Read The Man from Berlin for Free Online Page A

these friends. Talk to them. See what they know.’
    Padelin grunted assent, those eyes flat, far back in his head. ‘That is for us, I think.’
    Reinhardt pursed his mouth and stared at the ground. Not much to go on, his new partner already playing jurisdiction games, and they were the best part of two days behind the killer, or killers. He raised his head. ‘There is something I heard about a witness who might have seen something on the night of the murder?’
    Padelin blinked slowly and nodded. ‘Hofler. The old lady across the alley. She saw a car on Saturday night.’
    â€˜Hofler? A German? I’d like to talk to her. Coming?’

4
    T he two of them headed over the narrowroad and away from Vukić’s house. The houses up here were beautiful, set in large lawns, with all the space the city lacked. ‘Who lives up here?’ Reinhardt asked, as they walked.
    Padelin glanced around as he spoke. ‘Only the rich live out here. Bankers. Lawyers. Businessmen.’
    â€˜And how did Vukić come by the house she wasin?’
    â€˜The maid said it was her grandfather’s.’
    Reinhardt nodded. ‘And the father? What happened to him? The Serbs gothim?’
    Padelin’s strides were heavy, his arms hanging almost unmoving from his wide shoulders. ‘Yes. The father was a senior UstaÅ¡e official,’ he said, referring to the governing political party in the NDH. The UstaÅ¡e were fascists, and quite incredibly brutal about it, to the extent that their excesses sometimes even turned the stomachs of their German allies, and had thrown up two main resistance movements in Bosnia: the Četniks, Serb nationalists and royalists led by a former colonel in the Yugoslav Army called Mihailović, and the more formidable Partisans, who were Communists and, far more worryingly, multiethnic, led by a man known only as ‘Tito’. ‘Četniks killed him in an ambush in Herzegovina, down near Gacko.’ He turned at a house a couple of hundred metres up from Vukić’s, with a high, pointed roof and walls of red brick. Reinhardt finished his cigarette and tossed the butt onto the road as Padelin rang the doorbell and heard a dog bark somewhere inside. A maid dressed in a neat, black uniform with a white lace apron answered the door. She ushered them in and asked them to wait a moment in the hallway while she announced them. She whispered down the hall and vanished into the main living room. A shrill, imperious sounding voice rang out in Austrian-­accented German.
    â€˜But of course ! Show them in, show the brave officersin!’
    The maid reappeared at the entrance to the living room, and ­beckoned them forward. They paused at the door while she took Rein­hardt’s hat, and even Padelin seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of lace and frills in the living room, such that it took them a moment to spot Frau Hofler, sitting with her back regally straight in an armchair with ornate wooden arms. She wore a flowing dress of a creamy colour and fabric that fell and pooled around her feet and looked like it might have been fashionable in Vienna in the last century. A small dog sat upon her lap, a pink bow tying its hair back above beady black eyes. Hofler sat with the light behind her, grey hair forming a halo around her head. A heavy smell of perfume and talcum powder deadened the stillair.
    â€˜ Officers! ’ she gushed as they came in, her eyes lingering on Reinhardt. She wore heavy red lipstick that split in a smile to reveal teeth far too white and even to be real on a person of her age. She held out a frail-looking hand, a ring on each finger. ‘ Do come in,’ she said, fluttering her hand like a piece of paper caught in a breeze. The two moved into the room, walking carefully around small tables and display stands that held a profusion of porcelain figurines. ‘Sit down. Sit down there. There , on the sofa.’