The Man from Berlin (15 page)

Reinhardt knew that no self-respecting general would be without his staff officers, and he would have liked to be able to note them down as well. They probably would also have been accompanied to the conference by their intelligence officers, and likely by some of their senior regimental and battalion commanders, but that was asking for too much. This was a good start, but before he went any further he would have to know whether this really was an avenue worth pursuing. ­Reinhardt stared at his list as Kruger looked over his shoulder. What he really needed was to cross-reference this with service history, to find out who among them had served in Russia.

Kruger snorted. ‘Good luck with that. I don't have that in­formation.'

Reinhardt froze. He had not realised he had spoken out loud. ‘Who might?' asked Reinhardt, trying to keep his voice normal.

‘Paymaster might.'

Reinhardt sighed long and softly. ‘A lot of bureaucracy involved in getting anything out of them.'

‘Unless you owe them money,' quipped Kruger, as he began putting his files away. He came back to his desk and paused with his hands on another. ‘I'm sorry, Captain. I'm not sure how else I can help
you.'

‘That's fine, you've been very helpful.'

Kruger removed his pince-nez, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘What's an officer's Russian service history to do with your updating your files, anyway?'

Reinhardt froze, feeling a cold sweat suddenly break out down his back, knowing his mouth had run away with him. He looked at his list a moment longer, then raised his eyes to Kruger, forcing the cold he felt inside out of his gaze. ‘Need-to-know basis, Kruger. Need-to-know.'

‘Right,' said Kruger with a lopsided grin as he put his file away. ‘Sorry.'

‘No harm done. And thanks again,' said Reinhardt, through a parched mouth. Reinhardt walked back upstairs to his office, the cold sweat that had risen after Kruger's question drying away.

13

B
ack in his office, Reinhardt tossed his notebook on his desk and paced around his room. The bell at the cathedral began to toll, and he counted off the bells to midday. As the tolling faded away, a muezzin's call sounded from somewhere to the east, then another, and another. He decided to give Claussen another five or ten minutes to find Hueber, and then he would go for lunch. He thought a moment, then pulled a pencil and paper towards him and began to sketch out what he had so far on the case. He wrote
Vukić
in the centre of a blank page, and
Hendel
next to it. Then he jotted down what they knew, which was next to nothing – the car, and the cigarettes, what they knew of Vukić's life, what he knew of Hendel's duties. He wrote
murderer
, and stared at it. Then added a pair of parentheses to the end of
murderer
and added an
s
. More than likely there was more than one of them
.

More names appeared on the paper – Freilinger's, Padelin's, ­Becker's – and the various organisations they served – the army, the Ustaše, the police, the Feldgendarmerie. Jelić, almost the last person they knew of who had seen Vukić alive. The map took shape, lines connecting names, sundry information jotted down next to names. Motives, such as he assumed them. Facts, such as he knew them. Avenues of investigation… Padelin's choice of a politically expedient suspect. Reinhardt's own investigation.

His stomach growled. Glancing at his watch, he saw that nearly three quarters of an hour had gone by while he worked and wrote. He folded the map into his breast pocket and drove out through the heavy midday heat to the barracks. The officers' mess was a long, narrow room, overlooking the Miljačka and the strip of garden in which the band had played last night, and mercifully cool. Tables with white cloths were spread across most of the space, with a bar at one end of the room and a corner where a motley collection of armchairs and settees had been drawn up into a smoking and reading area. A swastika hung on the wall above the entrance, with a portrait of the Führer to the right. The walls were covered in unit plaques and other memorabilia. The place stank of cigarettes and pork and beer.

Most of the officers were done eating, but a sizable crowd was holding up the bar, and a group of senior officers Reinhardt did not recognise, mostly colonels it seemed, had colonised the reading area under a fog of smoke. Reinhardt chose an unoccupied table by the window and sat with his back to the bar, hanging his cap off his chair. A waiter appeared with a menu under one arm and a decanter of water in his other hand.

‘Good afternoon, Captain,' the waiter murmured as he poured Reinhardt a glass of water.

‘Afternoon, Kurt,' replied Reinhardt. ‘What is it today, then?'

‘What is it ever in this city, Captain?' the waiter replied, brushing away an almost imperceptible crease in the white tablecloth. ‘Pork chops. But we do have some runner beans. Quite fresh.'

‘Fine, Kurt. Thank
you.'

‘Thank you, Captain,' replied the waiter, inclining his head. ­Reinhardt watched him go, remembering out of the blue the time that Kurt had confided in him he had once waited tables at Medved's, the Russian restaurant in Berlin. ‘
Certain standards
,' he had said, ‘
once learned, can never be unlearned. No matter where one finds oneself.
' He laughed to himself at the trite irony of a waiter's reminiscence and attempt to maintain his own standards, and the parallel with his own situation. His own standards. There was a blast of laughter behind him, and he instinctively hunched his shoulders up and his head down and away from the noise. He felt wound so tight.

