The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  What would he do? What would any of them do . . . ?

  On a shouted command, the Feldjäeger ranks about-faced, and marched back, leaving their weapons piled on the grass. Another command, and they turned to face their general. He was in trouble, Reinhardt knew, looking at him. Something had happened in Greece, Reinhardt was not sure what. The war might be over, but what had happened in it would follow him.

  It would follow them all, in its different ways.

  There was a last salute, echoed by the Americans, and then it really was over. The ranks broke up, men separating, coalescing. Lainer stood alone, looking far away. Benfeld had gone somewhere, as had Scheller.

  “Smoke?”

  Collingridge stood next to Reinhardt, a captain of the American Military Police. He shook Lucky Strikes from a packet, lit them both up. They smoked quietly, surrounded by Feldjäegers and Americans, moving and mixing together.

  “Long road, right?”

  “It has been a long road,” Reinhardt answered around a mouthful of smoke, his English slow and precise.

  “You’re a free man, now, Reinhardt. Now what?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I do not know that, either.”

  “It’s gotta feel good, no?”

  Reinhardt put his face to the sun. They began walking, boots swishing slowly through the grass. “It feels . . . something,” he replied. He felt lighter. As if a load had been lifted. As if traces he had worn a long time had been lifted off, but his English was inadequate to the moment. Collingridge seemed to feel it, and switched to German.

  “What about home?”

  “I do not know where that is anymore.”

  “Aren’t you from Berlin?”

  “I am. But there is nothing there for me.”

  “You used to be a policeman, didn’t you? The city could use a good cop, from what I hear.”

  Reinhardt stopped, looking at Collingridge. The American had been a good enough colleague. The war had ended in May last year, but the Feldjäegers had not surrendered along with the rest of the army. Rather, their surrender had not been accepted. The Americans had used them to help maintain law and order, guarding prison camps and securing roads, ensuring a valuable link between the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war and their captors. Whatever help the Feldjäegers had given, it was no longer needed, now. The camps were almost empty. Reinhardt and the others would join the ranks of the demobilized, the aimless.

  “Are you trying to tell me something, Captain?”

  “Call me David, please.” Reinhardt smiled, but waited. “I’m going,” Collingridge said, eventually. “To Berlin. I’m being reassigned.”

  “To what?”

  “To the Allied Control Council. I’m to work on the law-and-order committee. Something glorified like that.” He spoke of it lightly, yet it was clear to Reinhardt that Collingridge felt it differently. He was a man who saw longer shadows everywhere other than the one he himself threw. And why not, he wondered? There was work, even great work, to do in this Germany. Shadows were everywhere. People cast them. People lived under them. Perhaps this was a chance for Collingridge to cast a long shadow of his own.

  “Good luck to you, David,” said Reinhardt. “You will do well.”

  Collingridge smiled, finished his cigarette with a long, slow draw.

  “Think hard about it, Reinhardt. About what you’re going to do. It’s a tough world out there now. Men like you,” he said, gesturing at Reinhardt and the other Feldjäegers, “you’re not popular. No ex-officer is.”

  “Defeat is an orphan. An unloved only child.”

  “A redheaded stepchild,” Collingridge quipped.

  “As you say,” said Reinhardt, not understanding. “I have been here before, in a way, David. In 1918. We were not popular then either. Us officers.”

  “It’s a different world now.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “I mean it’s really different. The army no longer exists. In any form. You have no rights, you veterans. The people hate you. The officers most of all. Listen, Reinhardt. You’ve been a good man to work with. I’ve appreciated our cooperation. You did good work with us in the prisoner-of-war camps. We wouldn’t have solved that case of the Sudeten Germans without your help. What I’m saying is, I can help you. If you want.”

  He was, to Reinhardt, a painfully young man, smooth-faced, his hair carefully brushed. A man with many answers, but precious few questions, it sometimes seemed. A lawyer more than a soldier.

  “What are you trying to say, David?”

  “I’m saying think about Berlin, Reinhardt.”

  “Think about the police, you mean?”

