The Man from Berlin Read online

  ‘No signs of unusual behaviour? She mentioned nothing that might have been troubling her?’

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Vukić. She blew her nose elegantly into her handkerchief.

  ‘Nothing to do with men? With money? At her work?’ Vukić shook her head to all of it. ‘Can you tell us what she did, exactly?’

  ‘She was a filmmaker. And a photographer.’ Her German was slow, precise. She went over to an elegant escritoire of dark, varnished wood with brass handles and came back with a folder tied up with a ribbon. She spread a collection of clippings, photos, postcards, letters, and other memorabilia onto the table and fingered through it. She found one in particular, a certificate of completed training with the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. Propaganda Kompagnien. One of Goebbels’s little stormtroopers, thought Reinhardt, and a woman. Well, well, well. He put it back as Vukić showed him another page, handwritten in an elegant, old-fashioned script, probably hers. It listed all of Marija’s assignments, and the dates she was away. Poland 1939, France and the Netherlands 1940, the Balkans and Greece 1941, USSR twice, in 1941 and again in 1942, North Africa 1942, Italy. ­Everywhere, it seemed.

  The door to the room creaked open and an old dog wandered in. It sniffed aimlessly at Reinhardt’s leg before flopping to the floor at Vukić’s feet. Vukić stroked its head, then leaned forward in her chair. ‘Will you take something to drink? I have coffee that was a present from Marija from her last trip to North Africa.’ She offered him a cup of coffee, thick and black, flavoured with cardamom. Reinhardt lifted his cup to his lips, remembering the last time he had tasted something like it, in Benghazi, in a café overlooking the sea with the water like a sheet of molten metal beneath him. She poured for Padelin, but he only put his cup briefly to his lips, putting it down almost untouched. ‘Yes, a photographer. A good one, too. She worked with Leni. Leni Riefenstahl,’ she added, unnecessarily. A first flicker of an emotion other than grief roused itself in her face and there was pride in her voice ‘She travelled with the troops. She followed the Croat soldiers to Russia. I have all her letters and cards. Perhaps you might want to look at them.’

  ‘That might be useful,’ said Reinhardt. ‘Mrs Vukić, I saw her apartment and the collection of photographs. I understand that she travelled extensively with the military, but did she travel with anyone in particular?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Always with the general staff.’

  ‘There were at least two men at Marija’s house that night.’ Vukić’s mouth firmed, and she dipped her head to sip from her cup. ‘One of them was found dead at the scene. A blond man. Blue eyes. A soldier, perhaps thirty to thirty-five years old. Do you know who that might be?’

  ‘She used to see a Major Bruno Gord, in the propaganda companies. I never met him, though. Then again,’ she said, quietly, ‘it might not be him.’

  There was an awkward silence. Padelin indicated with his eyes for Reinhardt to go ahead. The big policeman shifted in his chair as Rein­hardt cleared his throat. ‘What do you mean, Mrs Vukić?’

  Vukić’s eyes rose from her cup, first to Padelin, then to Reinhardt, blinking as if surprised to find him there. She held his gaze for a long moment, then sighed. ‘I mean that Marija liked men. Men with power, authority. She liked older men. She had a lot of them. I could not… did not try… to keep track of them. I cannot say I liked her behaviour. But… Marija was strong-willed. What I liked and wanted stopped being important to her a long time ago. I mean, she lived by herself, out there in Ilidža, instead of here with me. How many good Bosnian girls do that to their mothers? She always said she was a “modern” girl. She wanted her own place. Her father indulged her.’ Just for a moment her eyes strayed to the photos on the piano. ‘He always did. He gave her his father’s house, the one in Ilidža. And when we divorced, he moved out there with her.’

  She looked at the two of them. ‘Understand, I love her.’ Her voice hitched as she caught herself, swallowed, and then it seemed that a conscious refusal to talk of her love for her daughter in the past crept over her face. ‘But she was complicated. She could be close at times. She was distant more often.’ She looked far away. ‘Especially since Vjeko – my husband – passed away. Distant. But always dutiful,’ she said, her hand passing over the folder and its letters, cards, and snapshots from faraway countries. ‘She was her father’s daughter. More than she was ever mine.’

