The Pale House Read online

  “Živjeli,” Reinhardt answered.

  guffawed, and they both sipped. The brandy was very good, dangerously so, a smooth, tidal flood from his mouth right into the pit of his belly.

  “To your promotion, .” The Ustaša smirked his thanks. “What triggered that?”

  “Actually, it was your old friend and partner, Reinhardt. Padelin. Remember him? You were bad news for him, you know. After you left, he changed. Sort of went into hibernation and came out a different man. Began to take his work seriously. Much too seriously. So seriously, he became a liability, right at the time when we needed unity around us. So when a group of us were offered promotion into the Ustaše, we left him behind. We’d had enough of the police by that point. There was nothing happening and no way to get ahead. Anyway, Padelin ended up making such a nuisance of himself he got himself purged by . Not long ago, in fact.”

  “Charming story.”

  “One of the last things I heard him say was, ‘,’ he said, ‘police work may as well be fool’s work in this town.’ And let me tell you, he never said a truer thing in all the time I knew him.”

  “Your German is much better.”

  smiled, straightening. “Thank you. I have made efforts . . .” And then it was as if he remembered something; the smile was rinsed from his face, and his fingers began to knead his dice.

  “What am I doing here, ?”

  rolled his lips around a large sip of brandy, his porcine eyes glittering. “I’ve a feeling we are operating under a misunderstanding, Reinhardt. You are under the impression that, at best, we are a bunch of ill-disciplined psychopaths, and at worst, ill-disciplined psychopaths who are your enemies, no?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “We are nothing of the sort, Reinhardt. Not ill-disciplined, not psychopaths, certainly not your enemies. We are something much more. Your people, my people, we are a rampart. We have a duty to civilization, to the future. We have an alliance, your people and mine, a sacred alliance. There should be no mistrust between us, to ensure—”

  “Oh God, .” Brandy sloshed from the glass as Reinhardt put it down. “You did not bring me here for a lesson in propaganda.”

  face reddened. He turned and poured himself another brandy, the bottle rattling along the rim of his glass. “Very well. No propaganda. No history. No whatever. Just some truth.” He rolled his dice, ran his eyes over the numbers. “You are investigating the murders of three of your men. You seem to be linking them to more deaths in a forest. You seem to think the Ustaše had something to do with it.”

  “Go on,” challenged Reinhardt, though he would have bitten it back if he could.

  “You were shown the bodies of four of my men tonight. Murdered and mutilated. Whoever is killing people, Reinhardt, my people are suffering too.”

  “A bit too soon to make such an assumption, .”

  “That my people are suffering?”

  “I don’t doubt that,” said Reinhardt, a scornful edge to his words that he could not help. “I meant it’s a bit too soon to be assuming the same people are doing the killing.”

  “There’s such a thing as overanalyzing a situation, Reinhardt.”

  “There are such things as instinct and evidence, as well.”

  “What about the similarities between your murders, Reinhardt? The bodies in the forest. The ones you found this morning in Logavina. Should you not be interested in that?”

  “How about, for instance, the dead silence up at that murder scene, tonight? Not a single inhabitant on the street. No one being questioned. It’s as if there was no need.”

  eyes slitted. “But there was no need. The Partisans did it.”

  Reinhardt bit back on his feeling that only two men had been killed there that night and inclined his head, a sardonic tilt to the movement.

  “I’ll go one better, Reinhardt. We are the masters of this city. Law and order. Life and death. If I need something taken care of—and by that, I mean if I need someone arrested, if I believe someone is a danger, or must be removed—I order it done.” He flicked his fingers and his dice pattered across the tabletop. “Like that! No skulking in the shadows. No leaving a trail of bodies. Just action. Did you see what we did at Marijin Dvor? Two nights ago?”

  “The hangings?”

  “The hangings.”

  “That was you?”

  nodded. “Was that skulking in the shadows? Was that hiding what we had to do?”

