Fatherland (3 page)

"You must hate it."

Jost shrugged. "I survive. And I've been told—unofficially, naturally—that I will not have to go to the front. They need an assistant at the officers' school in Bad Tölz to teach a course on the degeneracy of American literature. That sounds more like my kind of thing: degeneracy." He risked another smile. "Perhaps I shall become an expert in the field."

March laughed and glanced again at the statement. Something was not right here, and now he saw it. "No doubt you will." He put the statement to one side and stood up. "I wish you luck with your teaching."

"Am I free to go?"

"Of course."

With a look of relief, Jost got to his feet. March grasped the door handle. "One thing." He turned and stared into the SS cadet's eyes. "Why are you lying to me?"

Jost jerked his head back. "What?"

"You say you left the barracks at five-thirty. You called the cops at five past six. Schwanenwerder is three kilometers from the barracks. You're fit: you run every day. You do not dawdle: it is raining hard. Unless you suddenly developed a limp, you must have arrived at the lake quite some time before six. So there are—what?—twenty minutes out of thirty-five unaccounted for in your statement. What were you doing, Jost?"

The young man looked stricken. "Maybe I left the barracks later. Or maybe I did a couple of circuits of the running track there first—"

" 'Maybe, maybe.'" March shook his head sadly. "These are facts that can be checked, and I warn you: it will go hard for you if I have to find out the truth and bring it to you, rather than the other way around. You are a homosexual, yes?"

"Herr Sturmbannführer! For God's sake—"

March put his hands on Jost's shoulders. "I don't care. Perhaps you run alone every morning so you can meet some fellow in the Grunewald for twenty minutes. That's your business. It's no crime in my book. All I'm interested in is the body. Did you see something? What did you really do?"

Jost shook his head. "Nothing. I swear." Tears were welling in his wide, pale eyes.

"Very well." March released him. "Wait downstairs. I'll arrange transport to take you back to Schlachtensee." He opened the door. "Remember what I said: better you tell me the truth now than I find it out for myself later."

Jost hesitated, and for a moment March thought he might say something, but then he walked out into the corridor and was gone.

March phoned the basement garage and ordered a car. He hung up and stared out of the grimy window at the wall opposite. The black brick glistened under the film of rainwater pouring down from the upper stories. Had he been too hard on the boy? Probably. But sometimes the truth could only be ambushed, taken unguarded in a surprise attack. Was Jost lying? Certainly. But then if he were a homosexual, he could scarcely afford not to lie: anyone found guilty of "anticommunity acts" went straight to a labor camp. SS men arrested for homosexuality were attached to punishment battalions on the eastern front; few returned.

March had seen a score of young men like Jost in the past year. There were more of them every day. Rebelling against their parents. Questioning the state. Listening to American radio stations. Circulating their crudely printed copies of proscribed books—Günter Grass and Graham Greene, George Orwell and J. D. Salinger. Chiefly, they protested against the war—the seemingly endless struggle against the American-backed Soviet guerrillas, which had been grinding on east of the Urals for twenty years.

He felt suddenly ashamed of his treatment of Jost and considered going down to apologize to him. But then he decided, as he always did, that his duty to the dead came first His penance for his morning's bullying would be to put a name to the body in the lake.

The duty room of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei occupies most of Werderscher-Markt's third floor. March mounted the stairs two at a time. Outside the entrance, a guard armed with a machine gun demanded his pass. The door opened with a thud of electronic bolts.

An illuminated map of Berlin takes up half the far wall. A galaxy of stars, orange in the semidarkness, marks the capital's 122 police stations. To its left is a second map, even larger, depicting the entire Reich. Red lights pinpoint those towns big enough to warrant their own Kripo divisions. The center of Europe glows crimson. Further east, the lights gradually thin until, beyond Moscow, there are only a few isolated sparks, winking like camp fires in the blackness. It is a planetarium of crime.

Krause, the duty officer for the Berlin Gau, sat on a raised platform beneath the display. He was on the telephone as March approached and raised his hand in greeting. Before him, a dozen women in starched white shirts sat in glass partitions, each wearing a headset with a microphone attached. What they must hear! A sergeant from a Panzer division comes home from a tour in the East. After a family supper, he takes out his pistol, shoots his wife and each of his three children in turn. Then he splatters his skull across the ceiling. A hysterical neighbor calls the cops. And the news comes here—is controlled, evaluated, reduced—before being passed downstairs to that corridor with cracked green linoleum, stale with cigarette smoke.

Behind the duty officer, a uniformed secretary with a sour face was making entries cm the night incident board. There were four columns: crime (serious), crime (violent), incidents, fatalities. Each category was further quartered: time reported, source of information, detail of report, action taken. An average night of mayhem in the world's largest city, with its population of ten million, was reduced to hieroglyphics on a few square meters of white plastic.

There had been eighteen deaths since ten the previous night. The worst incident—
1H 2D 4K
—was three adults and four children killed in a car crash in Pankow just after eleven. No action taken; that could be left to the Orpo. A family burned to death in a house fire in Kreuzberg, a stabbing outside a bar in Wedding, a woman beaten to death in Spandau. The record of March's own disrupted morning was last on the list:
0607 hours
(O) (that meant notification had come from the Orpo)
1H Havel/March
. The secretary stepped back and recapped her pen with a sharp click.

