The Man from Berlin (17 page)

‘But that doesn't rule you out, Ascher,' blurted a colonel with ruddy cheeks, quite obviously some way into his cups. ‘You were there, weren't you? You and Kappel, and… and…' He trailed off, looking around the assembled officers with watery eyes.

‘Where what?' asked Ascher, turning from his conversation with Stolić and Eichel. Stolić looked over his shoulder. His eyes, as Reinhardt had guessed from the dim light of the bar last night, were indeed very pale. They fastened on Reinhardt, and he saw recognition jolt through them, followed by what could only be fury.

‘Careful now,' joked one of the officers. ‘Do we need alibis?'

Reinhardt smiled back. ‘I don't know. Do some of you think you
might
?'

Conversation just died away from the men around him. At the bar, Stolić and Ascher exchanged glances. Reinhardt breathed shallowly over the awful lump that sat sodden and heavy in his chest, aghast at what he had just said.

Faber's eyes narrowed. ‘Captain,' said Ascher, from where he stood against the bar. ‘I am sure you cannot be insinuating anything.'

‘Nothing at all, sir,' he replied, forcing a tone of levity into his voice.

‘Good. Then I am quite sure you are stating nothing, either.'

‘Correct, sir.' God, what had he been
thinking
to say what he did? Was it the drink? Recounting the past? From a time when he was someone, when what he did counted for something? Things were just right. They were always
just right
, until the moment they were
not.

‘Just a minute,' said Stolić, coming forward. As they had last night, his cheeks bore a high flush. Ascher half raised a hand to stop him, but the Standartenführer ignored it. ‘Just a bloody minute. You say you are investigating a murder that occurred in and around the same place and time that some here were present? And you told us
nothing
of this? What, you tried to insinuate yourself into our confidence? To sound us out?' Stolić's face became further suffused, his eyes becoming even paler as a result, and his voice rising as he spoke. He took a step, then another, until he loomed over Reinhardt. All conversation stopped, all heads turned. To Reinhardt, they were nothing but a row of pale ovals in his periphery. ‘Just who the hell do you think you are,
Captain
?' In the face of Stolić's aggression, Reinhardt froze. Coming to attention was all he could do, directing his gaze to a point just behind Stolić's head, ignoring the blaze of humiliation that roared through
him.

‘A captain of the Abwehr, apparently,' said Ascher. ‘An ex-­policeman. Of course he was sounding you out. He was sounding all of us
out.'

‘Is this true, Reinhardt?' grated Faber.

Reinhardt had not been the focus of so many men who could do him harm in a long time. ‘No, sir,' he said, with as much confidence as he could muster, keeping his eyes front and focused on nothing. He had wanted to sound them out, but God knew the way things were progressing it would have been a terrible idea. It was bad enough now, when he had not even meant for any of it to come out. ‘If you will recall, sir, I came upon your invitation.'

‘That's true,' said Faber, half to himself, half to Stolić.

‘Don't be so bloody gullible, Faber,' Stolić snarled. His teeth, ­Reinhardt suddenly noticed, were in bad shape, and the man's breath was pinched, acidic. ‘The man's a policeman. Deception's in his blood. I'll bet he planned it all.' He stepped back, raking him up and down with his eyes, then swinging them around to look over the others. ‘I caught him sniffing around the Ragusa last night. Who the
hell
thought it was a good idea to spring him on us?' The officers shifted and muttered, looking left and right, most of them looking to Faber and Lehmann. Faber looked hard at the tank officer, who went red with embarrassment.

‘Who is your superior, Reinhardt?' demanded Ascher.

‘Major Freilinger,
sir.'

‘Good. He will be hearing from me about this.'

‘Now,' said Stolić, stabbing Reinhardt's chest with a finger, right on his Iron Cross, and then pointing over his shoulder. ‘Fuck
off.'

14

R
einhardt forced himself to walk back
through the halls to the courtyard. He looked straight ahead, praying he would meet no one he knew, but as he approached the door to the parking lot, he paused; checking that there was no one behind him, he collapsed backwards against the wall, feeling his knees trembling as if they were about to give way on him. He breathed deeply, a slow, ragged, shuddering breath. ‘Gregor,' he whispered. ‘Gregor, why couldn't you have left it alone?'

Voices had him standing straight, tugging at the hem of his tunic as he walked briskly back out into the courtyard, into the blaze of heat and light to his car. He drove back to his office, where he found Claussen and Hueber waiting.

