“Reinhardt! Wait.”
Markworth caught up with him as Reinhardt walked shakily down the stairs. He was covered in a cold sweat, and he did not know what had just happened, nor really what he had tried to achieve.
“Listen, don’t mind Whelan so much. He’s a bit sensitive. He’s a good enough sort, but he’s not cut out for the rough and tumble.”
“And you are?” Reinhardt wished he could have called the words back, but Markworth seemed to pay them no offense.
“If you like. More so than him, in any case. Listen, I once asked if you wanted a drink. How about now?”
“I would like to,” Reinhardt sighed. He did. He needed one, and he liked Markworth, despite not wanting to. The Englishman felt solid. Dependable. “I’m sorry, though, I’ve no time.”
“You do. You must. Just come with me. All right?”
He followed Markworth down and out, the Englishman taking the stairs and then the floor in even, decisive steps. Even as he limped heavily, it was as if nothing would stop him, as if no obstacle would hold him back or sidetrack him. Reinhardt followed him down the clear paths along the centers of a tangle of streets behind the Kammergericht, between slides of rubble to a building that had been cracked open like an egg. There was a door that led down to an underground cellar. Inside was a low-ceilinged bar, all brick arches and even a few prints and paintings hanging on the wall. A massive wooden slab, thickly varnished, stretched along one side. A barman nodded to Markworth, who raised two fingers, and then pointed Reinhardt to a table under a narrow window crosshatched with metal bars.
They sat quietly, smoking, until their drinks arrived, two tall glasses of clear gold liquid beneath a tier of foam. The barman nodded cordially to Markworth, resting a hand on his shoulder a moment. The Englishman knocked his glass against Reinhardt’s.
“Life. The only blessing wickedness possesses,” he said, and drank deeply. The toast seemed misplaced coming from him. It sounded more like something a Russian would say, Reinhardt thought, remembering Skokov, as he drank as well. It was Berliner Weisse, he found to his surprise, properly mixed with caraway schnapps. He had not had anything like this in years, memories flooding back as the drink swelled the contours of his mouth and flowed down his throat.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Markworth smiled.
“A couple of Kassler’s pork ribs to go with it, and it would be perfect,” Reinhardt said with appreciation.
“None of them to be had, I’m afraid. It is hard to believe this place survived, but there you are. You are welcome anytime, Reinhardt, but keep the place quiet. I do not want half the Berlin Kripo leaning their elbows on the bar. Listen, I owe you some answers,” Markworth continued quietly, his German slow and measured. “About Carlsen. But first, a question. Something you said at the station before, when we saw each other last, and again just now in Whelan’s office, does not make sense to me. You said Carlsen was looking at the same things as Skokov?”
“I found Carlsen had been in the WASt. Looking into information on the pilots being murdered. You didn’t know?”
“I did not,” Markworth said, his face blank. He blinked his eyes, and his face cleared. “It explains . . . it maybe helps to explain some things.”
“I hear that Carlsen spent time in East Berlin. Did you know that?” Markworth nodded. “Do you know what he was doing there?”
“Intellectual diversion. That’s the way he put it.”
“Do you know who he was talking to?”
Markworth shook his head, his mouth turning down. “Not really. You think he met someone there involved in his death?”
“I don’t know,” said Reinhardt, thinking about Skokov. “I don’t know enough about him.”
“You asked me, the first day we met, at the police station, how I knew about Carlsen. How I was on his trail so fast. I told you, he was my friend. You know he worked in the ACC with Whelan on military affairs. He was a specialist in what they’re calling ‘international humanitarian law.’ It’s all the rage now. They’re busy signing treaties at this new United Nations, hoping new laws will stop wars like the one we just had ever happening again.”
“That’s a worthy enough ambition, isn’t it?” Reinhardt murmured, taking another long drink.
