The Pale House Page 20

  “Mirsad ,” said .

  “That’s him. Her husband is dead. I found his body in the forest, at that massacre I told you of. How . . . how did he end up there, if she thinks he was taken here?”

  eyes were wide as she stared back at him, and then she slid to the side along the car seat. “Wait. I will ask her.”

  Reinhardt lit a cigarette as he waited, staring hard at his hand as it shook, willing himself to calm. Twisting himself back in the seat, he saw walking arm in arm with the woman who had held that photograph of a man in a dark suit, smooth brushed hair, and a neat little goatee beard. He watched as they said their good-byes, the woman walking away with another, hurrying back with her arms folded tightly across her.

  “Her husband was taken about a week ago,” she said, hunching herself onto the kubelwagen’s back bench. “You are sure he is dead.” Reinhardt nodded. “She thinks he is still alive. A prisoner saw him four days ago.”

  “In the Pale House?”

  “Yes.”

  Reinhardt faced forward, watching the woman walk past, head bowed, a hard truth awaiting her. He shook his head, took a last pull on his cigarette, and tossed it over the car door, nodding to the driver to get going again.

  From the back, leaned forward to direct the driver, and her hand came to rest on Reinhardt’s shoulder. She left it there as the car nosed its way through the streets, almost no lights to be seen, just the pulsing glow of fires, the light spilling and slipping here and there from doorways, windows, and stairwells. The car stopped at her word in front of a square building of Austro-Hungarian construction with three floors. Reinhardt climbed out as she did.

  “Shall I escort you?”

  “No, I . . .” She shook her head. “Thank you, that is not necessary.”

  The two of them looked at each other a moment.

  “In there, in the Pale House—” Reinhardt stopped. “They are . . .” He stopped again. “The people outside. Do they know?” Do they know what? There seemed to be no words, and she lifted one hand and cupped his cheek. Her fingers were small, and very cold as he covered them with his hand. “Thank you, again,” he said.

  She nodded and turned away into her building. He watched her disappear into the darkness inside, listening as her steps faded up on wooden flights of stairs until he heard a door shut and he knew she was home safe.

  The desks outside Dreyer’s office were empty of personnel, papers neatly piled up and sorted next to half-filled crates. Reinhardt stood quietly in the doorway to the clerks’ office, wondering again if he had done the right thing in coming. There was a razor line of light under the door of that erudite judge’s office, Judge Erdmann, nothing under Dreyer’s, but there was a thread of music in the air. It was somewhat incongruous, but it was there and as he leaned his ear against Dreyer’s door, he realized it was coming from his old friend’s office.

  He knocked softly, then again, harder, but there was no response. He opened the door, softly, onto musty darkness, and a soft, smooth trill of notes from a saxophone. A spreading rectangle of light flowed into the room, and there was a jerk of movement from the bed in the corner, and Dreyer rolled over. His face was red, puffy, and his breathing came high and edged with a ragged wheeze. Reinhardt’s heart sank as he looked at him.

  “I’m sorry,” Reinhardt said. “I didn’t think . . .”

  “Reinhardt,” Dreyer said, pausing for breath. “It’s all right. Close the door. Here, on the desk. Put the lamp on, then help me get this off.”

  Dreyer was still wearing one boot, Reinhardt saw, as he clicked on the small lamp on the desk. Reinhardt heaved at it, and it sucked itself free. He stumbled a step backward as Dreyer rolled back onto his bed with a sigh, covering his face with his arm. He lay there breathing heavily, his belly mounding up and down, and then he struggled up onto one elbow and scrabbled around on top of a wooden crate that served as a bedside table.

  “This what you’re after?” said Reinhardt, lifting the hip flask from the floor.

  There was a fleeting look of embarrassment on Dreyer’s face, but he waved Reinhardt over, took the flask, and put it to his mouth. He drank deeply, sighed again, and lay back on the bed.

  “Still don’t want any, Gregor?” he asked.

  “None for me.”

  Dreyer turned a bleary eye on him. “Not going all moral on me, are you?”

