The Pale House Read online

  “Captain,” Reinhardt said, glancing at the man’s epaulettes, but the man did not let him finish.

  “‘Captain’ nothing!” He snapped an order at his men, and two of them stepped forward, pointing back up the road as they unslung their rifles. The huge Ustaše had already turned his attention away when Reinhardt heard the safety go off Benfeld’s assault rifle.

  “Get back, German, wait your fucking turn,” said one of the Ustaše, a thin, narrow-faced man, a scar worming its way down the side of his jaw and under his collar.

  “Is there a problem, sir?” Benfeld asked, quietly, locking eyes with the Ustaša. The man’s scar went white against the strained red of his face, and the air crackled between them all. One wrong move, Reinhardt thought. One wrong move would be all it would take.

  “Captain,” said Reinhardt, again, taking a slow step forward, keeping his tone easy, trying to make it a conversation between the two of them. “I have no real wish to embarrass you, or for this to end badly. But I will not stand idly by while you abuse these people, and if I lose men because the Partisans come down that road behind me, and I’m stuck with you in front of me, I will kill you first, then your men, before I turn back and fight them. Do I make myself understood?”

  Reinhardt wondered if he did. He wondered what words penetrated the Ustaša’s thick skull, that obvious sense of power and entitlement his size and uniform afforded him. He ran his tongue around his mouth, probing the gap in his back teeth where the Gestapo had knocked one out. He pulled his tongue back. More and more, he did that when he was nervous, and he hated it for the sign of weakness it was.

  All three of the Ustaše fixed their eyes on Benfeld. Bunda licked his lips, worry seeping across his pinched features as he pointed at the lieutenant. “Who are you, German?”

  Reinhardt turned, saw what Bunda was pointing at. It was Benfeld’s armband, lying stark around the gray of his tunic.

  “Feldjaegerkorps,” said Benfeld. Reinhardt’s own armband was under the sleeve of his coat.

  “Feldjaegerkorps?” said Bunda, as if trying the word for the first time, and staring now at Benfeld’s assault rifle, at the curved banana magazine, as if he had never seen one, then more closely at their gorgets. “Not Feldgendarmerie?”

  “Ni je sa nama, Bunda.”

  Reinhardt twisted, seeing the major standing behind him, looking at the Ustaše.

  “I think you should listen to the captain,” the Feldgendarme said.

  For a long, long moment, all was frozen, but the Ustaše nodded, finally. Reinhardt inclined his head in a gesture he hoped the other man would find courteous. The Ustaša’s face twitched once more, and then he was snarling orders at his men. They heaved themselves into their trucks and lurched them off to the sides of the road. Bunda gave Reinhardt a last, long, venomous look, then took himself to one side, glowering as, around him, the crowd began moving step by shaken step down into the city. One or two walked hesitantly over to the bodies. A man darted out from the crowd to help the old man to his feet as the old lady shoved what few possessions they had back into the broken suitcase, pausing, turning, and daring a quick nod of thanks at Reinhardt before she hurried away.

  The major watched them go. He was a slim man in a good leather overcoat belted tight around his waist, his eyes swiveling back and forth as the crowd moved past, then settling on Bunda. “Not wise to rile a bear when his blood’s up.”

  “That particular bear’s blood’s always up.”

  The major raised his eyebrows. “You know Bunda, then?”

  “I know the type,” said Reinhardt, keeping his answer short and his eyes on the major. “Lieutenant, let’s get the column moving.” Benfeld slid back up through the crowd.

  “The heart of man by griefs oppressed, in life’s storms stricken sore, can never hope to gain true rest until it throbs no more,” the major said, suddenly, the flow of his words at odds with the way he stabbed his eyes across the people as they shuffled past.

  “Johann Salis,” said Reinhardt without thinking as a window in his mind opened. He saw his father’s study, the shelves heavy with books, and his father’s lined face shone up happily at Reinhardt from where he sat in his armchair, an old book of poetry open on his lap.

