The Pale House (16 page)

“Right you are, sir,” murmured the driver, hauling the
kubelwagen
in a tight circle out of the courtyard, out through the archway, past the Feldgendarmes in their leather coats around their brazier, and back down the winding road down the hill. Where the road joined up with King Alexander Street and
ran down toward the Miljacka River, Reinhardt motioned the driver to slow, then stop, pulling the car to the side of the road. There was a food distribution underway, lines of people wound across the square, trucks with red crosses on them, and the place was full of people, an eddying swirl pulled in by the presence or expectation of help. He did not know how he would spot that man in all this, doubting he could have made it out of that fortress, anyway.

“Planning on staying long, sir?” asked the driver.

“Not long. I'm supposed to meet . . .
there
,” said Reinhardt, spotting him. “Five minutes. Then blow the horn.” He walked briskly over to the corner of the square, eyes tracking left, right, back up the road to the fortress, watching for something, anything.

“Copper!”

He turned at the hissed voice. The man was backed up into a narrow alley, his eyes and head shifting from side to side over Reinhardt's shoulders. He motioned Reinhardt deeper into the alley. Reinhardt paused, then ostentatiously released the catch on his pistol's holster and took several small steps in after the man. The place stank of human waste, of damp and rot.

“Got another smoke?” Reinhardt passed him one, then lit it for him. “Name's Kreuz,” the man said, taking a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling through clenched teeth with his eyes flashing left and right. “How many penal battalions you come across, Captain?”

“This is my first.”

“This is my second. I been a bad boy, Captain. But I did my time in the first one, got out, then managed to get myself straight back in. I'm what you might call a repeat offender, Captain.”

“Makes me wonder all the more why I'm talking to you, then.”

“Don't be hasty, Captain. Copper like you should know. Patience is the name of the game.”

“It's certainly the name of some games. And why do you keep calling me ‘copper'?”

Kreuz laid a finger alongside his nose, his jumpiness gone all of a sudden. “I can tell. I can always tell. You were a real one once, weren't you? Big-city copper. What was it? Hamburg? Berlin?”

“What is it you want?”

“Like I said, I want out of here before I get done in.”

“Why would you get ‘done in'?”

“
'
Cause people like me have a habit of sticking their nose in where it's not wanted. Occupational hazard, some calls it. Occupational therapy's what I call it.”

“You're a snitch?”

“I'm that, Captain. A man has to live. And be true to his nature. And I been hearing things.”

“Let me guess,” Reinhardt said, losing interest. No one liked a snitch. He was talking to a man the Feldgendarmerie probably paid as an informant to keep an eye on what was being said and done in the ranks. “You've heard one too many things.”

“I'm
serious
,” Kreuz hissed, and his edginess was back. “The hiwis have been arguing. They're not happy.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“The battalion's riddled with 'em,” Kreuz rasped, the sound drawing hard against the back of his throat. “How's a man like me s'posed to make a living if he can't understand a word of what's being said?”

“Kreuz, you're talking German to me, and I can hardly understand a word you're saying.”

“Hiwis, Captain. They drive. They cook. They forage. The bloody battalion runs on them.”

“Hiwis?
Hilfswiliger?
Foreign volunteers?”

“You could call 'em that. Started with the Greeks. Then the Albanians. We've got a few Serbs, some Bulgarians, a couple of Russians. But it's the Greeks and Albanians that are the worst.”

“Worst for what?”

“Having things their way. The Greeks've a boss, called Alexiou. Some kind of old patriarch. Him'n his sons rule the roost. Live like kings for all the good they do.” Kreuz drew furiously on the cigarette, twitching, a live wire needing to be grounded. He poked his head out around the corner, eyes flashing left and right. “Look, do you want to help me?”

“I thought you wanted to help me.”

Kreuz giggled. “Right, right. Forgot that bit. Well, the hiwis've been arguing. Among themselves. And with some of the guards. I been told to . . .”

“Who told you?”

