Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

‘Well. What do I have to lose?’

‘We always have a lot to lose, Reinhardt. I would have thought someone like you would know better than to make a flippant remark like that.’

Reinhardt flushed. ‘Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?’

Freilinger shook his head, looking away. ‘No. Dismissed.’

At the door, Reinhardt paused as Freilinger called out to him. ‘Captain. If you will continue with this, with the GFP…’ He paused, the words trailing off.

‘I will be careful, sir,’ replied Reinhardt, stepping into the breach. Freilinger’s expression gave no hint as to whether that was what he had wanted to say. If he felt any frustration, if he felt Reinhardt was being obtuse, he showed no sign of it, and only nodded and looked away.

There was a message slip on his desk. Thallberg had called and was waiting to see him at the State House. He put the piece of paper from Freilinger on his desk and scanned the names. He took his own list of officers commanding the units in Schwarz and compared the two. Freilinger had underlined three names as having served in the USSR – Generals Grabenhofen, Eglseer, and von Le Suire. Only Grabenhofen was involved in Schwarz, and the other two were not on Reinhardt’s list. Of the other transfers on Freilinger’s list, one was in command of a unit in Schwarz – General Verhein – but had not served in Russia.

He straightened, stepped back from his desk. This was all getting tangled in his mind, and he needed to straighten it out. He glanced at the message slip again and saw that Thallberg had called about twenty minutes ago. He should take some time, try to make some sense of what he had now. He telephoned downstairs, ordering them to find Claussen and send him up, then shut the door and sat at his desk, flattening his map of the case onto it. He began adding information – GFP next to Hendel’s and Krause’s names. Pausing a moment, he linked Becker’s name to the empty circle of the suspect. He glanced at the list Freilinger had given him, and then the list of commanders, and back at his map. For now, he refrained from listing those names. If anyone else came across the map, it would look very bad, especially as he had nothing to substantiate it all with. Underneath the suspect’s circle he wrote senior , and then USSR , linking USSR to Vukic.

There was a knock at the door. ‘One moment,’ he called. Reinhardt folded up the map, grabbed the keys to the kubelwagen , and opened the door. Claussen stood in the hallway. Reinhardt tossed him the keys and they went back downstairs and out to the car.

‘Where to, sir?’

‘State House,’ Reinhardt answered. He settled into his normal position, back wedged between the seat and the door as Claussen took the car out onto Kvaternik, then pulled it around the Rathaus and back down King Aleksander Street. Reinhardt watched the streets go by on the right, the old Ottoman buildings giving way to the drab fronts the Austrians had put up until the car pulled in front of the pillared portico of the State House. A soldier on duty lifted a striped barrier and let Claussen park in the street down the side of the building. Next to the staff cars already there, black and shiny with pennants on their hoods, the kubelwagen with its dull grey panels looked like a fish out of water.

The foyer inside was gloomy and heavy. A woman in an army uniform directed Reinhardt to follow the stairs up to the second floor. He passed the offices of the small German civilian security administration that had accompanied the army into Yugoslavia. It was mostly officers from the Gestapo, with a few from the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazis’ own security service. They were mostly here to work with the Ustase, oversee the treatment meted out to undesirables – Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies, chiefly – and to keep an eye on the ideological behaviour of the Germans. Unlike in Poland and the USSR, though, the Germans had not brought the full panoply of their bureaucracy and administration with them, and the civilians, even the powerful ones with senior Party ranks, were kept pretty much in check by the army. Bosnia was supposed to be part of Croatia, after all, an allied state. So no Reich governorate for Yugoslavia and so much less squabbling between civilians, soldiers, and SS; much less administrative chaos; and corruption at a manageable scale. And there were no death squads on the scale of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, the special action units, the rumours of which were enough to chill the blood. Mass killings were their forte: Jews, the politically undesirable, unwanted populations, resistance fighters… No, for that here they had the Ustase, who managed very well.

Reinhardt stared at the Geheime Feldpolizei sign on the frosted glass of a door, at the blocky Gothic lettering, remembering other signs like it on other doors in Berlin. He had hated those names, bastard amalgams of police and political, but now he just felt detached from it. Was this what it meant to get old and jaded? he wondered. Men walked briskly past and around him as he stood there. Just as at the Abwehr offices, Reinhardt felt untouched by it all. Finally, he knocked and went in without waiting for an answer.

A corporal, tall and wiry in all ill-fitting uniform and with a fuzz of iron grey hair, was just opening the door for him and came to attention. Thallberg was on the telephone, standing in his shirtsleeves by a window that looked out over the road outside and across to a small park with a couple of Ottoman-era tombstones standing crookedly among the trees. His jacket hung over the back of a chair, and his equipment was strewn around an otherwise largely empty office. A camp bed with crumpled sheets stood against one wall. He gestured Reinhardt to take a seat as he listened to the person on the other line. He snapped a terse ‘Yes’, then put the phone down on his desk and stood looking down at Reinhardt with his hands on his hips.

‘So, how are you this morning?’

Reinhardt nodded as he took a cigarette from his packet. ‘Fine,’ he said, offering the pack to Thallberg, who shook his head. Maybe it was the setting, seeing him in an office in a building like this. Despite his general sense of undress, Thallberg seemed sharper, more competent.

‘I’m hearing things,’ said Thallberg, as he pulled back a chair and sat down. He put his booted feet up on the desk and crossed his ankles, scrubbing his hands through his unkempt blond hair. ‘Things have gone a bit pear-shaped over at police HQ?’

Reinhardt nodded again around a mouthful of smoke. ‘Their suspect’s dead,’ he replied. ‘But seeing as whoever he was didn’t do it, it still leaves us pretty much nowhere.’

Thallberg grunted. ‘And no sign of Krause.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘Telling.’ He picked up a mug and peered into it. ‘You want some coffee? It’s pretty good here.’ He spooned coffee into two cups and handed them to the corporal. ‘That’ll be all for now, Beike, thank you,’ he said to him. ‘I talked to the Feldgendarmerie this morning and warned them off him.’

‘Who did you talk to?’ Reinhardt looked at the door through which the corporal had gone. ‘And who was that?’

‘That was Corporal Beike. My right-hand man, if I’m honest. Memory like an encyclopedia. I trust him. And I talked to the Feld shy;gendarmerie commandant.’

‘Colonel Lewinski?’ Thallberg nodded. Reinhardt pursed his lips, holding Thallberg’s eyes. ‘Lewinski’s old-school Prussian. A gentleman. Also wholly ineffectual. Major Becker’s the one who runs things around here, and he’s the one you’ve got to worry about.’

‘You and he have a history together, correct?’ Thallberg asked, echoing Claussen’s words yesterday.