The Fatherland Files

by volker Kutscher

  But then he’d have been picked up too, wouldn’t he? The way he’d cried out just now?

  There was another possibility, of course: the bastards had stitched him up. Why? Because Kowalski was too much of a coward, and wanted to forestall his command?

  It was pointless thinking about it. All that mattered was that they were gone.

  He gazed over the moor. Five hundred metres to Radlewski’s hideout, Adamek had said, but that was madness, he was alone here in the wilds. There was no way he was setting foot on that moor, even if the hut was only a stone’s throw distant. Assuming, of course, Adamek was telling the truth. Or was this revenge for their exchange in Pritzkus’s dive?

  He returned to the clearing, retracing his steps without difficulty. Arriving at the border he lit an Overstolz, his second-last, and tried to take his bearings. The sun was setting in the west: wasn’t that where he needed to go? If he held slightly north, he’d be fine. North was to the right of west. No problem.

  He entered the Prussian pinewood in good spirits, now assuming he was on the right track. At least he was no longer in Poland, and, if he didn’t reach the forest edge or the little lake, so long as he continued in a straight line he was bound to hit upon a path or perhaps even a road at some point.

  That was the plan, but after an hour’s strenuous walking he still hadn’t made it out. In the meantime it had grown darker. Soon it would be dusk.

  Damn it! He had no torch, nothing – but at least he had good shoes.

  He couldn’t help remembering when he and Charly had got lost by the Müggelsee, and gradually his faith in his sense of direction started to evaporate. On that occasion it was actually Kirie who’d led them astray. Without her, his chances were probably greater. A compass would have been good; soon he’d no longer be able to take his bearings by the sun. Even now the diffuse light filtering through the treetops gave little indication of where it was setting, or, indeed, had already set.

  He fought his growing sense of panic and yomped on. In the meantime his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and he could still discern the tree trunks that stood behind and alongside each other in unrelenting uniformity. There was nothing to suggest the forest was about to end.

  ‘Kowalski!’ he shouted again, knowing it was futile. ‘Adamek!’

  The wood responded with brutal silence.

  At last he made out a glimmer of light. The forest edge. Soon he’d be back by the lake, no need to panic, but when he emerged he stood at another clearing. Not, thankfully, his starting point: at least he hadn’t been going round in circles.

  Apart from that, he had no idea where he was. Overhead the sky was full of stars, and a crescent moon beamed over the tips of the trees. Grounds for optimism at last. In spite of his disappointment he felt something akin to relief. On this clear evening he’d have enough light. Now, where did the moon rise? Was it in the east like the sun? Or west? Or somewhere else entirely?

  He’d given up on finding his way back to Markowsken. By now it’d be enough to hit upon any path leading to civilisation. If, indeed, that’s what Masuria was. Where culture ends, there Masuria begins. In his present state even a peasant’s cottage without electricity or running water would look like paradise, and the prospect of being picked up by a Polish border patrol had lost its edge. At least they’d get him out of here.

  The moonlight was so bright that he could see little beasts leaping in all directions to avoid his tread. Grasshoppers, he thought at first, but he wasn’t moving over grass, rather, soft moss, and, bending down, he saw that they were in fact tiny frogs. There was something reassuring about the sight, the place couldn’t be entirely unsuited to life. He yomped gamely on, wondering whether the moon really did rise in the east, when the moss under his feet gave way and he stepped into something damp and soggy. A mudhole!

  Again, he recalled his Müggelsee adventure. On that occasion they had also found themselves in marshland, costing him a shoe. Well, not this time. The thought of struggling through this interminable forest in his stockings spurred him on. He just had to make sure he didn’t pull up his foot too fast. He tried, cautiously, but felt it sink deeper. He had to shift his weight somehow, and took a small step with his free right leg, straight into another mudhole. Everything below the layer of moss, on which the frogs had just now been hopping, seemed, suddenly, to swim.

  He leaned forward and tried to reach his left foot with his hand. In vain: he felt himself sink deeper.

