Fatherland

ONE

Thick cloud had pressed down on Berlin all night, and now it was lingering into what passed for the morning. On the city’s western outskirts, plumes of rain drifted across the surface of Lake Havel, like smoke.

Sky and water merged into a sheet of grey, broken only by the dark line of the opposite bank. Nothing stirred there. No lights showed.

Xavier March, homicide investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei — the Kripo — climbed out of his Volkswagen and tilted his face to the rain. He was a connoisseur of this particular rain. He knew the taste of it, the smell of it. It was Baltic rain, from the north, cold and sea-scented, tangy with salt. For an instant he was back twenty years, in the conning tower of a U-boat, slipping out of Wilhelmshaven, lights doused, into the darkness.

He looked at his watch. It was just after seven in the morning.

Drawn up on the roadside before him were three other cars. The occupants of two were asleep in the drivers” seats. The third was a patrol car of the Ordnungspolizei — the Orpo, as every German called them. It was empty. Through its open window, sharp in the damp air, came the crackle of static, punctuated by jabbering bursts of speech. The revolving light on its roof lit up the forest beside the road: blue-black, blue-black, blue-black.

March looked around for the Orpo patrolmen, and saw them sheltering by the lake under a dripping birch tree. Something gleamed pale in the mud at their feet. On a nearby log sat a young man in a black tracksuit, SS insignia on his breast pocket. He was hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands pressed against the sides of his head — the image of misery.

March took a last draw on his cigarette and flicked it away. It fizzed and died on the wet road.

As he approached, one of the policemen raised his arm.

“Heil Hitler!”

March ignored him and slithered down the muddy bank to inspect the corpse.

It was an old man’s body — cold, fat, hairless and shockingly white. From a distance, it could have been an alabaster statue dumped in the mud. Smeared with dirt, the corpse sprawled on its back half out of the water, arms flung wide, head tilted back. One eye was screwed shut, the other squinted balefully at the filthy sky.

Tour name, Unterwachtmeister?” March had a soft voice. Without taking his eyes off the body, he addressed the Orpo man who had saluted.

“Ratka, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

Sturmbannfuhrer was an SS title, equivalent in Wehrmacht rank to major, and Ratka — dog-tired and skin-soaked though he was -seemed eager to show respect. March knew his type without even looking round: three applications to transfer to the Kripo, all turned down; a dutiful wife who had produced a football team of children for the Fuhrer; an income of 200 Reichsmarks a month. A life lived in hope.

“Well, Ratka,’said March, in that soft voice again. “What time was he discovered?”

“Just over an hour ago, sir. We were at the end of our shift, patrolling in Nikolassee. We took the call. Priority One. We were here in five minutes.”

“Who found him?”

Ratka jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

The young man in the tracksuit rose to his feet. He could not have been more than eighteen. His hair was cropped so close the pink scalp showed through the dusting of light brown hair. March noticed how he avoided looking at the body.

“Your name?”

“SS-Schutze Hermann Jost, sir.” He spoke with a Saxon accent — nervous, uncertain, anxious to please. “From the Sepp Dietrich training academy at Schlachtensee.” March knew it: a monstrosity of concrete and asphalt built in the 1950s, just south of the Havel. “I run here most mornings. It was still dark. At first, I thought it was a swan,” he added, helplessly.

Ratka snorted, contempt on his face. An SS cadet scared of one dead old man! No wonder the war in the Urals was dragging on forever.

“Did you see anyone else, Jost?” March spoke in a kindly tone, like an uncle.

“Nobody, sir. There’s a telephone box in the picnic area, half a kilometre back. I called, then came here and waited until the police arrived. There wasn’t a soul on the road.”

March looked again at the body. It was very fat. Maybe 110 kilos.

“Let’s get him out of the water.” He turned towards the road. Time to raise our sleeping beauties.” Ratka, shifting from foot to foot in the downpour, grinned.

It was raining harder now, and the Kladow side of the lake had virtually disappeared. Water pattered on the leaves of the trees and drummed on the car roofs. There was a heavy rain-smell of corruption: rich earth and rotting vegetation. March’s hair was plastered to his scalp, water trickled down the back of his neck. He did not notice. For March, every case, however routine, held — at the start, at least — the promise of adventure.

