Free The Man from Berlin by Luke McCallin Page B

day’s events. Sighing, Reinhardt sat at his desk and picked up a note from Claussen that told him he had arranged an ­appointment with the Feldgendarmerie traffic commander for four o’clock.
    He leaned back in his chair, lit his last Atikah, blew smoke at the ceiling, stared at the paper, then closed his eyes and wondered whether he would be able to avoid running into Becker at the Feldgendarmerie. He sat in silence for what seemed quite some time, running over the day in his mind. Feeling his way along it, around it. As he did with the prisoners he interrogated in the rooms beneath the prison. Feeling along the hard edges men brought with them, searching for the breach, the chink that would let him in. Letting silence do the work. The wearying rote of routine, long pauses as each question sinks in, the prisoner’s mind asking itself a dozen more to his one, his hold on his story weakening from minute to minute, hour to hour. Except, more and more, Reinhardt had found himself sinking into his own silence, his questions falling stillborn, chased into the emptiness between men by memories of a child’s scream, the sluggish drift of smoke, the swivel and hunch of rifles into shoulders. Flashes of his nightmares. The inside seeping up into the waking world.
    The prisoner in front of him finished his cigarette, stubbed it out. His eyes flicked up at Reinhardt, away, back. The silence was working on him. The hands now empty, nothing to do with them. Nothing to fill them. The air now empty between him and Reinhardt. Space needing to be filled, and there were only words to fill them. No one here understood the value of silence anymore. The burden of words dropped into emptiness.
    â€˜Why’d you take so long?’ the translator whispered, words strained as he held back a yawn. ‘Just beat him.’
    â€˜Like the others do?’
    His eyes flared open as he smelled smoke, and he jerked upright in his seat. He did not feel like writing; he needed to move, so he went looking for Weninger and Maier, the two Abwehr officers Freilinger had put to searching Hendel’s material, and found Maier. The Abwehr was subdivided into abteilungen – offices. Reinhardt ran Abteilung II J. The official designation was moral sabotage. In reality, it meant interrogations of captured enemy soldiers, particularly officers. It was not dissimilar to his police work in Berlin before the war, interrogating suspected criminals. Hendel had been Abteilung III H, internal army security. Before that, he had worked in the unit responsible for document forgery and technical espionage. Hendel had not been in Sarajevo long, only about three months. Most of what he had been working on, according to Maier as he sifted through Hendel’s admittedly poor paperwork, dealt with following up on rumours about a secret line of communication between the Partisans and German forces. And that the British were now up in the hills with the Partisans.
    â€˜The British?’ said Reinhardt. He thought back over the last interrogations. One of them had been a Partisan lieutenant. He had mentioned nothing about there being any British, but then captured Partisans rarely said much. ‘With the Partisans? Not the Četniks? Last I heard, Mihailović still had a British liaison group.’
    â€˜So did we all think the British were with the Četniks?’ Maier wore small pince-nez and still affected the airs and graces of the ­university lecturer he once was. ‘And we even release signal traffic overestimating the Četniks and the damage their actions are causing. You know that, because some of the stuff we release is through our agents. That way we’re pretty sure the Brits pick it up. The last thing we want is the Tommies changing sides, but in the long run, who can know? Those bloody British. Playing both sides, I’m sure of it. These Partisans – I don’t know, I think they could really hurt us, you