The Pale House (A Gregor Reinhardt Novel) Page 4

  “What is it you think happened, sir?” asked Benfeld.

  “A guess? There’s two different sets of murders. Possibly even three,” he said, as he put his pistol back together. A last draw on his cigarette, and he tossed the butt away.

  “Murders, sir?”

  “Yes, Benfeld. Murder. That’s usually the name we give to the unlawful and often premeditated killing of one human being by another. Something about that strikes you as odd?”

  “Well, sir . . .” The big man seemed at a loss. “It’s just . . .”

  “. . . One of those words that seems to have fallen out of favor?” Reinhardt interrupted. “A term that’s lost the power to shock. A definition that’s all but meaningless . . . ?” Reinhardt looked around, sighed. “All of the above, probably,” he said, quietly. “But that doesn’t change what it is.”

  “No, sir. You were saying?”

  “Those burned corpses in what’s left of that hut are one set of murders. Then the civilians. Refugees. Whatever they were, are a second set. At a wild guess, these refugees were . . . probably . . . in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Witnesses?” said Benfeld.

  “Probably.”

  “Poor bastards.”

  “The ones in the hut are more important. Someone wanted to hide evidence of something, and from the evidence you found, they were wearing German uniforms.”

  “That does not make them German soldiers, though,” said Benfeld.

  “No. It does not.”

  “But someone went to some effort to cover their deaths up,” said Benfeld.

  “Go on,” motioned Reinhardt.

  “Someone . . . a falling-out, perhaps? A disagreement?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, Lieutenant.”

  “You said three, sir? Possibly three sets of murders.”

  “That old man. Him, there. City dweller.” Reinhardt chewed his lower lip, then stroked that gap in his teeth with his tongue. “What’s his story . . . ?”

  Although the woods stood on the cusp of spring, the winter had been harsh. The ground and trunks were slimed with mud and damp, and though the trees stood thick, the pillared spaces between them were sheeted with darkness more than new growth, and that was how the boy came so close with no one to spot him.

  One of the sergeants did, though. He clicked his fingers with quiet insistence, and when Reinhardt and Benfeld looked at him, he motioned their eyes over to the boy who stood partially hidden at the clearing’s edge, staring blankly across to the huts and what lay around them. A quick motion to the soldiers to act normally and Reinhardt was moving before he thought of it, long strides across the hard ground, into a position where he was hidden from the boy. Then he was running, pushing past the pain in his knee, and still the boy had not moved until suddenly he leaned around the tree and saw Reinhardt, and his eyes widened. One, two steps backward, and he was turning back into the darkness of the woods, but Reinhardt was almost on him, even if the boy ran with a terrified desperation.

  Hard on the boy’s heels, Reinhardt followed a lurching line through the scissored prospect afforded him by the lean and slant of the trees, pinpricks of white stabbing down through the green darkness. He caught the boy quickly, as he knew he had to. There was no way otherwise, not with this knee, and this gloom. The boy’s arms flailed wide as he found his way blocked. He dodged back around Reinhardt, wriggled past one hand but not the other, stumbled and fell in a tangle of limbs. Reinhardt gripped him by the neck, pushed him down, breathing heavily as the boy writhed against the wet ground, a thin keening all the sound he made as his little fingers made fists of the earth.

  “It’s all right,” gasped Reinhardt, swallowing, chasing the right words across the edges of his memory. “U redu. Sve je u redu. It’s all right.”

  Reinhardt knelt by the boy, pulled him up to his knees. He was caked with grime, and his eyes rolled left and right. “Hey, hey,” said Reinhardt, taking the boy by the shoulders, feeling how desperately thin he was beneath the clothes he wore, tattered and torn to worse than rags. A hard edge showed through the back of his coat and, lifting the fabric away, Reinhardt found something long and thin wrapped in leather and thrust down the back of the boy’s trousers. “What is happening? Šta se ?” he asked, the Serbo-Croat coming slowly. “Zašto se bojiš? Why are you scared?” He unwrapped the leather, revealing a long, heavy-bladed knife, like a butcher would use. The boy’s eyes fastened on it hungrily. The blade was clean, and even in the dim light beneath the trees the edge glimmered sharp.

