Fatherland (33 page)

He closed the book. "Another story for you, I think."

"And a good one. There are only nine undisputed Leonardos in the world." She smiled. "If I ever get out of here to write it."

"Don't worry. We'll get you out." He lay back and
closed his eyes. After a few moments he heard her put down the book, then she joined him on the bed, wriggling close to him.

"And you?" she breathed into his ear. "Will you come out with me?"

"We can't talk now. Not here."

"Sorry. I forgot." Her tongue tip touched his ear.

A jolt, like electricity.

Her hand rested lightly on his leg. With her fingers, she traced the inside of his thigh. He started to murmur something, but again, as in Zürich, she placed a finger to his lips.

"The object of the game is not to make a sound."

Later, unable to sleep, he listened to her: the sigh of her breath, the occasional mutter—far away and indistinct. In her dream, she turned toward him, groaning. Her arm was flung across the pillow, shielding her face. She seemed to be fighting some private battle. He stroked the tangle of her hair, waiting until whatever demon it was had released her. Then he slipped out from beneath the sheets.

The kitchen floor was cold to his naked feet. He opened a couple of cupboards. Dusty crockery and a few half- empty packages of food. The refrigerator was ancient, might have been borrowed from some institute of biology, its contents blue furred and mottled with exotic molds. Cooking, it was clear, was not a priority around here. He boiled a kettle, rinsed a mug and heaped in three spoonsful of instant coffee.

He wandered through the apartment sipping the bitter drink. In the living room he stood beside the window and pulled back the curtain a fraction. Bülow-Strasse was deserted. He could see the telephone booth, dimly illuminated, and the shadows of the station entrance behind it. He let the curtain fall back.

America. The prospect had never occurred to him before. When he thought of it, his brain reached automati
cally for the images Doctor Goebbels had planted there. Jews and Negroes. Top-hatted capitalists and smokestack factories. Beggars on the streets. Striptease bars. Gangsters shooting at one another from vast automobiles. Smoldering tenements and modern jazz bands, wailing across the ghettos like police sirens. Kennedy's toothy smile. Charlie's dark eyes and white limbs.
America
.

He went into the bathroom. The walls were stained by steam clouds and splashes of soap. Bottles everywhere, and tubes, and small pots. Mysterious feminine objects of glass and plastic. It was a long time since he had seen a woman's bathroom. It made him feel clumsy and foreign—the heavy-footed ambassador of some other species. He picked up a few things and sniffed at them, squeezed a drop of white cream onto his finger and rubbed at it with his thumb. This smell of her mingled with the others already on his hands.

He wrapped himself in a large towel and sat down on the floor to think. Three or four times before dawn he heard her shout out in her sleep.

Just before seven he went down into Bülow-Strasse. His Volkswagen was parked a hundred meters up the street, on the left, outside a butcher's shop. The owner was hanging plump carcasses in the window. A heaped tray of bloodred sausages at his feet reminded March of something.

Globus's fingers, that's what it was—those immense raw fists.

He bent over the backseat of the Volkswagen, tugging his suitcase toward him. As he straightened, he glanced quickly in either direction. There was nothing special to see—just the usual signs of Saturday morning. Most shops would open as normal but then close early in honor of the holiday.

Back in the apartment he made more coffee, set a mug on the bedside table beside Charlie and went into the bathroom to shave. After a couple of minutes he heard her come in behind him. She clasped her arms around his chest and squeezed, her breasts pressing into his bare back. Without turning around he kissed her hand and wrote in the steam on the mirror: PACK, NO RETURN. As he wiped away the message, he saw her clearly for the first time—hair tangled, eyes half closed, the lines of her face still soft with sleep. She nodded and ambled back into the bedroom.

He dressed in his civilian clothes as he had for Zürich, but with one difference. He slipped his Luger into the right-hand pocket of his trench coat. The coat—old surplus Wehrmacht issue, picked up cheaply long ago—was baggy enough for the weapon not to show. He could even hold the pistol and aim it surreptitiously through the material of the pocket, gangster-style: "Okay, buddy, let's go." He smiled to himself. America again.

