The Man from Berlin (21 page)

Reinhardt sat back down and reached for his glass. He looked up at Thallberg as he took a careful sip from it and put it back down. ‘You're right about Kripo.' He felt a flush of anger, remembering his conversation with Claussen about being an NCO. Christ, was it only yesterday? He acknowledged nothing else. Nothing about the east in 1916, the transfer to the stormtroopers and the Western Front in 1917, the attacks of 1918 when they seemed to have victory in their grasp, the wound that saw him hospitalised for the last months of the war and almost cost him his leg, the riotous years following it. To do so, it seemed, was an admission that it was fine to distill a man's life down to a few choice nouns, but it grated on him that he was allowing this Captain Thallberg to draw his own conclusions about him. ‘As to how Master Sergeant Brauer feels, you'd have to ask him.' His voice seemed to come from far away.

Thallberg grinned that boyish grin. ‘I'll be in touch tomorrow,' he said, and with that he was gone.

Reinhardt stayed in his chair a while longer after Thallberg had gone. The man was something of a whirlwind, for sure. He was certainly different from most of the officers around here, and Reinhardt could not but feel strangely attracted to the thought of working with someone like him. As GFP, he would be of invaluable assistance, as long as Reinhardt could manage him and for as long as the GFP saw value in a partnership. The GFP could do pretty much anything. Go anywhere. Be anyone. Wear any uniform, or none at all. Use whatever they needed, when they needed it. What was that English expression… ? Holding a tiger by the tail… ?

All of a sudden, he realised he was shaking, and a spasm ran through his stomach. He glanced quickly around the bar, but no one was paying him any attention, and he folded his arms tightly, pressing his hands to his sides. He hunched around the blaze of stress and confusion and frustration that burned in the pit of his belly and drew a long, ragged breath through his clenched teeth. It was coming up to midnight, and he realised how tired he was and how much he had absorbed that
day.

‘Enough,' he said to himself. ‘Enough.' When he felt steady, he left and crossed the courtyard over to his wing and took the stairs up to his second-floor room. With a trembling hand he pushed the door open to the bathroom and pulled on the light. The bulb flickered on, steadying slowly. Showers to the left, behind a wall of cracked white tiles. Toilet stalls to the right, the toilets mere squats, holes with footrests to either side. A line of sinks down the middle of the room with mirrors in front of them.

His stomach cramped, and he winced. He hunched over a sink, but nothing came up. He ran water and splashed his face, wetting the back of his neck, and drank his fill. Settling his fists, he stared at himself in the dull mirror. He looked dreadful. His face was drawn and lined, a drab fuzz of stubble furring his cheeks, his eyes sunk far back and the whites yellow in the vapid glow of the bulb.

He felt the bile rising again and hung his head over the sink, breathing hoarsely through his nose, waiting. Nothing came up, but he felt something. His skin began to crawl. He lifted his head, sniffing the air like an animal, and found it. That acrid tang. The same one he had smelled outside Vukić's house. He drew his pistol as he lurched around, his eyes stabbing along the line of stalls. One by one, he pushed the doors open onto nothing, only the stained round hole in the floor, until he came to the end, to the one he often used. There was a window there, there was light during the day, and the smell of men's waste and the carbolic slop the cleaners used was not quite so strong. He pushed the door open. The smell was there. There was a sprinkling of ash down the angle of floor and wall, and there, floating in the water at the bottom of the hole, a finger's length of what looked like cardboard. He fished it out with two fingers. A cardboard filter. A Belomorkanal papirosa.

He backed hurriedly out, hastening back to his room. Feeling in his pocket for his key he saw something. Felt it, more than saw it, he realised, as he leaned over to look at his door. There was just light enough to show him the several small, bright strikes of metal to either side of the keyhole. Glints, where something had been put into the keyhole, and moved around. Someone had tried to force his door. Perhaps had succeeded.

He told himself whoever it was, they were gone now. He unlocked the door and pushed it open with his foot, sweeping the room with his pistol. The room was empty and, as far as he could see in the light coming in the window, had not been disturbed. Taking a quick glance up and down the corridor again, he went inside and locked the door, shoving his ladderback chair up under the door handle.

Whatever strength had held him together until then, it began to slough away like sand in the tide. He lurched across the room and fumbled open the drawer on the little table by his bed, lifting out Carolin's picture in its silver frame. He clutched it to his chest and slid down into the corner opposite the door, drawing his knees up, and, dragging the air into his lungs, he willed the panic, and the stress, and all the pent-up emotions of the day to pass. But as much as he wished for it, he dreaded the sleep that would follow, and the dream that now haunted him, nearly every night.

It
is a cool day for October, but his head feels cooked inside his helmet, and his shirt inside the battledress tunic is stuck to his back with sweat. He stands by the side of the road where the Feldgendarmerie have ordered them to stop. Smoke broods over the town; there is the rattle and clatter of gunfire. Here, there, women huddle in desperate groups bounded by the anguished lines of their backs and shoulders, fists clenched at their mouths.

