‘What about you?’
‘When I see you’ve made contact with Luther, I’ll drive across and pick you up. The rear doors are unlocked. Keep to the lower steps, close to the road. And don’t let him drag you into a long conversation – we need to get out of here fast.’
She was gone before he could wish her luck.
Luther had chosen his ground well. There were vantage points all around the Platz: the old man would be able to watch the steps without showing himself. Nobody would pay any attention to three strangers meeting. And if something did go wrong, the throngs of visitors offered the ideal cover for escape.
March lit a cigarette. Twelve minutes to go. He watched as Charlie climbed the long flight of steps. She paused at the top for breath, then turned and disappeared inside.
Everywhere: activity. White taxis and the long, green Mercedes of the Wehrmacht High Command circled the Platz. The television technicians checked their camera angles and shouted instructions at one another. Stallholders arranged their wares – coffee, sausages, postcards, newspapers, ice cream. A squadron of pigeons wheeled overhead in tight formation and fluttered in to land beside one of the fountains. A couple of young boys in Pimpf uniforms ran towards them, flapping their arms, and March thought of Pili – a stab – and closed his eyes for an instant, confining his guilt to the dark.
At five to nine exactly she came out of the shadows and began descending the steps. A man in a fawn raincoat strode towards her. Nightingale.
Don’t make it too obvious, idiot . . .
She stopped and threw her arms wide – a perfect mime of surprise. They began talking.
Two minutes to nine.
Would Luther come? If so, from which direction? From the Chancellery to the east? The High Command building to the west? Or directly north, from the centre of the Platz?
Suddenly, at the window beside him, a gloved hand appeared. Attached to it: the body of an Orpo traffic cop in leather uniform.
March wound down the window.
The cop said: ‘Parking here suspended.’
‘Understood. Two minutes and I’m out of here.’
‘Not two minutes. Now.’ The man was a gorilla, escaped from Berlin Zoo.
March tried to keep his eyes on the steps, maintain a conversation with the Orpo man, while pulling his Kripo ID out of his inside pocket.
‘You are screwing up badly, friend,’ he hissed. ‘You are in the middle of a Sipo surveillance operation and, I have to tell you, you are blending into the background as well as a prick in a nunnery.’
The cop grabbed the ID and held it close to his eyes. ‘Nobody told me about any operation, Sturmbannführer. What operation? Who’s being watched?’
‘Communists. Freemasons. Students. Slavs.’
‘Nobody told me about it. I’ll have to check.’
March clutched the steering wheel to steady his shaking hands. ‘We are observing radio silence. You break it and Heydrich personally will have your balls for cufflinks, I guarantee you. Now: my ID.’
Doubt clouded the Orpo man’s face. For an instant he almost looked ready to drag March out of the car, but then he slowly returned the ID. ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Thank you for your co-operation, Unterwachtmeister.’ March wound up his window, ending the discussion.
One minute past nine. Charlie and Nightingale were still talking. He glanced in his mirror. The cop had walked a few paces, had stopped, and was staring back at the car. He looked thoughtful, then made up his mind, went over to his bike and picked up his radio.
March swore. He had two minutes, at the outside.
Of Luther: no sign.
AND then he saw him.
A man with thick-framed glasses, wearing a shabby overcoat, had emerged from the Great Hall. He stood, peering around him, his hand touching one of the granite pillars as if afraid to let go. Then, hesitantly, he began to make his way down the steps.
March switched on the engine.
Charlie and Nightingale still had their backs to him. He was heading towards them.
Come on. Come on. Look round at him, for God’s sake.
At that moment Charlie did turn. She saw the old man and recognised him. Luther’s arm came up, like an exhausted swimmer reaching for the shore.
Something is going to go wrong, thought March suddenly. Something is not right. Something I haven’t thought of . . .
Luther had barely five metres to go when his head disappeared. It vanished in a puff of moist red sawdust and then his body was pitching forward, rolling down the steps, and Charlie was putting up her hand to shield her face from the sunburst of blood and brain.
