The Man from Berlin

by Luke McCallin

  ‘Yes,’ said Padelin. ‘We are sorry for your loss. Did you work with her a long time?’

  ‘About two years,’ said Jelić, around a deep drag of his cigarette. ‘I was the sound engineer. It was Branko took care of the cameras and films. He’s not here. He had to go back to Zagreb on Friday.’

  ‘And when was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Friday as well. She was here.’ He motioned towards one of the doors that led off from the central space. ‘She has… had an editing studio. Just a small one. We were cutting the film we took in Višegrad. She sat just there.’ He pointed at the couch. ‘We talked, and laughed, and had coffee.’ His eyes watered over.

  ‘How did she seem to you?’ Reinhardt looked at the mirror and the couch, remembering the room in the club, and for a moment he imagined Vukić sitting there. Her legs crossed at the ankles as she read a magazine. No, too demure. Too like her mother. Crossed with one leg on her knee, like a man, and she was slumped back in the couch, one hand around a cup of coffee as she laughed and joked.

  Jelić shrugged and looked at them with wide eyes. ‘What can I say? She was normal. Happy. Funny. She was looking forward to the weekend. There was a man coming, I think. But she was also very engaged in this film. She wanted it to be right,’ he continued, ‘because they were going to show it in Zagreb, to Pavelić. She kept Branko here so late, I was sure he would miss his train, but she drove him down to the station herself.’

  ‘This man you just mentioned,’ said Padelin. ‘Did you know who it was?’

  Jelić shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette with short, sharp movements. ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘I wasn’t her keeper.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Padelin. ‘No one is saying you were. But you were close to her. You knew her. And we believe this man may have been the one who killed her.’ Reinhardt blinked at that. They had no reason to think that yet, least of all Padelin. The Sarajevo police already had their suspect, so what was this line of questioning? Just stringing things along? Keeping the nosy German happy?

  The technician squashed the butt flat and looked up at them with rebellious eyes. Almost adolescent eyes. Reinhardt had seen that look in the eyes of his son, many times. Padelin seemed to see something too, because he sat up straighter. The sniffling man was gone, replaced by something that looked more like a jilted lover. ‘Look, I didn’t keep track of her men. You know what they say about sailors, right? A girl in every port? That was Marija for you.’

  Reinhardt leaned forward. ‘We understand she had a thing for older men.’

  Jelić laughed. ‘Yeah. And in uniform if she could get them. The truth was, though, she would fuck anything she took a fancy to that could move its hips fast enough and that wasn’t dead.’

  Without saying anything, Padelin rose and calmly struck him a thunderous blow across the ear with the flat of his hand. The slap reverberated around the room, followed by the crash and clatter of Jelić and his stool hitting the floor together. Jelić groaned in pain, his hand to the side of his ear. ‘Picku materinu!’ he croaked. He sat up on the floor, his head down between his knees, gasping and swearing in Serbo-Croat. Padelin sat down as if nothing had happened and folded his big hands on the table. Jelić looked up and seemed to remember Reinhardt, and that he had an audience. ‘Fuck! What the fuck did you do that for?’ he moaned, switching back to German. ‘Did you see that?’ he said to Reinhardt. ‘Did you see what he just did to me?’ Reinhardt nodded. ‘And you’re just going to let him do it?’

  Reinhardt raised his eyebrows, more shocked than he wanted to let on. Padelin’s sudden ferocity had awakened a slew of bad memories, of the last months and weeks of his service in Berlin, when that sort of casual violence had become commonplace, accepted. ‘He’s your problem, not mine.’

  Jelić sneered. ‘Fucking cops. You’re all the fucking same.’

  ‘Keep a civil tongue,’ said Padelin, heavily. ‘Or I’ll give you another one to go with it. Sit down.’ The technician picked up his stool and righted it, sitting down a respectful distance from Padelin’s hands. ‘And tell us about Marija Vukić, and what you know about the men she frequented.’

  Jelić worked his jaw and winced. He straightened his glasses on his nose, and his hand crawled across the table to his cigarettes. He lit one, all the while keeping Padelin in sight out of the corner of his eyes. His hand shook as he held it. ‘Look, all I know is Marija liked them… mature. And she liked to hurt, and to be hurt. That was her thing.’