  There was a confusion of voices, angry words, and Benfeld came through the trees with a pair of Feldjaeger behind him as Reinhardt wrapped the knife back up and pushed it through his belt.

  “There’s two more,” Benfeld said, looking blankly at the boy.

  “Two what?” Something in Benfeld’s flat gaze made Reinhardt draw the boy closer.

  “Survivors. An elderly couple. They must have been with the boy. When he ran, they came out of the woods. Maybe his grandparents?”

  Reinhardt stood, picking the boy up in his arms. He weighed nothing, just a tight bundle of skin and bones, and began to walk back through the trees. By the huts, an old lady cried out as they came out into the clearing, her arms outstretched to the boy. Reinhardt put him down, watched as she gathered him into her arms, pushing his face into her shoulder. An old man stood behind them, a tattered woolen cap riding high atop a thatch of matted gray hair, and his gnarled fist tight around the handle of an old, square suitcase, stenciled in black across it.

  “You speak German? Govorite li ?” The man just looked at him, his eyes flickering up to Reinhardt’s face and down to his gorget, widening each time they did so, but the woman’s eyes came up, and he looked at her. “What happened, here? Šta se . . .” he gritted his teeth, frustrated at the way the Serbo-Croat skittered away from his tongue, as the woman put her head back down, sobbing quietly into the boy’s hair. “Šta se dešava ovdje? Šta se . . . Partisans? Ustaše? Was it the Ustaše?”

  “Molim vas, gospodine, molim vas,” she wept, over and over. “Milosti, gospodine, molim vas, milosti.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Reinhardt said in response to what he understood were pleas for mercy, but the woman just went on, darting her eyes up, then around at the old man, back to Reinhardt. She said nothing else, just repeated herself, over and over, pulling herself and the boy closer to the man, and Reinhardt had enough experience of victims to know not to badger them.

  “They’ll know,” said Benfeld, gesturing at the three refugees where they stood in a tight huddle, the man staring at nothing, the woman pressed up against him, the boy buried in her arms.

  “They probably do.”

  “So? Why aren’t we asking them?”

  “Give it time,” said Reinhardt. “Anyway, aren’t you the one said it wasn’t any of our business?” He looked into Benfeld’s cold eyes, measuring the moment the lieutenant would answer back. “We’ve wasted enough time. The rest of the unit’s probably reached Sarajevo by now. Call in and give them our estimated time of arrival, then let’s get moving. Put them in the Horch. We’ll take them down to the city. Hand them over to . . . someone. I don’t know.”

  The cars shuddered to life, bouncing heavily laden down the track where it plunged on into the forest on the far side of the clearing. The track wound through the trees for some minutes, then opened out onto the side of a hill. Like a rough-hewn template, the ground hacked as if by a crude maker’s tools, slopes rose in forested blocks to broken peaks all around them. The mountains stood painted in shades of gray and green, their shadows a dark purple where they inked the land. A faint radiance outlined where the peaks ran against a dirty sky that seemed low enough to reach up and touch, like a smoke-blackened ceiling.

  The driver lurched the car down the slope, Reinhardt holding himself squared against the
heave and roll of the road. That faltering rhythm began to lull him, so their arrival at what must have been one of the last defense lines took him almost by surprise, the column winding through a barrier of trenches, barbed wire, sandbagged emplacements, and gun positions, a pair of tanks hull-down in their berms. The post’s commander stood by the gap in the defenses, muffled up against the cold, most of his face hidden behind a thick scarf, and his eyes were hard and distant. He stopped Reinhardt’s car as it came through.

  “Message from your commanding officer,” the man said. “Rendezvous at the main barracks. At Kosovo Polje.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You it?”

  “Am I what?”

  “The last?”

  “I don’t know,” said Reinhardt, looking back along the road as it snaked up and away across the face of the hills. “Very likely.” There was no one there but Partisans now. This was the very edge, he knew. The edge of what they had taken and called theirs, now slowly furling in on itself like a leaf against the heat of a fire. All around the fringes of what they were told was a thousand-year Reich, men were standing like them, watching, looking, feeling the edges of the times they were in fold up and around them, feeling the iron weight of things still to come shifting closer and closer.