A beat. A beat and a half. Then the crack of a high-velocity rifle howled around the Platz, scooping up the pigeons, scattering them like grey litter across the square.
PEOPLE started to scream.
March threw the car into gear, flashed his indicator and cut sharply into the traffic, ignoring the outraged hooting – across one lane, and then another. He drove like a man who believed himself invulnerable, as if faith and will-power alone would protect him from collision. He could see a little group had formed around the body which was leaking blood and tissue down the steps. He could hear police whistles. Figures in black uniforms were converging from all directions – Globus and Krebs among them.
Nightingale had Charlie by the arm and was propelling her away from the scene, towards the road, where March was braking to a halt. The diplomat wrenched open the door and threw her into the back seat, crammed himself in after her. The door slammed. The Volkswagen accelerated away.
WE were betrayed.
Fourteen men summoned; now fourteen dead.
He saw Luther’s hand outstretched, the fountain bursting from his neck, his trunk exploded toppling forwards. Globus and Krebs running. Secrets scattered in that shower of tissue; salvation gone . . .
Betrayed . . .
HE drove to an underground parking lot just off Rosen Strasse, close to the Börse, where the Synagogue used to stand – a favourite spot of his for meeting informers. Was there anywhere more lonely? He took a ticket from the machine and pointed the car down the steep ramp. The tyres cried against the concrete; the headlights picked out ancient stains of oil and carbon on the floors and walls, like cave paintings.
Level two was empty – on Saturdays, the financial sector of Berlin was a desert. March parked in a central bay. When the engine died the silence was complete.
Nobody said anything. Charlie was dabbing at her coat with a paper handkerchief. Nightingale was leaning back with his eyes closed. Suddenly, March slammed his fists down on the top of the steering wheel.
‘Whom did you tell?’
Nightingale opened his eyes. ‘Nobody.’
‘The Ambassador? Washington? The resident spy-master?’
‘I told you: nobody.’ There was anger in his voice.
‘This is no help,’ said Charlie.
‘It’s also insulting and absurd. Christ, you two . . .’
‘Consider the possibilities.’ March counted them off on his fingers. ‘Luther betrayed himself to somebody – ridiculous. The telephone box in Bülow Strasse was tapped – impossible: even the Gestapo does not have the resources to bug every public telephone in Berlin. Very well. So was our discussion last night overheard? Unlikely, as we could hardly hear it ourselves!’
‘Why does it have to be this big conspiracy? Maybe Luther was just followed.’
‘Then why not pick him up? Why shoot him in public, at the very moment of contact?’
‘He was looking straight at me . . .’ Charlie covered her face with her hands.
‘It needn’t have been me,’ said Nightingale. ‘The leak could have come from one of you two.’
‘How? We were together all night.’
‘I’m sure you were.’ He spat out the words and fumbled for the door. ‘I don’t have to take this sort of shit from you. Charlie – you’d better come back to the Embassy with me. Now. We’ll
get you on a flight out of Berlin tonight and just hope to Christ no one connects you with any of this.’ He waited. ‘Come on.’
She shook her head.
‘If not for your sake, then think of your father.’
She was incredulous. ‘What’s my father got to do with it?’
Nightingale hauled himself out of the Volkswagen. ‘I should never have let myself be talked into this insanity. You’re a fool. As for him’ – he nodded towards March – ‘he’s a dead man.’
He walked away from the car, his footsteps ricocheting around the deserted lot – loud at first, but fast becoming fainter. There was the clang of a metal door banging shut, and he was gone.
March looked at Charlie in the mirror. She seemed very small, huddled up in the back seat.
Far away: another noise. The barrier at the top of the ramp was being raised. A car was coming. March felt suddenly panicky, claustrophic. Their refuge could serve equally well as a trap.
‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. He switched on the engine. ‘We have to keep moving.’
‘In that case I want to take more pictures.’
‘Do you have to?’
