The Pale House

by Luke McCallin

  “Major Jansky, you are under arrest . . .”

  “Oh, please.”

  “. . . for the murders of George Abler, Carl Benirschke, Otto—”

  “You are persistent, Captain Reinhardt, I’ll give you that.”

  “You are a shit, Major Jansky. I’ll give you that.”

  Jansky laughed. “Careful, Reinhardt. You’re speaking to a senior officer.”

  “Major Jansky, you are under arrest for the murders of—”

  “Oh, spare me, Reinhardt.” Jansky sneered. “You don’t know what you’re ta—”

  He stopped as Reinhardt flipped Keppel’s soldbuch at him, flicking it like a playing card. “I can’t figure that one out. What was it? A first attempt?”

  Jansky opened the soldbuch, tossed it back at Reinhardt, where it flopped open against his boots. “A first attempt at what, Reinhardt?”

  “That must have been when you were trying to forge the books, before someone hit on the idea of just issuing replacements.” Reinhardt opened the bloodied soldbuch he had taken off body. The name on the book was that of Ulrich Vierow, one of the names from the paper the colonel had given him, but it was face that stared up at him in elegant profile. He snapped the book at Jansky, where it bounced off the Feldgendarme’s chest. “You still needed the forger, I suppose. Signatures, stamps, some level of authenticity. You know killed him?”

  “Killed who, Reinhardt?” Jansky smiled, but it was taut and tight at the corners as he glanced at book, then tossed it aside onto the table.

  “Your forger. He’s lying dead in the Pale House.”

  “If you say so. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Who shot those three men in the forest?”

  “Which men?” Jansky turned away, rifling through his papers.

  “I’m fairly sure it was you, and Lieutenants Brandt and Metzler. If you didn’t know it already, Metzler’s out of it. I left him for dead in the archives at the barracks, and Erdmann committed suicide. I found the trial transcripts . . .”

  He broke off as Jansky whirled around, a pistol in his hand and his arm extending straight, but Reinhardt had seen it and had sidled closer to Jansky as the other man had his back turned. He stepped inside the length of Jansky’s arm, gripped and held it under his own, and stripped the gun from the Feldgendarme’s hand and threw it away. Jansky yelped as the pistol twisted free, and Reinhardt’s elbow pistoned into his face. He staggered away but then surged back, his nose streaming blood. He wriggled and struck like an eel, all elbows and knees and hands like blades as he came at Reinhardt. The two of them traded blows, Jansky’s fast, jabbing high and low, Reinhardt’s more measured, heavier, using elbows and knees as he struck back with all the mounting frustration and anger he had been holding in, beating Jansky down until he swept his legs from under him and stunned him flat with a kick to the side of the head.

  He stood over the Feldgendarme, breathing like a bellows and starting to feel the sting and swell of Jansky’s blows where they lay over the ones Bunda had inflicted, feeling the cracked pain of his wrist most of all. Jansky pushed himself into a corner and slumped up into it, his eyes the rolling crescents of something beaten. The two of them glared at each other, and then Jansky leaned to one side, worked his mouth, and swore as he spat a tooth to the floor. Reinhardt watched the tooth bounce away, his mind jarring, and just for a moment he was back in that cell with the Gestapo and he envisoned his own tooth rattling across a floor of mismatched tiles.

  “Listen, Reinhardt,” said Jansky, a finger in his mouth as he felt along its new geometry. “You’re a good investigator. Whatever it all is, you found it all out. Bravo.”

  “This is where it ends, Jansky.”

  “What ends?” Jansky laughed, blood dribbling down his chin, and he sniffed back on his nose.

  Reinhardt breathed in, long and slow, pursed his lips. “Very well,” he replied. He walked back to the door through which he had entered and made a wave with his hand. Moments later, Colonel Scheller’s broad bulk cut across the door frame, Captain Lainer ducking beneath the lintel. The three Feldjaeger stared at Jansky, and the man’s chin bunched, and he shifted with the nerves he must have been feeling.

  Scheller glanced at his watch. “It is almost time, is it not?”

