The Pale House (A Gregor Reinhardt Novel)

by Luke McCallin

  “Or a decision that is made for you.”

  Reinhardt needed suddenly to be away from here.

  “I would like to thank you for this. For taking the time to show it to me.” He winced inside, hearing himself so formal. So Prussian. “If you will excuse me, I wish you a pleasant evening.”

  She tilted her head, knowing something was wrong. “I am glad you enjoyed it.” She paused. “If you are going through the new town, perhaps you will escort me home, Captain?” He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Then let me get my coat.”

  Reinhardt kept coming back to . —Valter, as he was better known—was elusive in the extreme. The Partisans’ best-kept secret. For to have revealed himself like that, exposed himself to such risk, meant the Partisans were concerned, profoundly so. They would use all the tools in their possession, including Reinhardt. And after all, he thought to himself, was that so different from the way he had spent so much of his life? Being a tool in someone else’s possession? Soldier, policeman, soldier again. A life in service, so why the fixation on independence, now? Was he still so enamored of a need to make his own mark, in his own service?

  He needed air, and there was still a crowd at the entrance. It shuffled out, slowly, and he could feel something was wrong. The crowd pulled him out into the cold air and he drank it deep, wanting to wake himself back up. He paused on the steps. Someone had hung a lantern from a makeshift hook over the door, and his breath puffed up and away into its light.

  Bunda stood at the bottom of the steps, lantern-light glittering in his eyes, looking up at him.

  “Getting cozy with the natives, is you?”

  Reinhardt said nothing. He walked down the steps slowly, Bunda’s eyes following all the way.

  “I ’eard you was ’ere. I been looking for you.” The huge Ustaša leaned back against a car with two other Ustaše standing on either side of him. Reinhardt’s back prickled suddenly with his fear, and he pushed his tongue hard into the gap in his teeth.

  “Captain?” The light from inside the theater and from the lantern cast into sharp lines of light and dark so he could not see her eyes. The Ustaše straightened, even Bunda. He seemed to coil up and in at the sight of her, and something in the set of his gaze sent a flood of cold through Reinhardt. seemed to hesitate, looking back inside, then came down the stairs, the light changing, flowing and fading and pooling differently over her as she stepped out of the lantern’s glow. “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem, madam,” said Bunda, slowly. “Only, we was asked to fetch ’im.”

  “Who?”

  “’im, right there.”

  “He has a rank. Do him the honor of using it.”

  Bunda’s lips furled in around his teeth. He paused. Breathed. “That would be ’im. Captain Reinhardt.”

  “Better, Captain. Thank you. Why?”

  “Something to show ’im. And someone wants to see ’im. Someone you don’t want to keep waitin’, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “An Ustaša?” Reinhardt asked. Bunda nodded. flashed through Reinhardt’s mind. Here was a golden opportunity, but it was so soon. Too soon. “Then as I am not at your beck and call, I think I must respectfully decline,” he said, stalling.

  “No, Reinhardt. You don’t decline. You just come.” The two Ustaše to either side of him straightened, and their hands tightened on their weapons. “No fuss, now. Not ’ere. Not with all these nice people around. Just come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Not far.”

  “The Pale House?”

  Bunda smiled. “After I show you something.”

  “Who wants to see me?”

  “It’s a surprise,” Bunda said. His face shifted, hardened. “Enough.” He hauled himself upright and opened the car door. “We ain’t about to ’urt you, Reinhardt. Don’t be such an old woman. It’s just talk. Your driver can follow. So just get in. ’fore I lose my temper.”

  “Very well,” Reinhardt said, remembering Bunda as he stood at that checkpoint at the entrance to the city. He wanted to walk away but dared not. He felt the pressure of eyes all around him, the people gathered and bunched up around him on the stairs, in the theater, and the eyes he could only feel staring down at him from the windows along the street. “I will come with you.”

  “I sincerely hope nothing amiss will come to Captain Reinhardt,” said , suddenly. “Or I will have words with General .”

