Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

Reinhardt ate alone in the officers’ mess, making a point of not staying away as much as he wanted to. He sat at a table facing the bar and the corner with the easy chairs. Kurt served him in silence with his usual impeccable style. Pork again, in some sort of cream sauce. The bar was not as full as it might have been, with so many troops gone to the front. It was mostly officers from the Sarajevo garrison, most of whom ignored him, a couple looking his way just long enough for him to be sure that word of what had happened that afternoon had spread. A couple of times he heard whispering, barely restrained snorts of laughter, but he ignored it, even if it did make the flush rise that bit higher in his cheeks and neck.

When he had finished his meal, he made himself go to the bar, but the only other person he exchanged a few words with was Paul Oster, a captain he knew in the medical corps, who sat slumped against the bar, exhausted by the preparations for Schwarz.

‘Now all we can do is wait for the casualties to come in,’ he muttered into his beer. ‘Got everything ready. From here to Mostar. Clean sheets. Soft pillows. Sharp saws. A train ticket home for the lucky ones,’ he giggled, staring into the bottom of his empty beer glass. ‘But those badly wounded will be lucky to get up those bloody roads out of the valleys and through all these damn mountains. And as if that weren’t enough, the idiots have to keep getting themselves hurt,’ he said, as he nodded thanks to the beer Reinhardt bought him.

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, you know. Carelessness. Idiocy. Self-inflicted wounds. Treated a pair of infantrymen for burns the other day. Quite bad ones, actually. Stupid buggers. They said it was an accident but I’ll bet they were burned siphoning fuel for the black market or some other brainless bloody stunt.’ Oster slurped from his beer, his eyes glazed with fatigue and booze. He left soon after, waving a bleary goodbye as he weaved off.

Reinhardt stayed a while longer with his drink, absently tracing his fingernail through the wood grain on the bar top. There was a pile of magazines and newspapers at one end of the bar, and he flicked through back copies of Signal and Das Schwarze Korps , half hoping to find something by Vukic. He thought back to what Padelin had said about her work. He remembered the sparkle she brought to that Christmas party when she had danced with him and could imagine the light and warmth she must have brought to the lives of soldiers far from home. He could easily see her posing for a photo sitting on a tank with her arms around a couple of lucky men or leading them all in a song.

‘Are you Reinhardt?’ He jerked slightly. A captain of infantry stood behind him, a cloth-covered helmet under his arm with a pair of goggles strapped to them. An unloaded MP 40 hung across his chest and a long pair of leather gloves were shoved behind his belt. His uniform, with the red stripe of the Winter Campaign medal, was covered in dust and his face was dirty, his cheeks showing the crescents of his goggles. ‘Reinhardt?’ he asked, unscrewing the top button of his uniform. Reinhardt nodded, cautiously. ‘Hans Thallberg. Good to meet you,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Barman,’ he called. ‘Give me a wet cloth. Been driving most of the day,’ he said to Reinhardt as he dropped his helmet on the bar. ‘Come on, man, quickly now,’ he snapped as he was handed a towel. He wiped his face and hands on it vigorously, wadded it up, and tossed it back over the bar. ‘Anyone drinking that?’ he asked Reinhardt, pointing to Oster’s half-empty glass. Reinhardt shook his head and Thallberg knocked it back. ‘Barman, don’t go away. A beer. Tall and cold. And… another slivovitz?’ His nose wrinkled. ‘You’ve a taste for that stuff, do you? A slivo for the captain.’

Reinhardt watched him, somewhat bemused by all the breeze and bluster. Their drinks arrived and Thallberg’s beer went down his throat in three gusty swallows. ‘If you’ve a moment, I’d appreciate a word,’ he gasped, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Table over there? Barman,’ he barked. ‘Another beer.’

The two of them took their seats at a table in the corner of the mess, a couple of battered armchairs arranged around it. Thallberg put his helmet on the table, unstrapped his MP 40, and laid it with a metallic clack on the floor next to him. His equipment belt followed, and he sank into his chair and stretched his legs out. His second beer arrived, and half of it went straight down. He sighed in pleasure, scrubbing fingers through his cropped blond hair. ‘By Christ, I needed that. This is not bad stuff,’ he said, twirling his glass in his hands. ‘They make it here, you know. Sarajevo Brewery. Just up the hill, in fact. Built it right on top of a freshwater spring. Haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’ Reinhardt lit one for each of them and sat back.

‘What do you want, Captain?’

‘Hans, please.’ He sat up in his chair, sipped from his beer, and spoke quietly, the happy-go-lucky demeanour suddenly gone and replaced by something more serious. ‘I understand you’re investigating the murder of Stefan Hendel?’

‘That’s not common knowledge, Captain,’ said Reinhardt, looking straight at him.

‘Not common knowledge?’ Thallberg snorted. ‘After your little rumpus in the mess this afternoon with the colonels? How quick do you think word like that gets around? Relax, Gregor,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’m not here about whose toes you might have trodden on.’ He shoved his cigarette into the corner of his mouth and, reaching inside his jacket pulled out a small, green booklet. Reinhardt knew what it was but opened it anyway, seeing the two photos of Thallberg inside, one of him in uniform, a second of him in civilian clothes. ‘I’m shy;Geheime Feldpolizei. Hendel was one of mine.’

Reinhardt flipped the ID shut and handed it back. ‘Let me see your warrant disc as well.’ Thallberg handed it over. Reinhardt twisted it in his fingers, flipping it over to see Thallberg’s number stamped under Geheime Feldpolizei , and Oberkommando Des Heeres above that. Save for that, it looked just like the one he used to carry as a Berlin detective and, he thought morosely, was probably stamped in the same factory that had once made his. ‘Secret field police? You are secret field police? As was Hendel?’ he asked as he gave it back. Christ, that explained a lot, he thought as pieces of the investigation slid and clicked into place.

‘I was down near Foca when word reached me this morning he’d been killed. I came back as soon as I could. He was working on something pretty secret. I didn’t know exactly what. His tasking came direct from Berlin, but he was after someone senior, I think. The last I heard from him, he was following up a lead given him by this Vukic.’

‘Where would Marija Vukic get information like that?’

‘The girl got around, if half the stories about her are to be believed,’ replied Thallberg. ‘Maybe she got it from someone she was banging. If that’s in fact what she had. Hendel wasn’t all that clear about it.’

‘Did she know Hendel was GFP?’

‘The idiot probably told her. No doubt he was trying to impress her. Can’t think why he’d want to do that,’ he muttered into his beer glass, raising his eyebrows suggestively at Reinhardt.

Reinhardt was finding Thallberg’s lurches between levity and shy;seriousness somewhat disconcerting, as it was probably meant to be. Nothing was ever spontaneous, not with the GFP. ‘And she was planning on giving him this information when?’

‘Apparently, she wanted him to have it at the same time she confronted the person with it. It sounded like a bit of an elaborate setup, if you ask me. Bit too much like the way it happens in the movies. Which, seeing as she was a film director or what have you, shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose. Those sorts of things have a habit of going a bit pear-shaped in real life, though, but I was too far away, and too tied up with work for this attack, so I left it with him.’