The Pale House (28 page)

Reinhardt stood in the doorway, stock-still with his hands clenched knuckle-white around the flashlight. Around his feet coiled a tubular tangle of limbs, cloth stretched tight over the angles of joints. He thought there were four bodies there, heaped across each other, at least two of them in poses of deliberate sexual obscenity with each other. Reinhardt's eye stuttered across the punctures and slashes of mutilations, across pallid swells of flesh, past raw-edged butchery, a part of him beginning to tick over deep inside, storing up glimpses and impressions, before coming up to rest on Bunda. The Ustaša's eyes had a wildness to them, and his face was engorged as if he strained to take everything in he could. A flicker of movement over his shoulder was
, the police inspector, looking utterly miserable again.

“What happened here, Bunda?”

“The Partisans happened, Reinhardt.”

Reinhardt turned, startled, not wanting to show it. An Ustaša stood in the shadowed doorway of another room. He was tall, and very big, his uniform strained taut over his height and weight, a black belt bowing under a vast spread of gut. He stepped a little farther into what little light there was.

“Hello, Captain,” the UstaÅ¡a said.

“
,” Reinhardt replied, remembering this man from two years ago, the leader of Sarajevo's police, remembering the embarrassment and humiliation Reinhardt had heaped upon him as he had torn through the UstaÅ¡e's excuse for an investigation into Marija
murder.

“That's
Colonel
to you, Reinhardt,” snarled Bunda, ever the lackey solicitous of his master's rights.

“Partisans,
?” Reinhardt asked around a dry mouth, ignoring Bunda. “How so?”

smiled at him and gestured at the bodies. “They're UstaÅ¡e. All of them. The Partisans did that. It's what they do when they get hold of one of us. But we got one of them. Show him,
.”

Reinhardt followed the inspector out into a patch of ground behind the house overgrown with high grass and weeds traced silver by the flashlight's beam as the inspector pointed to a lump in the grass. Reinhardt walked carefully over to the body, checking the ground around it with his flashlight. The body lay on its stomach, its arms flat to its sides and its face twisted high to the right. Its mouth and nose were almost gone, smashed away by some terrible blow, rendering almost superfluous the gunshot wound that holed its neck. The body was dressed in an ill-fitting uniform of dull brown, and a cap lay in the grass by its head. Reinhardt picked it up, turned it in his hands until he saw the red star of the Partisans sewn to the front. Despite himself, he grinned, an ironic twist of his mouth, looking up at the sky to compose himself.

It had been a woman. Reinhardt ran his eyes up and down the body, the memory of that forest crowding suddenly into his mind, and then the basement. He touched his fingers to the bullet wound. It had not bled, meaning it was a postmortem wound. Reinhardt made to heave off one of the body's boots, but it slid away easily from the leg, being much too large for the woman. The foot was bare, no sock. Reinhardt sat back on his heels, thinking of those five bodies from the construction site. His mouth twisted, anger rising slowly. He turned at a rustle in the grass, having almost forgotten about
. The inspector stood there like a penitent, a notebook flapping open from his hand.

“You . . . you were a detective. Before. So. What does this all look like to you?”
asked.

“It looks bad,” was all Reinhardt could find to say.

stared, then laughed. A high-pitched giggle that he gulped back. “Bad?
Bad?
Oh, you have no idea.” His mouth moved soundlessly, and then his eyes slewed left and right. He looked like a cornered animal. There was something very wrong, here, Reinhardt knew. Something that went beyond the slaughter that had taken place.

“Tell me,” he said.

shook his head, stepping backward through the grass, and then he was gone, back inside the house. Reinhardt followed him in, turning a corner into the wall of Bunda's chest.