  As Bunda inclined his head, a glitter in his eyes as he looked at , something feral lurking far under the cavernous hang of his brow, Reinhardt realized she had spoken in Serbo-Croat. “Wouldn’t dream of ’arm coming to the captain, ma’am. Not seeing as ’e’s your particular friend.” He said it loud, and he said it for the crowd around them. If it was meant to wound, or embarrass, seemed not to notice. Reinhardt looked at her as if for the first time. She had drawn herself up, standing straight. She was half Bunda’s size, yet she still filled the space around her with a confidence rooted in some calm authority. But the risk she was taking, standing up to an Ustaša. For a German.

  put her arm on Reinhardt’s sleeve as he made to move. “I will see you later,” she said, looking at Bunda as she said it. Again, there came that feral look in the giant’s eyes as she turned and walked away, straight-backed elegance, her long black coat flaring out over her hips.

  “Now that,” said Bunda, “is one regal-looking backside.” Bunda smiled, locking eyes with Reinhardt. “Nothing to say, Reinhardt? In the car, then.”

  Reinhardt took a moment to tell his driver to follow. The Feldjaeger was standing behind his kubelwagen, an StG 44 in his hands. He nodded, safed his weapon, and started his engine.

  Thus comforted by knowing he had at least some support, Reinhardt climbed into the back of Bunda’s car as one of the Ustaše pushed in after him. The car lurched to one side as Bunda dumped his huge weight into the front and the driver fired up the engine with a ratcheting cough, followed by the stench of homemade fuel. The car rattled down the road, turned left onto Kvaternik, then right, across the Princip Bridge. People moved around them in the gathering gloom, hurrying home. Fog was settling in, drowning the tops of the buildings, and the street was studded with points and pockets of light from candles, flashlights, even a couple of brands that left halos of light as they bobbed away into the deepening evening.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Not far, don’t worry. But there’s something you’d like to see, I reckon. It’s up here.”

  The car’s engine whined as the driver put it at a steep hill, and Reinhardt realized they were in, or not far from, Bistrik, the neighborhood to the south of the Miljacka where he had previously been barracked. The car lurched into a right-hand turn, a white sign on a wall proclaiming Balibegovica Street, and stopped outside a house. Like a staged reproduction of the killings that morning in Logavina, cars were drawn up outside it, but they were all local, one or two police cars, and a truck with Ustaše plates. The car door was opened, and Reinhardt, followed by Bunda, went up to the front door, past a soldier on guard, and into the house, flicking on a flashlight as he went. The place was dark, the heavy wooden walls and floors drinking what little daylight was left. There was a stench, latrine thick, as he was pulled to the side, into one of the rooms that led off the entrance, and handed the flashlight. It might once have been a dining room but was now a place where men had been murdered. Butchered, in fact.

  Reinhardt stood in the doorway, stock-still with his hands clenched knuckle-white around the flashlight. Around his feet coiled a tubular tangle of limbs, cloth stretched tight over the angles of joints. He thought there were four bodies there, heaped across each other, at least two of them in poses of deliberate sexual obscenity with each other. Reinhardt’s eye stuttered across the punctures and slashes of mutilations, across pallid swells of flesh, past raw-edged butchery, a part of him beginning to tick over dee
p inside, storing up glimpses and impressions, before coming up to rest on Bunda. The Ustaša’s eyes had a wildness to them, and his face was engorged as if he strained to take everything in he could. A flicker of movement over his shoulder was , the police inspector, looking utterly miserable again.

  “What happened here, Bunda?”

  “The Partisans happened, Reinhardt.”

  Reinhardt turned, startled, not wanting to show it. An Ustaša stood in the shadowed doorway of another room. He was tall, and very big, his uniform strained taut over his height and weight, a black belt bowing under a vast spread of gut. He stepped a little farther into what little light there was.

  “Hello, Captain,” the Ustaša said.

  “,” Reinhardt replied, remembering this man from two years ago, the leader of Sarajevo’s police, remembering the embarrassment and humiliation Reinhardt had heaped upon him as he had torn through the Ustaše’s excuse for an investigation into Marija murder.

  “That’s Colonel to you, Reinhardt,” snarled Bunda, ever the lackey solicitous of his master’s rights.

