Fatherland (40 page)
Authors: Robert Harris
He took a step toward her, to hold her, but she fended him off. "I'm not saying good-bye. Not here. I'll see you tonight.
I will see you
."
There was a moment of anticlimax when the Opel refused to start. She pulled out the choke and tried again, and this time the engine fired. She backed out of the parking space, still refusing to look at him. He had a last glimpse of her profile—staring straight ahead, her knuckles clenching the wheel—and then she was gone, leaving a trail of blue-white vapor hanging in the chilly morning air.
March sat alone in the empty room, on the edge of the bed, holding her pillow. He waited until an hour had passed before putting on his uniform. He stood in front of the dressing-table mirror, buttoning his black tunic. It would be the last time he wore it, one way or the other.
"We'll change history."
He donned his cap, adjusted it. Then he took his thirty sheets of paper, his notebook and Buhler's pocket diary, folded them together, wrapped them in the remaining sheet of brown paper and slipped them into his inside pocket.
Was history changed so easily? He wondered. Certainly, it was his experience that secrets were an acid— once spilled, they could eat their way through anything: if a marriage, why not a presidency, why not a state? But talk of history—he shook his head at his own reflection— history was beyond him. Investigators turned suspicion into evidence. He had done that. History he would leave to her.
He carried Luther's bag into the bathroom and shoveled into it all the rubbish that Charlie had left behind—the discarded bottles, the rubber gloves, the dish and spoon,
the brushes. He did the same in the bedroom. It was strange how much she had filled these places, how empty they seemed without her. He looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty. She should be well clear of Berlin by now, perhaps as far south as Wittenberg.
In the reception area, the manager hovered.
"Good day, Herr Sturmbannführer. Is the interrogation finished?"
"It is indeed, Herr Brecker. Thank you for your patriotic assistance."
"A pleasure." Brecker gave a short bow. He was twisting his fat white hands together as if rubbing them with oil. "And if ever the Sturmbannführer feels the desire to do a little more interrogation . . ." His bushy eyebrows danced. "Perhaps I might even be able to supply him with a suspect or two?"
March smiled. "Good day to you, Herr Brecker."
"Good day to
you
, Herr Sturmbannführer."
He sat in the front passenger seat of the Volkswagen and thought for a moment. Inside the spare tire would be the ideal place, but he had no time for that. The plastic door panels were securely fastened. He reached under the dashboard until his fingers encountered a smooth surface. It would serve his purpose. He tore off two lengths of cellophane tape and attached the package to the cold metal.
Then he dropped the roll of tape into Luther's case and dumped the bag into one of the rubbish bins outside the kitchen. The brown leather looked too incongruous lying on the surface. He found a broken length of broom handle and dug a grave for it, burying it at last beneath the coffee dregs, the stinking fish heads, the lumps of grease and maggoty pork.
Yellow signs bearing the single word
Fernverkehr
— long-distance traffic—pointed the way out of Berlin, toward the racetrack autobahn that girdled the city. March had the southbound carriageway almost to himself—the few cars and buses about this early on a Sunday morning were heading the other way. He passed the perimeter wire of the Tempelhof aerodrome, and abruptly he was into the suburbs, the wide road pushing through dreary streets of red brick shops and houses, lined by sickly trees with blackened trunks.
To his left, a hospital; to his right, a disused church, shuttered and daubed with Party slogans. "Marienfelde," said the signs. "Bückow." "Lichtenrade."
At a set of traffic lights he stopped. The road to the south lay open—to the Rhine, to Zürich, to America ... Behind him someone tooted. The lights had changed. He flicked the turn signal, swung off the main road, and was quickly lost in the gridiron streets of a housing estate.
In the early fifties, in the glow of victory, the roads had been named for generals: Student-Strasse, Reichenau-Strasse, Manteuffel-Allee. March was always confused. Was it right off Model into Dietrich? Or was it left into Paulus, and
then
Dietrich? He drove slowly along the rows of identical bungalows until at last he recognized it.
He pulled over in the familiar place and almost sounded the horn until he remembered that this was the third Sunday in the month, not the first—and therefore not his—and that in any case his access had been revoked. A frontal assault would be needed, an action in the spirit of Hasso von Manteuffel himself.
There was no litter of toys along the concrete drive, and when he rang the bell, no dog barked. He cursed silently. It seemed to be his fate this week to stand outside deserted houses. He backed away from the porch, his eyes fixed on the window beside it. The net curtain flickered.
"Pili! Are you there?"