  “Time for what?” Jansky asked, suspicion writ broad across his features. Behind the fan of blood across the bottom of his face, he had gone very white.

  “Oh, I don’t know. How about a roll call?” Scheller nodded to Lainer. The tall Feldjaeger strode past to the door to the courtyard, and Jansky quailed away from the look that must have been in his eyes. From outside, the strains of a bugle could be heard, and then the sound of men, hundreds of them, falling in across the courtyard, the sounds of their boots and the shuffle of their feet rising to an echoing din, then fading away.

  “What are you doing? Reinhardt?”

  “Putting an end to this charade, Jansky. Get up.”

  “Reinhardt,” Jansky hissed, his eyes pinned on Reinhardt. “You don’t get to have the cake and eat it. There are too many people in this.”

  “So there is something.”

  Jansky shook his head, eyes narrowing in frustration. “Most of these people are senior to you and me. So”—he ran a hand across his mouth—“pat yourself on the back. You’ve royally fucked things up for a lot of people. But just what do you think happens next?”

  Reinhardt hauled Jansky to his feet and prodded him outside, into the luminous light of the early morning. Around the courtyard, the Zenica steelworks towered. Smokestacks and chimneys, girders and grids of reddened iron, and everywhere a stench of rust, and coal, and a granular feel to the air, as if it crept inside to coat men’s innards with a flouring of dust and filth. Around three walls of the courtyard the men of the penal battalion were drawn up in ranks, a listless sense to their stance even though they stood at attention, but confusion in their faces as they looked at Scheller and Lainer, and behind them Jansky with his bloodied face, Reinhardt close against him. Scheller waved one arm, and the walls of the courtyard were suddenly lined with men, more pouring in through the gates, and the ranks of the penal battalion shifted, lost their cohesion as they bunched away from the newcomers. It was over in seconds, and the penal battalion was ringed with Feldjaeger.

  “Gentlemen,” Scheller called. “Roll call.”

  Reinhardt stepped forward in front of the men, running his eyes across them, looking for those faces he knew would be there, knowing he would only be able to recognize one of them. He took the sheet of paper the colonel had written.

  “Corporal George Abler,” Reinhardt called. “Abler?”

  He stared around at the faces of the men, dumb and blank.

  “Sergeant Carl Benirschke. Benirschke?”

  Something. A shift in the way some men stood. He looked at Jansky. The major blinked back at him and shrugged, his lip twitching up in a sardonic twist.

  “The dead ride quickly, Reinhardt.”

  Something clicked inside, and Reinhardt found himself quoting from some distant memory that unfolded itself like the page of a book, a stanza from Burger’s poem, Lenore.

  “‘Dost hear the bell with its sullen swell,

  As it rumbles out eleven?

  Look forth! look forth! the moon shines bright:

  We and the dead ride fast by night.’”

  And the memory folded itself shut again. “You’re not the only one who can trot out the classics when he feels like it, Major. Care to remind me how it ends? It ends in death, does it not?” Jansky went pale and swallowed. Reinhardt turned his back on him.

  “Private Otto Berthold.”

  “Private Werner Janowetz.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  The shout had come from
the ranks. Reinhardt did not try to find who it was, hoping, wanting the conversation and confusion to spread, to get the men to lance the cancer that lurked within them themselves.

  “Private Christian Seymer.”

  “Is this a fucking joke?” More men took up the call.

  “Why would it be a joke?” Reinhardt pointed at one of the men who had shouted.

  “Because they’re fucking dead, that’s why.”

  “Is that right?” Reinhardt called out, a ragged chorus of assent coming back at him.

  “Fucking Partisans killed ’em.”

  “Vanished in the forest.”

  “Is that right?” Reinhardt challenged them, again.

  “Fucking right, hero stealer.”

  “Goddamn chain dog.”

  Reinhardt turned his eyes across the ranks of men, their mood wretched and cracked, turned his eyes until he found them, the hiwis huddled in a tight mass in a corner of the courtyard. He walked toward them slowly, feeling the weight of the men’s attention shift with him. He looked across the hiwis, seeing how they stood stock-still, none of the movement or agitation of the others. He looked across them until he saw him.

