The Pale House (A Gregor Reinhardt Novel) Page 6

  Her eyes were very blue as she looked at him, as if she weighed him against some measure of her own. Her face hardened, although if at him he could not say. “It’s possible,” she said, at last. “They sent someone from Zagreb to, as they said, ‘take things in hand’ down here. His name’s Vjekoslav . They call him Maks .”

  “I have heard of him.”

  “Well, it’s all true. All of it. And more.”

  She shivered, from the cold or from their words he could not say, and he realized how tired she looked. Her hair was still blond, but shot through with gray now, and there were lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her shoulders were hunched round and tight beneath her coat, worn shiny at the elbows and waist.

  “You are busy, and it’s cold. I must not detain you longer.” She smiled again, briefly, but there was warmth in it and her face lightened. “Here are the people I mentioned to you.” greeted each of them, and she knelt to put her hand on the boy’s shoulder, his head turning out from the old woman’s embrace slowly.

  “Thank you again, Captain,” she said. She looked at him and offered her hand. “It was . . . good to see you.”

  Her hand was small and very cold. He pulled off his gloves and offered them to her, very conscious of the eyes of his driver and the people he had brought in. “Please. If they don’t fit you, perhaps someone else could use them?”

  She smiled again and took the gloves from him. “You were very kind to me, Captain. I have never forgotten that. Thank you for these.” She turned away, leading the people down into the square. He watched her go, running her words over in his mind. stopped, turned back. “Captain, perhaps, if you have time—perhaps you will tell me how it all ended. That investigation. Marija’s death. I never knew in the end if you . . . found the person.”

  Reinhardt frowned. “No one ever told you?” She shook her head, and, with a last small wave of her hand, she was gone, her arm around the boy. Before they vanished back into the crowd, the boy turned, looking back over his shoulder. Their gazes locked, and Reinhardt felt a shiver as he remembered the two boys from his nightmare of that winter field at Kragujevac. Moving without really thinking, Reinhardt took the boy’s knife wrapped in its leather, and offered it back. The boy took it, a quick, firm movement, blinked, and they faded back into the crowd, and when Reinhardt turned back to his car Bunda was standing behind him.

  Up close, Bunda was enormous, bigger than he had seemed at the checkpoint. His bloodied staff was stuffed behind his belt. He was looking at as she moved through the crowd; then his little eyes flickered shut and when they opened he was looking at Reinhardt.

  “’Ello again,” he smiled. Reinhardt said nothing. “You know, I thought you looked familiar. And now I’ve remembered.” Reinhardt still said nothing. The man engendered some kind of primeval reflex within him. Fight or flight, though neither was possible. So he stayed very still, just pushed his tongue hard into that gap in his teeth. “Captain Reinhardt. In’t it?” He looked at Reinhardt’s gorget, smiled again, reached out and touched it. Just touched it, but Reinhardt could feel the massive weight behind that blunt finger. “You caused us a bit of bother back in the day, you know. And you didn’t even say good-bye when it was all over.”

  “You’ve come up in the world, Bunda, I’m glad to see,” said Reinhardt. It was the first thing that came into his head, some way of pulling Bunda away from whatever path his little mind was set on following. “Police patrolman to Ustaše captain. Congratulations.”

  “You ’ad no right to do what you did up there, Reinhardt. Embarrassing me in front of my men. In front of them people.” He curled his finger where it rested on the gorget, the Ustaše’s cracked fingernail making the faintest of scrapes across the metal. “And you got no right to be getting mixed up with the likes of Mrs. . She’s fucking royalty compared to you. She’s ours. What you want with ’er, anyway?”

  “Something I can do for you, Bunda?”

  “You can drop dead, is what,” the giant growled.

  “Well, miracles can always happen, but if they do it’ll be a long time after an Ustaše gives an order to a German soldier.” Reinhardt could see his words moving turgidly through the Ustaše’s mind, so he took the opportunity to slide out of his way. “If that’s all, then, I must be going.” The words felt ridiculous, formulaic and polite, but Reinhardt could think of no other way of getting out and past him.

