Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

‘You said something about the wounds and the knife. Go over it again.’

‘Sir. Err… the wounds. Average depth three inches. Deepest penetration six and a half inches. Errr… Wounds characteristic of a very sharp, heavy knife with a bottom edge curving up to a point, and a top edge equally sharp along at least two inches, but showing a pronounced… err… hook? A hook shape? A curve…’ The corporal trailed off. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m not at all… sure of the words. That seems to be what they are describing.’

‘A hook shape?’ repeated Reinhardt.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What kind of a knife is hook-shaped… ?’

Hueber went red, reading over the report, and then his notes. ‘Sorry, sir. It doesn’t say.’

‘Don’t worry, son. It’s not your fault.’ He sighed. ‘Nothing much, eh?’ Claussen nodded in agreement. ‘Very well. Thank you, Hueber. You are dismissed. Type those notes up for me.’

The corporal left, and Reinhardt sighed, suddenly deflated. He slumped on his elbows. Looking down past his knee, he could see the drawer where he kept that bottle of slivovitz. The temptation was strong, but he stood instead, walking over to look at the big wall map. His eyes ran back and forth between Ilidza and Sarajevo, and then over and up around the thread of the city’s streets. The whole place was so small, but wound in and built up upon itself. He put his hand on the map. With his thumb on Ilidza, he could almost stretch his little finger out to Sarajevo, and when he put his palm on the map it almost obliterated the city. And yet to get anywhere, it seemed you had to turn and turn and turn again…

‘Captain Reinhardt?’ Reinhardt looked up and away from the map at the tone in Claussen’s voice. ‘Is something wrong, sir?’

Reinhardt paused, then related the incident in the bar. Woodenly. No expression. At the end of it, Claussen just stared at him and shook his head slightly.

‘What does that mean?’ hissed Reinhardt through tight lips, life surging back into his voice. ‘I didn’t ask to get dragged into entertaining a bunch of colonels like that.’

‘No, sir,’ Claussen replied, imperturbable in the face of Reinhardt’s anger. What was it about sergeants and their ability to do that to him? Brauer had had the same effect on him. Like a father staring down a guilty son, although Reinhardt was sure he had never managed that same stare with Friedrich. Perhaps, if he had been able to, things between them might have been different. ‘But you didn’t walk away from it, either.’ The two of them stared at each other, but it was Claussen who stepped back. ‘Will you be needing anything else for the time being, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Reinhardt. ‘Find out who Peter Krause was. Is. I’ve no rank, but I’m guessing he was a lieutenant like Hendel. You are dismissed for now.’

With Claussen gone, Reinhardt had nothing to occupy his mind while he waited for the inevitable summons from Freilinger. He unfolded his map, stared at it, put it away, unfolded it again, and added Stolic to the names on it, linking it to Vukic’s, thinking of the way Dragan described Stolic and his knife. He checked in on Maier and Weninger. He found Weninger this time, a small and taciturn man, who pointed at Hendel’s sorted files with a pencil and had his head back down in his own material as Reinhardt walked out with them back up to his office. There was a lot going on in the building. Frantic last-minute arrangements for Schwarz, mostly. Reinhardt passed through it, feeling detached, alone.

Hendel’s material was not much, Reinhardt thought, as he looked at the stack of paper and cardboard standing in the middle of his desk, but he should have looked at it earlier himself. He checked that it was ordered chronologically and then began to go through the files one after the other, starting with Hendel’s activity log. Hendel’s work was internal army security. He had made log entries fairly regularly upon arrival in Sarajevo at the end of December, but they had begun to tail off around the beginning of March. Flipping through the log, he saw no references to Vukic. He went back through the log more carefully, looking for euphemisms, initials, some kind of internal code, and found nothing.

He sat back, drumming his fingers quietly on the desktop, not sure what to make of that absence. He lifted the case files one by one, glancing at the titles as he went. A couple were for operations he knew of, mostly targeting the Croatian Army for Partisan infiltrators or leaks. Unlike the Ustase, the Croatian Army – the Domobranstvo – was not what anyone would call ideologically inclined or committed and suffered high rates of desertion and low levels of morale, particularly among its Bosnian Muslim conscripts. Most of the Croats in its ranks were from Croatia proper, far from home and desperately homesick. At the command level there was a sustained level of mutual loathing and distrust between the Domobrantsvo’s officers and the Ustase. In that, they were not too different from the way many German officers felt about the SS. Some of the files had the names and ranks of soldiers on them, mostly Germans, none of whom he knew, and none above the rank of major, with the exception of one file belonging to a colonel of the Domobranstvo, one Tihomir Grbic.

Out of interest more than anything else, Reinhardt opened the file, which, from the date stamped on the cover, was one of the last files that Hendel opened before his death. The case against Grbic seemed to be one of cowardice in the face of the enemy. He scanned down the front page, and the name of Standartenfuhrer Mladen Stolic leaped out at him. Reinhardt flipped to the after-action report, which stated that Grbic’s men had failed to press home an attack against the Partisans made in conjunction with units from the 7th SS. It was not the first time Grbic’s men had failed in action, but from reading over a summary of Grbic’s service record, it was clear the man himself was anything but a coward. He had served with the Croatian Army in the USSR until he was seriously wounded in the fighting around Stalingrad. The man was a veteran, thought Reinhardt. It was his troops, all new and mostly conscripts, who were probably unwilling. That seemed to be the emerging gist of Hendel’s investigation, such as it was recorded in the file.

Reinhardt sat back, not knowing what, if anything, to make of this. There was a clear connection from Hendel to Stolic, and from them both to Vukic. It was clear Stolic knew of, and disliked, Hendel. What was wrong here? Too obvious, perhaps? Too clear a link? For a moment, he seemed to hear his old probationary officer’s voice. It’s the little things, Gregor. Always the little things. Where was the little thing in this, he wondered, seeing Claussen appear at the door.

‘What do you have, Sergeant?’ Reinhardt asked, shaking an Atikah loose from a packet.

‘Lieutenant Peter Krause, sir,’ said Claussen, stepping into the room and reading from the page. He passed through the beam of light, the light snapping and dividing around him, sending the motes of dust into a new frenzy of movement. ‘Works in transportation. Movement supply officer. Been posted here since June last year.’ He passed the paper across Reinhardt’s desk.

Reinhardt scanned down the handwritten notes. ‘They’ve reported him missing?’ he asked as he lit his cigarette.

‘Reported missing to the Feldgendarmerie yesterday morning.’

‘And yet we know Becker’s been looking for him since Sunday.’ Reinhardt snapped back in his chair, staring hard at Claussen. He clicked his fingers and pulled his cigarette from his mouth, pointing his fingers at the sergeant. ‘ That’s where I know Krause’s name from. The list of deserters and wanted men. He was on that list I saw in the Feldgendarmerie’s HQ while I was waiting to see Becker yesterday afternoon.’ He twisted his mouth in an ironic smile. ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered. He took a long drag on the cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs.