Fatherland (10 page)

Jost said, "Changed, haven't I?"

March was shocked and tried to hide it. "Your sister?" he asked.

"She's still at school."

"And your father?"

"He runs an engineering business in Dresden now. He was one of the first into Russia in '41. Hence the uniform."

March peered closely at the stern figure. "Isn't he wearing the Knight's Cross?" It was the highest decoration for bravery.

"Oh, yes," said Jost. "An authentic war hero." He took the photograph and replaced it in the locker. "What about your father?"

"He was in the Imperial Navy," said March. "He was wounded in the First War. Never properly recovered."

"How old were you when he died?"

"Seven."

"Do you still think about him?"

"Every day."

"Did you go into the navy?"

"I was in the U-boat service."

Jost shook his head slowly. His pale face had flushed pink. "We all follow our fathers, don't we?"

"Most of us, maybe. Not all."

They smoked in silence for a while. Outside, March could hear the physical training session still in progress. "One, two, three . . . One, two, three . . ."

"These people," said Jost, and shook his head again.

"There's a poem by Erich Kastner—'Marschliedchen.' " He closed his eyes and recited:

"You love hatred and want to measure the world against it.

You throw food to the beast in man,

That it may grow, the beast deep within you!

Let the beast in man devour man."

The young man's sudden passion made March uncomfortable. "When was that written?"

"1932."

"I don't know it."

"You wouldn't. It's banned."

There was a silence, then March said, "We now know the identity of the body you discovered. Doctor Josef Buhler. An official of the General Government. An SS-Brigadeführer."

"Oh, God." Jost rested his head in his hands.

"It has become a more serious matter, you see. Before coming to you, I checked with the sentries' office at the main gate. They have a record that you left the barracks at five-thirty yesterday morning, as usual. So the times in your statement make no sense."

Jost kept his face covered. The cigarette was burning down between his fingers. March leaned forward, took it and stubbed it out. He stood.

"Watch," he said. Jost looked up and March began jogging on the spot.

"This is you yesterday, right?" March made a show of exhaustion, puffing out his cheeks, wiping his brow with his forearms. Despite himself, Jost smiled, "Good," said March. He continued jogging. "Now, you're thinking about some book, or how awful your life is, when you come through the woods and onto the path by the lake. It's pissing with rain and the light's not good, but off to your left you see something . . ."

March turned his head. Jost was watching him intently.

"Whatever it is, it's not the body . . ."

"But—"

March stopped and pointed at Jost. "Don't dig yourself any deeper into the shit, is my advice. Two hours ago I went back and checked the place where the corpse was found— there's no way you could have seen it from the road."

He resumed jogging. "So: you see something, but you don't stop. You run past. But being a conscientious fellow, five minutes up the road you decide you had better go back for a second look. And then you discover the body. And only then do you call the cops."

He grasped Jost's hands and pulled him to his feet. "Run with me," he commanded.

"I can't—"

"Run!"

Jost broke into an unwilling shuffle. Their feet clattered on the flagstones.

"Now describe what you can see. You're coming out of the woods and you're on the lake path—"

"Please—"

"Tell me!"

"I... I see... a car..." Jost's eyes were closed. "Then three men . . . It's raining fast, they have coats, hoods—

like monks... Their heads are down... Coming up the slope from the lake . . . I. . . I'm scared. ... I cross the road and run up into the trees so they don't see me ..."

"Go on."

"They get into the car and drive off
_
I wait, and then

I come out of the woods and I find the body . . ."

"You've missed something."

"No, I swear—"

"You see a face. When they get into the car, you see a face."

"No . . ."

"Tell me whose face it is, Jost. You can see it. You know who it is. Tell me."

"Globus!" shouted Jost. "I see Globus!"

The package he had taken from Buhler's mailbox lay unopened on the front seat next to him. Perhaps it's a bomb, thought March as he started the Volkswagen. There had been a blitz of parcel bombs over the past few months, blowing off the hands and faces of half a dozen government officials. He might just make page three of the
Tageblatt
: INVESTIGATOR DIES IN MYSTERIOUS BLAST OUTSIDE BARRACKS.

He drove around Schlachtensee until he found a delicatessen, where he bought a loaf of black bread, some Westphalian ham and a quarter bottle of Scotch whisky. The sun still shone; the air was fresh. He pointed the car westward, back toward the lakes. He was going to do something he had not done for years. He was going to have a picnic.

After Göring had been made Chief Reich Huntsman in 1934, there had been some attempt to lighten the Grunewald. Chestnut and linden, beech, birch and oak, had all been planted. But the heart of it—as it had been a thousand years ago, when the plains of northern Europe were still forest—the heart remained the hilly woods of melan
choly pine. From these forests, five centuries before Christ, the warring German tribes had emerged; and to these forests, twenty-five centuries later, mostly on weekends, in their campers and their trailers, the victorious German tribes returned. The Germans were a race of forest dwellers. You could make a clearing in your mind, if you liked; the trees just waited to reclaim it.

March parked, took his provisions and Buhler's mail bomb, or whatever it was, and walked carefully up a steep path into the forest. Five minutes' climb brought him to a spot that commanded a clear view of the Havel and of the smoky blue slopes of trees receding into the distance. The pines smelled strong and sweet in the warmth. Above his head, a large jet rumbled across the sky, making its approach to the Berlin airport. As it disappeared, the noise died, until at last the only sound was birdsong.

March did not want to open the parcel yet. It made him uneasy. So he sat on a large stone—no doubt casually deposited here by the municipal authorities for this very purpose—took a swig of whisky and began to eat.