  “Something you need to understand, Reinhardt,” said Bunda, his eyes following him. “This ain’t the place it used to be. There’s no rules now but what we make. Ain’t no gettin’ around or away from that. Ain’t no gettin’ in the way of it, neither.”

  “I will bear that in mind, Bunda,” replied Reinhardt, with a lightness of tone he did not feel.

  “You get the one warning.”

  “And that was it?” Bunda just stared back at him as Reinhardt tapped the driver on the shoulder, and the car moved away slowly, its wheels skidding on the cobbles.

  The kubelwagen wound its way carefully down King Alexander Street, straight through the old town and on into the newer, Austrian-built sections. The road was treacherous, and the driver was forced to hold the kubelwagen to a juddering path down a pair of ruts carved through remnants of black and filthy ice, through the tears and potholes in its surface, the tires squelching through a slough of snow and sludge.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, one side of the road was filled with soldiers, thousands of them it seemed, marching or standing or sitting in lines that threaded toward the train station, and evacuation. On the other, people struggled across sidewalks humped with sheets and blocks of ice and snow, or chunks of stone and rubble, walking splay-legged to avoid slipping, often bent almost double under heavy loads. Clothes were bundled tight around their bodies, scarves and hoods around faces that, to Reinhardt’s eyes, seemed pinched and drawn with cold and hunger, and he remembered something he had read once. Something about how in winter the cold kept the rich in but drove the poor out, if only to keep moving to stay warm.

  The road opened out as it passed in front of the State House, the ruts widening to several separate series that merged and divided, like train tracks. In the small wood across from the State House, several small fires gleamed, smoke drifting heavily through the trees, the shapes of people clustered close around them. Past the wood, the Marijin Dvor intersection was packed with people, a black mass of them, and the car slowed, allowing Reinhardt to see what it was that held them there.

  It was bodies. Dozens of them, turning slowly from the cords from which they hung. Hanging from trees, from lampposts and signposts, some dangling from windows. Men, mostly, but a few women as well. Braziers and lights painted the bodies in a ghastly play of orange and black that made grinning masks of the faces of the corpses, masks that seemed to mock the onlookers as if with knowledge only the dead could comprehend. Ustaše ringed the scene, and the tension of the crowd was palpable, wives and children yearning after the bodies of those who were so recently husbands and fathers. Reinhardt exchanged a glance with his driver, and then the car was into open space again, the long, white walls of Kosovo Polje barracks looming out of a rising mist. The sentry at the guardpost, muffled up tight against the cold, waved them through the barrier and into a vehicle park.

  The vehicles parked around the walls were dusted with thin limbs and lines of clean, white snow from some recent fall, but the courtyard was an expanse of muddy grit across which the kubelwagen slid. Reinhardt and the driver heaved their baggage out of the car, mud caking the soles of their boots as they trudged heavily over to the entrance with the most signs outside it. He ran his eyes down them as he knocked the muck from his boots, found the sign to Feldjaegerkorps operations, and began their walk into the labyrinthine corridors of the huge barracks.

  The corridors were gloomy and very cold, the ceilings and windows high, representative of the architecture of another era. Many of the windo
ws were smashed or cracked, panes of glass covered in tape or hidden behind stepped piles of sandbags. The building echoed to the sound of hurrying men, shouted orders, the clack and clatter of typewriters and teleprinters, the jangle of telephones. They found the operations center, eventually. It was a huge room, the walls dominated by great expanses of maps and the floor covered in tables around which stood or sat dozens of soldiers and officers. The air was full of the noise of conversations, orders, the staccato rhythms of one-way exchanges on telephones and radios, and thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of bad food, wet clothes, and unwashed men. A lieutenant pointed them to a door across the room, beyond which was Feldjaeger operations.

  “Reinhardt. There you are,” said Colonel Scheller from behind his desk. He was frowning at a map of the city. “You’re just in time. Staff meeting. I was about to send a search party out after you.” He waved Reinhardt to a chair. “Cigarette? So?” he asked, as Reinhardt lit up, then sat.

