“You wouldn’t understand, you fool,” Erdmann managed.
Reinhardt twisted the judge’s injured hand, and Erdmann yelped. “Try me. Why is Dreyer involved in this?”
Erdmann laughed, a cough of spittle and snot. “Your precious Dreyer. Not all he seemed, was he?” Reinhardt twisted his hand again, and Erdmann’s face collapsed in pain, heels drumming at the floor. “No, please.”
“Make sense, Erdmann.”
“Blackmail, Reinhardt. It was as simple as that. We had something on him. He was ours, until he found you.”
“What? What?!”
“All right, all right. It was money, Reinhardt. It is always money. He and Jansky were involved in something, I do not know what, back in Poland. Jansky cheated him, or something like that. I do not know. But Dreyer came looking to try to get his own back, and Jansky led him straight to us.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“We did not, you cretin.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were getting too close. He was using you to find a way out for himself. We sat him down, me and Herzog, and reminded him what we knew about him. Even if you found what you were looking for, we would still have him. We left him alive. He killed himself to implicate us. To make it look like murder.”
“Why would he do that? Why?!”
“Ahhh, my hand.”
“I said make sense, Erdmann, or I’ll take care of your other hand as well.”
“I will tell you. Let go!” Reinhardt shoved his hand away, Erdmann curling around it. The judge sagged back with relief, looking at Reinhardt through his spectacles lying askew across his aquiline nose. “He got cold feet, Reinhardt. He could not do it anymore. Because he was weak. He could not take the shame of what he had done. Not that we ever gave him a choice. He was ours.”
“He was a war crimes judge. He couldn’t . . . he couldn’t have been mixed up in your affair.”
“Did you ever check that, Reinhardt? No? Some policeman you must have been.” Erdmann sneered, pushing his glasses straight. “He was a war crimes judge, until we took control of him. He spun you a tale. A tall tale. One he knew you would listen to. About the Ustaše. And you swallowed it.”
“What the hell are you all playing at?”
“Playing? These are not games, Reinhardt. It’s about preservation. It’s about the future.”
Reinhardt crumpled his fingers into Erdmann’s lapels, dragging the judge up and closer. “Preservation? The future?! You idiot! It’s over. It’s finished. Can’t you see that? There’s no way back from this. There’s no way back from what we’ve done.”
Erdmann looked at him, suddenly calm, and then his mouth moved, as if he wanted to spit, his chin bunching. Reinhardt shifted back, then understood too late. There was a crunch, and Erdmann’s eyes came alight.
“One people. One Reich. One Führer.”
Erdmann gagged, and then his whole body tightened, as if bent on a bow. A gargled scream escaped his mouth on a white froth, and he sagged bonelessly to the floor.
Cyanide. Reinhardt’s face twisted in disgust, but a part of him measured the extremity of Erdmann’s act. Whatever it was, Erdmann could not fail it, even though it cost him his life. Reinhardt took a long breath, considering. Whatever it was, it went from here to Vienna, and it ran through the army at least as high as Herzog, probably higher, and it involved the murder of soldiers by other soldiers.
Reinhardt hauled a deep breath in, then prodded himself into motion. He dragged Metzler’s body over to Erdmann’s, piling the two together into that dark recess of the archives, then stacked boxes in front of them. It would not last forever, but would do for a while, he hoped, wishing Metzler luck in explaining himself when he regained consciousness. He risked a last check through the files, finding the remaining names from the list. He took them out and put them with the others, then hammered the lid shut with the crowbar. Stuffing the files under his coat, he calmed himself as best he could, but the roil in his gut grew too nauseating, and he doubled over, breathing harshly, willing it to happen, willing it to somehow cleanse him of what he had just learned and done. He dropped to one knee and retched, then vomited what little he had inside him, a caustic thread of bile and spittle, counterpoint to the acidic blight of the thoughts and images his mind summoned up.
Dreyer, his friend, asking for his help. “I know Jansky is guilty,” he had said. Reinhardt saw it now; the all-but-open admission it was of Dreyer’s own guilt.
