The Pale House (11 page)

“Bastards,” grated Lainer.

The three flashlights were not much help, but Reinhardt was able to make out the general shape of the street. There were gaps in the houses up ahead, walls tumbled out and down across the cobbled road, roofs caved in or gone completely. This must have been where the bombing had hit the street, Reinhardt thought, his feet crunching across pieces of stone and masonry. Up ahead was a white signboard, red letters printed across it.
KEEP OUT—CONSTRUCTION ZONE
, a line of timber trestles marching across the width of the street as if to emphasize the point. The bulldozer the Feldgendarme sergeant had mentioned was parked up ahead to the left, side-on to the street, its blade resting almost against a house that, probably, was due for demolition. Just beyond it stood a small wooden hut, the whole thing wrapped in a heavy chain, presumably to secure whatever materials were stored inside it.

Beyond the sign, the street seemed to end. The houses on either side were gone; the whole expanse, what he could see of it, was graded flat except for two mounded depressions. Those were probably the bases for the anti-aircraft guns the sergeant had mentioned.

Dead end
, Reinhardt thought,
except if you were on foot
. On foot, you could escape across that construction site, move farther up the hill, or melt away into the houses to either side.
If it was Partisans, they could do that with their eyes closed
, he thought, remembering the way he had been led that winding, circuitous route through the old town to that meeting with Dr.
in his safe house, the Partisans taking every precaution before delivering him to the man who was Senka—“The Shadow”—the man the Gestapo had most wanted to lay hands on. Not for the first time, Reinhardt wondered where
was, what had become of him, wondering as well if this new Partisan, this Valter, had replaced him.

But if you weren't a Partisan
 . . . If you were something else, or if you had a car, or a truck, the only way out of here was down. Back past that car you had just shot up. Which meant someone in that crowd of townspeople had to have heard or seen something.

Which also meant something had pulled the Feldjaeger's attention up here. This was an isolated part of town, unless they wandered up here by accident, new to the town, not knowing where they were going.

“Lainer. How long had those three been patrolling?”

“Past two days.”

“Up here?”

“Hereabouts.”

Reinhardt looked down the hill, at the firefly play of light at the bottom of the street. You would have to know these streets to navigate them on a night like this, he thought. Not to mention, run no risk or fear of being stopped. But the Feldjaeger, he thought, turning back, aiming the spike of his flashlight's beam in front of him, had stopped for something, or someone.

One of the trestles was awry, and there was a gap between it and the next one. There were no marks on the ground Reinhardt could see when he played his flashlight over it, but he passed through the gap easily, standing on the other side, looking at the bulldozer, then at the house.

There was a door just to the left of the bulldozer's blade. Rather, it was an opening, with no door in it. Reinhardt held the flashlight well out to the side of his body and aimed it into the house, peering around the frame of the door, his head jerking back at a reek that pushed out of the house, a stab of something sulfuric, a rotten-egg stench. Pushing his head back in, it seemed to be one room, empty of any furnishings, with another door on the far side. He drew and cocked his pistol, the sound harsh and metallic in the still air. He heard Lainer and Benfeld do the same, then stepped slowly into the house.

The floor was wood and the boards creaked under his feet. He took two steps, a third, then gave up trying to walk quietly, concentrating instead on what he could see. The floor was covered in dust and debris, and there were clear marks in it. Footsteps, drag marks, all leading across to that other door. He pointed at the floor, then at the door, and Benfeld and Lainer moved to flank him as he paused, then pushed it open.

There was darkness on the other side, and then Reinhardt saw the steps that led down to what had to be a basement. Pointing the flashlight down, he saw the wear on the steps, bright shards and splinters standing across the flat sheen of old wood, and something else. Something dark red, almost brown, smeared here and there. He walked down, the stairs creaking alarmingly under his weight, a smell of damp and oil rising to meet him, that reek from upstairs fading away. He stepped off the bottom step, swung his flashlight's beam across a floor of beaten earth, pounded flat, and then his light froze.

There was a confused play of shadows across the basement's walls and floor as Lainer and Benfeld clattered down behind him, but their lights steadied, and the three flashlights shone full and bright upon the bodies that lay there.

“R
einhardt, just what the hell is going on here?” grated Lainer.

The basement was low, and none of them could quite stand upright under the wooden beams holding up the ceiling. Reinhardt shifted sideways down toward the bodies and knelt, playing his flashlight slowly across them from left to right. There were five bodies. All men, and all quite savagely mutilated. Their faces had been smashed, their noses and mouths caved in. The flashlight gave the wounds a terrible depth and darkness, like holes that had been dug down into places that should never have been seen. On top of the matted red ruin of their faces, their foreheads were cratered, each one, with the starred exit point of a gunshot. Heaving one of the bodies over, and feeling a sudden and unexpected sense of déjà vu, he saw the hole in the back of its head.

