So it was with Fiebes – the myopic, stooping, buck-toothed, cuckolded Fiebes – whom the Reich had blessed with the one job he really wanted. Homosexuality and miscegenation had replaced rape and incest as capital offences. Abortion, ‘an act of sabotage against Germany’s racial future’, was punishable by death. The permissive 1960s were showing a strong increase in such sex crimes. Fiebes, a sheet-sniffer by temperament, worked all the hours the Führer sent and was as happy, in Max Jaeger’s words, as a pig in horseshit.
But not today. Now, he was drinking in the office, his eyes were moist, and his bat’s-wing toupee hung slightly askew.
March said: ‘According to the newspapers, Stuckart died of heart failure.’
Fiebes blinked.
‘But according to the Registry, the file on Stuckart is out to you.’
‘I cannot comment.’
‘Of course you can. We are colleagues.’ March sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘I take it we are in the familiar business of “sparing the family embarrassment”.’
Fiebes muttered: ‘Not just the family.’ He hesitated. ‘Could I have one of those?’
‘Sure.’ March gave him a cigarette and flicked his lighter. Fiebes took an experimental draw, like a schoolboy.
‘This affair has left me pretty well shaken, March, I don’t mind admitting. The man was a hero to me.’
‘You knew him?’
‘By reputation, naturally. I never actually met him. Why? What is your interest?’
‘State security. That is all I can say. You know how it is.’
‘Ah. Now I understand.’ Fiebes poured himself another large helping of schnapps. ‘We’re very much alike, March, you and I.’
‘We are?’
‘Sure. You’re the only investigator who’s in this place as often as I am. We’ve got rid of our wives, our children – all that shit. We live for the job. When it goes well, we’re well. When it goes badly . . .’ His head fell forward. Presently, he said: ‘Do you know Stuckart’s book?’
‘Unfortunately, no.’
Fiebes opened a desk drawer and handed March a battered, leather-bound volume. A Commentary on the German Racial Laws. March leafed through it. There were chapters on each of the three Nuremberg Laws of 1935: the Reich Citizenship Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People. Some passages were underlined in red ink, with exclamation marks beside them. ‘For the avoidance of racial damage, it is necessary for couples to submit to medical examination before marriage.’ ‘Marriage between persons suffering from venereal disease, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy or “genetic infirmities” (see 1933 Sterilisation Law) will be permitted only after production of a sterilisation certificate.’ There were charts: ‘An Overview of the Admissibility of Marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans’, ‘The Prevalence of Mischling of the First Degree’.
It was all gobbledygook to Xavier March.
Fiebes said: ‘Most of it is out of date now. A lot of it refers to Jews, and the Jews, as we know’ – he gave a wink – ‘have all gone east. But Stuckart is still the bible of my calling. This is the foundation stone.’
March handed him the book. Fiebes cradled it like a baby. ‘Now what I really need to see’, said March, ‘is the file on Stuckart’s death.’
He was braced for an argument. Instead, Fiebes merely made an expansive gesture with his bottle of schnapps. ‘Go ahead.’
*
THE Kripo file was an ancient one. It went back more than a quarter of a century. In 1936, Stuckart had become a member of the Interior Ministry’s ‘Committee for the Protection of German Blood’ – a tribunal of civil servants, lawyers and doctors who considered applications for marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. Shortly afterwards, the police had started receiving anonymous allegations that Stuckart was providing marriage licences in exchange for cash bribes. He had also apparently demanded sexual favours from some of the women involved.
The first name complainant was a Dortmund tailor, a Herr Maser, who had protested to his local Party office that his fiancée had been assaulted. His statement had been passed to the Kripo. There was no record of any investigation. Instead, Maser and his girlfriend had been dispatched to concentration camps. Various other stories from informants, including one from Stuckart’s wartime Blockwart, were included in the file. No action had ever been taken.