The possible presence of a microphone cast a shadow over their preparations. They moved quietly around the apartment without speaking. At ten past eight she was ready. March got the radio from the bathroom, placed it on the table in the sitting room and turned up the volume.
"From the pictures sent in for exhibition, it is clear that the eye of some men shows them things other than as they are—that there really are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, the clouds sulfur yellow..."
It was the custom at this time to rebroadcast the Führer's most historic speeches. They replayed this one every year—the attack on modern painters, delivered at the inauguration of the House of German Art in 1937.

Ignoring her silent protests, March picked up her suitcase as well as his own. She donned her blue coat. From one shoulder she hung a leather bag. Her camera dangled from the other. On the threshold, she turned for a final look.

"Either these 'artists' do really see things in this way and believe in that which they represent—then one has but to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister of the Interior will have to see to it that so ghastly a defect shall not be allowed to perpetuate itself—or, if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek on other grounds to impose them upon the nation, then it is a matter for a criminal court."

They closed the door on a storm of laughter and applause.

As they went downstairs, Charlie whispered, "How long does this go on?"

"All weekend."

"That will please the neighbors."

"Ah, but will anyone dare ask you to turn it down?"

At the foot of the stairs, as still as a sentry, stood the concierge—a bottle of milk in one hand, a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
tucked under her arm. She spoke to Charlie but stared at March: "Good morning, Fräulein."

"Good morning, Frau Schustermann. This is my cousin from Aachen. We are going to record the images of spontaneous celebration on the streets." She patted her camera. "Come on, Harald, or we'll miss the beginning."

The old woman continued to scowl at March, and he wondered if she recognized him from the other night. He doubted it: she would remember only the uniform. After a few moments she grunted and waddled back into her apartment.

"You lie very plausibly," said March when they were out on the street.

"A journalist's training." They walked quickly toward the Volkswagen. "It was lucky you weren't wearing your uniform. Then she really would have had some questions."

"There's no possibility of Luther getting into a car driven by a man in the uniform of an SS-Sturmbannführer. Tell me: do I look like an embassy chauffeur?"

"Only a very distinguished one."

He stowed the suitcases in the trunk of the car. When he was settled in the front seat, before he switched on the engine, he said, "You can never go back, you realize that? Whether this works or not. Assisting a defector—they'll think you're a spy. It won't be a question of deporting you. It's much more serious than that."

She waved her hand dismissively. "I never cared for that place anyway."

He turned the key in the ignition and they pulled out into the morning traffic.

Driving carefully, checking every thirty seconds to make sure they were not being followed, they reached Adolf-Hitler-Platz at twenty to nine. March executed one circuit of the square. Reich Chancellery, Great Hall, Wehrmacht High Command building—all seemed as it should be: masonry gleaming, guards marching; everything was as crazily out of scale as ever.

A dozen tour buses were already disgorging their awed cargoes. A crocodile file of children made its way up the snowy steps of the Great Hall, toward the red granite pillars, like a line of ants. In the center of the Platz, beneath the great fountains, were piles of crush barriers, ready to be put into position on Monday morning, when the Führer was due to drive from the chancellery to the hall for the annual ceremony of thanksgiving. Afterward he would return to his residence to appear on the balcony. German television had erected a scaffolding tower directly opposite. Live broadcast vans clustered around its base.

March pulled into a parking space close to the tour buses. From here he had a clear view across the lanes of traffic to the center of the hall.

"Walk up the steps," he said. "Go inside, buy a guidebook, look as natural as you can. When Nightingale appears, bump into him: you're old friends, isn't it marvelous, you stop and talk for a while."

"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 Mercedeses 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 toward 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 toward 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 center 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 the 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're screwing up badly, friend," he hissed. "You're in the middle of a Sipo surveillance operation and, I have to tell you, you're 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're observing radio silence. You break it and I guarantee you, Heydrich personally will have your balls for cuff links. 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 cooperation, Unterwachtmeister." March wound up his window, ending the discussion.

One minute past nine. Charlie and Nightingale were still talking. He glanced into 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.

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 toward them.

Come on. Come on. Look around at him, for God's sake.