“The guards. The chain dogs. Bloody Feldgendarmes. Them that's supposed to be in charge of this. They told me to get in among them. Find out what they're saying. 'Cept I can't understand it, can I? And the dogs won't take that for an answer. So they keep pushing, and I keep poking around, and I'm sure the hiwis're wise to me, now.”

“Occupational hazard, seems to me,” said Reinhardt, still wondering where this was going.

“And you would be right, Captain.” Kreuz giggled, again. “Don't get me wrong, I get by doing what I do. Extra smokes. Easier work. First pick of the girls if there's any after the chain dogs get done with 'em.”

“Get to the point, man,” snapped Reinhardt, his mouth twisting.

“So the chain dogs are telling me to keep an eye on the hiwis, the hiwis are wise to that, and then the hiwis tell me to keep an eye on the guards. If I don't, I'll end up in a ditch somewhere, and I know they keep their promises like that. So there I am, hammer on one side, anvil on the other. And then this big-shot officer comes a'visiting, and the hiwis get worked up like I've never seen them . . .”

“Kreuz, wait. Wait.” Reinhardt put up a hand, slowing the torrent of words. “This isn't making sense.”

“I keep hearing a name. A couple of names. When the hiwis are arguing.”

“What names?”

“Two names. Men the hiwis was close with. One called Berthold. The other called Seymer.”

“Berthold and Seymer?”

Kreuz nodded. “Got another smoke?”

“No. What do you expect me to do about two names like that?”

“Look into it, Captain. Investigate.” Kreuz took a deep breath, as if trying to control himself, but then it all seemed to fall apart around the edges. “Look, look. I did a bit of poking around on my own. Both of them are reported missing. Missing in action, is what they're saying. But I don't believe it. It's been over a week, now, and their
soldbuchs
is still in the command post.”

“Soldbuchs?”

“
Yesss
,” Kreuz hissed, taking a couple of bouncy steps forward, making Reinhardt take a step back. “Their
soldbuchs
. They've vanished, but their books've not been handed in. You need to do that, right? When a soldier dies? So what're they keeping 'em for?”

Reinhardt frowned, thinking. “Drawing pay? Rations . . . ? Late with the administration?”

“Dead men's pay. Dead men's rations. Probably, probably. And I don't reckon it's the first time that's happened. Oh,
shit
!”

Reinhardt looked over his shoulder. A truck had drawn to a stop not far away, back up where the fortress road joined up with King Alexander Street. A group of men climbed down from it, looking intently across the square. Stocky, heavy men, dark skin and darker hair.

“That's 'em!” Kreuz wheezed, beginning to panic back there in his shadows.

“The hiwis? The Greeks?”

The man nodded, the whites of his eyes glowing white. “They can't see me with you. Listen. You're all I have. No one'll listen to me. I've tried. But this time I've got something. All right?”

“Sense, Kreuz. You're not making any sense.”

Kreuz's face twisted in frustration, and he took a deep breath, his eyes tracking over Reinhardt's shoulder, craning to keep the hiwis in sight. “If you'll help me, I'll bring you something. Tomorrow. At the barracks in Kosovo Polje. This time tomorrow.”

“Kreuz . . .” Reinhardt began, but the man was not listening.

“I tried talking to others. Tried talking to a judge, but the judge didn't seem to like me. Fancy that, eh?” Kreuz giggled again, and then it stuttered out, as if he swallowed it back.

“What judge?”

But Kreuz was turning and beginning to shift himself down the alley, the shadows seeming to reach out and pull him away. “Oh, God, one's coming here. Tomorrow, Reinhardt. The mess hall. Kosovo Polje barracks.”

“Wait!”

Kreuz was gone, and Reinhardt could feel someone coming closer behind him. Moving on instinct, he unbuttoned his trousers and began urinating on a pile of sodden rags that, from the smell, others had used for the same purpose. Steam puddled around his ankles, and he resisted the urge to whistle, not wanting to overdo his act. Buttoning himself back up, he turned around. A soldier stood at the entrance to the alley, a swarthy man with a heavy shadow of beard on his thick jaws, and a red triangle patch bright on his tunic.

