The Pale House (59 page)

“Ten UstaÅ¡e?”

“Ten Volksdeutsche.” Jansky smiled, teeth like needles behind a scum of blood. “Dreyer was doing his best to round up as many as he could, but it was hard to find the right profiles. 'Specially ones as big as Bunda and
.”

“Who is behind it all?”

Jansky had shaken his head. “I don't know. I don't know anyone other than Herzog and Erdmann.”

“There are others.”

“There must be,” Jansky had replied, a sudden clarity to his words. “If you think about it, this might be happening everywhere. This, or something like it. We've a lot of friends to get out of harm's way. Or, you could think of this as a trial run. For something bigger and better.” He had grinned at the thought. “Think of that, eh? What does that do to your policeman's soul?”

When Reinhardt had left, Scheller was involved in helping the judge find his backbone and confront Herzog, but the colonel had been doubtful anything would come of that. Outwardly, Herzog would suffer no consequences, Reinhardt knew. There was no proof linking him to the deaths, only Jansky's word against his, but Reinhardt consoled himself with the thought that the powerful suffered their own sanctions. There would always be rumors about Herzog, because Scheller would be sure to start spreading them. People would talk, there would be a loss of confidence, perhaps a transfer, and with any luck, someone—perhaps someone higher in the conspiracy than Herzog—would suggest to him a quiet way out, and perhaps that person would leave behind a pistol with one round in the chamber. For personal use.

Jansky would not talk, and in any case, Jansky was gone now, Reinhardt knew. Lainer would not let him live, and if he was honest with himself, Reinhardt did not care either way. The dead would ride no more, and although
Lenore
ended with a hint of redemption for its damned heroine, there would be none for Jansky. The trail stopped with him. Whatever Jansky said, the proof would not suffice to reel anyone else in. Herzog would be the judge's problem, and maybe Scheller's. Erdmann was dead. Whoever was in Vienna would remain nameless. The others, too, because there were bound to be others.

And that was all right, too, he realized.

The penal battalion would be broken up, the men dispersed. Most of them would go back to their original units, while the incorrigible cases would be sentenced elsewhere. The hiwis were—there was no other way to put it—in trouble.

It was an escape line Reinhardt had stumbled across, he knew now. Some way of rescuing something from the wrack and ruin of the war, a way of preserving something for someone's twisted vision of the future. Again, that image came to him of a ship that was foundering, sinking slowly and rolling belly-up in dark waters, its hull a squirming mass, rats abandoning ship searching for a chance—any chance—at escape. Some would drown. Some would strike away alone across the waters; others would find some way to survive, entrust themselves to a desperate lunge at safety.

Rats abandoning a ship. Someone throwing a lifeline.

A ratline.

There had just been the last question, the one Reinhardt had been loath to ask.

“What was it with you and Dreyer?”

Jansky had tilted his head back, the better to needle the slits of his eyes at Reinhardt. “Give me another cigarette, and I'll tell you. Dreyer came after me in Poland,” Jansky had said, blowing smoke across the table. “A real terrier. He had witnesses to what we were up to, trafficking artwork back to the Reich, weapons to the Polish underground. We made the witnesses go away. Those we couldn't kill, we bribed quiet. You should've seen how hard he tried to get to us. Almost made you feel sorry for him.”

He had drawn long and hard on his cigarette, eyes drifting to Brandt, where the lieutenant sat slumped with his head across his arms. “He found someone, eventually, a last witness. Probably wouldn't have done much, but we took no chances, made him an offer. And he refused. Then we made him another. And it's true what they say, that every man has his price. He didn't look very proud of himself, but he took what we offered. I told him not to take it so badly, that if he could not beat us, he might as well join us. He took a bribe.” Jansky grinned, a cocky twist of his lacerated lips. “And that's when I told him, ‘All are not huntsmen . . .'”

“‘ . . . who can blow the hunter's horn,'” Reinhardt finished.

“The army broke us apart, and he went one way and I went another. Never gave him another thought until he showed up in Greece, working for the War Crimes Bureau. He had heard something of what I had done with the Greeks, stealing all that gold, and he tried to blackmail me in return for a share. Poor bugger. He didn't have a clue what he was getting himself into. Before he knew it, they had him out of the Bureau and back into the army judicial service. He wasn't the same man, though,” Jansky said, considering. “Russia had really screwed him up.”

