He sighed and stirred himself. Feeling sorry for his lot would get him precisely nowhere. And nowhere was where he was. No suspect. No investigation. No support. He took the stairs up to Freilinger’s office slowly and found the major much as he had found him the night before, standing by his window, looking west. Freilinger turned as he came in, and Reinhardt was struck by how tired he looked, the lines on his face long and deep. The two of them stared at each other a moment, and then the major gestured to the chair in front of his desk. ‘So,’ he said, pointing to his telephone. ‘I’ve just spoken to Putković. I understand things have come to a pass?’
‘They think their suspect was murdered by one of their own doctors, whom they’re now searching for as a Partisan agent.’
‘So I hear.’
‘Even if he didn’t kill Vukić, Topalović must’ve been important to them,’ said Reinhardt, staring out the window. He turned back to Freilinger. ‘I mean, Topalović must have been pretty important if an agent as apparently well placed as Begović was blown just to shut him up.’
‘Hmm,’ said Freilinger, rolling one of his ubiquitous mints in his fingers. He fixed Reinhardt with those blue eyes. ‘Putković seems to have it in his head you had something to do with it.’
Reinhardt was too tired to muster up a protest. ‘I met the doctor last night when I went to police HQ. I –’
‘What were you doing there?’ interrupted Freilinger.
‘I was angry, sir,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘What you told me seemed so wrong. I went to try and talk to Padelin, to…’ He paused, ran a hand over his face, swallowed. ‘It’s not important why I went, I suppose. I couldn’t find Padelin. The doctor escorted me out of the building and walked me as far as the Latin Bridge. That was it.’
‘So it was some sort of mercy killing?’ Reinhardt nodded. ‘Well, so might this be, I suppose.’ Reinhardt straightened in the chair. ‘It’s over. The investigation. I’ve been told to bring it to an end.’
‘By whom, sir?’
‘Staff, up at Banja Luka. It would seem the telephone lines have been buzzing. Some colonel on the commander’s staff seems to have a dim view of us wasting resources, getting in the way of senior officers, distracting attention, sowing confusion within our own forces, upsetting our allies…’ He rolled the mint around the front of his mouth. ‘Seems you’ve stirred up quite the hornet’s nest, Reinhardt.’
Reinhardt nodded once, slowly, closing his eyes as he did so. ‘So it would seem, sir,’ he said quietly.
Freilinger frowned at him, his lips pursing and moving as he swallowed his mint. He drummed his fingers quietly on the table, one after the other, a rolling little beat that came to an abrupt stop. He leaned forward on his elbows, looking hard at him. ‘My God. This has really got to you, hasn’t it?’
Reinhardt opened his mouth to reply and found nothing. Freilinger seemed willing to wait, so he tried again. ‘It has got to me, sir. You’re right. I think… I think it’s because you held the door open to a past that meant something to me. And, for whatever reason, I could not seem to join that past up with this present.’ He looked away, down at the floor, then back. ‘Naïve of me, I know.’ He found he had nothing more to say and gave a twitch of a smile in place of the words that would not come.
‘Reinhardt,’ Freilinger said, after a moment. ‘I’ve no written orders for you yet, but I know you are supposed to stand ready to transfer down to Foča. That’s where they’re setting up the holding area for prisoners, and they’ll want you for interrogations.’ He leaned back. ‘I’m being reassigned. My replacement’s on his way from Belgrade, and I’m off to Italy.’
Reinhardt knew there were consequences here. Implications. For both of them, but he could not think them through, could only feel them, waiting like steps in a road he would have to take. He wondered whether this was what Becker’s parting shot had been about. ‘It was the Feldgendarmerie making the calls,’ Freilinger continued. ‘The colonel at army HQ referred specifically to the commandant of the Feldgendarmerie.’
‘The commandant? He only knows what Becker tells him.’ Reinhardt shifted. ‘Is your transfer because of… this?’
