‘What would you like to do?’
He shrugged again.
They had lunch in Budapester Strasse, opposite the Zoo, in a modern place with vinyl seats and a plastic-topped table: father and son, one with beer and sausages, the other with apple juice and a hamburger. They talked about the Pimpf and Pili brightened. Until you were a Pimpf you were nothing, ‘a non-uniformed creature who has never participated in a group meeting or a route march’. You were allowed to join when you were ten, and stayed until you were fourteen, when you passed into the full Hitler Youth.
‘I was top in the initiation test.’
‘Good lad.’
‘You have to run sixty metres in twelve seconds,’ said Pili. ‘Do the long jump and the shot-put. There’s a route march – a day and a half. Written stuff. Party philosophy. And you have to recite the Horst Wessel Lied.’
For a moment, March thought he was about to break into song. He cut in hurriedly: ‘And your dagger?’
Pili fumbled in his pocket, a crease of concentration on his forehead. How like his mother he is, thought March. The same wide cheekbones and full mouth, the same serious brown eyes, set far apart. Pili laid the dagger carefully on the table before him. He picked it up. It reminded him of the day he got his own – when was it? ’34? The excitement of a boy who believes he’s been admitted to the company of men. He turned it over and the swastika on the hilt glinted in the light. He felt the weight of it in his hand, then gave it back.
‘I’m proud of you,’ he lied. ‘What do you want to do? We can go to the cinema. Or the zoo.’
‘I want to go on the bus.’
‘But we did that last time. And the time before.’
‘Don’t care. I want to go on the bus.’
‘THE Great Hall of the Reich is the largest building in the world. It rises to a height of more than a quarter of a kilometre, and on certain days – observe today – the top of its dome is lost from view. The dome itself is one hundred and forty metres in diameter and St Peter’s in Rome will fit into it sixteen times.’
They had reached the top of the Avenue of Victory, and were entering Adolf Hitler Platz. To the left, the square was bounded by the headquarters of the Wehrmacht High Command, to the right by the new Reich Chancellery and Palace of the Führer. Ahead was the hall. Its greyness had dissolved as their distance from it had diminished. Now they could see what the guide was telling them: that the pillars supporting the frontage were of red granite, mined in Sweden, flanked at either end by golden statues of Atlas and Tellus, bearing on their shoulders spheres depicting the heavens and the earth.
The building was as crystal-white as a wedding cake, its dome of beaten copper a dull green. Pili was still at the front of the coach.
‘The Great Hall is used only for the most solemn ceremonies of the German Reich and has a capacity of one hundred and eighty thousand people. One interesting and unforeseen phenomenon: the breath from this number of humans rises into the cupola and forms clouds, which condense and fall as light rain. The Great Hall is the only building in the world which generates its own climate . . .’
March had heard it all before. He looked out of the window and saw the body in the mud. Swimming trunks! What had the old man been thinking of, swimming on Monday night? Berlin had been blanketed by black clouds from late afternoon. When the storm finally broke the rain had descended in steel rods, drilling the streets and roofs, drowning the thunder. Suicide, perhaps? Think of it. Wade into the cold lake, strike out for the centre, tread water in the darkness, watch the lightning over the trees, wait for tiredness to do the rest . . .
Pili had returned to his seat and was bouncing up and down in excitement.
‘Are we going to see the Führer, papa?’
The vision evaporated and March felt guilty. This daydreaming was what Klara used to complain of: ‘Even when you’re here, you’re not really here . . .’
He said: ‘I don’t think so.’
The guide again: ‘On the right is the Reich Chancellery and Residence of the Führer. Its total façade measures exactly seven hundred metres, exceeding by one hundred metres the façade of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles.’
The Chancellery slowly uncoiled as the bus drove by: marble pillars and red mosaics, bronze lions, gilded silhouettes, gothic script – a Chinese dragon of a building, asleep at the side of the square. A four-man SS honour guard stood at attention beneath a billowing swastika banner. There were no windows, but set into the wall, five storeys above the ground, was the balcony on which the Führer showed himself on those occasions when a million people gathered in the Platz. There were a few dozen sightseers even now, gazing up at the tightly drawn shutters, faces pale with expectation, hoping . . .
