“Na zdorovie,” managed Reinhardt.
Skokov nodded, smiling. He breathed out to one side, and knocked his drink back.
Very good vodka, Reinhardt realized as he took a drink, feeling the alcohol swell through his mouth and then chase itself down his throat.
“Pozhaluysta. Please,” said Skokov, taking a piece of bread and sniffing it. “You were saying you are confused, Captain,” he continued, popping a slice of sausage almost delicately into his mouth. Reinhardt’s eyes were hooked by a sudden glimpse of a row of silver teeth in Skokov’s mouth along the side that seemed sunken in, before he concentrated on his own food. The sausage was very good, some kind of smoked beef, he thought, better and stronger than anything he had had in a long time. “That would be because you are being left in the dark by your English and American friends. And so tell me. Tell me your story of this investigation.”
“I have two pilots—Noell and Zuleger—who have been murdered in similar ways, within days of each other. Noell was murdered after attending some kind of event, or function. Zuleger was murdered before Noell, and maybe before going to the same function. I found an invitation at his apartment, to an address in Grunewald.”
Reinhardt paused. There had been a note at the station, from one of the secretaries. The police in Grunewald had gone to the address as he asked and found an abandoned property. A dead end, maybe, but Reinhardt knew he would eventually have to go himself and check. He had never liked leaving aspects of his inquiries to others, and he liked it less now, in this environment, with this police force.
“I have a third pilot—Stucker—murdered last year. All three of them were in the same fighter Group, IV./JG56. At least two of them—Zuleger and Stucker—were in the same unit when it was redesignated as a night-fighter group, III./NJG64. The Night Hawks. There is a link between them and a man called Carlsen. I found him dead at the same address as Noell. All four of them were murdered in the same fashion.”
“This business of sand and water, correct?”
Reinhardt blinked his surprise back, covering it with a sip of vodka. “Yes. There is a matter of water found in Noell’s mouth, and sand in Zuleger’s.”
“Stucker’s autopsy report said nothing of the kind?”
“It was inconclusive. And there is also the precision of the blows that all but killed them.”
“Go on,” Skokov encouraged him, slicing off more sausage.
“There is a potential fifth victim in Hamburg. This man—Haber—had also served in the air force.”
“But not in either of these squadrons,” said Skokov.
It was terrifying how much this man knew. “Groups. Not squadrons. No, we don’t know that, yet. But the body was found in a similar state to the ones we found here. Only his murderer forced him to ingest water.”
“Water? Like Noell? How interesting. A toast, Captain!”
“You’re longer dead than you are alive.”
Skokov laughed, a glitter of teeth along one side of his mouth. He huffed his breath out and they drank. He poured again, sniffed his bread and ate it, reflectively, then sharpened his eyes on Reinhardt. “There are other names. Tell me of Gieb and Stresemann. Tell me of Markworth and Whelan. Tell me,” he grinned, a wet metal glisten, “of Collingridge.”
24
“Gieb was a prostitute who claimed to have been with Carlsen the night he was killed. She said he was killed by a man named Stresemann. Both of them have vanished. Markworth and Whelan are British agents . . .”
“Whelan is on the Public Security Committee, yes.”
“I think they were colleagues of Carlsen’s . . .”
“Yes. He was a legal advisor to the British member of the committee. Colonel Stewart.”
“Thank you,” said Reinhardt, confused by Skokov’s apparent knowledge. “And Collingridge . . .”
“. . . is your American benefactor,” Skokov said, when Reinhardt’s voice ran to a stop. “It is all right, Captain. There is nothing wrong with a benefactor. There is no shame. He brought you back to Berlin, didn’t he? Back into the police. He does not ask for much, just a little information from time to time. Am I wrong?” Reinhardt said nothing, and Skokov smiled again, but there was no mockery in it, reaching across the table to pour vodka into Reinhardt’s glass. “A toast, Captain. Give me another toast.”
“To the best. For the best is the cheapest thing to buy.”