The corner of the curtain was abruptly parted, as if some hidden dignitary had pulled a cord unveiling a portrait, and there it was—his son's white face staring at him.
"May I come in? I want to talk!"
The face was expressionless. The curtain dropped back.
Good sign or bad? March was uncertain. He waved to the blank window and pointed to the garden. "I'll wait for you here."
He walked back to the little wooden gate and checked the street. Bungalows on either side, bungalows opposite. They extended in every direction like the huts of an army camp. Old folks lived in most of them: veterans of the First War, survivors of all that had followed—inflation, unemployment, the Party, the Second War. Even ten years ago, they had been gray and bowed. They had seen enough, endured enough. Now they stayed at home and shouted at Pili for making too much noise and watched television all day.
March prowled around the tiny handkerchief of lawn. Not much of a life for the boy. Cars passed. Two doors down an old man was repairing a bicycle, inflating the tires with a squeaky pump. Elsewhere, the noise of a lawnmower ... No sign of Pili. He was wondering if he would have to get down on his hands and knees and shout his message through the letterbox when he heard the door being opened.
"Good lad. How are you? Where's your mother? Where's Helfferich?" He could not bring himself to say "Uncle Erich."
Pili had opened the door just enough to enable him to peer around it. "They're out. I'm finishing my picture."
"Out where?"
"Rehearsing for the parade. I'm in charge. They said so."
"I bet. Can I come in and talk to you?"
He had expected resistance. Instead the boy stood aside without a word and March found himself crossing the threshold of his ex-wife's house for the first time since their divorce. He took in the furniture—cheap but good looking; the bunch of fresh daffodils on the mantelpiece; the neatness; the spotless surfaces. She had done it as well as she could without much to spend. He would have expected that. Even the picture of the Führer above the telephone—a photograph of the old man hugging a child—was tasteful: Klara's deity always was a benign god, New Testament rather than Old. He took off his cap. He felt like a burglar.
He stood on the nylon rug and began his speech. "I have to go away, Pili. Maybe for a long time. And people, perhaps, are going to say some things to you about me. Horrible things that aren't true. And I wanted to tell you . . ." His words petered out.
Tell you what?
He ran his hand through his hair. Pili was standing with his arms folded, gazing at him. He tried again. "It's hard not having a father around. My father died when I was very little— younger even than you are now. And sometimes I hated him for that."
Those cool eyes . . .
". . . But that passed, and then—I missed him. And if I could talk to him now—ask him ... I'd give anything ..."
... all human hair cut off in concentration camps should be utilized. Human hair will be processed for industrial felt and spun into thread.
He was not sure how long he stood there, not speaking, his head bowed. Eventually he said, "I have to go now."
And then Pili was coming toward him and tugging at his hand. "It's all right, Papa. Please don't go yet. Please. Come and look at my picture."
The boy's bedroom was like a command center. Model Luftwaffe jets assembled from plastic kits swooped and fought, suspended from the ceiling by invisible lengths of fishing line. On one wall, a map of the eastern front, with colored pins to show the positions of the armies. On another, a group photograph of Pili's Pimpf unit—bare knees and solemn faces, photographed against a concrete wall.
As he drew, Pili kept up a running commentary, with sound effects. "These are our jets—
rrroowww!
—and these are the Reds' AA guns.
Pow! Pow!"
Lines of yellow crayon streaked skyward. "Now we let them have it. Fire!" Little black ants' eggs rained down, creating jagged red crowns of fire. "The commies call up their own fighters, but they're no match for ours." It went on for another five minutes, action piled on action.
Abruptly, bored by his own creation, Pili dropped the crayons and dived under the bed. He pulled out a stack of wartime picture magazines.
"Where did you get those?"
"Uncle Erich gave them to me. He collected them."
Pili flung himself onto the bed and began to turn the pages. "What do the captions say, Papa?" He gave March the magazine and sat close to him, holding on to his arm.
" 'The sapper has worked his way right up to the wire obstacles protecting the machine gun position,'" read March. " 'A few spurts of flame and the deadly stream of burning oil has put the enemy out of action. The flamethrowers must be fearless men with nerves of steel.' "
"And that one?"
This was not the farewell March had envisaged, but if it was what the boy wanted ... He plowed on: "I want to fight for the new Europe: so say three brothers from Copenhagen with their company leader in the SS training camp in Upper Alsace. They have fulfilled all the conditions relating to questions of race and health and are now enjoying the manly open-air life in the camp in the woods.'"