  “A learned man,” murmured the major, one eyebrow tilted at Reinhardt. “Johann Salis, indeed.”

  If it was an invitation to say more, Reinhardt’s silence declined it, savoring instead the umber lines of that small memory as it faded.

  “So, have you Feldjaegerkorps chaps come to save us, Reinhardt?” the major asked, turning, eyebrows raised. He moved toward Reinhardt with the stiff-backed walk of a martinet. “We could always use the help. Don’t think otherwise, Captain.”

  “I’m sure we’ll do our best, sir.”

  “Where have you come from, then?”

  “Up from Montenegro, most recently.”

  “Dreadful place,” muttered the major. “Nothing but bloody mountains. Had much trouble?”

  “Some. We came across a massacre this morning. Quite a recent one.”

  “Really? Doesn’t surprise me at all. Those forests aren’t fit for man nor beast, now. Not with the Partisans crawling through them like bloody termites.”

  “‘Ni je sa nama.’”

  “What?”

  “‘They are not with us.’ That’s what you said to the Ustaše.”

  “I did?” The Feldgendarme’s mouth shrugged itself into a lazy curl as he glanced at Reinhardt. “Well, self-evidently, you are not.”

  Reinhardt’s kubelwagen came to a stop next to him. He waved the rest of the cars on. The other three kubelwagens passed by, then the Horch, with Priller up on the machine gun, and the three refugees huddled tight and low on the rear bench. Bunda saw them as they went by, and he straightened, stamping into the road.

  “WAIT!” he yelled, hammering a fist on the Horch’s hood, shouting at his men who gathered around him.

  “Who are they?” shouted the Ustaša with the scar, his rifle poking into the car at the refugees. Benfeld and several other Feldjaeger jumped out of their cars, unslinging their weapons.

  “Captain,” Reinhardt called.

  “Answer me. Who are they?”

  “Refugees,” answered Reinhardt.

  “What I tell you about spies?” spat Bunda.

  “Them? A couple of old peasants and a boy?”

  “Partisans can be anywhere. Be anyone.”

  “They can be. But not these ones.”

  “Yes?” asked the major, coming to stand next to them. The woman had begun to cry, clasping the boy to her, rocking and repeating “molim vas, molim vas” over and over. The man just sat straight, his case on his lap, and his bird-bright eyes fixed on the red tumble of the city’s roofs, just ahead. “What makes you so sure? Where did you find them?”

  “They survived a massacre. That one I mentioned to you.”

  “Did they, by God,” said the major. “Lucky for them you came along when you did.”

  Bunda’s face had gone blank, and then his mouth twisted as if around something foul, and he stepped back. “Massacre? Where?”

  Reinhardt shook his head, puzzled by Bunda’s change in tone and stance. “I don’t know where, exactly. I am taking them into the city to find help for them.”

  “Is the German Army a humanitarian organization now, Captain?” drawled the major.

  “You take a risk, German,” grated Bunda, his eyes fixed on the refugees. “You take a risk bringing them here. You embarrass me. You will learn . . .” He stopped himself, his lip curling, and then was gone. Reinhardt watched him storm away, the angled frame of his shoulders hunched tight around his fury. He roared an order at the Ustaše, and then they were all piling into their vehicles, thumping them down the hill with clouds of black diesel belching behind them.

  “You’ll learn, Ca
ptain, that if you’re going to do well here, then you’re going to have to do better with them,” the major said, pointing at the retreating Ustaše. “Call it a fact of life. And with that, the very best of luck to you, Captain.” The major smiled, although his eyes remained hard and focused. He looked at the refugees, and the old woman cringed before him, the boy staring fixedly at him from the crook of her arm. “Want me to take care of them for you? I know where to take them.”

  “I’ve an idea as well,” answered Reinhardt. “Anyway, they’re my responsibility.”

  “A man of conscience.” The major smiled as his car pulled up.

  Reinhardt watched him go, the silence sudden.