He walks away from where Freilinger argues with the Feld­gendarmerie. He turns a corner, another. Doors stand open. A length of fabric hangs torn out of a smashed shutter. The smell of burning is strong. Faces twitch at him from the darkness within houses, from behind the sheen of a window, from behind the folds of a curtain. Another corner, then another, and there is a field, the hassocks stiff with frost, the ground hard and tufted. There are soldiers, and lines of men and boys, just schoolboys with, here and there, the taller figures of their teachers. They are ordered into the field, class by class, the younger ones hand in hand, some crying, some walking bravely. Most just stare at the back of the person in front of them with the fixed resignation of those already dead.

And there, a moment that comes perhaps once in a lifetime. A pivot, around which a life can turn. A line of children, a row of soldiers, people moving, a swirl in the crowd, and two boys at the end of the line are left alone. Brothers, twins perhaps, they stand small and lost and wide-eyed in each other's arms as the crowd eddies around them. He sees them, and they him, and he has but to reach out to them and he can take them away from here. He knows it, they know it, he sees himself doing it – he feels himself doing it – but the boys are gone, taken away. The moment is past, a fading outline of possibilities.

They are all gone, pressed and herded into the field, lined up in front of the ditches with the earth turned fresh and black behind them, and Reinhardt is moving forward, pushing men from his way, but they are heavy, immobile. He comes up behind the rank of soldiers as they raise their rifles, their shoulders swivelling. The crash of gunfire, the screams. Officers step down into the ditch. There is the crack-crack of their pistols. Somewhere nearby, the field is burning; smoke eddies slow and heavy, lying indolently atop the stench of blood and bowel.

A moment of stillness, and calm. It was a pivot, that moment, around which a life can turn. Or a nail, from which it could hang itself.

Par
t Two

Wheels Within Wheels

18

WEDNESDAY

H
e woke with a ragged, tearing intake of breath. The smell of the smoke faded away, but he knew that as long as he lived he would never forget that day in October, in Kragujevac, behind the barracks at Stanovija Polje, when more than two thousand men and boys were executed in reprisal for a Partisan ambush that had killed and wounded some thirty Germans.

It was early morning, and he already felt drained, empty. He winced from the pain of his bladder as he straightened his legs, uncurling himself from the corner. His left knee was stiff and painful, his eyes full of sand from lack of sleep. He cleaned himself up as well as he could, avoiding his eyes in the mirror as he shaved as well as his shaking hand would allow. Downstairs, his breakfast tasted like ashes. More and more, what was within him seemed to leach out into the waking world. That, or the madness the world seemed to have sunk into was leaking in. He did not know anymore, but it was the dream that seemed to symbolise, for him, the predicament he found himself in. A man who loved his country, but who hated what it had become. A man who had found friendships stronger than anything he could have imagined in the army, but who could no longer stand the sight of the uniform he wore. Not for the first time, he longed for someone to confide in, but of the three people with whom he might have done so – Carolin, Meissner, and Brauer – one was dead and the other two far away.

Reinhardt liked to think he was at least somewhat self-aware. He was a man whose formative years were spent in strict discipline and war. His father, a university professor, was a stern taskmaster who instilled in his son two perhaps contradictory ideas: a sense of duty to the state and people, and a respect for learning and independence of thought that constantly brought him into trouble with the university's rectors and eventually forced him from his post. From him, Reinhardt inherited also his taciturn nature. Although he had a keen mind, he was not free with his opinions. Carolin would often chastise him, not for not having a mind of his own, but for keeping it, and his temper, too firmly under control.

She sometimes resented the influence Meissner had over Reinhardt but knew she could not fight it. The debt Reinhardt felt to Meissner was not one he ever thought about repaying. Meissner was a father figure to him who had saved his life several times during the war and from penury after it. She appreciated, although could not fully understand, the deep ties of loyalty and respect that bound them together, and she learned to find a place in that relationship. With Brauer, though, it was different, their two families coming from similar left-wing working-class backgrounds.

As he sipped his coffee, Reinhardt again thought back to the end of 1938, to his return to the colours and the start of the journey that had led him, via Norway, France, Yugoslavia, and North Africa, to where he was now. Reinhardt knew he had been a good policeman. It had been a surprise and a revelation to him how much he had enjoyed it, the security and respect it afforded, after those bitter and tumultuous years immediately after the war. The chance to channel all that anger and frustration from the war into something else, something constructive. But his fall from grace with the Nazis had been rapid, especially once he had refused transfer to the Gestapo for the second time, after he had clashed repeatedly with the new men they were pushing into the police, but more often with the men he had known for years who suddenly, overnight, expressed sympathy or outright support for Hitler and his ideals. He was pushed off the homicide desk and began a descent through the various departments, then out of Alexanderplatz into the suburbs, until he was running missing-person investigations. Which, seeing as just about all missing persons were Jews and just about all of them had been made missing by the people who employed him, was about as low as a detective could go in those days.