‘It’s been on the cards a while. This has probably sped things up, is all.’ He looked down at something on his desk. ‘Last night, I promised you some information.’ He held up a sheet of paper. ‘Recent transfers of general staff officers to Bosnia in the last six months.’ Freilinger considered it a moment, then held it out to Reinhardt. ‘Not much use to you now, I suppose, but I marked the three officers who served in the USSR.’ Glancing at the paper, Reinhardt saw that it listed about a half dozen names and folded it into his pocket. Freilinger watched him, twisted his lips, and sat back in his chair.
‘Sir, you talk as if it’s over for me. I know that’s what Banja Luka told you, but you seemed to be hinting that I ought to continue until orders come telling me otherwise. Was I wrong about that?’
‘When I referred to written orders, Reinhardt, I indeed only referred to myself. I have none for you. You may very well consider that licence to pursue your inquiries. Or you may not. Perhaps it would be safer not to.’
‘Yes, sir. I ask because I met with someone last night. A Captain Thallberg. Ostensibly an infantry captain, he is GFP. He told me Hendel was as well, as was Krause. They were working for him.’
Freilinger looked back at him. ‘What?’ he said.
If Reinhardt had been in that kind of mood, he might have taken pleasure in the look on Freilinger’s face. One of complete surprise, written blankly across his drawn features. ‘They were GFP. Hendel was on some kind of surveillance mission. He was tasked to it by someone senior, not in country. This Thallberg doesn’t know who, but he’s trying to find out.’
Freilinger seemed to deflate in his chair. His mouth moved. ‘GF…’ He paused, swallowed, passed a hand across his face, then began to rub his hands together under his chin. That slow movement, back and forth and around and around.
‘The GFP are often involved in court martials, aren’t they?’ Freilinger nodded, slowly. ‘Maybe that’s the case here. Maybe Hendel was building up a case against someone.’
‘Do you know who he was after?’
Reinhardt shook his head. ‘I would’ve hoped to find out eventually. But sir, it has to have been the man Vukić was seeing, who was at her house that night. My belief remains the same. She knew something about a senior member of our armed forces. She had revealed all, or part, to Hendel, who was after the same person. How they met, I do not know. Probably at the nightclub. They arranged a confrontation. It went wrong. Probably, she tried to control too much of it and lost the control she sought. He ended up killing both of them, and Krause is on the run. He knows who did this, and he’s terrified.’ He tapped the list in his pocket. ‘With any luck, he’s one of those names you found.’
Freilinger’s eyes followed Reinhardt’s hand, then drifted away. The silence lengthened. ‘Do you think the GFP’s involvement really changes things?’ Reinhardt asked. He knew it did. It was a nonsensical question. It was just that the silence made him suddenly uncomfortable.
The major’s eyes hardened, as if they focused on something, and swung back to Reinhardt. ‘Of course it does. Reinhardt, if the GFP are involved, this isn’t a murder investigation anymore. It’s something else. Who knows what… ? But I do know the stakes will be much higher.’ Freilinger paused, swallowing slowly. ‘And if you felt strongly before about trying to do this right, then you’ll have to fight doubly hard with the GFP. They can do anything.’
‘Well. What do I have to lose?’
‘We always have a lot to lose, Reinhardt. I would have thought someone like you would know better than to make a flippant remark like that.’
Reinhardt flushed. ‘Yes, sir. Will there be anything else?’
Freilinger shook his head, looking away. ‘No. Dismissed.’
At
the door, Reinhardt paused as Freilinger called out to him. ‘Captain. If you will continue with this, with the GFP…’ He paused, the words trailing off.
‘I will be careful, sir,’ replied Reinhardt, stepping into the breach. Freilinger’s expression gave no hint as to whether that was what he had wanted to say. If he felt any frustration, if he felt Reinhardt was being obtuse, he showed no sign of it, and only nodded and looked away.
21
There was a message slip on his desk. Thallberg had called and was waiting to see him at the State House. He put the piece of paper from Freilinger on his desk and scanned the names. He took his own list of officers commanding the units in Schwarz and compared the two. Freilinger had underlined three names as having served in the USSR – Generals Grabenhofen, Eglseer, and von Le Suire. Only Grabenhofen was involved in Schwarz, and the other two were not on Reinhardt’s list. Of the other transfers on Freilinger’s list, one was in command of a unit in Schwarz – General Verhein – but had not served in Russia.