  “Bloody chain dogs,” Benfeld muttered, eyes heavy on the Feldgendarmes as they drove past. He looked at Reinhardt. “Did you see their badges? They’re from a penal battalion.”

  Reinhardt had not seen and did not particularly care. He looked at the refugees. “What did you see up there?” he asked, quietly. “Što ste . . . vid . . . vidjeli?” But the woman just repeated her litany, and the boy said nothing. The man turned his head slowly, his cap perched at an absurd angle and height atop his hair. He looked at Reinhardt, as if seeing him for the first time, then looked down at his gorget, and the man’s eyes widened and he blinked once, then looked straight ahead.

  A last turn, and then they were driving past the dirty froth of the Miljacka where its course forced the road close against the bone-white cliffs. The road passed underneath the banded walls of the Town Hall—the Rathaus—in the cellars of which Reinhardt had spent those several days being questioned by the Gestapo after the affair with Verhein, through the Oriental warren of Bentbaša before curling around the northern end of , the old Ottoman square with its fountain, artisans, coffee shops, and mosques. Crusted dark and filthy in the shadow of the Rathaus, snow and ice still lay heaped high to either side of the road and filled the tram tracks. Buildings had collapsed, doors hung open, and much of the glass in the windows was smashed. The crowd of refugees bunched up as they came to and began spilling off to the side, joining a much larger crowd that milled across the square.

  Reinhardt stopped his vehicles on the square and walked back to Benfeld’s car to order him and the others on to the Kosovo Polje barracks on the far side of town. He watched them go, then looked out at the tidal swell of people across the square, ordering the civilians out of the Horch. They stood, shaken and uncertain by the side of the road, staring out across the mass of heads that shifted across . They were new to the city, he could see. They would have been blinking and wide-eyed at the best of times, and these were not them.

  “Wait here,” he said, as the Horch drove away. “I will see if I can bring you some help.”

  He walked carefully across the square’s icy cobbles, searching for something he had only heard of, that the city’s humanitarian organizations had a presence here on the square to offer what little help they could provide to the refugees. The city was choked with them now. Winter and the heavy fighting of the last few weeks along the approaches to Sarajevo had emptied the countryside. Those who had not fled to the Partisans had washed up here, and here was precious little. The people he passed seemed listless, ground down by the war and the cold. Many stood in lines, waiting for he knew not what: a ration ticket, perhaps, maybe shelter, a chance to be examined by a doctor but with no hope of treatment. Despite the cold, the smell on the square was heavy and sour with sweat and filth and mud. The smell of a Balkan winter.

  Their desperation and, if he was honest, his loneliness had sunk into him, he knew, these past few months. He missed Koenig and the others. Even if not much had ever come of what they wanted to do, the company of like-minded men was a valuable thing. The Feldjaeger were a tight-knit unit, but they were hard, hard men, most of them, and individualists to a great degree. They reminded him, Reinhardt knew, of himself when he was a stormtrooper on the Western Front in the first war, and God knew he had no real wish to be that man again.

  Despite what he saw, he realized he was happy to be back as he climbed up onto one of the benches around the fountain so as to be able to see better. Labyrinthine, claustrophobic, a place of hidden secrets and beauty, Sarajevo was all that and more, but it was the place where he had awoken to himself after too many years, and he found he had missed it more than he thought he would.

  He spotted what he was after not far from the café where he used to take his coffee. When he reached the old coffee shop he saw it was closed up and the windowpanes showed nothing but darkness inside, just the faint outline of the ovens where the owner had once stooped over his big, black kettles. Next to it, a sign on a tattered white banner indicated an office of Napredak, the Croatian cultural organization. He eased his way through the crowd outside, worming his way into the front office. The place reeked of damp, and the sweet odor of sickness. Behind a rickety wooden desk, a woman in coat, hat, and gloves was taking down a list of particulars from a refugee. She stopped what she was doing as he came in, looking at him wordlessly like they all were.

