Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

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 Cetniks? Last I heard, Mihailovic still had a British liaison group.’

‘So did we all think the British were with the Cetniks?’ Maier wore small pince-nez and still affected the airs and graces of the shy;university lecturer he once was. ‘And we even release signal traffic overestimating the Cetniks 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 Ustase 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, Ustase, and Cetniks 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 Vukic 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 Vukic. 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.’

‘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. Vukic.’ 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 con shy;tinued. ‘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 kubelwagen , 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 Feld shy;gendarmerie’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 shy;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.’