They did need to talk, though. Finishing his coffee and lighting cigarettes for them both, Reinhardt spread a map on the hood of the kubelwagen. The wind lifted one edge, and he weighed it down with the watch. ‘Have you ever driven down to Foca? No? Two possible roads there from Sarajevo. South, through Trnovo, Dobro Polje, then east to Miljevina. Or east, then south through Rogatica and Gorazde. That’s the road we’re on. It’s a fairly straight run through Rogatica’ – he pointed to the map southeast of their position – ‘to Gorazde’ – shy;farther south still – ‘and then along the Drina to Foca. Schwarz is aimed at the Partisans, here,’ he said, his finger circling the map south of Foca, over Mount Sutjeska. ‘But this is where we might have trouble. Brod.’ He pointed to a section on the map where the Drina, flowing north, made a sharp turn east towards Foca. Brod was where the southern and eastern roads met. A crossroads. If word of them had gone out, it would find them at Brod. ‘I don’t know of any way around it…’ He trailed off, looking at the map. ‘Nothing for it but to get there as fast as we can and then… play it by ear, I suppose,’ he finished, tossing the cigarette butt away, picking up the Williamson.
‘A favour, sir?’ Claussen motioned at the watch. ‘What’s the story with that? Never seen you with it before.’
Reinhardt ran his fingers over the inscription, giving himself time to surmount the reluctance within to talk of it. Only Brauer and Meissner knew the story. And poor old Isidor Rosen, but if anyone deserved to hear it now, it was Claussen. ‘It was that same battle in 1918 I got the Cross. That British redoubt. We fought a game of cat-and-mouse with the Tommies through the trenches for three days. I killed their officer, but not before he gave me this,’ he said, pointing at his knee, ‘and ended my war. Before he died, he gave me the watch and… asked me to give it back to his father if I survived the war.’ He paused, remembering suddenly, vividly, the viscous slide of mud, the latrine stench, the spatter of men across the bottom of the trenches. ‘I put it down to things a dying man says. But then the war ended and what he said stayed with me. I wrote to his father. We met. Spoke of his son. I offered him back the watch, but he said to keep it.’ Which he had, the watch taking on a significance that, after all this time, even Reinhardt himself was not sure of anymore. Only that it reminded him of a chance meeting of kindred spirits, a short space of time when he could be something other than the creature he was turning into, and because that Englishman was the last man he killed in that war, and that was worth remembering.
He weighed it in his hand, hesitating, then pulled the file from his backpack. ‘This is what it’s about. The evidence against Verhein.’ He explained the case, outlining what they knew and suspected, Claussen’s eyes moving from the file, to him, and back.
‘You can’t leave that lying around,’ Claussen said when Reinhardt had finished. He took a crowbar from the tool kit and levered the spare tyre away from its rim. ‘Under here,’ he said, voice strained. Reinhardt pushed and shoved the file under the tyre, against the inner tube. When it was done, they shared a blank look, a shared complicity that needed no words.
They set off again, descending steeply down the side of the mountain until the road emerged onto the flats, and Claussen opened the throttle and put the car on the road that arrowed straight across a wide, empty prairie, where the light undulated over a wash of grass runnelled winter pale and spring green. Gradually the foothills ahead emerged out of the haze, and the flats ended, the road sliding its way down into a deep canyon, down to where Rogatica nestled in its valley. The road took them past a destroyed hamlet, past an Orthodox church with its steeple blown off, the remains of its walls skirted in rubble, and through scarred neighbourhoods that showed the signs of much fighting, until they found the German headquarters.
A Feldgendarmerie officer informed Reinhardt that the road to Gorazde was backed up with traffic, and movement was slow around the bridge over the Praca. As they drove slowly back out, the town seemed sunk under a slough of decay and abandonment. Bullet holes pocked the walls; many houses were destroyed, and more burned out. Charcoal scrawls on some of the walls showed crosses, Catholic and Orthodox. Once, a Star of David on a house where the doors and windows gaped open. What few people he saw seemed stooped over, whatever their age, their eyes elsewhere. There were Serbs among them, mostly old women in black headscarves and black dresses who walked with a bandy-legged shuffle. Reinhardt could feel the fear in the town. As in the lands around Sarajevo, Rogatica’s Serbs had mostly been deported, massacred, or fled to the hills.
Leaving Rogatica, the road wound through a gorge between high cliffs of blunt rock. It was cold, the sun shut out by the height of the rock walls. A wind blew down the steep cut in the mountains, bringing with it a dark, damp chill that seemed to push them on their way until, at length, the mountains pulled apart and the vista suddenly opened out. The light changed, as if a gauze had been snatched away, and they drove along the lathered shores of a river, the Praca rushing east out of the mountains, a froth of water that foamed and streamed away to the east towards Visegrad. The sun shone brightly on the brilliant green of the water, and on the other side thickly forested hills rose straight from the river. A military bridge spanned the Praca, the river backing and curling around its pillars, and that was their road south.
An Italian convoy was stopped in front of the bridge, heavy trucks with their engines off and their drivers idling around the vehicles. ‘Road down to Gorazde’s too narrow, sir,’ said a Feldgendarme, saluting Reinhardt as he asked what was going on. ‘Medical convoy’s coming up from Gorazde, so they’ve got priority. Won’t be long now, I would think.’
‘Time for a break,’ said Reinhardt, walking back to Claussen. He stretched as Claussen began checking the car. Huddled around the spire of a mosque was a hamlet tucked up against the sides of the cliff that faced out over the water. A small herd of goats picked at the grass on the steep shoulders of the road. An old lady had a small fire going, pots hanging over and in the flames. Reinhardt sorted through the supplies on the backseat.
‘Do we have any coffee?’
‘Pack on the floor,’ replied Claussen, checking the kubelwagen’s tyres, a Mokri clamped in the corner of his mouth.
‘You want one?’
‘Not for me, sir, thank you.’
Reinhardt found coffee and sugar and walked up to the lady. She backed away from him, staring up at him from the stoop in her back. He offered the tins to her. ‘Coffee? Can you make me some coffee?’
By dint of gesture and a few words, he seemed to make her understand, and she fetched a small metal pot and began to make the coffee in the traditional way he had come to appreciate. She handed it to him in a chipped mug, and he lit a cigarette as he stood by her fire, staring around him. This was a truly beautiful spot, with the river, the plunge of the mountains. A man could be happy here, raising a family.
Something caught his eye on the far shore, and he stared at it a moment, his eyes squinting around a curl of smoke from his cigarette, before realizing it was a burned-out house. Where there was one, there were usually more, and his eyes found them eventually, in their ones and twos, scattered across the face of the mountain. Someone had gone to quite some trouble to burn those people out, the houses standing blackened and empty, like skulls.