Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

There was more shouting and a thump of feet. Reinhardt looked up at the room’s ceiling, raising his eyebrows.

‘Just our Italian allies having a bit of a tantrum, sir.’

‘About?’

‘The Ustase, I would imagine, sir, it usually is.’

Closing the operations room door, he heard a clatter on the stairs and someone shouting again. Two Italians came down, one a colonel no less, followed by a German captain. The colonel was visibly furious, his knuckles stretched white against the hat clenched in his fist, which he slammed against his thigh to emphasise his words.

‘Barbarians!’ he seethed, his German thick with an Italian accent. ‘Absolute barbarians !’

The captain caught sight of Reinhardt and frowned but kept his attention on the Italian. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said, with an air of having repeated the same thing several times already. ‘There is little I can do about it. Please, I advise you to take your complaint to divisional headquarters.’

‘My complaint ?’ roared the Italian. He looked up past the German at two Ustase coming down the stairs in their black uniforms. The colonel shook his fist up at them. ‘They are your allies,’ he bellowed. ‘ Yours! Control them. Do something .’ One of the Ustase paused on the stairs, his mouth stretched in a sneer of a smile, and the vitriol in his reply was evident. The Italian went red, let loose a strangled expletive, erupted in a stream of Italian, and made to climb back up the stairs, but the captain got in his way, his arms up; the other Italian spoke urgently into the colonel’s ear, and he allowed himself to be pulled away, still roaring in fury.

The Ustase laughed and came downstairs, screwing on their caps. The German officer stood in the doorway until the Italians had left. The Ustase seemed not to care, sniggering among themselves. One of them turned and saw him, and Reinhardt recognised him as the one who had been at Stolic’s table back at the Ragusa. Ljubcic, Freilinger said his name was. Then the captain was gesturing them out, and Reinhardt did not know if the Ustasa had recognised him. They gave the captain a mocking salute and were gone, laughing and nudging each other.

‘You are… ?’ the captain asked as the Ustase drove away, people cowering to either side of the car as it cut through the crowded streets.

‘Reinhardt, Abwehr,’ he said, shaking hands with the officer.

‘Seigler,’ sighed the captain as he removed his cap and ran a hand through thinning hair.

‘What was all that about?’

Seigler shook his head. ‘The Italians claim the Ustase have been… that they destroyed a village south of here and massacred everyone in it. The village was once Serbian, until they were all… killed. Then Muslims moved into it after they were displaced by Cetniks.’ He sighed again. ‘He’s probably right.’

‘He is right,’ said Reinhardt, looking out at the slow shuffle of refugees.

‘What?’

‘They are our allies.’

Seigler shrugged. ‘Yes. Well, we usually can control the… worst… of it with them, but with the operation, everything’s committed to that and they are pretty much free to…’ He trailed off. ‘Although now the colonel’s saying it’s the SS encouraging the Ustase.’

Reinhardt swallowed slowly, keeping his eyes as uninterested as possible. ‘SS? In this area?’

‘Liaison unit. Arrived about a day ago. I think they’re down near Foca. Maybe Kalinovik.’ The captain’s eyes drifted away.

‘Town’s full,’ said Reinhardt.

Seigler nodded. ‘They started coming in two days ago. There’s been fighting up along the approaches to Cajnice,’ he said, motioning behind and across the river where the hills swelled up into the distance. He frowned. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

Reinhardt shook his head. ‘Just updated route information to Foca. Your operations people have already helped me.’

‘Good. Well, drive carefully.’

Reinhardt stood there a moment after Seigler left. The hotel was near the river, and there was a sandbank out in the flow, a smooth teardrop shape, white sand shining in the sun. Children were playing on it, seemingly oblivious to the choked tenor of the streets, and their laughter drifted faintly across the rush of the river as it purred along over its rocky bed. He felt very afraid, and very cold. An SS unit could mean anything, but it almost certainly meant Stolic, and if, as it seemed, he was in a killing mood, Reinhardt had no idea how he would approach him, nor what the presence of that Ustasa might mean. He told Claussen what he had learned. The sergeant swigged from a canteen, screwing his eyes shut as he lifted his face to the light and wiped the back of his mouth with a blocky fist.

‘Change of plan?’

Reinhardt shook his head. ‘Let’s get going. We should be able to make Foca in an hour, maybe less.’

The drive to Foca was uneventful but particularly beautiful. The Drina flowed in broad, languid sweeps and bends to the left, now bottle green, now turquoise, now a lather of foam where it ran shallow over its stony bed, rocks lying like mosaics. The land along the river was good, the rich alluvial soil ripe for crops, the banks dotted with small hamlets and settlements, but the signs of war were everywhere. Many of the villages were empty or destroyed, fields and crops unkempt and uncared for, and on the far bank, smoke ribboned up from burning houses. The fighting along the Drina had been bitter and internecine since the war first came here in 1941, with Cetniks massacring Muslims, Ustase massacring Serbs, and the land suffering under the succession of German, Italian, Croat, and Partisan armies.

The road was busier, mostly German traffic coming up from Foca, but they passed a bus trailing a plume of filthy exhaust, horse carts, and men, women, and children on foot. More refugees, haunted and hunched under what little they had, herded and pressed to the side of the road by soldiers in Croatian Army uniforms.

Despite the thickening traffic, they made good time to Foca, the road crossing over an iron bridge with sheet metal flooring that clanked and clattered under the car’s wheels. The town was much narrower and darker than Gorazde, and like Rogatica showed the signs of fighting: bullet holes in walls, the heaped remnants of destroyed houses like rotted teeth in the lines of streets. As for the townspeople, it seemed most of them were gone, and the place had an empty, haunted feel despite the troops who thronged through it – German and Croat mostly. They passed a group of Cetniks gathered on the steps of a dilapidated building that looked like it had once been something official, a shambles of shaggy ponies and rickety carts, and men with thick beards and long hair that splayed out from under rectangular caps and who watched them go by with sullen expressions, distrust writ large across their heavy features.

They followed the tactical signs to the local headquarters building. While Claussen went in search of fuel, Reinhardt searched through the scrum of activity inside, finally cornering a harassed operations lieutenant who pointed at a map to a location west of Foca. ‘121st were at Brod last night. They were supposed to advance on Predelj today,’ he continued, tapping the map farther south. ‘Last information is their reconnaissance battalion is stalled somewhere here,’ he said, pointing to the long, twisting route that led south from Brod towards Scepan Polje, on the Montenegrin border. If you’re looking for them, they’re around there.’

‘How’s the operation going?’

‘Well, I think. Early days. Some pretty stiff fighting over by Cajnice. Lots of confirmed kills. That’s all I can tell you for now,’ he finished, as he turned to answer a telephone.