TUESDAY
Two days later, and Reinhardt was on a train moving painfully out of Schlesischer Station in Friedrichshain. Reinhardt remembered Schlesischer as one of the more dangerous parts of Berlin for a policeman, firmly under the control of the city’s organized crime. Even the Nazis had pretty much left it alone, trusting the criminal gangs to keep order, and essentially leaving them to make whatever profits they wanted, in whatever way they had wanted. Drinking, gambling, prostitution, drugs, racketeering . . . It had all gone on here, and if half the police had turned a blind eye, the other half had been on the take.
Reinhardt found a seat on a bench by a window and stared out as Berlin crumbled slowly away as the train moved east. It trundled through Köpenick, where Reinhardt had been born in 1898 and where he had grown up. It had been a small town then, on the outskirts of Berlin, but time and the city’s expansion had seen it incorporated, and it was just one more stretch of gouged cityscape now, the houses perhaps a little quainter, a little older. Somewhere out there, he knew, as the train passed through the station without stopping, was his father’s house. He had not been to Köpenick in years, in longer than he could remember, and he had no idea in what state that old house was in. He felt a pang of sudden nostalgia for his father’s library, the smell of books and cigars, of long, genteel discussions with his father and his father’s friends, professors and teachers all.
But the fondness was followed swiftly by bitterness at the memory of his father fading away in his library after he was sacked from the university, hounded out because he dared speak up about the ludicrousness of the laws this new Germany was passing, at the treatment of Jews among the students and professors. How quickly his father found himself alone, ridiculed and friendless, how fast a life of respect came to nothing, and how empty that library became. It killed him, eventually, Reinhardt knew, his father dying of a broken heart, and perhaps his son’s parallel descent into loneliness and ostracization had sped him on his way.
No, Reinhardt thought, as the train nosed on into the countryside beneath clouds smeared, like spilled milk, across the blue bowl of the sky, he no longer cared. That life he had had was so far gone, it may as well have been on the other side of the world. Instead, he filled his eyes with green as the train moved on. The countryside was copsed and wooded, trees cleared by the clean sweep of fields and meadows, but amid the seemingly pristine verdure, every small village bore its scars and ruins, its tumbled walls and its holed roofs with their patchwork braces of blackened timbers. He sat and watched a world that was not all shattered stone and rubble, and wondered that he had not thought to miss something as small as a stretch of meadow that was not given over to growing vegetables. Within the smashed confines of the city, he had lost track of time, of the passage of the seasons. He only knew when it got cold, when it got colder, when finally it warmed a little. There was nothing else to help pin the mind to the passage of time beyond Berlin.
He let his mind drift back instead to what he had done these past two days. Brauer had survived Leyser’s attack, although he moved painfully, his sternum a huge, mottled bruise, swearing he had never been hit so hard in his life. He had not had a good look at Leyser either. Brauer only remembered the fixed glitter of Leyser’s eyes, and a firm line of mustache amidst a riot of stubble. Brauer was also on the move, gone these past two days to Potsdam to follow up on the information that Leyser had been born there. Reinhardt had hoped to have talked to him before his trip into the Soviet zone, but there was no sign of him and he could only hope he had not come to grief. Reinhardt could have used the police there for his inquiries, but he knew anything he asked for would make it back to Skokov, and he had no wish to give the Russian more information than he had to. So Brauer had gone, armed with a carton of Lucky Strikes and an enthusiasm for a bit of investigative work. Reinhardt had rarely seen Brauer so happy in a long while, joking that if this jaunt—as he had put it—worked out, he might set himself up in private practice.
After an hour or so trundling through the countryside, the train stopped at a small village, a provincial station, with a stationmaster’s house and a bullet-holed sign hanging from a chain. One or two other people climbed down with him, the platform becoming for a moment a swirl of people and baggage moving toward the exit from the station. Reinhardt paused to breathe deeply of the chill, fresh air, and was suddenly conscious of the city’s dust on his trousers and shoes. He flapped it off, watching the people who had left the train bunch up at the exit. Reinhardt felt a quiver run through them as they filtered slowly out, a murmur, a susurration that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Something was wrong, but he did not know what, nor did anyone else on the platform with him until it was his turn to pass out into the street.
A Soviet truck was parked across the road, a squad of soldiers in it and standing around it. And on the pavement, right outside the station, stood Skokov.
The major smiled as Reinhardt walked out.
“Reinhardt!” he said jovially, the scarring about his mouth slipping across the taut line of his smile. “Fancy meeting you here!”
Reinhardt said nothing, surprised, and yet not.
“What? Did you think your request for a pass would not reach me? Of course it would. But I do appreciate your attempt to be open and transparent, Captain. It does you credit, although all you had to do was ask me for help.”
