The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  “To a village called Bielwiese.”

  Skokov snapped something at the lieutenant, who strode away to snap something at a sergeant. Orders and words were snapped, descending down a chain of command until they came back up, and the lieutenant leaned forward to murmur respectfully in Skokov’s ear.

  “Come, it is not so far, I am told,” the major said. “You can sit with me.”

  Reinhardt followed him to a BMW with Red Army plates as the squad of soldiers climbed aboard their truck. The little convoy rattled through the streets of the village, then out across a ribbon of metalled road.

  “So, tell me, Captain, what are we doing here? What have you learned since we saw each other last? Tell me of your new trips to the WASt and the Kammergericht. What did you find there, Captain?” he asked, with a smile that creased the scars at the corner of his mouth.

  Reinhardt’s tongue stole into the gap in his teeth, and he reminded himself, again, never to underestimate this man. “I believe the man I am looking for is named Marius Leyser. He is a former soldier, possibly working for the British, or at least impersonating someone who is.”

  “The British?” Skokov purred. “Go on.”

  “The archivists in the WASt had managed to identify him, but this Leyser had already been in the WASt and removed nearly all trace of his existence. We found one entry, hidden in obscure records, however. I confronted the British with this information and with other information that indicates British influence or presence in the murders.” Reinhardt talked on as the car drove through the countryside. He spoke of the pattern of the murders, the dead pilots’ unit, and the veterans’ association and the rumor of British involvement in it, to which Skokov reacted with suspicion. Again, the news the “wrong” Noell had been killed, Reinhardt kept to himself. This was a big piece of the puzzle to hide from a man as dangerous and perceptive as Skokov, but Reinhardt found he was ready to take that risk.

  “And so who is it you are going to see, now?”

  “A man called Gareis. He is the last survivor of this squadron. I do not know if the killer is aware of his existence as he was reported killed in action during the war.”

  “Very good. You realize that you told me he was dead.”

  “I found out the contrary from the veterans’ association.”

  “Precisely. And what else?”

  “Nothing else for now, Major. Gareis may be able to give me information on what may have happened in North Africa.”

  “There’s a link, is there?”

  “The only one I can find. I may be wrong.”

  “We shall see soon enough,” Skokov said, settling into himself as if for a long voyage. He stared out the window. “It is good country around here. Good for crops. For livestock,” Skokov said, staring out across undulating fields. To Reinhardt’s eyes, despite the green that soothed and lulled, the countryside was flat and uninteresting. His mind, he found, still shaped the countryside around him to the folds and pitches of Bosnia’s mountains, to its heights and depths, and what he found outside the window, he found wanting and found testament to the war. The burned hulk of a tank squatted in the middle of a field, half-overgrown with weeds, and Reinhardt spotted the crumbled remains of earthworks snaking across a rise.

  “Does it remind you of home, Major?” Skokov nodded slowly. “And where is that, if I may ask?”

  Skokov turned his head slowly, looking at Reinhardt with blank, empty eyes that sparked, suddenly and finally, to life. “Home would be not far from the Urals, Captain. Near Ekaterinburg.” Reinhardt nodded, gave a tight smile. He had been taken aback by Skokov’s eyes, the distance and coldness in them. Perhaps, he thought, there was precious little time and space in the major’s life for small talk about one’s origins. Or perhaps origins were a source of weakness. To reveal them revealed something about you. Something that could be used against you by someone when the time came.

  “Where your grandmother kept bees.”

  Skokov smiled, relaxing slightly, and Reinhardt breathed a little easier, wondering if the major had seen through his ploy of steering the conversation back to safer ground. Out here, far from Berlin, Reinhardt felt very lonely and very alone. There would be no one to help him, if help was needed. Tanneberger and Ganz knew, but they could not help themselves within their own precinct, if push came to shove. Weber had grinned and wished him luck. Collingridge knew he was out here, but the American had shrugged when Reinhardt told him what he intended to do, quipped it was “nice knowing you” and handed over a couple of packs of Luckies. “Get-out-of-jail-free cards,” Collingridge had called them, the cultural reference escaping Reinhardt. When he had met him again in the beer cellar, hunched over glasses of Berliner Weisse, Markworth had not trivialized what Reinhardt intended, running through the itinerary and plans and timing with military precision, but he, too, had ended the conversation with a shrug that anything could happen in the Soviet zone, and the best-laid plans could come to naught.