“Wishful thinking is what it is, Reinhardt. But Carlsen believed in it. I suppose he had to. Whelan told you Carlsen escaped to England, just before the war? His family were murdered in one of the camps. He could have let that define who he was, and who the Germans were, but he did not. He . . . he was able to get over and past it. He was fair and open. He took people for what they were. He . . .” Markworth paused, as if struggling for the right words. “He condemned where condemnation was merited. He believed passionately in the law. He was a better man than me in that way, given what he had had to endure. Mistrust within the British ranks, something worse than death from the Germans if he was caught, but he persevered. He had to show the British that not all Germans were SS or brutes, and he had to show the Germans that their conquerors were men of honor, who would not act like barbarians once the war was won, who would apportion blame to the individual and not tar the race with the stain of the Nazis. In short, he was an honorable man. His honor was something precious, but it was dangerous. It left him defenseless against those with less honor than him, or against those for whom honor had no place anymore,” Markworth said, sadly.
“But he had two weaknesses, Reinhardt. Drink, and a need to rescue people. From themselves. From their circumstances. He found Gieb some time ago. She had survived the camp where his parents were killed, I think. Or something like that. She was perfect for him. Someone to be saved, even if she didn’t want saving. Or if people like Stresemann didn’t get in his way.”
“Where did you and Carlsen meet?”
“Here. We became good friends. You wouldn’t have thought it to see us. Me, I’m a bit of a thug, as you’ve no doubt guessed.” Markworth smiled to take the sting out of his own words. “Carlsen was . . . a boy, really, despite what he had been through. He was . . . he always seemed a bit lost. Wide-eyed and blinking. He needed looking after, and more often than not I ended up doing it.”
“Did he fight in the war?”
“Holland and Germany.”
“You?”
“France. Then North Africa. Then up through Italy.”
“What service?”
“Take a look at me, Reinhardt,” Markworth grinned. “Compact. Solid. Don’t take up much space.”
“Tanks?”
Markworth lifted his glass. “First Armored.”
“The Rhinos, correct?” Reinhardt asked, lifted his glass back. Markworth grinned and nodded.
“That’s where I got the hand,” Markworth said, holding up his right hand and pointing at the scars along the side and over the back of his fist. “Too many hours spent next to an overheated cannon.”
“And the limp?”
“I tore the ligaments in my knee getting out of my tank after it was hit. End of my war, right there.”
“I have a bad knee too,” Reinhardt said suddenly. “First war. British spade.” Why had he suddenly offered that up?
Markworth winced in sympathy. “Here’s to dodgy knees then, and the men they carry.”
They drank. “Now what are you doing?”
“His Majesty’s Service, Reinhardt.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Does that not sound grand enough?” Markworth grinned again. “I am a liaison officer between Bad Oeynhausen and the British staff in the Kammergericht and in Berlin. I make sure the uniforms and the civilians talk to each other.”
“Where are you from?”
Markworth raised his eyebrows over his beer as he drank. “Place called Northwood. Near London.”
“Where’d your German come from?”
“Here and there. A few holidays when I was a boy. A few years at university reading German philosophy. A year in Heidelberg. What? What?”
“Sorry,” smiled Reinhardt. “You just don’t seem the philosophizing type.”
“You know, I hear that a lot.”
“‘Life, the only blessing wickedness possesses.’”
“You studied the classics?”
“My father. He was partial to Schiller.”
“Your turn then.”
“I was in North Africa too.”
Markworth nodded as he drank. “I know. Tell me something I don’t. What kind of war did you have?”
There was something in Markworth’s eyes, some challenge to the truth. If he knew about North Africa, he likely knew Reinhardt had been an Abwehr officer, and a Feldjäeger. That was not what the Englishman was pushing at. “There was a time I didn’t know what kind of war I was having. I only knew, it wasn’t my war. I kept telling myself that. And I tried to do the least I could to get through it. It wasn’t that war held secrets for me. I’d fought on the Eastern Front and been a stormtrooper in the first war. You didn’t fight in that one?” Markworth shook his head “That was a bad one. But it seemed . . . honest? Does that make sense? It doesn’t always make sense to me. But this one . . . I’d never seen . . . never imagined . . . anything like it. I saw the camps around Munich. Christ, what we did, I’ll never understand it as long as I live . . .” he whispered.