Dreyer, the accomplice, reporting all Reinhardt found back to Erdmann, to Herzog, to whoever else was involved. How else had they known about the Greeks? And he remembered, a flash of memory, that last time they had talked, Dreyer mentioning Alexiou’s name when Reinhardt never had. Dreyer had known. He had known who the “Greek” was.
Dreyer, taking the only way out he could. Some last desperate gamble, a gesture to the man he once was. A suicide that looked like murder. “I would shoot myself in the heart,” he had said, had he only the courage to do it. “I would never go out to that music,” he had said. All ways to arouse Reinhardt’s suspicions, pull him deeper in, and further on.
Used. Manipulated.
All in plain sight.
Reinhardt stayed there a moment after the spasms in his belly subsided, wiped a sleeve across his mouth, and then walked out, his head as high as he could make it.
He kept it high, eyes focused somewhere far ahead, until he was back in the empty mess hall. He found a lukewarm cup of coffee and took a packet of iron rations from a pile of them by the door. He split the pack open, digging out the bread and jam, and then spreading all he had on a table. Three soldbuchs, the paper with the handwritten names, the files.
It all came down to the soldbuchs and the judicial files. He stared at the books as he chewed his bread and jam, trying to understand what they represented. Whatever information was in those soldbuchs, the military region from which these two men had been recruited would have backup information in the main registries, the wehrstammbuchs. You could change one thing somewhere, and it would not change something somewhere else. He realized, then, he was picking after process, looking for loopholes in a supposedly perfect plan. This—whatever this was, he thought, holding the two soldbuchs in his hand—did not need to be perfect. It needed to be good enough for a time and place, and that was here and now.
This was like no investigation he had ever conducted. He did not really even know if it was one. He had the shape of a crime, more than one, in fact. He had the names of conspirators—Erdmann and Metzler for sure, Herzog and Jansky probably, though his mind still turned from Dreyer. Without evidence, though, he had nothing to confront them with. The evidence he had, soldbuchs and trial transcripts, pointed in an unknown direction. They could damn or they could be explained, and so on their own they were just paper. He had just one witness, a frightened little boy who could not be pulled into this, a little boy who said he saw Feldgendarmes gun down other Germans, and something landed right in front of him with a crack of paper.
Reinhardt jumped back, startled, looking at the file that lay atop his evidence, and turned his head up and around. It took a moment before he recognized the man standing behind him.
“Dr. Henke.”
“You know, for a man who had my sleep ruined for two nights in a row, you didn’t seem particularly interested in what I found for you.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor?”
“Yes, you bloody well should be.”
The doctor collapsed onto the bench next to Reinhardt, his back against the edge of the table and his legs splayed out in front of him. His head went back in a gargantuan yawn and then rocked forward. Henke blinked once or twice, then looked at Reinhardt, then down at the file.
“That’s what you were after, wasn’t it? An autopsy of those bodies.”
Reinhardt opened the file, fingering through five
sheets of paper with handwritten notes.
“You did them?”
“You did ask so nicely, Captain.” Henke’s fingertips played against each other, and Reinhardt saw how his nails, and the folds of skin across the backs of his knuckles, were crusted dark, flecks and spots of something dark and brown. “And then you never came looking for them.”
“I tried . . . we tried to contact you.”
“Well, no one found me. You’re lucky I’m a man of my word, and that I happened to be stopping here before continuing on.”
“May I offer you a coffee?”
“You may.” Henke yawned, again. He nodded his thanks as Reinhardt came back with a cup from the urn at the mess hall’s entrance, lifting his eyes from the evidence on the tabletop and putting down the soldbuchs. “It’s all there in the notes. Four of them had eaten the same thing at about the same time.”
“What was that?”
Henke pointed at the packet on the tabletop. “Iron rations.”
“Iron rations?”
“And some sort of broth of goat and tubers. Rather unappetizing, I would have thought.”