  This wasn’t just some mudhole. How much moorland was there here, goddamn it? For there was no doubting the landscape was more idyllic than the spot Adamek had shown him; with its shrubs and moss carpet it reminded him of the Wahner Heath. There were no dead trees, no indication that the environment was unsuited to life. It couldn’t be Radlewski’s patch.

  Don’t panic, he told himself, laying his forearms and hands on the undulating moss as he tried to get a hold, but there was nothing to hold him. The carpet of grass and moss pitched on the water and gave way under his weight. All he had achieved was to make the hole in which he stood larger still, as if he were digging a pond. The more he struggled, the firmer and colder the moor’s grip.

  He was afraid of being swallowed entirely when he remembered his natural history. Buoyancy would prevent him from becoming submerged. The only mortal danger lay in not being discovered, as exposure could take hold in a matter of hours.

  Already he felt the cold penetrating deeper in his body, even with the heat of the day still in the air. He’d lost feeling in his legs and had difficulty moving them. The midges were out in force and he shooed them away by waving his arms, until realising that this, too, only made him sink deeper. He was completely dependent on outside help, and had the creeping sense that he’d never been so far removed from a human dwelling in all his life.

  ‘Help!’ he cried, as loud as he could. ‘Help!’

  His cry echoed in the moonlit night. He listened, heard the treetops rustling in the wind, heard an owl screech, otherwise nothing. The owl wasn’t Kowalski. ‘Help,’ he cried again, and there was a swishing sound at the edge of the forest. He turned his head so that he could see better. A massive shadow lumbered towards him.

  Were there still wolves here? he wondered. Don’t go attracting any beasts of prey! Before he could make out its contours, however, the shadow disappeared.

  His face itched everywhere, but by now he’d given up trying to bat away the midges. He felt himself being stung on the upper lip, and realised he was shivering, could even hear his teeth chatter. By God, it was cold!

  He closed his eyes and tried to think clearly, but it was growing more and more difficult. Again, he heard a rustling noise, and opened his eyes wide to see a massive form leaning over him, gazing curiously. A head with a huge set of antlers. He couldn’t believe his eyes. An elk. An elk gawped at him, watching him die.

  He couldn’t help thinking of Charly’s words at the airport. Perhaps you’ll see an elk.

  Charly. Would that botched goodbye at Tempelhof be their final evening together? Would he really die like this, at the very start of their journey? When he’d been unfaithful to her for the first time. He thought of last night with Hella. Suddenly all this felt like a punishment.

  No, there was no meaning to any of it. Death was just as meaningless as life. He remembered the military cemetery at Markowsken. Anyone who spoke of death being meaningful, of laying down one’s life for the Fatherland, of dying a hero’s death, was a goddamn liar. It was all nonsense. Meaningless as it was, he wanted to live, damn it, live.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to the elk, cautiously, so as not to scare it. ‘Just one more step.’

  The large head did indeed draw closer; the beast seemed to trust this man jutting out of the ground. Rath had read somewhere that, unlike roe deer or stags, elks were rarely frightened of people. Not this one, anyway. It was now or never.

  Quick as a flash he grabbed for the antlers, thought for a moment he could feel soft skin, when the
beast jumped back and jerked its head up. He clutched at thin air as it took another step towards the brush before trotting majestically away, illuminated by the moonlight.

  He gazed after it until it’d gone.

  Idiot! he thought, driving away your only friend out here.

  ‘Help,’ he cried again, astonished by the frailty of his voice. Could this mercilessly cold moor really have sapped so much strength out of him? Had he lost his mind?

  He thought of his pistol, and fumbled the Walther out of its holster. His hands could barely grip the cold steel, but somehow he managed to release the safety catch and fire. The recoil almost threw the pistol out of his frozen hand but at the last moment he caught it and stowed it back in the holster. Perhaps he would need it again if there really were wolves.

  Despair crept inside him, worse than the cold. Hopelessness drowned him like heavy, black, rotten ink, a viscous sludge spreading everywhere. At the same time somewhere deep inside was an irrepressible will to live that fought to get near the surface.