He was forty-two years old — slim, with grey hair and cool grey eyes that matched the sky. During the war, the Propaganda Ministry had invented a nickname for the men of the U-boats — the “grey wolves” — and it would have been a good name for March, in one sense, for he was a determined detective. But he was not by nature a wolf, did not run with the pack, was more reliant on brain than muscle, so his colleagues called him “the fox” instead.

U-boat weather!

He flung open the door of the white Skoda, and was hit by a gust of hot, stale air from the car heater.

“Morning, Spiedel!” He shook the police photographer’s bony shoulder. Time to get wet.” Spiedel jerked awake. He gave March a glare.

The driver’s window of the other Skoda was already being wound down as March approached it. “All right, March. All right.” It was SS-Surgeon August Eisler, a Kripo pathologist, his voice a squeak of affronted dignity. “Save your barrack-room humour for those who appreciate it.”

They gathered at the water’s edge, all except Doctor Eisler, who stood apart, sheltering under an ancient black umbrella he did not offer to share. Spiedel screwed a flash bulb on to his camera and carefully planted his right foot on a lump of clay. He swore as the lake lapped over his shoe.

“Shit!”

The flash popped, freezing the scene for an instant: the white faces, the silver threads of rain, the darkness of the woods. A swan came scudding out of some nearby reeds to see what was happening, and began circling a few metres away.

“Protecting her nest,” said the young SS man.

“I want another here.” March pointed. “And one here.”

Spiedel cursed again and pulled his dripping foot out of the mud. The camera flashed twice more.

March bent down and grasped the body under the armpits. The flesh was hard, like cold rubber, and slippery.

“Help me.”

The Orpo men each took an arm and together, grunting with the effort, they heaved, sliding the corpse out of the water, over the muddy bank and on to the sodden grass. As March straightened, he caught the look on Jost’s face.

The old man had been wearing a pair of blue swimming trunks which had worked their way down to his knees. In the freezing water, the genitals had shriveled to a tiny clutch of white eggs in a nest of black pubic hair.

The left foot was missing.

It had to be, thought March. This was a day when nothing would be simple. An adventure, indeed.

“Herr Doctor. Your opinion, please.”

With a sigh of irritation, Eisler daintily stepped forward, removing the glove from one hand. The corpse’s leg ended at the bottom of the calf. Still holding the umbrella, Eisler bent stiffly and ran his fingers around the stump.

“A propeller?” asked March. He had seen bodies dragged out of busy waterways — from the Tegler See and the Spree in Berlin, from the Alster in Hamburg — which looked as if butchers had been at them.

“No.” Eisler withdrew his hand. “An old amputation. Rather well done in fact.” He pressed hard on the chest with his fist. Muddy water gushed from the mouth and bubbled out of the nostrils. “Rigor mortis fairly advanced. Dead twelve hours. Maybe less.” He pulled his glove back on.

A diesel engine rattled somewhere through the trees behind them.

“The ambulance,” said Ratka. They take their time.”

March gestured to Spiedel. Take another picture.”

Looking down at the corpse, March lit a cigarette. Then he squatted on his haunches and stared into the single open eye. He stayed that way a long while. The camera flashed again. The swan reared up, flapped her wings, and turned towards the centre of the lake in search of food.

TWO

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 Berliner-luft 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 cars 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 six-fifteen. The call had not woken him. He had been lying in the semi-darkness 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,” said March, “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 again at your list.”

There had been a pause at the other end, then Krause had come back on the line, grudgingly apologetic. “You are in luck, March. I was looking at last week’s rota. You can go back to sleep. Or…” He had sniggered: “Or 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 is 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 rear-view mirror. Jost had been silent ever since they left the Havel. He sat stiffly in the back seat, staring at the grey 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. i 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 Fuhrertag, a public holiday — and every band in the Reich would be on parade. The windscreen 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.

The 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-metre-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 untersection 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 storeys 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 scrutinised 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 Fuhrertag. 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 Fuhrer and the Head of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, stared at one another with blank eyes.

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

The security forces which 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 were in a grim complex around Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, a kilometre south-west 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 got 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 lined the passage, some half open. 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 centre in the ceaseless war against the criminal enemies of National Socialism’,” said March, quoting a recent headline in the Party newspaper, the Volkischer 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, memorialising 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 ago 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 uniform when he could avoid it, and this morning he had used the rainstorm on the Havel as an excuse to dress in grey trousers and a thick blue sweater. He pushed Jaeger’s chair towards 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 — boasting 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 labourer 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 Madel, 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 Sturmer as a warning to others. Two years in Ravensbruck 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 weaselly 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.