  Reinhardt, who knew something of complicated family relationships, especially with children, said nothing. He felt a stab of embarrassment for Vukić but screwed it down tight. Vukić seemed to realise she might have said too much of the wrong thing and breathed in deeply, her back straightening. Padelin cleared his throat, but she had not finished talking.

  ‘You know, lots of people liked Marija. Lots of people liked being with her. But I also think there were people who did not like her. What she was. What she did.’ She looked directly at Reinhardt as she talked. ‘You know, she was not afraid to say what some said was the truth about our situation – that is, the situation of Croats – before the war. But she was not afraid to say some things about women, and what some could and should say about what women did with their lives.’

  Reinhardt thought Padelin looked uncomfortable with this, although whether it was the extra detail about an icon he had admired from afar or the talk about disloyalty towards the Party was not clear. He made a valiant effort to bring the conversation back to the case. ‘Mrs Vukić, what can you tell us about the guests your daughter had?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, shortly. ‘I don’t know who she might have entertained. But just be sure,’ she said, again focusing on Reinhardt, ‘just be sure that when you look for whoever did this, you look close to home, not just far from it. Those who would hold her highest are those who would drop her furthest.’ She sat back, an expression of satisfaction on her face.

  Padelin looked even more uncomfortable with that, to the extent that Reinhardt stepped in for him. ‘What do these friends of hers do?’

  ‘I’m afraid I really don’t know.’ Her eyes were far away again, the shock catching up with her. There seemed to be little more they could do here, now. Reinhardt leaned forward to place his saucer on the table and froze as Vukić began talking again.

  ‘My husband called her feisty,’ she said, in little more than a whisper. ‘Independent-minded. Very political. Very… involved with the Party. And she liked having a good time. Parties. Dancing. Drinking. Smoking. The men.’ Her cup rattled slightly in her hand, but she did not seem to notice.

  ‘Mrs Vukić,’ said Padelin. ‘Did your daughter have any ad­dictions?’

  Vukić seemed to rouse herself. ‘No. Heavens, no,’ she gushed, a mother roused to automatic defence of a child. If that was what it was, it faded fast, the sudden show of spirit falling back into the increasing emptiness in her eyes. ‘She knew how to separate business from pleasure. Another thing my husband taught her. No, no addictions. Her work, perhaps. And the Party.’ She sipped from her cup, and the silence grew. The two policemen exchanged looks, and Padelin put his hands on the arms of his chair but stopped, again. ‘You know, if I’m honest, I should say I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the details of her life. I know she worked hard. And she liked to have a good time when she was not working.’

  Reinhardt felt an echo of her grief deep inside, the memories of Carolin and Friedrich stirring and shifting. One dead, one as good as dead. He watched her, this woman struggling with herself, her feelings. He felt a stir of admiration for her, for her elegance and composure in the face of her grief. He knew what awaited her, what awaited those left behind by their loved ones, but he showed nothing. It was not difficult anymore, to show little or nothing in the face of another’s pain, but there was still a little part of him that reminded him it was not always that way, and he was not always like this.

  Reinhardt nodded at Padelin that he was finished. For all his imposing appearance, the inspecto
r could be, it seemed, a gentle man. He put his card down on the table. ‘Mrs Vukić, you will need to identify the body. When you are feeling better, please call me at that number, and we will arrange for you to come in.’ Padelin nodded to Reinhardt that he had finished his questions, and the two of them rose to their feet. Vukić stayed sitting, looking small and fallen in on herself. ‘Please accept our condolences. Do not get up. We will see ourselves out.’ They left her there in the middle of her perfumed living room with its ticking clock and the old dog wheezing at her feet.

  6

  Reinhardt left Padelin in front of police headquarters, the big detective tight-lipped and taciturn on the drive back down from Vukić’s mother’s house. Getting out, Padelin suggested they meet the next morning, giving him enough time to track down any members of Vukić’s production team in the city, and Reinhardt time to start following up on the German side of the investigation. He barely gave Reinhardt time to agree before he was turning away, walking stiffly up into the building.

