Fatherland (34 page)

At that moment Charlie did turn. She saw the old man and recognized him. Luther's arm came up, like that of an exhausted swimmer reaching for the shore.

Something is going to go wrong, thought March suddenly. Something is not right. Something I haven't thought of. . .

Luther had barely five meters to go when his head disappeared. It vanished in a puff of moist red sawdust and then his body was pitching forward, rolling down the steps, and Charlie was putting up her hand to shield her face from the sunburst of blood and brain.

A beat. A beat and a half. Then the crack of a high- velocity rifle howled around the Platz, scooping up the pigeons, scattering them like gray litter across the square.

People started to scream.

March threw the car into gear, flashed his indicator and cut sharply into the traffic, ignoring the outraged hooting—across one lane, and then another. He drove like a man who believed himself invulnerable, as if faith and willpower alone would protect him from collision. He could see a little group forming around the body, which was leaking blood and tissue down the steps. He could hear police whistles. Figures in black uniforms were converging from all directions—Globus and Krebs among them.

Nightingale had Charlie by the arm and was propelling her away from the scene, toward the road, to where March was braking to a halt. The diplomat wrenched open the door and threw her into the backseat, crammed

himself in after her. The door slammed. The Volkswagen accelerated away.

We were betrayed.

Fourteen men summoned; now fourteen dead.

Luther's hand outstretched, the fountain bursting from his neck, his trunk exploding, toppling forward. Globus and Krebs running. Secrets scattered in that shower of tissue; salvation gone . . .

Betrayed. . .

He drove to an underground parking lot just off Rosen-Strasse, close to the Börse, where the Synagogue had once stood—a favorite spot of his for meeting informers. Was there anywhere more lonely? He took a ticket from the machine and pointed the car down the steep ramp. The tires cried out against the concrete; the headlights picked out ancient stains of oil and carbon on the floors and walls, like cave paintings.

Level two was empty—on Saturdays, the financial sector of Berlin was a desert. March parked in a central bay. When the engine died, the silence was complete.

Nobody said anything. Charlie was dabbing at her coat with a tissue. Nightingale was leaning back with his eyes closed. Suddenly March slammed his fists down on the top of the steering wheel.

"Whom did you tell?"

Nightingale opened his eyes. "Nobody."

"The ambassador? Washington? The resident spy master?"

"I told you: nobody." There was anger in his voice.

"This is no help," said Charlie.

"It's also insulting and absurd. Christ, you two—"

"Consider the possibilities." March counted them off on his fingers. "Luther betrayed
himself
to somebody— ridiculous. The telephone booth in Bülow-Strasse was

tapped—impossible: even the Gestapo does not have the resources to bug every public telephone in Berlin. Very well. So was our discussion last night overheard? Unlikely, as we could hardly hear it ourselves!"

"Why does it have to be this big conspiracy? Maybe Luther was just followed."

"Then why not just pick him up? Why shoot him in public, at the very moment of contact?"

"He was looking straight at me." Charlie covered her face with her hands.

"It needn't have been me," said Nightingale. "The leak could have come from one of you two."

"How? We were together all night."

"I'm sure you were." He spat out the words and fumbled for the door. "I don't have to take this sort of shit from you. Charlie—you'd better come back to the embassy with me. Now. We'll get you on a flight out of Berlin tonight and just hope to Christ no one connects us with any of this." He waited. "Come on."

She shook her head.

"If not for your sake, then think of your father."

She was incredulous. "What's my father got to do with it?"

Nightingale hauled himself out of the Volkswagen. "I should never have let myself be talked into this insanity. You're a fool. As for him"—he nodded toward March— "he's a dead man."

He walked away from the car, his footsteps richocheting around the deserted lot—loud at first, but fast becoming fainter. There was the clang of a metal door banging shut, and he was gone.

March looked at Charlie in the mirror. She seemed very small, huddled up in the backseat.

Far away: another noise. The barrier at the top of the ramp was being raised. A car was coming. March felt suddenly panicky, claustrophobic. Their refuge could equally well serve as a trap.

"We can't stay here," he said. He switched on the engine. "We have to keep moving."

"In that case, I want to take more pictures."

"Do you have to?"

"You assemble your evidence, Sturmbannführer, and I'll assemble mine."

He glanced at her again. She had put aside her tissue and was staring at him with a fragile defiance. He took his foot off the brake. Crossing the city was risky, no question, but what else were they to do? Lie behind a locked door waiting to be caught?

He swung the car around in a circle and headed toward the exit as headlights flashed in the gloom behind them.

They parked beside the Havel and walked to the shore. March pointed to the spot where Buhler's body had been found. Her camera clicked as Spiedel's had four days before, but there was little left to record. A few footprints were just visible in the mud. The grass was flattened slightly where the corpse had been dragged from the water. In another day or two even these signs would disappear. She turned away from the water and drew her coat around her, shivering.

It was too dangerous to drive to Buhler's villa, so he stopped at the end of the causeway with the engine running. She leaned out to take a picture of the road leading to the island. The red-and-white pole was down. No sign of the sentry.

"Is that it?" she asked. "
Life
won't pay much for these."

He thought for a moment. "Perhaps there is another place."

No. 56-58 Am grossen Wannsee turned out to be a large nineteenth-century mansion with a pillared façade. It no
longer housed the German headquarters of Interpol. At some point in the years since the war it had become a girls' school. March looked this way and that, up and down the leafy street, where the blossom was in full pink bloom, and tried the gate. It was unlocked. He gestured to Charlie to join him.

