In the cold outside, Reinhardt paused to light a cigarette. He offered one to Weber, but the detective only sneered at Reinhardt’s Luckies and lit a cigarette of his own, shifting his weight from foot to foot in his excitement. Reinhardt cupped a hand around his match at a sudden swirl of wind through the factory’s courtyard.
“What did you make of that, Weber?”
“I think we left a lot undone and unsaid,” Weber replied, as Reinhardt unfolded the piece of paper Weber had given him in von Vollmer’s office. “What is that, anyway? And don’t say ‘it’s an address’ because I know it’s an address.”
“Well, it’s an address,” Reinhardt said with equanimity, unable to resist that little dig. “I found an address at Zuleger’s apartment, on an invitation. I wanted to compare it with von Vollmer’s.”
“Why?”
“To eliminate possibilities, Weber. It’s police work. Basic police work.”
“You hoped it would match.”
“I didn’t ‘hope,’ Weber. That’s not how this works.”
“There’s more going on here, isn’t there?” Weber’s voice was excited.
“Like what?”
“Like . . . like political . . . stuff. That literature you found. That manifesto. There’s ex–air force and ex-who-knows-who-else in there. They’re not supposed to be gathering together.”
“They’re working, Weber. Not plotting to bring back the Third Reich.”
“Says you.”
“The laws forbid the formation by veterans of any association or organization with a military or militaristic character . . .”
“Like what we just saw in there?”
“. . . but they say nothing about who a businessman can hire or not.”
“Oh, listen to yourself, Reinhardt. You’re a bloody apologist for them. It’s true what they say, isn’t it? You officer types all stick together and watch each other’s backs. What do you do for fun? Reminisce about the bloody Kaiser and how to bring back yesterday’s politics?”
“Why are you so excited about the politics? And what’s that you mentioned about political police?” Weber gave an angry sigh as he pulled on his cigarette. “Weber, what did I tell you about keeping your mouth shut in there?” Weber colored, the red rising unpleasantly up his neck. “Did you have to be so unpleasant?”
“I have to ask you, Reinhardt,” Weber said, his nose twisting as if at the scent of something unpleasant, “where your loyalties lie? Unpleasant?” He seemed to swell up, all teenage anger with no clear outlet for whatever moved him except Reinhardt, and he stepped up close, poking a finger into his chest. “Unpleasant, you say? To men like von Vollmer? It was men like him,” he spat, poking Reinhardt again, “that got us into the war.”
“Will you calm down, Weber,” Reinhardt said quietly, but it only seemed to infuriate Weber further. Instead of poking him, Weber closed a white-knuckled fist into Reinhardt’s coat and pushed him step-by-grudging-step back against the wall. As he did so, Weber seemed to grow, as if through the shame that stung the back of Reinhardt’s eyes at being manhandled thus, manhandled by a mere boy, Weber became more focused, a proclamation of the harm men could do—that a man could do—given the wrong means in the right circumstances. Reinhardt felt a shiver of fear, suppressing the instinct to slap Weber’s hand away, but the humiliation was worse. Humiliation at being manhandled around by someone like Weber, but aware—so aware—that the man in front of him was not just some young man, barely out of adolescence. Despite the sanction imposed upon him by Ganz, Weber was someone. Moreover, he was something. Reinhardt was honest enough to admit he was scared of Weber’s callow strength, and through him of Ganz, and of his blatant opportunism. And through Ganz . . . Behind Ganz there was the communist-dominated hierarchy of Berlin’s police, and Reinhardt was aware, painfully aware, of his place in that. Unbidden, his tongue began to stroke the gap in his teeth.
“These are new times, Reinhardt,” Weber hissed, his breath acid with bad tobacco.
“What color are you, Weber?” Reinhardt cast it out as if to throw Weber offtrack, unbalance him, but Weber frowned, his face untwisting itself. “Are you brown? The Nazis were brown. Are you red? Are you old enough to understand what that means? Are you one of those who changes his colors? There are plenty of them around. You’d be in good company.”
“Fuck off, Reinhardt.”
“And where are you from? I can’t place your accent. You’re not from Berlin. And you’re not from Saxony. There’s a lot of Saxons sitting in the Soviet sector, starting with Ulbricht at the top. Are you one of them? Are you one of those that came back with the Red Army?”