March glanced at his son. Pili was transfixed, his little dagger clutched tightly in his hand like a crucifix.
THE coach dropped them back at its pick-up point outside the Berlin-Gotenland railway station. It was after five as they descended from the bus, and the last vestiges of natural light were fading. The day was giving up on itself in disgust.
The entrance to the station was disgorging people – soldiers with kitbags walking with girlfriends and wives, foreign workers with cardboard suitcases and shabby bundles tied with string, settlers emerging after two days’ travelling from the Steppes, staring in shock at the lights and the crowds. Uniforms were everywhere. Dark blue, green, brown, black, grey, khaki. It was like a factory at the end of a shift. There was a factory sound of shunting metal and shrill whistles, and a factory smell of heat and oil, stale air and steel-dust. Exclamation marks clamoured from the walls. ‘Be vigilant at all times!’ ‘Attention! Report suspicious packages at once!’ ‘Terrorist alert!’
From here, trains as high as houses, with a gauge of four metres, left for the outposts of the German Empire – for Gotenland (formerly the Crimea) and Theoderichshafen (formerly Sevastopol); for the Generalkommissariat of Taurida and its capital, Melitopol; for Volhynia-Podolia, Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolaev, Dnepropetrovsk, Karkov, Rostov, Saratov . . . It was the terminus of a new world. Announcements of arrivals and departures punctuated the ‘Coriolan Overture’ on the public address system. March tried to take Pili’s hand as they wove through the crowd, but the boy shook him away.
It took fifteen minutes to retrieve the car from the underground car park, and another fifteen to get clear of the clogged streets around the station. They drove in silence. It was not until they were almost back at Lichtenrade that Pili suddenly blurted out: ‘You’re an asocial, aren’t you?’
It was such an odd word to hear on the lips of a ten-year-old, and so carefully pronounced, that March almost laughed out loud. An asocial: one step down from traitor in the Party’s lexicon of crime. A non-contributor to Winter Relief. A non-joiner of the endless National Socialist associations. The NS Skiing Federation. The Association of NS Ramblers. The Greater German NS-Motoring Club. The NS Criminal Police Officers Society. He had even one afternoon come across a parade in the Lustgarten organised by the NS-League of Wearers of the Life-Saving Medal.
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘Uncle Erich says it’s true.’
Erich Helfferich. So he had become ‘Uncle’ Erich now, had he? A zealot of the worst sort, a full-time bureaucrat at the Party’s Berlin headquarters. An officious, bespectacled scout master . . . March felt his hands tightening on the steering wheel. Helfferich had started seeing Klara a year ago.
‘He says you don’t give the Führer-salute and you make jokes about the Party.’
‘And how does he know all this?’
‘He says there’s a file on you at Party Headquarters and it’s only a matter of time before you’re picked up.’ The boy was almost in tears with the shame of it. ‘I think he’s right.’
‘Pili!’
They were drawing up outside the house.
‘I hate you.’ This was delivered in a calm, flat voice. He got out of the car. March opened his door, ran round and followed him up the path. He could hear a do
g barking inside the house.
‘Pili!’ he shouted once more.
The door opened. Klara stood there in the uniform of the NS-Frauenschaft. Lurking behind her, March glimpsed the brown-clad figure of Helfferich. The dog, a young German shepherd, came running out and leapt up at Pili, who pushed his way past his mother and disappeared into the house. March wanted to follow him, but Klara blocked his path.
‘Leave the boy alone. Get out of here. Leave us all alone.’
She caught the dog and dragged it back by its collar. The door slammed on its yelping.
LATER, as he drove back towards the centre of Berlin, March kept thinking about that dog. It was the only living creature in the house, he realised, which was not wearing a uniform.
Had he not felt so miserable, he would have laughed.
FOUR
hat a pig of a day,’ said Max Jaeger. It was seven-thirty in the evening and he was pulling on his coat in Werderscher Markt. ‘No possessions handed in; no clothing. I’ve gone back on the missing list to Thursday. Nothing. So that’s more than twenty-four hours since estimated time of death and not a soul has missed him. You sure he’s not just some derelict?’
March gave a brief shake of the head. ‘Too well-fed. And derelicts don’t own swimming trunks. As a rule.’
