The Man from Berlin by Luke McCallin

Author:Luke McCallin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

21

There was a message slip on his desk. Thallberg had called and was waiting to see him at the State House. He put the piece of paper from Freilinger on his desk and scanned the names. He took his own list of officers commanding the units in Schwarz and compared the two. Freilinger had underlined three names as having served in the USSR – Generals Grabenhofen, Eglseer, and von Le Suire. Only Grabenhofen was involved in Schwarz, and the other two were not on Reinhardt’s list. Of the other transfers on Freilinger’s list, one was in command of a unit in Schwarz – General Verhein – but had not served in Russia.

He straightened, stepped back from his desk. This was all getting tangled in his mind, and he needed to straighten it out. He glanced at the message slip again and saw that Thallberg had called about twenty minutes ago. He should take some time, try to make some sense of what he had now. He telephoned downstairs, ordering them to find Claussen and send him up, then shut the door and sat at his desk, flattening his map of the case onto it. He began adding information – GFP next to Hendel’s and Krause’s names. Pausing a moment, he linked Becker’s name to the empty circle of the suspect. He glanced at the list Freilinger had given him, and then the list of commanders, and back at his map. For now, he refrained from listing those names. If anyone else came across the map, it would look very bad, especially as he had nothing to substantiate it all with. Underneath the suspect’s circle he wrote senior, and then USSR, linking USSR to Vukić.

There was a knock at the door. ‘One moment,’ he called. Reinhardt folded up the map, grabbed the keys to the kübelwagen, and opened the door. Claussen stood in the hallway. Reinhardt tossed him the keys and they went back downstairs and out to the car.

‘Where to, sir?’

‘State House,’ Reinhardt answered. He settled into his normal position, back wedged between the seat and the door as Claussen took the car out onto Kvaternik, then pulled it around the Rathaus and back down King Aleksander Street. Reinhardt watched the streets go by on the right, the old Ottoman buildings giving way to the drab fronts the Austrians had put up until the car pulled in front of the pillared portico of the State House. A soldier on duty lifted a striped barrier and let Claussen park in the street down the side of the building. Next to the staff cars already there, black and shiny with pennants on their hoods, the kübelwagen with its dull grey panels looked like a fish out of water.

The foyer inside was gloomy and heavy. A woman in an army uniform directed Reinhardt to follow the stairs up to the second floor. He passed the offices of the small German civilian security administration that had accompanied the army into Yugoslavia. It was mostly officers from the Gestapo, with a few from the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazis’ own security service.

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