Various signs were posted at the checkpoint, including the by now standard one for Berlin (1,030 kilometres, apparently) and one for vehicles to stop and check in. A Feldgendarme corporal put down his cup of coffee next to the barrel of the heavy machine gun covering the road and saluted Reinhardt, casting a bleary eye over the vehicle.
‘Corporal. How are things ahead?’ asked Reinhardt, lifting the goggles.
The Feldgendarme indicated a status board leaning against the sandbags. ‘Latest is the road’s clear as far as Rogatica. You’ll have to check in there for conditions farther on. Your destination?’
‘Foča.’ He proffered his movement orders at the Feldgendarme, who glanced at them before handing them back.
‘Safe trip, sir.’
Reinhardt nodded and took a deep breath, lowering the goggles back down. He shared a quick glance with Claussen, then squared his shoulders and looked ahead. Claussen hauled the wheel left and started down the road. The Feldgendarme watched them go until, flickering through the trees, the car vanished over a rise and the sound of its engine faded away into the still air of the mountains.
Part Three
The Mountain
33
THURSDAY
As they left the checkpoint behind, the road switchbacked up Mount Romanja, which lay athwart their route east, snaking through lands that had once been well inhabited, and past houses, alone or in hamlets, built of wood and dressed stone. Most were empty, and many were destroyed, walls collapsed in rubble and skewed timbers blackened and burned, gardens and fields overgrown and abandoned. These lands had been farmed and worked mainly by Serbs until the Ustaše came, and most of the people had been slaughtered, rounded up in camps, or driven off into the arms of either the Partisans or the Četniks. Signs of life were few. A spiral of smoke from a chimney, a handful of goats that twitched their heads nervously as the car went by, washing hanging from a line.
They rose higher up the rounded flanks of the mountain, the countryside flattening into view to their left. As always, when he saw it from the heights, Reinhardt found something about the Bosnian forest that registered on a level below that of rational conception. It spread out beneath and around them, a canopy of varied greens and shifting forms, rising and falling with the land hidden beneath it, and the earth was lobed by the frayed sweep and curve of hills, fissured sometimes by flanks of exposed rock like the bleached karstic bones of the land.
The road swung across the rounded summit, through a forest sunk in gloom, the trees flowing against the blue sky that streamed overhead through a tracery of branches. They drove past mountain meadows across which marched the matchsticks of broken fences made to keep in livestock long gone. Big houses, like chalets or ranches, stood abandoned and gutted. When they emerged from the forest, at a point where the road swung down the other side of Romanja, they stopped for a break and to have something to eat.
Claussen had brought a flask of coffee and some bread and sausage, and Reinhardt walked to the edge of the road, sipping from a mug, and looked down across the country below them. The road wound away across flatlands to where a range of mountains broached the haze around their foothills, summits seeming to hang in the air like the brushstrokes of a painter. Standing there, he felt happy or, at least, resigned to a course of action. Perhaps they were the same thing, he mused, as he took the Williamson from his pocket, rolling it over in his hand and watching the play of light across the inscription. In any case, happiness did not mean conversation. Neither he nor Claussen had exchanged more than a couple of words since they left, but there was a comfort in that silence that he was loath to break for the sake of mere speech.
They did need to talk, though. Finishing his coffee and lighting cigarettes for them both, Reinhardt spread a map on the hood of the kübelwagen. The wind lifted one edge, and he weighed it down with the watch. ‘Have you ever driven down to Foča? No? Two possible roads there from Sarajevo. South, through Trnovo, Dobro Polje, then east to Miljevina. Or east, then south through Rogatica and Goražde. That’s the road we’re on. It’s a fairly straight run through Rogatica’ – he pointed to the map southeast of their position – ‘to Goražde’ – farther south still – ‘and then along the Drina to Foča. Schwarz is aimed at the Partisans, here,’ he said, his finger circling the map south of Foča, over Mount Sutješka. ‘But this is where we might have trouble. Brod.’ He pointed to a section on the map where the Drina, flowing north, made a sharp turn east towards Foča. Brod was where the southern and eastern roads met. A crossroads. If word of them had gone out, it would find them at Brod. ‘I don’t know of any way around it…’ He trailed off, looking at the map. ‘Nothing for it but to get there as fast as we can and then… play it by ear, I suppose,’ he finished, tossing the cigarette butt away, picking up the Williamson.
