directions he wanted, to the administration offices, although the harassed officer who spoke to him wished him luck at finding anyone there. When he arrived, Reinhardt found the officer was correct. The offices were empty, a slew of papers across the floors, tables and chairs in disarray, and a smell of burning in the air from a wastebasket that still smoked.

  Reinhardt’s face curled up in frustration, before another idea occurred to him, and he raced back through the tumult of the halls, back to operations. In one of the offices that split off the main room was military intelligence. His old stomping ground, he thought ironically. The suite of offices was full, a haze of cigarette smoke hanging over a dozen or so men all talking excitedly into telephones, radios, with each other. He caught the eye of one of the men and told him he needed to speak with someone in counterintelligence, preferably someone knowledgeable about documentation, or more precisely, forged documentation. An officer was pointed out to him, and Reinhardt crossed the room, weaving his way through a tangle of wires and limbs and boxes of papers.

  “I need a favor,” Reinhardt said.

  The officer, a fellow captain, looked up from stuffing papers into a box, his eyes bouncing from Reinhardt’s face to his gorget, flickering across Reinhardt’s decorations, and plunging down to his armband. His eyebrows rose, and he straightened. “Anything for an esteemed member of our Feldjaegerkorps.”

  Reinhardt extended his hand. “Reinhardt,” he said. “Got somewhere quiet we can talk for five minutes?”

  “Prien,” replied the officer. “I’ll give you ten if you have a smoke. Over here.” He pointed, leading Reinhardt to a corner of the room where there was a small niche in the wall. “What can I do for you?”

  “I want you to look at something for me,” said Reinhardt, as he lit cigarettes for them both. “Know anything about soldbuchs? I think I’ve got some forgeries here, and I would appreciate it if you took a look at them.”

  Prien’s eyebrows went up as Reinhardt handed over the books. “Interesting,” he murmured, flicking each of them open, quickly, pausing at Keppel’s, his thumb stroking over the place where there should have been a photo. “And what makes you think they’re forgeries?”

  “We came across them during an anti-Partisan sweep,” Reinhardt lied around a mouthful of smoke.

  “If it’s true, this could be a worrying development,” Prien said, taking a magnifying glass from a pocket. “Give me a minute, let’s see . . .”

  Reinhardt watched as he examined each of the pages of the books, and his five minutes stretched to ten, and on. He kept his patience under control as Prien turned page after page, until he had worked his way through the three of them, and straightened up with a wince and a hand in his back.

  “Well?”

  “Well, these two,” he said, holding up Abler’s and Maywald’s, “they’re not fakes. They’re originals, but they’re replacements. See, here,” he said, pointing to the top of the first page. “That number? It’s the code for a replacement book. So, if they were being used for nefarious purposes, you would need to find the original records for which these are replacements.”

  “Interesting,” Reinhardt murmured. “What about the other one. For Keppel.”

  “I’m not sure about that one. Other than that the photo’s missing, there’s nothing I can see wrong with it, or unusual. If it was part of some shady business it could be it was a trial run. Maybe they tried to rework it and failed. I mean, it’s not impossible to forge entries, or alter them, but it takes time, and you’d need a pretty good forger and some special equipment.”

  “Or maybe they found a pretty good forger, and he didn’t finish whatever he started.”

  “There’s always that.”

  Reinhardt shook his head, his spirits deflating. “Well . . . thank you, I suppose.”

  “Hang on, hang on. There’s a few bits and pieces that are interesting. Let’s put aside this one—Keppel’s—for a moment, and look at the other two.” He spread them both open at the cover and first page. “All’s in order. Serial numbers of the books, dog tag numbers, ranks, promotions, names, blood type, gas mask size, and military identification number. Nothing jumps out, right? Next pages, personal details, age, place of birth, height, physical appearance and distinguishing characteristics . . .”

  “Abler had a scar,” noted Reinhardt.

  “Yes. It’s mentioned later in his medical record. Shrapnel wound on the neck. But staying with these first pages, we have civilian professions—a plumber and a carpenter, apparently—next of kin . . .”

  “Both blank,” said Reinhardt, looking between them.

  “Yes. No loved one waiting for them at home. Parents deceased as well, as there’s nothing there either. Religion, both Catholic. Shoe sizes. Always found that one funny. And here is where we have further proof of these being replacements. Here, just above the unit notarization, we have the notation ‘replacement for lost soldbuch,’ and the signing officer.” Reinhardt squinted down at the signature. “Don’t bother. Signing officers usually sign like a doctor on a prescription. Only a nurse can read it, and we don’t have any nurses around. Got another cigarette?”

  Reinhardt handed one over. “We can’t read the name, but we can see the title. In both cases, it reads ‘company commander.’”

  “Doesn’t mean much. Those things were usually put in with a stamp. Anyone could do it. No, what’s interesting is this, here,” he said, pointing to a faded stamp next to the company commander’s signature, a round shape with Gothic text and an eagle and swastika, and at the bottom, the name of the unit. “Can you see?”