“Listen, Captain Crow,” Weber snarled, both fists coming up to grip Reinhardt’s coat, thrusting hard against him. “You need to watch your mouth. Never mind my history. What about yours? I’ll bet there are parts of yours that might not stand up to scrutiny either.”
“‘Either’?” repeated Reinhardt. Weber went white, then red, a flush that subsumed the splotched archipelago of his face into a wash of blood. His hands tightened on Reinhardt, twisting. Without thinking, Reinhardt lifted his hands to cover Weber’s fists, clenched his thumbs hard against the ends of the other man’s little fingers where they curled into his palms. Weber frowned a moment, then his face creased with pain and he tried to pull himself back, but Reinhardt held him tight, held him tighter until, just for a moment, he felt something deep inside, a sudden serpentlike coiling. As if something old and hoary had turned over, giving him a glimpse of a darker nature, mud-smeared and with the mad rolling eye of an animal gone wild. Reinhardt squeezed tighter still, frightened as always by that glimpse inside himself, of how he imagined and internalized what he could do as something awful rising from ruined ground, then released the pressure. Weber pulled his hands away as if burned, stumbling back.
“We’re finished here. I’m going to go back to the morgue to see Professor Endres. You can come with me. But if not, you can visit this place,” Reinhardt said, holding out the invitation he had found at Zuleger’s apartment. His eyes were flat, as if daring Weber to come back at him, and effectively ignoring the other man’s display of aggression.
Weber blinked, flexing his hands against his pain, looked down at the paper. His face twitched, and he shook his head. “You bloody go. I’m going back in there for a look around.”
“Suit yourself,” Reinhardt said, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground. “Get some dates. Squadron postings. Times those pilots were all together. Something factual,” he finished, walking away, feeling Weber’s furrowed astonishment as he did so, but he had neither the time nor the patience for him, and right then he could not have cared less for Ganz’s inevitable anger at his having left Weber behind. Weber was a big boy. He could look after himself.
Reinhardt walked quickly out of the factory, pain stabbing his knee with every step as if it could feel his intention to try and outpace his own frustration and was warning him against it. He waited for what seemed like a long time for a train, smoking, cursing Ganz for not giving him a vehicle. When one finally came, he squeezed himself into it, worming through the press of people until he found a corner to wedge himself into and take the weight off his leg, letting his mind go blank, feeling it as the only way he could calm himself down.
His mind stilled, but it was a viscous stillness, torpid, heavy with introspection, thoughts adrift and lost somewhere between here and there, between now and then. Between the Berlin he had known, and the one that stumbled before him through the clouded glass of the train’s windows. Between the man he had been, and the man he was now. Always, he thought, always this seemed to come back to haunt him. The fact he could not be the man he wanted to be. Time and circumstance never seemed to permit it, and he never seemed to find a way to fit himself into where and when he was.
The war was over, but it would not leave him alone. He was not the only one feeling that, he knew, and he felt no temptation to self-pity, but he could not help a mounting fury and frustration at how he, an individual, was being subsumed into the mass of those men who had fought the war so badly, so awfully, so criminally. Thinking of reflections again, thinking of the times as a policeman when he had held up the truth of a suspect’s actions only for that person to reject it, he knew men could not be prodded to truth. They had to come to it themselves, and he could not see truth in the eyes of the people all around him.
He had once thought of reflections. On a mountainside in Bosnia, listening to Partisans as they sang the night in and watched the sun set across a horizon of knuckled mountains, he had thought of reflections, the truths they could sometimes give back. He had thought back then there would be a reckoning when the war ended. Every man would have to stand face-to-face with judgment of some kind, and often the hardest judgment came from the face you saw reflected back at you every day. A face you saw reflected everywhere, in mirrors and windows, in metal and water, sharp-edged or sunken, chopped or blurred. The splintered facets of yourself that stared back at you from a thousand pairs of eyes. A face you saw reflected within you.
Reflections were everywhere, he had thought then, but he knew better now. Berlin was closed to him, shattered in on itself, and its walls gaped blind. Its people were closed to him, and to themselves. They reflected nothing, except the stunned labor of living. The city reflected nothing except the damage men had done it.