Fatherland

by Robert Harris

  Before it had been renamed Gotenland, this had been the Anhalter Bahnhof: the Reich’s main eastern railway terminus. It was from here that the Führer had set out in his armoured train, Amerika, for his wartime headquarters in East Prussia; from here, too, that Berlin’s Jews – the Weisses among them – must have embarked on their journey east.

  ‘. . . from 10 October onwards the Jews have been evacuated from Reich territory to the East in a continuous series of transports . . .’

  In the air behind him, growing fainter: the platform announcements; somewhere ahead, the clank of wheels and couplings, a bleak whistle. The yard was vast – a dreamscape in the orange sodium lighting – at its centre, the one patch of brilliant white. As March neared it, he could make out a dozen figures standing in front of a high-sided goods train: a couple of Orpo men, Krebs, Doctor Eisler, a photographer, a group of anxious officials of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, and Globus.

  Globus saw him first, and slowly clapped his gloved hands in muffled and mocking applause. ‘Gentlemen, we can relax. The heroic forces of the Kriminalpolizei have arrived to give us their theories.’

  One of the Orpo men sniggered.

  The body, or what was left of it, was under a rough woollen blanket spread across the tracks, and also in a green plastic sack.

  ‘May I see the corpse?’

  ‘Of course. We haven’t touched him yet. We’ve been waiting for you, the great detective.’ Globus nodded to Krebs, who pulled away the blanket.

  A man’s torso, neatly cropped at either end, along the lines of the rails. He was belly down, slanted across the tracks. One hand had been severed, the head was crushed. Both legs had also been run over, but the bloodied shards of clothing made it difficult to gauge the precise point of amputation. There was a strong smell of alcohol.

  ‘And now you must look in here.’ Globus was holding the plastic sack up to the light. He opened it and brought it close to March’s face. ‘The Gestapo does not wish to be accused of concealing evidence.’

  The stumps of feet, one of them still shod; a hand ending in ragged white bone and the gold band of a wristwatch. March did not close his eyes, which seemed to disappoint Globus. ‘Ach, well.’ He dropped the sack. ‘They’re worse when they stink, when the rats have been at them. Check his pockets, Krebs.’

  In his flapping leather coat, Krebs squatted over the body like carrion. He reached beneath the corpse, feeling for the inside of the jacket. Over his shoulder, Krebs said: ‘We were informed two hours ago by the Reichsbahn Polizei that a man answering Luther’s description had been seen here. But by the time we got here . . .’

  ‘He had already suffered a fatal accident.’ March smiled bitterly. ‘How unexpected.’

  ‘Here we are, Herr Obergruppenführer.’ Krebs had retrieved a passport and wallet. He straightened, and handed them to Globus.

  ‘This is his passport, no question,’ said Globus, flicking through it. ‘And here are several thousand Reichsmarks in cash. Money enough for silk sheets at the Hotel Adlon. But, of course, the bastard couldn’t show his face in civilised company. He had no choice but to sleep rough out here.’

  This thought appeared to give him satisfaction. He showed March the passport: Luther’s ponderous face peered out from above his calloused thumb. ‘Look at it, Sturmbannführer, then run along and tell Nebe it is all over. The Gestapo will handle everything from now on. You can clear off and get some rest.’ And enjoy it, his eyes said, while you can.

  ‘The Herr Obergruppenführer is kind.’

  ‘You’ll discover how kind I am, March, that much I promise you.’ He turned to Eisler. ‘Where’s that fucking ambulance?’

  The pathologist stood to attention. ‘On its way, Herr Obergruppenführer. Most definitely.’

  March gathered he had been dismissed. He moved towards the railway workers, standing in a forlorn group about ten metres away. ‘Which of you discovered the body?’

  ‘I did, Herr Sturmbannführer.’ The man who stepped forward wore the dark blue tunic and soft cap of a locomotive driver. His eyes were red, his voice raw. Was that because of the body, wondered March, or was it fear at the unexpected presence of an SS general?