  “‘999th Field Punishment Battalion,’” said Reinhardt, his eyes flicking between the two.

  “If you look on the first page, you’ll see both Abler and Maywald of course started their military careers in different units. That’s normal. Soldiers transfer. But in both these cases,” he said, flicking to the pages in the soldbuchs that listed the soldiers’ assignments, “they were sentenced to a term in a penal unit. Abler in October 1944, Maywald in January this year. But in both cases, these replacement books were issued within days of each other.”

  “In March 1945,” said Reinhardt, nodding as he followed Prien’s finger. The information was laid out, right there, but it took someone with a different set of eyes to point it out.

  “You suspect foul play, right? Here’s another interesting thing. These two are replacement books for soldiers who joined up, respectively, in 1940 and 1942. Back then, when these two joined up . . . do you remember how t
he old soldbuchs looked? The old soldbuchs . . .”

  “. . . did not have photographs,” Reinhardt finished, thinking of his own book.

  “Exactly. Photographs were introduced as a security measure in 1943.”

  “So, let me understand this,” said Reinhardt, his excitement mounting. “These two soldbuchs are replacements for older books, either lost or destroyed, we can’t know. Both the original books were issued prior to 1943, therefore no photographic correlation of the holders is possible between the originals, if they existed, and these. These were issued in March 1945, by the 999th Field Punishment Battalion.”

  “Correct,” said Prien, around a mouthful of smoke. “And both these men are Volksdeutsche.”

  “Volksdeutsche?” Reinhardt repeated.

  “Ethnic Germans, yes. Abler was born in . . .” Prien flicked back through the pages. “Here. Abler is from Marburg, Slovenia. And Maywald is from Troppau, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.”

  “What are the odds . . . ?” It had been staring him in the face from the beginning.

  “Whatever they are, rather low, I would have thought,” Prien answered.

  “Thanks, you’ve been very helpful. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea what these are?” Reinhardt hoped, pointing to the six-digit numbers next to the handwritten names on his list.

  “Nope, not a clue.” Prien smiled.

  “Ah, well, it was worth a try.”

  Prien nodded. “But him there,” he said, pointing at a fellow officer, “he’s a lawyer. He might know.”

  Everything was linked, Reinhardt knew. He had known that as a policeman. He had known it as an intelligence officer. Paper begat paper. Forms and rules created cages of procedure. A web that wove into and around and through your life, strand after strand. You had to know how it worked, and how to get around it, and where to look for the holes in it that ought not to have been there. Blocked on one path, you looked on another. A birth certificate, a high school diploma, a medical record, an identity document, a driving license, a police record, an army soldbuch, or a judicial record. These became links in a chain, a chain that made up a life, there to be read and dissected for those who knew how, and those who needed to.

  Every army unit had a department for administration staffed by an adjutant, often a legal officer. Like the one Prien pointed out to him, a man with a fussy air. He had taken one harassed look at Reinhardt’s paper and told him what those numbers were, and those numbers had led him here, to an all-but-abandoned section of the barracks, to a warehouse filled with packing cases.

  Paper begat paper. It was a sludge that flowed from one desk to another. Some took a mania to it and could not live without it. Others hated it and did their best to ignore it. Others knew how to use it to beat the system it was supposed to serve, but whatever you did, the paper remained. Maybe filed, maybe hidden, maybe forgotten or misplaced, but it was there. You just had to know where and how to look.

  The room in front of him was stacked with rows of crates and boxes, the wood colored dark yellow by the ceiling’s dim electric light. Despite the cold, there was a warmth to the air, the smell of wood and varnish and paper. Of records, files, proceedings, case studies . . . It was all here, and although part of Reinhardt was astonished anyone would try to save this, another part of him knew the value of what he was looking at.

  “Where are they, then?” Reinhardt asked.

  The sergeant with him looked up and down at crates stenciled with numbers and names, back down at the sheaf of papers stuck to his clipboard. “Boxes from the State House should be here. There!”

  The two of them heaved down half a dozen boxes, and the sergeant levered them open with a crowbar to reveal files in blue and yellow cardboard folders. The sergeant looked at it askance. “You sure you’ll be able to finish, sir?”

  “If it’s in order, yes, Sergeant, and you give me a hand.”

  “Yes, sir, but . . .”

  “Whatever it is, it’ll wait. You take that box. We’re looking for these files,” Reinhardt said, showing him the paper with its numbers next to each name.

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, just perilously short of a sigh. “What is it we’re looking at anyway, sir?”

  “Court-martial records, Sergeant.”

  “That’d be the files from the court-martial office, sir?” Reinhardt stopped, looking up, and nodded. “They’re not here, sir. They’re in the annex. It all came over from the State House earlier this morning. There was a real mess there last night. Someone got killed and it messed up the shipments. There’s been hell to pay, apparently. Someone’s been wanting them all morning.”