Krause had finished his telephone call and was looking defensive. "I've already apologized, March."

"Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say, the past forty-eight hours."

"No problem." Krause looked relieved and swiveled around in his chair to the sour-faced woman. "You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything's come in in the past hour." He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. "I'd have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place—you know how it is."

March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a gray cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of color: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a fetus, was an island linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.

Schwanenwerder.

"Does Goebbels still have a place there?"

Krause nodded. "And the rest."

It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred meters away.

Krause said, "The local Orpo call it 'the pheasant run.' "

March smiled: "golden pheasants" was street slang for the Party leadership.

"It's not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep."

Helga had returned. "Persons reported missing since Sunday morning," she announced, "and still unaccounted for." She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. "Plenty to keep you busy there." He seemed to find this amusing. "You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He's the one who should be looking after this business, remember?"

"Thanks. I'll make a start, at least."

Krause shook his head. "You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You're on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?"

March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. "You forget yourself, comrade," he said. "
Arbeit macht frei
." The slogan of the labor camps: Work makes you free.

He turned and made his way back through the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. "See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?"

March arrived back in his office just as Max Jaeger was hanging up his coat. "Zavi!" Jaeger spread his arms wide. "I got a message from the duty room. What can I say?" He wore the uniform of an SS-Sturmbannführer. The black tunic still bore traces of his breakfast.

"Put it down to my soft old heart," said March. "And don't get too excited. There was nothing on the corpse to identify it and there are a hundred people missing in Berlin since Sunday. It'll take hours just to go through the list. And I've promised to take my boy out this afternoon, so you'll be on your own with it."

He lit a cigarette and explained the details: the location, the missing foot, his suspicions about Jost. Jaeger took it in with a series of grunts. He was a shambling, untidy hulk of a man, two meters tall, with clumsy hands and feet. He was fifty, nearly ten years older than March, but they had shared an office since 1959 and sometimes worked as a team. Colleagues in Werderscher-Markt joked about them behind their backs: the Fox and the Bear. And maybe there was something of the old married couple about them, in the way they bickered with and covered for each other.

"This is the 'missing' list." March sat down at his desk and unrolled the printout: names, dates of birth, times of disappearance, addresses of informants. Jaeger leaned over his shoulder. He smoked stubby fat cigars, and his uniform reeked of them. "According to the good doctor Eisler, our man probably died some time after six last night, so the chances are nobody missed him until seven or eight at the earliest. They may even be waiting to see if he shows up this morning. So he may not be on the list. But we have to consider two other possibilities, do we not? One: he went missing some time
before
he died. Two—and we know from hard experience this is not impossible—Eisler has screwed up the time of death."

"The guy isn't fit to be a vet," said Jaeger.

March counted swiftly. "One hundred two names. I'd put the age of our man at sixty."

"Better say fifty, to be safe. Twelve hours in the drink and nobody looks his best."

"True. So we exclude everyone on the list born after 1914. That should bring it down to a dozen names. Identification couldn't be much easier: was Grandpa missing a foot?" March folded the sheet, tore it in two and handed one half to Jaeger. "What are the Orpo stations around the Havel?"

"Nikolassee," said Max. "Wannsee. Kladow. Gatow. Pichelsdorf—but that's probably too far north."

Over the next half hour, March called each of them in turn, including Pichelsdorf, to see if any clothing had been handed in or if some local derelict matched the description of the man in the lake. Nothing. He turned his attention to his half of the list. By 11:30 he had exhausted every likely name. He stood up and stretched.

"Mr. Nobody."

Jaeger had finished calling ten minutes earlier and was staring out of the window, smoking. "Popular fellow, isn't he? Makes even you look loved." He removed his cigar and picked some shreds of loose tobacco from his tongue. "I'll see if the duty room has received any more names. Leave it to me. Have a good time with Pili."

The late-morning service had just ended in the ugly church opposite Kripo headquarters. March stood on the other side of the street and watched the priest, a shabby raincoat over his vestments, locking the door. Religion was officially discouraged in Germany. How many worshippers, March wondered, had braved the Gestapo's spies to attend. Half a dozen? The priest slipped the heavy iron key into his pocket and turned around. He saw March looking at him, and immediately scuttled away, eyes cast down, like a man caught in the middle of an illegal transaction. March buttoned his trench coat and followed him into the filthy Berlin morning.

"Construction of the Arch of Triumph was commenced in 1946 and work was completed in time for the Day of National Reawakening in 1950. The inspiration for the design came from the Führer and is based upon original drawings made by him during the Years of Struggle."

The passengers on the tour bus—at least those who could understand—digested this information. They raised themselves out of their seats or leaned into the aisle to get a better view. Xavier March, halfway down the bus, lifted his son onto his lap. Their guide, a middle-aged woman clad in the dark green of the Reich Tourist Ministry, stood at the front, feet planted wide apart, back to the windshield. Her voice over the address system was thick with cold.

"The arch is constructed of granite and has a capacity of two million, three hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-five cubic meters." She sneezed. "The Arc de Triomphe in Paris will fit into it forty-nine times."

For a moment, the arch loomed over them. Then, suddenly, they were passing through it—an immense stone- ribbed tunnel longer than a football pitch, higher than a fifteen-story building, with the vaulted, shadowed roof of a cathedral. The headlights and taillights of eight lanes of traffic danced in the afternoon gloom.