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 clamour 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 had just begun studying at the university at Gottingen 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 are so anti-military, what are you doing in the SS?” He guessed the answer.

“My father. He was a founder member of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. You know how it is: I am his only son; it was his dearest wish.”

“You must hate it.”

Jost shrugged. “I survive. And I have been told -unofficially, naturally — that I will not have to go to the front. They need an assistant at the officer school in Bad Tolz to teach a course on the degeneracy of American literature. That sounds more 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 call the cops at five past six. Schwanenwerder is three kilometres from the barracks. You are 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 round. You are a homosexual, yes?”

“Herr Sturmbannfuhrer! 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 rang down to 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 storeys. 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 was a homosexual, he could scarcely afford not to lie: anyone found guilty of’anti-community acts” went straight to a labour 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 — Gunter 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 guerillas, 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 apologise 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 semi-darkness, marks the capital’s one hundred and twenty-two 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 centre 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. An hysterical neighbour 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 on 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 often million, was reduced to hieroglyphics on a few square metres of white plastic.

There had been eighteen deaths since ten o’clock the previous night. The worst incident- JH 2D 4K-was three adults and four children killed in a car smash in Pankow just after 11. 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: 06:07 [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 apologised, March.”

“Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say: the last forty-eight hours.”

“No problem.” Krause looked relieved and swivelled round in his chair to the sour-faced woman. “You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything’s come in in the last hour.” He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. Td 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 grey cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of colour: 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 foetus, 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 metres 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 labour 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 Sturmbannfuhrer. 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 metres 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 print-out: 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 and 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 their 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 eleven-thirty he had exhausted every likely name. He stood up and stretched.

“Mister Nobody.”

Jaeger had finished calling ten minutes earlier and was staring out of the window, smoking. “Popular fellow, isn’t he? Makes even you looked loved.” He removed his cigar and picked some shreds of loose tobacco from his tongue. “I’ll see if the Duty Room have 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 round. 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 trenchcoat and followed him into the filthy Berlin morning.

THREE

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 Fuhrer 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, half-way down the bus, lifted his son on to 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 windscreen. 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 metres.” 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-storey building, with the vaulted, shadowed roof of a cathedral. The headlights and tail-lights of eight lanes of traffic danced in the afternoon gloom.

The Arch has a height of one hundred and eighteen metres. It is one hundred and sixty-eight metres wide and has a depth of one hundred and nineteen metres. On the inner walls are carved the names of the three million soldiers who fell in defence of the Fatherland in the wars of 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1946.”

She sneezed again. The passengers dutifully craned their necks to peer at the Roll of the Fallen. They were a mixed party. A group of Japanese, draped with cameras; an American couple with a little girl Pili’s age; some German settlers, from Ostland or the Ukraine, in Berlin for the Fuhrertag. March looked away as they passed the Roll of the Fallen. Somewhere on it were the names of his father and both his grandfathers. He kept his eyes on the guide. When she thought no one was looking, she turned away and quickly wiped her nose on her sleeve. The coach re-emerged into the drizzle.

“Leaving the Arch we enter the central section of the Avenue of Victory. The Avenue was designed by Reich Minister Albert Speer and was completed in 1957. It is one hundred and twenty-three metres wide and five-point-six kilometres in length. It is both wider, and two and a half times longer, than the Champs Elysees in Paris.”

Higher, longer, bigger, wider, more expensive… Even in victory, thought March, Germany has a parvenu’s inferiority complex. Nothing stands on its own. Everything has to be compared with what the foreigners have…

The view from this point northwards along the Avenue of Victory is considered one of the wonders of the world.”

“One of the wonders of the world,” repeated Pili in a whisper.

And it was, even on a day like this. Dense with traffic, the Avenue stretched before them, flanked on either side by the glass and granite walls of Speer’s new buildings: ministries, offices, big stores, cinemas, apartment blocks. At the far end of this river of light, rising as grey as a battleship through the spray, was the Great Hall of the Reich, its dome half hidden in the low cloud.