“I was sure your contacts would be good enough, Major. I just did not expect to find you out here, yourself.”
“Indeed. Let me see the pass, please.”
Reinhardt handed it over, and Skokov passed it without looking to another officer, a lieutenant, if Reinhardt knew his Soviet ranks well enough. The lieutenant read the pass carefully, then handed it to two local policemen. Two militiamen, Reinhardt corrected himself, remembering how the Soviets had renamed the police in their zone. The two men lowered their heads over the paper, looking up at him with heavy, hostile eyes, and then handed it back.
“Haracho,” the lieutenant said, nodding to Skokov.
“All is in order, it seems,” Skokov said. He tucked the pass into the pocket of his tunic. “I shall look after this for you, if you don’t mind.” If he noticed Reinhardt’s eyes fasten on the pass as it disappeared into Skokov’s pocket, as if yearning toward a last chance at salvation, he said nothing. “Where are we going, Captain?”
“To a village called Bielwiese.”
Skokov snapped something at the lieutenant, who strode away to snap something at a sergeant. Orders and words were snapped, descending down a chain of command until they came back up, and the lieutenant leaned forward to murmur respectfully in Skokov’s ear.
“Come, it is not so far, I am told,” the major said. “You can sit with me.”
Reinhardt followed him to a BMW with Red Army plates as the squad of soldiers climbed aboard their truck. The little convoy rattled through the streets of the village, then out across a ribbon of metalled road.
“So, tell me, Captain, what are we doing here? What have you learned since we saw each other last? Tell me of your new trips to the WASt and the Kammergericht. What did you find there, Captain?” he asked, with a smile that creased the scars at the corner of his mouth.
Reinhardt’s tongue stole into the gap in his teeth, and he reminded himself, again, never to underestimate this man. “I believe the man I am looking for is named Marius Leyser. He is a former soldier, possibly working for the British, or at least impersonating someone who is.”
“The British?” Skokov purred. “Go on.”
“The archivists in the WASt had managed to identify him, but this Leyser had already been in the WASt and removed nearly all trace of his existence. We found one entry, hidden in obscure records, however. I confronted the British with this information and with other information that indicates British influence or presence in the murders.” Reinhardt talked on as the car drove through the countryside. He spoke of the pattern of the murders, the dead pilots’ unit, and the veterans’ association and the rumor of British involvement in it, to which Skokov reacted with suspicion. Again, the news the “wrong” Noell had been killed, Reinhardt kept to himself. This was a big piece of the puzzle to hide from a man as dangerous and perceptive as Skokov, but Reinhardt found he was ready to take that risk.
“And so who is it you are going to see, now?”
“A man called Gareis. He is the last survivor of this squadron. I do not know if the killer is aware of his existence as he was reported killed in action during the war.”
“Very good. You realize that you told me he was dead.”
“I found out the contrary from the veterans’ association.”
“Precisely. And what else?”
“Nothing else for now, Major. Gareis may be able to give me information on what may have happened in North Africa.”
“There’s a link, is there?”
“The only one I can find. I may be wrong.”
“We shall see soon enough,” Skokov said, settling into himself as if for a long voyage. He stared out the window. “It is good country around here. Good for crops. For livestock,” Skokov said, staring out across undulating fields. To Reinhardt’s eyes, despite the green that soothed and lulled, the countryside was flat and uninteresting. His mind, he found, still shaped the countryside around him to the folds and pitches of Bosnia’s mountains, to its heights and depths, and what he found outside the window, he found wanting and found testament to the war. The burned hulk of a tank squatted in the middle of a field, half-overgrown with weeds, and Reinhardt spotted the crumbled remains of earthworks snaking across a rise.
“Does it remind you of home, Major?” Skokov nodded slowly. “And where is that, if I may ask?”
Skokov turned his head slowly, looking at Reinhardt with blank, empty eyes that sparked, suddenly and finally, to life. “Home would be not far from the Urals, Captain. Near Ekaterinburg.” Reinhardt nodded, gave a tight smile. He had been taken aback by Skokov’s eyes, the distance and coldness in them. Perhaps, he thought, there was precious little time and space in the major’s life for small talk about one’s origins. Or perhaps origins were a source of weakness. To reveal them revealed something about you. Something that could be used against you by someone when the time came.
“Where your grandmother kept bees.”
Skokov smiled, relaxing slightly, and Reinhardt breathed a little easier, wondering if the major had seen through his ploy of steering the conversation back to safer ground. Out here, far from Berlin, Reinhardt felt very lonely and very alone. There would be no one to help him, if help was needed. Tanneberger and Ganz knew, but they could not help themselves within their own precinct, if push came to shove. Weber had grinned and wished him luck. Collingridge knew he was out here, but the American had shrugged when Reinhardt told him what he intended to do, quipped it was “nice knowing you” and handed over a couple of packs of Luckies. “Get-out-of-jail-free cards,” Collingridge had called them, the cultural reference escaping Reinhardt. When he had met him again in the beer cellar, hunched over glasses of Berliner Weisse, Markworth had not trivialized what Reinhardt intended, running through the itinerary and plans and timing with military precision, but he, too, had ended the conversation with a shrug that anything could happen in the Soviet zone, and the best-laid plans could come to naught.