He straightened, stepped back from his desk. This was all getting tangled in his mind, and he needed to straighten it out. He glanced at the message slip again and saw that Thallberg had called about twenty minutes ago. He should take some time, try to make some sense of what he had now. He telephoned downstairs, ordering them to find Claussen and send him up, then shut the door and sat at his desk, flattening his map of the case onto it. He began adding information – GFP next to Hendel’s and Krause’s names. Pausing a moment, he linked Becker’s name to the empty circle of the suspect. He glanced at the list Freilinger had given him, and then the list of commanders, and back at his map. For now, he refrained from listing those names. If anyone else came across the map, it would look very bad, especially as he had nothing to substantiate it all with. Underneath the suspect’s circle he wrote senior, and then USSR, linking USSR to Vukić.
There was a knock at the door. ‘One moment,’ he called. Reinhardt folded up the map, grabbed the keys to the kübelwagen, and opened the door. Claussen stood in the hallway. Reinhardt tossed him the keys and they went back downstairs and out to the car.
‘Where to, sir?’
‘State House,’ Reinhardt answered. He settled into his normal position, back wedged between the seat and the door as Claussen took the car out onto Kvaternik, then pulled it around the Rathaus and back down King Aleksander Street. Reinhardt watched the streets go by on the right, the old Ottoman buildings giving way to the drab fronts the Austrians had put up until the car pulled in front of the pillared portico of the State House. A soldier on duty lifted a striped barrier and let Claussen park in the street down the side of the building. Next to the staff cars already there, black and shiny with pennants on their hoods, the kübelwagen with its dull grey panels looked like a fish out of water.
The foyer inside was gloomy and heavy. A woman in an army uniform directed Reinhardt to follow the stairs up to the second floor. He passed the offices of the small German civilian security administration that had accompanied the army into Yugoslavia. It was mostly officers from the Gestapo, with a few from the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazis’ own security service. They were mostly here to work with the Ustaše, oversee the treatment meted out to undesirables – Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies, chiefly – and to keep an eye on the ideological behaviour of the Germans. Unlike in Poland and the USSR, though, the Germans had not brought the full panoply of their bureaucracy and administration with them, and the civilians, even the powerful ones with senior Party ranks, were kept pretty much in check by the army. Bosnia was supposed to be part of Croatia, after all, an allied state. So no Reich governorate for Yugoslavia and so much less squabbling between civilians, soldiers, and SS; much less administrative chaos; and corruption at a manageable scale. And there were no death squads on the scale of the Einsatzgrüppen in Russia, the special action units, the rumours of which were enough to chill the blood. Mass killings were their forte: Jews, the politically undesirable, unwanted populations, resistance fighters… No, for that here they had the Ustaše, who managed very well.
Reinhardt stared at the Geheime Feldpolizei sign on the frosted glass of a door, at the blocky Gothic lettering, remembering other signs like it on other doors in Berlin. He had hated those names, bastard amalgams of police and political, but now he just felt detached from it. Was this what it meant to get old and jaded? he wondered. Men walked briskly past and around him as he stood there. Just as at the Abwehr offices, Reinhardt felt untouched by it all. Finally, he knocked and went in without waiting for an answer.
A corporal, tall and wiry in all ill-fitting uniform and with a fuzz of iron grey hair, was just opening the door for him and came to attention. Thallberg was on the telephone, standing in his shirtsleeves by a window that looked out over the road outside and across to a small park with a couple of Ottoman-era tombstones standing crookedly among the trees. His jacket hung over the back of a chair, and his equipment was strewn around an otherwise largely empty office. A camp bed with crumpled sheets stood against one wall. He gestured Reinhardt to take a seat as he listened to the person on the other line. He snapped a terse ‘Yes’, then put the phone down on his desk and stood looking down at Reinhardt with his hands on his hips.
‘So, how are you this morning?’
Reinhardt nodded as he took a cigarette from his packet. ‘Fine,’ he said, offering the pack to Thallberg, who shook his head. Maybe it was the setting, seeing him in an office in a building like this. Despite his general sense of undress, Thallberg seemed sharper, more competent.