  “Partisans, ?” Reinhardt asked around a dry mouth, ignoring Bunda. “How so?”

  smiled at him and gestured at the bodies. “They’re Ustaše. All of them. The Partisans did that. It’s what they do when they get hold of one of us. But we got one of them. Show him, .”

  Reinhardt followed the inspector out into a patch of ground behind the house overgrown with high grass and weeds traced silver by the flashlight’s beam as the inspector pointed to a lump in the grass. Reinhardt walked carefully over to the body, checking the ground around it with his flashlight. The body lay on its stomach, its arms flat to its sides and its face twisted high to the right. Its mouth and nose were almost gone, smashed away by some terrible blow, rendering almost superfluous the gunshot wound that holed its neck. The body was dressed in an ill-fitting uniform of dull brown, and a cap lay in the grass by its head. Reinhardt picked it up, turned it in his hands until he saw the red star of the Partisans sewn to the front. Despite himself, he grinned, an ironic twist of his mouth, looking up at the sky to compose himself.

  It had been a woman. Reinhardt ran his eyes up and down the body, the memory of that forest crowding suddenly into his mind, and then the basement. He touched his fingers to the bullet wound. It had not bled, meaning it was a postmortem wound. Reinhardt made to heave off one of the body’s boots, but it slid away easily from the leg, being much too large for the woman. The foot was bare, no sock. Reinhardt sat back on his heels, thinking of those five bodies from the construction site. His mouth twisted, anger rising slowly. He turned at a rustle in the grass, having almost forgotten about . The inspector stood there like a penitent, a notebook flapping open from his hand.

  “You . . . you were a detective. Before. So. What does this all look like to you?” asked.

  “It looks bad,” was all Reinhardt could find to say.

  stared, then laughed. A high-pitched giggle that he gulped back. “Bad? Bad? Oh, you have no idea.” His mouth moved soundlessly, and then his eyes slewed left and right. He looked like a cornered animal. There was something very wrong, here, Reinhardt knew. Something that went beyond the slaughter that had taken place.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  shook his head, stepping backward through the grass, and then he was gone, back inside the house. Reinhardt followed him in, turning a corner into the wall of Bunda’s chest.

  “You saw outside? The Partisan?”

  “I saw her, Bunda.”

  “Fuckers. Using women. No shame. And look what they did to my men. Go on, look. No secrets, Reinhardt. Look at ’em, I said! What do you see?”

  “Bodies.”

  “You see provocation,” said . “Look a little closer.”

  “Look at ’im.” Bunda’s flashlight stabbed at a body. “His eyes have been gouged out. That one. Eviscerated. That’s the stench. It’s ’is bowels. That one, engaged in buggery? On this one, and ’e’s been . . .” The giant stuttered to a stop.

  “Emasculated.”

  “That’s a fancy fucking word for ’aving your balls chopped off.”

  “You wanted me to see this, so give me a moment, Bunda.”

  Bunda subsided back, his huge arms folded across the boulder of his chest. stood quietly to one side, one of his meaty fists closed around something small, something that moved with a gentle clack of hard surfaces. Reinhardt shone the light into the faces of the dead, his stomach turning at the one who had been blinded, at the empty, bloodied sockets. Each of the heads he turned to the right, until he came to the one he wanted, running a soft fingertip down the ridge of scar that ran from the man’s ear down his jaw, and under his collar. Squatting there, he ran the flashlight over the room, and saw the blood spatters leap out at him. Two of them. On the wall. At a height consistent with men being made to kneel and then shot in the back of the head.

  “What do you make of that, then?” he asked the Ustaše, the light shining on the bloodied walls.

  Bunda leaned in, then growled. “Least they didn’t suffer, did they.”

  At least two of them did not suffer, Reinhardt thought as he stood, wincing at the pain in his knee. “Is this it?”

  “You’re taking this a bit lightly, aren’t you?” rumbled , and Reinhardt realized his position, all but alone up here, and his tongue shot into the gap in his teeth.

  “Bet you weren’t so fucking flippant when it was your boys lying in the dirt.” Bunda seemed to swell even bigger, fairly suffused with his anger.

  No apologies. Not for these men, even if he was alone up here. “What do you want from me?”

