The Man from Berlin (35 page)

35

‘I
think we have trouble, sir,' he said quietly. There was a window with a view onto the street. ‘There.' Following his finger, Reinhardt saw a Feldgend
armerie unit parked, two motorcycles with sidecars. There was one man standing by the machines, his uniform dirty and lined with white dust. ‘They came down the Kalinovik road about five minutes ago,' said Claussen. ‘Don't know if they're after us, but I got the strong sense they were in a hurry. They went into the Feldgendarmerie post right after they arrived,' he continued. He paused, as if waiting for Reinhardt to say something, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘Where to, sir?' he asked.

‘The 121st was in Brod,' Reinhardt said after a moment. ‘West of here, bit less than half an hour's drive if we're lucky.'

‘I don't think we should take any chances,' said Claussen, panning his eyes across the street. ‘There's a parking lot around the back. I can meet you there. I doubt they're looking for
me.'

Stepping out into the back of the building, Reinhardt passed through a crowded parking area, trucks and cars and troop carriers in serried rows. There was a wall and fence of dry-looking wood topped with a twist of barbed wire along the length of the parking area where it ran along a lane around the back of the headquarters. He made himself walk easily past the vehicles, skirting a platoon of soldiers as they boarded trucks under the hoarse instructions of a sergeant. He lit a cigarette as he came up to the sentry at the back gate, just as Claussen pulled up in the lane. Reinhardt saluted the sentry as he went past, ignoring him but feeling himself tense up as he waited for a challenge, but none came.

Claussen pulled away gently, bumping the car over the rutted lane past dishevelled houses that seemed to sag under the weight of unkempt roofs. The place reeked of despondency, the whole town seeming to be holding its breath, as if in expectation of more violence than it had already suffered. After a few minutes' driving, they found the tarred road that ran through the centre of town, with the Drina a long stone's throw to their right. ‘Left, now,' said Reinhardt, unfolding a map, ‘then find somewhere to pull over.'

The houses petered out into a jumble of scrubland, and Claussen pulled over in front of a house with a gaping hole in its second floor. The two of them looked at Reinhardt's map. ‘The 121st is somewhere along this road, leading south from Brod,' Reinhardt said. ‘To get there we'll need to get through the crossroads at Brod, and there's bound to be controls there. If those Feldgendarmerie came down the road from Miljevina,' he said, his finger tracing the road that headed south from Sarajevo and then swung east and ran through Trnovo to Foča, ‘and if they're looking for us, then chances are the controls may have been reinforced.' He paused, running his eyes over and over the map, looking for a way, any way, to get through Brod. If Thallberg had been with them, he might have known a way, or he would probably just have taken them through any control, trusting in the authority of the
GFP.

‘I've got no bright ideas, sir,' said Claussen. ‘I don't know this country at all, but' – he paused, looking back over his shoulder – ‘that platoon is coming up behind us. We might tag along with them. Safety in numbers.' The trucks clanked past, open-topped and filled with soldiers, some of whom glanced over at them incuriously, and Reinhardt nodded at Claussen.

The sergeant accelerated the
kübelwagen
after them, keeping a short way back as the road wound along the steep sides of the hills along the south bank of the Drina. Ahead, one of the soldiers flicked his cigarette butt out into the road, where it bounced and sparked. Reinhardt followed it as it rolled to the side of the road and saw movement out of the corner of his eye behind them. Shifting in his seat to look back down the road, he saw a flash of grey through the trees.

‘Trouble?' asked Claussen, as he straightened in his seat.

‘I think those motorcycles are behind
us.'

Claussen glanced into the
kübelwagen
's wing mirrors. Reinhardt could hear them after a moment, the high pitch of their engines getting louder and louder. ‘It's those two, sure enough,' said Claussen, tightly. He shifted the car to the side of the road and waved them by. They went past in a surge of noise and dust, the rider of each sidecar holding on to a mounted machine gun. The second one seemed to pause, just a moment, the passenger's eyes lost behind his goggles as he looked at them. Reinhardt went cold, a chill erupting all over him as he forced himself to remain still, and then the motorcycles were onto the road ahead of them. Reinhardt's breath came short and high as he waited for them to stop, to pull them over, but they caught up to the trucks, weaved around them, and were gone.

