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arms, pushing his face into her shoulder. An old man stood behind them, a tattered woolen cap riding high atop a thatch of matted gray hair, and his gnarled fist tight around the handle of an old, square suitcase,stenciled in black across it.
    â€œYou speak German?
Govorite li?
” The man just looked at him, his eyes flickering up to Reinhardt’s face and down to his gorget, widening each time they did so, but the woman’s eyes came up, and he looked at her. “What happened, here?
Šta se . . .”
he gritted his teeth, frustrated at the way the Serbo-Croat skittered away from his tongue, as the woman put her head back down, sobbing quietly into the boy’s hair. “
Šta se dešava ovdje? Šta se
 . . . Partisans? Ustaše? Was it the Ustaše?”
    â€œ
Molim vas, gospodine, molim vas
,” she wept, over and over. “
Milosti, gospodine, molim vas, milosti
.”
    â€œI’m not going to hurt you,” Reinhardt said in response to what he understood were pleas for mercy, but the woman just went on, darting her eyes up, then around at the old man, back to Reinhardt. She said nothing else, just repeated herself, over and over, pulling herself and the boy closer to the man, and Reinhardt had enough experience of victims to know not to badger them.
    â€œThey’ll know,” said Benfeld, gesturing at the three refugees where they stood in a tight huddle, the man staring at nothing, the woman pressed up against him, the boy buried in her arms.
    â€œThey probably do.”
    â€œSo? Why aren’t we asking them?”
    â€œGive it time,” said Reinhardt. “Anyway, aren’t you the one said it wasn’t any of our business?” He looked into Benfeld’s cold eyes, measuring the moment the lieutenant would answer back. “We’ve wasted enough time. The rest of the unit’s probably reached Sarajevo by now. Call in and give them our estimated time of arrival, then let’s get moving. Put them in the Horch. We’ll take them down to the city. Hand them over to . . . someone. I don’t know.”

T he cars shuddered to life, bouncing heavily laden down the track where it plunged on into the forest on the far side of the clearing. The track wound through the trees for some minutes, then opened out onto the side of a hill. Like a rough-hewn template, the ground hacked as if by a crude maker’s tools, slopes rose in forested blocks to broken peaks all around them. The mountains stood painted in shades of gray and green, their shadows a dark purple where they inked the land. A faint radiance outlined where the peaks ran against a dirty sky that seemed low enough to reach up and touch, like a smoke-blackened ceiling.
    The driver lurched the car down the slope, Reinhardt holding himself squared against the heave and roll of the road. That faltering rhythm began to lull him, so their arrival at what must have been one of the last defense lines took him almost by surprise, the column winding through a barrier of trenches, barbed wire, sandbagged emplacements, and gun positions, a pair of tanks hull-down in their berms. The post’s commander stood by the gap in the defenses, muffled up against the cold, most of his face hidden behind a thick scarf, and his eyes were hard and distant. He stopped Reinhardt’s car as it came through.
    â€œMessage from your commanding officer,” the man said. “Rendezvous at the main barracks. At Kosovo Polje.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œYou it?”
    â€œAm I what?”
    â€œThe last?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Reinhardt, looking back along the road as it snaked up and away across the face of the hills. “Very likely.” There was no one there but Partisans now. This was the very edge, he knew. The edge of what they had taken and called theirs, now slowly furling in on itself like a leaf against the heat of a fire. All around