March looked again at the body. It was very fat. Maybe 110 kilos.
‘Let’s get him out of the water.’ He turned towards the road. ‘Time to raise our sleeping beauties.’ Ratka, shifting from foot to foot in the downpour, grinned.
It was raining harder now, and the Kladow side of the lake had virtually disappeared. Water pattered on the leaves of the trees and drummed on the car roofs. There was a heavy rain-smell of corruption: rich earth and rotting vegetation. March’s hair was plastered to his scalp, water trickled down the back of his neck. He did not notice. For March, every case, however routine, held – at the start, at least – the promise of adventure.
He was forty-two years old – slim, with grey hair and cool grey eyes that matched the sky. During the war, the Propaganda Ministry had invented a nickname for the men of the U-boats – the ‘grey wolves’ – and it would have been a good name for March, in one sense, for he was a determined detective. But he was not by nature a wolf, did not run with the pack, was more reliant on brain than muscle, so his colleagues called him ‘the fox’ instead.
U-boat weather!
He flung open the door of the white Skoda, and was hit by a gust of hot, stale air from the car heater.
‘Morning, Spiedel!’ He shook the police photographer’s bony shoulder. ‘Time to get wet.’ Spiedel jerked awake. He gave March a glare.
The driver’s window of the other Skoda was already being wound down as March approached it. ‘All right, March. All right.’ It was SS-Surgeon August Eisler, a Kripo pathologist, his voice a squeak of affronted dignity. ‘Save your barrack-room humour for those who appreciate it.’
THEY gathered at the water’s edge, all except Doctor Eisler, who stood apart, sheltering under an ancient black umbrella he did not offer to share. Spiedel screwed a flash bulb on to his camera and carefully planted his right foot on a lump of clay. He swore as the lake lapped over his shoe.
‘Shit!’
The flash popped, freezing the scene for an instant: the white faces, the silver threads of rain, the darkness of the woods. A swan came scudding out of some nearby reeds to see what was happening, and began circling a few metres away.
‘Protecting her nest,’ said the young SS man.
‘I want another here.’ March pointed. ‘And one here.’
Spiedel cursed again and pulled his dripping foot out of the mud. The camera flashed twice more.
March bent down and grasped the body under the armpits. The flesh was hard, like cold rubber, and slippery.
‘Help me.’
The Orpo men each took an arm and together, grunting with the effort, they heaved, sliding the corpse out of the water, over the muddy bank and on to the sodden grass. As March straightened, he caught the look on Jost’s face.
The old man had been wearing a pair of blue swimming trunks which had worked their way down to his knees. In the freezing water, the genitals had shrivelled to a tiny clutch of white eggs in a nest of black pubic hair.
The left foot was missing.
It had to be, thought March. This was a day when nothing would be simple. An adventure, indeed.
‘Herr Doctor. Your opinion, please.’
With a sigh of irritation, Eisler daintily stepped forward, removing the glove from one hand. The corpse’s leg ended at the bottom of the calf. Still holding the umbrella, Eisler bent stiffly and ran his fingers around the stump.
‘A propeller?’ asked March. He had seen bodies dragged out of busy waterways – from the Tegler See and the Spree in Berlin, from the Alster in Hamburg – which looked as if butchers had been at them.
‘No.’ Eisler withdrew his hand. ‘An old amputation. Rather well done in fact.’ He pressed hard on the chest with his fist. Muddy water gushed from the mouth and bubbled out of the nostrils. ‘Rigor mortis fairly advanced. Dead twelve hours. Maybe less.’ He pulled his glove back on.
A diesel engine rattled somewhere through the trees behind them.
‘The ambulance,’ said Ratka. ‘They take their time.’
March gestured to Spiedel. ‘Take another picture.’
Looking down at the corpse, March lit a cigarette. Then he squatted on his haunches and stared into the single open eye. He stayed that way a long while. The camera flashed again. The swan reared up, flapped her wings, and turned towards the centre of the lake in search of food.