Claussen puffed out a breath and exchanged a wry look with him. Reinhardt laughed, an explosive release of tension, and Claussen laughed back. The sergeant shook his head. ‘Like geese before Christmas, the pair of us,' he snorted. Ahead and below them, a cluster of buildings stood inside a tight bend in the Drina, the river flowing up from the south and swinging sharply to the east. A road wound out of a steep-sided valley ahead of them and split, one fork continuing south on the far bank of the river, another crossing the Drina over a stone bridge. From here, they could see that the crossroads was busy, vehicles backed up on all three of its forks.

‘Not out of the woods yet, seems like,' muttered Claussen as he followed the trucks down into the town, which, apart from the military traffic through it, seemed abandoned.

‘Listen, Claussen, if it goes bad, you say you knew nothing. Understood? You were just following my orders to drive me here.'

Claussen did not look back at him. ‘Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we, sir?' he said, as he braked behind the last truck. They moved forward slowly, the soldiers in the truck in front engrossed in a card game, and Reinhardt's nervousness grew as they crawled through the town and then over the bridge. They could see the checkpoint up ahead on the far side: sandbagged machine gun emplacements, a half-track, a tent with a radio mast. ‘Here they come,' said Claussen, softly. A Feldgendarme walked up to the cab of the truck in front, said something to the driver, then waved it on. The truck pulled away, following the others as they went south. Reinhardt saw what he took to be one of the two motorcycles with its crew parked by the tent as the Feldgendarme waved them up, standing in front of a block of concrete placed in the road at the end of the bridge.

‘Papers.' The Feldgendarme's eyes were hard and focused under the brim of his helmet. He checked their documents, then handed them back. ‘Very well, proceed.'

Claussen pulled away, then paused as a convoy began passing in front of them. A space opened up between a truck and a pair of Kettenkrad half-tracks, and at a nod from Reinhardt, Claussen slipped the
kübelwagen
into the convoy. Reinhardt craned his neck to look in the mirror but saw no one at the checkpoint paying any attention to them, and then it was gone. He breathed out and exchanged a look with Claussen. The sergeant shrugged, no words needing to be said, the release of tension almost palpable.

The road ran almost due south here, clinging to the steep western bank of the Drina, the river flowing up from Montenegro down a narrow gorge thick with trees. The tarred road petered out soon after Brod, becoming a dirt track the engineers had resurfaced and reinforced in places. The trucks lifted plumes of white dust into the air, and Reinhardt and Claussen were soon covered in it until the sergeant was able to overtake them, and then the road was open to them, unrolling before them like a ribbon in twists and turns around the sides of the gorge. It was midafternoon, now, and very
hot.

Reinhardt had no idea how far they would have to drive to find the 121st. If the unit was still in Predelj, it was about a dozen kilometres or so south of Brod, but on these roads that could take well over an hour. Thinking about it, he saw the first signs of fighting. A pair of burned-out trucks, a swath of forest that looked like it had been shelled, and farther on a chunk of earth gouged from the embankment that looked like it had been mined. As the road swung around the flank of the gorge, he saw, far off over the humped back of a ridge, plumes of smoke rising up into the sky and a spotter plane, a Storch, scribing tight circles over the hills. It swooped up, and moments later it seemed there was a shiver in the air, studs of light along the underside of the smoke as an artillery barrage came down. Seconds later came a ripple of noise, the crackle of explosions.

Claussen snaked around a big crater, and there was more wreckage by the roadside. Down in the trees above the river the back end of a half-track poked up from a cradle of bent and burned trees. Houses appeared, ones, twos, a ruined hamlet that still smoked, and then there, in the road, a Feldgendarmerie motorcycle with a trooper hunched over the foreshortened barrel of a machine gun. A second Feldgendarme stood in the road. As Claussen braked hard, Reinhardt spotted two more behind the cover of a low wall. He watched the Feldgendarme walk up to them. The man's MP 40 was held in both hands, not exactly aiming at them, but not turned away either. He looked at them expressionlessly, eyes tracking from one to the other.

‘Pull the car over there.'

‘What is the problem, Sergeant?' asked Reinhardt, putting an emphasis on the man's rank and holding his eyes. He was scared, again. From his breast pocket, he took Thallberg's paper naming him a GFP auxiliary.

‘No problem. Sir. Over there, please.'

‘Better.'

Claussen drove slowly to the side of the road and parked by the Feldgendarme behind the wall, the machine gunner on the sidecar following them all the way. ‘Out of the car,' one of them snapped.

‘What the hell is going on?' demanded Reinhardt, rising up in his seat.