  “There is killing and there is killing, .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That some deaths will not survive scrutiny.”

  snorted. “What must I do to prove to you we are the masters of this town?” he said, his tone almost musing. “That we have nothing to hide. Come. Let me show you.”

  scooped up his dice and pulled aside an edge of curtain. He looked down into an inner courtyard, Reinhardt joining him at the window. Torches burned in stakes and from sconces, washing muddy orange light across mounded heaps stacked against two of the walls. Pairs of Ustaše moved across the dark ground with the lurching precision of men bearing heavy loads, their shadows flowing across the walls. As he squinted down, the low clouds flickered with silver light, and the shape of the courtyard stuttered, as though summoned reluctantly from the darkness. As thunder rumbled in its wake, Reinhardt’s eyes struggled to make sense of what he had seen stenciled in the strobed light. Bodies, stacked like cordwood along the walls, the Ustaše heaving more of them atop those already there.

  “Is it worth,” Reinhardt paused, pushing back on the nauseous anger he felt, “asking what any of them did?”

  “No. You still don’t get it, do you? Who they were alive is not as important as the message they sent dead. What they did? It’s what they might have done. It’s who they were. I suppose all that matters is they were people who entered this building and never left it. I gave them a chance, some of them. The least I could do. I offer them a gamble. They name a number”—he clattered the dice across the tabletop—“and if it comes up, away they go. If not, not. So, you see, Reinhardt, what happens to our enemies. This is no secret. Only, perhaps, the scale of it.”

  “Do you think this can go on forever?” frowned at him, Reinhardt thinking he would never have a better chance to challenge any of the Ustaše on what had demanded of him. “There’s nearly always a reckoning to be had, . The war is turning. There’s a new future coming, and it’s not the future our leaders told us it would be. Wait, let me finish,” he said, as made to interrupt him. “What will become of the Ustaše? What will become of you? You surely aren’t going to wait here for the Partisans to wash over you, and you surely can’t think you can hold them off anymore. So where will all those like you run to?”

  “If you wore black, I’d have your tongue for those words,” whispered, turning on Reinhardt, his dice crunched in his hand.

  “But I don’t wear black, ,” said Reinhardt, matching him step for step, but it was as if there were some kind of magnetism between them that kept them apart. Something almost physical, visceral, an inability to get close to each other. As if in touching, colliding, they would cancel each other out. “I wear gray. And even if the colors are not so different, you and I, , we are poles apart, and so I’ll say anything I damn well please to you.”

  “Maybe I should still educate you further about the realities of this place. Come with me.”

  shouldered open the door, thumping down the hallway, past the wretch chained to his radiator. He stopped outside a door, listening, one thick finger lifted theatrically to his lips as he turned to face Reinhardt. He opened the door, one heavy hand on Reinhardt’s shoulder, pushing him in. Reinhardt’s face twisted in disgust at the stench from inside. Urine and excrement and fear, and the iron catch of blood. He stopped, stepped back, and then was up against him and there was nowhere to go but in.

  The
re were two Ustaše in the room, and a man, a prisoner. A wooden baton rested on two tables that had been pushed quite close together. The baton ran behind the prisoner’s knees, and the man himself was suspended upside down from it. The man was weeping, and choking on the blood and tears and mucus that flowered around his mouth and nose. With his hands tied behind his back, and his ankles tied to his wrists, he could do nothing about the state he was in, nor do anything against the blows an Ustaša was raining down on him with a rubber truncheon. The man’s thighs and stomach were welted red, and the Ustaša was stripped to his shirtsleeves, sweat shining across his face. The floor beneath the pair of them was stained and dulled, the shine of blood freshly spilt atop a dull glaze of deeper red, almost brown, of older blood that had sunk into the room’s floorboards.

  The Ustaša paused in midstroke, the baton raised high.

  “Tko je ovo?” the man panted, looking at Reinhardt framed in the doorway with towering behind him.