His meal arrived, and Reinhardt ate it quietly and methodically, sitting back when he was done. Kurt removed his empty plate and replaced it with coffee and a small dish of rice pudding. Reinhardt drank the coffee, which was awful watery stuff compared to what could still be had in the city, and left the pudding. He took the map from his pocket and spread it on the tablecloth, staring at the blank area where his investigation should
be.

He put his elbows on the table and held the map in two hands, running the paper between thumbs and forefingers. Reinhardt glanced quickly at this watch, then stood. It was half past one. Time for one drink, and then he had to find Claussen and see what had been done about translating the pathology report.

There was still a clutch of officers at the bar, and a group of colonels in the armchairs. Reinhardt walked to the end of the bar, ordered slivovitz, and spread his map out again. A couple of the officers looked over at him. He nodded to them cordially, not wanting any contact or conversation. One of them, a solid-looking man with ash-blond hair, looked at him a little longer than the others.

Looking at his map, he saw two options. The first was to investigate Hendel's death by following up in the city, with the people who knew him or might have seen him, or who knew Vukić, but he had neither time nor resources for that, and in any case his remit was to assist the Sarajevo police while concentrating on Hendel's death. The second was to pursue his investigation within the army, following up on the information that Vukić frequented officers of senior rank, and try to find where Hendel fitted into that.

‘I beg your pardon, but we've met, have we
not?'

Reinhardt started, swallowing his slivovitz a little too quickly and coughing. He put his glass down and his hand over his map, and turned to face the man standing next to him. It was the officer who had looked longest at him, a lieutenant colonel in the black uniform of the panzer troops. He had cropped blond hair and cheeks made florid from drinking. Reinhardt came to attention with his heels together. The officer was rather young for his rank and, as Reinhardt looked at him, he did seem rather familiar, standing there smiling and with a half-drunk glass of beer in his hand.

‘Excuse me, sir,' he managed around the burn in his throat, and the burn he could feel on his cheeks. ‘You were saying?'

The lieutenant colonel raised his glass and pointed it at him. ‘We've met,' he repeated.

‘Forgive me, sir, but I am not sure I can recollect when I might have had that honour.'

The officer clicked his fingers repeatedly, staring at Reinhardt with his smile seemingly stuck on his face. ‘I've almost got it,' he exclaimed. ‘R… Ran… Rein… Rein something or other. Damn it, it's on the tip of my tongue!'

‘Reinhardt. Gregor Reinhardt.'

‘That's it!' he exclaimed, a finger in the air. ‘And you don't remember me! You need a clue,
Monsieurrr
?' he asked, dragging out the French word and almost gargling it at the back of his throat.

That was what did it, though. Reinhardt smiled, offering his right hand. ‘Johannes Lehmann. 1st Panzer. Although you were a captain last time I saw you,
sir.'

‘What can I say? Promotion comes pretty fast in a panzer unit! But fancy meeting you here. Long way from France,
no?!'

‘A long way, indeed. When was it, then? May, June 1940? Dunkirk, right?'

‘That's it,' Lehmann replied, jovially. ‘We had just finished chasing the Tommies into the sea, and you were what, doing interrogations or some such?'

‘Debriefings of captured enemy officers,' said Reinhardt.

‘That's what they call it, do they?' snorted Lehmann, taking a swig from his glass. ‘Well, you must've had your work cut out for you, because we certainly gave you plenty of officers to debrief.'

‘No complaints from me on that score,' said Reinhardt. He breathed deep and slow to cover his surprise. ‘Last time we saw each other was, when? Paris, wasn't it? Christmas?'

‘Christmas in Paris! Those were good days. France. The weather. The wine, the parties. The girls,' he finished, with wide eyes beneath raised brows.

Reinhardt would have added
victories
to that list of good things. There were not that many of them anymore, especially for the tankers, since the glory days of 1940. ‘You were divisional intelligence, weren't you?'

‘Still am. Still am. And you? Still with Abwehr?'

‘For my sins,' said Reinhardt. He glanced at Lehmann's decorations. He wore the gold-and-silver panzer assault badge pinned to the breast of his coat, the white tank destruction ribbon on his right arm, and the red, white, and black stripes of the Winter Campaign medal made a diagonal slash of colour across the big lapels of his black uniform. He raised his glass at them. ‘You've been busy, I see. Where has the war taken
you?'

‘Poland and Russia mostly. We were with Army Group North. Got to within sight of Leningrad before we got pulled back. We were beaten up pretty badly,' he said, swigging from his beer. ‘Then Rzhev, for about a year. We were pulled out again and sent back to France for refitting in January this year. God, what a relief that was!
You?'