"What about these?"
March smiled. "Come on, Pili. You're ten years old. You can read these easily."
"But I want you to read them. Here's a picture of a U-boat, like yours. What does it say?"
He stopped smiling and put down the magazine. There was something wrong here. What was it? He realized: the silence. For several minutes now, nothing had happened in the street outside—not a car, not a footstep, not a voice. Even the lawn mower had stopped. He saw Pili's eyes flick to the window, and he understood.
Somewhere in the house: a tinkle of glass. March scrambled for the door, but the boy was too quick for him—rolling off the bed, grabbing his legs, curling himself around his father's feet in a fetal ball, a parody of childish entreaty. "Please don't go, Papa," he was saying. "Please..." March's fingers grasped the door handle, but he couldn't move. He was anchored, mired. I have dreamed this before, he thought. The window imploded behind them, showering their backs with glass—now real uniforms with real guns were filling the bedroom—and suddenly March was on his back gazing up at the little plastic warplanes bobbing and spinning crazily at the ends of their invisible wires.
He could hear Pili's voice: "It's going to be all right, Papa. They're going to help you. They'll make you better. Then you can come and live with us. They promised . . ."
His hands were cuffed tight behind his back, wrists outward. Two SS men had propped him against the wall, against the map of the eastern front, and Globus stood before him. Pili had been hustled away, thank God. "I have waited for this moment," said Globus, "as a bridegroom waits for his bride," and he punched March in the stomach, hard. March folded, dropped to his knees, dragging the map and all its little pins down with him, thinking he would never breathe again. Then Globus had him by the hair and was pulling him up, and his body was trying to retch and suck in oxygen at the same time and Globus hit him again and he went down again. This process was repeated several times. Finally, while he was lying on the carpet with his knees drawn up, Globus planted his boot on the side of his head and ground his toe into his ear. "Look," he said, "I've put my foot on shit," and from a long way away, March heard the sound of men laughing.
"Where's the girl?"
"What girl?"
Globus slowly extended his stubby fingers in front of March's face, then brought his hand arching down in a karate blow to the kidneys.
This was much worse than anything else—a blinding white flash of pain that shot straight through him and put him on the floor again, retching bile. And the worst was to know that he was merely in the foothills of a long climb. The stages of torture stretched before him, ascending as notes on a scale, from the dull bass of a blow in the belly, through the middle register of kidney punches, onward and upward to some pitch beyond the range of the human ear, a pinnacle of crystal.
"Where's the girl?"
"What. . . girl?"
They disarmed him, searched him, then they half pushed, half dragged him out of the bungalow. A little crowd had gathered in the road. Klara's elderly neighbors watched as he was bundled, head bowed, into the back of the BMW. He glimpsed briefly along the street four or five cars with revolving lights, a lorry, troops. What had they been expecting? A small war? Still no sign of Pili. The handcuffs forced him to sit hunched forward. Two Gestapo men were jammed into the backseat, one on either side of him. As the car pulled away, he could see some of the old folks already shuffling back into their houses, back to the reassuring glow of their television sets.
He was driven north through the holiday traffic, up into Saarland-Strasse, east into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Fifty meters past the main entrance to Gestapo headquarters, the convoy swung right, through a pair of high prison gates and into a brick courtyard at the back of the building.
He was pulled out of the car and through a low entrance, down steep concrete steps. Then his heels were scraping along the floor of an arched hallway. A door, a cell. . . silence.
They left him alone to allow his imagination to go to work—standard procedure. Very well. He crawled into a corner and rested his head against the damp brick. Every minute that passed was another minute's traveling time for her. He thought of Pili, of all the lies, and clenched his fists.
The cell was lit by a weak bulb above the door, imprisoned in its own rusty metal cage. He glanced at his wrist, a useless reflex, for they had taken away his watch. Surely she could not be far from Nuremberg by now? He tried to fill his mind with images of the Gothic spires—St. Lorenz, St. Sebaldus, St. Jakob... Every limb—every part of him to which he could put a name—ached, yet they could not have worked him over for more than five minutes, and still they had managed not to leave a mark on his face. Truly, he had fallen into the hands of experts. He almost laughed, but that hurt his ribs, so he stopped.
He was taken along the hallway to an interview room: whitewashed walls, a heavy oak table with a chair on each side; in the corner, an iron stove. Globus had disappeared; Krebs was in command. The handcuffs were removed. Standard procedure again—first the hard cop, then the soft. Krebs even attempted a joke: "Normally, we would arrest your son and threaten him as well, to encourage your cooperation. But in your case, we know that such a course would be counterproductive." Secret policeman's humor! He leaned back in his chair, smiling, and pointed his pencil. "Nevertheless. A remarkable boy."