But even then he was still of interest to the Gestapo, and by June 1936 he knew there would not be a third offer. They would just move him. There was a lull during the Olympics when, for a few weeks, the city almost seemed to return to normal. Reinhardt was even reinstated back to homicide, but when the Games were over, it all came lurching back. That summer, the Nazis amalgamated the Kripo and the Gestapo with the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party – the Sicherheitsdienst – and there was no longer any distinction between the forces of the state and those of the Party. He became desperate in the autumn of that year to find a way
out.

There was one more reprieve, at the end of the year, when he was posted to Interpol in Vienna. The Nazis were desperate to maintain a semblance of professionalism, and Reinhardt had a good reputation and contacts in England and France. He was their ‘face' in Interpol. It was a sop, and he knew it, but it got him away from them, and they left him alone for a while. Carolin's health even seemed to improve, but Vienna's charms wore off fast as the city began the same downward spiral as in Berlin. After nine months there, the farce of Interpol was over as the Nazis moved it to Berlin, and Reinhardt went back into Kripo.

He muddled through that winter, keeping his head down, working nights, taking sick leave, all the while continuing to try to do his best, and clever enough to realise his best was only serving the Nazis. It was then, he knew, his horizons began to narrow, when he began measuring his days against the least he could do to get through them. The shambles of those months made him realise he was a man with few convictions in life, and he found himself with little or no desire or willingness to fight for the few he had. That realisation was horrifying to him. He held to the need to keep working to pay for Carolin's treatment as a justification to stay on the job, but as her condition worsened, and as the work became increasingly surreal in the juxtaposition of formal procedure, extreme violence, and breathtaking political chicanery, he took steadily to drink.

Almost as soon as they returned to Berlin, and against Reinhardt's express wishes, Friedrich joined up and Carolin, increasingly sick and worn out by the constant struggle between father and son, faded away and died. And then, at what seemed the lowest point, Meissner stepped in and arranged, through his contacts, a transfer to the Abwehr. ­Reinhardt accepted even though the army held no more attraction for him, and the oath to the Führer stuck in his throat, but it got him out of the police and away from the Nazis. The mental weight he had borne for several years eased.

Reinhardt was left only with the friendships of Meissner and Brauer, who had himself quit the force in 1935 after a violent altercation with his new commander. As a rambunctious working-class man with strong left-wing leanings, Brauer was instinctively hostile to the Nazis but smart enough to keep his head down. A self-confessed ‘simple' man, Brauer had no illusions about his abilities to resolve a crisis of conscience, so he decided not to have one. From his position in the Foreign Office, Meissner's motivations remained a mystery to Reinhardt, something that, when he thought about it, still gave him cause for concern.

What it all meant to Reinhardt, he realised more and more, was that he had no reason to do any of the things he did anymore. In the first war, he was a young man. Told to fight for the Kaiser, and for Germany, he did so to the best of his abilities, which in the end were considerable, and, truth be told, he had never been as alive as during those days of iron and mud. He would never be younger, never be fitter, one of the elite. But in reality he fought for Brauer, and Meissner, and all the others who shared the hardships of that war, and the riotous peace that followed. All those men from different walks of life, professions, persuasions, and convictions. Lives like threads that came together in one place and time to form one particular pattern of experiences, a unique combination shared by no one else. This time around, he had nothing and no one to fight for, and no one to fight alongside. No one to guard his back, as he once guarded theirs, and so he skulked through this war, keeping his head down, staying in the shadows.

It had been a long time since he had thought of anything like this, and he wondered whether it had done him any good. He knew he was lonely. Sometimes he even revelled in it. He knew he had not been true, really true, to himself for many years. He even knew when it first began, when he had first avoided his own eyes in the mirror. It was the time in 1935 they received the news about Carolin's cousin. Greta was disabled and had been transferred to one of the new sanitoria. A few months later they received word she had died. He knew, though… As a policeman, you heard things.

The last excuse for carrying on and muddling through had been Carolin, and she was gone, and so the question he could not avoid answering much longer was, what made him keep going the way he was? Serving a cause he detested, in a uniform he hated, in an army he could not respect, with men he did not think he could fight for, feeling his convictions falling away one by one. He knew that collaboration and resistance came in many forms. He knew collaboration was not necessarily immediate, coerced, or unconditional, just as he knew resistance was not always instant, fervent, or inflexible. Knowing this gave him no comfort, and he knew that however much he had tried to hew to some kind of middle path, he had done both over the last few years.

Screwing his eyes tight shut against their gritty feel, he knocked back the last of his coffee and then walked up to his room. From a trunk under his bed he took a policeman's extendable baton, spring-loaded, a lead ball at the tip. He checked the action, flicking his wrist and watching the baton snicking out smoothly. He looked at it, wondering why he had come back up for it. Maybe it was the memories, he thought, of times gone by when he was a respectable man doing well in a respectable profession. He collapsed the baton and slid it down into the pocket of his trousers.