In 1953, Stuckart had begun a liaison with an eighteen-year-old Warsaw girl, Maria Dymarski. She had claimed German ancestry back to 1720 in order to marry a Wehrmacht captain. The conclusion of the Interior Ministry’s experts was that the documents were forged. The following year, Dymarski had been given a permit to work as a domestic servant in Berlin. Her employer’s name was listed as Wilhelm Stuckart.
March looked up. ‘How did he get away with it for ten years?’
‘He was an Obergruppenführer, March. You don’t make complaints about a man like that. Remember what happened to Maser when he complained? Besides, nobody had any evidence – then.’
‘And there is evidence now?’
‘Look in the envelope.’
Inside the file, in a manila envelope, were a dozen colour photographs, of startlingly good quality, showing Stuckart and Dymarski in bed. White bodies against red satin sheets. The faces – contorted in some shots, relaxed in others – were easy to identify. They were all taken from the same position, alongside the bed. The girl’s body, pale and undernourished, looked fragile beneath the man’s. In one shot she sat astride him – thin white arms clasped behind her head, face tilted towards the camera. Her features were broad, Slavic. But with her shoulder-length hair dyed blonde she could have passed as a German.
‘These weren’t taken recently?’
‘About ten years ago. He turned greyer. She put on a bit of weight. She looked more of a tart as she got older.’
‘Do we have any idea where they are?’ The background was a blur of colours. A brown wooden bedhead, red-and-white striped wallpaper, a lamp with a yellow shade; it could have been anywhere.
‘It’s not his apartment – at least, not the way it’s decorated now. A hotel, maybe a whorehouse. The camera is behind a two-way mirror. See the way they sometimes seem to be staring into the camera? I’ve seen that look a hundred times. They’re checking themselves in the mirror.’
March examined each of the pictures again. They were glossy and unscratched – new prints from old negatives. The sort of pictures a pimp might try and sell you in a back street in Kreuzberg.
‘Where did you find them?’
‘Next to the bodies.’
Stuckart had shot his mistress first. According to the autopsy report, she had lain, fully clothed, face down on the bed in Stuckart’s apartment in Fritz Todt-Platz. He had put a bullet in the back of her head with his SS Luger (if that was so, thought March, it was probably the first time the old pen-pusher had ever used it). Traces of impacted cotton and down in the wound suggested he had fired the bullet through a pillow. Then he had sat on the edge of the bed and apparently shot himself through the roof of his mouth. In the scene-of-crime photographs neither body was recognisable. The pistol was still clutched in Stuckart’s hand.
‘He left a note,’ said Fiebes, ‘on the dining room table.’
‘By this action I hope to spare embarrassment to my family, the Reich and the Führer. Heil Hitler! Long live Germany! Wilhelm Stuckart.’
‘Blackmail?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Who found the bodies?’
‘This is the best part.’ Fiebes spat out each word as if it were poison: ‘An American woman journalist.’
Her statement was in the file: Charlotte Maguire, aged 25, Berlin representative of an American news agency, World European Features.
‘A real little bitch. Started shrieking about her rights the moment she was brought in. Rights!’ Fiebes took another swig of schnapps. ‘Shit, I suppose we have to be nice to the Americans now, do
we?’
March made a note of her address. The only other witness questioned was the porter who worked in Stuckart’s apartment block. The American woman claimed to have seen two men on the stairs immediately before the discovery of the bodies; but the porter insisted there had been no one.
March looked up suddenly. Fiebes jumped. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. A shadow at your door, perhaps.’
‘My God, this place . . .’ Fiebes flung open the frosted glass door and peered both ways along the corridor. While his back was turned, March detached the envelope pinned to the back of the file and slipped it into his pocket.
‘Nobody.’ He shut the door. ‘You’re losing your nerve, March.’
‘An over-active imagination has always been my curse.’ He closed the folder and stood up.
Fiebes swayed, squinting. ‘Don’t you want to take it with you? Aren’t you working on this with the Gestapo?’