  Markworth had had little to say for his inquiries into the murders in Bad Oeynhausen. All he would say was that there was a Royal Military Police report he was trying to obtain, but he was clearly worried. The town of Bad Oeynhausen had been entirely taken over by the British. Apart from waiters and maids, and the odd technical expert, there were no Germans left living in it. It was fuel to Reinhardt’s fire, Markworth said, that the killer was British or working for them.

  “I cannot fathom such a distance,” Reinhardt said to Skokov, the words just popping into his mouth. “From here to the Urals. Half a continent. Forgive me, though, but I must ask. Your German is very good. There is a touch of something old-fashioned in it. I wonder, have you spent time here before? Perhaps before the war?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, Captain. Are you sure that’s healthy?”

  “It’s answers that are bad for your health, I’ve found, Major.”

  Skokov smiled, the scarring around his mouth shifting and tightening. He ran a finger across their glossy ripple, glanced at the flecked pink of the back of his driver’s neck.

  “Answers are often worse, Captain. Especially if they are the right ones. You are right. I learned my German at home, and then here, in the aftermath of the first war. My parents were White Russians. Landed gentry. They fled Lenin’s Russia, the birth of the Soviet Union. I . . . I was an impressionable youth and, like most youths, I ran counter to the beliefs of my parents. I found Communism on the streets of Berlin, and I went back to Russia when I was old enough. I joined the Party. I did what was asked of me. I returned here in the mid-’30s, working in the embassy in counterintelligence. I had connections. I was useful.” He stopped, looking out the window.

  “Then the purges came,” Reinhardt prompted him.

  Skokov shook his head. “You call them purges. For us,” his mouth worked, and his finger stroked the scars, “they were a paroxysm of growth. A necessary evil. A rejection of the weak and the burdensome.”

  “Is that what you were?”

  The Russian smiled. “I am what the Party tells me I am. Useful, or useless. What am I, but a part of something greater? When I was called back to Moscow I suspected something. I was accused of . . . many things. Some of them were even true,” Skokov smiled. “I had been warning about German rearmament. About Nazi intentions. How could I know such information went against the Party’s objectives?”

  “Against the pact?”

  “Precisely. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Peace between our nations.”

  “The deep breath before the plunge.”

  “That too. But it gave us time. Precious years of peace.”

  “We were talking of you, Skokov,” Reinhardt said gently.

  “This is me, Reinhardt,” Skokov replied, as the car rocked over a section of bad road. “It was part of me. I was part of it. So were you. Pieces of history. Moved by forces greater than us. Who are we to question how we a
re moved? What moved me was the historical impetus of class struggle, while what moved you was the warped ideology of racial superiority. But it was my past that did me in. My White Russian past. My bourgeois past. It was the camps for me. I thought I would end my days there, but one day they came looking for me. They needed someone with my skills.”

  “You mean they’d seen the error of their ways?”

  “All was forgiven. No system is infallible, you see? Any system can make mistakes, but not every system can admit as much.”

  “You mean your system had suffered such casualties, it was no longer picky about who fought for it, nor where they found the people to fight.”

  “As you say. You know our Marshal Rokossovsky? He, too, was in a camp. Did you know that? They released him and gave him an army, and what wonders he achieved with it! So, what system was it? One that imprisoned me, or men like me, wrongly? Or one that could admit its wrongs and release me?”

  “Admit its wrongs when its needs were great enough, and release you to nothing but war. Is that where you got those scars? In a camp?”