“And from what I know now, what I saw and heard was as nothing compared to what was going on in the East.” Markworth listened expressionlessly, but attentively. “Come 1943, and after tours in Norway and France, and Yugoslavia and North Africa, I was on the edge of suicide, in complete despair at what my life had come to, when I was given a lifeline. I was back in Yugoslavia, in Sarajevo. A German officer and a journalist, a woman, had been murdered. I was asked to investigate.”
He talked on, of his redemption in his own eyes in a forest on a Bosnian mountain, his determination to make this war his. Reinhardt kept talking, and the years of frustration rolled by, until Sarajevo came back, and he heard rumors of Germans going missing and stumbled across a conspiracy to save something from the war’s ruin. He talked of how he had dismantled an escape route for Ustaše and other German collaborators. He talked of Partisans, of the city of Sarajevo in the folds of its encircling hills, of his abiding love and respect for that benighted land of Yugoslavia. But of the love he had found himself, of the memory of Suzana Vukić’s ash-blonde hair and the determined tilt to her eyes, he kept to himself.
“We call them ‘ratlines’ now,” Markworth said, wiping a glitter of beer from his lip. “You took apart a ratline . . . Bloody well done, sir.”
A second round of molles arrived, and Reinhardt talked on. It felt liberating, somehow, to talk. To get so much out. He had talked with no one of the whole experience of the war since it ended. Collingridge knew some, Brauer knew more, Mrs. Meissner knew a little. No one knew all of it, and it was not that Reinhardt was baring his soul to Markworth, but he felt he had found someone to whom he could talk.
“The German resistance,” Markworth said, when the words tailed off, seemingly of their own accord, and Reinhardt found he felt good. Lighter, freer than he had in a long time. Markworth twisted his mouth into his beer. “You have to wish and wonder why there weren’t more of them.”
“People were scared, Markworth. It’s lonely stepping out of line. The odds are terribly stacked against you. And there’s that feeling, that question, that tomorrow, maybe the day after, things will get better.”
“Or someone else will take care of it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“There’s that too.”
“The famous German eleventh commandment,” Markworth murmured.
“‘One must always take that view of a matter which the good Lord commands,’” Reinhardt quoted. He had not heard that one in a long time, but the good Lord had too often in German history been a king or some other despot.
They drank in silence.
“What happened to us, Reinhardt? What were we thinking to let things get so out of hand?”
“‘Us,’ Markworth?” Reinhardt asked, wondering if he had misheard.
“‘Us,’ Reinhardt. People. Germans and Englishmen. Americans and Frenchmen. Poles and Russians. The whole sorry damn lot of us. Human beings. Apes clothed in velvet. I’m led to believe we were and still are all in it together. At least, that’s what Carlsen used to say. That’s why he put such hopes in his laws and treaties and his United Nations.”
“I don’t know what happened to us, Markworth. ‘Us’ is too big a word, I think. I know what happened to me. I was afraid. And I kept hoping someone else would take care of things. And someone did, except it was not the right person.”
“And so here we all are . . .” Markworth said, peering into his glass as if for inspiration.
Reinhardt said nothing, reluctant even to move. He felt stilled with an unexpected shame, as if his very skin had shrunk around the taut lines of his bones.
“It bothers me, Reinhardt,” Markworth said, after a moment. “That we may have pressured the police to look in the wrong places, and for the wrong people. When it seems to me we should have been supporting you.” Reinhardt stayed quiet. “I was sure it was because of Stresemann. The man was a . . . toe rag,” Markworth spat, in English.
Reinhardt blinked. “Markworth, how do you know all this?”
“I told you,” Markworth answered, an irritated toss to his head. “Carlsen was my friend. I looked after him as well as I could. He came across Stresemann through Gieb. Are you sure the same man killed Carlsen and all these others? I want to believe it, if only because I want Carlsen’s killer found.”
“It’s the same man, I know it.”
“Not a group?”