  Reinhardt shook his head. “I’m not. But I’ve been there. Where you are. And it didn’t do me any good, in the end.” Reinhardt felt spread thin, utterly worn out by the pressure of the day, and knew it would not take much to tip him over the edge. He did not want to rediscover that part of himself that took solace in alcohol, nor did he want to be what he saw Dreyer had become.

  Dreyer looked at him, blinked, turned his head up to the ceiling. “Oh, I doubt that,” he whispered. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, I think you wouldn’t turn this down so easily.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then?” said Reinhardt, sighing, as he shrugged out of his overcoat and sat in one of the chairs, crossing his left leg over his right and rubbing his knee. “Tell me. Tell me what happened to you, Marcus.” He wondered if he meant it. Behind him, so out of time and place, that saxophone played on, what sounded like a trumpet playing counterpoint to it, and he realized it was jazz. Prewar, American jazz, like they used to hear in the Berlin clubs in the old days.

  “To make me like this, you mean?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  “And I didn’t think it either. Marcus. Please. Don’t . . . think . . . don’t think I judge you. I don’t. I wouldn’t.”

  Dreyer giggled, suddenly, an incongruous sound from a man his size. He shook his head as Reinhardt looked at him quizzically, and he sipped from his flask. “Nothing. It’s nothing. It’s just I always find it funny when people use the word judge with me.”

  Reinhardt smiled back. “Seeing as you used to be one.”

  “Seeing as I still am one, if you can believe it . . .” He looked at the flask, sipped again. “A lot of people can’t.”

  “A judge with a Knight’s Cross. I remember you,” said Reinhardt. He leaned back into the chair, one hand still kneading his knee, and closing his eyes. “First time I met you, a snotty-nosed kid. When was it? Winter of 1917? In France. You looked just like a lawyer. We figured you wouldn’t last long. If the Tommies didn’t get you, the cold would.”

  Dreyer smiled, sipped. “You . . . you took care of me, though. You. And Brauer. And Rosen.”

  “Always take care of the company quartermaster, was Brauer’s motto.” Reinhardt grinned, his eyes still closed. “I remember you in Berlin, afterward. Spic-and-span in that suit of yours. The one with the long tails. And the top hat.”

  “The penguin suit.”

  “Then came those judge’s robes. It was a good day for the police when you got made a judge, Marcus.” He looked at Dreyer. “And a better day for those of us proud to call you our friend.”

  Dreyer looked at him, and then his eyes crinkled back and his face sank in on itself. He fell onto his back again, his arm across his mouth. There was a silence, then his chest heaved, and he sobbed, his mouth ground tight into his arm. Reinhardt kept quiet, his own eyes blurring, as his friend wept and wept, until finally he calmed, and he lowered his arm, sighing long and slowly.

  “Christ, I’m sorry. About that.”

  Reinhardt said nothing, only rubbed his knee.

  “That knee still giving you trouble?”

  “Always. What happened, Marcus?”

  “The Nazis. The Russians. War. Life.” Dreyer flipped open his silver cigarette case and offered it to Reinhardt. He took a cigarette himself and lit both with the matching lighter. Reinhardt looked back at him through a cloud of smoke.

  “I’m listening, Marcus.”

  “The Nazis
chased me out of my court in thirty-five.” Reinhardt nodded that he remembered. “But I’d seen the writing on the wall and had made arrangements with old friends from the army, in the legal department, and they took me back in. After Norway, I went into Russia with Barbarossa, as a divisional judge with 2nd Panzer. Within a month of the invasion, we were up to our eyeballs in cases. Theft, arson, murder, rape, you name it, we tried it. Passed tens of death sentences, and carried most of ’em out. Dozens more sent to the stockade, or punishment duty. All signed off on by the general. General Heinrici. Toughest little bastard you ever saw in a general’s uniform. He refused to pass on Hitler’s Barbarossa Decree. That soldiers couldn’t be tried for crimes against the civilian population. ‘We’ll have none of that,’ he said, the old bugger. ‘Courts will function as normal.’