‘I’m hearing things,’ said Thallberg, as he pulled back a chair and sat down. He put his booted feet up on the desk and crossed his ankles, scrubbing his hands through his unkempt blond hair. ‘Things have gone a bit pear-shaped over at police HQ?’
Reinhardt nodded again around a mouthful of smoke. ‘Their suspect’s dead,’ he replied. ‘But seeing as whoever he was didn’t do it, it still leaves us pretty much nowhere.’
Thallberg grunted. ‘And no sign of Krause.’
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
‘Telling.’ He picked up a mug and peered into it. ‘You want some coffee? It’s pretty good here.’ He spooned coffee into two cups and handed them to the corporal. ‘That’ll be all for now, Beike, thank you,’ he said to him. ‘I talked to the Feldgendarmerie this morning and warned them off him.’
‘Who did you talk to?’ Reinhardt looked at the door through which the corporal had gone. ‘And who was that?’
‘That was Corporal Beike. My right-hand man, if I’m honest. Memory like an encyclopedia. I trust him. And I talked to the Feldgendarmerie commandant.’
‘Colonel Lewinski?’ Thallberg nodded. Reinhardt pursed his lips, holding Thallberg’s eyes. ‘Lewinski’s old-school Prussian. A gentleman. Also wholly ineffectual. Major Becker’s the one who runs things around here, and he’s the one you’ve got to worry about.’
‘You and he have a history together, correct?’ Thallberg asked, echoing Claussen’s words yesterday.
Reinhardt reminded himself not to underestimate this man who seemed to have so many facts about his own past. ‘Becker and I were in Kripo together. He was a bad cop. A dirty one. He hasn’t changed. He runs the Feldgendarmerie here pretty much as he likes.’
‘Becker? Well… he’s a bit squirrelly, but he’s harmless enough.’
Reinhardt shook his head. ‘He’s dirty. Whoever killed Hendel has got Becker looking for Krause. Like I told you last night, if he finds him before you do…’
‘Fine,’ said Thallberg, shortly. ‘I’ll deal with Becker if I have to.’ He seemed to dismiss it from his mind, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk. Reinhardt wanted to stress the point: Becker was not someone you could just turn your back on like that, but he let it go. ‘So, what do we have, then?’
‘You’re supposed to have a list for me?’
‘Right.’ Thallberg pulled a folde
r towards himself and took a piece of paper from it. ‘Two, in fact. Transfers. And officers attending that planning conference. I had Beike working on that transfer list last night.’ He passed it across the table. He yawned and ran a hand over his face, stubble rasping beneath his palm.
Reinhardt looked at the transfer list, squinting past the smoke that spiralled up from his cigarette. Like Freilinger’s, it was only a half dozen names long. He ran his eyes down it, considering. He did not want to take out Freilinger’s to compare it. Something held him back.
There was a knock at the door, and a soldier came in with two mugs of coffee. ‘There’s only condensed milk. Sugar’s there,’ pointed Thallberg as he sat back in his chair with his mug held in two hands. ‘I had a look through Hendel’s files. These here,’ he said, pointing to a pile of paperwork. ‘There’s gaps. Nothing on what he was doing here.’
‘Is that usual? I mean, I don’t know how you GFP chaps work.’
‘You mean secret handshakes and Teutonic rituals? Silver daggers and oaths by moonlight?’ Thallberg smirked. ‘No, we leave that kind of crap to the SS. And no, it’s not usual. He was supposed to keep files and records. Just like any policeman.’
‘You’ve got nothing as to what he was on?’
Thallberg chewed his lip, that same small gesture he had used last night. ‘Nothing.’ Reinhardt could not tell whether he was lying.
‘So? What do you think?’
Reinhardt looked at Thallberg’s second list, which was longer. He folded them and put them on the table. He spooned sugar into his coffee. ‘I think it’s not much good to me anymore.’ Thallberg raised his eyebrows in query. ‘Freilinger told me this morning the investigation’s being halted. I’m supposed to stand ready to report for new duties.’ He sipped the coffee. ‘He’s being transferred to Italy.’
The Man from Berlin Page 22
