breath shuddered in and out, and the three Partisans shared an anxious glance. Then Simo nodded, and he handed his MP 40 to Reinhardt. waited a moment longer, then gave him his, nodding that he understood. edged open the door. At her feet, Neven ducked his head out, then whispered up at her, and they slid out into the little room. breathing came hard and fast; she looked at Reinhardt and then raised her hands, Simo and doing the same. Reinhardt slung one MP 40 over his shoulder and gripped the second hard, motioning them forward. In the theater’s foyer there was no one, and on the street outside, from the quick glance he gave, a squad of SS were lined up on the opposite pavement.
“Ready?” he whispered.
They nodded, then walked out, their hands high, Reinhardt close behind. He heard the shift of the SS as they turned toward them, and then Reinhardt raised a hand at their officer as he came forward.
“Halt there!” the man called, an Untersturmführer.
“My prisoners,” Reinhardt called back, urging the Partisans on, seeing Benfeld’s head pop up through the turret of the panzerfunkwagen.
“I said halt!” The SS barked an order, and his men broke into a ragged line, chasing after them.
“My prisoners, Untersturmführer!” Reinhardt snapped, turning and standing his ground. “This is Feldjaeger business. Butt out of it, unless you want more trouble than you can handle.”
The Untersturmführer paused, frowned. A Feldjaeger’s authority extended even to the SS, but the man could not let it go like that.
“Yes, sir. But who are they? What are you doing with them, anyway?”
“They are deserters.”
“Deserters? Why don’t you just shoot them? My men will be happy to oblige you.”
“Thank you, Untersturmführer, your zeal is commendable, but I prefer a different kind of justice.”
“And the woman?”
“Must I explain everything to you, Untersturmführer? Do you not have duties?” The other end of the street filled suddenly with Ustaše, doubling fast down toward them, and at their head was Captain , his hair awry.
“Of course, sir.” The Untersturmführer clicked his heels, inclined his head, and his arm came up. “Heil Hitler.”
Reinhardt turned, prodding the Partisans on with his MP 40, and that might have been it, but another voice cut across the street.
“Stop!” called.
“Keep moving,” Reinhardt hissed to the Partisans.
“Untersturmführer,” voice cracked behind him, “stop those men. Captain Reinhardt!”
“You know these people?” The Untersturmführer’s suspicions were back.
“They are saboteurs,” shouted. His eyes locked with Reinhardt’s and they were wide and wild, and Reinhardt knew he was part of it. “You must stop them.”
“This is no concern of yours, Untersturmführer. Nor of yours, Captain .”
The Untersturmführer’s eyes narrowed, flicking between the pair of them, and he made to unsling his weapon.
From an upstairs window came a shattering of glass and a sudden barrage of gunfire. The street around the SS was riddled with eruptions of dust and stones as bullets rang and burst around them. Some dropped, fell, lay motionless; others turned, swiveling up, vanishing behind puffs of smoke as they returned fire. Brick and glass exploded along the line of windows.
Simo and broke into a run.
“HALT!” screamed the Untersturmführer.
“Run!” called Reinhardt, staying back, trying to stay between them and the others, the SS and the Ustaše. He fired his MP 40, stabbing a line of bullets into the street behind the Partisans’ heels, as if opening fire on them. He turned back to the Untersturmführer, lifted his hand, and saw heave something into the air, watched it tumble overhead, bounce off the wall and land with a wooden thunk. Reinhardt pulled and Neven to the ground as the stick grenade exploded. There was a short scream, and Reinhardt was rolling back toward the SS and Ustaše. Many were down, but the Untersturmführer was still standing, behind him, and they were firing at him, the Ustaša’s eyes crazed with a kind of blurred focus. Reinhardt took a moment, aimed carefully, and fired back, emptying the magazine. The MP 40 juddered agonizingly against his injured wrist, and the two of them were hurled backward as he stitched his fire across them.