  ‘Masochism, is that what you’re saying?’ said Reinhardt.

  ‘Right, that’s it,’ Jelić replied, still working his jaw. ‘She was into pain. Watching it. And giving it. She got some sort of kick out of it. Some of the stuff we saw in Russia. And here. Jesus.’ He trailed off, his eyes far away. ‘Look, there was this story, right? I don’t know if it’s true. It was before I joined her crew. But I heard it like this. There was this Serb, rich, good-looking, someone important in Banja Luka. Banja Luka’s a nice enough town. Nice river. Mostly Serbs. Rather, it was a nice town in which a lot of Serbs used to live. Until we came along, right?’ He suddenly giggled. ‘So, this Serb, he was famous before the war for something or other, I don’t know. Music, maybe.’ He took a furious drag on his cigarette, his other hand cupping his cheek. ‘So, he’s got nothing, he’s due for deportation, and she sees him. In a line, or a queue, whatever, and he’s with his family, and she takes a fancy to him, and she tells the Ustaše to give him to her. For something like a week, she takes him. Takes care of him, dresses him, feeds him, and she’s fucki –’ He flinched, looking at Padelin. ‘And at the end of the week, they’re in bed, and she cuts his throat, and leaves the body there and walks away.’

  There was silence. Reinhardt and Padelin looked at each other, and each knew the other was thinking of that bedroom in Ilidža, and the knife wounds that had killed her. Could it be, wondered Reinhardt? Could it be that Padelin was right, and this was vengeance, pure and simple? ‘Like I said,’ Jelić said with his mouth all stretched out, eyes looking inward, trying to work out where it hurt the most, ‘it’s a story I heard. Might not be true. I never worked up the guts to ask her, even though we’d been through all kinds of hell together. But it’s got enough of the Marija I knew for me to believe it. Angel and demon. Light and dark. Someone who cares for you, and someone who takes away all you have. Shows you the highs, and leaves you in the lows.’ Reinhardt looked at the couch, and imagined Vukić on it, and something began to gnaw at him.

  ‘Where were you before you came back to film in Bosnia?’ asked Reinhardt.

  Jelić got up and went over to a small stove. ‘You want coffee?’ he asked. They both shook their heads, and Jelić continued. ‘Russia, until November last year,’ he said, pouring a cup, then taking a small sip. ‘Then back to North Africa, but that didn’t last long because the Afrika Korps was getting kicked out by the British. That made her cross, as she had designs on Rommel.’ Despite what was gnawing at him, Reinhardt could not suppress the grin he felt at her audacity. Jelić grinned sheepishly as he came back to the table, wrinkling his glasses on his nose. Only Padelin stayed expressionless. ‘She wanted to go back to Russia. Thank Christ that one was turned down. She was angry about that, so we went to Stokerau, in Austria. We interviewed some of the surviving Croat soldiers from Stalingrad, watched the training for the new 369th Division. They’re here now, you know. We filmed some of them up in Višegrad. Some of them remembered Marija from Stokerau. God, they were happy to see her…’

  He trailed off, staring at his cigarette, then sniffed and took a deep draw on it. ‘Italy, for a bit, earlier this year,’ Jelić continued, ‘filming the training of this new Croat division that the Italians are putting together. The Legion, they call it. We got back here about three months ago.’

  ‘Did anything like this story you told happen in Russia? Or anywhere else?’ asked
Reinhardt.

  ‘Not that I know,’ replied Jelić. He seemed subdued now, turned in on himself. He lifted his cup to his mouth, then paused. ‘There were three guys I know of who she was seeing in Russia. One of those affairs was just crazy. But that was pretty much straight-up sex, if what I heard was right.’

  ‘And here?’ demanded Padelin. Jelić shook his head. ‘And you? Did you… ?’ Padelin trailed off. Reinhardt looked at the table, trying to work out what was bothering him. Why was he thinking of mirrors?

  Jelić shook his head. ‘Not that I didn’t want to.’

  ‘What were the names of the men she was seeing in Russia?’ asked Padelin.

  ‘One was an SS general, but he was killed. The other two…’ He sighed. ‘I can’t remember. There was one of them, though. Christ, half the division could hear them having sex. That one ended badly, apparently. That’s all she’d say about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they’d picked up where they left off.’