“Reinhardt,” Lainer said, again. “What is this?”

“These bodies were never meant to be found.” Reinhardt looked up at the two officers, their faces seemingly suspended in midair, lit from beneath, ghoul-like. “Somehow, your men must have come across this. Or across the edge of it. This is a cover-up. At least, it was meant to be. And, in terms of cover-ups, this one is, to put it mildly, excessive.”

“And that matters?”

“It matters, Lainer. It might give us an indication of who did this. Who would want to hide something like this? Who stands to lose from this being found?”

“Well? Can you tell?”

Reinhardt held up a placatory hand, forestalling Lainer's protest. “I will do my best for you, Lainer. And for your men.”

From upstairs, there came the creak of wood, a confusion of voices, and then someone called out.

“Benfeld, get upstairs and see what's going on. I don't want half the army traipsing around down here.”

“What do you want me to do?” said Lainer.

“Can your men keep this place secure?”

“Yes.”

“Then only those I allow down here may come. Anyone else . . . Well, it's about time we used our vaunted Feldjaegerkorps authority to tell others to get lost.” The tiniest smile fissured Lainer's taut features. “You should go and do that, now.”

Lainer nodded, turned to leave, then paused. “Anything you need, Reinhardt. You tell me.”

Left alone, Reinhardt sat back on his heels, his mind ticking over, slowly, then faster, his tongue stroking that gap in his teeth. Five head shots. Five bodies here. Three more up in that forest clearing. Shot the same way, but then burned. Evidence destroyed. But not here. He looked up at the wall, up at the ceiling, seeing, imagining, that bulldozer up there. This house part of a construction zone. The wall coming down, rubble burying all this, obliterating it, as if it had never been.

“They were shot. Then their faces were smashed in,” he said, talking to himself. The wounds to the faces had not bled, meaning they were caused after death. “Then they were dumped here to be buried. Someone . . .” His mind ticked over, gears clicking and moving, thoughts shifting, moving around pieces of a puzzle he could not know the shape of. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to try to dispose of these bodies. He flexed the arm of one of the bodies, or at least tried to. Rigor mortis was still present. Meaning this man had died sometime in the last day or so. Crabbing from one to the other, he checked a limb on each of them. They were all the same, which meant they had all died at roughly the same time.

“You poor bastards,” he muttered to himself. He drew back the sleeve of the body nearest him. Ligature marks. The flashlight made a mockery of colors, giving everything a flat, sepia tone, but Reinhardt guessed they would stand out livid, purpled, like bruised fruit. There were ligature marks on all the bodies, he saw, as he checked them one by one, evidence that their wrists had all been bound. He examined their hands, finding most of them hardened and callused.

As he shifted one of the bodies, its foot sagged, and a shoe fell off. Reinhardt paused, staring down at the man's foot, where the toenails glistened in the light. No socks, he realized. “Who the hell . . .” he muttered as he shifted down to the man's foot. Who would wear no socks in weather like this? “Someone who might not have time to put them on,” he answered himself, taking off the other shoe, imagining the pounding on a door, a man rousted from sleep, dragged out into the night with only the clothes he had on. Then he frowned. The two shoes were not the same.

Looking more closely at each of the bodies, he examined the clothing. None of the men were dressed for the outdoors. None of them were dressed in clothes that seemed to fit. Laces were undone around the bulge of feet too large for the shoe, or shoes had no laces at all. Sleeves and trouser legs were too short, or too long. There were stains on them, and some of those stains were blood, almost certainly, but Reinhardt could not match up the stains to any wound on the men's bodies. In one case, a shirt was ripped across the back, the frayed edges crusted in blood, but there was no injury on the man.

He wiped his light slowly across the room. In one of the corners, the bare stone of the walls was mottled dark with overlapping spatters, like handfuls of paint thrown upon the stones. Squinting closer, he counted five such clusters, and the ground was fouled and scuffed beneath them.

“Five bodies,” he murmured to himself as he swung his light back. “Five sets of clothes belonging to someone else. Ligature marks. Gunshot wounds. Disfigurement.”

“A real riddle, sir.” Reinhardt turned quickly in surprise. He had not heard the stairs creak as Benfeld came back down them. “We have visitors upstairs. Feldgendarmerie. New ones. From a penal battalion. Say they have jurisdiction here, as their men are working on this construction site. And the UstaÅ¡e have shown up, with a policeman in tow. Lainer's keeping them back for now.”

“Who would be missing five men, Lieutenant? Or put it another way, who would need to hide the identities of five men?”

Benfeld pursed his lips as he shook a cigarette from a packet. He shrugged, a tight little movement. He looked very tense, his arms close to his side. He swung his cigarette up to his mouth, his forearm swiveling close to his body, and drew hard on it. The red glow spread across his face, so much gentler than the yellow glow of the flashlight.