‘A favour, sir?’ Claussen motioned at the watch. ‘What’s the story with that? Never seen you with it before.’
Reinhardt ran his fingers over the inscription, giving himself time to surmount the reluctance within to talk of it. Only Brauer and Meissner knew the story. And poor old Isidor Rosen, but if anyone deserved to hear it now, it was Claussen. ‘It was that same battle in 1918 I got the Cross. That British redoubt. We fought a game of cat-and-mouse with the Tommies through the trenches for three days. I killed their officer, but not before he gave me this,’ he said, pointing at his knee, ‘and ended my war. Before he died, he gave me the watch and… asked me to give it back to his father if I survived the war.’ He paused, remembering suddenly, vividly, the viscous slide of mud, the latrine stench, the spatter of men across the bottom of the trenches. ‘I put it down to things a dying man says. But then the war ended and what he said stayed with me. I wrote to his father. We met. Spoke of his son. I offered him back the watch, but he said to keep it.’ Which he had, the watch taking on a significance that, after all this time, even Reinhardt himself was not sure of anymore. Only that it reminded him of a chance meeting of kindred spirits, a short space of time when he could be something other than the creature he was turning into, and because that Englishman was the last man he killed in that war, and that was worth remembering.
He weighed it in his hand, hesitating, then pulled the file from his backpack. ‘This is what it’s about. The evidence against Verhein.’ He explained the case, outlining what they knew and suspected, Claussen’s eyes moving from the file, to him, and back.
‘You can’t leave that lying around,’ Claussen said when Reinhardt had finished. He took a crowbar from the tool kit and levered the spare tyre away from its rim. ‘Under here,’ he said, voice strained. Reinhardt pushed and shoved the file under the tyre, against the inner tube. When it was done, they shared a blank look, a shared complicity that needed no words.
They set off again, descending steeply down the side of the mountain until the road emerged onto the flats, and Claussen opened the throttle and put the car on the road that arrowed straight across a wide, empty prairie, where the light undulated over a wash of grass runnelled winter pale and spring green. Gradually the foothills ahead emerged out of the haze, and the flats ended, the road sliding its way down into a deep canyon, down to where Rogatica nestled in its valley. The road took them past a destroyed hamlet, past an Orthodox church with its steeple blown off, the remains of its walls skirted in rubble, and through scarred neighbourhoods that showed the signs of much fighting, until they found the German headquarters.
A Feldgendarmerie officer informed Reinhardt that the road to Goražde was backed up with traffic, and movement was slow around the bridge over the Praća. As they drove slowly back out, the town seemed sunk under a slough of decay and abandonment. Bullet holes pocked the walls; many houses were destroyed, and more burned out. Charcoal scrawls on some of the walls showed crosses, Catholic and Orthodox. Once, a Star of David on a house where the doors and windows gaped open. What few people he saw seemed stooped over, whatever their age, their eyes elsewhere
. There were Serbs among them, mostly old women in black headscarves and black dresses who walked with a bandy-legged shuffle. Reinhardt could feel the fear in the town. As in the lands around Sarajevo, Rogatica’s Serbs had mostly been deported, massacred, or fled to the hills.
Leaving Rogatica, the road wound through a gorge between high cliffs of blunt rock. It was cold, the sun shut out by the height of the rock walls. A wind blew down the steep cut in the mountains, bringing with it a dark, damp chill that seemed to push them on their way until, at length, the mountains pulled apart and the vista suddenly opened out. The light changed, as if a gauze had been snatched away, and they drove along the lathered shores of a river, the Prača rushing east out of the mountains, a froth of water that foamed and streamed away to the east towards Višegrad. The sun shone brightly on the brilliant green of the water, and on the other side thickly forested hills rose straight from the river. A military bridge spanned the Prača, the river backing and curling around its pillars, and that was their road south.