  “It’s important you see this, Reinhardt,” said . “It’s important you know we have the same enemies. Now, let’s go somewhere a little more comfortable, shall we?”

  They went back outside. The street was very quiet, only the murmur of the Ustaše and police, a sentry’s feet crunching softly in the dark. Reinhardt stood a moment, listening to what was not there, then climbed back into the car with Bunda. Ahead of them, angled his bulk into another car, and then it was the same journey but in reverse, and the Pale House loomed out of the murk, edged by the forlorn huddles of people who waited against its walls, coalescing out of the gloom, then falling behind as the car passed them. Then they were slowing past guards with shouldered rifles, skeins of barbed wire wound around wooden trestles, and stopping in front of the doorway set back under an arch bracketed by a pair of heavy, wrought-iron lamps. Up on the roof, a crow cocked its head down at the street and cawed raucously.

  Bunda shifted around in the front and smiled at Reinhardt.

  The crowd fell silent as stepped out of his car. The big Ustaše ran lazy eyes across the penitent crowd, and he lifted his fist to his mouth, brushing it with his knuckles as his fingers curled around whatever he held. He seemed to play with the crowd, no words exchanged, none needed, only a predatorial sense of ownership, as if knew exactly the terms of the power he wielded, and whatever sufferance he allowed the crowd to have. He left them there, eventually, and Reinhardt followed Bunda back inside and up that flight of steps, the desk in front of it empty now.

  The building pressed back in around him, different now, a dog with its teeth bared wet and white, as if no pretenses were needed with the darkness outside. Someone was screaming in the building. It was far off, dimmed by distance and walls and doors, but it pierced the rank air of the entrance, a shrill thread of agony. Behind a door came the meaty thud of something being struck. and Bunda hauled themselves up the stairs, the giant breathing heavily, then prodded Reinhardt to the right, following , past a man chained to a huge, metal radiator. Reinhardt could feel the heat sloughing off it as he went by, and the man writhed desperately against the cast-iron pipes, whimpering, his face scarlet as he shifted one way, then the other.

  Reinhardt and Bunda followed into another room, some ki
nd of office with a huge wooden desk surrounded by mismatched chairs. Heavy brown drapes hung at the windows, and moved to each of them, drawing them closed. There was a smell in the air, like something had been burned. turned and looked at Reinhardt, Bunda moving over to stand next to him. eyes were very dark and flat, no sign of what he was thinking visible in them or on his face. The fingers of one hand moved rhythmically, a faint clatter as something shifted around between them.

  “Leave us, Bunda.” ignored the crestfallen look on Bunda’s face, waited until he had left, then gestured to a chair. “Sit,” he said, his fingers moving again, and he rolled a pair of red dice onto a tabletop. “It has been a long time, Reinhardt.”

  Reinhardt took a long, slow breath. This day seemed to be getting longer and stranger the older it got. “You’re The Gambler.” inclined his head. “You’re in charge of the city’s security now.”

  “You are well informed.” stirred the dice with his fingers, rolling them softly across the table.

  Reinhardt shrugged, keeping his eyes on the Ustaša. “Know your friends . . .”

  “Know your enemies better.” smiled. It did not reach those flat eyes. “Are we your enemies, Reinhardt?” he asked, scooping up his dice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we did not part on the best of terms, last time. I admit that. And now you return, two years later, and you start where you left off.” Reinhardt said nothing. There was something here to be seen or heard, that was clear, and Reinhardt was content to let this conversation spin out the way wanted it to.

  “A drink, Reinhardt?” turned to a wooden cabinet of dark, carven wood, opening it to reveal a jumble of bottles. “What will you have? Let’s have a rakija!”

  Reinhardt wanted nothing to drink, and wanted nothing less than to raise a glass with , but he remembered how sensitive people in the Balkans were about their hospitality. “A slivovitz, then.”

  “Good choice. I’ve a nice homemade one in here . . . somewhere,” said, hunching into the cabinet and clattering bottles aside. “Evo, sprska rakija! Here! Say what you like about the Serbs, they make the best slivo.” He handed Reinhardt a glass of clear plum brandy. “Cheers!”