  Skokov stroked his mouth. “One winter, things were so bad that some of the prisoners turned to cannibalism, and they didn’t always wait for their victims to be dead. They came for me one night. One of them bit me in the mouth, tried to tear off my lips. The human mouth is one of the filthiest places on earth, Reinhardt, did you know that? I got rid of him, but he left a nasty infection behind that saw me lose most of my teeth and get a mouthful of silver in return. And so now that you have answers, are you happy with them?”

  What Reinhardt was, was afraid. He had been a fool to ask questions like that, of a man like Skokov, in a place like this. The answers had put him in Skokov’s power. Men like him rarely revealed anything, and when they did, it was either because they had something to gain, or nothing to lose. And if Skokov had nothing to lose, it meant he had little use for Reinhardt and no compunction in sharing such intimate information with him.

  “And so here you are,” he said. It was all he could think of to say.

  “No. Here we are, Reinhardt.”

  42

  The car had turned down a lane lined with boundary stones that had once been painted white. A track led to a large farmhouse, half of which had been burned down. The vehicles squealed to a halt in a cloud of dust, the soldiers leaping out to fan across a bare expanse of courtyard across which raced a startled brace of chickens. A man appeared in the doorway of the farmhouse. One of the soldiers leveled his weapon at him, then lowered it shamefaced at a snapped order from Skokov. Another order, and the soldiers fell back into a group, pulling away from the house. On the other side of the farmyard was what looked like a barracks, hastily constructed from planks and timber that was already warping from the weather. A couple of women came to its door, children peering out curiously from behind their skirts.

  “Captain,” Skokov said, a tilt of his head. “We are in your hands.”

  The man in the door of the house stepped out, his eyes tracking narrow and worried across the soldiers, coming to rest upon Skokov and Reinhardt. He was of medium build, dressed in what looked like cast-off mechanic’s overalls, a sleeveless sheepskin jacket around his torso.

  “Are you Gareis?”

  “I am.”

  “Reinhardt. Berlin Kripo,” Reinhardt said, holding out his warrant disc. He said nothing about Skokov, lurking off to the side. “I would like to ask you some questions about some people you knew during the war.”

  “What people? I didn’t do anything wrong.” Gareis’s voice was low but insistent, and his eyes kept flickering to Skokov and to the two militiamen. “I had nothing to with any of that. I was a pilot.”

  “I know, Mr. Gareis. That’s why I’m here. It’s about the pilots you knew during the war. When you served with IV./JG56.”

  “Right,” Gareis breathed out, and Reinhardt saw tension flow out of him.

  Gareis led Reinhardt into the heavy gloom of the farmhouse, into a kitchen filled with a mismatch of furniture, some of which looked like it had been rescued from a fire. An old lady sat in a corner, her head bent to a piece of fabric in her hand into which a needle and thread darted in and out. She blinked confusedly at Gareis and Reinhardt as they came in, then she started back in her chair with fear, and Reinhardt saw that Skokov had followed them in, quietly.

  “Mother, it’s fine, it’s nothing. They’ve just come to see me. It’s nothing.”

  “What do they want?” the old lady stammered.

  “They just want to talk to me. It’s nothing,” Gareis soothed her as he led Reinhardt and Skokov to a big table. The old lady subsided, blinking round wet eyes at Reinhardt and Skokov from out of a face that seemed, on her left, to be shrunken in, as if the bone beneath was missing. “I’m sorry,” Gareis said, as they sat. “I’ve nothing to offer you.”

  “Conrad, what do they want? Why are they here?” the old lady called.

  “Nothing, Mother. Nothing. It’s all right.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Gareis. This should not take too long. Your mother is not well?”

  “She had a rough time of it at the end of the war. You saw half the place burned down. She was here alone. And . . . well, you know what was happening to women then. Her age didn’t spare her.”

  “Do you know who did it?” Skokov asked. If he was being disingenuous, Reinhardt thought, he covered it up well.