An Italian convoy was stopped in front of the bridge, heavy trucks with their engines off and their drivers idling around the vehicles. ‘Road down to Goražde’s too narrow, sir,’ said a Feldgendarme, saluting Reinhardt as he asked what was going on. ‘Medical convoy’s coming up from Goražde, so they’ve got priority. Won’t be long now, I would think.’
‘Time for a break,’ said Reinhardt, walking back to Claussen. He stretched as Claussen began checking the car. Huddled around the spire of a mosque was a hamlet tucked up against the sides of the cliff that faced out over the water. A small herd of goats picked at the grass on the steep shoulders of the road. An old lady had a small fire going, pots hanging over and in the flames. Reinhardt sorted through the supplies on the backseat.
‘Do we have any coffee?’
‘Pack on the floor,’ replied Claussen, checking the kübelwagen’s tyres, a Mokri clamped in the corner of his mouth.
‘You want one?’
‘Not for me, sir, thank you.’
Reinhardt found coffee and sugar and walked up to the lady. She backed away from him, staring up at him from the stoop in her back. He offered the tins to her. ‘Coffee? Can you make me some coffee?’
By dint of gesture and a few words, he seemed to make her understand, and she fetched a small metal pot and began to make the coffee in the traditional way he had come to appreciate. She handed it to him in a chipped mug, and he lit a cigarette as he stood by her fire, staring around him. This was a truly beautiful spot, with the river, the plunge of the mountains. A man could be happy here, raising a family.
Something caught his eye on the far shore, and he stared at it a moment, his eyes squinting around a curl of smoke from his cigarette, before realizing it was a burned-out house. Where there was one, there were usually more, and his eyes found them eventually, in their ones and twos, scattered across the face of the mountain. Someone had gone to quite some trouble to burn those people out, the houses standing blackened and empty, like skulls.
Skulls got him thinking of Stolić, and of Verhein. He knew he had no real plan, no real idea of how to approach these two, or where to find them. He had movement orders as far as Foča, and he had Thallberg’s letter, which he knew he had to be careful about using. He also had to assume Becker would soon realise he was gone from Sarajevo, if not already, and the word would be going out to the Feldgendarmerie. Any checkpoint at any time might stop and detain him. Which of them was the priority? Stolić was SS. Strictly speaking, as an army officer Reinhardt had no authority to question him at all. He was, however, Verhein’s liaison, so maybe the best thing would be to start with Verhein, and then request permission to question Stolić. Thinking about Stolić had him thinking about that knife. The knife was one of the keys, he knew, but he still could not quite factor it into how the murders had played out that Saturday night.
Movement on the other side of the bridge became a convoy of trucks with red crosses on their sides. Over the bridge they came, passing in front of him on their way to Rogatica. There was movement all along the stopped vehicles, the creak of metal and stamp of doors, and engines coughed into life with gusts of black exhaust.
Reinhardt drank the last of his coffee and picked up his tins. Pausing, he looked among the old lady’s possessions and saw two empty little pots. He emptied half his coffee and half his sugar into each of them. The lady looked at the pots, then at him, and her face opened up, as if something within wished to get out. Her eyes stared up at him from deep within their sockets, but then there was a blast of noise, the Feldgendarmerie blowing their whistles, engines revving, and whatever it was, was gone. Her face closed up and in, the wrinkles on her face drawing tight, like the threads of a net, and the light in her eyes fell back and down, closing around whatever words might have bridged that sudden small space between them. Claussen had the engine running as Reinhardt climbed back into the car, and as it pulled away he looked up at her, lonely by her fire, a little pot in each hand.
34
The convoy of trucks rumbled over the bridge, the kübelwagen at its tail, and after about an hour of driving they came down into Goražde through small villages where most of the houses were burned. The city was spread out along both banks of the Drina, connected by a pair of bridges, and long rectangular fields ran up from the banks of the river and into the bluffs of the hills, minarets poking up above the town’s red roofs.