“What did you bribe him with? That time in Poland.”

“You know that Art Deco rubbish? All that modern crap? He was mad for it, and we were up to our eyeballs in the stuff. The Poles had a real taste for it, particularly the aristocrats, and the Jews. All those artists and intellectuals. I laid a whole load out for him. Glasses. Vases. Ashtrays. Jewelry. Paintings. What did it for him was this flask by some Jewish artist. It mesmerized him.”

—

Reinhardt looked at the flask where it lay against his leg, then up at the road as it wound on, almost empty, only the occasional truck or car hurrying north. Sometimes a village flashed past hard by the road, clustered around the spike of a minaret, or a hamlet lifted its roofs from the forest, but there was no one and nothing in them. The countryside was empty, the people vanished, knowing the war was about to roll over them, and Reinhardt watched the trees, wondering how it would look if, by some magic, he could cause them to vanish. What would he see, he wondered, imagining a host of people that would suddenly appear as if brought forth by his own will.

They reached the front lines at around noon, although
line
would not have been the description Reinhardt would have given the cluster of tanks and mobile guns he found at the crossroads near the town of Kakanj. The officer in charge had been warned of their coming, and they passed through without comment, feeling the eyes of the rear guard until the winding road hid them from sight. They stopped when they were out of sight of the Germans long enough for Reinhardt to tie red streamers to the truck's wing mirrors, and then they were moving again, slower now, deeper every minute into Partisan territory.

They found them just north of Visoko. A car was parked by the side of the road with a red flag flying from a makeshift pole that had been wedged into its rear window. A man straightened from where he had been smoking as the truck appeared, and climbed into the car, his arm emerging to wave the truck to follow him. They pulled in behind him until they arrived in a ruined hamlet with a truck drawn up across the road, a red flag draped over its bonnet. Partisans emerged from cover behind the hamlet's gapped walls. They were big men, some with closely shorn beards, and they carried weapons that looked well cared for. They were dressed in uniforms of green and brown, leather boots on their feet, and if their faces were dark with the grime of long journeys, they carried themselves like soldiers of the victorious army they were.

Benfeld turned the truck and reversed it so it was facing back north, and let the engine clatter into silence. Reinhardt climbed down and walked slowly toward the Partisans, his arms open at his sides until he reached a point midway between his truck and the Partisans, and there he waited. He stayed there, still, under the curious eyes of a dozen Partisan soldiers until he saw movement behind their truck, and two people passed onto the road. One was tall, walked with a limp, and leaned heavily on a cane. The other was a woman, dressed like a man in a dark blouse and trousers tucked into low boots, a pistol belted at her waist, looking curiously like a Russian. He watched her, drinking in the sight of her, at the wisps of gray-gold hair that escaped the knot she had bound at the nape of her neck.

The three of them stood together in the middle of the road, a peculiar tension molding the spaces between them. It was the change in the balance of power, Reinhardt knew. He had always been the interloper, but they had not always been able to stand tall before him like they did now.

“You kept your word,” said Simo, finally.

Reinhardt pulled his eyes from
and nodded, wondering if he looked as distant to her as she did to him.

“This way,” he said, walking back to the truck. Simo and
followed, and a handful of Partisan soldiers followed them. Reinhardt nodded to Benfeld, and he unfastened the chain that secured the back doors, then pulled them open, light pouring into the dark box of the truck's load bed.

blinked against the glare, lifted bound hands to shield his eyes. Next to him, the five others did the same, lowering them slowly, squinting in confusion. Then, one after the other, the realization of where they were was swept away, replaced by fear that rose and bloomed across their faces.

The Partisans stared up at them with what Reinhardt could only describe as a ravenous hunger that could neither declare nor sate itself. As if, confronted by their enemies, now, at the moment of their victory, all their hopes and options had suddenly collapsed down to one point. To a single road, one they were loath to take, as if to do so would break a moment so long hoped for. Until Simo broke it, pointing at them, then down at the road.

“Izlazite.”

climbed down and stood on weak legs, leaning back against the truck. Two others managed to get out themselves, but Sutko broke and cowered in the back until two big Partisans went in after him and cast him in a blubbering heap on the road. Simo stood before them, measuring them with the weight of his eyes.