TWO
ripo headquarters lie on the other side of Berlin, a twenty-five-minute drive from the Havel. March needed a statement from Jost, and offered to drop him back at his barracks to change, but Jost said no: he would sooner make his statement quickly. So once the body had been stowed aboard the ambulance and dispatched to the morgue, they set off in March’s little four-door Volkswagen through the rush-hour traffic.
It was one of those dismal Berlin mornings, when the famous Berliner-luft seems not so much bracing as merely raw, the moisture stinging the face and hands like a thousand frozen needles. On the Potsdamer Chaussee, the spray from the wheels of the passing cars forced the few pedestrians close to the sides of the buildings. Watching them through the rain-flecked window, March imagined a city of blind men, feeling their way to work.
It was all so normal. Later, that was what would strike him most. It was like having an accident: before it, nothing out of the ordinary; then, the moment; and after it, a world that was changed forever. For there was nothing more routine than a body fished out of the Havel. It happened twice a month – derelicts and failed businessmen, reckless kids and lovelorn teenagers; accidents and suicides and murders; the desperate, the foolish, the sad.
The telephone had rung in his apartment in Ansbacher Strasse shortly after six-fifteen. The call had not woken him. He had been lying in the semi-darkness with his eyes open, listening to the rain. For the past few months he had slept badly.
‘March? We’ve got a report of a body in the Havel.’ It was Krause, the Kripo’s Night Duty Officer. ‘Go and take a look, there’s a good fellow.’
March had said he was not interested.
‘Your interest or lack of it is beside the point.’
‘I am not interested,’ said March, ‘because I am not on duty. I was on duty last week, and the week before.’ And the week before that, he might have added. ‘This is my day off. Look again at your list.’
There had been a pause at the other end, then Krause had come back on the line, grudgingly apologetic. ‘You are in luck, March. I was looking at last week’s rota. You can go back to sleep. Or . . .’ He had sniggered: ‘Or whatever else it was you were doing.’
A gust of wind had slashed rain against the window, rattling the pane.
There was a standard procedure when a body was discovered: a pathologist, a police photographer and an investigator had to attend the scene at once. The investigators worked off a rota kept at Kripo headquarters in Werderscher Markt.
‘Who is on today, as a matter of interest?’
‘Max Jaeger.’
Jaeger. March shared an office with Jaeger. He had looked at his alarm clock and thought of the little house in Pankow where Max lived with his wife and four daughters: during the week, breakfast was just about the only time he saw them. March, on the other hand, was divorced and lived alone. He had set aside the afternoon to spend with his son. But the long hours of the morning stretched ahead, a blank. The way he felt it would be good to have something routine to distract him.
‘Oh, leave him in peace,’ he had said. ‘I’m awake. I’ll take it.’
That had been nearly two hours ago. March glanced at his passenger in the rear-view mirror. Jost had been silent ever since they left the Havel. He sat stiffly in the back seat, staring at the grey buildings slipping by.
At the Brandenburg Gate, a policeman on a motorcycle flagged them to a halt.
In the middle of Pariser Platz, an SA band in sodden brown uniforms wheeled and stamped in the puddles. Through the closed windows of the Volkswagen came the muffled thump of drums and trumpets, pounding out an old Par
ty marching song. Several dozen people had gathered outside the Academy of Arts to watch them, shoulders hunched against the rain.
It was impossible to drive across Berlin at this time of year without encountering a similar rehearsal. In six days’ time it would be Adolf Hitler’s birthday – the Fuhrertag, a public holiday – and every band in the Reich would be on parade. The windscreen wipers beat time like a metronome.
‘Here we see the final proof,’ murmured March, watching the crowd, ‘that in the face of martial music, the German people are mad.’
He turned to Jost, who gave a thin smile.
A clash of cymbals ended the tune. There was a patter of damp applause. The bandmaster turned and bowed. Behind him, the SA men had already begun half-walking, half-running, back to their bus. The motorcycle cop waited until the Platz was clear, then blew a short blast on his whistle. With a white-gloved hand he waved them through the Gate.