  “I got told today that everything east of the last line is ‘Indian country,’” Reinhardt said. Scheller snorted, gave a wry smile. “We made our last sweep here,” said Reinhardt, pointing out his unit’s patrol route on the map with his cigarette, “and we found . . . something. Not sure what to make of it.”

  “Those deserters?”

  Reinhardt’s mouth twisted around a mouthful of smoke. “Could be. I just don’t know. Three dead bodies. Probably German. Evidence of at least two units. It could be them.”

  “Frenchie mentioned something else?”

  “A massacre of civilians. Refugees, by the looks of them. Executed by firing squad.”

  “The deserters?”

  “Who knows, sir,” sighed Reinhardt.

  “Well, if it was them, they’re on their own, now. Army command has ordered no more movements east of . . . east of . . .” he said, peering at the map. “Ahh, bloody hell, I can’t get my tongue around these names. Here,” he stabbed a fingernail on the map. “Donje something-or-other. From there”—he traced an arc south across the main road to the east, along which Reinhardt had arrived in the city that afternoon—“to here.” A point to the south. “Everything east of that line is, as you say, Indian country.”

  “So that’s it, then,” said Reinhardt, quietly, watching the smoke spiral up from his cigarette.

  “That, as you say, is it. And Frenchie tells me you’ve been scaring the local wildlife?”

  Reinhardt started, pulling his mind back from thoughts again of that girl in her father’s arms, and the man with the goatee. “Sorry, sir?”

  Scheller grinned. “Barely five minutes into the city, and you’ve upset our staunch allies.”

  “The Ustaše?”

  “None other.” He waved a piece of paper. “Official complaint about your behavior.”

  “Bloody hell,” murmured Reinhardt. “They didn’t waste much time.”

  “No,” said Scheller, chewing softly on the left of his bottom lip, as was his habit when thinking. “There’s a lot going on, it would seem. Come!” he called, as there came a knock on the door. Two Feldjaeger officers stepped inside, the other captains in the unit, Lainer and Morten, together with a pair of Feldgendarmes—one of them a general, Reinhardt saw, as he straightened up—followed by an army captain.

  The general was squat, almost as wide as he was tall, with the pugnacious set and build of a bulldog, all chest and a flat, belligerent face and narrow little eyes with which he blinked around the room. The other Feldgendarme with him, a major, had an altogether different look: tall, slim, slicked-back hair, but a nervous slant to his features as he looked askance at the general, as if expecting him to make a mistake or say something wrong.

  “Gentlemen, this is General Herzog, commander of military police forces in the Sarajevo area.” There were murmurs of greeting, exchanges of names that the general took in with a flat, expressionless face. “And these are Major Neuffer, who has been assigned as our liaison officer with the Feldgendarmerie, and Captain Langenkamp, army liaison to the Ustaše. I know it is late, but now that the whole unit is in the city I have asked the general here to give us his assessment of the situation, as it is his men we will be supporting. He has kindly agreed. General,” said Scheller, indicating chairs drawn up around a low table, “please, be seated.”

  “Well, you are all welcome to Sarajevo,” said Herzog, blinking his little eyes around the table as an orderly slipped into the room with a tray of sandwiches and coffee. “Not that I asked for you. But you’re welcome all the same, and we’ll find you gainful employment, don’t you worry. Just don’t go abusing that vaunted Feldjaegerkorps authority around me and my men. I’ll not stand for it. You’ll forgive my bluntness—actually, I couldn’t care less if you forgive it or not—but I do believe honesty and forthrightness are the best ways to start a new relationship.”

  Reinhardt glanced around at Scheller and the captains, wondering if they felt as nonplussed as he did.

  “That said, I want us all on the same page regarding the situation because we’re going to be, pardon the expression, fucking busy. Gentlemen, our position here in Sarajevo is precarious. Over thirty-five thousand German troops, and many tens of thousands of our allies, are all but surrounded. We have one functioning railway on which to move, which leads north, through Visoko to Zenica, and on to the border with Croatia, where it is coming under threat from the Soviet forces massing around Belgrade. The line south to the coast was cut when the Partisans took Mostar on the fourteenth of February. The Partisan front lines have been reported as close as seven miles away . . .”