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘God, yes, sir. Thanks.’

  The driver took one, giving a furtive glance towards Globus, who was now talking to Krebs.

  March offered him a light. ‘Relax. Take your time. Has this happened to you before?’

  ‘Once.’ The man exhaled and looked gratefully at the cigarette. ‘It happens here every three or four months. The derelicts sleep under the wagons, to keep out of the rain, poor devils. Then, when the engines start, instead of staying where they are, they try to get out of the way.’ He put his hand to his eyes. ‘I must have reversed over him, but I never heard a thing. When I looked back up the track, there he was – just a heap of rags.’

  ‘Do you get many derelicts in this yard?’

  ‘Always a couple of dozen. The Reichsbahn Polizei try to keep them away, but the place is too big to patrol properly. Look over there. Some of them are making a run for it.’

  He pointed across the tracks. At first, March could make out nothing, except a line of cattle-trucks. Then, almost invisible in the shadow of the train, he spotted a movement – a shape, running jerkily, like a marionette; then another; then more. They ran along the sides of the wagons, darted into the gaps between the trucks, waited, then scampered out again towards the next patch of cover.

  Globus had his back to them. Oblivious to their presence, he was still talking to Krebs, smacking his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

  March watched as the stick-figures worked their way to safety –then suddenly the rails were vibrating, there was a rush of wind, and the view was cut off by the sleeper train to Rovno, accelerating out of Berlin. The wall of double-decker dining cars and sleeping compartments took half a minute to pass and by the time it had cleared the little colony of drifters had vanished into the orangey dark.

  PART FIVE

  SATURDAY 18 APRIL

  Most of you know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side. Or five hundred. Or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from some exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never to be written and is never to be written.

  HEINRICH HIMMLER

  secret speech to senior SS officers,

  Poznan, 4 October 1943

  ONE

  crack of light showed beneath her door. Inside her apartment a radio was playing. Lovers’ music – soft strings and low crooning, appropriate for the night. A party? Was this how Americans behaved in the presence of danger? He stood alone on the tiny landing and looked at his watch. It was almost two. He knocked and after a few moments the volume was turned down. He heard her voice.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The police.’

  A second or two elapsed, then there was a clatter of bolts and chains, and the door opened. She said: ‘You’re very funny,’ but her smile was a false one, pasted on for his benefit. In her dark eyes exhaustion showed, and also – was it? – fear? He bent to kiss her, his hands resting lightly on her waist, and immediately felt a pricking of desire. My God, he thought, she’s turning me into a sixteen-year-old . . .

  Somewhere in the apartment: a footstep. He looked up. Over her shoulder, a man loomed in the doorway of the bathroom. He was a couple of years younger than March: brown brogues, sports jacket, a bow tie, a white jersey pulled on casually over a business shirt. Charlie stiffened in March’s embrace and gently broke free of him. ‘You remember Henry Nightingale?’

  He straightened, feeling awkward. ‘Of course. The bar in Potsdamer Strasse.’

  Neither man made a move towards the other. The American’s face was a mask.

  March stared at Nightingale and said softly: ‘What’s going on here, Charlie?’

  Sh
e stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. ‘Don’t say anything. Not here. Something’s happened.’Then, loudly: ‘Isn’t this interesting, the three of us?’ She took March’s arm and guided him towards the bathroom. ‘I think you should come into my parlour.’

  IN the bathroom, Nightingale assumed a proprietorial air. He turned on the cold water taps above the basin and the bath, increased the volume of the radio. The programme had changed. Now the clapboard walls vibrated to the strains of ‘German jazz’ – a watery syncopation, officially approved, from which all traces of ‘Negroid influences’ had been erased. When he had arranged everything to his satisfaction, Nightingale perched on the edge of the bath. March sat next to him. Charlie squatted on the floor.

  She opened the meeting: ‘I told Henry about my visitor the other morning. The one you had the fight with. He thinks the Gestapo may have planted a bug.’