Skokov blinked at him, then guffawed, clashing his glass against Reinhardt’s. “Captain! You are full of surprises! Say rather, a useless thing is dear at any price,” he laughed, huffing out and knocking his vodka back. He tore a piece of bread in half. “Here. Eat. Eat! Ah, Captain,” sighed Skokov, brushing a finger at the corner of one eye. “You are no storyteller. You have no soul for it,” he said, shaking his head as he poured more vodka for them both. “No embellishment. No drama! A Russian would know how to put drama into even the dreariest of stories. Look at what you have,” he enthused, waving his glass in one hand, “a story involving a conquered but still proud people, a swirling mix of politics, obstructionism from within, interest from without, dead pilots—cavaliers of the air!—a dead British agent, and yourself. An ex-policeman and an ex-officer in the Fascist armed forces. Men who are despised, mistrusted, robbed of nearly all self-respect. I saw your Fragebogen. The one you filled out for employment with the police. Quite a war you had. Would it interest you to know that the Soviet representative to the Public Security Committee was not happy having you back on the force? The Americans wanted you to work with Bliemeister, the assistant chief of their sector. You know he is allowed three advisors: one each from the detectives, uniformed police, and administration. You would have been the detective, but you were assessed as too independent. But the Americans insisted on another position for you, and fair is fair, I suppose. They have their men, we have our men. Everyone has their men. Still,” he mused, holding his vodka up to the light, the sunken side of his mouth a gentle, shadowed dip, “despite your best efforts to tell it otherwise, it is quite an interesting story.”
“Perhaps one you could finish,” Reinhardt dared, conscious suddenly that he had held Kausch’s name back, reeling from what Skokov seemed to know about him.
Reinhardt’s temerity seemed to delight Skokov. He smiled, a full flash of his metal teeth, and he lifted his glass. “Za vstrechoo!” he toasted. “To our meeting, for a good meeting always fills the heart, Captain.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?” Reinhardt managed around the vodka’s scald. His head was spinning, and he felt adrift. He wedged his feet uncomfortably between the legs of his chair and pressed them into the wood, feeling a slow burn in his knee under the strain.
“I feel it defines you more than ‘inspector.’ Perhaps I am wrong?”
“It is what I was,” Reinhardt said. “Not what I am.”
“So, I shall resume. This Carlsen is the first victim you find, but not the first victim of this killer. Nearby, you find Noell. The British tell you Carlsen is one of theirs and demand the German police investigate his murder as a priority, leaving you on your own to follow up on Noell. You are on your own because you disagree with the Allies’ orders, and because you are something of a pariah. You will forgive me,” Skokov said, his hand opening around his vodka glass in a gesture of conciliation, “it is not an opinion I share, merely an observation I proffer. You continue your investigation, uncovering more bodies, a worrying trail that goes back years. Meanwhile, despite all the evidence you lay out for them that there is only one killer, your poor colleagues are bumbling along dragging in half of Berlin’s underworld, and in doing so, they manage to mislay this prostitute, their prime witness and as well their prime suspect. When were you going to tell me about Fischer?”
Reinhardt pressed his feet harder against the chair. Skokov smiled at him, cocking his head slightly to one side, his brow furrowed into lines of query. Reinhardt
bit back the first question, the “How did you know about that?” and instead forged ahead. “I did not see the relevance,” he managed. “I thought it was an old score being settled. Nothing to do with the investigation.”
Skokov’s mouth pursed, the lines on his forehead smoothing themselves out. “I’m not sure I believe you, Captain. That upsets me, somehow. You would think, of course, that a man in my profession is used to lies, and to obfuscation. I expect it even. I did not, I shall be honest, expect it from you. Somehow, it offends me. It offends my sense of this house, and that grand lady who runs it.”
“Fischer said that . . . he said that some of the men in the cells who were rounded up got to talking. Some of them knew me, so they thought maybe I was behind some of the arrests.”
“No mention of an individual in particular?” Reinhardt said nothing, his mouth opening. “No? Well, it may comfort you to know Fischer could not say who it was put him on that particular path. He heard it from someone, who heard it from someone . . . You know how it goes.”