"We are Herr and Frau March," he said as he pushed open the gate. "We have a daughter—"

Charlie nodded. "Yes, of course. Heidi. She's seven. With braids—"

"She is unhappy at her present school. This one was recommended. We wanted to look around." They stepped into the grounds. March closed the gates behind them.

She said, "Naturally, if we're trespassing, we apologize . . ."

"But surely Frau March does not look old enough to have a seven-year-old daughter?"

"She was seduced at an impressionable age by a handsome investigator . . ."

"A likely story."

The gravel drive looped around a circular flower bed. March tried to picture it as it might have looked in January 1942. A dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps, or frost. Bare trees. A couple of guards shivering by the entrance. The government cars, one after the other, crunching over the icy gravel. An adjutant saluting and stepping forward to open the doors. Stuckart: handsome and elegant. Buhler: his lawyer's notes carefully arranged in his briefcase. Luther: blinking behind his thick spectacles. Did their breath hang in the air after them? And Heydrich. Would he have arrived first, as host? Or last, to demonstrate his power? Had the cold imparted color even to those pale cheeks?

The house was barred and deserted. While Charlie took a picture of the entrance, March picked his way through low shrubbery to peer through a window. Rows of dwarf-sized desks with dwarf-sized chairs upended and stacked
on top. A pair of blackboards from which the pupils were being taught the Party's special grace. On one:

Before meals—

Führer, my Führer, bequeathed to me by the Lord,

Protect and preserve me as long as I live!

Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress,

I thank thee today for my daily bread.

Abideth thou long with me, forsaketh me not,

Führer, my Führer, my faith and my light!

Heil, mien Führer!

On the other:

After meals—

Thank thee for this bountiful meal,

Protector of youth and friend of the aged!

I know thou hast cares, but worry not,

I am with thee by day and by night.

Lay thy head in my lap,

Be assured, my Führer, that thou art great.

Heil, mein Führer!

Childish paintings decorated the walls—blue meadows, green skies, clouds of sulfur yellow. Children's art was perilously close to degenerate art; such perversity would have to be knocked out of them... March could smell the school smell even from here: the familiar compound of chalk dust, wooden floors and stale institutional food. He turned away.

Someone in a neighboring garden had lit a bonfire. Pungent white smoke—wet wood and dead leaves— drifted across the lawn at the back of the house. A wide flight of steps flanked by stone lions with frozen snarls led down to the lawn. Beyond the grass, through the trees, lay the dull, glassy surface of the Havel. They were facing south. Schwanenwerder, less than half a kilometer away,

would be just visible from the upstairs windows. When Buhler had bought his villa in the early 1950s, had the proximity of the two sites been a motive? Had he been the villain being drawn back to the scene of his crime? If so, what crime had it been, exactly?

March bent and dug up a handful of soil, sniffed at it, let it run through his fingers. The trail had gone cold years ago.

At the bottom of the garden were a couple of wooden barrels, green with age, used by the gardener to collect rainwater. March and Charlie sat on them side by side, legs dangling, looking across the lake. He was in no hurry to move on. Nobody would look for them here. There was something indescribably melancholy about it all—the silence, the dead leaves blowing across the lawn, the smell of the smoke—something that was the opposite of spring. It spoke of autumn, of the end of things.

He said, "Did I tell you that before I went away to sea, there were Jews in our town? When I got back, they were all gone. I asked about it. People said they had been evacuated to the East. For resettlement."

"Did they believe that?"

"In public, of course. Even in private it was wiser not to speculate. And easier. To pretend it was true."

"Did you believe it?"

"I didn't think about it." He was silent, then: "Who cares?" he said suddenly. "Suppose everyone knew all the details. Who would care? Would it really make any difference?"

"Someone thinks so," she reminded him. "That's why everyone who attended Heydrich's conference is dead. Except Heydrich."

He looked back at the house. His mother, a firm believer in ghosts, had used to tell him that brickwork and plaster soaked up history, stored what they had witnessed like a sponge. Since then March had seen his share of

places in which evil had been done, and he did not believe it. There was nothing especially wicked about Am grossen Wannsee 56-58. It was just a businessman's large mansion, now converted into a girls' school. So what were the walls absorbing now? Teenage crushes? Geometry lessons? Exam nerves?

He pulled out Heydrich's invitation. "A discussion followed by luncheon." Starting at noon. Ending at— what?—three or four in the afternoon. It would have been growing dark by the time they left. Yellow lamps in the windows; mist from the lake. Fourteen men. Well fed; maybe some of them tipsy on the Gestapo's wine. Cars to take them back to central Berlin. Chauffeurs who had waited a long time outside, with cold feet and noses like icicles . . .

And then, less than five months later, in Zürich in the heat of midsummer, Martin Luther had marched into the offices of Hermann Zaugg, banker to the rich and frightened, and opened an account with four keys.

"I wonder why he was empty-handed."

"What?" She was distracted. He had interrupted her thoughts.

"I always imagined Luther carrying a small suitcase of some sort. Yet when he came down the steps to meet you, he was empty-handed."

"Perhaps he had stuffed everything into his pockets."

"Perhaps." The Havel looked solid; a lake of mercury. "But he must have landed from Zürich with luggage of some sort. He had spent a night out of the country. And he had picked up something at the bank."

The wind stirred in the trees. March looked around. "He was a suspicious old bastard, after all. It would have been in his character to have kept back the really valuable material. He wouldn't have risked giving the Americans everything at once—otherwise, how could he have bargained?"