‘No. A separate matter.’
‘Oh.’ He sat down heavily. ‘When you said “state security”, I assumed . . . Doesn’t matter. Out of my hands. The Gestapo have taken it over, thank God. Obergruppenführer Globus has assumed responsibility. You must have heard of him? A thug, it is true, but he’ll sort it out.’
THE information bureau at Alexander Platz had Luther’s address. According to police records, he still lived in Dahlem. March lit another cigarette, then dialled the number. The telephone rang for a long time – a bleak, unfriendly echo, somewhere in the city. Just as he was about to hang up, a woman answered.
‘Yes?’
‘Frau Luther?’
‘Yes.’ She sounded younger than he had expected. Her voice was thick, as if she had been crying.
‘My name is Xavier March. I am an investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei. May I speak to your husband?’
‘I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand. If you’re from the Polizei, surely you know . . .’
‘Know? Know what?’
‘That he is missing. He disappeared on Sunday.’ She started to cry.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ March balanced his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray.
God in heaven, another one.
‘He said he was going on a business trip to Munich and would be back on Monday.’ She blew her nose. ‘But I have already explained all this. Surely you know that this matter is being dealt with at the very highest level. What . . . ?’
She broke off. March could hear a conversation at the other end. There was a man’s voice in the background: harsh and questioning. She said something he could not hear, then came back on the line.
‘Obergruppenführer Globocnik is with me now. He would like to talk to you. What did you say your name was?’
March replaced the receiver.
ON his way out, he thought of the call at Buhler’s place that morning. An old man’s voice:
‘Buhler? Speak to me. Who is that?’
‘A friend.’
Click.
SEVEN
ülow Strasse runs west to east for about a kilometre, through one of the busiest quarters of Berlin, close to the Gotenland railway station. The American woman’s address proved to be an apartment block midway down.
It was seedier than March had expected: five storeys high, black with a century of traffic fumes, streaked with bird shit. A drunk sat on the pavement next to the entrance, turning his head to follow each passer-by. On the opposite side of the street was an elevated section of the U-bahn. As he parked, a train was pulling out of the Bülow Strasse station, its red and yellow carriages riding blue-white flashes of electricity, vivid in the gathering dark.
Her apartment was on the fourth floor. She was not in. ‘Henry,’ read a note written in English and pinned to her door, ‘I’m in the bar on Potsdamer Strasse. Love, Charlie.’
March knew only a few words of English – but enough to grasp the sense of the message. Wearily, he descended the stairs. Potsdamer Strasse was a long street, with many bars.
‘I’m looking for Fräulein Maguire,’ he said to the concierge in the hall. ‘Any idea where I might find her?’
It was like throwing a switch: ‘She went out an hour ago, Sturmbannführer. You’re the second man to ask. Fifteen minutes after she went out, a young chap came looking for her. Another foreigner – smartly dressed, short hair. She won’t be back until after midnight, that much I can promise you.’
March wondered how many of her other tenants the old lady had informed on to the Gestapo.
‘Is there a bar she goes to regularly?’
‘Heini’s, round the corner. That’s where all the damned foreigners go.’
‘Your powers of observation do you credit, madam.’
By the time he left her to her knitting five minutes later, March was laden with information about ‘Charlie’ Maguire. He knew she had dark hair, cut short; that she was small and slim; that she was wearing a raincoat of shiny blue plastic ‘and high heels, like a tart’; that she had lived here six months; that she stayed out all hours and often got up at noon; that she was behind with the rent; that he should see the bottles of liquor the hussy threw out . . . No, thank you, madam, he had no desire to inspect them, that would not be necessary, you have been most helpful . . .
He turned right along Bülow Strasse. Another right took him to Potsdamer Strasse. Heini’s was fifty metres up on the left. A painted sign showed a landlord with an apron and a handlebar moustache, carrying a foaming stein of beer. Beneath it, part of the red neon lettering had burnt out: Hei s.