There were appreciative murmurs from the settlers. “It’s like a mountain,” said the woman sitting behind March. She was with her husband and four boys. They had probably been planning this trip all winter. A Tourist Ministry brochure and a dream of April in Berlin: comforts to warm them in the snowbound, moonless nights of Minsk or Kiev, a thousand kilometres from home. How had they got here? A package tour organised by Strength-Through-Joy, perhaps: two hours in a Junkers jet with a stop-off in Warsaw. Or a three-day drive in the family Volkswagen on the Berlin-Moscow Autobahn.

Pili wriggled out of his father’s grasp and walked unsteadily to the front of the coach. March pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, a nervous habit he had picked up — when? — in the U-boat service, he supposed, when the screws of the British warships sounded so close the hull shook and you never knew if their next depth charge would be your last. He had been invalided out of the navy in 1948 with suspected TB and spent a year convalescing. Then, for want of anything better to do, he had joined the Marine-Kustenpolizei, the Coastal Police, in Wilhelmshaven as a lieutenant. That year he had married Klara Eckart, a nurse he had met at the TB clinic. In 1952, he had joined the Hamburg Kripo. In 1954, with Klara pregnant and the marriage already failing, he had been promoted to Berlin. Paul — Pili — had been born exactly ten years and one month ago.

What had gone wrong? He did not blame Klara. She had not changed. She had always been a strong woman who wanted certain simple things from life: home, family, friends, acceptance. But March: he had changed. After ten years in the navy and twelve months in virtual isolation, he had stepped ashore into a world he barely recognised. As he went to work, watched television, ate with friends, even -God help him — slept beside his wife, he sometimes imagined himself aboard a U-boat still: cruising beneath the surface of everyday life; solitary, watchful.

He had picked Pili up at noon from Klara’s place — a bungalow on a dreary post-war housing estate in Lichtenrade, in the southern suburbs. Park in the street, sound the horn twice, watch for the twitch in the parlour curtain. This was the routine which had evolved, unspoken, since their divorce five years ago — a means of avoiding embarrassing encounters; a ritual to be endured one Sunday in four, work permitting, under the strict provisions of the Reich Marriages Act. It was rare for him to see his son on a Tuesday, but this was a school vacation: since 1959, children had been given a week off for the Fuhrer’s birthday, rather than for Easter.

The door had opened and Pili had appeared, like a shy child-actor being pushed out on stage against his will. Wearing his new Pimpf uniform — crisp black shirt and dark blue shorts — he had climbed wordlessly into the car. March had given him an awkward hug.

“You look smart. How’s school?”

“All right.”

“And your mother?”

The boy shrugged.

“What would you like to do?”

He shrugged again.

They had lunch in Budapester Strasse, opposite the Zoo, in a modern place with vinyl seats and a plastic-topped table: father and son, one with beer and sausages, the other with apple juice and a hamburger. They talked about the Pimpf and Pili brightened. Until you were a Pimpf you were nothing, “a non-uniformed creature who has never participated in a group meeting or a route march”. You were allowed to join when you were ten, and stayed until you were fourteen, when you passed into the full Hitler Youth.

“I was top in the initiation test.”

“Good lad.”

“You have to run sixty metres in twelve seconds,” said Pili. “Do the long jump and the shot-put. There’s a route march — a day and a half. Written stuff. Party philosophy. And you have to recite the Horst Wessel Lied.”

For a moment, March thought he was about to break into song. He cut in hurriedly: “And your dagger?”

Pili fumbled in his pocket, a crease of concentration on his forehead. How like his mother he is, thought March. The same wide cheekbones and full mouth, the same serious brown eyes, set far apart. Pili laid the dagger carefully on the table before him. He picked it up. It reminded him of the day he got his own — when was it? ’34? The excitement of a boy who believes he’s been admitted to the company of men. He turned it over and the swastika on the hilt glinted in the light. He felt the weight of it in his hand, then gave it back.

“I’m proud of you,” he lied. “What do you want to do? We can go to the cinema. Or the zoo.”

“I want to go on the bus.” — “But we did that last time. And the time before.”

“Don’t care. I want to go on the bus.”

“The Great Hall of the Reich is the largest building in the world. It rises to a height of more than a quarter of a kilometre, and on certain days — observe today — the top of its dome is lost from view. The dome itself is one hundred and forty metres in diameter and St Peter’s in Rome will fit into it sixteen times.”