“You spoke with Fischer?”
“He spoke to one of my men, who then spoke to me.”
“Where is he?”
“In a cell somewhere, I should imagine. Or perhaps on the street. We’ve no further use for him. What shall you do next?” Skokov asked, changing tack again.
“I need access to official records. The kind the Allies have.”
“You mean the Berlin Document Center?”
“No. That material is related to the Nazis, not the armed forces. Four of the five victims were ex-military. I need Wehrmacht records. I need to get into the WASt.”
“Ah, yes, the WASt, the Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and POWs. A treasure trove of information, from the mundane to the munificent. Under the control of our French friends. When shall you go?”
“One does not . . . someone like me does not just walk into it. I shall ask my chief to try and obtain access for me.”
“You shall have it,” Skokov said, with an air of confident dismissal. “About your story. I would like to keep hearing of it. What you find out. What you hear.”
“You want me to report to you?”
“You can say that. Don’t worry, Captain,” Skokov said, as he sliced off a piece of sausage, “I don’t need you to come to Karlshorst or anything like that.”
“That is . . . a relief.” Karlshorst was known colloquially in Berlin as the Little Kremlin. It did not pay for Germans to go in there. Karlshorst triggered a sudden thought of Kausch and Poles, and Reinhardt realized he had said nothing about either of them.
“I would imagine so,” Skokov grinned, a tight clench of his lips that pulled the sunken side of his mouth down. “Although remember, the devil is never so black as he is painted. No. Whatever you find out that touches upon these murders, or whatever you hear from your Allied friends, be sure that I will be interested to hear of it.”
“That’s it? Nothing in particular?”
“I will tell you something for nothing, Reinhardt. Or rather, I will tell you something for the excellent welcome your Mrs. Meissner afforded me. Carlsen may not be your priority, but he is indeed interesting. He was a particular type of British agent. He was an Anglo-German who fought for the British in the war.”
“Anglo-German?” Reinhardt repeated.
“Even so,” Skokov said, as he began wrapping up the sausage and bread. “You should look into them if you have the time. Churchill’s Germans! That old imperial fox! There were quite a few of them. Children of two peoples who fought for the Allies—for the West, and for us—instead of the Germans. You can imagine their use, now, in occupied Germany.”
“How do you know this?” Skokov smiled, said nothing. “What more can you tell me?”
Skokov smiled and shook his head, putting the package to one side. “You have an expression in German, I believe. ‘The listener never hears any good of himself.’ I should not need to remind you, Captain, that the flow of information in this relationship needs to be from you to me.”
“Why would I do that?” Reinhardt asked, skating along the awkward impression Skokov gave him, of erudition and eloquence and yet a man with a mouthful of metal teeth. However Reinhardt had judged him, whether the vodka had eroded any sense of caution, he knew it was a risk and a danger in talking so to a Soviet officer, but Skokov only smiled again, as he put another tightly wrapped packet on the table.
“You will find it is in your interest. And if you doubt—after all, it is only human to doubt—I remind you that Berlin is but an island in a sea. An island cannot survive alone. It must trade. Goods and people must come in. And out. And that the sea around this particular island is red. This,” he said, rising to his feet and pointing at the packets, “I leave for you to give to Mrs. Meissner. There is butter and cheese, and the rest of the bread and sausage. There is sugar here. Tell her, she should give some of it to her bees. And we shall drink a last toast to her, and to women like her. To the lady of the house! Za hazyaiku etovo doma!”
Reinhardt stood as well, untangling his feet from the chair legs, and washing the last of the vodka down and back.
“And with that, Captain, I wish you a pleasant evening.”
Reinhardt sat at the table after Skokov left, listening, waiting. He heard voices, doors slam shut, and the car drive away into the night, and then he waited a little more. His head was buzzing from the vodka and he sat breathing deeply, trying to still and center himself. After a while, he rose and poured a glass of water, still listening to the night as he drank it down, and poured and drank another. When he was sure there was nothing and no one around, he went quietly up the stairs to his room and pushed open the door.