" 'Remarkable'—your word." At some point during his beating, March had bitten his tongue. He talked now as if he had spent a week in a dentist's chair.
"Your ex-wife was given a telephone number last night," said Krebs, "in case you attempted contact. The boy memorized it. The instant he saw you, he called. He's inherited your brains, March. Your initiative. You should feel some pride."
"At this moment, my feelings toward my son are indeed strong."
Good, he thought, let's keep this up. Another minute, another kilometer.
But Krebs was already down to business, turning the pages of a thick folder. "There are two issues here, March. One: your general political reliability, going back over many years. That does not concern us today—at least, not directly. Two: your conduct over the past week—specifically, your involvement in the attempts of the late Party Comrade Luther to defect to the United States."
"I have no such involvement."
"You were questioned by an officer of the Ordnungspolizei in Adolf-Hitler-Platz yesterday morning—at the exact time the traitor Luther was planning to meet the American journalist, Maguire, together with an official of the United States Embassy."
How did they know that? "Absurd."
"Do you deny you were in the Platz?"
"No. Of course not."
"Then why were you there?"
"I was following the American woman."
Krebs was making notes. "Why?"
"She was the person who discovered the body of Party Comrade Stuckart. I was also naturally suspicious of her, in her role as an agent of the bourgeois democratic press."
"Don't piss me about, March."
"All right. I had insinuated myself into her company. I thought: if she can stumble across the corpse of one retired state secretary, she might stumble across another."
"A fair point." Krebs rubbed his chin and thought for a moment, then opened a fresh pack of cigarettes and gave one to March, lighting it for him from an unused box of
matches. March filled his lungs with smoke. Krebs had not taken one for himself, he noticed—they were merely a part of his act, an interrogator's props.
The Gestapo man was leafing through his notes again, frowning. "We believe that the traitor Luther was planning to disclose certain information to the journalist Maguire. What was the nature of this information?"
"I have no idea. The art fraud, perhaps?"
"On Thursday you visited Zürich. Why?"
"It was the place Luther went before he vanished. I wanted to see if there was any clue there that might explain why he disappeared."
"And was there?"
"No. But my visit was authorized. I submitted a full report to Oberstgruppenführer Nebe. Have you not seen it?"
"Of course not." Krebs made a note. "The Oberstgruppenführer shows his hand to no one, not even us. Where is Maguire?"
"How should I know?"
"You should know because you picked her up from Adolf-Hitler-Platz after the shooting yesterday."
"Not me, Krebs."
"Yes, you, March. Afterward, you went to the morgue and searched through the traitor Luther's personal effects—this we know absolutely from SS surgeon Eisler."
"I was not aware that the effects were Luther's," said March. "I understood they belonged to a man named Stark who was three meters away from Maguire when he was shot. Naturally, I was interested to see what he was carrying, because I was interested in Maguire. Besides, if you recall,
you
showed me what you said was Luther's body on Friday night. Who did shoot Luther, as a matter of interest?"
"Never mind that. What did you expect to pick up at the morgue?"
"Plenty."
"What? Be exact!"
"Fleas. Lice. A skin rash from his shitty clothes."
Krebs threw down his pencil. He folded his arms. "You're a brainy fellow, March. Take comfort from the fact that we credit you with that, at least. Do you think we'd give a shit if you were just some dumb fat fuck, like your friend Max Jaeger? I bet you could keep this up for hours. But we don't have hours, and we're less stupid than you think." He shuffled through his papers, smirked and then played his ace.
"What was in the suitcase you took from the airport?"
March looked straight back at him. They had known all along. "What suitcase?"
"The suitcase that looks like a doctor's bag. The suitcase that doesn't weigh very much, but might contain paper. The suitcase Friedman gave you thirty minutes before he called us. He got back to find a telex, you see, March, from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse—an alert to stop you from leaving the country. When he saw that, he decided— as a patriotic citizen—he'd better inform us of your visit."
"Friedman!" said March. "A 'patriotic citizen'? He's fooling you, Krebs. He's hiding some scheme of his own."
Krebs sighed. He got to his feet and came around to stand behind March, his hands resting on the back of March's chair. "When this is over, I'd like to get to know you. Really. Assuming there's anything left of you to get to know. Why did someone like you go bad? I'm interested. From a technical point of view. To try to stop it happening in the future."