  “This?” answered in German, shoving Reinhardt forward. “This is someone who needs a lesson in what it means to cross us.”

  “Well, he’s come to the right place,” the Ustaša answered back.

  “And Sutko’s the one to give the lesson,” the other Ustaša quipped. They smiled and laughed, all of them, the one called Sutko giving a little bow and flourishing his baton as if it were a sword. Straightening up, the Ustaša pointed his eyes at fist. “Is it time?”

  “Did he give his number?” asked , pointing at the prisoner.

  “The number twelve.” Sutko grinned.

  Reinhardt was suddenly and appallingly aware of danger, all around. He breathed long and slow, sucking down the fetid air of that room, and made himself stand easy, his eyes roving lazily over the Ustaše, the man hanging from the baton. It helped if he stuck his tongue hard between his teeth. It bunched up his chin, made him seem contemptuous of what he saw.

  looked at Reinhardt, and something twitched across his face, as if he were disappointed. He walked over to the prisoner hanging upside down, reached down, and grabbed the man’s hair. He lifted, pulled, the man’s knees pivoting around the baton that ran behind them. The Ustaša looked blankly down at him, the man croaking and gasping on his own blood. Then he let him go, the man swinging back and then forth like a carcass in an abattoir, a new whine of agony escaping his ruined mouth. weighed his dice in his hands, then opening and sweeping his fingers over the floor. The red dice rattled across the wood. He looked at them, then folded them back into his hand.

  “Wrong number?” smirked Sutko.

  “I’m afraid so,” said , looking at Reinhardt, his eyes flat, and then he spoke to the third Ustaša. “Finish it, Marin.”

  Reinhardt turned away, back to the door, only glimpsing the one called Marin bending over the hanging man with a long blade in his hand. Then the door was shut, and there was only the image, burned onto the backs of his eyes, and a sound, a gargled scream. He stood in the corridor, breathing hoarsely, staring at the man chained to the radiator, until the door opened behind him, and stepped back out into the corridor. Their gaze cracked and ground together, and then Reinhardt turned on his heels and walked back to office.

  “You see, now?” asked as he followed him. “This is how it is.”

  Bile rose in Reinhardt’s throat, choking off what he had to say, and it might all have gone even further downhill from there, but they were interrupted by a knock at the door. A pair of Ustaše stepped in at answer.

  “Sir, General wants to see you before he leaves.”

  “At once. Wait outside a moment.” When they were gone, breathed out, very slowly, the dice shifting in his fingers again, visibly making an effort to calm himself. “I will send Bunda to you. He will see you out.”

  The door thudded shut behind and, alone in the room, Reinhardt waited a moment, listening for voices, the sounds of footsteps, then let himself go. One explosive breath out, a blind rake of his eyes across the ceiling. His heart slowed as he listened to the house, and he heard voices, a snatch of laughter. From outside, it seemed. He walked back to the window, looking down, seeing standing with hands on hips next to another man. Crows lumbered across the corpses, and more lined the roof of the courtyard like black hooks against the now-pallid gray of the sky.

  “All done, then?”

  Reinhardt’s heart froze solid a moment with fear. He had not even heard Bunda come back into the room, and he could not move, and then realized he had best make the most of it.

  “What’s that down there?”

  The giant grinned. “Housekeeping.”

  Reinhardt swallowed, then let the curtain fall back. “You’re wasted up here, Bunda. Man like you could shift two of those bodies at one go.”

  Bunda’s face curled and shifted. “I don’t do that no more.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s that mean, Reinhardt?”

  “Nothing, Bunda.”

  “Don’t say ‘nothing,’ Reinhardt.”

  “You make the rules, now, right? You’re an officer, now.”

  “What d’you mean, Reinhardt?”

  Reinhardt stared back at the giant and, even though he stood in the heart of Bunda’s power, he felt his fear of him slide away.

  “That an ape is still an ape, though you dress it in velvet.”

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  “Thank God for the Ustaše, right, Bunda? Else you’d have been milking cows all your life . . .”

