‘The same for the others, please?’
Kruger went through the list one by one, adding a commanding officer next to a unit that Reinhardt jotted down into his book. 1st Mountain, Lieutenant General Walter Stettner Ritter von Grabenhofen. 7th SS Prinz Eugen, Obergruppenfuhrer Arthur Phleps, handing over command to Brigadefuhrer Karl Reichsritter von Oberkamp on 15th May. 118th Jager Division, Lieutenant General Josef Kubler. 121st Jager Division, Lieutenant General Paul Verhein commanding.
Reinhardt knew that no self-respecting general would be without his staff officers, and he would have liked to be able to note them down as well. They probably would also have been accompanied to the conference by their intelligence officers, and likely by some of their senior regimental and battalion commanders, but that was asking for too much. This was a good start, but before he went any further he would have to know whether this really was an avenue worth pursuing. shy;Reinhardt stared at his list as Kruger looked over his shoulder. What he really needed was to cross-reference this with service history, to find out who among them had served in Russia.
Kruger snorted. ‘Good luck with that. I don’t have that in shy;formation.’
Reinhardt froze. He had not realised he had spoken out loud. ‘Who might?’ asked Reinhardt, trying to keep his voice normal.
‘Paymaster might.’
Reinhardt sighed long and softly. ‘A lot of bureaucracy involved in getting anything out of them.’
‘Unless you owe them money,’ quipped Kruger, as he began putting his files away. He came back to his desk and paused with his hands on another. ‘I’m sorry, Captain. I’m not sure how else I can help you.’
‘That’s fine, you’ve been very helpful.’
Kruger removed his pince-nez, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘What’s an officer’s Russian service history to do with your updating your files, anyway?’
Reinhardt froze, feeling a cold sweat suddenly break out down his back, knowing his mouth had run away with him. He looked at his list a moment longer, then raised his eyes to Kruger, forcing the cold he felt inside out of his gaze. ‘Need-to-know basis, Kruger. Need-to-know.’
‘Right,’ said Kruger with a lopsided grin as he put his file away. ‘Sorry.’
‘No harm done. And thanks again,’ said Reinhardt, through a parched mouth. Reinhardt walked back upstairs to his office, the cold sweat that had risen after Kruger’s question drying away.
13
Back in his office, Reinhardt tossed his notebook on his desk and paced around his room. The bell at the cathedral began to toll, and he counted off the bells to midday. As the tolling faded away, a muezzin’s call sounded from somewhere to the east, then another, and another. He decided to give Claussen another five or ten minutes to find Hueber, and then he would go for lunch. He thought a moment, then pulled a pencil and paper towards him and began to sketch out what he had so far on the case. He wrote Vukic in the centre of a blank page, and Hendel next to it. Then he jotted down what they knew, which was next to nothing – the car, and the cigarettes, what they knew of Vukic’s life, what he knew of Hendel’s duties. He wrote murderer, and stared at it. Then added a pair of parentheses to the end of murderer and added an s. More than likely there was more than one of them.
More names appeared on the paper – Freilinger’s, Padelin’s, shy;Becker’s – and the various organisations they served – the army, the Ustase, the police, the Feldgendarmerie. Jelic, almost the last person they knew of who had seen Vukic alive. The map took shape, lines connecting names, sundry information jotted down next to names. Motives, such as he assumed them. Facts, such as he knew them. Avenues of investigation… Padelin’s choice of a politically expedient suspect. Reinhardt’s own investigation.
His stomach growled. Glancing at his watch, he saw that nearly three quarters of an hour had gone by while he worked and wrote. He folded the map into his breast pocket and drove out through the heavy midday heat to the barracks. The officers’ mess was a long, narrow room, overlooking the Miljacka and the strip of garden in which the band had played last night, and mercifully cool. Tables with white cloths were spread across most of the space, with a bar at one end of the room and a corner where a motley collection of armchairs and settees had been drawn up into a smoking and reading area. A swastika hung on the wall above the entrance, with a portrait of the Fuhrer to the right. The walls were covered in unit plaques and other memorabilia. The place stank of cigarettes and pork and beer.
Most of the officers were done eating, but a sizable crowd was holding up the bar, and a group of senior officers Reinhardt did not recognise, mostly colonels it seemed, had colonised the reading area under a fog of smoke. Reinhardt chose an unoccupied table by the window and sat with his back to the bar, hanging his cap off his chair. A waiter appeared with a menu under one arm and a decanter of water in his other hand.
‘Good afternoon, Captain,’ the waiter murmured as he poured Reinhardt a glass of water.
‘Afternoon, Kurt,’ replied Reinhardt. ‘What is it today, then?’
‘What is it ever in this city, Captain?’ the waiter replied, brushing away an almost imperceptible crease in the white tablecloth. ‘Pork chops. But we do have some runner beans. Quite fresh.’
‘Fine, Kurt. Thank you.’
‘Thank you, Captain,’ replied the waiter, inclining his head. shy;Reinhardt watched him go, remembering out of the blue the time that Kurt had confided in him he had once waited tables at Medved’s, the Russian restaurant in Berlin. ‘Certain standards,’ he had said, ‘once learned, can never be unlearned. No matter where one finds oneself.’ He laughed to himself at the trite irony of a waiter’s reminiscence and attempt to maintain his own standards, and the parallel with his own situation. His own standards. There was a blast of laughter behind him, and he instinctively hunched his shoulders up and his head down and away from the noise. He felt wound so tight.
His meal arrived, and Reinhardt ate it quietly and methodically, sitting back when he was done. Kurt removed his empty plate and replaced it with coffee and a small dish of rice pudding. Reinhardt drank the coffee, which was awful watery stuff compared to what could still be had in the city, and left the pudding. He took the map from his pocket and spread it on the tablecloth, staring at the blank area where his investigation should be.
He put his elbows on the table and held the map in two hands, running the paper between thumbs and forefingers. Reinhardt glanced quickly at this watch, then stood. It was half past one. Time for one drink, and then he had to find Claussen and see what had been done about translating the pathology report.
There was still a clutch of officers at the bar, and a group of colonels in the armchairs. Reinhardt walked to the end of the bar, ordered slivovitz, and spread his map out again. A couple of the officers looked over at him. He nodded to them cordially, not wanting any contact or conversation. One of them, a solid-looking man with ash-blond hair, looked at him a little longer than the others.
Looking at his map, he saw two options. The first was to investigate Hendel’s death by following up in the city, with the people who knew him or might have seen him, or who knew Vukic, but he had neither time nor resources for that, and in any case his remit was to assist the Sarajevo police while concentrating on Hendel’s death. The second was to pursue his investigation within the army, following up on the information that Vukic frequented officers of senior rank, and try to find where Hendel fitted into that.
‘I beg your pardon, but we’ve met, have we not?’
Reinhardt started, swallowing his slivovitz a little too quickly and coughing. He put his glass down and his hand over his map, and turned to face the man standing next to him. It was the officer who had looked longest at him, a lieutenant colonel in the black uniform of the panzer troops. He had cropped blond hair and cheeks made florid from drinking. Reinhardt came to attention with his heels together. The officer was rather young for his rank and, as Reinhardt looked at him, he did seem rather familiar, standing there smiling and with a half-drunk glass of beer in his hand.