  “But it was like building a sand castle in the tide. Your little bit of it works, holds up. Principles, evidence, all that.” Dreyer paused, hiccupped. “But all around, to left and right, in front and behind, you can’t imagine . . . the things we were doing. Which were happening. And then Heinrici moved on to 4th Army, and the man who replaced him was a thorough-going Nazi. An absolute bastard. It all came to an end. ‘No incompatibility with army discipline and National Socialist principles,’ he declared. Theft, arson, murder, rape, you name it, we turned a blind eye to it. And no amount of booze would take away the taste of the day. Of knowing you were letting men . . . who . . . had done the most terrible things . . . you were letting them get away with it. With murder.”

  He fell silent. Reinhardt watched him, imagining the compromises Dreyer must have made with himself.

  “The last . . . the last straw for me, was a man, a soldier . . .” Dreyer paused, drank. “Part of a unit accused of butchering the villagers of . . . some . . . flyspeck hovel. This soldier killed an entire family. Four generations. And then bayonetted an infant to its mother’s breast. ‘She was already dead,’ he said. ‘It was kinder to kill the child.’ I mean”—Dreyer’s head hung down—“I mean what kind of fucked-up world is that? What kind of logic . . .” He drank. “I requested a transfer to the front. I couldn’t do it anymore. They refused. ‘You’re a judge,’ they said,” he mouthed sonorously. “‘So just judge.’ Just judge, little judge. Make the facts fit a National Socialist view. Then, it’s all right to bayonet a child to . . . its . . .”

  “Christ, Marcus,” Reinhardt whispered, finally.

  “Christ was nowhere to be found. I kept asking for that transfer. Pulled in every favor I had and finally got it. All I wanted was to die, because I was too afraid to put a bullet in my own heart. Suicide’s a sin, right? Isn’t that what they taught us in Sunday school? Suicide’s a sin . . . How is it such seemingly inconsequential things—words, a belief—can still hold sway and influence in a world like ours, after what we’ve seen and done? I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it, so I gave the Russians every chance to do it for me. And they fucked it up.” He laughed. “They royally fucked it up. Missed me every time. Instead I got this superhuman reputation. Suicidally brave. All that rubbish. I just wanted to die. So they gave me a medal. Then another one. Until it all came apart on me. I cracked. And they can stand many things, but a holder of the Knight’s Cross who turns into a gibbering drunk they can’t stand. They pulled me out. Dried me out,” he snorted, waving the flask. “Assigned me elsewhere. And here I am. And that . . .” he said, upending the flask, shaking the last drops onto his tongue, “is that. That is what happened to me.”

  Reinhardt finished his cigarette and flattened it into the ashtray. “Where did they send you, after they pulled you out?”

  “What?” mumbled Dreyer. His head rocked back as he considered the question, and he belched, softly and wetly. “Sorry ’bout that. My . . . friends . . . in the legal department. They put me in the . . . the War Crimes Bureau.” He giggled again. “Talk about irony. Investigating Russian crimes against our side. A man would starve on the difference between us and them. It was a load of rubbish. Two bald men fighting over a comb. I put up with it about a year, then requested a transfer again. And here I am.” Dreyer shook his head, screwing his eyes into the palms of his hands.

  “Tell me again how you came across Jansky.”

  Dreyer raised his head, squinting at Reinhardt. “I told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me differently.”

  Dreyer’s eyes slid away, but Reinhardt had seen the dead light in them. “It was Poland. Just before Barbarossa. The whole country was crammed with Germans. There was a lot of waiting and a lot of tension. Men began looking for things to do. Jansky was in charge of a police unit in some wretched Polish town. Near the Russian border. I can’t even remember the name.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Dreyer snapped, then seemed to remember something, perhaps himself, and he reddened and passed a hand across his face. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. He moved his mouth, his tongue running thickly across his lips. “There was some sort of scam under way. I think it was trafficking in stolen art and treasure. Jansky had some sort of network moving the stuff back to Germany. Jewish art. Polish heirlooms. Things like that.”

  Reinhardt frowned at Dreyer. Something was not quite right, but he kept his doubts to himself, letting Dreyer ramble on. “There was some sort of falling-out. Dishonor among thieves. I came onto the case when we discovered a pair of dead Germans. Officers. They were known associates of Jansky. Subordinates of his.” That was it, Reinhardt realized. Dreyer was rambling. This should have been clear to him. It was a seminal event, what had put Dreyer onto Jansky. There should not have been any I think or some sort of. Dreyer should have known this, but maybe it was just the drink, Reinhardt reasoned to himself.