Markworth had had little to say for his inquiries into the murders in Bad Oeynhausen. All he would say was that there was a Royal Military Police report he was trying to obtain, but he was clearly worried. The town of Bad Oeynhausen had been entirely taken over by the British. Apart from waiters and maids, and the odd technical expert, there were no Germans left living in it. It was fuel to Reinhardt’s fire, Markworth said, that the killer was British or working for them.
“I cannot fathom such a distance,” Reinhardt said to Skokov, the words just popping into his mouth. “From here to the Urals. Half a continent. Forgive me, though, but I must ask. Your German is very good. There is a touch of something old-fashioned in it. I wonder, have you spent time here before? Perhaps before the war?”
“You ask a lot of questions, Captain. Are you sure that’s healthy?”
“It’s answers that are bad for your health, I’ve found, Major.”
Skokov smiled, the scarring around his mouth shifting and tightening. He ran a finger across their glossy ripple, glanced at the flecked pink of the back of his driver’s neck.
“Answers are often worse, Captain. Especially if they are the right ones. You are right. I learned my German at home, and then here, in the aftermath of the first war. My parents were White Russians. Landed gentry. They fled Lenin’s Russia, the birth of the Soviet Union. I . . . I was an impressionable youth and, like most youths, I ran counter to the beliefs of my parents. I found Communism on the streets of Berlin, and I went back to Russia when I was old enough. I joined the Party. I did what was asked of me. I returned here in the mid-’30s, working in the embassy in counterintelligence. I had connections. I was useful.” He stopped, looking out the window.
“Then the purges came,” Reinhardt prompted him.
Skokov shook his head. “You call them purges. For us,” his mouth worked, and his finger stroked the scars, “they were a paroxysm of growth. A necessary evil. A rejection of the weak and the burdensome.”
“Is that what you were?”
The Russian smiled. “I am what the Party tells me I am. Useful, or useless. What am I, but a part of something greater? When I was called back to Moscow I suspected something. I was accused of . . . many things. Some of them were even true,” Skokov smiled. “I had been warning about German rearmament. About Nazi intentions. How could I know such information went against the Party’s objectives?”
“Against the pact?”
“Precisely. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Peace between our nations.”
“The deep breath before the plunge.”
“That too. But it gave us time. Precious years of peace.”
“We were talking of you, Skokov,” Reinhardt said gently.
“This is me, Reinhardt,” Skokov replied, as the car rocked over a section of bad road. “It was part of me. I was part of it. So were you. Pieces of history. Moved by forces greater than us. Who are we to question how we are moved? What moved me was the historical impetus of class struggle, while what moved you was the warped ideology of racial superiority. But it was my past that did me in. My White Russian past. My bourgeois past. It was the camps for me. I thought I would end my days there, but one day they came looking for me. They needed someone with my skills.”
“You mean they’d seen the error of their ways?”
“All was forgiven. No system is infallible, you see? Any system can make mistakes, but not every system can admit as much.”
“You mean your system had suffered such casualties, it was no longer picky about who fought for it, nor where they found the people to fight.”
“As you say. You know our Marshal Rokossovsky? He, too, was in a camp. Did you know that? They released him and gave him an army, and what wonders he achieved with it! So, what system was it? One that imprisoned me, or men like me, wrongly? Or one that could admit its wrongs and release me?”
“Admit its wrongs when its needs were great enough, and release you to nothing but war. Is that where you got those scars? In a camp?”
Skokov stroked his mouth. “One winter, things were so bad that some of the prisoners turned to cannibalism, and they didn’t always wait for their victims to be dead. They came for me one night. One of them bit me in the mouth, tried to tear off my lips. The human mouth is one of the filthiest places on earth, Reinhardt, did you know that? I got rid of him, but he left a nasty infection behind that saw me lose most of my teeth and get a mouthful of silver in return. And so now that you have answers, are you happy with them?”
What Reinhardt was, was afraid. He had been a fool to ask questions like that, of a man like Skokov, in a place like this. The answers had put him in Skokov’s power. Men like him rarely revealed anything, and when they did, it was either because they had something to gain, or nothing to lose. And if Skokov had nothing to lose, it meant he had little use for Reinhardt and no compunction in sharing such intimate information with him.
“And so here you are,” he said. It was all he could think of to say.
“No. Here we are, Reinhardt.”