Brauer was lying on the floor in the corner. His eyes twinkled back at Reinhardt as the light lit them.
“How much of that did you hear?” Reinhardt asked.
“Most of it,” Brauer replied, sitting up, moving stiffly beneath his blankets.
“What have you got there?”
“What?”
“Rudi,” Reinhardt growled.
“Oh, this old thing,” Brauer said, pulling out a Bergmann submachine gun, a First World War relic.
“Ah, Christ. Rudi. Do you still have that? That ‘old thing’ is, I’m sure, in perfect working order and it’ll get you in more trouble than it’s worth. If that Soviet had found you with it . . .”
“Don’t worry about things that haven’t happened.”
“There’s vodka downstairs. Come and have a drink.”
Down in the kitchen, Reinhardt poured two small measures, Brauer’s eyes following his every movement. They were sunk deep beneath the troubled line of his brow. Brauer seemed to have been whittled back to the blunt edges of his body, his face harshly planed beneath the obtrusion of his cheeks. His hands, where they played with the vodka glass, turning and turning it slowly with his fingers, were corded with tendons splayed between knobbed joints that looked like pebbles.
“What have you gotten yourself into?” Brauer asked, elbows on the table.
Reinhardt knew someone had talked. It could have been anyone. He suspected Ganz or Weber, but it did not really matter.
“I need help, Brauer. Will you watch my back for me?”
“Of course I would. Of course . . . but . . . I’m not. I’m not . . .”
“You know, during the war, there was a captain in the secret field police. His name was Thallberg. I met him in Sarajevo during that investigation I told you about. The one into the murder of that journalist. Well, he knew all about you. About us. He asked after you. After the infamous Inspector Brauer.”
“Really?” asked Brauer, straightening.
“I told him you were in the army, probably terrifying new recruits.”
“Not far off,” murmured Brauer. He sniffed at his glass, took a swig. “Christ, that’s not very nought-eigh
t-fifteen,” he wheezed, the old trenches slang for the common and commonplace. “That’s good stuff.”
“He said he fancied the pair of us for the secret field police. Imagine the trouble we’d have caused, you and I.”
Brauer grinned, took another swig, nodding to himself. “Look . . . If you want me to help . . . Of course, I’ll do it. You know I will.”
Reinhardt nodded, a small, tight smile. He had wanted to shake Brauer out of his despondency, perhaps bring him back to himself, but Reinhardt felt himself draining away, all of a sudden. The end of a long, long day, and Reinhardt began to sink back into himself, retreating, remembering Sarajevo, remembering what he had accomplished there, the people left behind. Remembering Suzana Vukić, remembering the last time he had seen her with her gray-blonde hair pulled back behind her neck, walking away from her under the chill light of a spring morning.
Those thoughts stayed with him as they went to bed, Brauer curling himself up into his corner. Reinhardt lay awake, desperately tired, but he could not drift off, thoughts plucking at him at random, and so he was awake to hear the sound of steps on the street, awake to hear them pause, and he knew they were outside the house. He sat up in bed as he heard steps on the pathway that led up to the door, pause again, then move around the side of the house.
He stole downstairs, pulled on his shoes and opened the door onto the garden silently. His feet soughed through wet grass as he scampered to the corner of the house, pushing himself into the shadows, waiting. He heard steps, the scuff of a shoe, the sudden gasp as fabric and skin hooked on the wire Reinhardt had laid. The detective slid around the corner. There was a man hopping on one leg, the faintest edge of moonlight lining his head and shoulders. Reinhardt stepped quietly up to him, squeezing the man’s head into an armlock and pushing a knee into his back. The man gave a startled cry, lurching backward into Reinhardt, fabric tearing as he came off the wire.
“Quiet!” hissed Reinhardt. “What the hell are you doing?” He released the pressure, enough to allow the man to speak. “Who are you?”
The Divided City Page 18