  In the meantime the midges no longer concerned him; let them devour him, he wouldn’t resist. And then he thought he must be delirious.

  Again a beast emerged from the brush, a huge black dog which reminded him of an illustration from his copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a huge, great hellhound. Now was the moment to reach for his pistol, but he couldn’t, his muscles no longer obeyed, only shivered.

  He closed his eyes, ready to die. If this hellhound wasn’t the product of his imagination, then it would surely eat him. And, if he had imagined it, it would be gone as soon as he opened his eyes.

  He kept his eyes closed, sensing his eyelids were the only muscles still capable of obeying, and when, after a time, he opened them again, he saw that he had not been eaten, and that the dog had, indeed, disappeared. In its place was a figure reminiscent of another illustration from his childhood books. Or, rather, two: Robinson Crusoe, and Leatherstocking.

  A man stood there with an unbelievably wild full beard and long, shaggy hair, dressed in leather and hides, bow and quiver across his shoulders; on his head a beaver-fur cap.

  Rath stared at the vision and then closed his eyes with his mouth relaxing into a peaceful smile. Even his shivering had ceased. He felt a deep sense of peace, and, all of a sudden, a great warmth in spite of the cold. With that he was plunged, once and for all, into darkness. A darkness no longer reached by the crescent moon.

  PART III

  Prussia

  18th July to 6th August 1932

  It is seldom, that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

  David Hume

  63

  Black-and-white flags were everywhere, even on the coffin, which, amidst all the rest, seemed strangely incidental. Never had there been so many flags at a police funeral, colleagues said, although, since it was her first time, Charly was no judge. She just knew she hated it. The pomp, the ironed uniforms, the bombastic speeches – if this was what it meant to pay your last respects she wanted no part.

  The church was nigh-on empty, with rows of pews unoccupied. These days in Berlin a dead policeman was nothing out of the ordinary; more and more officers were being caught in the fire between Communists and Nazis. Others were killed in cold blood, like Officers Anlauf and Lenk the previous year.

  There were few mourners, but the coffin positively drowned in wreaths. Custom dictated that both Police Commissioner Grzesinski and Uniform Commander Heimannsberg should lay one, though neither had appeared in person. Grzesinski’s deputy, Bernhard Weiss, gave the eulogy, an honour usually bestowed upon police officers killed by Communists or Nazis, but the dead man had, like them, died in the line of duty.

  Given the treasury’s long-standing money problems, it was no surprise that the floral tributes had nothing to do with the Free State of Prussia. The dead policeman’s brother had ensured events could proceed with the kind of ceremony normally reserved for dead ministers or members of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Most of the wreaths could be ascribed to his financial clout and influence. The Marggrabowa Homeland Service had gifted one, as had the Treuburg Citizenry, but the most impressive came from Gustav Wengler himself: a sumptuous arrangement of white and dark-violet, almost black, asters. In Everlasting Memory, the ribbon read, Your Brother, Gustav.

  Charly tried to listen to Weiss’s speech but couldn’t. No matter, she was here to keep an eye on Wengler, who sat diagonally in front of her in the first row with his head bowed. She had encountered him once already, when he’d presented himself at headquarters and answered the questions the Vaterland team had in connection with his brother’s death, and the events of 1924. Afterwards it became clear that Charly wasn’t alone in thinking he might be holding something back.

  It would have been useful to consult Gereon, but no one had heard from him in days.

  Though still registered at his Treuburg hotel, he had failed to return calls from headquarters. ‘Gereon Rath missing in action’ was by now an all too familiar trope, and Böhm was beside himself.

  Even more vexing was his failure to contact her. If he had done so, she might have covered for him. She’d have given him a piece of her mind, of course, but never in a million years would she have shopped him to Böhm. Didn’t he trust her, or was he simply trying to avoid the inevitable quarrel?

  In the meantime she had relieved Erika Voss of her canine duties and moved into Carmerstrasse with Kirie, in the hope that he might call there, but the line was so dead she wondered if it was even connected.