  Reinhardt listened with only one ear, chewing softly on a sandwich with an all-but-tasteless piece of meat and cheese inside, thinking of that man with the goatee. What was it about him? What instinct was it stirring? Was it being back here, he wondered, sipping black coffee, and wishing for a cup of the Turkish brew he used to drink on ? That conversation with Benfeld rattled around inside his head. Could murder still mean anything, after all that had happened? Because it had been committed, up there, in that forest. Just as it had been committed in places like it across the sweep of the continent. As always, his mind shied away from thoughts like that, unwilling, unable to comprehend what had been done, what they had witnessed, these past years, but here it had been done under his nose, almost. What chance, he wondered, of doing something about it . . . ?

  “. . . therefore, the evacuation by rail is our priority and is proceeding day and night, with troops being moved up to the station on a rolling basis. Finally, in addition to the Partisan forces massing around the city, within Sarajevo itself there is increasing Partisan activity—sabotage, espionage—all of which is being managed by cells of operatives. These cells are allegedly under the control of a senior Communist Party operative known only as ‘Valter.’ He is, for want of a better word, a cowardly and cunning son of a bitch whom I would like to catch and string up by his balls. However, this touches upon our Ustaše allies. For that, I hand over to Captain Langenkamp.”

  At mention of the Ustaše, Reinhardt stuffed his musing to one side and paid attention. Langenkamp had, perhaps, seen just a little too much of the Ustaše. He sat very still in his chair, hands folded on the table in front of him, and spoke very quietly as if from very far away. As if he sought to put distance between himself and the world.

  “The Ustaše are in a most delicate position. Their hold over Bosnia is all but gone, and they are now concentrating their forces on defending the borders of Croatia itself. In addition, the Ustaše are increasingly affected by the emergence of factions that are forming around various territories, each led or held by a particular personality. For instance, the Ustaše in Sarajevo are under the control of General Vjekoslav . General is renowned as quite single-minded in his devotion to the Ustaše cause, and unmerciful to those he considers weak in its defense, or who have betrayed or compromised it. He has around him a coterie of six to seven men, his lie
utenants, men like Svetozar , Jovan Buzdek, and Ante .” Reinhardt frowned and shifted at the mention of that name. “They exercise total impunity in how they run the city. , in particular, is responsible for security in the city itself, and for the recent wave of arrests, on no particular grounds, of dozens of people. He is actually known by his nom de guerre of The Gambler, as he carries a set of dice that he uses to determine what punishment is meted out to prisoners or suspects. Just today, there was a mass execution of some eighty people, with the bodies hung up in the trees around the Marijin Dvor area.

  “The Ustaše’s capacity as an effective fighting force in Sarajevo is very low. It is questionable the extent to which they are still following orders from Zagreb in any meaningful way. As they grow weaker, they seem to be growing more desperate and out of control in the way they govern what little territory is left to them, with an increase in the use of terror, corruption, and brutality.” Those ought to have been the Ustaše watchwords, thought Reinhardt—to go along with their ridiculous triptych of “knife, revolver, bomb”—and most certainly this Langenkamp had seen a little too much of all that. Reinhardt could see it in the man’s eyes and the rigid set of the tendons in his neck. Ustaše liaison. Reinhardt could imagine few jobs more distressing and degrading.

  “I would add one piece of intelligence. It seems a purge may be about to take place within the Ustaše in Sarajevo. There are rumors that some of the more senior Ustaše have disappeared, possibly deserted, and General is allegedly furious, suspecting treason and betrayal.”

  “Nevertheless,” Herzog interrupted, impatience writ large across his boxer’s face, “despite their weaknesses and internal divisions, they remain our allies. Our allies, gentlemen,” he said, rolling his spiky little eyes around the group. “As our allies, they have ruled out any kind of accommodation with the Partisans, and the two groups seem set on a fight to the death, with no quarter being asked or given. The Ustaše are paranoid about Partisan infiltration into the city, and regularly conduct sweeps and arrests in an effort to break up the Partisan cells and capture or kill Valter and his commanders. They are utterly obsessed with him.