  “Not only that.”

  “But mostly that.” Collingridge looked away a moment, and Reinhardt wondered how much of this was genuine and how much was Collingridge following an order or a suggestion. “You mean I can be of use to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I can decide what I want.”

  Collingridge shrugged. “Of course.”

  “Because I am a free man now,” said Reinhardt.

  “Yes.”

  But Reinhardt knew otherwise. He could feel the traces coming back on. Different. Seemingly lighter. But traces just the same, and after all, he thought, everyone wore them. It was just they hung heavier on some than on others. And Reinhardt remembered. He remembered 1918. We called ourselves free, then, too, he thought, but freedom was not much use on an empty belly.

  PART TWO

  By His Work Is a Craftsman Known

  7

  Reinhardt slept a few hours, sleep that did little to refresh him, waking to hear the big clock in the house eating away the hours with every tick. He lay in bed, smoking, letting the smoke dull the taste of too little sleep from his mouth. Downstairs he found Brauer staring outside where Mrs. Meissner was pottering around, tending the rows of plants and vegetables that grew thickly along the length of the garden. There was mint tea and honey, which Reinhardt spooned thickly into his mug, relishing the sweetness, feeling more awake for it. Meissner had boiled the eggs, and he ate one slowly with a slice of the ham.

  Brauer sat with him, embarrassed, like he always was after nights like that. Reinhardt knew that what had happened at the end of the war was still haunting him. Brauer’s wife had been killed in a bombing raid that had injured him, rendering him unfit for front-line service but not unfit for being drafted into the Volksstürm, the citizen army of old men, cripples, and boys that the Nazis had cobbled together at the very end to defend Berlin to the death. The way Brauer told it, he had been given a rocket-propelled grenade and a pistol older than he was, lined up with a dozen other men, then put under the command of a boy in the Hitler Youth and told to go out and hunt Soviet tanks.

  “I’ve caught a case.”

  Brauer spluttered into his tea. “You?”

  Reinhardt smiled, happy for that momentary spark of life in Brauer. He remembered Brauer as so much more than this: a wiry, upright man, a strong but simple sense of right and wrong, but he left soon after Reinhardt came down. Brauer had done something at the end of the war, but he would not say what. It was not that he had survived, nor that he had survived by running away like, as he said, a beaten dog. Reinhardt knew there was more, but Brauer would say nothing, changing the subject instead to ask about Reinhardt’s work.

  He glanced at the newspaper Mrs. Meissner had left on the table, folded open to a story about looted art. A former director of Berlin’s Museum of Decorative Arts, Hilde Meissner had resigned in horror at the Nazis’ continent-wide theft of artworks. Only her husband’s position in the Foreign Ministry had protected her from the repercussions of her resignation, and she now avidly followed news of the attempts to find and restore plundered art. Reinhardt scanned the article, a story about
various commissions—French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian, Polish, even a Yugoslavian one—being formed to try and track down what the Nazis had stolen. He read it desultorily, leaving it to stand and watch the old lady at her digging and weeding.

  On his way out of the house, Reinhardt paused, then walked quietly into the living room. All its old, heavy furniture was gone, stolen at the end of the war or smashed or broken up for firewood. The fireplace was cold, but he remembered how it had been that last time, before the war. He had sat just there on the floor by the fire, and Meissner, his former colonel, had sat just there in his leather armchair, that night Reinhardt had finally decided to abandon the police and return to the army.

  “Will you go back in?” Meissner had asked.

  “I’ll do it for you, sir. For nothing else.”

  Meissner had sighed softly, then nodded, the fire playing across his white hair. “Thank you.”

  The chair was gone, although his mind’s eye could still see it angled toward the fireplace. Tomas Meissner was gone, too. He had not survived the war, he and the other members of his resistance group, swept up by the Gestapo in the aftermath of the July plot against Hitler in 1944. They found out later he had been executed just a day before the Americans would have liberated the prison he was held in.