The Unter den Linden gaped ahead of them. It had lost its lime trees in ʼ36 – cut down in an act of official vandalism at the time of the Berlin Olympics. In their place, on either side of the boulevard, the city’s Gauleiter, Josef Goebbels, had erected an avenue of ten-metre-high stone columns, on each of which perched a Party eagle, wings outstretched. Water dripped from their beaks and wingtips. It was like driving through a Red Indian burial ground.
March slowed for the lights at the Friedrich Strasse intersection and turned right. Two minutes later they were parking in a space opposite the Kripo building in Werderscher Markt.
It was an ugly place – a heavy, soot-streaked, Wilhelmine monstrosity, six storeys high, on the south side of the Markt. March had been coming here, nearly seven days of the week, for ten years. As his ex-wife had frequently complained, it had become more familiar to him than home. Inside, beyond the SS sentries and the creaky revolving door, a board announced the current state of terrorist alert. There were four codes, in ascending order of seriousness: green, blue, black and red. Today, as always, the alert was red.
A pair of guards in a glass booth scrutinised them as they entered the foyer. March showed his identity card and signed in Jost.
The Markt was busier than usual. The workload always tripled in the week before the Führertag. Secretaries with boxes of files clattered on high heels across the marble floor. The air smelled thickly of wet overcoats and floor polish. Groups of officers in Orpo-green and Kripo-black stood whispering of crime. Above their heads, from opposite ends of the lobby, garlanded busts of the Führer and the Head of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, stared at one another with blank eyes.
March pulled back the metal grille of the elevator and ushered Jost inside.
The security forces which Heydrich controlled were divided into three. At the bottom of the pecking order were the Orpo, the ordinary cops. They picked up the drunks, cruised the Autobahnen, issued the speeding tickets, made the arrests, fought the fires, patrolled the railways and the airports, answered the emergency calls, fished the bodies out of the lakes.
At the top were the Sipo, the Security Police. The Sipo embraced both the Gestapo and the Party’s own security force, the SD. Their headquarters were in a grim complex around Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, a kilometre south-west of the Markt. They dealt with terrorism, subversion, counter-espionage and ‘crimes against the state’. They had their ears in every factory and school, hospital and mess; in every town, in every village, in every street. A body in a lake would concern the Sipo only if it belonged to a terrorist or a traitor.
And somewhere between the other two, and blurring into both, came the Kripo – Department V of the Reich Main Security Office. They investigated straightforward crime, from burglary, through bank robbery, violent assault, rape and mixed marriage, all the way up to murder. Bodies in lakes – who they were and how they got there – they were Kripo business.
The elevator stopped at the second floor. The corridor was lit like an aquarium. Weak neon bounced off green linoleum and green-washed walls. There was the same smell of polish as in the lobby, but here it was spiced with lavatory disinfectant and stale cigarette smoke. Twenty doors of frosted glass lined the passage, some half open. These were the investigators’ offices. From one came the sound of a solitary finger picking at a typewriter; in another, a telephone rang unanswered.
‘“The nerve centre in the ceaseless war against the criminal enemies of National Socialism”,’ said March, quoting a recent headline in the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. He paused, and when Jost continued to look blank he explained: ‘A joke.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Forget it.’
He pushed open a door and switched on the light. His office was little more than a gloomy cupboard, a cell, its solitary window opening on to a courtyard of blackened brick. One wall was shelved: tattered, leather-bound volumes of statutes and decrees, a handbook on forensic science, a dictionary, an atlas, a Berlin street guide, telephone directories, box files with labels gummed to them – ‘Braune’, ‘Hundt’, ‘Stark’, ‘Zadek’ – every one a bureaucratic tombstone, memorialising some long-forgotten victim. Another side of the office was taken up by four filing cabinets. On top of one was a spider plant, placed there by a middle-aged secretary two years ago at the height of an unspoken and unrequited passion for Xavier March. It was now dead. That was all the furniture, apart from two wooden desks pushed together beneath the window. One was March’s; the other belonged to Max Jaeger.