  “Fuck you, Reinhardt.”

  “. . . living in the country, where men are men and the sheep run scared.”

  “Fuck you, Reinhardt. I don’t get off on no animals.”

  “What do you get off on, Bunda?”

  “I can get anyone I want. Anything. ’Cause it’s there to be taken.”

  “Because the city’s yours, right, Bunda? Country boy made good. Taking out your frustrations on the city folk.”

  “Careful, Reinhardt. You’re all alone here. And the general’s leaving. The city’s ours, now.”

  “ said you were to see me out, Bunda.”

  The Ustaša blinked at the change in conversation, his mind still lumbering down the track Reinhardt had laid before him.

  “Going too fast for you, Bunda?”

  “What d’you say?”

  “I told you, orders are for you to see me out.”

  “That’s Colonel to you, Reinhardt.”

  Reinhardt said nothing, walking around Bunda’s bulk back into the corridor, past the man chained to his radiator. He heard Bunda’s heavy footsteps pause, then a thud, an agonized gush of breath. He glanced back as Bunda lashed his foot again into the belly of the chained man.

  “Bunda!” The giant’s eyes glittered far back under his brows. “ said it was important, Bunda. But you have your fun, don’t let me stop you. Up to you.”

  In that gloomy corridor, poised over the prisoner, Bunda was a form carved from primeval memory, the hulking apparition at the entrance to a cave. Reinhardt carried on down the stairs, his back crawling to have the giant behind him, hearing Bunda’s footsteps thumping down after him. Reinhardt pushed himself outside, sucking down the night air, great gulps of it. He could not stay here anymore. The place was driving into him from all angles, and it was then he remembered the crowd, the people he had passed on the way in.

  “Please. Did you see him?” An old lady held out a portrait, a sepia-toned window to another, happier, time. “Did you see my Selmir?”

  “Bosko ? My husband. Did you see him?”

  “Mirsad . The photographer. An elderly man?”

  “Mohamed . From Logavina. Mohamed ?”

  “Hey, you. German.” An Ustaša beckoned Reinhardt over, pointing out his car idling just the other side of the wire. The crowd followed him, and then they were all around him, holding up pictures, photographs, document
s, sacks and parcels. Names came at him, of the men and boys of this town, the women their only guardians, now. The cries came at him thick and fast, urging, pleading, strident, and he felt himself slipping sideways in his own mind, overlays of the horror inside the Pale House jagging across the faces of the women in front of him, images of bodies stacked one atop the other and now only bait for crows. Dimly he heard the guards shouting, beating the women back, and then suddenly was there.

  She took his arm, talking all the while with the women around them. He did not hear what she said, but space opened up around her, and there was something else other than desperation in the faces around him. There was respect there, even some affection, like they might once have given a noble. held his arm tight, pulled him gently from the crowd, and walked him to the car.

  “What are you doing here?” Reinhardt asked.

  “I was worried about you,” said.

  “Thank you,” Reinhardt whispered to her, his throat tight. She said nothing, only smiled, and he took strength from it. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to the crowd and speaking in Serbo-Croat. He tried to take them all in with his eyes. “I didn’t see any of them. I’m sorry.”

  “Go, now,” said . “They will have to go themselves, anyway. It is tolerated, but it is well past curfew.”

  “Then let me take you home. At least let me do that.”

  She hesitated, then nodded, giving the driver an address near the line between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman parts of town. The car started off, and then Reinhardt froze, a pair of images jarring together like a bell that had been struck. He turned back, looking at the Pale House, seeing the Ustaše beating and chasing the women from in front of its walls, scattering them like geese.

  “The goatee,” he whispered to himself. “From the forest. Stop!” he said to the driver. He kept looking back, ignoring the other two, then finally swiveled his eyes to . “Back there. One of the women was holding a photograph of her husband. She called him . . . she called him Mira . . . Mirad . . . Something like that. A photographer.”