Fatherland (2 page)

Kripo headquarters lie on the other side of Berlin, a twenty-five-minute drive from the Havel. March needed a statement from Jost and offered to drop him back at his barracks to change, but Jost said no: he would sooner make his statement quickly. So once the body had been stowed aboard the ambulance and dispatched to the morgue, they set off in March's little four-door Volkswagen through the rush hour traffic.

It was one of those dismal Berlin mornings when the famous
Berlinerluft
seems not so much bracing as merely raw, the moisture stinging the face and hands like a thousand frozen needles. On the Potsdamer-Chaussee, the spray from the wheels of the passing ears forced the few pedestrians close to the sides of the buildings. Watching them through the rain-flecked window, March imagined a city of blind men, feeling their way to work.

It was all so
normal
Later, that was what would strike him most. It was like having an accident: before it, nothing out of the ordinary; then, the moment; and after it, a world that was changed forever. For there was nothing more routine than a body fished out of the Havel. It happened twice a month—derelicts and failed businessmen, reckless kids and lovelorn teenagers; accidents and suicides and murders; the desperate, the foolish, the sad.

The telephone had rung in his apartment in Ansbacher-Strasse shortly after 6:15. The call had not awakened him. He had been lying in the semidarkness with his eyes open, listening to the rain. For the past few months he had slept badly.

"March? We've got a report of a body in the Havel." It was Krause, the Kripo's night duty officer. "Go and take a look, there's a good fellow."

March had said he was not interested.

"Your interest or lack of it is beside the point."

"I am not interested," March had said, "because I am not on duty. I was on duty last week, and the week before."
And the week before that
, he might have added. "This is my day off. Look at your list again."

There had been a pause at the other end, then Krause had come back on the line, grudgingly apologetic. "You're in luck, March. I was looking at last week's rota. You can go back to sleep. Or—" he had sniggered "—whatever else it was you were doing."

A gust of wind had slashed rain against the window, rattling the pane.

There was a standard procedure when a body was discovered: a pathologist, a police photographer and an investigator had to attend the scene at once. The investigators worked off a rota kept at Kripo headquarters in Werderscher-Markt.

"Who's on 'today, as a matter of interest?"

"Max Jaeger."

Jaeger. March shared an office with Jaeger. He had looked at his alarm clock and thought of the little house in Pankow where Max lived with his wife and four daughters: during the week, breakfast was just about the only time he saw them. March, on the other hand, was divorced and lived alone. He had set aside the afternoon to spend with his son. But the long hours of the morning stretched ahead, a blank. The way he felt, it would be good to have something routine to distract him.

"Oh, leave him in peace," he had said. "I'm awake. I'll take it."

That had been nearly two hours ago. March glanced at his passenger in the rearview mirror. Jost had been silent ever since they had left the Havel. He sat stiffly in the backseat, staring at the gray buildings slipping by.

At the Brandenburg Gate, a policeman on a motorcycle flagged them to a halt.

In the middle of Pariser-Platz, an SA band in sodden brown uniforms wheeled and stamped in the puddles. Through the closed windows of the Volkswagen came the muffled thump of drums and trumpets pounding out an old Party marching song. Several dozen people had gathered outside the Academy of Arts to watch them, shoulders hunched against the rain.

It was impossible to drive across Berlin at this time of year without encountering a similar rehearsal. In six days' time it would be Adolf Hitler's birthday—the
Führertag
, a public holiday—and every band in the Reich would be on parade. The windshield wipers beat time like a metronome.

"Here we see the final proof," murmured March, watching the crowd, "that in the face of martial music, the German people are
mad
."

He turned to Jost, who gave a thin smile.

A clash of cymbals ended the tune. There was a patter of damp applause. The bandmaster turned and bowed. Behind him, the SA men had already begun half walking, half running back to their bus. The motorcycle cop waited until the Platz was clear, then blew a short blast on his whistle. With a white-gloved hand he waved them through the gate.

Unter den Linden gaped ahead of them. It had lost its lime trees in '36—cut down in an act of official vandalism at the time of the Berlin Olympics. In their place, on either side of the boulevard, the city's Gauleiter, Josef Goebbels, had erected an avenue of ten-meter-high stone columns, on each of which perched a Party eagle, wings outstretched. Water dripped from their beaks and wingtips. It was like driving through a Red Indian burial ground.

March slowed for the lights at the Friedrich-Strasse intersection and turned right. Two minutes later they were parking in a space opposite the Kripo building in Werderscher-Markt.

It was an ugly place—a heavy, soot-streaked, Wilhelmine monstrosity six stories high on the south side of the Markt. March had been coming here nearly seven days of the week for ten years. As his ex-wife had frequently complained, it had become more familiar to him than home. Inside, beyond the SS sentries and the creaky revolving door, a board announced the current state of terrorist alert. There were four codes, in ascending order of seriousness: green, blue, black and red. Today, as always, the alert was red.

A pair of guards in a glass booth scrutinized them as they entered the foyer. March showed his identity card and signed in Jost.

The Markt was busier than usual. The workload always tripled in the week before the
Führertag
. Secretaries with boxes of files clattered on high heels across the marble floor. The air smelled thickly of wet overcoats and floor polish. Groups of officers in Orpo green and Kripo black stood whispering of crime. Above their heads, from opposite ends of the lobby, garlanded busts of the Führer and the head of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, stared at each other with blank eyes.

March pulled back the metal grille of the elevator and ushered Jost inside.

The security forces Heydrich controlled were divided into three. At the bottom of the pecking order were the Orpo, the ordinary cops. They picked up the drunks, cruised the
Autobahnen
, issued the speeding tickets, made the arrests, fought the fires, patrolled the railways and the airports, answered the emergency calls, fished the bodies out of the lakes.