‘Hueber has that translation you were asking for,' said Claussen as they followed Reinhardt into his office.

Reinhardt sat in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. ‘Proceed, Corporal,' he said, tightly.

Hueber shuffled some sheets in his hand, glancing down at a page of handwritten notes, and began reading. It was a fairly standard pathology report. Dates, times, places, findings of the autopsy, which, it seemed, barely qualified as one as the pathologist had stopped at the knife wounds and gone no further. The corporal finished, saw Reinhardt staring hard at him, and blushed.

‘You said something about the wounds and the knife. Go over it again.'

‘Sir. Err… the wounds. Average depth three inches. Deepest penetration six and a half inches. Errr… Wounds characteristic of a very sharp, heavy knife with a bottom edge curving up to a point, and a top edge equally sharp along at least two inches, but showing a pronounced… err… hook? A hook shape? A curve…' The corporal trailed off. ‘I'm sorry, sir. I'm not at all… sure of the words. That seems to be what they are describing.'

‘A hook shape?' repeated Reinhardt.

‘Yes,
sir.'

‘What kind of a knife is hook-shaped… ?'

Hueber went red, reading over the report, and then his notes. ‘Sorry, sir. It doesn't
say.'

‘Don't worry, son. It's not your fault.' He sighed. ‘Nothing much, eh?' Claussen nodded in agreement. ‘Very well. Thank you, Hueber. You are dismissed. Type those notes up for
me.'

The corporal left, and Reinhardt sighed, suddenly deflated. He slumped on his elbows. Looking down past his knee, he could see the drawer where he kept that bottle of slivovitz. The temptation was strong, but he stood instead, walking over to look at the big wall map. His eyes ran back and forth between Ilidža and Sarajevo, and then over and up around the thread of the city's streets. The whole place was so small, but wound in and built up upon itself. He put his hand on the map. With his thumb on Ilidža, he could almost stretch his little finger out to Sarajevo, and when he put his palm on the map it almost obliterated the city. And yet to get anywhere, it seemed you had to turn and turn and turn again…

‘Captain Reinhardt?' Reinhardt looked up and away from the map at the tone in Claussen's voice. ‘Is something wrong,
sir?'

Reinhardt paused, then related the incident in the bar. Woodenly. No expression. At the end of it, Claussen just stared at him and shook his head slightly.

‘What does that mean?' hissed Reinhardt through tight lips, life surging back into his voice. ‘I didn't ask to get dragged into entertaining a bunch of colonels like that.'

‘No, sir,' Claussen replied, imperturbable in the face of Reinhardt's anger. What was it about sergeants and their ability to do that to him? Brauer had had the same effect on him. Like a father staring down a guilty son, although Reinhardt was sure he had never managed that same stare with Friedrich. Perhaps, if he had been able to, things between them might have been different. ‘But you didn't walk away from it, either.' The two of them stared at each other, but it was Claussen who stepped back. ‘Will you be needing anything else for the time being,
sir?'

‘Yes,' said Reinhardt. ‘Find out who Peter Krause was. Is. I've no rank, but I'm guessing he was a lieutenant like Hendel. You are dismissed for
now.'

With Claussen gone, Reinhardt had nothing to occupy his mind while he waited for the inevitable summons from Freilinger. He unfolded his map, stared at it, put it away, unfolded it again, and added
Stolić
to the names on it, linking it to Vukić's, thinking of the way Dragan described Stolić and his knife. He checked in on Maier and Weninger. He found Weninger this time, a small and taciturn man, who pointed at Hendel's sorted files with a pencil and had his head back down in his own material as Reinhardt walked out with them back up to his office. There was a lot going on in the building. Frantic last-minute arrangements for Schwarz, mostly. Reinhardt passed through it, feeling detached, alone.

Hendel's material was not much, Reinhardt thought, as he looked at the stack of paper and cardboard standing in the middle of his desk, but he should have looked at it earlier himself. He checked that it was ordered chronologically and then began to go through the files one after the other, starting with Hendel's activity log. Hendel's work was internal army security. He had made log entries fairly regularly upon arrival in Sarajevo at the end of December, but they had begun to tail off around the beginning of March. Flipping through the log, he saw no references to Vukić. He went back through the log more carefully, looking for euphemisms, initials, some kind of internal code, and found nothing.