  Gareis stared at him, as if taking his measure or sharing the same thought as Reinhardt. “Not Red Army, so far as I can make out. Could’ve been deserters. Or DPs. The countryside was awash in bands of them. But I think it was more probably the forced laborers. There were Poles on the farm, a couple of Frenchmen too. The government put them here to work the land during the war along with a . . . piece-of-shit overseer. When the neighbors got here, they were all gone, the place was half-gutted, the overseer was strung up in the courtyard, and my mother . . .” Gareis glanced over at her, where the old lady had gone back to her stitching and sewing, her face screwed up in concentration. “That’s the only thing that keeps her going now. Helps keep her mind off things. Anyway,” he sighed, folding big, callused hands on the table, “you didn’t come here to listen to all that. What do you want?”

  “Mr. Gareis, during the war, you flew with a squadron designated IV./JG56. You were posted in North Africa. Over the past year or so, all the members of the squadron within which you flew who survived the war have been murdered. Several of them have been murdered in the last few days in Berlin, after coming to the city to meet with other veterans in an association called ‘Ritterfeld.’”

  “After the Group’s first aerodrome. Yes, I know of the association,” Gareis said. “They contacted me, but I wanted no part of it. Those days are over. Let them go.”

  “Can you shed any light at all on what might be happening?”

  “List the men for me, please.”

  “Prellberg, Hauck, Stucker, Osterkamp, Jurgen, Zuleger, Fenski, and Noell.”

  Gareis was silent, and then he seemed to deflate slightly. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how the past can sometimes catch up with you. You think it has a connection to North Africa? Well, you’re right. When we were based in North Africa, we committed a war crime. No. Wait. It would be a war crime now. Back then, no one knew what it was all about. In any case,” he said, “the squadron shot up a village of Arabs. A Berber encampment. Just a bunch of tents, camels, and a few people. There were rumors the Berber were working with the British, but who really knew,” Gareis said. “We were bored. Pissed off. Tired of retreating in the face of the British, so we shot the place up, killed everyone in it, and reported that we had been fired upon from the camp.

  “Only we didn’t know that it wasn’t a Berber camp. Rather, it was, but with a difference. They were Germans, disguised as Berbers. They were Brandenburgers. You know about them?”

  Reinhardt frowne
d. “They were special troops. They used to belong to the Abwehr, to military intelligence.” Memories bobbed up, little more than generalities and rumors. Even within the Abwehr, the Brandenburgers had been a little-known organization. Infiltration, he remembered. They were specially trained in infiltration. In disguises. In blending in, he thought, wondering how often Leyser had followed him through Berlin’s streets wheeling his little cart.

  “They were the equivalent of British Commandos. Masters at infiltration,” Gareis said, echoing Reinhardt’s own thoughts, “every man a weapons expert, multitalented. The squadron should have known,” said Gareis. “At least, Prellberg should have known. We’d been briefed about a special mission, been told to stay away from a certain sector, but we had forgotten, or we’d gotten lost, or we’d been in a fight and barely gotten out of it alive. I can’t remember. I only remember we were all pissed off, tired of always losing, itching for a scrap, and one of the pilots saw the encampment, and then someone remarked about how the Arabs are always spying, and you can’t trust them further than you can throw them, and then someone else says ‘let’s have some fun,’ and we did. We destroyed everything, especially when it turned out someone from the encampment did fire upon us. But it was friendly fire. The whole thing was a friendly fire incident. I remember . . . I remember chasing men across the desert, machine-gunning them as they tried to run, until there was nothing, only smoke and sand.”

  Gareis brought a heavy pitcher of water back to the table and poured into three mismatched tumblers. He drank deeply, his eyes far away.

  “A few days later, the word came in that a Brandenburger mission had been destroyed by enemy action, and we realized it was us who had done it. A few days more, and they brought in a survivor. He was badly wounded, almost delirious, but already rumors were spreading, that the Brandenburgers might not have been destroyed by enemy action. We debated what to do. A couple of us decided to take matters into their own hands.”

  “Who?” asked Reinhardt.