  It was going on three o’clock anyway and those of the city’s inhabitants who had jobs mostly worked a seven-to-three-o’clock shift. ­Reinhardt could feel Sarajevo entering that early-evening phase of relaxation when people downed their tools and came out to visit friends or went for coffee in the old town. He drove the kübelwagen back around Kvaternik Street for what seemed the umpteenth time that day. As he had said to Padelin, you often had that feeling with this city, of going around and around in circles.

  Sarajevo was a grim place, sometimes. Crammed in between its mountains, hemmed in between the Ustaše on one side and the Germans on the other, it always seemed to find a way to push the weight of the war to one side, at least once a day. More and more with each passing day, Reinhardt found himself waiting for that time, when even someone like himself, even someone who wore the uniform he wore, could simply sit and watch and listen and be around people who made an effort to put their cares aside.

  Turning left off Kvaternik, he drove up a narrow street that dead-ended in a guard post. Showing his identification to the soldiers on duty, he parked the car in front of the building the Abwehr used in Sarajevo. Inside, he asked the duty officer for an appointment with Freilinger, only to be told the major was out and not expected back that day, but instructions had been left for Reinhardt to prepare him a report on the day’s events. Sighing, Reinhardt sat at his desk and picked up a note from Claussen that told him he had arranged an ­appointment with the Feldgendarmerie traffic commander for four o’clock.

  He leaned back in his chair, lit his last Atikah, blew smoke at the ceiling, stared at the paper, then closed his eyes and wondered whether he would be able to avoid running into Becker at the Feldgendarmerie. He sat in silence for what seemed quite some time, running over the day in his mind. Feeling his way along it, around it. As he did with the prisoners he interrogated in the rooms beneath the prison. Feeling along the hard edges men brought with them, searching for the breach, the chink that would let him in. Letting silence do the work. The wearying rote of routine, long pauses as each question sinks in, the prisoner’s mind asking itself a dozen more to his one, his hold on his story weakening from minute to minute, hour to hour. Except, more and more, Reinhardt had found himself sinking into his own silence, his questions falling stillborn, chased into the emptiness between men by memories of a child’s scream, the sluggish drift of smoke, the swivel and hunch of rifles into shoulders. Flashes of his nightmares. The inside seeping up into the waking world.

  The prisoner in front of him finished his cigarette, stubbed it out. His eyes flicked up at Reinhardt, away, back. The silence was working on him. The hands now empty, nothing to do with them. Nothing to fill them. The air now empty between him and Reinhardt. Space needing to be filled, and there were only words to fill them. No one here understood the value of silence anymore. The burden of words dropped into emptiness.

  ‘Why’d you take so long?’ the translator whispered, words strained as he held back a yawn. ‘Just beat him.’

  ‘Like the others do?’

  His eyes flared open as he smelled smoke, and he jerked upright in his seat. He did not feel like writing; he needed to move, so he went looking for Weninger and Maier, the two Abwehr officers Freilinger had put to searching Hendel’s material, and found Maier. The Abwehr was subdivided into abteilungen – offices. Reinhardt ran Abteilung II J. The official designation was moral sabotage. In reality, it meant interrogations of captured enemy soldiers, particularly officers. It was not dissimilar to his police work in Berlin before the war, interrogating suspected criminals. Hendel had been Abteilung III H, internal army security. Before that, he had worked in the unit responsible for document forgery and technical espionage. Hendel had not been in Sarajevo long, only about three months. Most of what he had been working on, according to Maier as he sifted through Hendel’s admittedly poor paperwork, dealt with following up on rumours about a secret line of communication between the Partisans and German forces. And that the British were now up in the hills with the Partisans.

  ‘The British?’ said Reinhardt. He thought back over the last interrogations. One of them had been a Partisan lieutenant. He had mentioned nothing about there being any British, but then captured Partisans rarely said much. ‘With the Partisans? Not the Četniks? Last I heard, Mihailović still had a British liaison group.’