He sat back, drumming his fingers quietly on the desktop, not sure what to make of that absence. He lifted the case files one by one, glancing at the titles as he went. A couple were for operations he knew of, mostly targeting the Croatian Army for Partisan infiltrators or leaks. Unlike the Ustaše, the Croatian Army – the Domobranstvo – was not what anyone would call ideologically inclined or committed and suffered high rates of desertion and low levels of morale, particularly among its Bosnian Muslim conscripts. Most of the Croats in its ranks were from Croatia proper, far from home and desperately homesick. At the command level there was a sustained level of mutual loathing and distrust between the Domobrantsvo's officers and the Ustaše. In that, they were not too different from the way many German officers felt about the SS. Some of the files had the names and ranks of soldiers on them, mostly Germans, none of whom he knew, and none above the rank of major, with the exception of one file belonging to a colonel of the Domobranstvo, one Tihomir Grbić.

Out of interest more than anything else, Reinhardt opened the file, which, from the date stamped on the cover, was one of the last files that Hendel opened before his death. The case against Grbić seemed to be one of cowardice in the face of the enemy. He scanned down the front page, and the name of Standartenführer Mladen Stolić leaped out at him. Reinhardt flipped to the after-action report, which stated that Grbić's men had failed to press home an attack against the Partisans made in conjunction with units from the 7th SS. It was not the first time Grbić's men had failed in action, but from reading over a summary of Grbić's service record, it was clear the man himself was anything but a coward. He had served with the Croatian Army in the USSR until he was seriously wounded in the fighting around Stalingrad. The man was a veteran, thought Reinhardt. It was his troops, all new and mostly conscripts, who were probably unwilling. That seemed to be the emerging gist of Hendel's investigation, such as it was recorded in the file.

Reinhardt sat back, not knowing what, if anything, to make of this. There was a clear connection from Hendel to Stolić, and from them both to Vukić. It was clear Stolić knew of, and disliked, Hendel. What was wrong here? Too obvious, perhaps? Too clear a link? For a moment, he seemed to hear his old probationary officer's voice.
It's the little things, Gregor. Always the little things.
Where was the little thing in this, he wondered, seeing Claussen appear at the door.

‘What do you have, Sergeant?' Reinhardt asked, shaking an Atikah loose from a packet.

‘Lieutenant Peter Krause, sir,' said Claussen, stepping into the room and reading from the page. He passed through the beam of light, the light snapping and dividing around him, sending the motes of dust into a new frenzy of movement. ‘Works in transportation. Movement supply officer. Been posted here since June last year.' He passed the paper across Reinhardt's desk.

Reinhardt scanned down the handwritten notes. ‘They've reported him missing?' he asked as he lit his cigarette.

‘Reported missing to the Feldgendarmerie yesterday morning.'

‘And yet we know Becker's been looking for him since Sunday.' Reinhardt snapped back in his chair, staring hard at Claussen. He clicked his fingers and pulled his cigarette from his mouth, pointing his fingers at the sergeant. ‘
That's
where I know Krause's name from. The list of deserters and wanted men. He was on that list I saw in the Feldgendarmerie's HQ while I was waiting to see Becker yesterday afternoon.' He twisted his mouth in an ironic smile. ‘Bloody hell,' he muttered. He took a long drag on the cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs.

‘One interesting thing, sir,' said Claussen. He leaned over the desk and pointed to the bottom of the page. ‘Krause is Volksdeutsche. His mother was Slovenian. He speaks the language.'

Reinhardt nodded. ‘So if he's gone to ground, he'll get by a lot easier than we would.' He trailed off, twisting around to look at the map again, imagining where someone like Krause might run to from Ilidža. Not only where, but to whom. He glanced back at the files on his desk. What would Hendel, an Abwehr officer on post here less than five months, be doing with a lieutenant of transportation troops? What was the link between them? There had to be one, beyond the fact that the pair of them seemed to like to drink and chase skirts together.

‘Captain Reinhardt?' A corporal stood in the door at attention. ‘Major Freilinger's compliments, sir, and you are requested to report to him immediately.'

‘Inform the major I will be there directly.' Reinhardt stood, tugging his uniform into place, and breathed out heavily through pursed lips as he stubbed his cigarette out. He exchanged a glance with Claussen, who looked back at him expressionlessly. ‘Wish me luck,' Reinhardt muttered, walking
out.