The weapon clicked empty, and he dropped it, rising to one knee, shrugging MP 40 from his shoulder and unfolding the stock as a clutch of SS opened fire on him. The bullets clacked past as they fired, high and wild, and he was still and cold as he hunched into the MP 40, pushing it hard forward on its straps, aimed, dropped one, then shifted to a second, but there was a ripping shatter of fire from behind him as Benfeld opened up with the turret gun. Reinhardt collapsed flat as the air overhead was threaded thick with metal, the walls and pavement vanishing in clouds of dust and brick as Benfeld hosed his fire across the street, and the SS and Ustaše were tossed back and down.
In the sudden silence Reinhardt surged to his feet, let the MP 40 fall on its strap, turned, and hauled and the boy up. They ran to the others. The grenade had caught both of them from behind and shredded their clothing. was dead, the back of his head pulped, and a huge pool of blood glistened beneath him, making islands of the street’s cobbles as it flowed in sluggish twists away from his body. Simo moaned as he clawed at the street with his arms, one leg useless behind him. He hauled himself to his side, saw , and cursed bitterly, biting back on his own pain. Reinhardt motioned, and the pair of them dragged Simo into a doorway, Reinhardt gritting his teeth against the pain in his wrist and his knee. Neven hauled on the handle, and the door creaked open onto a dark hallway. They pulled Simo inside as the boy pushed the door shut. Across the street, Benfeld made to jump down from the car, but Reinhardt waved him back.
and Reinhardt shared a flat gaze, and each knew the turmoil that screamed behind their eyes.
“You cannot stay here,” she said.
“I’m not coming back, Suzana.” She blinked, and her eyes glistened, suddenly. “But there’s a circle I have to close. You can still help me. Both of you,” he said, taking in Simo where the big Partisan blinked up at him from the floor.
“Tell me.”
So he drew her close, and told her. She stiffened, then nodded as he spoke, and she relaxed into his arms. He pulled back, looking into her eyes, pushing himself down into them.
“You understand?”
“Yes. I think . . . yes, it can work.”
“It must.” He handed her the MP 40, then knelt to take Simo’s hand. “Luck to you, Simo.”
“And you, Captain Reinhardt.”
Neven tapped him on the shoulder. The little boy was solemn, his eyes wide. Reinhardt extended his hand, and Neven took it, then tentatively wrapped thin arms around Reinhardt’s neck. Reinhardt froze, then closed his own arms around the fragile span of Neven’s shoulders.
walked him to the door. He brushed his fingers down her cheek. She blinked hard, and he opened the door, glancing up and down the street.
“Wait,” said, slipping past him, craning her head up at the windows. She called something, her eyes wide, then called again. A voice came back at her. “You can go,” she said, breathlessly. A last exchange of eyes, and he slipped out, running over to the panzerfunkwagen.
“Captain, what the fuck is going on?!” Benfeld yelled. “What the hell just happened?”
“Get back inside,” he shouted at Benfeld. He ducked inside the car, hearing Benfeld clamber up into the turret. He pulled the door shut, pausing only to spare a last glance at , where he lay in a puddle of red. The panzerfunkwagen’s engine exploded into life. Reinhardt paused, looked back at the street, at the bodies strewn across it, and drove the car the few dozen meters up to where lay. Leaving the engine running, he slipped out of the car, his eyes stabbing across the shattered windows above. His fingers slithered across the Ustaša’s body into the tunic pock
ets and pulled out a soldbuch, its cover matted red with blood. He backed away from the body. From windows above, pale faces peered down at him, tracked him back into the car. He dumped himself back into the seat, breathing heavily, and tore the car away from that street and the tumble of bodies that lay across it.
He drove the wrong way down Kvaternik, racing the river as it hurled itself along its rocky bed. Where the road joined with King Alexander Street at Marijin Dvor, Reinhardt merged the car into a broken flow of vehicles all streaming west out of the city. On a building, a red flag suddenly bloomed from a window; from roofs men and women waved crimson banners back and forth. A crowd of children shrieked as they hurled stones at the vehicles as they passed, and rocks clanged off the panzerfunkwagen’s armored sides. The edges of Sarajevo flickered past through the vehicle’s viewports, the steps and pillars of the National Museum on the left, the long white walls of the barracks on the right, the graded lines of its roofs dark and gray beneath a smog of ash and fumes from the burning inside. A train was pulling out of the station as he sped past, its engine belching thick smoke in frantic bursts as it struggled to build up speed. Then the buildings were gone, and it was only open countryside to left and right, fields that spread and bowled up into the mounded lines of the hills to north and south.