The bar was quiet, except for one corner, where a group of six sat around a table, talking loudly in English accents. She was the only woman. She was laughing and ruffling an older man’s hair. He was laughing, too. Then he saw March and said something and the laughter stopped. They watched him as he approached. He was conscious of his uniform, of the noise of his jackboots on the polished wooden floor.
‘Fräulein Maguire, my name is Xavier March of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei.’ He showed her his ID. ‘I would like to speak with you, please.’
She had large dark eyes, glittering in the bar lights.
‘Go ahead.’
‘In private, please.’
‘I’ve nothing more to say.’ She turned to the man whose hair she had ruffled and murmured something March did not understand. They all laughed. March did not move. Eventually, a younger man in a sports jacket and a button-down shirt stood up. He pulled a card from his breast pocket and held it out.
‘Henry Nightingale. Second Secretary at the United States Embassy. I’m sorry, Herr March, but Miss Maguire has said all she has to say to your colleagues.’
March ignored the card.
The woman said: ‘If you’re not going to go, why don’t you join us? This is Howard Thompson of the New York Times.’ The older man raised his glass. ‘This is Bruce Fallon of United Press. Peter Kent, CBS. Arthur Haines, Reuters. Henry, you’ve met. Me, you know, apparently. We’re just having a little drink to celebrate the great news. Come on. The Americans and the SS – we’re all friends now.’
‘Careful, Charlie,’ said the young man from the Embassy.
‘Shut up, Henry. Oh, Christ, if this man doesn’t move soon, I’ll go and talk to him out of sheer boredom. Look –’ There was a crumpled sheet of paper on the table in front of her. She tossed it to March. ‘That’s what I got for getting mixed up in this. My visa’s withdrawn for “fraternising with a German citizen without official permission”. I was supposed to leave today, but my friends here had a word with the Propaganda Ministry and got me a week’s extension. Wouldn’t have looked good, would it? Throwing me out on the day of the great news.’
March said: ‘It’s important.’
She stared at him, a cool look. The Embassy man put his hand on her arm. ‘You don’t have to go.’
That seemed to make up her mind. ‘Will you shut up, Henry?’ She shook herself free and pulled her coat over her shoulders. ‘He looks respectable enough. For a Naz
i. Thanks for the drink.’ She downed the contents of her glass – whisky and water, by the look of it – and stood up. ‘Let’s go.’
The man called Thompson said something in English.
‘I will, Howard. Don’t worry.’
Outside, she said: ‘Where are we going?’
‘My car.’
‘Then where?’
‘Doctor Stuckart’s apartment.’
‘What fun.’
She was small. Even clattering on her high heels, she was several centimetres short of March’s shoulder. He opened the door of the Volkswagen for her and, as she bent to get in, he smelled the whisky on her breath, and also cigarettes – French, not German – and perfume: something expensive, he thought.
The Volkswagen’s 1300 cc engine rattled behind them. March drove carefully: west along Bülow Strasse, around the Berlin-Gotenland station, north up the Avenue of Victory. The captured artillery from the Barbarossa campaign lined the boulevard, barrels tilted towards the stars. Normally this section of the capital was quiet at night, Berliners preferring the noisy cafés behind the K-damm, or the jumbled streets of Kreuzberg. But on this evening, people were everywhere – standing in groups, admiring the guns and the floodlit buildings, strolling and window shopping.
‘What kind of person wants to go out at night and look at guns?’ She shook her head in wonderment.
‘Tourists,’ said March. ‘By the twentieth, there’ll be more than three million of them.’
It was risky, taking the American woman back to Stuckart’s place, especially now Globus knew someone from the Kripo was looking for Luther. But he needed to see the apartment, to hear the woman’s story. He had no plan, no real idea of what he might find. He recalled the Führer’s words – ‘I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker’ – and he smiled.
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