March hung his overcoat on a peg by the door. He preferred not to wear uniform when he could avoid it, and this morning he had used the rainstorm on the Havel as an excuse to dress in grey trousers and a thick blue sweater. He pushed Jaeger’s chair towards Jost. ‘Sit down. Coffee?’
‘Please.’
There was a machine in the corridor. ‘We’ve got fucking photographs. Can you believe it? Look at that.’ Along the passage March could hear the voice of Fiebes of VB3 – the sexual crimes division – boasting of his latest success. ‘Her maid took them. Look, you can see every hair. The girl should turn professional.’
What would this be? March thumped the side of the coffee machine and it ejected a plastic cup. Some officer’s wife, he guessed, and a Polish labourer shipped in from the General Government to work in the garden. It was usually a Pole; a dreamy, soulful Pole, plucking at the heart of a wife whose husband was away at the front. It sounded as if they had been photographed in flagrante by some jealous girl from the Bund deutscher Mädel, anxious to please the authorities. This was a sexual crime, as defined in the 1935 Race Defilement Act.
He gave the machine another thump.
There would be a hearing in the People’s Court, salaciously recorded in Der Stürmer as a warning to others. Two years in Ravensbrück for the wife. Demotion and disgrace for the husband. Twenty-five years for the Pole, if he was lucky; death if he was not.
‘Fuck!’ A male voice muttered something and Fiebes, a weaselly inspector in his mid-fifties whose wife had run off with an SS ski instructor ten years before, gave a shout of laughter. March, a cup of black coffee in either hand, retreated to his office and slammed the door behind him as loudly as he could with his foot.
Reichskriminalpolizei Werderscher Markt 5/6
Berlin
STATEMENT OF WITNESS
My name is Hermann Friedrich Jost. I was born on 23.2.45 in Dresden. I am a cadet at the Sepp Dietrich Academy, Berlin. At 05.30 this morning, I left for my regular training run. I prefer to run alone. My normal route takes me west through the Grunewald Forest to the Havel, north along the lakeshore to the Lindwerder Restaurant, then south to the barracks in Schlachtensee. Three hundred metres north of the Schwanenwerder causeway, I saw an object lying in the water at the edge of the lake. It was the body of a male. I ran to a telephone half a kilometre along the lake-path and informed the police. I returned to the body and waited for the arrival of the authorities. During all this time it was raining hard and I saw nobody.
I am making this statement of
my own free will in the presence of Kripo investigator Xavier March.
SS-Schütze H. F. Jost.
08.24/14.4.64
March leaned back in his chair and studied the young man as he signed his statement. There were no hard lines to his face. It was as pink and soft as a baby’s, with a clamour of acne around the mouth, a whisper of blond hair on the upper lip. March doubted if he shaved.
‘Why do you run alone?’
Jost handed back his statement. ‘It gives me a chance to think. It is good to be alone once in the day. One is not often alone in a barracks.’
‘How long have you been a cadet?’
‘Three months.’
‘Do you enjoy it?’
‘Enjoy it!’ Jost turned his face to the window. ‘I had just begun studying at the university at Gottingen when my call-up came through. Let us say, it was not the happiest day of my life.’
‘What were you studying?’
‘Literature.’
‘German?’
‘What other sort is there?’ Jost gave one of his watery smiles. ‘I hope to go back to the university when I have served my three years. I want to be a teacher; a writer. Not a soldier.’
March scanned his statement. ‘If you are so anti-military, what are you doing in the SS?’ He guessed the answer.
‘My father. He was a founder member of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. You know how it is: I am his only son; it was his dearest wish.’
‘You must hate it.’
Jost shrugged. ‘I survive. And I have been told – unofficially, naturally – that I will not have to go to the front. They need an assistant at the officer school in Bad Tolz to teach a course on the degeneracy of American literature. That sounds more my kind of thing: degeneracy.’ He risked another smile. ‘Perhaps I shall become an expert in the field.’
March laughed and glanced again at the statement. Something was not right here, and now he saw it. ‘No doubt you will.’ He put the statement to one side and stood up. ‘I wish you luck with your teaching.’
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