  Reinhardt and Padelin sat up, Jelić cowering back from the big detective. ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Reinhardt. Mirrors. Why was he thinking of mirrors? Vukić in front of mirrors. At the club. Here. Her bedroom.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. One of those guys she was seeing in Russia. I heard he was here. Heard his name, something like that, don’t know, about a month ago, and asked her wasn’t that one of her… one of her men.’ His eyes glazed over a bit, as he focused inward, then back out at them. ‘You know, she had the strangest look when I mentioned it. She said she knew he was coming. She knew he was coming, and she had it all planned out.

  ‘Something happened between them, in Russia. I don’t know what it was, she never talked about it. I’m pretty sure it was some kind of argument. Maybe a lovers’ quarrel. Maybe he’d had enough of her, told her to get lost. That was something no man did to Marija. She’d never let them get away with it.’ He looked between them. ‘Hey, I mean, emotionally. Never let them get away with it emotionally. She’d find some way to get back at them.’

  ‘Mr Jelić, do you think you’d be able to identify this general if I found a picture of him?’ said Reinhardt.

  The man pursed his lips. ‘Look,’ he hesitated, ‘I don’t know he was a general…’

  ‘There’s a good chance, correct? From what you’ve told us about her, and about what she liked?’ said Reinhardt. Jelić shrugged, and nodded. ‘We’ll arrange it, then.’ He pulled out a notebook. ‘Give me the dates you were in Russia, please, when Vukić was seeing this man.’

  Jelić swallowed and squirmed on his stool. ‘Look. Sir. I really don’t want anything to do with this. I mean, come on. Look at me. I don’t want to get mixed up in stories like this. I wouldn’t last a second.’

  Reinhardt said nothing, just held his gaze as Padelin glowered next to him. Jelić’s eyes narrowed and twitched, and he sighed out. ‘Errr… it was last year. Hang on. I think I’ve got the dates somewhere.’ He went over to a desk and, opening a drawer, pulled out what looked like a journal. Reaching out for it, Reinhardt was disappointed to see it was some kind of ledger, not one of the missing diaries.

  Padelin peered over his shoulder, and turned a few pages with a thick finger. ‘It’s… how do you say?’ He looked at Jelić.

  ‘Accounts,’ said Jelić. ‘It’s an accounts book. A ledger.’

  Reinhardt flipped it around and handed it back to Jelić. ‘The dates, please.’

  Jelić lit another cigarette as he leaned over the book. ‘Russia, ­Russia…’ he muttered as he turned pages. ‘Here. We arrived 4th August, 1942. Left…’ He turned a page, then another. ‘Left on 6th November.’

  Reinhardt jotted it down. ‘You have locations in there?’

  Jelić puffed his cheeks and breathed out heavily, and coughed. ‘Some. Hotels usually. Let’s see. We flew in to Kharkov from Stokerau, stayed there a few days. Hotel Chichikov. Christ, what a dump that place was. Then out to the front, to join up with the 369th Division around… Selivanova. Back to Kharkov… then Glazkov with the division. The boys were refitting. Ah, yeah,’ he said, looking up. ‘Pavelić made a trip out to visit the troops.’ He grinned. ‘Yeah, that was a good evening. Medal parade in the afternoon, then dinner with the officers. That German general, what’s his name? The one in Stalingrad… Paulus?’ Reinhardt nodded, transfixed. ‘Paulus. He joined us. First good food we’d had in a while, but Christ, you should have seen the way they were all over Marija. She had ’em wrapped around her finger. Pavelić, he was…’ He looked up, as a man might look up expecting clear skies and instead the horizon was draped in thunderclouds. Jelić took a look at Padelin’s face and went back to the book.

  ‘That was the 24th September, and the end of the good times. The 369th went into Stalingrad a few days later. We hung around. Marija wanted to get into the city to do some filming, but the closest we got was the airfield at Pitomnik, and that was close enough.’ He looked up at Reinhardt. ‘We could hear the guns during the day, and during the night it burned. You could see it from miles away. You’ve got to feel sorry for the poor bastards who were in there. You know they say all the Croat boys are dead.’

