‘Am I free to go?’
‘Of course.’
With a look of relief, Jost got to his feet. March grasped the door handle. ‘One thing.’ He turned and stared into the SS cadet’s eyes. ‘Why are you lying to me?’
Jost jerked his head back. ‘What . . . ?’
‘You say you left the barracks at five-thirty. You call the cops at five past six. Schwanenwerder is three kilometres from the barracks. You are fit: you run every day. You do not dawdle: it is raining hard. Unless you suddenly developed a limp, you must have arrived at the lake quite some time before six. So there are – what? – twenty minutes out of thirty-five unaccounted for in your statement. What were you doing, Jost?’
The young man looked stricken. ‘Maybe I left the barracks later. Or maybe I did a couple of circuits of the running track there first . . .’
‘“Maybe, maybe . . .” ’ March shook his head sadly. ‘These are facts that can be checked, and I warn you: it will go hard for you if I have to find out the truth and bring it to you, rather than the other way round. You are a homosexual, yes?’
‘Herr Sturmbannführer! For God’s sake . . .’
March put his hands on Jost’s shoulders. ‘I don’t care. Perhaps you run alone every morning so you can meet some fellow in the Grunewald for twenty minutes. That’s your business. It’s no crime in my book. All I’m interested in is the body. Did you see something? What did you really do?’
Jost shook his head. ‘Nothing. I swear.’ Tears were welling in his wide, pale eyes.
‘Very well.’ March released him. ‘Wait downstairs. I’ll arrange transport to take you back to Schlachtensee.’ He opened the door. ‘Remember what I said: better you tell me the truth now than I find it out for myself later.’
Jost hesitated, and for a moment March thought he might say something, but then he walked out into the corridor and was gone.
March rang down to the basement garage and ordered a car. He hung up and stared out of the grimy window at the wall opposite. The black brick glistened under the film of rainwater pouring down from the upper storeys. Had he been too hard on the boy? Probably. But sometimes the truth could only be ambushed, taken unguarded in a surprise attack. Was Jost lying? Certainly. But then if he was a homosexual, he could scarcely afford not to lie: anyone found guilty of ‘anti-community acts’ went straight to a labour camp. SS men arrested for homosexuality were attached to punishment battalions on the Eastern front; few returned.
March had seen a score of young men like Jost in the past year. There were more of them every day. Rebelling against their parents. Questioning the state. Listening to American radio stations. Circulating their crudely printed copies of proscribed books – Günter Grass and Graham Greene, George Orwell and J. D. Salinger. Chiefly, they protested against the war – the seemingly endless struggle against the American-backed Soviet guerillas, which had been grinding on east of the Urals for twenty years.
He felt suddenly ashamed of his treatment of Jost, and considered going down to apologise to him. But then he decided, as he always did, that his duty to the dead came first. His penance for his morning’s bullying would be to put a name to the body in the lake.
THE Duty Room of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei occupies most of Werderscher Markt’s third floor. March mounted the stairs two at a time. Outside the entrance, a guard armed with a machine gun demanded his pass. The door opened with a thud of electronic bolts.
An illuminated map of Berlin takes up half the far wall. A galaxy of stars, orange in the semi-darkness, marks the capital’s one hundred and twenty-two police stations. To its left is a second map, even larger, depicting the entire Reich. Red lights pinpoint those towns big enough to warrant their own Kripo divisions. The centre of Europe glows crimson. Further east, the lights gradually thin until, beyond Moscow, there are only a few isolated sparks, winking like camp fires in the blackness. It is a planetarium of crime.
Krause, the Duty Officer for the Berlin Gau, sat on a raised platform beneath the display. He was on the telephone as March approached and raised his hand in greeting. Before him, a dozen women in starched white shirts sat in glass partitions, each wearing a headset with a microphone attached. What they must hear! A sergeant from a Panzer division comes home from a tour in the East. After a family supper, he takes out his pistol, shoots his wife and each of his three children in turn. Then he splatters his skull across the ceiling. An hysterical neighbour calls the cops. And the news comes here – is controlled, evaluated, reduced – before being passed downstairs to that corridor with cracked green linoleum, stale with cigarette smoke.
Behind the Duty Officer, a uniformed secretary with a sour face was making entries on the night incident board. There were four columns: crime (serious), crime (violent), incidents, fatalities. Each category was further quartered: time reported, source of information, detail of report, action taken. An average night of mayhem in the world’s largest city, with its population of ten million, was reduced to hieroglyphics on a few square metres of white plastic.
There had been eighteen deaths since ten o’clock the previous night. The worst incident – 1H 2D 4K – was three adults and four children killed in a car smash in Pankow just after 11. No action taken; that could be left to the Orpo. A family burned to death in a house-fire in Kreuzberg, a stabbing outside a bar in Wedding, a woman beaten to death in Spandau. The record of March’s own disrupted morning was last on the list: 06:07 [O] (that meant notification had come from the Orpo) 1H Havel/March. The secretary stepped back and recapped her pen with a sharp click.