At the top were the Sipo, the Security Police. The Sipo embraced both the Gestapo and the Party's own security force, the SD. Their headquarters was in a grim complex around Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, a kilometer southwest of the Markt. They dealt with terrorism, subversion, counterespionage and "crimes against the state." They had their ears in every factory and school, hospital and mess; in every town, in every village, in every street. A body in a lake would concern the Sipo only if it belonged to a terrorist or a traitor.

And somewhere between the other two, and blurring into both, came the Kripo—Department V of the Reich Main Security Office. They investigated straightforward crime, from burglary through bank robbery, violent assault, rape and mixed marriage, all the way up to murder. Bodies in lakes—who they were and how they had gotten there—they were Kripo business.

The elevator stopped at the second floor. The corridor was lit like an aquarium. Weak neon bounced off green linoleum and green-washed walls. There was the same smell of polish as in the lobby, but here it was spiced with lavatory disinfectant and stale cigarette smoke. Twenty doors of frosted glass, some half open, lined the hallway. These were the investigators' offices. From one came the sound of a solitary finger picking at a typewriter; in another, a telephone rang unanswered.

"'The nerve center in the ceaseless war against the criminal enemies of National Socialism,'" said March, quoting a recent headline in the Party newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
. He paused, and when Jost continued to look blank he explained, "A joke."

"Sorry?"

"Forget it."

He pushed open a door and switched on the light. His office was little more than a gloomy cupboard, a cell, its solitary window opening on to a courtyard of blackened brick. One wall was shelved: tattered, leather-bound volumes of statutes and decrees, a handbook on forensic science, a dictionary, an atlas, a Berlin street guide, telephone directories, box files with labels gummed to them—''Braune," "Hundt," "Stark," "Zadek"—every one a bureaucratic tombstone memorializing some long- forgotten victim. Another side of the office was taken up by four filing cabinets. On top of one was a spider plant, placed there by a middle-aged secretary two years before at the height of an unspoken and unrequited passion for Xavier March. It was now dead. That was all the furniture, apart from two wooden desks pushed together beneath the window. One was March's; the other belonged to Max Jaeger.

March hung his overcoat on a peg by the door. He preferred not to wear a uniform when he could avoid it, and this morning he had used the rainstorm on the Havel as an excuse to dress in gray trousers and a thick blue sweater. He pushed Jaeger's chair toward Jost. "Sit down. Coffee?"

"Please."

There was a machine in the corridor. "We've got fucking
photographs
. Can you believe it? Look at that." Along the passage March could hear the voice of Fiebes of VB3—the sexual crimes division—toasting of his latest success. "Her maid took them. Look, you can see every hair. The girl should turn professional."

What would this be? March thumped the side of the coffee machine and it ejected a plastic cup. Some officer's wife, he guessed, and a Polish laborer shipped in from the General Government to work in the garden. It was usually a Pole—a dreamy, soulful Pole plucking at the heart of a wife whose husband was away at the front. It sounded as if they had been photographed in flagrante by some jealous girl from the
Bund deutscher Mädel
, anxious to please the authorities. This was a sexual crime, as defined in the 1935 Race Defilement Act.

He gave the machine another thump.

There would be a hearing in the People's Court, salaciously recorded in
Der Stürmer
as a warning to others. Two years in Ravensbrück for the wife. Demotion and disgrace for the husband. Twenty-five years for the Pole, if he was lucky; death if he was not.

"Fuck!" A male voice muttered something, and Fiebes, a weasel inspector in his mid-fifties whose wife had run off with an SS ski instructor ten years before, gave a shout of laughter. March, a cup of black coffee in either hand, retreated to his office and slammed the door behind him as loudly as he could with his foot.

Reichskriminalpolizei

Werderscher-markt 5-6

Berlin

Statement of Witness

My name is Hermann Friedrich Jost. I was born on 2-23-45 in Dresden. I am a cadet at the Sepp Dietrich Academy, Berlin. At 0530 this morning, I left for my regular training run. I prefer to run alone. My normal route takes me west through the Grunewald Forest to the Havel, north along the lakeshore to the Lindwerder Restaurant, then south to the barracks in Schlachtensee. Three hundred meters north of the Schwanenwerder causeway, I saw an object lying in the water at the edge of the lake. It was the body of a male. I ran to a telephone half a kilometer along the lake path and informed the police. I returned to the body and waited for the arrival of the authorities. During all this time it was raining hard and I saw nobody.

I am making this statement of my own free will in the presence of Kripo investigator Xavier March.

SS-Schütze H. F. Jost.

0824 hours

4/14/64

March leaned back in his chair and studied the young man as he signed his statement. There were no hard lines to his face. It was as pink and soft as a baby's, with a clamor of acne around the mouth, a whisper of blond hair on the upper lip. March doubted if he shaved.

"Why do you run alone?"

Jost handed back his statement. "It gives me a chance to think. It is good to be alone once in the day. One is not often alone in a barracks."

"How long have you been a cadet?"

"Three months."

"Do you enjoy it?"

"Enjoy it!" Jost turned his face to the window. "I'd just begun studying at the university at Göttingen when my call-up came through. Let us say it was not the happiest day of my life."

"What were you studying?"

"Literature."

"German?"

"What other sort is there?" Jost gave one of his watery smiles. "I hope to go back to the university when I have served my three years. I want to be a teacher; a writer. Not a soldier."

March scanned his statement. "If you're so antimilitary, what are you doing in the SS?" He could guess the answer.

"My father. He was a founder member of the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, You know how it is: I'm his only son; it was his dearest wish."