They had reached the top of the Avenue of Victory, and were entering Adolf Hitler Platz. To the left, the square was bounded by the headquarters of the Wehrmacht High Command, to the right by the new Reich Chancellery and Palace of the Fuhrer. Ahead was the hall. Its greyness had dissolved as their distance from it had diminished. Now they could see what the guide was telling them: that the pillars supporting the frontage were of red granite, mined in Sweden, flanked at either end by golden statues of Atlas and Tellus, bearing on their shoulders spheres depicting the heavens and the earth.

The building was as crystal-white as a wedding cake, its dome of beaten copper a dull green. Pili was still at the front of the coach.

The Great Hall is used only for the most solemn ceremonies of the German Reich and has a capacity of one hundred and eighty thousand people. One interesting and unforeseen phenomenon: the breath from this number of humans rises into the cupola and forms clouds, which condense and fall as light rain. The Great Hall is the only building in the world which generates its own climate…”

March had heard it all before. He looked out of the window and saw the body in the mud. Swimming trunks! What had the old man been thinking of, swimming on Monday night? Berlin had been blanketed by black clouds from late afternoon. When the storm finally broke the rain had descended in steel rods, drilling the streets and roofs, drowning the thunder. Suicide, perhaps? Think of it. Wade into the cold lake, strike out for the centre, tread water in the darkness, watch the lightning over the trees, wait for tiredness to do the rest…

Pili had returned to his seat and was bouncing up and down in excitement.

“Are we going to see the Fuhrer, papa?”

The vision evaporated and March felt guilty. This daydreaming was what Klara used to complain of: “Even when you’re here, you’re not really here…”

He said: “I don’t think so.”

The guide again: “On the right is the Reich Chancellery and Residence of the Fuhrer. Its total facade measures exactly seven hundred metres, exceeding by one hundred metres the facade of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles.”

The Chancellery slowly uncoiled as the bus drove by marble pillars and red mosaics, bronze lions, gilded silhouettes, gothic script- a Chinese dragon of a building, asleep at the side of the square. A four-man SS honour guard stood at attention beneath a billowing swastika banner. There were no windows, but set into the wall, five storeys above the ground, was the balcony on which the Fuhrer showed himself on those occasions when a million I people gathered in the Platz. There were a few dozen i sightseers even now, gazing up at the tightly drawn shutters, ! faces pale with expectation, hoping …

March glanced at his son. Pili was transfixed, his little dagger clutched tightly in his hand like a crucifix.

The coach dropped them back at its pick-up point outside the Berlin-Gotenland railway station. It was after five as they descended from the bus, and the last vestiges of natural light were fading. The day was giving up on itself in disgust.

The entrance to the station was disgorging people — soldiers with kitbags walking with girlfriends and wives, foreign workers with cardboard suitcases and shabby bundles tied with string, settlers emerging after two days’ travelling from the Steppes, staring in shock at the lights and the crowds. Uniforms were everywhere. Dark blue, green, brown, black, grey, khaki. It was like a factory at the end of a shift. There was a factory sound of shunting metal and shrill whistles, and a factory smell of heat and oil, stale air and steel-dust. Exclamation marks clamoured from the walls. “Be vigilant at all times!” “Attention! Report suspicious packages at once!” “Terrorist alert!”

From here, trains as high as houses, with a gauge of four metres, left for the outposts of the German Empire — for Gotenland (formerly the Crimea) and Theoderichshafen (formerly Sevastopol); for the Generalkommissariat of Taurida and its capital, Melitopol; for Volhynia-Podolia, Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolaev, Dnepropetrovsk, Karkov, Rostov, Saratov … It was the terminus of a new world. Announcements of arrivals and departures punctuated the “Coriolan Overture” on the public address system. March tried to take Pili’s hand as they wove through the crowd, but the boy shook him away.

It took fifteen minutes to retrieve the car from the underground car park, and another fifteen to get clear of the clogged streets around the station. They drove in silence. It was not until they were almost back at Lichtenrade that Pili suddenly blurted out: “You’re an asocial, aren’t you?”

It was such an odd word to hear on the lips of a ten-year-old, and so carefully pronounced, that March almost laughed out loud. An asocial: one step down from traitor in the Party’s lexicon of crime. A non-contributor to Winter Relief. A non-joiner of the endless National Socialist associations. The NS Skung Federation. The Association of NS Ramblers. The Greater German NS-Motoring Club. The NS Criminal Police Officers Society. He had even one afternoon come across a parade in the Lustgarten organised by the NS-League of Wearers of the Life-Saving Medal.