“Goat?”
“Something wrong with your hearing, Captain? You keep repeating back to me what I say.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So you keep saying. But I’d say your suspicions were correct. They were probably soldiers. I don’t know any other group of men who would have eaten the same thing at about the same time. The iron rations are rather definitive evidence, seeing as no one but us has them. Unless,” the doctor yawned, again, “someone’s captured a stock of them.”
“The Partisans use Allied rations,” Reinhardt murmured, leafing through the notes. Soldiers. He had guessed right, and it was good, he supposed, to have it confirmed although he had more or less assumed it from the evidence of the past couple of days.
“Is that who they were?” Henke nodded at the soldbuchs. Reinhardt picked up Abler’s, opened it to the photograph. Something seemed to slide into place over it, and his breathing stopped, caught dead in his throat with a sudden surge of excitement.
“What do you mean, Doctor?” Reinhardt managed, after a moment.
The doctor tipped his mug back for the last of the coffee. “Just that. I mean, granted, none of them have a face left, but these two could be matches for two or three of those bodies. Height, weight, hair color.”
“Average.”
“Average,” Henke repeated.
In plain sight.
And he had it.
Dawn had begun to paint the sky, lighting the long edges of the clouds that hung low over the city. On the hills to the north, the crackle of gunfire was continuous, plumes of dark smoke smudging the slate sky, and there were reports coming in already of heavy concentrations of Partisan forces on Sarajevo’s eastern approaches, probing attacks slicing into the German and Ustaše lines. The fighting was heavy, and the German and Ustaše troops still in the city as rear guard were already under deepening pressure. Making matters worse, Valter’s Partisans inside Sarajevo were out in force, with bombings, sabotage, and ambushes flaring up across the length and breadth of the city.
Taking only the time to rush up to his room and throw some belongings into a canvas shoulder bag, Reinhardt ran out into the barracks vehicle park, his eyes searching for the car and driver Scheller had promised him was still there. He had left the colonel in the all-but-deserted operations room, most of the Feldjaeger having moved out to establish positions across the road to Visoko. Scheller’s mouth had curled with displeasure at the thought of their orders, to round up stragglers and deserters, the lost and the bewildered, and pack them back into the front lines.
“Well, that would be why they call us hero stealers,” Reinhardt had quipped, stuffing a pack of iron rations into his bag.
“Don’t remind me,” Scheller had muttered darkly, looking Reinhardt over. “You’ll make it, I trust, Reinhardt. We can’t wait. The lines are going to collapse before the end of the day. Well before, I’d reckon.”
“I’ll make it, sir,” Reinhardt had said, checking the action of his StG 44, strapping on webbing and pouches, and picking up a helmet.
“Something happen to make you as giddy as a girl?”
“What?”
“That was irony, Reinhardt. Remember that? You used to be rather good at it,” Scheller had said, his attention distracted by a messenger at the door. “Get going. Good luck.”
Reinhardt found he did indeed feel light, focused. The truth of what he had discovered seemed to have liberated him from whatever slough he had fallen into. He had laid most of it out to Scheller, the words tumbling out and over each other as he ran the colonel through what he had found. What he now knew, and what he still suspected. He had had to tell him; there was no other way Scheller would have allowed him back into the city, and the colonel had sat stunned in his chair when Reinhardt was done, watching him pace back and forth like a caged cat.
He found the car and blessed the colonel for his forethought. He had thought a kubelwagen, but the colonel had scrounged up an armored car with a radio, a panzerfunkwagen with the bedframe-like antenna folded flat around the top of the vehicle’s chassis. Standing in front of it was Benfeld, the big Feldjaeger straightening as Reinhardt came up.
“Frenchie,” Reinhardt acknowledged, slinging his bag into the armored car, a wariness to his voice.
“Captain,” Benfeld replied.
“Scheller’s told you what it’s about?”