  The warders had executed a dozen men that day. One might have put it down to a paroxysm of violence and vengeance; the last throes of a dying system that simply could not let things go. But no, it was far more mundane than that. It was simply that those prisoners had been scheduled for execution on that day, and so on that day they were executed, and the next day the Americans had come and everything had changed. So sharp and fine are the lines that divide us from one state to another, Reinhardt knew. He made to go, but found Mrs. Meissner standing behind him, a pair of gardening gloves in her hand. Her eyes were very calm in the porcelain of her face.

  “I remember you and him, in there. You miss him.”

  Reinhardt blinked, uncomfortable, so used to the woman’s reticence. “I somehow feel . . . somehow feel like I failed him. Like I was not there for him. At the end.”

  “You must not think that. Tomas loved you,” she said. Her eyes were very calm, but she threaded the gloves through her hands. “Come and sit with me in the kitchen. Just a moment. We’ve only talked a little since you came back. You’ve told me so little of what happened to you.”

  “I told you . . . I told you of Bosnia.”

  “Yes. Tomas told me he saw you there. And you have told me of the end.”

  “‘The end’,” Reinhardt snorted. “My pièce de résistance.”

  “Why so cynical, Gregor?”

  “I am sorry. It’s just . . . I look at what happened here. I think of what happened everywhere. And I wonder whether what I did amounted to anything.”

  “You acted. You fought back. You found respect, and love.” Reinhardt’s lips clenched as he shook his head. “Respect and love in the ranks of the enemy. That is not such a small thing. Why are you back, Gregor?” she asked, suddenly.

  “Where else . . . ? What else could I do?” Reinhardt replied, flustered.

  “Times change. This is not the place you knew. You could have gone elsewhere.”

  “Who I am . . . What I do . . . It’s what I know.”

  “Be someone else. If not for you, for someone else.” Reinhardt frowned, confused, at a loss for what to say. Mrs. Meissner seemed to sense it, and she gave a little smile and a shake of her head. “You know, I am happy you are here. I was happy when you arrived, out of nowhere. You saved me. You and Rudi. I don’t think I could have managed another winter alone.”

  “You survived the fall of the city well enough,” he interrupted, gently.

  “I escaped what happened to most women, yes. But you mustn’t feel that you owe me, Gregor.”

  “I do. I owe you both. So much.”

  “Don’t listen to me, Gregor. I’m just an old lady, lost in her dreams and her weeding. And you must go. I shall see you later.”

  Outside, even though he knew Brauer would have done it, Reinhardt made a tour of the house to check that the fences and barbed wire he had installed were intact. He’d put them up after the last time Mrs. Meissner’s vegetable patch had been raided. He thought again about Tomas Meissner’s fate.

  Life from death.

  Good luck from bad.

  Friends from enemies.

  At Gothaerstrasse, hoping that Berthold might have finished his report, Reinhardt went upstairs to his desk. Late morning, and the squad room was largely empty, much to his relief. Only Weber and Schmidt were there, Weber glancing up from his work as Reinhardt passed across the room. Their gazes slid across each other, no words exchanged, but a latent antagonism was there between them. Berthold’s report was waiting for him, as promised, but there was no address for Kessel, the man from whom Noell had been subletting. Reinhardt gathered up the file and made to leave, but as he reached the door, running the gauntlet of Weber’s hostility, the detective spoke.

  “Off somewhere interesting?”

  Reinhardt ignored him.

  “Just in case anyone asks. You know. I’m only looking out for you.”

  He heard the pair of them laugh as he headed back downstairs. The bodies had been taken to the main police mortuary in the Charité hospital complex on Hannoversche Strasse, in Mitte. But aside from the fact it was in the Soviet sector, it was a long and sometimes halting journey on the U-bahn to get there.

