Reinhardt struggled home on the trains, a slow and lurching journey on the S-bahn from Schmargendorf to Templehof, and the U-bahn one stop north to Paradestrasse. The illuminated airport was visible to his right as he went north, a wide arc that parceled the huge crescent of the landing apron into splintered islands of light. When he came up out of the U-bahn, he could hear the hum and drone of an aircraft in the darkness somewhere behind him as he paced out his long, hesitant walk through streets lit and lined by a furtive sliver of moon, each step paced out to the slow burn of his knee. The power was out in the district, and there were only drifts of light from window frames, ripples from candles and open flames. It was very cold, and he was so caught up in measuring his steps, in the slow roll of the day through his mind, that he saw the car parked outside his house too late.
He hesitated when he saw it, and he stopped when he saw the Red Army plates. The doors opened and men slipped out. He felt a gelid stab of fear, thought to step backward, froze again at the whisper of a footstep behind him. A man was there, a man he had not seen or heard. His face was blank, the low brim of a cap tracing a flowing line of shadow across his brows.
“Ti, idi siuda.” The words were Russian, the voice lazy, as if it knew no circumstance under which it might be disobeyed. All German men knew what those words meant, and what it might mean to disobey them, and so Reinhardt walked slowly over to the car where two men waited for him, removing his hat as he went. It felt right to do it, but it felt wrong, and he squirmed around a momentary hitch of loathing, but whether of himself or these men he did not know. He refused himself the opportunity to wonder. He needed to concentrate.
“Rukhi verkh,” one of them ordered, and Reinhardt raised his hands and was frisked by the man behind him, feeling the man’s breath intimate on his neck, fetid with the stench of makhorka, that tobacco the Russians all seemed to smoke and, for just a second, the faintest scrape of an unshaven chin across his nape. It jolted him, then froze him still. Only his eyes could move, and so he ran them over what he could see, trying to make himself think.
The men wore dark uniforms, dull gleams of metal on epaulettes and collars. Belts slanted across their chests, big pistols were holstered at their hips, their tunics flared out over the tops of their wide trousers, which were tucked into knee-high boots. Rules and regulations tumbled through Reinhardt’s mind, were swept away, but he knew any member of the Allied occupation forces had access to any sector at any time, so long as they were in uniform. As these men were.
The man searching him found his warrant disc and handed it to one of the others who looked at it with vague disinterest. The man turned the disk in his hands, showed it to the other who shrugged.
“Nu ladno,” the man behind him said.
The man who had his disk pointed at the house.
“Zaxhodi,” he said. “Inside,” he repeated, in German. “Go inside.”
Reinhardt felt the chill as soon as he stepped inside the house. The man prodded him in the back, and he walked forward through the muffled quiet into the kitchen. It was empty, but there were cups and a pot of honey on the table, and a uniform cap, lying upside down. A stir of wind pointed to the door to the garden. It was ajar, but suddenly washed open in a ripple of reflected light. Mrs. Meissner walked straight-backed into the kitchen, followed by another Soviet, an officer with a major’s insignia on his epaulettes.
“It is wonderful work, the way you have sheltered them from the winter,” the officer was saying, as he shut the door. “My grandmother would keep her bees by . . .” He stopped as he saw Reinhardt.
The soldier behind Reinhardt put a heavy hand on his shoulder, stopping him, then he leaned past and placed Reinhardt’s warrant disc on the table. He spoke briefly, a few words in Russian. The officer nodded, the faintest movement of his head, then gestured the man out with his eyes.
Under the buttery glow of the lantern that hung over the table, Mrs. Meissner sat very still and stiff in her chair. The officer was not a young man. He had a face creased and lined with wrinkles, webs of them to either side of his eyes, deep channels that grooved both sides of his nose, down to the corners of his lips. One side of his mouth was ridged by scars, as if he had been wounded and never properly healed, and the skin seemed to sag inward, just a little. From the look of the pale lines across his high forehead, he frowned often, and his hair was little more than a gray fringe around his ears and round the back of his head. He spun Reinhardt’s disc around with one finger, looking at it, then his mouth firmed and he lifted his head. He looked at Reinhardt a moment, then smiled, but a smile that spread no further than a tautening of his lips. He turned courteously to Meissner. He was not a tall man, at least a head shorter than Reinhardt, but he had a deep breadth of chest.
“Mrs. Meissner, thank you for the tea. And for the honey. It was delicious. It reminds me of the honey my grandmother would serve from the hives she kept.” Meissner inclined her head, graciously. “I congratulate you for keeping your bees alive through this terrible winter. I wonder, though, if you would be so kind as to give me and the captain some privacy.”
She nodded, the light rippling over the silver of her hair, and she took the hand he offered her to rise stiffly to her feet. Reinhardt watched her go, saw the blankness in her expression as she fixed him momentarily with her eyes when she passed behind the officer. Then she was gone, her steps slow and halting up the wooden stairs, and in the silence she left behind, Reinhardt suddenly heard the clock in the front room ticking heavily.
The officer watched Meissner leave, and then smiled at Reinhardt, a stretch of his lips with no glimpse of his teeth, but it changed his face, as if a younger man had parted the lines and creases life had left on it to peer out. “You have to admire people like her. Ladies of a certain generation and class. You would think nothing could ruffle them or cause them to break stride. They take what life gives them, and adapt. I had a look outside, in her garden. She is remarkably self-sufficient. Some vegetables. Which I see you have protected like a World War One trench! Beehives. Herbs. The mint tea is particularly good,” he said, lifting his mug and taking a sip. “Truly, she reminds me of my own grandmother. Nothing ever stopped her.