  “Sergeant Jürgen Sedlazcek.”

  There was silence, as the men realized this was no game, and there was an edge to the quiet, as if they scented blood.

  “Sergeant Jürgen Sedlazcek,” Reinhardt called again, holding the man with his eyes. Sedlazcek’s trial transcript had noted he had been very big. The man did not move until Reinhardt indicated to a pair of Feldjaeger, and they hauled the man out of the ranks. Big, fleshy, an old uniform devoid of insignia stretched taught over his height and weight, and a black belt bowing under a vast spread of gut. “Sergeant Jürgen Sedlazcek,” Reinhardt said, looking up into the flat eyes of Ustaše colonel Ante . “Point out the others to me, please.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I know Zulim is dead,” Reinhardt said, holding up Abler’s soldbuch. “Bunda got rid of him, on your orders, probably. He had drawn too much attention to himself.”

  swore something under his breath. “Fucking Bunda. What a fucking bull.”

  “Yes, he was, rather. He tended to overreact with predictable regularity. He was the one who smashed in the faces of those five prisoners, I’m guessing, probably in a panic when you heard I was around. Overkill, if you’ll excuse the term. Doing that just drew attention to the fact they had no faces, and so of course I wondered why. Still, if you send a butcher to do a tailor’s work, that’s what you get.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Bunda’s dead, too.”

  “You’re lying.”

  went pale as Reinhardt took Bunda’s soldbuch from his pocket, held it up.

  “I watched Suzana rip his balls off, and I left him to bleed his life out.”

  “What?”

  Reinhardt held up soldbuch. Then Labaš’s.

  “Point out the others, please.”

  “No.”

  “Bozidar . Tomislav Dubreta. Zvonimir Saulan.” blinked. “Do it quick, or I’ll tell the men what you’ve done, and watch them rip you all to pieces.”

  Reinhardt watched the play of frustration on face, and then he turned and called something out. Three men stepped out of the lines, joining . Reinhardt was about to speak when he saw something in eyes, some glitter of a secret suppressed.

  Ten names, Reinhardt thought. Ten Ustaše. Four of them were dead. Bunda, Labaš, Zulim, and . That left six, and four were standing in front of him.

  There were two more, somewhere.

  Reinhardt walked slowly along the ranks, his eyes flowing over faces, and then he saw him. It was the man’s eyes that gave him away, shifting back and forth between Reinhardt and something on the far side of the courtyard.

  “You.” Reinhardt pointed. The man did not move. “You,” Reinhardt said, again. The night Bunda and had brought Reinhardt to the Pale House, he was the one who had been torturing the prisoner.

  “Sutko.”

  The man swallowed and stepped out of the ranks.

  “And you,” Reinhardt said, swiveling his arm at a second man, half hidden behind a soldier. The man jumped, went pale. He had been there with Sutko that same night. He had killed the prisoner on orders as a demonstration to Reinhardt of the Ustaše’s supposed power, and why they did not need to do their killing in secret. Reinhardt remembered the man’s name. “Marin.”

  Reinhardt ran his eyes over them. Tall, short, slim, fat, blond hair, dark hair.

  Average men.

  Hidden in plain sight.

  Reinhardt nodded to the Feldjaeger, and the six Ustaše were taken away, back into the command post. He walked back to Jansky, standing there thin and broken in the middle of the courtyard.

  “The dead ride quickly, it would seem, indeed.”

  A truck drove away from Zenica, away from the pallid town that clustered around the steelworks. The Bosna River flowed north as the truck went south, a placid river, wide, bottle green, thin streamers of mist hanging like a man’s breath on a cold morning. The river was bounded on both sides by low hills that rolled up and away from the road, shrouded in trees that plucked and pinched at the skyline. There was a quality to the light, as if each branch and leaf of the thick forests that coated the hills had been picked out, shining and limned like the fine hair on a young girl’s arm when the sun shines at the right angle.