There was a metallic rattle as the Feldgendarmes levelled their MP 40s at them. ‘Out. Now.' Reinhardt and Claussen exchanged glances and stepped out of the car. ‘Hands
up.'

‘I am with the GFP, Sergeant.'

‘Shut up. And get your hands up.' The sergeant took the paper, gave the order to disarm them, and then at gunpoint ordered them up a narrow track towards a house. Farther up the path, across an open patch of ground, was another cluster of houses, with men lined up in front of it who had the hunch-shouldered look of prisoners, but that was neither here nor there as the Feldgendarmes pushed them inside, and face to face with Becker.

36

‘W
ell, well, look what the cat brought in.' Becker smiled as he said it, but there was a tightness to his jaw, to his eyes, that belied his levity. He glanced at the paper as the sergeant handed it to him. ‘Wait outside,' he said to the Feldgendarmes. There was a surge of light as the door opened and closed, and Reinhardt saw that Becker was holding a pistol against his leg. He smiled again. ‘Quite a merry chase you've led us on, Gregor.'

‘Well, if I'd known you wanted to play, Major, I'd have made a bit more of an effort for you,' said Reinhardt, forcing a levity into his voice that he did not feel.

Becker's eyes flicked to Claussen, and his brow creased slightly, as if trying to remember if he had ever met the sergeant. ‘Who is this?'

‘My driver.'

Becker flushed, as he always did when Reinhardt did not address him by rank. ‘You. Wait outside with the other Feldgendarmes.'

Claussen did not move, and Becker's flush deepened. ‘Wait outside, Sergeant,' said Reinhardt, after a moment. ‘I'll call you if I need you.'

‘Very good, sir,' said Claussen.

Becker smiled as the door closed. ‘You have a habit of backing the wrong horse, Gregor. And you've done it again.'

‘Which horse would that
be?'

‘A highly placed one. One that you should never have started to piss off. One that you know something about, and I want to know it,
too.'

‘You're not making sense, Becker,' said Reinhardt, dismissively, allowing his eyes to roam away from the major. There was not much, just a couple of rickety-looking chairs, a battered table with a tin water bottle on it, and a stack of chopped wood piled next to a blackened iron stove. The scent of earth and wood smoke mixed and merged in the humid atmosphere in the house.

‘Look, I'm going to put this away,' Becker said, making a show of holstering his pistol. He took his glasses off, holding the frames in his two hands, facing to his left with his head up. ‘You were right, the other day at police headquarters. I am looking for my ticket out of here. I've got a good one, but I think I see a better one with you, and what I reckon you've
got.'

‘Sense, Becker,' snapped Reinhardt, using the tone he used to use when he was Becker's superior in Kripo. ‘Make sense. Start naming names. Or this is all so much hot
air.'

‘Names are dangerous, Gregor,' Becker snapped back. ‘You know that.' Becker bit his lip, and Reinhardt could see the perspiration that lined his hair on either side of his parting. ‘Look, I can tell you this much. Someone asked me to help them. Someone you don't say no
to.'

‘I never knew what to think when you opened your mouth, Becker. I still don't. So stop pissing around the pot. I'll give you a name, Becker. General Paul Verhein. How's that?'

‘That's not a bad name, and he's part of it but not all of it.' Becker twisted his glasses in his hands, his stance shifting to his right, looking down. ‘So this someone offered to help me in return. They didn't need much. They needed Lieutenant Krause found, and they needed whatever they thought he had. That's
all.'

‘And for that, you impeded an investigation into the murder of a German officer.'

‘Oh, get off your high horse, Gregor, for fuck's sake,' Becker snapped. ‘Yes, I
impeded
your investigation. So bloody what? You should never have had it in the first place.'

‘And then what?'

‘Then what?' Becker paused, as if he were about to say something else and thought better of it. ‘Then things began getting out of hand. I couldn't find Krause, then there was the film, then you got in on the act and began making waves. Making people uncomfortable.' His stance shifted again.

‘Tell me about Thallberg. And try to keep still, will
you?'

Becker's mouth made an O of surprise. ‘Keep…
?'

‘Forget it. Thallberg.'

Becker shrugged. ‘That wasn't supposed to happen like that.'

‘Well, it
did.'