  “So you investigated?”

  “The . . . evidence . . . pointed to a Polish resistance attack.”

  “And there were reprisals.”

  “A village was destroyed. All the men executed.” Dreyer lowered his face into his palms.

  Reinhardt waited, but nothing more was forthcoming.

  “And Greece? I understand what you said, about Poland, about him getting away with it there. But for you to go all the way to Greece . . . ?

  “Greece,” said Dreyer. “The same thing. But bigger. Gold, this time. I found Jansky had gotten himself mixed up with a bunch of those Greek fascists in their security battalions.”

  “How did you hear about this?”

  Dreyer’s eyes rolled toward him, clawed veins reddening their edges.

  “Through the War Crimes Bureau.” Reinhardt waited. “You have to understand how these things work. I told you about Russia. The ridiculousness of it. Investigating their crimes in the middle of ours.”

  “Two bald men fighting over a comb.”

  “Right. Except, sometimes, we would launch investigations upon receipt of requests from the Allies. They pass cases through the Foreign Ministry. Through the Swedes, or the Swiss. Requests to investigate crimes against their soldiers. Their people. And sometimes we do the same.” Reinhardt shook his head at the thought of it, of missives passed between chancelleries, the smooth paperwork of diplomacy in the midst of such barbarity. “The British and the Greeks—their government in exile, the one in London—passed a request through the Swiss for investigation into crimes committed by men in the security battalions. They were lunatics, most of them. Completely out of control. Raping. Pillaging. Massacring their own countrymen. You know of them?”

  “Collaborationist units. Formed by the puppet government.”

  “The puppet government.” Dreyer nodded. “The one we put in place. One unit in particular had seen the writing on the wall and were making their own arrangements. They robbed the state bank, something like that, during the retreat from Athens. Jansky had a hand in it. Helping them or something. Organizing it.”

  “How do you know this?” aske
d Reinhardt. Something was not right, he thought again.

  “An informant,” said Dreyer, shortly, burying his face in his hands again.

  “What are you not telling me, Marcus?”

  Dreyer swallowed. “Everything in good time, Gregor.”

  Reinhardt nodded slowly and stood, walking to the window and watching the dull, dim lines of his reflection in the dark glass. “Nothing is what it seems,” he said, quietly, to himself, thinking of forests and photographers, burned bodies, executed bodies, Jansky and the Ustaše, Germans and hiwis.

  Dreyer surged up, suddenly. “What the fuck d’you mean? ‘Nothing is what it seems?’ Things are always what they seem. Bayonetting a child to its mother’s breast is what it seems. Lining people up and shooting them dead into a ditch is what it seems.”

  Reinhardt flinched back. Dreyer’s voice had gone ragged, flecked with spittle, and his eyes were fixed in his head, staring past Reinhardt at some faraway place. Reinhardt regretted his words. He had meant them for himself. Perhaps as sounds to fill a space, but he should have known in that case how wrong they were. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Whatever,” Dreyer said, waving a hand. “Don’t listen to me. Fat old man. Drunk.”

  “I’ve been there, too, Marcus.” Reinhardt worked his fingers against and between each other, running his thumbs across his palms and feeling the cold sweat coating them. “Maybe not as far down that road as you, but I’ve been there.”

  “Yes? And how did you fare along that road? How did you make it back? Or didn’t you?”

  In the window, Reinhardt’s reflection stared back at him, the curves and angles of his face like pale arcs. How to tell him? How to tell him of the conversion in that hut in the forest two years ago? He had never told anyone, and it had never come to anything, and anyway, was that not his burden to bear? How to tell him of a failed search for an act of resistance? How to tell him of the burden laid upon him by the Partisans?

  “Nothing?” Dreyer closed his eyes and rolled back onto his pillow. “Maybe I was wrong, then. It seemed there was more to you. Turn out the light on the way out, would you?”