  “I brought in three people,” Reinhardt said to her. “Two elderly people, and a boy. I found them in the forest. Can you help them?”

  The woman blinked back at him. “Help them?” She swallowed. “Help them,” she repeated. She looked around the room, back at him.

  Reinhardt could understand her, but he had no time for this. He had other duties, for which he was late, but he had assumed a measure of responsibility for those people and he would do what it took to meet it. “I have three people who need help. Can you help them?”

  “We all of us here need help, soldier,” someone said. He did not see who, but that was another indication of how this city had changed. Before, no one would have dared speak so to a German soldier.

  “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

  “Someone else?” The people in the room shifted at the shrill tone in the woman’s voice. It had a crack running through it, Reinhardt could hear, and madness squirmed within it. “There’s no one else. There’s only us.”

  “What is going on here?”

  Reinhardt turned. Another woman had come into the room, dressed in a long black coat, with a spill of gray-blond hair across her shoulders. He stared at her, for a moment speechless, as if he had seen a ghost, and as he watched her, he saw recognition bloom in her eyes, too.

  “Captain . . . Captain Reinhardt?”

  “Mrs. .”

  Reinhardt straightened, pulled off his glove, and offered his hand. She took it; they stared at each other, then seemed to remember at the same time they had an audience. She blinked and stepped back, releasing his hand. “I will deal with the captain, Anica,” she said to the woman at the desk. “This way,” she motioned, showing him back outside. He breathed deeply, pulling that chill down as deep as it would go. She came out with him, pulling her coat tighter around her. People waiting in line stared at them, and there was again that moment of silence between them.

  “Captain. It is . . . You have been well?”

  “Thank you, Mrs. . Quite well. Yourself?”

  “Busy,” she said, with a flicker of a smile. “Busier all the time.”

  “It is valuable work,” Reinhardt said after a moment, leaving the at least unsaid, but she looked at him quizzically a second, as if she strained after words she thought she had heard.

  “What help do you need, Captain?”

  “I picked up three people. I found them. It seems they survived a massacre. Up in the forest.”

  “A massacre? And . . . ?” She stopped, pointing at his coat. He looked down at a smear of something dark and red, and remembered Bunda’s club, the bloodied muck at the end of it.

  Reinhardt shook his head, scraping at the stain. “No. God, no,” he said, terrified suddenly she would think him responsible. “This is something else. When we arrived it was all over. It must have happened at least a day ago. Only an e
lderly couple, and a boy, seem to have survived it. They haven’t said anything of what happened. They’ve said very little at all, in fact. I don’t even know if they’re related. But I wanted to make sure they got whatever help there was. I realize that . . .” He tailed off, again, and they both stared at each other, but it was the milling helplessness across the square they both saw.

  “You did the right thing, Captain. Perhaps you will take me to them?”

  “This way, then,” he said, leading her off across . It was starting to snow, just a little, flakes wending convoluted patterns through the air. They picked their way through the crowds, and whereas the people parted for his uniform, they washed across her path. Many knew her. Hands reached out, people stepped toward her, her name was called. She moved slowly, taking each hand offered, touching each person’s shoulder who stepped in front of her, answering the names of those who called her, a gentle word here and there, but she did not stop, and they did not try overmuch to stop her from going.

  They broke into open space at the edge of the square and paused a moment. She looked back across . “They are more and more each day,” she said

  “It is fortunate for them you are here,” he said, remembering, suddenly, that her first name was Suzana.

  She smiled, wanly. “Prosvjeta for the Serbs, Merhamet for the Muslims, Napredak for the Croats. They were supposed to be organizations dedicated to cultural enlightenment. Some charity work for the communities they served. But not this. Not . . . scraping together aid rations and handouts. But the city’s got almost nothing, and the Ustaše. Well . . .”

  “They’re getting worse?” hesitated, then gave a little nod. Reinhardt shook his head. “As if that were possible,” he said, almost to himself, remembering that checkpoint and Bunda’s appalling assurance that what he was doing was not only right, but sanctioned.