Weaving in and out of the traffic, Reinhardt spotted what he was looking for and pulled the car off the road, bouncing it up a dirt track to where a low hill afforded a view back east. He turned the engine off, and there was a moment when there was nothing, no sound. He savored it, feeling the silence flowing up finally into the space he had made for it, and he climbed out of the car. He walked a little way, lighting a cigarette, one hand rubbing the swelling on his wrist, looking back at Sarajevo.
Under a tumult of clouds, the city lay under a gray pall of smoke that rose and eddied to the vagaries of the wind. The valley wore its shadows deep, the sun shining in great shafts through towering thunderheads, and these shafts caught the lines of the city in a luminous gray glow. Thick smoke lay to the north where the fighting was heaviest, the slopes alive with fire, tongues of orange flame that bled up into the sky. Beyond it all, the mountains lifted their folded shoulders in great furls of dark purple and green, the highest peaks still white with snow. He looked out across the rolling plain, over the chaos of vehicles along the thread of the road, saw how the colors of the grasses shifted as the wind and light passed over them, and heard the soft footstep behind him and the slow slide of a pistol’s action.
“You have a choice, Frenchie,” Reinhardt said, taking a long pull on his cigarette. He looked at the glowing end of it, where it flared brightly in the wind that flowed over this little hill, turned his head slightly to see Benfeld behind and to one side, a pistol held quivering in an outstretched arm. “You don’t need to do what they tell you anymore.”
“What do they tell me, Reinhardt?” Benfeld grated, and Reinhardt felt relief that Benfeld would talk.
“They tell you to look, and listen. To wait and watch. To go where they want, and do what they say.” Reinhardt turned to look fully at Benfeld, the burning city etched across the dappled horizon behind him. “They say these things because they have a hold over you. What was it? Your brother?” Benfeld’s eyes flickered wide, narrow, twitching back and forth, and his mouth moved, his knuckles tightening white on the pistol. “What did they say?”
“They said . . . they could take him out of where he was. From that penal battalion, on the Eastern Front.”
“Who said these things, Benfeld?”
“A general. And . . . a judge. They said, if I didn’t help them, they would make sure he never survived. They talked of my father, and my mother. They said they could do anything. The general, he boasted of . . . other things. Betrayals. The judge, he . . . blathered on about the future.”
“Oh, Benfeld.” Reinhardt shook his head. “You know that your brother is gone. Men don’t survive penal battalions. Not in the east. It’s what they’re for.”
“So what?” The younger man began to break down. “What could I have said? They knew everything. Everything about me.”
“So you told them what I was doing?” Benfeld nodded. “Where I was going? All those things I asked you to do, you did not do them.”
“Yes.”
“You told them of Koenig.”
“Yes.”
“They killed him. He was my friend, and they killed him.”
“I am sorry,” Benfeld whispered.
“You used the radio in the city. You told them, you told someone, where I was.”
“I didn’t . . .” He stopped under Reinhardt’s eyes, and the heavy glance Reinhardt put behind them at the panzerfunkwagen’s raised antenna.
“You couldn’t even have known what I was doing. You could not even have known if it was about Jansky.”
“They told me ‘everything,’ Reinhardt. Everything you do.”
“So you radioed it in? To whom?”
“It doesn’t matter. They just said to call in where you went. I’m sorry, Reinhardt.”
“No, it’s me. I suspected you. I thought you were the only one to watch out for, but there was another, and you slipped my gaze. If I had known the hold they had over you, I would not have brought you. You . . . we . . . cost a good man his life.”
“That Partisan?”
“That ‘Partisan’ was none other than Valter, Benfeld, the Partisans’ will-o’-the-wisp. Dead on the last day of his war. And now, you must make your choice.”
Benfeld shook, his mouth bunched, and his eyes clenched shut. His forearm went up, and he placed the back of the pistol against his forehead. Reinhardt felt what was coming, and was close enough when Benfeld slid the pistol under his own chin. Reinhardt placed his hand over the gun, gripping it tight and shifting it just enough.
