Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

Reinhardt had no idea how far they would have to drive to find the 121st. If the unit was still in Predelj, it was about a dozen kilometres or so south of Brod, but on these roads that could take well over an hour. Thinking about it, he saw the first signs of fighting. A pair of burned-out trucks, a swath of forest that looked like it had been shelled, and farther on a chunk of earth gouged from the embankment that looked like it had been mined. As the road swung around the flank of the gorge, he saw, far off over the humped back of a ridge, plumes of smoke rising up into the sky and a spotter plane, a Storch, scribing tight circles over the hills. It swooped up, and moments later it seemed there was a shiver in the air, studs of light along the underside of the smoke as an artillery barrage came down. Seconds later came a ripple of noise, the crackle of explosions.

Claussen snaked around a big crater, and there was more wreckage by the roadside. Down in the trees above the river the back end of a half-track poked up from a cradle of bent and burned trees. Houses appeared, ones, twos, a ruined hamlet that still smoked, and then there, in the road, a Feldgendarmerie motorcycle with a trooper hunched over the foreshortened barrel of a machine gun. A second Feldgendarme stood in the road. As Claussen braked hard, Reinhardt spotted two more behind the cover of a low wall. He watched the Feldgendarme walk up to them. The man’s MP 40 was held in both hands, not exactly aiming at them, but not turned away either. He looked at them expressionlessly, eyes tracking from one to the other.

‘Pull the car over there.’

‘What is the problem, Sergeant?’ asked Reinhardt, putting an emphasis on the man’s rank and holding his eyes. He was scared, again. From his breast pocket, he took Thallberg’s paper naming him a GFP auxiliary.

‘No problem. Sir. Over there, please.’

‘Better.’

Claussen drove slowly to the side of the road and parked by the Feldgendarme behind the wall, the machine gunner on the sidecar following them all the way. ‘Out of the car,’ one of them snapped.

‘What the hell is going on?’ demanded Reinhardt, rising up in his seat.

There was a metallic rattle as the Feldgendarmes levelled their MP 40s at them. ‘Out. Now.’ Reinhardt and Claussen exchanged glances and stepped out of the car. ‘Hands up.’

‘I am with the GFP, Sergeant.’

‘Shut up. And get your hands up.’ The sergeant took the paper, gave the order to disarm them, and then at gunpoint ordered them up a narrow track towards a house. Farther up the path, across an open patch of ground, was another cluster of houses, with men lined up in front of it who had the hunch-shouldered look of prisoners, but that was neither here nor there as the Feldgendarmes pushed them inside, and face to face with Becker.

‘Well, well, look what the cat brought in.’ Becker smiled as he said it, but there was a tightness to his jaw, to his eyes, that belied his levity. He glanced at the paper as the sergeant handed it to him. ‘Wait outside,’ he said to the Feldgendarmes. There was a surge of light as the door opened and closed, and Reinhardt saw that Becker was holding a pistol against his leg. He smiled again. ‘Quite a merry chase you’ve led us on, Gregor.’

‘Well, if I’d known you wanted to play, Major, I’d have made a bit more of an effort for you,’ said Reinhardt, forcing a levity into his voice that he did not feel.

Becker’s eyes flicked to Claussen, and his brow creased slightly, as if trying to remember if he had ever met the sergeant. ‘Who is this?’

‘My driver.’

Becker flushed, as he always did when Reinhardt did not address him by rank. ‘You. Wait outside with the other Feldgendarmes.’

Claussen did not move, and Becker’s flush deepened. ‘Wait outside, Sergeant,’ said Reinhardt, after a moment. ‘I’ll call you if I need you.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said Claussen.

Becker smiled as the door closed. ‘You have a habit of backing the wrong horse, Gregor. And you’ve done it again.’

‘Which horse would that be?’

‘A highly placed one. One that you should never have started to piss off. One that you know something about, and I want to know it, too.’

‘You’re not making sense, Becker,’ said Reinhardt, dismissively, allowing his eyes to roam away from the major. There was not much, just a couple of rickety-looking chairs, a battered table with a tin water bottle on it, and a stack of chopped wood piled next to a blackened iron stove. The scent of earth and wood smoke mixed and merged in the humid atmosphere in the house.

‘Look, I’m going to put this away,’ Becker said, making a show of holstering his pistol. He took his glasses off, holding the frames in his two hands, facing to his left with his head up. ‘You were right, the other day at police headquarters. I am looking for my ticket out of here. I’ve got a good one, but I think I see a better one with you, and what I reckon you’ve got.’

‘Sense, Becker,’ snapped Reinhardt, using the tone he used to use when he was Becker’s superior in Kripo. ‘Make sense. Start naming names. Or this is all so much hot air.’

‘Names are dangerous, Gregor,’ Becker snapped back. ‘You know that.’ Becker bit his lip, and Reinhardt could see the perspiration that lined his hair on either side of his parting. ‘Look, I can tell you this much. Someone asked me to help them. Someone you don’t say no to.’

‘I never knew what to think when you opened your mouth, Becker. I still don’t. So stop pissing around the pot. I’ll give you a name, Becker. General Paul Verhein. How’s that?’

‘That’s not a bad name, and he’s part of it but not all of it.’ Becker twisted his glasses in his hands, his stance shifting to his right, looking down. ‘So this someone offered to help me in return. They didn’t need much. They needed Lieutenant Krause found, and they needed whatever they thought he had. That’s all.’

‘And for that, you impeded an investigation into the murder of a German officer.’

‘Oh, get off your high horse, Gregor, for fuck’s sake,’ Becker snapped. ‘Yes, I impeded your investigation. So bloody what? You should never have had it in the first place.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then what?’ Becker paused, as if he were about to say something else and thought better of it. ‘Then things began getting out of hand. I couldn’t find Krause, then there was the film, then you got in on the act and began making waves. Making people uncomfortable.’ His stance shifted again.

‘Tell me about Thallberg. And try to keep still, will you?’

Becker’s mouth made an O of surprise. ‘Keep… ?’

‘Forget it. Thallberg.’

Becker shrugged. ‘That wasn’t supposed to happen like that.’

‘Well, it did.’

‘He came to me last night, accused me of… well, accused me of what I’d been doing, I suppose,’ he said, nonchalantly, the old Becker starting to reemerge. ‘Tempers flared, and he let slip that this was much bigger than covering up how some tart of a journalist met a sticky end. I told the people I was working for, and they told me to get what Thallberg knew. By any means.’

‘You killed him.’

‘I tried to make him a deal, but he was having none of it. Things… got out of hand. He didn’t say much, actually. I got more out of his corporal. Like Hendel being SD, maybe Krause too, and actually after Verhein as well. What’re the odds, eh?!’ Becker giggled, suddenly. ‘You can imagine my position, Gregor. Trying to get Verhein out of a sticky patch was my ticket out of here. Actually being able to get him into an even stickier patch might even be better for me. What’s an honest cop to do?!’ He giggled again, an edge to his hilarity like rust on a blade. ‘I don’t know exactly what Hendel and Krause had on Verhein, but I think you do, and I want to know what it is.’