  Benfeld drove, the big Feldjaeger taciturn and unquestioning. Though Reinhardt’s eyes watched the road unwind before him, his thoughts were back in the steelworks, in that office, hearing the thuds and groans from the other room where Lainer and his men had set about Jansky and Brandt. It was payback. Reinhardt understood that, although the man he had been—the man forged in police work, the man who had eschewed the child of the first war he had so recently been—would not have.

  So he had sat and waited, smoked a cigarette and looked at a pile of ten soldbuchs, and the court-martial records he had found in the archives, but it was into himself he looked, into that rent that ran down within him, feeling the coiling within of something old and hoary, staring back into its eye as it rolled mad and bloodshot. It was there, gripping the rent inside him with mud-smeared fingers, as if it wanted to come out, but as if it were content to let him alone. As if what Reinhardt was doing satisfied its sense of right and wrong.

  In the corner of the room, Scheller talked with a judge. Reinhardt had presented what he knew to him, the whole story, and the soldbuchs, and the files. The judge had clearly been panicked by the case, had wanted to take it as he would have wanted to grasp a shitty pole. Whether he would or not, Reinhardt found he did not care. His part was done. He had his hole in the wall, rubble about his feet, and enough light shining through for him to see something of the shape of the structure he had come across. He had no illusions he could do much more than he already had, and he wondered at the contentment this seemed to afford him.

  —

  “The thrill, Reinhardt,” Jansky had said, his words mumbled through his lacerated lips when Lainer had finally let him out, led him stumbling blind to a chair and dropped him into it. Jansky’s face had been swollen almost beyond belief, and he had sat hunched over to the side. In the chair next to him, Lieutenant Brandt’s eyes were bloodied shut, and they bracketed a nose that was crushed and misshapen. Jansky had smoked a cigarette through the last two fingers of his hand, the others swollen and broken. “Getting away with it. Herzog and Erdmann and the others can believe what they want. For me it was the challenge, the thrill. The money helped, of course.”

  “Did you kill those three Feldjaeger?”

  “Yes. Me and Brandt and Metzler.” He cocked his head to his cigarette, pecking at it with his broken lips like a bird at water, something strangely effete in his movements. “They found us up at the construction site. Bunda was with us, and a couple of his me
n.”

  “That was where you killed those five soldiers?”

  “Yes. We’d shot them there when we found out we couldn’t go back to the forest, and left the bodies because even if we weren’t working there anymore the site was still ours, and under our guard. We’d have come up quietly during the day to bring that house down on them. End of story. But Bunda was terrified of you and when we found we had to get rid of the bodies in the city, he was even more scared. He went berserk. You’ve never seen anything like what he did to those bodies. He smashed their faces in with his club, and then he dressed them in clothes he’d brought from the Pale House. He was like a boy playing with dolls.” Jansky giggled. “Playing dress-up, muttering to himself. But then two of his men kicked over that flare and it killed one of them—”

  “Labaš?”

  “Labaš.” Jansky nodded. “Burnt him to death. And then your Feldjaegers showed up. You know the rest.”

  “You sent Lieutenant Brandt to try to clear things up.”

  “Waste of time, but we had to try. When he found out what Bunda had done, disfiguring those bodies and triggering all that mess, was furious. He would have just put them in the Pale House, mixed them up in all the other bodies, but it was too late. Bunda had panicked, but then it got worse. Bunda sent Zulim to get those refugees, the ones you found, but that just made you more suspicious and you came looking for Zulim, so Bunda panicked again. Bye-bye Zulim. I mean,” said Jansky, drawing on his cigarette, “those two were virtually inseparable, but Bunda was unstoppable. He was so fucking scared. is apoplectic at this point, and tried to make the best of it and throw you a false trail, but no good. Bunda. What a moron. Ironic, though, isn’t it? That we should”—Jansky coughed, smoke splurting from his mouth as he winced in pain and squinted bloodied eyes at the judge—“that we should have been more careful listening to him. And been more careful with those soldbuchs. Zulim’s and Labaš’s, when we got them back.”