  One evening she decided she’d had enough and telephoned his hotel. Inspector Rath was currently unavailable, said a voice on the line, and it wasn’t certain when he would be back. The porter noted her request, but Gereon’s call never came. She hardly dared try again, to suffer the staff skating politely around his absence. Having called at all times of day and night, she asked herself if he was sleeping there at all. But then . . .where was he sleeping . . .? The bastard!

  Nor could she reach him through the Treuburg Police, since he hadn’t shared the details of his investigation with his Masurian colleagues. The local chief constable was decidedly miffed. She could just imagine Gereon treating him with the arrogance of a big-city cop investigating a small-town crime – seasoned with a good dose of Rath-ian pig-headedness. Gereon Rath, one-man investigation machine. God, she hated it. If he would just give them something, or was he planning to arrest Artur Radlewski on his own?

  The Treuburg Police seemed not to trust him, and the same was true in Berlin, with the exception of Gräf, perhaps, and a few others.

  She focused on the job in hand. She couldn’t work this Gustav Wengler out. How he listened to Weiss in a spirit of reverence, when she knew that he harboured Nazi sympathies, and would not be pleased that a Jew was delivering his brother’s final address. Slippery: the word could have been coined for the man.

  Maybe they’d crack him without Gereon’s help. They had cited him to appear at Alex again before leaving town, and this time they had a surprise in store.

  64

  The clock tower on the administration building showed twenty past nine. Bright neon lit the grounds and was reflected in the water of the harbour basin.

  Reinhold Gräf looked down from high above the quay, in the cabin of a loading crane belonging to the Berlin Harbour and Warehouse Company, through a set of field glasses taken from police stocks. A lone ship was being discharged, otherwise all was quiet. Most harbour workers were gone, with only a couple of dozen still on their feet – as well as a platoon of anti-riot officers currently hidden from view.

  Until last year Warehouse 2 had been where the Ford company assembled its cars for the German market, before shifting production to a factory in Cologne, contributing at once to Berlin’s growing unemployment and the vacancy rate of its warehouses. It was the ideal hideout for a hundred or more waiting officers. The Chief Customs Office had suggested it, and Berlin CID had put in its men as discreetly as possible, with civilian coats thrown over the
ir uniforms, their weapons and shakos stowed in crates. They looked like a company of workers charged with restoring the warehouse to life. Detective Chief Inspector Böhm and a senior customs official were last to enter. Böhm issued the men with their instructions, and distributed their shakos and carbines.

  Gräf gazed at the telephone beside the levers and buttons, fearing the slightest touch might set the crane in motion. The phones were used by crane drivers to co-ordinate with the foremen at ground level, but Gräf’s was connected directly with Warehouse 2. He knew this, but still gave a start when it rang.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Anything doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Nine o’clock, Lamkau’s notebook had said. Nine o’clock, Tuesday night. Five hundred crates, each containing twenty-four bottles. Stacks of paper – and even more schnapps. Enough to bring serious charges, but they didn’t know which boat, only which harbour, and here in the northern basin as many as five vessels were moored.

  He was wondering whether someone had smelled a rat when there was movement on Westhafenstrasse. They were coming. One vehicle after another rolled onto the site via the eastern gate, five lily-white delivery vans bearing slogans for Mathée Luisenbrand and Treuburger Bärenfang. Gräf hadn’t expected the Lamkau firm to transport such a delicate load so openly. Perhaps they were wrong, and the contents was the legitimate, taxed product of the Luisenhöhe distillery? But then why would Lamkau have entered the delivery date in a notebook otherwise recording illegal income that had no place in official company documents?

  The vans pulled up at the loading bay next to the warehouse and Gräf used his field glasses to check the name of the ship they had stopped beside. MS Erika.

  A few men appeared on deck and opened the loading hatches. Others emerged from the vans. Each vehicle held two men, clad in the uniform of the Lamkau firm. He was surprised at first, but anything else would have been more conspicuous. The men weren’t doing anything illegal, just loading a cargo ship with crates of schnapps, identical to those Gräf had seen in the lift at Haus Vaterland, next to Lamkau’s dead body.