‘He came to me last night, accused me of… well, accused me of what I'd been doing, I suppose,' he said, nonchalantly, the old Becker starting to reemerge. ‘Tempers flared, and he let slip that this was much bigger than covering up how some tart of a journalist met a sticky end. I told the people I was working for, and they told me to get what Thallberg knew. By any means.'

‘You killed
him.'

‘I tried to make him a deal, but he was having none of it. Things… got out of hand. He didn't say much, actually. I got more out of his corporal. Like Hendel being SD, maybe Krause too, and actually after Verhein as well. What're the odds, eh?!' Becker giggled, suddenly. ‘You can imagine my position, Gregor. Trying to get Verhein out of a sticky patch was my ticket out of here. Actually being able to get him into an even stickier patch might even be better for me. What's an honest cop to do?!' He giggled again, an edge to his hilarity like rust on a blade. ‘I don't know exactly what Hendel and Krause had on Verhein, but I think you do, and I want to know what it
is.'

‘How did this “someone” know to ask you for your help?'

Becker shook his head, a little grin on his face, and he turned again. ‘No. You don't get to know
tha –'

‘I said keep still. Still want to play silly games with the names? You were out at Ilidža the night Vukić was killed. Trying to calm Stolić down.' Becker maintained his grin, but it went tight at the edges. ‘An officer with a history of violence. You were last seen out there with him. And Vukić turns up dead shortly afterwards.'

Becker swallowed, moved his mouth a few times. ‘That's good, Reinhardt. Very good. But you can't pin her murder on me.' He shook his head. ‘No. You have something I need. A file, on Verhein, I believe. I'll trade for it. They'll kill you for
it.'

‘If I had such a file, you would be the last person I would give it to,' Reinhardt replied, with a confidence he was not sure he felt. It was so hot in the house. He picked up the water bottle, keeping Becker in his line of sight as he swigged from
it.

‘Help yourself,' murmured Becker.

‘I didn't say I was trying to pin her murder on you. Hendel's, ­perhaps… A bit of a stretch, but I could probably do it.' His turn to grin
now.

‘You might,' Becker said after a moment. ‘How about this, though? As much as you think you've got me over a barrel, I
know
I've got you over one. Disobeying orders. Consorting with the enemy. Interfering with a Feldgendarmerie investigation. Oh,' he said, looking down at the paper, ‘and I'll want to talk to you about the deaths of Captain Hans Thallberg and Corporal Jürgen Beike.'

‘Not interested.'

Becker held his eyes as he calmly tore the paper in two, then again. ‘Still want to play silly buggers, Gregor?'

‘Still not interested,' said Reinhardt, forcing a smirk as he held Becker's gaze.

‘What exactly do you hope to achieve, here?' Becker's tone seemed honestly intrigued. ‘You're trying to bring down a general. People like him don't sit still waiting for someone like you to prick them on the arse. Nor do the people around them. They'll swat you aside, especially at a time like this. Normally,' he grinned, ‘I'd stand aside and enjoy that, but if you go down, I end up with a losing hand. Rather, I end up with a winning hand – I get that either way – but marginally less good,' he giggled.

Something in what Becker was saying sparked something in ­Reinhardt's mind. Something similar to what he and Thallberg had talked about. ‘You keep saying “someone”, referring to “they”. You're not hiding Verhein from me. So he's not the one you're dealing with. Is he?' Becker's grin went tight again, and Reinhardt knew he had hit a nerve, and he had to keep hitting it. ‘What do you have on them? Or what do they have on you? What happened in Ilidža that night? How did they bring you into this? Who is it, Becker?'

‘You're fishing again, Gregor.'

‘Ilidža,' repeated Reinhardt.

Becker turned to his right, lowering his head as he put his glasses back on. He drew his pistol, and although Reinhardt's breath hitched a second, Becker only held it down by his leg. ‘I can wait a little longer for you to see sense. In the meantime, someone wants a quiet word with you. He may be able to help you see the relative merits of your position.' He gestured with the pistol. ‘Outside.'

Reinhardt backed through the door, blinking in the bright daylight. Becker followed him through, and Reinhardt could see the strain he was under. His hair was soaked with sweat, and he opened his mouth to breathe, panting like a dog. Casting his eyes around quickly, Reinhardt could see no sign of Claussen, and he dared not ask about him in case he put him in more danger.

‘Take Captain Reinhardt,' Becker said to his Feldgendarmes, nodding over to the other houses. ‘Someone wants to talk to him.' One of the guards smiled. ‘And when Captain Reinhardt is done, bring him back here.'