Although the streets reminded him of the old Ottoman city in Sarajevo with their cobbles and whitewashed houses, the town was choked with refugees. They were mostly farmers, it seemed, Muslims by their dress, and they stank of fear and the rich, heavy earth they farmed. Men and women bred to a tough life, but with desperation and fatigue etched into the leathered grime of their faces. In their slope-shouldered stance, gnarled hands listless by their sides, he saw a resigned incomprehension to the vagaries their lives had become, and he was reminded of that porter in Sarajevo bent double under his load. He wondered again what such people thought – could think – of events such as these that cut straight across the steady furrows of their lives, uprooting them from the mute certainties and traditions of their fathers, and their fathers before them.
They drifted slowly past the dull gaze of the refugees, past the Italian garrison, following the tactical signs to the German headquarters in a hotel just next to the first of the town’s bridges.
‘That doesn’t look too good,’ Claussen said, as he parked and leaned forward, putting his weight on the steering wheel.
Parked in front of the hotel were an Italian staff car and a car with Ustaše plates. An Italian stood at parade rest next to his car, with an Ustaša slouching against the front bumper of his. As he stepped out of the kübelwagen, Reinhardt could feel the tension between them. The Italian straightened and saluted him; the Ustaša barely moved.
‘Bit of a risk, isn’t it, sir?’ Claussen asked.
Reinhardt nodded, his hands feeling clammy. ‘Don’t see how we can avoid it. We need to know what’s ahead.’
Exchanging salutes with a sentry, he paused in the entrance, listening to the buzz of conversations, the ringing of phones. Inside was a hum of activity, and Reinhardt could feel the edge in the air that proximity to action sometimes brought on. He knocked on a door marked Operations. Inside, several soldiers sat at desks working on telephones and a harassed-looking lieutenant stood as he came in.
‘Sir?’
‘I’m on my way down to Foča, Lieutenant, and I wanted to know the conditions of the roads between here and there.’
The lieutenant pointed to a tactical map and was about to speak when a burst of shouting from somewhere in the hotel stopped him. A couple of the soldiers on the phones looked up, and one exchanged a knowing glance with the lieutenant. No one explained, however, and Reinhardt did not ask for details. ‘The road down to Foča is still considered safe for single-vehicle traffic. We have not had any confirmed Part
isan activity on it for several weeks now, but don’t use it after dark. It’s just past midday, so you should be in Foča in about an hour if you leave now.’
There was more shouting and a thump of feet. Reinhardt looked up at the room’s ceiling, raising his eyebrows.
‘Just our Italian allies having a bit of a tantrum, sir.’
‘About?’
‘The Ustaše, I would imagine, sir, it usually is.’
Closing the operations room door, he heard a clatter on the stairs and someone shouting again. Two Italians came down, one a colonel no less, followed by a German captain. The colonel was visibly furious, his knuckles stretched white against the hat clenched in his fist, which he slammed against his thigh to emphasise his words.
‘Barbarians!’ he seethed, his German thick with an Italian accent. ‘Absolute barbarians!’
The captain caught sight of Reinhardt and frowned but kept his attention on the Italian. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said, with an air of having repeated the same thing several times already. ‘There is little I can do about it. Please, I advise you to take your complaint to divisional headquarters.’
‘My complaint?’ roared the Italian. He looked up past the German at two Ustaše coming down the stairs in their black uniforms. The colonel shook his fist up at them. ‘They are your allies,’ he bellowed. ‘Yours! Control them. Do something.’ One of the Ustaše paused on the stairs, his mouth stretched in a sneer of a smile, and the vitriol in his reply was evident. The Italian went red, let loose a strangled expletive, erupted in a stream of Italian, and made to climb back up the stairs, but the captain got in his way, his arms up; the other Italian spoke urgently into the colonel’s ear, and he allowed himself to be pulled away, still roaring in fury.
The Man from Berlin Page 34