“He said to keep an eye on you, watch your back. Captain Lainer had a few words to say as well, sir. Bader, Pollmann, and Triendl were ours. And anyway,” Benfeld said, as he heaved himself up the side of the panzerfunkwagen, “we started this together, sir. I’d like to see it through.”
Bader, Pollmann, and Triendl were the three Feldjaeger killed at the construction site who had started all this. Except that was not true. It was three other bodies, burned and abandoned in a forest clearing, that had started it. It was the body of a man with a goatee, and a dead girl. He slid his StG 44 into the cabin and narrowed his eyes as he looked at Benfeld. The lieutenant was tired. They all were, but it was something else Reinhardt was looking for. Some remnant or sign of the obvious pressure Benfeld had been under these past couple of days. It was still there, Reinhardt fancied. Something lurking in the corner of Benfeld’s eyes, in the set of his shoulders. There was something more. There was a reckoning to be had, but not here and not now, Reinhardt thought, as the engine roared to life, the whole vehicle shaking.
“You’ll have to hang on up there, Benfeld,” Reinhardt shouted. “It’s been a long time since I’ve driven anything . . . like . . . this,” he said, each word punctuated by a grinding of metal as he tried to force the stick into first gear and finding it, the panzerfunkwagen lurching forward. He turned it in a wide circle around the edge of the vehicle park, then inched it out through the barracks’ fortified entrance. He trundled it down to the main road, paused, then twisted up to look at Benfeld.
“You sure you are all right to come with me? No harm in turning back.”
Benfeld peered down at him from the turret, his face backlit against the sky. “All’s well up here, Captain.”
“Right you are,” Reinhardt muttered as he swung the vehicle onto the main road and floored the accelerator.
Most of the traffic was oncoming, trucks and cars filled with troops, a convoy of ambulances, a battery of artillery. Reinhardt slid the panzerfunkwagen close up behind a pair of trucks moving into the city, watched the pinched faces of the soldiers in the back, hunched around the uprights of their rifles. It could not be easy, heading up to the front when everything in them would be urging them the other way.
How did you ask a man to be the last man to die for a place like this, in a cause like theirs?
You did not ask, Reinhardt knew, as he surged the panz
erfunkwagen out alongside the trucks and overtook them. You told him.
Reinhardt hauled the panzerfunkwagen right onto Kvaternik, following the sweep of the road next to the Miljacka. The streets were almost empty of people, but debris and detritus littered the sidewalk and spilled across the roads, and the windows of some buildings across the river showed the blackened traces of recent fire. He drove fast, drove straight, and pulled up in front of the Pale House without any difficulties.
Leaving Benfeld in the turret, Reinhardt hauled himself out of the panzerfunkwagen, pulling his assault rifle after him. On the pavement in front of the Pale House the barbed-wire entanglements had been pushed and pulled out of position. Scraps of clothing clung to the wire, belongings were scattered about: photo frames, a woman’s bag, a lone shoe. The building’s entrance was unguarded, the doors hanging ajar around the starred remnants of the windows. The foyer was empty and echoing; rubbish and junk patterned the stairs as Reinhardt took them two by two, up to the second floor, past the radiator with the manacles hanging from it, down to the end, to office. His breathing coming high and quick, he pushed the door open, nosing his assault rifle into the room.
It was empty. He followed the StG 44’s muzzle over to the curtains that hung half open. The darkness hung heavy and slanted down into the courtyard, a handful of crows pecking their way disconsolately across the churned earth. Reinhardt stood and listened, turning slowly in the room. Gunfire crackled thickly outside, the thud-thud of artillery coming in staccato rhythms, but the house was still. Whatever spirit had inhabited it, whatever had moved it, had caused it to come up thick and menacing around him those other times, it was gone.
His heart thudded hard, beating after a sense of failure, a scent that was strong but fading. His eyes fell on the liquor cabinet. Some spark flared along his veins, a challenge to madness, and he pulled it open, his chin bunched tight with his anger. Breathing hard through his nose, he pulled a bottle out, his fist clattering others aside. A bottle of slivovitz, clear, sparkling.
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