‘To cap it all,’ Max took a last puff on his cigar and stubbed it out, ‘I’ve got to go to a Party meeting tonight. “The German Mother: Warrior of the Volk on the Home Front”.’
Like all Kripo investigators, including March, Jaeger had the SS rank of Sturmbannführer. Unlike March, he had joined the Party the previous year. Not that March blamed him. You had to be a Party member to gain promotion.
‘Is Hannelore going?’
‘Hannelore? Holder of the Honour Cross of the German Mother, Bronze Class? Naturally she’s going.’ Max looked at his watch. ‘Just time for a beer. What do you say?’
‘Not tonight, thanks. I’ll walk down with you.’
They parted on the steps of the Kripo building. With a wave, Jaeger turned left towards the bar in Ob-wall Strasse, while March turned right, towards the river. He walked quickly. The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp and misty. The pre-war street lights gleamed on the black pavement. From the Spree came the low note of a foghorn, muffled by the buildings.
He turned a corner and walked alongside the river, enjoying the sensation of the cold night air against his face. A barge was chugging upstream, a single light at its prow, a cauldron of dark water boiling at its stern. Apart from that, there was silence. There were no cars here; no people. The city might have vaporised in the darkness. He left the river with reluctance, crossing Spittel Markt to Seydel Strasse. A few minutes later he entered the Berlin city morgue.
Doctor Eisler had gone home. No surprise there. ‘I love you,’ breathed a woman’s voice in the deserted reception, ‘and I want to bear your children.’ An attendant in a stained white tunic reluctantly turned away from his portable television and checked March’s ID. He made a note in his register, picked up a bunch of keys, and gestured to the detective to follow him. Behind them, the theme tune of the Reichsrundfunk’s nightly soap opera began to play.
Swing doors led on to a corridor identical to a dozen back in Werderscher Markt. Somewhere, thought March, there must be a Reichsdirektor for green linoleum. He followed the attendant into an elevator. The metal grille closed with a crash and they descended into the basement.
At the entrance to the storeroom, beneath a No Smoking sign, they both lit cigarettes – two professionals taking the same precaution, not against the smell of the bodies (the room was refrigerated: there was no stink of corruption) but to blot out the stinging fumes of the disinfectant.
‘You want the old fellow? Came in just after eight?’
‘Right,’ said March.
The attendant pulled a large handle and swung open the heavy door. There was a whoosh of cold air as they stepped inside. Harsh neon strips lit a floor of white tiles, slightly sloping on either side down to a narrow gutter in the centre. Heavy metal drawers like filing cabinets were set into the walls. The attendant took a clipboard from a hook by the light-switch and walked along them, checking the numbers.
‘This one.’
He tucked the clipboard under his arm and gave the drawer a hard tug. It slid open. March stepped over and pulled back the white sheet.
‘You can go now, if you like,’ he said, without looking round. ‘I’ll call when I’ve finished.’
‘Not allowed. Regulations.’
‘In case I tamper with the evidence? Do me a favour.’
The body did not improve on second acquaintance. A hard, fleshy face, small eyes and a cruel mouth. The scalp was almost entirely bald, apart from the odd strand of white hair. The nose was sharp, with two deep indentations on either side of the bridge. He must have worn spectacles for years. The face itself was unmarked, but there were symmetrical bruises on either cheek. March inserted his fingers into the mouth and encountered only soft gum. At some point a complete set of false teeth must have been knocked loose.
March pulled the sheet right back. The shoulders were broad, the torso that of a powerful man, just beginning to run to fat. He folded the cloth neatly a few centimetres above the stump. He was always respectful of the dead. No society doctor on the Kurfürstendamm was more tender with his clients than Xavier March.
He breathed warmth on to his hands and reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He pulled out a small tin case, which he opened, and two white cards. The cigarette smoke tasted bitter in his mouth. He grasped the corpse’s left wrist – so cold; it never ceased to shock him – and prised open the fingers. Carefully, he pressed each tip on to the pad of black ink in the tin. Then he put the tin down, picked up one of the cards, and pressed each finger on to that. When he was satisfied, he repeated the process on the old man’s right hand. The attendant watched him, fascinated.