“She told me she used to be a director at the Decorative Arts. An amazing place. I preferred the Pergamon, myself. Or the Tell Halaf! It made me want to be an archaeologist and go running off to Syria to dig through the sands.” The officer’s voice was low, quite deep, and his German was smooth, almost unaccented, and somehow archaic, as if he had learned it a long time ago, in a different time and place.
“You are probably wondering what’s going on, Captain. Let me put you at ease, first. I am not here to take you away. My name is Skokov. I am a major with the Soviet MGB. You are, of course, familiar with the MGB.”
“Soviet intelligence,” Reinhardt said around a dry tongue.
“‘State security,’ rather,” corrected Skokov, with another tight smile. Reinhardt said nothing as the major enjoyed another sip of his mint tea, but he could not help but note the man’s manners. Somewhat anachronistic in what he knew of Soviet political policemen, and either a show or real, but in both cases, disconcerting.
“Tell me, Captain, why did you go to Friedrichshain today?”
Reinhardt blinked, swallowed. “It was part of a murder investigation.”
Skokov smiled, sipped from his tea, the scars shining along his lips. “I have heard about your investigation, but I want to hear it from you too. It always sounds better coming from one closely involved, and I never tire of hearing a good story.” His eyes glittered, and they seemed to be saying “don’t bother hiding anything; I’ll know.”
“I think . . . I think that the man I am pursuing has been killing for some time. One of his victims may have been a man who lived in the Soviet sector.”
“This ‘Stucker,’ correct? A former air force pilot.”
“Yes,” said Reinhardt, shaken at how fast information had percolated up to this man. “That is why I was there today.”
“The others? All pilots as well? All from the same squadron?”
“The same Group,” Reinhardt corrected him. Skokov’s eyebrows rose, guttering the skin across his forehead, and Reinhardt cursed himself, covering his fear up with an air of perplexity. “I am confused, Major. What would a Soviet state security officer want with a murder investigation?”
Skokov did not immediately answer, instead lifting a small leather satchel onto the table, and taking from it a package wrapped in greaseproof paper and a bottle of clear fluid. “A good story requires good food. And good food requires good drink. Do you have two glasses, Captain?” Reinhardt brought two mismatched glasses to the table, as Skokov unwrapped the paper exposing a length of sausage, and half a loaf of black bread. “You pour, please,” he said, as he began to slice the sausage, and then two slices of the bread. Reinhardt twisted the cork out of the bottle, and then poured two measures into the glasses. It was vodka, he smelled. Skokov lifted his glass.
“To our meeting and our mutual understanding. Za vstrechu i vzaimnoye ponimaniye.” Skokov inclined his head, a light of expectation in his eyes beneath the furrows across his brows.
“Na zdorovie,” managed Reinhardt.
Skokov nodded, smiling. He breathed out to one side, and knocked his drink back.
Very good vodka, Reinhardt realized as he took a drink, feeling the alcohol swell through his mouth and then chase itself down his throat.
“Pozhaluysta. Please,” said Skokov, taking a piece of bread and sniffing it. “You were saying you are confused, Captain,” he continued, popping a slice of sausage almost delicately into his mouth. Reinhardt’s eyes were hooked by a sudden glimpse of a row of silver teeth in Skokov’s mouth along the side that seemed sunken in, before he concentrated on his own food. The sausage was very good, some kind of smoked beef, he thought, better and stronger than anything he had had in a long time. “That would be because you are being left in the dark by your English and American friends. And so tell me. Tell me your story of this investigation.”
“I have two pilots—Noell and Zuleger—who have been murdered in similar ways, within days of each other. Noell was murdered after attending some kind of event, or function. Zuleger was murdered before Noell, and maybe before going to the same function. I found an invitation at his apartment, to an address in Grunewald.”
Reinhardt paused. There had been a note at the station, from one of the secretaries. The police in Grunewald had gone to the address as he asked and found an abandoned property. A dead end, maybe, but Reinhardt knew he would eventually have to go himself and check. He had never liked leaving aspects of his inquiries to others, and he liked it less now, in this environment, with this police force.
“I have a third pilot—Stucker—murdered last year. All three of them were in the same fighter Group, IV./JG56. At least two of them—Zuleger and Stucker—were in the same unit when it was redesignated as a night-fighter group, III./NJG64. The Night Hawks. There is a link between them and a man called Carlsen. I found him dead at the same address as Noell. All four of them were murdered in the same fashion.”
“This business of sand and water, correct?”
Reinhardt blinked his surprise back, covering it with a sip of vodka. “Yes. There is a matter of water found in Noell’s mouth, and sand in Zuleger’s.”
“Stucker’s autopsy report said nothing of the kind?”
“It was inconclusive. And there is also the precision of the blows that all but killed them.”
“Go on,” Skokov encouraged him, slicing off more sausage.
“There is a potential fifth victim in Hamburg. This man—Haber—had also served in the air force.”
“But not in either of these squadrons,” said Skokov.
It was terrifying how much this man knew. “Groups. Not squadrons. No, we don’t know that, yet. But the body was found in a similar state to the ones we found here. Only his murderer forced him to ingest water.”
“Water? Like Noell? How interesting. A toast, Captain!”
“You’re longer dead than you are alive.”
Skokov laughed, a glitter of teeth along one side of his mouth. He huffed his breath out and they drank. He poured again, sniffed his bread and ate it, reflectively, then sharpened his eyes on Reinhardt. “There are other names. Tell me of Gieb and Stresemann. Tell me of Markworth and Whelan. Tell me,” he grinned, a wet metal glisten, “of Collingridge.”