‘Just a minute,’ said Stolic, coming forward. As they had last night, his cheeks bore a high flush. Ascher half raised a hand to stop him, but the Standartenfuhrer ignored it. ‘Just a bloody minute. You say you are investigating a murder that occurred in and around the same place and time that some here were present? And you told us nothing of this? What, you tried to insinuate yourself into our confidence? To sound us out?’ Stolic’s face became further suffused, his eyes becoming even paler as a result, and his voice rising as he spoke. He took a step, then another, until he loomed over Reinhardt. All conversation stopped, all heads turned. To Reinhardt, they were nothing but a row of pale ovals in his periphery. ‘Just who the hell do you think you are, Captain?’ In the face of Stolic’s aggression, Reinhardt froze. Coming to attention was all he could do, directing his gaze to a point just behind Stolic’s head, ignoring the blaze of humiliation that roared through him.
‘A captain of the Abwehr, apparently,’ said Ascher. ‘An ex- shy;policeman. Of course he was sounding you out. He was sounding all of us out.’
‘Is this true, Reinhardt?’ grated Faber.
Reinhardt had not been the focus of so many men who could do him harm in a long time. ‘No, sir,’ he said, with as much confidence as he could muster, keeping his eyes front and focused on nothing. He had wanted to sound them out, but God knew the way things were progressing it would have been a terrible idea. It was bad enough now, when he had not even meant for any of it to come out. ‘If you will recall, sir, I came upon your invitation.’
‘That’s true,’ said Faber, half to himself, half to Stolic.
‘Don’t be so bloody gullible, Faber,’ Stolic snarled. His teeth, shy;Reinhardt suddenly noticed, were in bad shape, and the man’s breath was pinched, acidic. ‘The man’s a policeman. Deception’s in his blood. I’ll bet he planned it all.’ He stepped back, raking him up and down with his eyes, then swinging them around to look over the others. ‘I caught him sniffing around the Ragusa last night. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to spring him on us?’ The officers shifted and muttered, looking left and right, most of them looking to Faber and Lehmann. Faber looked hard at the tank officer, who went red with embarrassment.
‘Who is your superior, Reinhardt?’ demanded Ascher.
‘Major Freilinger, sir.’
‘Good. He will be hearing from me about this.’
‘Now,’ said Stolic, stabbing Reinhardt’s chest with a finger, right on his Iron Cross, and then pointing over his shoulder. ‘Fuck off.’
14
Reinhardt forced himself to walk back through the halls to the courtyard. He looked straight ahead, praying he would meet no one he knew, but as he approached the door to the parking lot, he paused; checking that there was no one behind him, he collapsed backwards against the wall, feeling his knees trembling as if they were about to give way on him. He breathed deeply, a slow, ragged, shuddering breath. ‘Gregor,’ he whispered. ‘Gregor, why couldn’t you have left it alone?’
Voices had him standing straight, tugging at the hem of his tunic as he walked briskly back out into the courtyard, into the blaze of heat and light to his car. He drove back to his office, where he found Claussen and Hueber waiting.
‘Hueber has that translation you were asking for,’ said Claussen as they followed Reinhardt into his office.
Reinhardt sat in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. ‘Proceed, Corporal,’ he said, tightly.
Hueber shuffled some sheets in his hand, glancing down at a page of handwritten notes, and began reading. It was a fairly standard pathology report. Dates, times, places, findings of the autopsy, which, it seemed, barely qualified as one as the pathologist had stopped at the knife wounds and gone no further. The corporal finished, saw Reinhardt staring hard at him, and blushed.
‘You said something about the wounds and the knife. Go over it again.’
‘Sir. Err… the wounds. Average depth three inches. Deepest penetration six and a half inches. Errr… Wounds characteristic of a very sharp, heavy knife with a bottom edge curving up to a point, and a top edge equally sharp along at least two inches, but showing a pronounced… err… hook? A hook shape? A curve…’ The corporal trailed off. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m not at all… sure of the words. That seems to be what they are describing.’
‘A hook shape?’ repeated Reinhardt.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What kind of a knife is hook-shaped… ?’
Hueber went red, reading over the report, and then his notes. ‘Sorry, sir. It doesn’t say.’
‘Don’t worry, son. It’s not your fault.’ He sighed. ‘Nothing much, eh?’ Claussen nodded in agreement. ‘Very well. Thank you, Hueber. You are dismissed. Type those notes up for me.’
The corporal left, and Reinhardt sighed, suddenly deflated. He slumped on his elbows. Looking down past his knee, he could see the drawer where he kept that bottle of slivovitz. The temptation was strong, but he stood instead, walking over to look at the big wall map. His eyes ran back and forth between Ilidza and Sarajevo, and then over and up around the thread of the city’s streets. The whole place was so small, but wound in and built up upon itself. He put his hand on the map. With his thumb on Ilidza, he could almost stretch his little finger out to Sarajevo, and when he put his palm on the map it almost obliterated the city. And yet to get anywhere, it seemed you had to turn and turn and turn again…
‘Captain Reinhardt?’ Reinhardt looked up and away from the map at the tone in Claussen’s voice. ‘Is something wrong, sir?’
Reinhardt paused, then related the incident in the bar. Woodenly. No expression. At the end of it, Claussen just stared at him and shook his head slightly.
‘What does that mean?’ hissed Reinhardt through tight lips, life surging back into his voice. ‘I didn’t ask to get dragged into entertaining a bunch of colonels like that.’
‘No, sir,’ Claussen replied, imperturbable in the face of Reinhardt’s anger. What was it about sergeants and their ability to do that to him? Brauer had had the same effect on him. Like a father staring down a guilty son, although Reinhardt was sure he had never managed that same stare with Friedrich. Perhaps, if he had been able to, things between them might have been different. ‘But you didn’t walk away from it, either.’ The two of them stared at each other, but it was Claussen who stepped back. ‘Will you be needing anything else for the time being, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Reinhardt. ‘Find out who Peter Krause was. Is. I’ve no rank, but I’m guessing he was a lieutenant like Hendel. You are dismissed for now.’
With Claussen gone, Reinhardt had nothing to occupy his mind while he waited for the inevitable summons from Freilinger. He unfolded his map, stared at it, put it away, unfolded it again, and added Stolic to the names on it, linking it to Vukic’s, thinking of the way Dragan described Stolic and his knife. He checked in on Maier and Weninger. He found Weninger this time, a small and taciturn man, who pointed at Hendel’s sorted files with a pencil and had his head back down in his own material as Reinhardt walked out with them back up to his office. There was a lot going on in the building. Frantic last-minute arrangements for Schwarz, mostly. Reinhardt passed through it, feeling detached, alone.
Hendel’s material was not much, Reinhardt thought, as he looked at the stack of paper and cardboard standing in the middle of his desk, but he should have looked at it earlier himself. He checked that it was ordered chronologically and then began to go through the files one after the other, starting with Hendel’s activity log. Hendel’s work was internal army security. He had made log entries fairly regularly upon arrival in Sarajevo at the end of December, but they had begun to tail off around the beginning of March. Flipping through the log, he saw no references to Vukic. He went back through the log more carefully, looking for euphemisms, initials, some kind of internal code, and found nothing.