The smears of black on the white hands looked shocking; a desecration.
‘Clean him up,’ said March.
THE headquarters of the Reich Kripo are in Werderscher Markt, but the actual hardware of police business – the forensic laboratories, criminal records, armoury, workshops, detention cells – are in the Berlin Police Praesidium building in Alexander Platz. It was to this sprawling Prussian fortress, opposite the busiest U-bahn station in the city, that March went next. It took him fifteen minutes, walking briskly.
‘You want what?’
The voice, edged high with incredulity, belonged to Otto Koth, deputy head of the fingerprint section.
‘Priority,’ repeated March. He took another draw on his cigarette. He knew Koth well. Two years ago they had trapped a gang of armed robbers who had killed a policeman in Lankwitz. Koth had got a promotion on the strength of it. ‘I know you’ve got a backlog from here to the Führer’s hundredth birthday. I know you’ve got the Sipo on your back for terrorists and God knows what. But do this for me.’
Koth leaned back in his chair. In the bookcase behind him, March could see Artur Nebe’s book on criminology, published thirty years ago, but still the standard text. Nebe had been head of the Kripo since 1933.
‘Let me see what you’ve got,’ said Koth.
March handed over the cards. Koth glanced at them, nodding.
‘Male,’ said March. ‘About sixty. Dead for a day.’
‘I know how he feels.’ Koth took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘All right. They’ll go to the top of the pile.’
‘How long?’
‘Should have an answer by morning.’ Koth put his glasses back on. ‘What I don’t understand is how you know this man, whoever he was, had a criminal record.’
March did not know, but he was not going to hand Koth an excuse to wriggle out of his promise. ‘Trust me,’ he said.
MARCH arrived back at his flat at eleven. The ancient cage lift was out of order. The stairs, with their threadbare brown carpet, smelled of other people’s old meals, o
f boiled cabbage and burned meat. As he passed the second floor he could hear the young couple who lived beneath him quarrelling.
‘How can you say that?’
‘You’ve done nothing! Nothing!’
A door slammed. A baby cried. Elsewhere, someone turned up the volume of their radio in response. The symphony of apartment life. This had been a fashionable block, once. Now, like many of its tenants, it had fallen on harder times. He continued on up to the next floor and let himself in.
The rooms were cold, the heating having failed to come on, as usual. He had five: a sitting room, with a good high ceiling, looking out on to Ansbacher Strasse; a bedroom with an iron bedstead; a small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen; a spare room was filled with salvage from his marriage, still packed in boxes five years later. Home. It was bigger than the forty-four square metres which was the standard size of a Volkswohnung – a People’s Flat – but not much.
Before March had moved in it had been occupied by the widow of a Luftwaffe general. She had lived in it since the war and had let it go to ruin. On his second weekend, redecorating the bedroom, he had stripped off the mildewed wallpaper and found tucked behind it a photograph, folded up very small. A sepia portrait, all misty browns and creams, dated 1929, taken by a Berlin studio. A family stood before a painted backdrop of trees and fields. A dark-haired woman gazed at a baby in her arms. Her husband stood proud behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder. Next to him, a little boy. He had kept it on the mantelpiece ever since.
The boy was Pili’s age, would be March’s age today.
Who were these people? What had happened to the child? For years he had wondered, but hesitated – he always had plenty at the Markt to stretch his mind, without finding fresh mysteries to unravel. Then, just before last Christmas, for no reason he could properly define – a vague and growing uneasiness that happened to coincide with his birthday, no more than that – he had started to seek an answer.
The landlord’s records showed that the apartment had been rented between 1928 and 1942 to one Weiss, Jakob. But there was no police file on any Jakob Weiss. He was not registered as having moved, or fallen sick, or died. Calls to the records bureaux of the Army, Navy and Luftwaffe confirmed he had not been conscripted to fight. The photographer’s studio had become a television rental shop, its records lost. None of the young people in the landlord’s office remembered the Weisses. They had vanished. Weiss. White. A blank. By now, in his heart, March knew the truth – perhaps had always known it – but he went round one evening with the photograph even so, like a policeman, seeking witnesses, and the other tenants in the house had looked at him as if he were crazy even for asking. Except one.
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