  Nightingale gave an amiable grin. ‘Afraid that’s the way your country works, Herr Sturmbannführer.’

  Your country . . .

  ‘I’m sure – a wise precaution.’

  Perhaps he isn’t younger than me, thought March. The American had thick blond hair, blond eyelashes, a ski-tan. His teeth were absurdly regular – strips of enamel, gleaming white. Not many one-pot meals in his childhood, no watery potato soups or sawdust sausages in that complexion. His boyish looks embraced all ages from twenty-five to fifty.

  For a few moments nobody spoke. Euro-pap filled the silence. Charlie said to March: ‘I know you told me not to speak to anyone. But I had to. Now you have to trust Henry and Henry has to trust you. Believe me, there’s no other way.’

  ‘And, naturally, we both have to trust you.’

  ‘Oh come on . . .’

  ‘All right.’ He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  Next to her, balanced on top of the lavatory, was the latest in American portable tape recorders. Trailing from one of its sockets was a cable, at the end of which, instead of a microphone, was a small suction cup.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’ll understand.’ She leaned across and pressed a switch. The spools of tape began to revolve.

  ‘Fräulein Maguire?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The same procedure as before, Fräulein, if you please.’

  There was a click, followed by a buzz.

  She pressed another switch, stopping the tape. ‘That was the first call. You said he’d ring. I was waiting for him.’ She was triumphant. ‘It’s Martin Luther.’

  THIS was a crazy business, the craziest he had ever known, like picking your way through a haunted house in the Tiergarten fun fair. No sooner did you plant your feet on solid ground than the floorboards gave way beneath you. You rounded a corner and a madman rushed out. Then you stepped back and found that all the time you had been looking at yourself in a distorting mirror.

  Luther.

  March said: ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Eleven forty-five.’

  Eleven forty-five: forty minutes after the discovery of the body on the railway tracks. He thought of the exultant look on Globus’s face, and he smiled.

  Nightingale said: ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll explain. What happened next?’

  ‘Exactly as before. I went over to the telephone box and five minutes later he rang again.’

  March raised his hand to his brow. ‘Don’t tell me you dragged that machine all the way across the street?’

  ‘Damn it, I needed some proof!’ She glared at him. ‘I knew what I was doing. Look.’ She stood to demonstrate. ‘The deck hangs from this shoulder strap. The whole thing fits under my coat. The wire runs down my sleeve. I attach the suction cup to the receiver, like this. Easy. It was dark. Nobody could have seen a thing.’

  Nightingale, the professional diplomat, cut in smoothly: ‘Never mind how you got the tape, Charlie, or whether you should have got it.’ He said to March: ‘May I suggest we simply let her play it?’

  Charlie pushed a button. There was a fumbling noise, greatly magnified – the sound of her attaching the microphone to the telephone – and then:

  ‘We have not much time. I am a friend of Stuckart.’

  An elderly voice, but not frail. A voice with the sarcastic, sing-song quality of the native Berliner. He spoke exactly as March had expected. Then Charlie’s voice, in her good German:

  ‘Tell me what you want.’

  ‘Stuckart is dead.’

  ‘I know. I found him.’

  A long pause. On the tape, in the background, March could hear a station announcement. Luther must have used the distraction caused by the discovery of the body to make a phone call from the Gotenland platform.

  Charlie whispered: ‘He went so quiet, I thought I’d frightened him away.’

  March shook his head. ‘I told you. You’re his only hope.’

  The conversation on the tape resumed.

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wearily: ‘You say: What do I want? What do you think I want? Asylum in your country.’

  ‘Tell me where you are.’

  ‘I can pay.’

  ‘That won’t –’

  ‘I have information. Certain facts.’

  ‘Tell me where you are. I’ll come and fetch you. We’ll go to the Embassy.’

  ‘Too soon. Not yet.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. Listen to me. Nine o’clock. The Great Hall. Central steps. Have you got that?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Bring someone from the Embassy. But you must be there as well.’

  ‘How do we recognise you?’