Krause had finished his telephone call and was looking defensive. ‘I’ve already apologised, March.’
‘Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say: the last forty-eight hours.’
‘No problem.’ Krause looked relieved and swivelled round in his chair to the sour-faced woman. ‘You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything’s come in in the last hour.’ He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. ‘I’d have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place – you know how it is.’
March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a grey cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of colour: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a foetus, was an island, linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.
Schwanenwerder.
‘Does Goebbels still have a place there?’
Krause nodded. ‘And the rest.’
It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred metres away.
Krause said: ‘The local Orpo call it “the pheasant run”.’
March smiled: ‘golden pheasants’ was street slang for the Party leadership.
‘It’s not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep.’
Helga had returned. ‘Persons reported missing since Sunday morning,’ she announced, ‘and still unaccounted for.’ She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. ‘Plenty to keep you busy there.’ He seemed to find this amusing. ‘You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He’s the one who should be looking after this business, remember?’
‘Thanks. I’ll make a start at least.’
Krause shook his head. ‘You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You’re on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?’
March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. ‘You forget yourself, comrade,’ he said. ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ The slogan of the labour camps. Work Makes You Free.
He turned and made his way back throu
gh the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. ‘See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?’
MARCH arrived back in his office just as Max Jaeger was hanging up his coat. ‘Zavi!’ Jaeger spread his arms wide. ‘I got a message from the Duty Room. What can I say?’ He wore the uniform of an SS Sturmbannführer. The black tunic still bore traces of his breakfast.
‘Put it down to my soft old heart,’ said March. ‘And don’t get too excited. There was nothing on the corpse to identify it and there are a hundred people missing in Berlin since Sunday. It’ll take hours just to go through the list. And I’ve promised to take my boy out this afternoon, so you’ll be on your own with it.’
He lit a cigarette and explained the details: the location, the missing foot, his suspicions about Jost. Jaeger took it in with a series of grunts. He was a shambling, untidy hulk of a man, two metres tall, with clumsy hands and feet. He was fifty, nearly ten years older than March, but they had shared an office since 1959 and sometimes worked as a team. Colleagues in Werderscher Markt joked about them behind their backs: the Fox and the Bear. And maybe there was something of the old married couple about them, in the way they bickered with and covered for each other.
‘This is the “missing” list.’ March sat down at his desk and unrolled the print-out: names, dates of birth, times of disappearance, addresses of informants. Jaeger leaned over his shoulder. He smoked stubby fat cigars and his uniform reeked of them. ‘According to the good doctor Eisler, our man probably died some time after six last night, so the chances are nobody missed him until seven or eight at the earliest. They may even be waiting to see if he shows up this morning. So he may not be on the list. But we have to consider two other possibilities, do we not? One: he went missing some time before he died. Two – and we know from hard experience this is not impossible – Eisler has screwed up the time of death.’
‘The guy isn’t fit to be a vet,’ said Jaeger.
March counted swiftly. ‘One hundred and two names. I’d put the age of our man at sixty.’
‘Better say fifty, to be safe. Twelve hours in the drink and nobody looks their best.’
‘True. So we exclude everyone on the list born after 1914. That should bring it down to a dozen names. Identification couldn’t be much easier: was grandpa missing a foot?’ March folded the sheet, tore it in two, and handed one half to Jaeger. ‘What are the Orpo stations around the Havel?’
‘Nikolassee,’ said Max. ‘Wannsee. Kladow. Gatow. Pichelsdorf –but that’s probably too far north.’
Over the next half hour, March called each of them in turn, including Pichelsdorf, to see if any clothing had been handed in, or if some local derelict matched the description of the man in the lake. Nothing. He turned his attention to his half of the list. By eleven-thirty he had exhausted every likely name. He stood up and stretched.
‘Mister Nobody.’
Jaeger had finished calling ten minutes earlier and was staring out of the window, smoking. ‘Popular fellow, isn’t he? Makes even you looked loved.’ He removed his cigar and picked some shreds of loose tobacco from his tongue. ‘I’ll see if the Duty Room have received any more names. Leave it to me. Have a good time with Pili.’
THE late morning service had just ended in the ugly church opposite Kripo headquarters. March stood on the other side of the street and watched the priest, a shabby raincoat over his vestments, locking the door. Religion was officially discouraged in Germany. How many worshippers, March wondered, had braved the Gestapo’s spies to attend? Half-a-dozen? The priest slipped the heavy iron key into his pocket and turned round. He saw March looking at him, and immediately scuttled away, eyes cast down, like a man caught in the middle of an illegal transaction. March buttoned his trenchcoat and followed him into the filthy Berlin morning.
THREE
onstruction of the Arch of Triumph was commenced in 1946 and work was completed in time for the Day of National Reawakening in 1950. The inspiration for the design came from the Führer and is based upon original drawings made by him during the Years of Struggle.’
The passengers on the tour bus – at least those who could understand – digested this information. They raised themselves out of their seats or leaned into the aisle to get a better view. Xavier March, half-way down the bus, lifted his son on to his lap. Their guide, a middle-aged woman clad in the dark green of the Reich Tourist Ministry, stood at the front, feet planted wide apart, back to the windscreen. Her voice over the address system was thick with cold.