“A salute is customary to a senior officer,” Reinhardt snapped. The man came to attention as Reinhardt stepped past him, his eyes glittering blackly. “I don't recommend the facilities, but they're all yours, soldier.”

R
einhardt directed his driver back to the barracks, but they had not gone more than a few hundred meters when he ordered a halt. He sat in the car, looking straight ahead, feeling the driver's eyes on him, then made a decision. “I'm getting out,” he said, as he checked his pistol's load, holstered it, then took his gorget off and stuffed it into his pocket. “You or someone else, come back for me in an hour and wait back at the square where we stopped. If I'm not there, try again an hour later.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver frowned at him. “If I may, what are you doing, sir? For if the colonel asks me.”

“Following up on some ideas, Corporal,” said Reinhardt. “Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. Give this . . .” he said, noting Kreuz's names on a piece of paper as best he remembered them, “to Lieutenant Benfeld. Tell him to do a search of administration, find out who they were. Tell him they were assigned to the 999th
Field Punishment Battalion.”

He left the car, standing by the roadside as it drove slowly away. He felt a sudden sense of isolation. King Alexander Street pulled away in either direction, straight, lined and bounded by two- and three-story buildings of flat, square façades. A steady stream of people were walking down it, and those on his side of the road gave him a wide berth, looking up at him from beneath lowered brows. A small convoy of army trucks crunched past, their drivers casting incurious glances his way.

He took the first side road that branched south, into the heart of the city where it was bounded by King Alexander to the north, and the Miljacka river to the south. He walked past the boundary between the old Austrian and Ottoman towns, the square blocks of the Austro-Hungarian period fading down into low walls of white stone and cobbled streets. He walked past the city market, the cathedrals—the Orthodox to the right on its little park, the Catholic to the left on its square—past the Husref Bey mosque, the covered bazaar with its vaulted stone arches and back across the edge of
, skirting the crowd, and into the warren and twist of the streets around it. Despite the distribution under way on the square, it was silent in the metalsmiths' market, the stalls shuttered up, and the air felt still and dead without the tap and ring of their hammers and the bustle of their business.

At the Rathaus he swung right, walked back along Kvaternik Street, looking across the gelid roil of the Miljacka at the Emperor's mosque, and the old Residency building where he had been barracked two years ago, and at a tumbled swath of rubble where an Allied air raid had flattened a neighborhood. He walked slowly, not looking back despite the crawling urge to do so, but looking around, at streets smothered in refuse and choked with crowds of people that just seemed to eddy and flow, no purpose in their movement, their eyes lost somewhere in the past, or fixed on a future that might be no farther than the next street corner. In some places, men and women huddled in groups around fires built of rubbish, the smoke from them hanging heavy and low, tangling across the smells of damp and rot and excrement that sometimes rose up against the cold. Children slunk furtively along the edges of streets, from shadow to shadow, looking up at the world with little new moons of white beneath their dark eyes. Through it all, the Ustaše moved in their black uniforms, like harbingers, and they moved in their own space, the crowds opening and parting around them.

The Ustaše were everywhere. On the streets, at checkpoints, and in the few vehicles still running. He saw them eyeing up those who went past, their gazes lingering, flicking on, switching back. He saw arrests: a man pulled from the embrace of his family and bundled into a car; a refugee beaten bloody and hauled away like rubbish. He saw one killing, a man shot as he climbed down from a wagon drawn by a slat-ribbed donkey and stumbled into an Ustaša. And once, he saw a woman led away down a flight of steps into a cellar, her face glazed flat. He caught the eye of the Ustaša who stayed up on the street. The man flicked his chin up and head back at him—
What?
the Ustaša seemed be saying,
What are you looking at?
—and the man's jaw bunched as he sneered and looked away. They were everywhere, always in pairs, always with the stance of men looking for trouble.