‘Since Dunkirk? Here, until the end of forty-one. Then North ­Africa until September last year. Italy for a bit. Then back here.'

‘Riding with Rommel, eh?' Lehmann's eyes flicked over Reinhardt's map, then back up. ‘You still in counterintelligence?' ­Reinhardt nodded, as he slowly folded his map away. ‘Look, I'm here as advance liaison for the division. We're deploying out of here in June, to Serbia and Greece mainly. I'm getting the official line from all the right people, but I'd appreciate any information you have that could be useful to us, especially on the Četniks, seeing as we're going to be in Serbia. Something a bit more local. Anything to put things in perspective.'

‘I understand,' replied Reinhardt. ‘And I'm at your service, sir, of course.'

‘C'mon, don't make it sound so formal. Just talk, over drinks or something. Like whatever you've got about the politics here. They seem pretty messed up. Like nothing we've experienced anywhere else.'

‘They are labyrinthine, indeed. But you said you'd be in Serbia, and my area of operations is Bosnia, so I'm not so sure what use I'd be to
you.'

‘Well, there's Serbs here, and Serbs in Serbia. Right…
?'

‘Granted, but it doesn't mean they've the same motivations.'

‘Does my head in,' said Lehmann, putting his empty beer glass on the bar top. He pointed at Reinhardt's glass. ‘Another?' Reinhardt hesitated a moment, then nodded, glancing quickly at his watch as Lehmann called the barman over for their drinks. ‘So, in Bosnia you've got Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. No Croats in Serbia, right? For which I've been made to understand I should be eternally grateful. Then you've got all these damn organisations. Četniks, Ustaše. I'm still trying to get that straight. I went through it all again at that conference the other day. It made sense then, but now it's fading. Here, cheers,' he said, handing Reinhardt his slivovitz.

Reinhardt clinked glasses with him. ‘Firm ground under your tank,' he said, running what Lehmann had just said back over in his mind to make sure he had understood.

Lehmann snorted. ‘ “Firm ground”. I like that,' he said, taking a swig from his beer. ‘What it all means,' he continued, ‘is that a simple tanker like myself can't make head nor tail of it all. It was easier in Russia. There, it was just us and them.'

‘History is layered here, like anywhere else, really,' said Reinhardt. ‘Each people's version of the past, and the present, like the carpets you see for sale in the market. But the layers don't just lie one atop the other. They clash and rub up against each other as each side's fortunes wax, then wane, and the versions compete for the truth to the exclusion of any other. Compromise is not easy in such situations, and each side invariably expects – and receives – the worst from the other.'

‘Well, what do you expect?' mused Lehmann into his beer. ‘Always been the
way.'

That did not seem right. It seemed… easy. Stereotypical. And coming from a German soldier… ‘Well,' Reinhardt said, finally, looking inward at himself and feeling disappointed he could not come up with more. He sounded weak. ‘It's not, actually. Relations have often been strained, but actually they aren't any more prone to fighting themselves than anyone else, and often when they've fought its because they've been dragged into something bigger.'

‘What?' snorted Lehmann. ‘Like this war, y'mean? So it's our fault these people keep falling out with each other?'

Reinhardt smiled, feeling it strained and shallow. ‘Some might say that. But, for instance, here, in Sarajevo, the communities help each other more than not. Serbs in the countryside massacre Muslims, but the Muslim authorities here have often defended the city's Serbs against Ustaše depredations. And the Ustaše are Croat, but many of the city's Croats resent their behaviour.'

‘So it's complicated.'

‘It's complicated,' agreed Reinhardt. ‘Like I said, this war in Bosnia is many wars all piled up. You need to understand the many to understand the whole.'

‘But the Muslims are with us, right?'

Reinhardt sighed, sympathising with Lehmann's need for simplicity in the face of complexity even if he did not agree with it. ‘The Muslims don't have a big brother to look after them, and they have nowhere else to go. So, the way they see it, to survive this they keep their heads down, or they ally up either with the Croats or, more and more, with the Partisans, or with us.' Lehmann's eyes seemed to glaze over. ‘You said you were here on a conference?' asked Reinhardt, sipping his slivovitz.

‘Yep,' Lehmann replied, licking foam off his lip. ‘Senior officers planning for Schwarz. I was there as advance liaison for the division, as part of the area that the op will cover is in Serbia.'

‘That's right,' said Reinhardt. He felt nervous, hesitant, like someone on a high diving board for the first time, screwing up the courage to jump. This might take him somewhere. It might take him nowhere. ‘I'm hopeful for some good material coming out of this operation. Counterintelligence has been a bit slow lately.' He winced as he said it, it sounded so weak.