‘The Arch is constructed of granite and has a capacity of two million, three hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-five cubic metres.’ She sneezed. ‘The Arc de Triomphe in Paris will fit into it forty-nine times.’
For a moment, the Arch loomed over them. Then, suddenly, they were passing through it – an immense, stone-ribbed tunnel, longer than a football pitch, higher than a fifteen-storey building, with the vaulted, shadowed roof of a cathedral. The headlights and tail-lights of eight lanes of traffic danced in the afternoon gloom.
‘The Arch has a height of one hundred and eighteen metres. It is one hundred and sixty-eight metres wide and has a depth of one hundred and nineteen metres. On the inner walls are carved the names of the three million soldiers who fell in defence of the Fatherland in the wars of 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1946.’
She sneezed again. The passengers dutifully craned their necks to peer at the Roll of the Fallen. They were a mixed party. A group of Japanese, draped with cameras; an American couple with a little girl Pili’s age; some German settlers, from Ostland or the Ukraine, in Berlin for the Führertag. March looked away as they passed the Roll of the Fallen. Somewhere on it were the names of his father and both his grandfathers. He kept his eyes on the guide. When she thought no one was looking, she turned away and quickly wiped her nose on her sleeve. The coach reemerged into the drizzle.
‘Leaving the Arch we enter the central section of the Avenue of Victory. The Avenue was designed by Reich Minister Albert Speer and was completed in 1957. It is one hundred and twenty-three metres wide and five-point-six kilometres in length. It is both wider, and two and a half times longer, than the Champs Elysées in Paris.’
Higher, longer, bigger, wider, more expensive . . . Even in victory, thought March, Germany has a parvenu’s inferiority complex. Nothing stands on its own. Everything has to be compared with what the foreigners have . . .
‘The view from this point northwards along the Avenue of Victory is considered one of the wonders of the world.’
‘One of the wonders of the world,’ repeated Pili in a whisper.
And it was, even on a day like this. Dense with traffic, the Avenue stretched before them, flanked on either side by the glass and granite walls of Speer’s new buildings: ministries, offices, big stores, cinemas, apartment blocks. At the far end of this river of light, rising as grey as a battleship through the spray, was the Great Hall of the Reich, its dome half hidden in the low cloud.
There were appreciative murmurs from the settlers. ‘It’s like a mountain,’ said the woman sitting behind March. She was with her husband and four boys. They had probably been planning this trip all winter. A Tourist Ministry brochure and a dream of April in Berlin: comforts to warm them in the snowbound, moonless nights of Minsk or Kiev, a thousand kilometres from home. How had they got here? A package tour organised by Strength-Through-Joy, perhaps: two hours in a Junkers jet with a stop-off in Warsaw. Or a three-day drive in the family Volkswagen on the Berlin-Moscow Autobahn.
Pili wriggled out of his father’s grasp and walked unsteadily to the front of the coach. March pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, a nervous habit he had picked up – when? – in the U-boat service, he supposed, when the screws of the British warships sounded so close the hull shook and you never knew if their next depth charge would be your last. He had been invalided out of the navy in 1948 with suspected TB and spent a year convalescing. Then, for wan
t of anything better to do, he had joined the Marine-Küstenpolizei, the Coastal Police, in Wilhelmshaven as a lieutenant. That year he had married Klara Eckart, a nurse he had met at the TB clinic. In 1952, he had joined the Hamburg Kripo. In 1954, with Klara pregnant and the marriage already failing, he had been promoted to Berlin. Paul – Pili – had been born exactly ten years and one month ago.
What had gone wrong? He did not blame Klara. She had not changed. She had always been a strong woman who wanted certain simple things from life: home, family, friends, acceptance. But March: he had changed. After ten years in the navy and twelve months in virtual isolation, he had stepped ashore into a world he barely recognised. As he went to work, watched television, ate with friends, even – God help him – slept beside his wife, he sometimes imagined himself aboard a U-boat still: cruising beneath the surface of everyday life; solitary, watchful.
He had picked Pili up at noon from Klara’s place – a bungalow on a dreary post-war housing estate in Lichtenrade, in the southern suburbs. Park in the street, sound the horn twice, watch for the twitch in the parlour curtain. This was the routine which had evolved, unspoken, since their divorce five years ago – a means of avoiding embarrassing encounters; a ritual to be endured one Sunday in four, work permitting, under the strict provisions of the Reich Marriages Act. It was rare for him to see his son on a Tuesday, but this was a school vacation: since 1959, children had been given a week off for the Führer’s birthday, rather than for Easter.
The door had opened and Pili had appeared, like a shy child-actor being pushed out on stage against his will. Wearing his new Pimpf uniform – crisp black shirt and dark blue shorts – he had climbed wordlessly into the car. March had given him an awkward hug.
‘You look smart. How’s school?’
‘All right.’
‘And your mother?’
The boy shrugged.
Fatherland Page 3