These were end times, Reinhardt realized again. There was nothing to lose, and all to gain for those—like these men—who chose to go out and seize it for themselves, or in the name of what little that remained to them as a state, while around them the townspeople passed on with a philosophy that seemed to say what is not acknowledged does not exist. The tenor of the streets was so different from the Sarajevo he remembered. Reinhardt could feel it, as if the city were on the point of breaking and that it might go either way. Break down under the terror, crumple in on itself. Or break out, upward, against the Ustaše who plagued them, and the Germans who stood by and allowed their allies to rape and rend as they pleased, wanting only the space and time to evacuate as many of their troops through the city as they could.

Sure he had established enough of a trail for a blind man to follow, Reinhardt slipped past two men smashing up an old cupboard for wood and eased himself into a bricked-up doorway. He was a patient man and he needed time to think, so he stood there, hidden from most, watching for anyone following. He lit a cigarette, looking up at the slate-gray sky where it hung low and heavy over the city. He ran his tongue across his teeth, thinking.

There was a rumble of thunder, far off, and he could smell rain on the air. He lifted the collar of his coat higher around his neck and pushed himself deeper into the doorway in which he stood, glancing left and right. He could not be sure anyone was following him, but once or twice he had sensed something. Just a shape, a stance, a way of moving. He had seen it once too often for it to be coincidence. Between moving his eyes slowly from side to side, he ran his mind over what he knew, what he suspected, the shape of what he thought was out there.

Bodies in a forest, bodies in a cellar, bodies on a street. Fire and mutilation, someone with something to hide. The Ustaše everywhere. A major in a penal battalion with a manic temperament. Opportunity for those who saw it. Even in times like these, some things had to be hidden, and not everything that needed to be hidden always could be. People talked. Eyes saw.

He screwed the stub of his cigarette out beneath his heel and waited a little more, his mind ticking over quietly to itself, and he let it take its time. His thoughts wound down, eventually, around a conclusion, a course of action, and he could see no other. As he moved, the wail of a muezzin crawled across the still sky. He stopped and listened, realizing he had not heard the call to prayer since he came back, and it was as if a piece of a puzzle he had not realized was missing slotted itself into place. Sarajevo without its mosques, without its muezzins, was not the city he remembered, nor, he thought, could it be the city it needed to be again.

He waited, listening to the lonely thread of the muezzin's voice until it faded away, then made his way back to
. The distribution of whatever it was had finished, the trucks gone, but many people remained, waiting, listless, hopeful, and he caught a glimpse of a head of gray-blond hair spread across a black coat as she moved up and down and around the lines with a word here, a touch there, compassion and elegance. He waited a little longer, standing by the old coffee shop until he saw her go inside, back into the Napredak offices, the place where he had left the old couple and the boy he had brought into the city. Walking up to the door, she stepped back out and turned right, toward the Emperor's Bridge.

“Mrs.
.”

She started and turned, her eyes widening as they rose up to meet his. Her hand came up to her mouth in surprise, and he saw how the fear pulled at the corners of her eyes, as if she stared into a cold wash of wind, until recognition fluttered across her face. “Captain? I had—” She stopped, swallowing. “A moment, please. You gave me such a fright.”

“I am sorry.” He watched her calm, run her hands down her chest, fingers clenching at the fabric of her coat.

“What are you doing here?”

“I need your help, Mrs.
.”

“What with?”

“Those people I brought to you when I arrived in the city.” She nodded, cautiously. “I need to speak to them.”

“Why? What have they done?”

“Nothing. But I need to talk to them about what they saw. Or might have seen.”

“In the forest? The massacre? Must you?”

“I am afraid so.” He nodded, and she hesitated. “It is important. I would not be here otherwise.” Still, she hesitated. “If I don't find them, others might. I believe they might be in danger.”

“From whom?”

“From whoever murdered the others.”

A last moment of indecision, and she nodded, a quick duck of her head. She smiled, but it was brittle. She seemed to gather herself, as if she folded in the ragged edges of her spirit. “Shall we walk, then? It's not so far from here.”

They passed out of the crowds, and out onto the more open space of Kvaternik Street, next to where the Miljacka ran high and fast down its channel, the water a muddy froth. She led him down the street, and they walked in silence until she broke it with a question.