“That’s nonsense.”

“Uncle Erich says it’s true.”

Erich Helfferich. So he had become “Uncle” Erich now, had he? A zealot of the worst sort, a full-time bureaucrat at the Party’s Berlin headquarters. An officious, bespectacled scout master… March felt his hands tightening on the steering wheel. Helfferich had started seeing Klara a year ago.

“He says you don’t give the Fuhrer-salute and you make jokes about the Party.”

“And how does he know all this?”

“He says there’s a file on you at Party Headquarters and it’s only a matter of time before you’re picked up.” The boy was almost in tears with the shame of it. “I think he’s right.”

“Pili!”

They were drawing up outside the house.

“I hate you.” This was delivered in a calm, flat voice. He got out of the car. March opened his door, ran round and followed him up the path. He could hear a dog barking inside the house.

Pili!” he shouted once more.

The door opened. Klara stood there in the uniform of the NS-Frauenschaft. Lurking behind her, March glimpsed the brown-clad figure of Helfrerich. The dog, a young German shepherd, came running out and leapt up at Pili, who pushed his way past his mother and disappeared into the house. March wanted to follow him, but Klara blocked his path.

“Leave the boy alone. Get out of here. Leave us all alone.”

She caught the dog and dragged it back by its collar. The door slammed on its yelping.

Later, as he drove back towards the centre of Berlin, March kept thinking about that dog. It was the only living creature in the house, he realised, which was not wearing a uniform.

Had he not felt so miserable, he would have laughed.

FOUR

That a pig of a day,” said Max Jaeger. It was i seven-thirty in the evening and he was pulling on his coat in Werderscher Markt. “No possessions handed in; no clothing. I’ve gone back on the missing list to Thursday. Nothing. So that’s more than twenty-four hours since estimated time of death and not a soul has missed him. You sure he’s not just some derelict?”

March gave a brief shake of the head. “Too well-fed. And derelicts don’t own swimming trunks. As a rule.”

“To cap it all,” Max took a last puff on his cigar and stubbed it out, “I’ve got to go to a Party meeting tonight. "The German Mother: Warrior of the Volk on the Home Front".”

Like all Kripo investigators, including March, Jaeger had the SS rank of Sturmbannfuhrer. Unlike March, he had joined the Party the previous year. Not that March blamed him. You had to be a Party member to gain promotion.

“Is Hannelore going?”

“Hannelore? Holder of the Honour Cross of the German Mother, Bronze Class? Naturally she’s going.” Max looked at his watch. “Just time for a beer. What do you say?”

“Not tonight, thanks. I’ll walk down with you.”

They parted on the steps of the Kripo building. With a wave, Jaeger turned left towards the bar in Ob-wall Strasse, while March turned right, towards the river. He walked quickly. The rain had stopped, but the air was still damp and misty. The pre-war street lights gleamed on the black pavement. From the Spree came the low note of a foghorn, muffled by the buildings.

He turned a corner and walked alongside the river, enjoying the sensation of the cold night air against his face.

A barge was chugging upstream, a single light at its prow, a cauldron of dark water boiling at its stern. Apart from that, there was silence. There were no cars here; no people. The city might have vaporised in the darkness. He left the river with reluctance, crossing Spittel Markt to Seydel Strasse. A few minutes later he entered the Berlin city morgue.

Doctor Eisler had gone home. No surprise there. “I love you,” breathed a woman’s voice in the deserted reception, “and I want to bear your children.” An attendant in a stained white tunic reluctantly turned away from his portable television and checked March’s ID. He made a note in his register, picked up a bunch of keys, and gestured to the detective to follow him. Behind them, the theme tune of the Reichsrundfunk’s nightly soap opera began to play.

Swing doors led on to a corridor identical to a dozen back in Werderscher Markt. Somewhere, thought March, there must be a Reichsdirektor for green linoleum. He followed the attendant into an elevator. The metal grille closed with a crash and they descended into the basement.

At the entrance to the storeroom, beneath a No Smoking sign, they both lit cigarettes — two professionals taking the same precaution, not against the smell of the bodies (the room was refrigerated: there was no stink of corruption) but to blot out the stinging fumes of the disinfectant.

“You want the old fellow? Came in just after eight?”

“Right,” said March.

