Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

Most of the officers were done eating, but a sizable crowd was holding up the bar, and a group of senior officers Reinhardt did not recognise, mostly colonels it seemed, had colonised the reading area under a fog of smoke. Reinhardt chose an unoccupied table by the window and sat with his back to the bar, hanging his cap off his chair. A waiter appeared with a menu under one arm and a decanter of water in his other hand.

‘Good afternoon, Captain,’ the waiter murmured as he poured Reinhardt a glass of water.

‘Afternoon, Kurt,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘What is it today, then?’

‘What is it ever in this city, Captain?’ the waiter replied, brushing away an almost imperceptible crease in the white tablecloth. ‘Pork chops. But we do have some runner beans. Quite fresh.’

‘Fine, Kurt. Thank you.’

‘Thank you, Captain,’ replied the waiter, inclining his head. shy;Reinhardt watched him go, remembering out of the blue the time that Kurt had confided in him he had once waited tables at Medved’s, the Russian restaurant in Berlin. ‘ Certain standards ,’ he had said, ‘ once learned, can never be unlearned. No matter where one finds oneself. ’ He laughed to himself at the trite irony of a waiter’s reminiscence and attempt to maintain his own standards, and the parallel with his own situation. His own standards. There was a blast of laughter behind him, and he instinctively hunched his shoulders up and his head down and away from the noise. He felt wound so tight.

His meal arrived, and Reinhardt ate it quietly and methodically, sitting back when he was done. Kurt removed his empty plate and replaced it with coffee and a small dish of rice pudding. Reinhardt drank the coffee, which was awful watery stuff compared to what could still be had in the city, and left the pudding. He took the map from his pocket and spread it on the tablecloth, staring at the blank area where his investigation should be.

He put his elbows on the table and held the map in two hands, running the paper between thumbs and forefingers. Reinhardt glanced quickly at this watch, then stood. It was half past one. Time for one drink, and then he had to find Claussen and see what had been done about translating the pathology report.

There was still a clutch of officers at the bar, and a group of colonels in the armchairs. Reinhardt walked to the end of the bar, ordered slivovitz, and spread his map out again. A couple of the officers looked over at him. He nodded to them cordially, not wanting any contact or conversation. One of them, a solid-looking man with ash-blond hair, looked at him a little longer than the others.

Looking at his map, he saw two options. The first was to investigate Hendel’s death by following up in the city, with the people who knew him or might have seen him, or who knew Vukic, but he had neither time nor resources for that, and in any case his remit was to assist the Sarajevo police while concentrating on Hendel’s death. The second was to pursue his investigation within the army, following up on the information that Vukic frequented officers of senior rank, and try to find where Hendel fitted into that.

‘I beg your pardon, but we’ve met, have we not?’

Reinhardt started, swallowing his slivovitz a little too quickly and coughing. He put his glass down and his hand over his map, and turned to face the man standing next to him. It was the officer who had looked longest at him, a lieutenant colonel in the black uniform of the panzer troops. He had cropped blond hair and cheeks made florid from drinking. Reinhardt came to attention with his heels together. The officer was rather young for his rank and, as Reinhardt looked at him, he did seem rather familiar, standing there smiling and with a half-drunk glass of beer in his hand.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he managed around the burn in his throat, and the burn he could feel on his cheeks. ‘You were saying?’

The lieutenant colonel raised his glass and pointed it at him. ‘We’ve met,’ he repeated.

‘Forgive me, sir, but I am not sure I can recollect when I might have had that honour.’

The officer clicked his fingers repeatedly, staring at Reinhardt with his smile seemingly stuck on his face. ‘I’ve almost got it,’ he exclaimed. ‘R… Ran… Rein… Rein something or other. Damn it, it’s on the tip of my tongue!’

‘Reinhardt. Gregor Reinhardt.’

‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed, a finger in the air. ‘And you don’t remember me! You need a clue, Monsieurrr ?’ he asked, dragging out the French word and almost gargling it at the back of his throat.

That was what did it, though. Reinhardt smiled, offering his right hand. ‘Johannes Lehmann. 1st Panzer. Although you were a captain last time I saw you, sir.’

‘What can I say? Promotion comes pretty fast in a panzer unit! But fancy meeting you here. Long way from France, no?!’

‘A long way, indeed. When was it, then? May, June 1940? Dunkirk, right?’

‘That’s it,’ Lehmann replied, jovially. ‘We had just finished chasing the Tommies into the sea, and you were what, doing interrogations or some such?’

‘Debriefings of captured enemy officers,’ said Reinhardt.

‘That’s what they call it, do they?’ snorted Lehmann, taking a swig from his glass. ‘Well, you must’ve had your work cut out for you, because we certainly gave you plenty of officers to debrief.’

‘No complaints from me on that score,’ said Reinhardt. He breathed deep and slow to cover his surprise. ‘Last time we saw each other was, when? Paris, wasn’t it? Christmas?’

‘Christmas in Paris! Those were good days. France. The weather. The wine, the parties. The girls,’ he finished, with wide eyes beneath raised brows.

Reinhardt would have added victories to that list of good things. There were not that many of them anymore, especially for the tankers, since the glory days of 1940. ‘You were divisional intelligence, weren’t you?’

‘Still am. Still am. And you? Still with Abwehr?’

‘For my sins,’ said Reinhardt. He glanced at Lehmann’s decorations. He wore the gold-and-silver panzer assault badge pinned to the breast of his coat, the white tank destruction ribbon on his right arm, and the red, white, and black stripes of the Winter Campaign medal made a diagonal slash of colour across the big lapels of his black uniform. He raised his glass at them. ‘You’ve been busy, I see. Where has the war taken you?’

‘Poland and Russia mostly. We were with Army Group North. Got to within sight of Leningrad before we got pulled back. We were beaten up pretty badly,’ he said, swigging from his beer. ‘Then Rzhev, for about a year. We were pulled out again and sent back to France for refitting in January this year. God, what a relief that was! You?’

‘Since Dunkirk? Here, until the end of forty-one. Then North shy;Africa until September last year. Italy for a bit. Then back here.’

‘Riding with Rommel, eh?’ Lehmann’s eyes flicked over Reinhardt’s map, then back up. ‘You still in counterintelligence?’ shy;Reinhardt nodded, as he slowly folded his map away. ‘Look, I’m here as advance liaison for the division. We’re deploying out of here in June, to Serbia and Greece mainly. I’m getting the official line from all the right people, but I’d appreciate any information you have that could be useful to us, especially on the Cetniks, seeing as we’re going to be in Serbia. Something a bit more local. Anything to put things in perspective.’

‘I understand,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘And I’m at your service, sir, of course.’

‘C’mon, don’t make it sound so formal. Just talk, over drinks or something. Like whatever you’ve got about the politics here. They seem pretty messed up. Like nothing we’ve experienced anywhere else.’