  “Indian country, then,” said the officer. Reinhardt looked at him strangely. “You never watched those Westerns? Before the war?” Reinhardt shook his head. “Best get your men in. It’ll be dark soon.”

  “A moment,” said Reinhardt. “In the last day or so, who has been up this road?”

  “Christ knows,” the commander said. “Pretty much everyone. Up and down.”

  “Ustaše?”

  The commander considered a moment, then nodded. “Yesterday,” he said. “And today. A small group of them. They came back in a roaring good mood.”

  “Anything else you remember?”

  “I remember a lot of things, Captain, but I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at.”

  “There was a massacre of civilians up there,” said Reinhardt, pointing back up the mountain.

  “So what else’s new?”

  Reinhardt was about to answer when he saw the futility of it, the man’s disinterest, and so he said nothing, motioning his thanks and instructing the driver to carry on. The kubelwagen wound slowly through the lines, past a squad of laborers—from the look of them, men from a penal battalion under the guard of a Feldgendarme with his hands scrunched deep into the pockets of his coat—past the last of the barbed-wire entanglements, and then the slow lurching drive down the mountain continued. It rained shortly, the cars driving through sleet that angled out of the dim gray light as if aimed at each man. The weather-beaten span of the old Goat Bridge went by, down in its cleft, and then, atop a cliff of cracked rock blasted the color of bone, the white walls of the Ottoman fortress up on Vratnik loomed above them. Reinhardt stared at them, tension rising in him—as it had been all day—at the thought of seeing Sarajevo again.

  He had been close enough, but the Feldjaeger had stayed out of the city, up behind the crumbling front lines, these past few weeks as the army retreated, slowly at first, now a rabble, and always the indiscipline to deal with. Soldiers who ran amok, soldiers who refused to obey orders, and those who melted away and formed organized bands, terrorizing the countryside when they did not simply vanish or go over to the Partisans. It was a band such as that which Reinhardt and his men had been chasing rumors of for the past few days, which had led them to that forest clearing, and of all the things he saw there, that memory of a man with a goatee beard and a girl in the arms of her father would not leave him be, and so he was again caught off guard by the sudden squeal of brakes as the car lurched to a stop, and he looked up at a stopped column of trucks.

  Faintly, beneath the rumble of engines, he could hear something, and it sent a shiver down his back. It was the sound of a crowd. It was the sound of frightened women, he corrected himself. Nothing else made quite that high-pitched note, that shrill of fear or despair. Reinhardt climbed out of the car, his feet cold and stiff. With a shouted order to Priller to watch their rear, he and Benfeld began to slide down past the trucks, each one filled with men slumped bone-tired into the trucks’ stiff canvas coverings, such that the sides of the vehicles made a series of humps. The road opened up a little and he could see that all traffic was stopped at the last curve into the city. Three more trucks stood swaybacked farther down the road, surrounded by a milling mass of soldiers and, here and there, clutches of civilians.

  A gunshot cracked across the morning, and the crowd of people shuddered, shifted in the strange way crowds do. Another shot followed it, flatter, sharper, a pistol shot. Reinhardt frowned as he hurried on past the numb gaze of the soldiers. As long as the firing was in front of them, not behind, they were not overly concerned. He walked as fast as he carefully could, his knee sore and his feet cold and heavy until, just before he came to the head of the column, he came across a kubelwagen parked with a handful of Feldgendarmes in it.

  “What’s the holdup?”

  All eyes in the kubelwagen swiveled toward him, dulled with a sort of lazy insouciance.

  “It’s the Ustaše, sir,” the driver answered, eventually, a lieutenant. “They’ve got themselves a checkpoint at the entrance of the city. Fighting’s just about emptied the countryside and everyone and his mother’s trying to get into town.”

  “Can’t say I blame them,” said Reinhardt.

  “Well. No. Of course not. But the Ustaše are checking everyone and everything.”

  “And not being particularly gentle about it,” said a second lieutenant, sitting next to the driver. He had a heavy face, his jowls flushed pink by the cold.