  Padelin snarled something at Jelić in Serbo-Croat, and Jelić snapped back, the detective’s earlier violence towards him forgotten. Whatever it was he said, Padelin folded his hands on the table and just stared at him with those heavy eyes. ‘I know what I saw,’ Jelić said, quietly, staring back, and switching back to German. ‘And I know what I’ve heard. None of them are coming back,’ he finished, looking back down at the book. Reinhardt looked at him and swallowed in a dry throat, thinking of Jelić’s description of the city where his son had vanished.

  ‘Listen,’ said Jelić, turning pages and then looking up. ‘Do you need anything else from me?’

  Reinhardt nodded. ‘Do you know when Vukić met up with this officer in Russia?’

  ‘Yeah, sometime in late August, early September. We left the 369th in Glazkov, and joined up with some Germans as they advanced towards Stalingrad. We were in Voroshilovgrad on 28th August. The Hotel Donbass. I’m pretty sure that she had met up with him by then, but I can’t be sure. Rostov in early September. Then back to Glazkov, like I said.’

  ‘When did they break up, Vukić and this officer, you remember that?’

  Jelić shook his head. ‘I really don’t.’ He stared at the pages. ‘It was after we spent the first couple of weeks with the 369th. After Rostov, but before Pitomnik. So, sometime in September. Mid-September. She actually took off with him and his men for a few days while Branko and I stayed in the hotel. But the actual dates… I’m sorry, I really can’t remember. Branko will probably remember better than me. He’s usually good at dates. I’m hopeless.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Reinhardt, tapping his notebook with his pencil. ‘Padelin? You have anything else?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Jelić, you can come down to headquarters. We have some suspects in custody you can look at. Let us know if you ever saw them together with Miss Vukić.’ Jelić nodded again, although it looked like the last thing he wanted to do. ‘And I want an address for Branko… ?’

  ‘Branko Tomić,’ finished Jelić. He scribbled a name and a Zagreb address on a piece of paper. ‘I’ve no idea if he knows what’s happened. Poor guy. He’s been with her for years.’

  ‘You’ve been most helpful, Mr Jelić,’ said Padelin, with ponderous finality. ‘I will be in touch to arrange a time to come to headquarters. No, don’t get up.’ He raised a hand. ‘We’ll see ourselves out. And put some ice on that jaw, or it will swell up.’

  They left him in his studio, hunched over, watching them with feverish little eyes through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Downstairs, Padelin turned to Reinhardt. ‘Did you get anything useful out of that?’ His tone made it clear he had not.

  Reinhardt drummed his fingers on the kübelwagen’s windshield and nodded. ‘I did,’ he said, distantly. ‘Look, something he
said is gnawing at me. Going around and around in my head,’ he explained, seeing Padelin’s look of incomprehension. ‘Something about mirrors.’

  ‘Mirrors?’ grunted Padelin. He looked at Reinhardt, then away.

  ‘I want to go back to the house in Ilidža for another look. Do you want to come?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re looking for?’ demanded Padelin.

  ‘Maybe nothing. Maybe something. But I need to see.’

  ‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘I will come. It will be better if I do, in any case. We’re supposed to be working together, yes?’

  The road out to Ilidža was relatively empty of military traffic, and Reinhardt was able to drive fast all the way. Padelin sat quietly next to him, flexing his wrists and fists over and over again. They pulled up outside Vukić’s and surprised the police guard who was dozing along the shady side of the house, next to the motorcycle and sidecar. The man blanched at the look on Padelin’s face and fumbled the keys to the door, eventually getting it open and almost dropping his rifle as he stood aside and saluted them in. Reinhardt took the stairs quickly up to the second floor, through the living room and into the bedroom.

  The curtains had been drawn open, the two lights at the foot of the bed were turned off, and the bed had been stripped. Otherwise nothing had changed. The head of the bed was still covered in blood, and it had soaked into the mattress. Reinhardt walked to the bedside table and looked back. He could see himself standing in the other mirror. A glance up, and he saw that the roof of the four-poster was also a mirror. Padelin watched him from the doorway.

  Mirrors. She liked to watch, he thought. She liked to watch others. She liked to watch herself. He looked back and forth between the two mirrors, the one by the door and the one at the headboard. The blood on the light switch at the entrance caught his eye again. The mirrors. It was all a setup, he thought. Set up so that she could see. So that whoever was with her could see.