The Pale House (37 page)

“A committed man, as you say.”

“Many of these Bosnian UstaÅ¡e, particularly from Sarajevo, seem to bear some kind of grudge against the city. They feel they were excluded from the city prior to the war. From its life.”

“And are getting their own back, now,” finished Reinhardt. “You said three of them had gone missing? What were their names?”

“Three? When did I say that?”

“At the briefing you gave, on the first day we arrived here.” Reinhardt kicked himself, mentally, for mentioning “three.” It was
who had mentioned three missing UstaÅ¡e. Langenkamp had only referred to “a number,” and it was on such small details that anything—an investigation, a secret, a conspiracy—could come apart.

“If you say so; I do not recall.”

“Their names?”

“Bozidar
, Zvonimir Saulan, and Tomislav Dubreta. Why?”

Reinhardt shrugged noncommittally. “Does anyone have any idea where they have gone?” he asked, feeling those same names on that piece of paper Simo had given him, feeling them as if they were burning a hole in his pocket. The cheese was disgusting, and Reinhardt spread thick, gelatinous jam across a second slice of bread. “Murdered? Deserted?”

“No ideas, and if the UstaÅ¡e know otherwise, they have not told me.”

“What were they doing before they vanished?”

“
and Dubreta were in internal security. The UstaÅ¡e equivalent of the Gestapo, I suppose. Saulan was the commandant of the prison.”

“So . . . they all worked for, or with,
?”

“Yes. And he's got no idea, before you ask. He's as furious as
about them.”

“What else do they say?”

“Well . . .” Langenkamp paused, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. “They say money is missing. Gold. Other valuables. Cash. Including cash sent down from Zagreb.”

“Where is that gold and whatnot supposed to have come from?”

“The UstaÅ¡e have been stripping this place bare of anything worth taking for the last few years. Factor in corruption and extortion, and it all adds up, I am told.”

“Tell me another thing, Langenkamp,” Reinhardt said, taken aback by the captain's acerbic honesty. “How do they see their future?”

Langenkamp drank slowly from his cup of coffee, considering. “Will they fight to the death, like their propaganda says they should? It is anyone's guess. I would think not. But I have learned to be surprised by the UstaÅ¡e. You never quite know what they will do. And with that,” he said, rising, “I wish you good day, Captain.”

Reinhardt watched him go, dunking his bread and jam in his coffee in a vain effort to improve the taste, but the food tasted like cardboard, and the coffee was truly vile. He glanced around the mess hall, at the hunched shoulders and desultory conversation of his fellow officers, the monotony of the food, thinking that if this was what they were down to, they would be breaking out the iron rations fairly soon. He glanced at his watch. Kreuz was over an hour late for the meeting. Reinhardt had a few hours before he was on duty, and so he decided to go and find him.

He commandeered a vehicle and drove it up to Vratnik. He slowed on the road as it twisted beneath the steep tumble of the hill beneath the fortress's walls. Higher up the snow-shrouded slope, at a gap in the walls, he could see men looking down, the foreshortened lines of arms pointing at something. He slowed, stopped, tried to see what they were looking at. One of the men threw something, a rock, which plunged into a dip Reinhardt could not see from where he was. He heard a clack of stone, a faint burst of laughter from higher up, and a bird flapped up heavily into the air, cocked its head, and squawked raucously. It was a crow, perhaps. Or a raven, although Reinhardt did not know if those larger birds roosted around the city. He felt a chill as he restarted the car, a sense of foreboding that did not fade as he pulled up at the fortress's gates and asked for Major Jansky.

“Gone,” was their sergeant's reply as he huddled over a brazier. “Gone to Zenica. With most of the battalion. Only the runts left, and we're s'pposed to be off tomorrow.”

“Who is in charge?”

“That'd be Lieutenant Reche. But he's not here.”

“Do you know anything about what's attracted the men to the walls?” The Feldgendarmes looked blankly among one another, shrugged. “Well, I'll have a look if you don't mind,” he said, walking past them. He heard an intake of breath, a rustle of boots as someone moved, but no one stopped him. Inside, he could see and feel straightaway the fortress was all but deserted, the courtyard empty of vehicles, of material. Across its width, a small crowd had gathered around an old breach, where blocks of stone had once spilled out and tumbled down a steep plunge of brush-choked slope. He pushed through the men, angry mutters and queries fading away as they saw his uniform, his gorget, and space opened up and he looked down the slope.

There was a body in a dip in the ground, a handful of crows playing court around it, bouncing languidly from side to side and across it. The body lay facedown, the gray of its uniform blending well with the rock and icy snow.

“Anyone know who it is?” he asked, looking around. Men avoided his gaze, most looking away, mouths downturning in unspoken no's. A face caught his gaze, dark and swarthy, heavy cheeks under black eyes. “You,” he said, pointing at one of the Greeks he remembered from
. “You'll help bring it up. And you,” he said, pointing at the nearest soldier. “Find rope. Long enough to get down there. Move.
Now!
”

He pointed at the Greek, then pointed over the wall. The man moved slowly, looking elsewhere for a moment as if for support or salvation, but none was forthcoming. He went reluctantly and, as Reinhardt climbed carefully over the wall, he understood it was not just an apparent reluctance to obey orders that made the man move slowly. The slope was treacherous, sheeted in scree and rubble and icy cold. He slipped, slid, caught himself, and his knee flared, and he grimaced down the slope, no one to see his face twist in pain. He moved as carefully as he could, following the other man down, until they crouched over the body, the crows watching them with cocked heads from safer perches. Reinhardt motioned for the man to turn the body over.

It was Kreuz. His skull had been caved in, a dark red ruin of a wound against his forehead.

Reinhardt looked at the body as he had once been trained to do. From top to toe, then back up, and for a moment he forgot the chill in the air, the wet stench of the fortress, the stiffness in his knee that never went away anymore. He saw the matted hair, the grimy crescents of fingernails, the filthy tunic, the greasy collar of a gray shirt. He saw how the wound on Kreuz's head had not bled. The front of Kreuz's tunic was frozen, a wide, dark stain of alcohol, the fabric caught in long creases. A broken bottle lay smashed at his side. He pushed back Kreuz's sleeves, then his trousers. The skin was unblemished. He opened his tunic, pulling up his shirt. His torso was bruised, sheeted with blood, crisscrossed with livid welts and long cuts, made while he was still alive. He heaved the body onto its back, but there was nothing there. Reinhardt looked at the bruising on Kreuz's torso, again, looking up the slope, wondering if it was the fall that had done that, or someone's fists. The body showed marked signs of hypostasis, the skin on Kreuz's front mottled purple with the blood that had pooled inside him once it stopped flowing. He was no doctor, but hypostasis was fairly reliable as an indicator and he had seen enough bodies in his time to estimate that Kreuz had been dead and lying here at least six hours.

“Who is Dreyer?”

Reinhardt frowned, started. The Greek was looking at him, crouched in an easy stance, squatting down with his elbows between his knees, his feet splayed out wide for balance. There was something immediately foreign but immediately natural about the way he lounged there, as if he squatted in the shade of a far-off, sun-kissed land, where life moved at a slower pace.

“Who is Dreyer?” the man said again, looking at Reinhardt with his dark eyes limpid in his sun-browned face. “Is not such a difficult question.”

Maybe it was not a difficult question, but the answer had implications. All answers did. Certainly, the day was young, it had room for surprises, thought Reinhardt. Maybe he was tired, and maybe that made him reckless, and maybe he was tired of worrying about the shape of what was out there, so he sloughed off some of the weight of caution that bogged him down. “A judge,” he said, finally.