  All the men in the car laughed, all except the major in the backseat who just smiled, a sardonic curl of his lip.

  “There’s been a couple of executions, sir. I’m afraid the road’s totally blocked.”

  “What’ve you tried?” Reinhardt looked from blank face to blank face. “To get this unblocked. To put a stop to what’s going on.”

  “Are you new here?” This from the major, eyes narrowed, flicking back and forth between Reinhardt and Benfeld.

  “Relatively,” answered Reinhardt.

  “Then you’ll not know better.”

  “Than what?”

  “To leave heaven to the angels, as the famous poet wrote. To leave the Ustaše alone, Captain.” The major leaned forward. “Is there something wrong with your acknowledgment of authority?”

  “None,” said Reinhardt. “Sir.”

  “Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Captain Gregor Reinhardt.” He fished inside his coat and pulled out his gorget. “Feldjaegerkorps.” He watched the men in the kubelwagen, watched the way their eyes fastened on the gorget.

  “Well, Captain Gregor Reinhardt, Feldjaegerkorps. Be patient. It’ll all be over soon. Right, gentlemen?” he said, bringing the other Feldgendarmes into it, those lips pursed out into a simulacrum of a smile. “Unless of course you’d fancy having a crack at them yourself?”

  And why the hell not? Reinhardt clenched his jaw, drawing in a long, slow breath of cold air. It punched through his teeth, waking him, rooting him firmly. He unfastened the catch on his holster and pushed off down the road, threading his way between soldiers, down to where the field gray of uniforms began to give way to coats in dirty browns and blacks. People clustered together in families, huddled around what little baggage they had been able to bring with them. He pushed them apart with his hands on shoulders, murmuring words of apology as he passed through until his presence began to seep into the crowd and it began to part before him, people drawing back and away. He heard the sound of raised voices, a woman crying, and a space opened up in front of him.

  An old man knelt in the road, a hand clutched to a bloodied forehead. A woman stood behind him, a h
and raised. A suitcase had been spilled open, linen lay crumpled across the road, and a picture lay curled and ripped in a smashed wooden frame. In front of them stood a huge man in a black uniform with a spiked club in his hand, the end a slick of blood, and something darker, heavier. Behind him a pair of trucks were parked nose to nose across the road, each manned by a black-uniformed machine gunner. More Ustaše stood here and there, some going through piles of baggage, two more standing over a handful of bodies lying by the side of the road. From the quick glance Reinhardt gave them, at least two of the bodies had had their heads crushed in by that club.

  The Ustaše officer looked up as he felt the crowd go silent, and his eyes fastened on Reinhardt. He had a face whose features were clustered close together and much too small for a man of his size, as if they were an afterthought to the proportions of his frame. Little, dark eyes over a slit of a mouth, a wide nose that twitched as he looked at Reinhardt, and Reinhardt felt a stab of fear at the sight of this man, a stab that followed quick on a hard thrust of memory, from the last time Reinhardt had seen him, lumbering after him through the darkness . . .

  “You’re blocking the road,” said Reinhardt, in German. The woman looked between them desperately as the old man put both his hands on the ground and coughed out a weak dribble of spit and blood.

  “What?” said Bunda.

  “The road. You are blocking it with this checkpoint.”

  “I’m controlling traffic. Checking for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘infiltrators,’” he said, enunciating each word slowly, carefully, then aiming a kick at the man on the ground. His foot caught the man’s arm, and he collapsed onto his shoulder. The woman cried out and tried to cover his body with hers.

  “Captain, right now, I doubt any Partisan needs to come down this road disguised as a farmer in order to get into the city.”

  “What the fuck d’you know?” Bunda snarled, flicking his club at him, and it looked like a stick in those massive hands. Something flew off the club, spattered against Reinhardt’s coat. The Ustaše drilled his eyes into Reinhardt and for a terrifying moment he thought the man had remembered him, but then his mouth curled, twitched, as if a sneer stuttered on the edge of something he suddenly knew for truth. “In any case, I don’t take no orders from no Germans. We don’t do that no more. We’re done when we’re done.”