Of Odilo Globocnik—Globus—March knew little, and that only by reputation. His fortunes had swung like a weathercock over the past thirty years. An Austrian by birth, a builder by profession, he had become Party leader in Carinthia in the mid-1950s, and ruler of Vienna. Then there had been a period of disgrace connected with illegal currency speculation, followed by a restoration, as a police chief in the General Government when the war started—he must have known Buhler there, thought March. At the end of the war, there had been a second fall to—where was it?—Trieste, he seemed to remember. But with Himmler's death Globus had come back to Berlin, and now he held some unspecified position within the Gestapo, reporting directly to Heydrich.

That smashed and brutal face was unmistakable, and despite the rain and the poor light, Jost had recognized it at once. A portrait of Globus hung in the Academy's Hall of Fame, and Globus himself had delivered a lecture to the
awestruck cadets—on the police structures of the Reich— only a few weeks earlier. No wonder Jost had been so frightened. He should have called the Orpo anonymously and cleared out before they arrived. Better still, from his point of view, he should not have called them at all.

March finished his ham. He took the remains of the bread, broke it into pieces and scattered the crumbs across the forest floor. Two blackbirds that had watched him eat emerged cautiously from the undergrowth and began pecking at them.

He took out the pocket diary. Standard issue to Party members, available in any stationer's. Useful information at the beginning. The names of the Party hierarchy: government ministers,
Kommissariat
bosses, Gauleiters.

Public holidays: Day of National Reawakening, January 30; Potsdam Day, March 21; Führer's birthday, April 20; National Festival of the German People, May 1, . . .

Map of the Empire with railway journey times: Berlin- Rovno, sixteen hours; Berlin-Tiflis, twenty-seven hours; Berlin-Ufa, four days . . .

The diary itself was a week to two pages, the entries so sparse that at first March thought it was blank. He went through it carefully. There was a tiny cross on March 7. For April 1, Buhler had written "My sister's birthday." There was another cross on April 9. On April 11, he had noted "Stuckart/Luther, 10 a.m." Finally, on April 13, the day before his death, Buhler had drawn another small cross. That was all.

March wrote down the dates in his notebook. He began a new page. The death of Josef Buhler. Solutions. One: the death was accidental, the Gestapo had learned of it some hours before the Kripo was informed and Globus was merely inspecting the body when Jost passed by. Absurd.

Very well. Two: Buhler had been murdered by the Gestapo, and Globus had carried out the execution. Absurd again. The "Night and Fog" order of 1941 was still in effect. Buhler could have been bundled away quite legally to some secret death in a Gestapo cell, his property confiscated by the state. Who would have mourned him? Or questioned his disappearance?

And so, three: Buhler had been murdered by Globus, who had covered his tracks by declaring the death a matter of state security and by taking over the investigation himself. But why had the Kripo been allowed to get involved at all? What was Globus's motive? Why had Buhler's body been left in a public place?

March leaned back against the stone and closed his eyes. The sun on his face made the darkness bloodred. A warm haze of whisky enveloped him.

He could not have been asleep more than half an hour when he heard a rustle in the undergrowth beside him and felt something touch his sleeve. He was awake in an instant, in time to see the white tail and hindquarters of a deer darting into the trees. A rural idyll ten kilometers from the heart of the Reich! Either that, or the whisky. He shook his head and picked up the package.

Thick brown paper, neatly wrapped and taped. Indeed,
professionally
wrapped and taped. Crisp lines and sharp creases, an economy of materials used and effort expended. A paradigm of a package. No man March had ever met could have produced such an object—it must have been wrapped by a woman. Next, the postmark. Three Swiss stamps showing tiny yellow flowers on a green background. Posted in Zürich at 1600 hours on 4/13/64. The day before yesterday.

He felt his palms begin to sweat as he unwrapped the package with exaggerated care, first peeling off the tape and then slowly, centimeter by centimeter, folding back the paper. He lifted it fractionally. Inside was a box of chocolates.

Its lid showed flaxen-haired girls in red-checked dresses dancing around a maypole in a flowery meadow. Behind them, white-peaked against a fluorescent-blue sky, rose the Alps. Overprinted in black Gothic script was the legend, "Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Führer,

1964." But there was something odd about it. The box was too heavy to contain just chocolates.

He took out a penknife and cut round the cellophane cover. He set the box gently on the log. With his face turned away and his arm fully extended, he lifted the lid with the point of the blade. Inside, a mechanism began to whir. Then this:

Love unspoken

Faith unbroken

All life through

Strings are playing

Hear them saying

"I love you."

Now the echo answers

"Say you'll want me too."

All the world's in love with love

And I love you.

Only the tune, of course, not the words; but he knew them well enough. Standing alone on a hill in the Grunewald Forest, March listened as the box played the waltz duet from Act Three of
The Merry Widow.

The streets on the way back into central Berlin seemed unnaturally quiet, and when March reached Werderscher-Markt he discovered the reason. A large notice board in the foyer announced there would be a government statement at 4:30. Personnel were to assemble in the staff canteen. Attendance: compulsory. He was just in time.

They had developed a new theory at the Propaganda Ministry that the best time to make big announcements was at the end of the working day. News was thus received communally, in a comradely spirit: there was no opportunity for private skepticism or defeatism. Also, the broadcasts were always timed so that the workers could go home slightly early—at 4:50, say, rather than 5:00— fostering a sense of contentment, subliminally associating the regime with good feelings. That was how it was these days. The snow-white propaganda palace on Wilhelmstrasse employed more psychologists than journalists.