“That is not the way, Frenchie,” he whispered. The two stood almost nose to nose, eye to eye. Benfeld strained at the gun; Reinhardt’s wrist shook and throbbed. He felt Benfeld’s strength through the strain of their arms and knew he could not stop him, whatever the young Feldjaeger decided to do.
“But it is. It is. It goes on forever, Reinhardt. How can you ever fight them?”
“By taking apart what you see in front of you. Stone by stone. Brick by brick. Piece by piece. And before you know it you have a hole in a wall.”
“What use is that?”
“A wall with a hole’s not much of a wall,” said Reinhardt, a wry edge to his voice, pushing, searching for some crack in Benfeld’s misery. “It’s not men we fight or move against. It’s a system. It’s men as pieces on a board. But you can only play the hand you’re dealt.”
“It . . . what does that even mean, Reinhardt?”
“I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even know if I make sense to myself. But it’s about the beauty or danger of a system, Frenchie. Do you see? In a system, who is responsible? Who is to blame? And if you find no one man is to blame, whom do you seek out . . . ? You seek out the ones you can find. Start with that. Start small. The rest will come.”
Benfeld wiped an angry hand across his eyes. “You sound so sure. I want . . . to believe you.”
Reinhardt put his hand on the back of Benfeld’s neck, butted their heads together. “Believe, Frenchie. I know where they are. I know what they’ve done. We can end this little bit. You and me, and the others. And you have already made your choice, on that street, when you covered me from the turret when the SS were firing at me. And you’ve made it here. Now.”
The door creaked softly as Reinhardt eased it open. The room inside was empty, only a pair of battered tables standing against bare concrete walls. It was warm, though; the outlines of an iron stove in the middle of the room shimmered through the mirage of its heat, and there was that smell, that tubercular reek. He closed the door softly behind him, standing, listening. From the opposite wall, windows let i
n yellow daylight, a view through warped panes of a large courtyard bounded by high brick walls.
He walked slowly over to a door that was slightly ajar, pushing it open. Inside, that smell was stronger, and a shape lay humped on a camp bed, covered in a gray blanket. Reinhardt touched it with a finger, gently at first, then a little harder, and the shape rolled over, thin shoulders dropping to the bed, a skeletal head following. Eyes blinked up at him, and a hand came out from under the covers and touched the red band around Reinhardt’s wrist, then the gorget hanging from his throat.
“It’s you,” the old colonel whispered. Pistorius.
Reinhardt nodded, unfolding the piece of paper with the bloodstain, and the names written across its fine grain in that flowing, old-fashioned script. The colonel’s eyes blinked at it, then up at Reinhardt.
“You understood.”
“Yes,” said Reinhardt. “It was you. You sent Kreuz to me, as well, and gave him those soldbuchs.”
“Yes,” Pistorius breathed, struggling to sit up. Reinhardt slid a hand under his back, feeling the blade of his shoulders clearly through the colonel’s tunic, but the man waved him away, collapsing back onto the bed and coughing. Pistorius turned his head, hacking wetly into a handkerchief already stained with red. “It was me,” he managed, finally. “It was my last . . . throw . . . in this game of theirs. My last chance. When I saw . . . saw you, I knew . . .” His voice faded out.
“They used you, too.”
“Yes. They used me. One . . . indiscretion. A woman. That was all. Used my reputation. And they said . . . they said they would keep my family safe. Safe. I was dying, anyway.” Pistorius’s eyes flickered open and shut to the tortured rhythm of his breath.
Someone came into the other room, a quick tap of feet. Reinhardt stood slowly, then paused as the colonel’s hand plucked at his.
“Is it over, now?”
Reinhardt nodded, and Pistorius went limp in his bed, a small sigh escaping. He walked quietly to the door, then stepped softly into the other room. There was a man standing there, bent over papers on one of the tables. The man turned, and his eyes flared wide in panic. It was written broad across his face, just for a moment, before he looked past Reinhardt, searching for others. The two of them faced off, the air crackling between them, before Jansky turned back to his papers. “Captain Reinhardt. What a surprise. Is there something I can help you with?”
The Pale House Page 34