  ‘So did we all think the British were with the Četniks?’ Maier wore small pince-nez and still affected the airs and graces of the ­university lecturer he once was. ‘And we even release signal traffic overestimating the Četniks and the damage their actions are causing. You know that, because some of the stuff we release is through our agents. That way we’re pretty sure the Brits pick it up. The last thing we want is the Tommies changing sides, but in the long run, who can know? Those bloody British. Playing both sides, I’m sure of it. These Partisans – I don’t know, I think they could really hurt us, you know? I mean, just look at what we’ve got for allies. The Croats, they’re useless without us, and those Ustaše are just berserk. The Italians are getting all squirrelly about getting home to defend against any Allied attack there – and let’s face it, they were useless anyway…’

  Reinhardt leafed through a few of the files on Hendel’s desk in a desultory fashion as he listened to Maier, and eventually he left him to it. The man was right about one thing. The politics of wartime Bosnia were byzantine in the extreme, a kaleidoscope of shifting frontlines as Germans, Italians, Croatians, Ustaše, and Četniks fought the Partisans. A veteran of the first war, Reinhardt was no stranger to war or suffering, and his mind shied away from what he had heard of the Eastern Front, but he had himself never seen or experienced anything like what he had been exposed to here in Bosnia. The slaughter of civilians, the reprisals, the villages and towns razed to the ground, the summary execution of prisoners, the almost medieval barbarity…

  Returning to his office, he arrived at the same time as Claussen. ‘How was the mother?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Much as you’d expect,’ Reinhardt said. He rummaged in the drawer of his desk, coming up with an old packet of Bosnian cigarettes. The tobacco was stale, but it served its purpose. ‘I found out Vukić was in the propaganda companies, though. Although she seemed to do a fair bit of her work herself. The mother mentioned a Bruno Gord. A major in the propaganda companies. We’ll need to see him.’ His office overlooked Ferhadija Street, itself running parallel to King Aleksander Street through the heart of the city. He watched the ebb and flow of people along it for a moment. ‘Did you have a look at Hendel’s place?’

  Claussen nodded. ‘Nothing much, sir. I talked to a couple of the men he bunked with, at the main barracks in Kosevo Polje. One of them linked him definitely to Vukić. Said he must’ve met her about a month ago. There was a picture of her in his room. A roommate seemed to think he would meet her sometimes at a club in town…’ He paused, leafing through a notebook. ‘Some place called Ragusa.’r />
  ‘We’ll have a look at it.’ Reinhardt looked at the sergeant, considering. ‘What did you notice about the bodies, then? Back at the house.’

  ‘The woman. Vukić.’ Reinhardt nodded at him to continue. ‘She didn’t drop dead like that. Like she was just lying down. Whoever killed her…’ He trailed off.

  ‘Remorse?’ asked Reinhardt.

  ‘Something like that, to lay her out like he did.’

  ‘And he couldn’t have cared less about Hendel,’ said Reinhardt. Claussen nodded. ‘Unless there were two of them,’ Reinhardt con­tinued. ‘Or the same murderer, but two very different reactions.’ He sighed. ‘Keep that in mind. For now, shall we go and see what the chain dogs have?’

  Back down into the kübelwagen, and Reinhardt let Claussen drive again. The sergeant had learned the intricacies of Sarajevo’s little side streets and alleys and the one-way system much better than he ever had. Claussen weaved and dodged his way back to the Marijin Dvor intersection, then sped down to Vrbanja, where the Feldgendarmerie had their main headquarters. In the commandant’s office a young lieutenant, dressed in a uniform that was regulation ironed and starched, directed them to a Captain Kessler, in charge of Feldgendarmerie traffic. Kessler was a tall young officer who came around from behind his desk to greet them. His gorget – the crescent-shaped piece of metal that hung around his neck and was the source of the Feld­gendarmerie’s less-than-flattering nickname of ‘chain dogs’ – was polished to a brilliant shine.

  ‘Captain Reinhardt, yes? I received your request for information.’ He turned to a table standing against one wall, two blue folders ­precisely arrayed upon it. ‘However, I have been ordered to have you report to my superior officer, Major Becker, before releasing any official information.’ Kessler’s face and voice were carefully neutral, and Reinhardt could not tell whether the Feldgendarme thought those orders excessive. Reinhardt breathed in slowly and deeply through teeth that he clenched, carefully. Bureaucracy, it seemed, had caught up with him. It was almost inevitable that Becker would too. ‘I can take you to him now, if that is convenient.’