  A laugh. ‘No. I shall recognise you, show myself when I am satisfied.’ Pause. ‘Stuckart said you were young and pretty.’ Pause. ‘That was Stuckart all over.’ Pause. ‘Wear something that stands out.’

  ‘I have a coat. Bright blue.’

  ‘Pretty girl in blue. It is good. Until the morning, Fräulein.’

  Click.

  Purr.

  The clatter of the tape machine being switched off.

  ‘Play it again,’ said March.

  She rewound the tape, stopped it, pressed PLAY. March looked away, watched the rusty water swirling down the plughole, as Luther’s voice mingled with the reedy sound of a single clarinet. ‘Pretty girl in blue . . .’ When they had heard it through for the second time, Charlie reached over and turned off the machine.

  ‘After he hung up, I came over here and dropped off the tape. Then I went back to the telephone box and tried to call you. You weren’t there. So I called Henry. What else could I do? He says he wants someone from the Embassy.’

  ‘Got me out of bed,’ said Nightingale. He yawned and stretched, revealing an expanse of pale, hairless leg. ‘What I don’t understand is why he didn’t just let Charlie pick him up and bring him straight to the Embassy tonight.’

  ‘You heard him,’ said March. ‘Tonight is too soon. He daren’t show himself. He has to wait until the morning. By then the Gestapo’s search for him will probably have been called off.’

  Charlie frowned. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘The reason you couldn’t reach me two hours ago was because I was on my way to the Gotenland marshalling yards, where the Gestapo were hugging themselves with joy that they had finally discovered Luther’s body.’

  ‘That can’t be.’

  ‘No. It can’t.’ March pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. It was hard to keep his mind clear. ‘My guess is Luther’s been hiding in the rail yard for the past four days, ever since he got back from Switzerland, trying to work out some way of contacting you.’

  ‘But how did he survive all that time?’

  March shrugged. ‘He had money, remember. Perhaps he picked out some drifter he thought he could trust, paid him to bring him food and drink; warm clothes, maybe. Until he had his plan.’

  Nightingale said: ‘And what was his plan, Sturmbannführer?’
/>   ‘He needed someone to take his place, to convince the Gestapo he was dead.’ Was he talking too loudly? The Americans’ paranoia was contagious. He leaned forward and said softly: ‘Yesterday, when it was dark, he must have killed a man. A man of roughly his age and build. Got him drunk, knocked him out – I don’t know how he did it – dressed him in his clothes, gave him his wallet, his passport, his watch. Then he put him under a goods train, with his hands and head on the rails. Stayed with him to make sure he didn’t move until the wheels went over him. He’s trying to buy himself some time. He’s gambling that by nine o’clock this morning, the Berlin Polizei will have stopped looking for him. A fair bet, I would say.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Nightingale looked from March to Charlie and back again. ‘And this is the man I’m supposed to take in to the Embassy?’

  ‘Oh, it gets better than that.’ From the inside pocket of his tunic, March produced the documents from the archive. ‘On the twentieth of January 1942, Martin Luther was one of fourteen men summoned to attend a special conference at the headquarters of Interpol in Wannsee. Since the end of the war, six of those men have been murdered, four have committed suicide, one has died in an accident, two have supposedly died of natural causes. Today only Luther is left alive. A freak of statistics, you would agree?’ He handed Nightingale the papers. ‘As you will see, the conference was called by Reinhard Heydrich to discuss the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe. My guess is Luther wants to make you an offer: a new life in America in exchange for documentary proof of what happened to the Jews.’

  The water ran. The music ended. An announcer’s silky voice whispered in the bathroom: ‘And now, for you night-lovers everywhere, Peter Kreuder and his orchestra with their version of I’m in Heaven . . .’

  Without looking at him, Charlie held out her hand. March took it. She laced her fingers into his and squeezed, hard. Good, he thought, she should be afraid. Her grip tightened. Their hands were linked like parachutists in free fall. Nightingale had his head hunched over the documents and was murmuring ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ’ over and over again.