“What do you need, sir?”

“Give me one of those, for a start,” said Reinhardt, tucking his flashlight under his arm as he lit a cigarette from Benfeld's. “Then get these bodies out of here. I want them taken down to the military hospital. You take care of it. Go with them, and find a doctor. I want the bodies examined, and then autopsied.”

“Autopsied? Yes, sir.”

“Any news on my lights?”

“None. I wouldn't hold your hopes up for it, either.”

“What I wouldn't give for a camera and some photos,” Reinhardt muttered to himself, angry when he realized his tongue was stroking that gap in his teeth. He walked over to the bodies, taking one last look at them, at the way they lay. “A
penal
battalion, did you say?” he asked Benfeld, turning suddenly. The lieutenant nodded, a small, tight movement. Reinhardt's mouth pursed, and then he followed Benfeld up the stairs and out into the chill air. Outside the house he stopped, checked by that smell, that rotten-egg stench. He followed it up the side of the house, his flashlight's beam breaking over rubble and stone, a wall that tumbled down into the dark. The smell was stronger back here as he peered into the neighboring house, which had collapsed into itself. A strong sulfuric reek, and something else. The smell of burned wood and stone, and beneath it all, a furtive layer, like charred meat. He had smelled this before, in Belgrade, and in Vienna, after an air raid.

He climbed carefully up over a slew of rubble, moving his flashlight slowly until the light settled on a swath of blackened rock and stone, and nestled at the bottom of it, a twisted cylinder of metal, bent and rippled by some extreme heat. Reinhardt leaned, putting his hand close to it, feeling the echo of residual warmth, wondering if there were any more of them out there, and remembering this place had been bombed not so long ago.

“There,” he said to Benfeld, who had followed him out. “That's what's left of an incendiary flare. The Allies drop them during their raids to mark their targets for them. I'm guessing the killers must have triggered it by mistake, and that was the light and noise that woke the neighbors and brought the Feldjaeger up here.” He stepped back down the spill, his feet clacking softly on loose stone. “Tell everyone to be careful. There could be all kinds of unexploded ordnance still lying around.”

Back down the street, his foot kicked a shell casing that went ringing off into the dark, to where the checkpoint had been set up, and where flashlights and headlights made a confusion of shapes, angled shadows and pools of darkness. Lainer called to him, backlit by a car's lights.

“Reinhardt, over here!” Several men stood with him, a pair of Feldgendarmes—one of them Major Neuffer, the liaison officer with the Feldgendarmerie—and an UstaÅ¡a. A fourth man, standing somewhat back from the others, was dressed in a rumpled suit and overcoat. “Reinhardt, you remember Major Neuffer. And this is Lieutenant Brandt, from the 999th Balkans Field Punishment Battalion. It seems we're in his way.” The lieutenant was a thin man, his gorget hanging from a scrawny neck. The red triangle of a penal unit was stitched to the arm of his coat. He seemed familiar.

“Come now, Captain,” said Neuffer. “He didn't state it in quite those terms. A nasty business, it seems, eh, Reinhardt?”

“What do you want, Neuffer?”

There was a pause, as if Neuffer had been put out by Reinhardt's forthrightness. “It's not so much what I want, Captain,” he said, emphasizing the rank ever so slightly. “It's what others want, and need. Lieutenant Brandt has a job to do. And this is Captain
, Ustaše liaison to the army, and Inspector
of the Sarajevo police. They also have a job to do.”

“What might those be?”

“I have an anti-aircraft installation to complete, Captain Reinhardt,” said Brandt. Reinhardt cocked his head, slightly, looking at him, realizing he had seen him the day before. At the UstaÅ¡e checkpoint, in the car with the Feldgendarme major.

“It's a bit early in the morning for construction work, isn't it?”

None of the Feldgendarmes replied to that, but
stepped forward. “Captain, you have bodies up there? Then, respectfully, I put it to you that this is the job of the police to investigate,” he said, indicating
, a thin man with only a frizz of hair that ran over his ears and around the back of his white head. The inspector kept his eyes level, but Reinhardt could see the man's discomfort. He was a civilian, a Muslim by his name, caught between the sharp edges of jurisdiction, between what might be right, and what might be acceptable. Once, Reinhardt might have felt sorry for him. Once, Reinhardt had
been
him, but that was a long time ago. He felt a sudden light-headedness, a vertigo tilt as if he looked down on this and could not take the air at such a rarefied height. He took a deep breath, calmed himself, and realized the feeling for what it was. Power. The raw exercise of it. That he and Lainer—and Benfeld, for that matter—had the mastery of this situation. Not because they were more fit for it but because of who they were.