Reinhardt thought of Kausch and his men, discarded the thought. They would not be so precise, those men, nor so consistent. Besides, they were trapped in Berlin. They could not have that reach, to leave bodies all across the length of Germany.
“You’re sure . . . you’re sure the same man is doing the killing?”
“They’re being killed the same way. But I believe there’s only one man. Murder is an intimate business. Killers hardly ever work together.”
“Except in wartime.”
Reinhardt lifted his glass in acknowledgment. “Except in wartime.”
“And you seem to be saying there’s a North African connection to these murders.”
“All the pilots murdered have, so far as I can tell, one thing in common. They served at the same time in North Africa. And several of them were involved in some kind of incident involving a soldier called Leyser.”
“That’s it?”
“Not much, is it?”
“It’s a damn sight more than your colleagues ever came up with following up on Stresemann,” Markworth muttered darkly. “So how can I help, Reinhardt? I’m going to be honest, I’m concerned about these rumors of British involvement. I won’t get in your way. I won’t hide what I find, but I’ll want to control that aspect. You understand? You want me to follow up in Bad Oeynhausen? Or with these veterans? The ones who seem to have started it in the first place? What do you think of their story? Someone, allegedly a Brit, convinces them to set up a veterans’ association by harking back to past wrongdoings? Bit of a tall tale, isn’t it?”
“There’s just enough truth in it to be plausible. But listen,” Reinhardt said, sliding his beer glass to one side, sifting through the barrage of questions Markworth had fired at him. “If you really want to help, you can do two things. You can indeed get in touch with Bad Oeynhausen and find out what you can there. And can you try to get into the Berlin Document Center? There’s no way they’ll let someone like me in. I pretty much know what that experimental unit was doing, but I need to know who was in it.”
“Why?”
“For starters, they may be in danger, Markworth.”
Markworth pursed his mouth into his beer and murmured something, some expletive in English. “What’s it to me, Reinhardt? Sounds like some of these men deserved what they got.”
“No one deserves what they got, Markworth. Being held down, and then asphyxiated?”
Markworth shrugged as he finished his beer. “You remind me of Carlsen. We’d always argue about things like that.”
“Sounds like I would’ve liked him.”
Markworth smiled, a little lopsided grin as a couple of elderly Germans came down into the cellar and sat at the bar. “I’ll see what I can do for the center, and I’ll be up in Bad Oeynhausen directly. I’m due to rotate back in a couple of days anyway. What do you think about the murderer? This man Leyser?”
“I don’t know it’s him. He’s just a name that’s come up in the investigation. He was in North Africa at the same time as the pilots being murdered, mentioned in some kind of incident in Tobruk, fighting with several of the pilots. After that, nothing. But that’s the thing. Nothing. He vanishes. Almost no trace of him in the WASt, but I know he survived the war. He was in the WASt not later than the beginning of last year.”
“So? What does that tell you?”
“That he’s alive. That he’s apparently working for the Allies. But how, I don’t know.”
“What about Leyser the man?”
Reinhardt pushed his beer glass with one finger. “He’s quite something. From what I can tell he’s . . . methodical. Patient. Clever. He’s efficient. He plans ahead. He’s manipulative. He’s a chameleon. He can be anyone, anywhere.”
“Meaning?”
“So far, I’ve found him impersonating some kind of British liaison officer in the WASt, and I’ve found him in a high-end hotel, and in a working-class neighborhood and, apparently, convincing von Vollmer to set up a veterans’ association and—again, if it’s him—he’s been operating a long time across the breadth of Germany.” Of Leyser’s visit to Meissner’s house—because Reinhardt was convinced it had been him—he said nothing.
“Quite the character. What was he doing in the WASt?”
“Removing all trace of his existence.”
“Not all, obviously.” Reinhardt frowned. “You still found his name.”
“In an obscure place. He coerced an archivist into redacting his records, but the man left one mention—in a list of prisoners for exchange between the British and the Germans—and there was another mention neither of them thought to look for in the logbook of the squadron in which all these pilots served.”