  The Charité had been badly damaged at the end of the war and, despite extensive repairs by the Soviets, was still not completely functional. Professor Endres ran the police pathology facilities in the morgue. Whereas Reinhardt had jumped before he was pushed out of the police by the Nazis, Endres had clung tenaciously to his position in the medical services until he was fired, and had spent the last two years of the war in a concentration camp following his arrest for allegedly treasonous activities. Liberated by the British, he had turned up back at the mortuary, looking, as one man said, like he belonged on a slab, not standing over one, and wishing to resume work as if nothing had ever happened. With the morgue bombed out and not liking what he saw going on, Endres had made his opinions clear as to what he thought of the new Berlin police force’s levels of professionalism, but he had put his heart and soul into getting the facilities back up and functioning, and somehow the new police administration and the Soviets had left him to it. Together with Berthold and a handful of other men, including, Reinhardt liked to sometimes think, himself, Endres had brought a much-needed sense of calm and professionalism back to police work.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Reinhardt,” Endres said, when Reinhardt found him in his small office belowground, next door to the autopsy facilities. Endres was tall and cadaverous, an impression worsened by his austere black suit and white doctor’s overcoat. He had never stood on ceremony and he did not now, rising out from behind his desk. “I must tell you that your superior has been looking for you.”

  “Tanneberger?”

  “He called and left a message you were to report to him.”

  “When?”

  “Momentarily.”

  Reinhardt’s mouth tightened as he quietly cursed Weber, but he was here now, and he might as well finish, as he said to Endres.

  Endres nodded, ushering Reinhardt back down a corridor and into the autopsy room where two bodies lay on tables under bright light. The hospital was a priority for electricity, so the power was usually on, and the refrigeration units still worked, although they had taken a battering during the war and were badly in need of repair and spare parts. Reinhardt recognized Noell and the still unidentified second man, the scars left by the autopsies riding livid up and across the bodies, which seemed strangely sunken in on themselves. Reinhardt shivered, drawing himself tighter, feeling, as he always did, how the air felt colder than it actually was in place
s like this, and was reminded how much he detested hospitals.

  “I should thank you, Reinhardt. This was interesting. The first real case I’ve had in quite some time.”

  “You’re most welcome, Professor,” said Reinhardt, not at all flippantly. Endres was infamous for having no sense of humor at all, only a blade-bright understanding of professionalism that time and his experiences had not dulled. Reinhardt shook a couple of Luckies from his packet and offered them to the professor, who tucked them into the breast of his white coat. “May I ask a question before you begin? Thank you. The time of death?”

  “I would say sometime between midnight and one o’clock in the morning. For both of them. Shall we look at the unidentified body first?” Endres asked. Reinhardt nodded politely, knowing the professor had not really asked a question. Endres stood at the body’s head. Under the harsh light, his scalp shone pinkly through the thin weave of his silver hair. “Observe,” he said, “a very serious blow to the sternum. Extremely powerful. Observe further,” pointing to the body’s left eye, down across the nose to the collarbone. “You see the discoloration? It forms a line. Eye, nose, shoulder. A second blow, here, across the throat, that crushed and damaged his cartilage.” Endres’s finger pointed to a bruised line of flesh, as if someone had laid an iron bar across the man’s throat and pushed.

  “Then, his assailant tried to break his neck. He did break it, in fact, except that the spinal cord was not quite severed. Breaking someone’s neck is always difficult to do, or in any case, much harder than people think, and in this case the man survived, just. Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps it was because he was incapacitated, and he seemed dead.” Endres spoke in a calm, measured voice, toasted and caked by decades of cigarettes, his eyes steady on the body laid out in front of him. “In any case, his attacker knew that to break a neck, you do so by whipping it from one side to the other, fast, and applying precise force. You can see the bruising on his jaw, there,” he pointed, “and there’s some discoloration of the scalp on the opposite side. A push, and a pull,” he mimed, his hands coming up, spiderlike, one hand resting on Reinhardt’s jaw, the other behind his head. “Push,” he murmured, tilting Reinhardt’s head to one side, “pull,” his hands moving Reinhardt’s head back the other way with the slightest of jerks, fingers coming away and spread into the air. “Done fast. Done precisely. The tissue, muscle, and tendon damage is quite conclusive. His spinal cord was ruptured at the C2 vertebra, up here, then it finally broke in his last fall.”