‘You assemble your evidence, Sturmbannführer, and I’ll assemble mine.’
He glanced at her again. She had put aside her handkerchief and was staring at him with a fragile defiance. He took his foot off the brake. Crossing the city was risky, no question, but what else were they to do? Lie behind a locked door waiting to be caught?
He swung the car round in a circle and headed towards the exit as headlights flashed in the gloom behind them.
THREE
hey parked beside the Havel and walked to the shore. March pointed to the spot where Buhler’s body had been found. Her camera clicked as Spiedel’s had four days before, but there was little left to record. A few footprints were just visible in the mud. The grass was flattened slightly where the corpse had been dragged from the water. But in a day or two these signs would disappear. She turned away from the water and drew her coat around her, shivering.
It was too dangerous to drive to Buhler’s villa so he stopped at the end of the causeway with the engine running. She leaned out to take a picture of the road leading to the island. The red and white pole was down. No sign of the sentry.
‘Is that it?’ she asked. ‘Life won’t pay much for these.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps there is another place.’
NUMBERS fifty-six to fifty-eight Am grossen Wannsee turned out to be a large nineteenth-century mansion with a pillared façade. It no longer housed the German headquarters of Interpol. At some point in the years since the war it had become a girls’ school. March looked this way and that, up and down the leafy street where the blossom was in full pink bloom, and tried the gate. It was unlocked. He gestured to Charlie to join him.
‘We are Herr and Frau March,’ he said, as he pushed open the gate. ‘We have a daughter . . .’
Charlie nodded. ‘Yes, of course, Heidi. She is seven. With plaits . . .’
‘She is unhappy at her present school. This one was recommended. We wanted to look around . . .’ They stepped into the grounds. March closed the gates behind them.
She said: ‘Naturally, if we are trespassing, we apologise . . .’
‘But surely Frau March does not look old enough to have a sevenyear-old daughter?’
‘She was seduced at an impressionable age by a handsome investigator . . .’
‘A likely story.’
The gravel drive looped around a circular flower bed. March tried to picture it as it might have looked in January 1942. A dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps, or frost. Bare trees. A couple of guards shivering by the entrance. The government cars, one after the other, crunching over the icy gravel. An adjutant saluting and stepping forward to open the doors. Stuckart: handsome and elegant. Buhler: his lawyer’s notes carefully arranged in his briefcase. Luther: blinking behind his thick spectacles. Did their breath hang in the air after them? And Heydrich. Would he have arrived first, as host? Or last, to demonstrate his power? Did the cold impart colour even to those pale cheeks?
The house was barred and deserted. While Charlie took a picture of the entrance, March picked his way through a small shrubbery to peer through a window. Rows of dwarf-sized desks with dwarf-sized chairs up-ended and stacked on top. A pair of blackboards from which the pupils were being taught the Party’s special grace. On one:
BEFORE MEALS –
Führer, my Führer, bequeathed to me by the Lord,
Protect and preserve me as long as I live!
Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress,
I thank thee today for my daily bread.
Abideth thou long with me, forsaketh me not,
Führer, my Führer, my faith and my light!
Heil, mein Führer!
On the other:
AFTER MEALS –
Thank thee for this bountiful meal,
Protector of youth and friend of the aged!
I know thou hast cares, but worry not,
I am with thee by day and by night.
Lie thy head in my lap,
Be assured, my Führer, that thou art great.
Heil, mein Führer!
Childish paintings decorated the walls – blue meadows, green skies, clouds of sulphur-yellow. Children’s art was perilously close to degenerate art; such perversity would have to be knocked out of them . . . March could smell the school-smell even from here: the familiar compound of chalk dust, wooden floors and stale, institutional food. He turned away.