"Your passion for self-improvement is laudable."
"There you go again, you see? A problem of attitude. Things are changing in Germany, March—from within— and you could have been a part of it. The Reichsführer himself takes a personal interest in the new generation— listens to us, promotes us. He believes in restructuring, greater openness, talking to the Americans. The day of men like Odilo Globocnik is passing." He stooped and whispered in March's ear, "Do you know why Globus doesn't like you?"
"Enlighten me."
"Because you make him feel stupid. In Globus's book, that's a capital offense. Help me, and I can shield you from him." Krebs straightened and resumed, in his normal voice, "Where is the woman? What was the information Luther wanted to give her? Where is Luther's suitcase?"
Those three questions, again and again.
Interrogations have this irony, at least: they can enlighten those being questioned as much as—or more than—those who are doing the questioning.
From what Krebs asked, March could measure the extent of his knowledge. This was, on certain matters, very good: he knew March had visited the morgue, for example, and that he had retrieved the suitcase from the airport. But there was a significant gap. Unless Krebs was playing a fiendishly devious game, it seemed he had no idea of the nature of the information Luther had promised the Americans. Upon this one, narrow ground rested March's only hope.
After an inconclusive half hour, the door opened and Globus appeared, swinging a long truncheon of polished wood. Behind him stood two thick-set men in black uniforms.
Krebs leapt to attention.
Globus asked, "Has he made a full confession?"
"No, Herr Obergruppenführer."
"What a surprise. My turn then, I think."
"Of course." Krebs stooped and collected his papers.
Was it March's imagination, or did he see on that long, impassive face a flicker of regret, even of distaste?
After Krebs had gone, Globus prowled around, humming an old Party marching song, dragging the length of wood over the stone floor.
"Do you know what this is, March?" He waited. "No? No answer? It's an American invention. A baseball bat. A pal of mine at the Washington Embassy brought it back for me." He swung it around his head a couple of times. "I'm thinking of raising an SS team. We could play the U.S. Army. What do you think? Goebbels is keen. He thinks the American masses would respond well to the pictures."
He leaned the bat against the heavy wooden table and began unbuttoning his tunic.
"If you want my opinion, the original mistake was in '36, when Himmler said every Kripo flatfoot in the Reich had to wear SS uniform. That's when we were landed with scum like you and shriveled-up old cunts like Artur Nebe."
He handed his jacket to one of the two guards and began rolling up his sleeves. Suddenly he was shouting: "My God, we used to know how to deal with people like you. But we've gone soft. It's not 'Has he got guts?' anymore, it's 'Has he got a doctorate?' We didn't need doctorates in the East, in '41, when there was fifty degrees of frost and your piss froze in midair. You should have heard Krebs, March. You'd have loved it. Fuck it, I think he's one of your lot." He adopted a mincing voice. " 'With permission, Herr Obergruppenführer, I would like to question the suspect first. I feel he may respond to a more subtle approach.' Subtle, my ass. What's the point of you? If you were my dog, I'd feed you poison."
"If I were your dog, I'd eat it."
Globus grinned at one of the guards. "Listen to the big man!" He spat on his hands and picked up the baseball bat. He turned to March. "I've been looking at your file. I see you're a great one for writing. Forever taking notes, compiling lists. Quite the frustrated fucking author. Tell me: are you left-handed or right-handed?"
"Left-handed."
"Another lie. Put your right arm on the table."
March felt as if iron bands had been fastened around his chest. He could barely breathe. "Go screw yourself."
Globus glanced at the guards and powerful hands seized March from behind. The chair toppled and he was being bent headfirst over the table. One of the SS men twisted his left arm high up his back and wrenched it, and he was roaring with the pain of that as the other man grabbed his free hand. The man half climbed onto the table and planted his knee just below March's right elbow, pinning his forearm, palm down, to the wooden planks.
Within seconds, everything was locked in place except his fingers, which were just able to flutter slightly, like a trapped bird.
Globus stood a meter from the table, brushing the tip of the bat lightly across March's knuckles. Then he lifted it, swung it in a great arc, like an ax, through three hundred degrees, and with all his force brought it smashing down.
He did not faint, not at first. The guards let him go and he slid to his knees, a thread of spit dribbling from the corner of his mouth, leaving a snail's trail across the table. His arm was still stretched out. He stayed like that for a while, until he raised his head and saw the remains of his hand— some alien pile of blood and gristle on a butcher's slab— and then he fainted.