  It took a moment to register, but when it did, the sergeant stepped back from the look that must have been in Reinhardt’s face, but he was past caring. He moved fast over to the sergeant, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder, pushing him back into the row of crates.

  “Who has been asking?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Honest. Someone on the phone. Gave the lieutenant hell until we found the boxes. And there was a Feldgendarme here as well.”

  “Show me this annex.”

  The sergeant took him back outside, past a squad of soldiers and impressed civilians heaving crates up into trucks, their feet squelching in the wet gravel of the courtyard. Around the corner, there was a long, brick extension to the barracks’ main walls. The sergeant heaved a heavy set of sliding doors partway open, and Reinhardt followed him into the gloom of the extension. The building had a sense of space to it, and the brickwork was badly done, light stabbing through chinks in the walls and holes in the roof, picking through the web of rafters and crossbeams. The sergeant flicked a switch, and bulbs flickered lazily to life, the light wavering as if it had itself forgotten how to shine.

  “Here, I think,” said the sergeant, walking with his torso cocked sideways as he scanned the writing on a row of crates piled haphazardly, but then Reinhardt’s breath quickened, and he stepped past him.

  “Thank you, Sergeant, I have what I need.”

  The sergeant gave him the crowbar and left. Reinhardt looked at the three boxes. He had seen them before, he realized, neatly packed, in the office in the State House belonging to Erdmann. His finger reached out and touched the stencil that read Court-Martial Office, and he levered the first crate open. It was books, legal tomes and such. He pulled a few out, rifled through them to be sure that was all the box contained, then moved to the second one, heaved off the lid, and stopped, his breath shortening.

  They were files, three stacks of them, each of them with the eagle and swastika, each of them with a name and case number. A six-digit case number. He lifted them out pile by pile and began to try to make some sense of the numbers, hoping for something sequential, and found one, which he pulled out of the stack. The number corresponding to Werner Janowetz. He opened it and found the proceedings of a court-martial. He scanned through the particulars of Janowetz. Volksdeutsche, from the Sudetenland. The charge was absenteeism. The verdict was transfer to a penal battalion. The 999th Balkans Field Punishment Battalion. He got to the unanimous judgment of the jury, and froze.

  The presiding judge was Dreyer.

  He read further, seeing the sentences confirmed by Herzog, advised by Erdmann.

  He swallowed, put the file to one side, and kept going. He found two more in quick succession, understanding that in this, as in so much of this case, the trick was to hide what was being hidden in plain sight.

  He found Benirschke and Sedlaczek’s files. Both were Volksdeutsche, Benirschke from Slovenia and Sedlaczek from the Vojvodina in Serbia, near the Hungarian border, Reinhardt knew. Seymer was next, an Italian from the South Tyrol, and then Berthold, born in Romania.

  All transcripts of courts-martial that led to sentencing in a penal battalion.

  All with Dreyer as the presiding judge.

  Not Erdmann.


  He had been sure it would be Erdmann.

  He felt sick. He did not know what to make of this, but he had all of a sudden a better idea of the shape of what was out there. It had come that bit closer, looming larger, that much more menacing.

  A scuff behind him was all the warning he had. That, and a muttered curse, then an order.

  “Stand up slowly.”

  “Careful. I do not want his blood all over the documents.”

  Reinhardt craned his neck around. Metzler stood behind him with a pistol, and behind the Feldgendarme was Erdmann, his erudite eyebrows arched over the silver frames of his spectacles.

  “I said stand up.”

  Reinhardt stood.

  “Turn around.”

  Reinhardt turned, slowly. As he turned, his right hand picked up the crowbar where it lay atop one of the crates and, still turning slowly, his eyes holding Metzler’s, Reinhardt whipped his right arm into a swing at the pistol. The crowbar took the Feldgendarme full on his fist with a crack of steel on bone. Metzler’s face crumpled, his arm going wide, and Reinhardt was swinging the crowbar back, stepping into the swing. Metzler got his arm up and the bar bounced up his shoulder and crashed into the side of his neck. The Feldgendarme’s body seemed to fold in many places and Metzler collapsed like an empty sack.

  Erdmann gasped, fumbled a moment at his holster, then turned and ran. Reinhardt threw the crowbar after him, end over end until it thudded into Erdmann’s back and the judge staggered, stumbled, and fell sideways into a pile of crates that teetered and fell on him. He screamed as a case pinned him by the hand, squirming around the weight of it, his eyes wide with his fear as Reinhardt bore down on him.

  Reinhardt heaved the crate off Erdmann, took the judge by the collar, and dragged him kicking and whimpering back past where Metzler wheezed unconscious on the floor, past the crates, into a darkened corner between piles of boxes.

  “What does it mean?” he snarled, holding up one of the files. The judge said nothing, cradling his hand, and Reinhardt bunched the file into Erdmann’s face, shoving it hard. Erdmann twisted his head, crying out. “What does it fucking mean?”