Someone in a neighbouring garden had lit a bonfire. Pungent white smoke – wet wood and dead leaves – drifted across the lawn at the back of the house. A wide flight of steps flanked by stone lions with frozen snarls led down to the lawn. Beyond the grass, through the trees, lay the dull, glassy surface of the Havel. They were facing south. Schwanenwerder, less than half a kilometre away, would be just visible from the upstairs windows. When Buhler bought his villa in the early 1950s, had the proximity of the two sites been a motive – was he the villain being drawn back to the scene of his crime? If so, what crime was it exactly?
March bent and dug up a handful of soil, sniffed at it, let it run through his fingers. The trail had gone cold years ago.
AT the bottom of the garden were a couple of wooden barrels, green with age, used by the gardener to collect rainwater. March and Charlie sat on them side by side, legs dangling, looking across the lake. He was in no hurry to move on. Nobody would look for them here. There was something indescribably melancholy about it all – the silence, the dead leaves blowing across the lawn, the smell of the smoke – something that was the opposite of spring. It spoke of autumn, of the end of things.
He said: ‘Did I tell you that before I went away to sea, there were Jews in our town? When I got back, they were all gone. I asked about it. People said they had been evacuated to the East. For resettlement.’
‘Did they believe that?’
‘In public, of course. Even in private it was wiser not to speculate. And easier. To pretend it was true.’
‘Did you believe it?’
‘I didn’t think about it.
‘Who cares?’ he said suddenly. ‘Suppose everyone knew all the details. Who would care? Would it really make any difference?’
‘Someone thinks so,’ she reminded him. ‘That’s why everyone who attended Heydrich’s conference is dead. Except Heydrich.’
He looked back at the house. His mother, a firm believer in ghosts, used to tell him that brickwork and plaster soaked up history, stored what they had witnessed, like a sponge. Since then March had seen his share of places in which evil had been done and he did not believe it. There was nothing especially wicked about Am grossen Wannsee 56/58. It was just a large, businessman’s mansion, now converted into a girls’ school. So what were the walls absorbing now? Teenage crushes? Geometry lessons? Exam nerves?
He pulled out Heydrich’s invitati
on. ‘A discussion followed by luncheon.’ Starting at noon. Ending at – what? – three or four in the afternoon. It would have been growing dark by the time they left. Yellow lamps in the windows; mist from the lake. Fourteen men. Well-fed; maybe some of them tipsy on the Gestapo’s wine. Cars to take them back to central Berlin. Chauffeurs who had waited a long time outside, with cold feet and noses like icicles . . .
And then, less than five months later, in Zürich in the heat of midsummer, Martin Luther had marched into the offices of Hermann Zaugg, banker to the rich and frightened, and opened an account with four keys.
‘I wonder why he was empty-handed.’
‘What?’ She was distracted. He had interrupted her thoughts.
‘I always imagined Luther carrying a small suitcase of some sort. Yet when he came down the steps to meet you, he was empty-handed.’
‘Perhaps he had stuffed everything into his pockets.’
‘Perhaps.’ The Havel looked solid; a lake of mercury. ‘But he must have landed from Zürich with luggage of some sort. He had spent the night out of the country. And he had collected something from the bank.’
The wind stirred in the trees. March looked round. ‘He was a suspicious old bastard after all. It would have been in his character to have kept back the really valuable material. He wouldn’t have risked giving the Americans everything at once – otherwise how could he have bargained?’
A jet passed low overhead, dropping towards the airport, the pitch of its engines descending with it. Now that was a sound which did not exist in 1942 . . .
Suddenly he was on his feet, lifting her down to join him, and then he was striding up the lawn towards the house and she was following – stumbling, laughing, shouting at him to slow down.
HE parked the Volkswagen beside the road in Schlachtensee and sprinted into the telephone kiosk. Max Jaeger was not replying, neither at Werderscher Markt nor at his home. The lonely purr of the unanswered phone made March want to reach someone, anyone.
He tried Rudi Halder’s number. Perhaps he could apologise, somehow hint it had been worth the risk. Nobody was in. He looked at the receiver. What about Pili? Even the boy’s hostility would be contact of a sort. But in the bungalow in Lichtenrade there was no response either.
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