“What’s next, then?”
“I go into the Soviet zone to speak to this Gareis.”
Markworth’s eyebrows lowered, and he tilted his head to one side. “But why the Soviet zone? Can’t this archivist help? And what about von Vollmer and his crowd? They met this Leyser character.”
“Von Vollmer and Bochmann, his former executive officer, could describe him, but neither of them met Leyser during the war. The archivist could identify him, possibly, but there’s no proof the man he might identify is Leyser. There’s only Gareis, who actually met him during the war. Fought with him, actually. And I need to know what sparked this all off back then. Leyser is killing pilots, but I don’t know why. Gareis could tell me.”
“Be careful, Reinhardt. It’s not so bad as it used to be out there, but still bad enough. If anything goes wrong, you’re on your own.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“There’s careful, and there’s cautious, Reinhardt,” Markworth said as he shrugged into his coat. “Be sure you know the difference when the time comes.”
It was darker outside on the street, the sky a luminous line up above the crazed scrawl of rooftops and walls. “Don’t worry about Whelan, all right? I’ll smooth things over with him. He’s a good man. He used to be a High Court judge, so he’s a bit sensitive about his reputation. He probably feels you’ve slandered him or disrespected his authority.” Markworth took in a long breath, then held his hand out to Reinhardt. “I’m sorry I doubted you. Or misjudged you.”
“It’s all right, Markworth,” Reinhardt replied, taken aback. He could not quite figure this man out. Blunt, outspoken, quietly competent, solid, and reassuring. All that, but there was a streak of danger in him, a ruthless aspect of his character, and Reinhardt realized that, in many ways, Markworth reminded him of himself. Maybe not now, and Reinhardt was not sure he had ever given off that air of solidity, but he remembered how cold and clinical he had been about life after the first war. Was that what Reinhardt saw in Markworth? Was that what called out to him?
“You’ll be in touch? Especially if you hear more about this infamous British connection?” Markworth asked, as an American staff car came to a stop, and an officer with a colonel’s insignia stepped out onto the pavement, followed by a statuesque blonde. The officer looked the two of them up and down, as if expecting some kind of greeting or acknowledgment. The blonde and Reinhardt pegged each other for German immediately, and she studiously ignored him. Markworth and Reinhardt exchanged glances as they went past, down into the beer cellar.
“Fraternization, eh?” Reinhardt mused.
“One rule for some, another for others,” Markworth said, and if he recognized the irony in the situation—that here, an American colonel had just taken a German woman into a bar while Carlsen had gotten himself killed trying to do his best for a broken-down prostitute—he said nothing.
Reinhardt nodded. “Markworth,” he said. Markworth paused as he made to walk away. “You said Carlsen felt compelled to rescue people from themselves.” Markworth nodded. “Did he feel that with you? Was he compelled to rescue you from something?”
Markworth looked at him, then gave a tight smile and simply turned away, turning up the collar of his coat as he limped back up the road.
—
From the cellar, Reinhardt headed north, picking up Potsdamstrasse and the U-bahn station at Bulowstrasse. At Gleisdreieck he changed to the B line and rode the train to Hallesches Tor. He walked slowly through the ruined circle of Belle Allianz Platz, intending to head toward the place he used to live with Carolin, but his steps drew him more toward the Landwehr. He walked along its length, hearing it whisper quietly between its sculpted banks, the water backing and gurgling here and there where rock and stone had fallen down into it and disturbed the tranquillity of its flow. He smoked a cigarette, looking down into the canal. The water glistened past, a swirled invitation, but to what he did not know.
Reinhardt tossed the butt into the canal and walked the little way to the ruins of his apartment. He was not sure why he felt the need to come. Perhaps it was the sense, the risk, he might never be back. Markworth was right. The Soviet zone was not a safe place for a German man, but he knew he needed to go. Either that, or bring Gareis here, to Berlin, but he did not know how much time that might take, or if it would be possible, or even if he wanted to leave the arrangements for that in Skokov’s hands.
