Thallberg grinned. ‘Sounds like good old-fashioned detective work to me.’
Reinhardt almost smiled back. ‘It is. It’s slow. Methodical. Sometimes it pays off.’
‘I can do that. You used to be a big shot in Kripo, didn’t you?’ Reinhardt blinked at him, taken aback by the question. Thallberg grinned at his discomfort. ‘I’ve read your file. Gregor Sebastian Reinhardt. One of the best criminal inspectors in the Alexanderplatz. A half dozen big crooks to your name. We liked the look of you for the GFP at one point. That’s how I know. Brauer was your partner, wasn’t he? You two went through the first war together. Eastern Front. Western Front. Iron Cross First Class. At Amiens, right? 1918? You got the first- and second-class Crosses the same day, didn’t you?’ he said, answering his own question. Thallberg looked at him, his eyes bright and inquisitive in the white patch of clean skin his goggles had left. ‘Quite something. How does Brauer take being a sergeant again? You were both inspectors, weren’t you? Now here’s you, a captain, and him, a sergeant.’
Reinhardt sat back down and reached for his glass. He looked up at Thallberg as he took a careful sip from it and put it back down. ‘You’re right about Kripo.’ He felt a flush of anger, remembering his conversation with Claussen about being an NCO. Christ, was it only yesterday? He acknowledged nothing else. Nothing about the east in 1916, the transfer to the stormtroopers and the Western Front in 1917, the attacks of 1918 when they seemed to have victory in their grasp, the wound that saw him hospitalised for the last months of the war and almost cost him his leg, the riotous years following it. To do so, it seemed, was an admission that it was fine to distill a man’s life down to a few choice nouns, but it grated on him that he was allowing this Captain Thallberg to draw his own conclusions about him. ‘As to how Master Sergeant Brauer feels, you’d have to ask him.’ His voice seemed to come from far away.
Thallberg grinned that boyish grin. ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow,’ he said, and with that he was gone.
Reinhardt stayed in his chair a while longer after Thallberg had gone. The man was something of a whirlwind, for sure. He was certainly different from most of the officers around here, and Reinhardt could not but feel strangely attracted to the thought of working with someone like him. As GFP, he would be of invaluable assistance, as long as Reinhardt could manage him and for as long as the GFP saw value in a partnership. The GFP could do pretty much anything. Go anywhere. Be anyone. Wear any uniform, or none at all. Use whatever they needed, when they needed it. What was that English expression… ? Holding a tiger by the tail… ?
All of a sudden, he realised he was shaking, and a spasm ran through his stomach. He glanced quickly around the bar, but no one was paying him any attention, and he folded his arms tightly, pressing his hands to his sides. He hunched around the blaze of stress and confusion and frustration that burned in the pit of his belly and drew a long, ragged breath through his clenched teeth. It was coming up to midnight, and he realised how tired he was and how much he had absorbed that day.
‘Enough,’ he said to himself. ‘Enough.’ When he felt steady, he left and crossed the courtyard over to his wing and took the stairs up to his second-floor room. With a trembling hand he pushed the door open to the bathroom and pulled on the light. The bulb flickered on, steadying slowly. Showers to the left, behind a wall of cracked white tiles. Toilet stalls to the right, the toilets mere squats, holes with footrests to either side. A line of sinks down the middle of the room with mirrors in front of them.
His stomach cramped, and he winced. He hunched over a sink, but nothing came up. He ran water and splashed his face, wetting the back of his neck, and drank his fill. Settling his fists, he stared at himself in the dull mirror. He looked dreadful. His face was drawn and lined, a drab fuzz of stubble furring his cheeks, his eyes sunk far back and the whites yellow in the vapid glow of the bulb.
He felt the bile rising again and hung his head over the sink, breathing hoarsely through his nose, waiting. Nothing came up, but he felt something. His skin began to crawl. He lifted his head, sniffing the air like an animal, and found it. That acrid tang. The same one he had smelled outside Vukic’s house. He drew his pistol as he lurched around, his eyes stabbing along the line of stalls. One by one, he pushed the doors open onto nothing, only the stained round hole in the floor, until he came to the end, to the one he often used. There was a window there, there was light during the day, and the smell of men’s waste and the carbolic slop the cleaners used was not quite so strong. He pushed the door open. The smell was there. There was a sprinkling of ash down the angle of floor and wall, and there, floating in the water at the bottom of the hole, a finger’s length of what looked like cardboard. He fished it out with two fingers. A cardboard filter. A Belomorkanal papirosa.
He backed hurriedly out, hastening back to his room. Feeling in his pocket for his key he saw something. Felt it, more than saw it, he realised, as he leaned over to look at his door. There was just light enough to show him the several small, bright strikes of metal to either side of the keyhole. Glints, where something had been put into the keyhole, and moved around. Someone had tried to force his door. Perhaps had succeeded.
He told himself whoever it was, they were gone now. He unlocked the door and pushed it open with his foot, sweeping the room with his pistol. The room was empty and, as far as he could see in the light coming in the window, had not been disturbed. Taking a quick glance up and down the corridor again, he went inside and locked the door, shoving his ladderback chair up under the door handle.
Whatever strength had held him together until then, it began to slough away like sand in the tide. He lurched across the room and fumbled open the drawer on the little table by his bed, lifting out Carolin’s picture in its silver frame. He clutched it to his chest and slid down into the corner opposite the door, drawing his knees up, and, dragging the air into his lungs, he willed the panic, and the stress, and all the pent-up emotions of the day to pass. But as much as he wished for it, he dreaded the sleep that would follow, and the dream that now haunted him, nearly every night.
It is a cool day for October, but his head feels cooked inside his helmet, and his shirt inside the battledress tunic is stuck to his back with sweat. He stands by the side of the road where the Feldgendarmerie have ordered them to stop. Smoke broods over the town; there is the rattle and clatter of gunfire. Here, there, women huddle in desperate groups bounded by the anguished lines of their backs and shoulders, fists clenched at their mouths.
He walks away from where Freilinger argues with the Feld shy;gendarmerie. He turns a corner, another. Doors stand open. A length of fabric hangs torn out of a smashed shutter. The smell of burning is strong. Faces twitch at him from the darkness within houses, from behind the sheen of a window, from behind the folds of a curtain. Another corner, then another, and there is a field, the hassocks stiff with frost, the ground hard and tufted. There are soldiers, and lines of men and boys, just schoolboys with, here and there, the taller figures of their teachers. They are ordered into the field, class by class, the younger ones hand in hand, some crying, some walking bravely. Most just stare at the back of the person in front of them with the fixed resignation of those already dead.
And there, a moment that comes perhaps once in a lifetime. A pivot, around which a life can turn. A line of children, a row of soldiers, people moving, a swirl in the crowd, and two boys at the end of the line are left alone. Brothers, twins perhaps, they stand small and lost and wide-eyed in each other’s arms as the crowd eddies around them. He sees them, and they him, and he has but to reach out to them and he can take them away from here. He knows it, they know it, he sees himself doing it – he feels himself doing it – but the boys are gone, taken away. The moment is past, a fading outline of possibilities.