Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

‘Right. I owe you something of an explanation. Vukic travelled a lot. She was a member of the propaganda companies, in fact. She often visited the troops, and when she travelled she had a technical team with her. One of them is in Sarajevo now. He told me about her movements in Russia. She was there towards the end of last year and, according to him, she had a pretty tumultuous affair with a senior German officer that ended badly.’ Reinhardt paused, drank some coffee, and gestured at the list. ‘According to him, whoever that officer is, he transferred here not long ago, and Vukic was aware of it. Again, according to him, Vukic was not the sort of woman to come second best in love. She was certainly planning something this officer wouldn’t like.’

Thallberg seemed fascinated, hanging on Reinhardt’s words. It made him feel alternately uncomfortable and somewhat gratified. Something in the way Thallberg looked at him suddenly reminded him of when he was the mentor to a young detective called Sander, and the way he had absorbed Reinhardt’s advice, of the way he had seemed to look up to Reinhardt, the famous criminal inspector. Right up until Sander had joined the SS in 1934, claiming that police work was too much like hard work. Whichever it was, Reinhardt wanted to feel none of it.

Thallberg flicked his eyes over the lists. ‘So we need to compare movements.’

‘Correct. I have hers. Now we need to match them up to these four.’

The door opened and Beike slipped inside, putting a sheet of typed paper on Thallberg’s desk. ‘I don’t know, Reinhardt. It’s pretty thin stuff, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve built up good cases with less,’ replied Reinhardt, with a bravado that he did not quite feel. He had indeed done that, but in other places, at other times, and with a little less riding on the outcome.

‘All right, then,’ said Thallberg. ‘Leave them with me and I’ll start looking up more details. Shall we check back together later on today?’

Reinhardt nodded. ‘I’m going out to Ilidza. See if anything new occurs to me.’

‘Let’s hope so. I need to be getting back down to the front tomorrow.’ Thallberg went back around to his chair, suddenly all business and efficiency. ‘This is exciting, but I don’t want to miss the battle.’ He glanced at the paper, scrawled his signature over the stamp, and handed it to Reinhardt. ‘Until later, then?’

Walking back outside, Reinhardt paused on the steps, lighting a cigarette and looking across the junction at the little park, then down at the letter of authorisation he held in his hand, naming him as a GFP auxiliary. He drew deeply on the cigarette, drawing the smoke around the roil of emotions he was feeling. Satisfaction, even a sense of exhilaration, that he was still on the case. Trepidation, uncertainty at his new ally. Folding the letter away, he spotted Claussen waiting at the corner of the building and gestured that he should join him across the road.

He walked across to the park, over to the tombs. The stone was white, pitted, and the way they jutted out of the grass was like bones from a grave. Flowing Arabic script was carved into their sides, and the head of each tombstone was shaped like a turban. His hand feeling furtive, he took Freilinger’s list from his pocket and unfolded it. He stared at it, then stared at Thallberg’s, his eyes moving back and forth between the two. He was not wrong. The two did not compare. One name was different.

He was quiet on the long drive out to Ilidza. The jarring rattle of the kubelwagen , the slap of its tyres on the crumbling road, he blanked it all out, his attention focused on that name and on why Freilinger might have failed to mark it, to draw it to Reinhardt’s attention. An oversight? Unlikely, but possible. An attempt to draw him away? Why? It was Freilinger who had put him on the investigation. Why would he then obstruct him? He was still worrying it over as Claussen parked the kubelwagen in front of Vukic’s house, and he realised he had not paid any of the attention he had intended to on the trip out.

Cursing under his breath, noting the policeman rising to his feet from where he had been lying in the shade under a tree in the garden, he stood in the lane and looked around. Quite some distance away, through the trees on the other side of the road, he could make out the white walls of the Hotel Austria. To his right, the lane arrowed straight on up to the source of the Bosna. He pushed open the gate, walking up to the front door, cursing himself again for not bringing Hueber as the policeman stood in his way.

The man was young, nervous looking. Reinhardt gestured at the house. ‘Speak German? Njemacki govorish? ’ The policeman shrugged, a pained smile on his face. ‘Padelin. You know Padelin?’ The policeman nodded vigorously, repeating the detective’s name. Reinhardt’s hands fluttered back and forth as he tried to pantomime his relationship with him, struggling with his pidgin Serbo-Croat. ‘Me. Padelin. Good, yes? Friends. Drugi. Kolegi. ’

‘ Da, da, razumem ,’ said the policeman, apparently coming to some kind of understanding. ‘Nema problema.’ He hitched his rifle onto his shoulder and took a key from his pocket. He pushed open the front door, standing to one side, and gesturing with his hand that Reinhardt could go in.

Reinhardt walked slowly in, the policeman standing uncertainly just to one side of the door. His boots waking the wood, which creaked softly underneath, Reinhardt walked the length of the hallway, opening the doors to either side and peering in. There was nothing in the rooms except furniture covered in sheets and the smell of dust and disuse. He went upstairs, up past the pitted stain on the wall where Hendel had been killed, up to the third floor. Pausing on the landing, he looked down and around. Just dust, as Claussen had said.

Back down to the living room, into Vukic’s bedroom, eyes passing across the blood-soaked mattress, the big mirror, imagining the room behind it. Someone had to operate that camera, but from where? He went back into the living room and sat down gingerly in one of the armchairs, feeling the leather creak comfortingly around him. He looked at the doorway to Vukic’s bedroom, at the stain of Hendel’s blood, at the righted drinks cabinet. A showdown, a setting for a denunciation. What were they thinking, those two? What had they hoped to accomplish? What made them think it was a risk worth taking? Moreover, why had Hendel gone along with it? Reinhardt was fairly sure his orders would not have countenanced something like this. So what was it? Had Vukic convinced him? Bewitched him, somehow?

He rubbed his hands briskly together, then put them to his mouth, sighing out and shaking his head in frustration. The policeman was still standing by the front door, his eyes uncertain on Reinhardt as he paused at the foot of the stairs and went into the kitchen. There were three doors, and none of them led down to a basement. He checked the ground-floor rooms without finding anything either. Wondering if there might be an entrance outside he walked briskly out, past the policeman, and made a tour of the house.

He found a garden shed in a far corner, almost hidden behind a big rosebush. The door was not locked, but dug into the ground as he pulled it open in fits and jerks. The interior was dim, the walls lined with tools and plank shelves on which rested the usual bric-a-brac of a garden shed. He ducked his head and walked in and, past a wheelbarrow and a lawn mower with earth and grass still stuck to the blades, saw another door. It was locked, but the lock had been shattered off. He put his shoulder to the door and pushed it open, the bottom dragging at the earthen floor of the shed, and stepped into the little room he had found. There was a table and chair, and along one wall under a dirty little window was a neatly made-up camp bed. The chair was incongruous, the wood dark and lustrous, with a plump red cushion and, on the table, resting on old newspaper, was what looked like the parts of a disassembled camera, together with an array of tools. A bottle and a glass turned upside down stood to one side, as did a pipe in a bowl, a little tin of tobacco next to it, and the slumped remains of a candle in a jar.