At the entrance to the building, he flicked on his flashlight, the light breaking and angling across the wreckage inside. He found his little spot and sat, rubbing his knee, emptying his mind, calming himself. He sat there a long while, just letting himself be. One or two people hurried down the street. In the darkness someone laughed, and a wheel crunched through patches of rubble and grit as a man pushed a small barrow.
He did not feel as calm as he had hoped, that sense of peace eluding him. It felt like it had those few times he had felt watched, those few times when he knew, now, that Friedrich had been there. He ran the flashlight’s beam around, thinking perhaps that Leena or one of her children might have followed him here, but saw nothing.
Eventually he stirred himself, and made his careful way back to the street, skipping awkwardly over the rubble and hurting his knee, and heading back toward the U-bahn. There was almost no light, and the city was quiet, only a soft crunch of wheels behind him. He glanced back, seeing a man pushing a barrow. He walked on a few more steps, and then felt a flood of cold come surging up and through him, drenching him with a sudden gush of perspiration.
He stopped dead in the street.
Behind him, the wheels ran, then stopped as well.
Reinhardt turned.
He could not make the man out, clearly. He wore a flat cap, what looked like a quilted jacket, ill-fitting trousers. Of the face, Reinhardt could make out nothing, but he could feel the eyes, staring hard at him out of the dark, and something more. A crackle of recognition.
The man straightened up. He seemed to change, become larger, and the street seemed to dim, the man’s outline silhouetted in darkness. Reinhardt was suddenly very scared, his mouth dry as a bone, but he managed to work one word out of it as the man took a step toward him, his arms straight by his sides.
“Leyser?”
The man stopped. The pressure of those eyes increased.
Leyser—it had to be him, Reinhardt thought—took another step forward, another. He walked stiffly, as though he went through each movement with great care, Reinhardt noted, remembering the description the children had given him that very first night. Reinhardt felt rooted to the spot, pinned there by a will not his own. The man came closer and, remembering it suddenly, Reinhardt switched on his flashlight and aimed it at the man.
Leyser froze, one arm coming up to shield his face. Finding the strength somewhere deep inside, Reinhardt took one step toward him.
The man backed away.
Reinhardt managed another step, a third, and Brauer stepped out of the night behind the man. Leyser froze a moment, then swiveled his stance so he had both of them in his sight.
“Leyser?” Reinhardt croaked.
There was the echo of footsteps, and a laugh floated out of the dark. A couple walked into the street, arm in arm. Leyser turned and simply walked away, leaning into his stride, and the quilting on his jacket lengthening and folding into the night. Brauer took a step toward him, but Leyser suddenly shifted low, his weight skimming over the road, and he seemed to slide inside Brauer’s sudden desperate attempt to ward him off. Leyser’s shoulders curved, contracted, and Reinhardt saw Leyser’s elbow scythe across Brauer’s face, heard the second blow he struck into Brauer’s chest. Reinhardt cried out as his friend cannoned backward, sprawling legs and arms akimbo, and his head rattling on the street.
Reinhardt shouted again, pushed past the pain in his knee. Behind him, the woman laughed again, the sound incongruous in this street of ruins, cutting across the feral nature of this confrontation. Reinhardt shambled past Brauer’s body, his eyes desperate for any sign he lived, and there was an abrupt dislocation as his mind wrenched up a memory . . .
—
. . . . of dashing across No-Man’s Land, men falling left and right, but stopping for none of them. A friend plowed into the ground ahead, arcing around the bow of his agony. His friend’s face contorted into a bloodied wail as he clawed a hand across Reinhardt’s leg but he shook him off, hurling himself on, always on, his body hunched into the storm of iron as if into a blast of wind and rain . . .
—
. . . but although he pushed himself as hard as he could, Leyser was just that little bit quicker. Reinhardt cursed himself, cursed his knee, but it availed him nothing, and when the man ghosted away up a slide of rubble and over the top, Reinhardt’s light wavering behind him, Reinhardt knew he could not follow. He stayed down on the street, pushing his eyes into the darkness, but Leyser was gone.