The Divided City (A Gregor Reinhardt Novel, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Luke McCallin is the author of the Gregor Reinhardt novels, including The Pale House and The Man from Berlin. He was born in 1972 in Oxford, grew up around the world and has worked with the United Nations as a humanitarian relief worker and peacekeeper in the Caucasus, the Sahel, and the Balkans. His experiences have driven his writing, in which he explores what happens to normal people—those stricken by conflict, by disaster—when they are put under abnormal pressures. 

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2016 Luke McCallin

Chapter One

Berlin, early 1947

Monday

Reinhardt had come to prefer the nights.

The nights were when things felt cleaner, clearer. The nights were when his city could sometimes resemble something more than the shattered ruin it was. The nights were when he did have to look down at the dust and grit that floured his shoes and trousers, the innards of his city turned out and spread wide for all to see. It was the days when Berlin emerged scarred and scorched into the light, when its people arose to chase their shadows through the day, wending their way from who knew where to who knew what beneath frowning escarpments of ruin and rubble, which humped up and away in staggered mounds of wreckage, and through which the roads seemed to wind like the dried-out bottoms of riverbeds.

It was very early on a Monday morning when the call came in, a body in a stairwell in an apartment building in the American sector of Berlin, down in Neukölln. These were bad hours by anyone’s reckoning, the hours no one wanted, the hours married men were curled up asleep with their wives, the single men with their girls, when even drunks found a corner to sleep it off. They were the hours those on the chief’s blacklist worked. They were the hours they gave the probationers—those too new to the force to maneuver themselves a better shift—or those too old but who had nowhere to go.

Reinhardt knew he was closer to the second category than to the first. But however those hours were counted by others, he considered them his best, when it was quiet and he could have the squad room all but to himself, or else wander the darkened streets and avenues, winding his way past the avalanche slides of brick and debris, learning the new architecture the war had gouged across Berlin’s façades. He and his city were strangers to each other, he knew. They had moved on in different ways, and these night hours—these witching hours, when he would sometimes chase the moon across the city’s jagged skyline, spying it through the rents and fissures deep within buildings, watching the play of light and shadow in places it should never have been seen—were what he needed to rediscover it, what it was, and what had become of it.

All this, though, was in the back of his mind as the ambulance followed the dull glow of its headlights down a road swept clear along its middle, pocked and pitted with shell craters and tears in its surface, a suggestion of looming ruin to either side. He spotted the building up ahead, the fitful yellow beams of flashlights wobbling yolk-like in its entrance and casting the shadows of people up the walls and out into the street. He climbed stiffly out of the ambulance, switching on his own flashlight as he turned up the channel cleared between the rubble. He paused. He swung the flashlight at the entrance of a ruined building across the road. Hidden in the shadows, a pack of children watched with glittering eyes, vanishing from view when he held the light on them a moment longer.

A uniformed officer in his archaic uniform, complete with brass-fronted gray shako, watched as Reinhardt knocked the dust from his shoes in the building’s entry, pocketing his flashlight.

“There we were about to send for the American MPs, but it looks like the Yanks have shown up anyway,” the young officer quipped.

“Which police station are you from?”

“Reuterstrasse,” said the policeman, his face clenching in suspicion.

“I’ll speak to whoever’s in charge here,” said Reinhardt, holding the younger officer’s eyes as he took his hat off.

The officer’s face darkened, but he cocked his head inside. “Sergeant. Sergeant!”

A second officer pushed his way out of a crowd of people milling in the entrance. Reinhardt thought he recognized him, a man well into middle age, tall, lanky, with old-fashioned sideburns—although it if was him, the man used to be a lot heftier and bulkier.

“Cavalry’s here, Sarge,” the young officer said. Reinhardt ignored him as the older officer threw his colleague a reproachful look.

“Good morning, sir,” he said. “What Officer Diechle means, sir, is we was about to call the Amis, I mean, the American Military Police. We didn’t know if anyone was coming out from Kripo at this hour.”

“Well, some of us detectives are up and about,” Reinhardt said, smiling, his voice soft. “Inspector Reinhardt, Schöneberg Kripo Division.”

“Yes, sir. No offense at our surprise in seeing you, sir.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because they don’t usually stir themselves for what seems like accidents or open-and-shut cases,” said Diechle. “’Specially not at this hour.”

“Who says it was either of those?”

“He was drunk, he fell down the stairs,” Diechle snorted. “That’s all it is.”

“Show me what you’ve found. Sergeant Frunze, isn’t it?” Reinhardt suddenly remembered the man’s name, feeling it slip onto his tongue from out of nowhere, it seemed. Something in the man’s appearance, those old-fashioned side-burns, the accent triggering a memory of a line of struggling, sweating policeman trying to hold apart a seething mass of Nazis and Communists, and Frunze reeling away with blood sheeting his cheeks but a brown-shirted thug caught under his arm, the lout’s face turning red inside the policeman’s armlock as Frunze calmly recited the man’s rights to him.

“That it is, sir. Frunze. Very glad to see you remember, sir,” he said, ignoring the way his younger colleague rolled his eyes. “This way, sir.”

“Last time I saw you, you were up in one of the Tiergarten stations.”

“Time’s moved on a bit, sir. You go where they send you these days,” Frunze replied, a quick glance at Reinhardt. He could not tell what the glance might have meant, but an experienced officer like Frunze, especially one his age, ought not to be running a night shift in a place like Neukölln. It had always been a rough neighborhood. Left-wing, working class, where the cops had never been welcome, and Reinhardt did not think things had changed much as Frunze led him through the small crowd of people to the bottom of the stairs, over to where the body of a man lay, face up. The light in the entrance was a shifting mix of flashlights, candles, and lanterns held by the policemen and by the cluster of people—men, women, and children—to the side of the stairs. It made for a confusing play of shadows, but there was light enough for Reinhardt to see that the man’s nose and mouth were a puffed and bruised welter of blood that fanned the bottom of his face and jaw and had soaked into the clothes on his left shoulder. There were scratches and lesions on his face, on his scalp, and on his hands, the skin of his knuckles stripped raw. Reinhardt’s eyes were drawn back to the injuries around the nose and mouth, the wounds framed by black and blue discolorations that indicated he had received them some time before dying. If he got those falling down the stairs, Reinhardt thought, he would have lain here a good long time before dying and there was no pooling of blood, so far as he could see.

“Has forensics arrived, yet?”

“No, sir.”

“It should be Berthold coming. I called him before I left. Any identification on the body?”

“None, sir.”

“Keys?...