The attendant pulled a large handle and swung open the heavy door. There was a whoosh of cold air as they stepped inside. Harsh neon strips lit a floor of white tiles, slightly sloping on either side down to a narrow gutter in the centre. Heavy metal drawers like filing cabinets were set into the walls. The attendant took a clipboard from a hook by the light-switch and walked along them, checking the numbers.

“This one.”

He tucked the clipboard under his arm and gave the drawer a hard tug. It slid open. March stepped over and pulled back the white sheet.

“You can go now, if you like,” he said, without looking round. “I’ll call when I’ve finished.” “Not allowed. Regulations.”

“In case I tamper with the evidence? Do me a favour.” The body did not improve on second acquaintance. A hard, fleshy face, small eyes and a cruel mouth. The scalp was almost entirely bald, apart from the odd strand of white hair. The nose was sharp, with two deep indentations on either side of the bridge. He must have worn spectacles for years. The face itself was unmarked, but there were symmetrical bruises on either cheek. March inserted his fingers into the mouth and encountered only soft gum. At some point a complete set of false teeth must have been knocked loose.

March pulled the sheet right back. The shoulders were broad, the torso that of a powerful man, just beginning to run to fat. He folded the cloth neatly a few centimetres above the stump. He was always respectful of the dead. No society doctor on the Kurfurstendamm was more tender with his clients than Xavier March.

He breathed warmth on to his hands and reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He pulled out a small tin case, which he opened, and two white cards. The cigarette smoke tasted bitter in his mouth. He grasped the corpse’s left wrist- so cold; it never ceased to shock him — and prised open the fingers. Carefully, he pressed each tip on to the pad of black ink in the tin. Then he put the tin down, picked up one of the cards, and pressed each finger on to that. When he was satisfied, he repeated the process on the old man’s right hand. The attendant watched him, fascinated.

The smears of black on the white hands looked shocking; a desecration.

“Clean him up,” said March.

The headquarters of the Reich Kripo are in Werderscher Markt, but the actual hardware of police business — the forensic laboratories, criminal records, armoury, workshops, detention cells — are in the Berlin Police Praesidium building in Alexander Platz. It was to this sprawling Prussian fortress, opposite the busiest U-bahn station in the city, that March went next. It took him fifteen minutes, walking briskly. “You want what?”

The voice, edged high with incredulity, belonged to Otto Koth, deputy head of the fingerprint section.

“Priority,” repeated March. He took another draw on his cigarette. He knew Koth well. Two years ago they had trapped a gang of armed robbers who had killed a policeman in Lankwitz. Koth had got a promotion on the strength of it. “I know you’ve got a backlog from here to the Fuhrer’s hundredth birthday. I know you’ve got the Sipo on your back for terrorists and God knows what. But do this for me.”

Koth leaned back in his chair. In the bookcase behind him, March could see Artur Nebe’s book on criminology, published thirty years ago, but still the standard text. Nebe had been head of the Kripo since 1933. “Let me see what you’ve got,” said Koth. March handed over the cards. Koth glanced at them, nodding.

“Male,” said March. “About sixty. Dead for a day.”

“I know how he feels.” Koth took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “All right. They’ll go to the top of the pile.”

“How long?”

“Should have an answer by morning.” Koth put his glasses back on. “What I don’t understand is how you know this man, whoever he was, had a criminal record.”

March did not know, but he was not going to hand Koth an excuse to wriggle out of his promise. “Trust me,” he said.

March arrived back at his flat at eleven. The ancient cage lift was out of order. The stairs, with their threadbare brown carpet, smelled of other people’s old meals, of boiled cabbage and burned meat. As he passed the second floor he could hear the young couple who lived beneath him quarrelling.

“How can you say that?”

“You’ve done nothing! Nothing!”

A door slammed. A baby cried. Elsewhere, someone turned up the volume of their radio in response. The symphony of apartment life. This had been a fashionable block, once. Now, like many of its tenants, it had fallen on harder times. He continued on up to the next floor and let himself in.

The rooms were cold, the heating having failed to come on, as usual. He had five: a sitting room, with a good high ceiling, looking out on to Ansbacher Strasse; a bedroom with an iron bedstead; a small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen; a spare room was filled with salvage from his marriage, still packed in boxes five years later. Home. It was bigger than the forty-four square metres which was the standard size of a Volkswohnung — a People’s Flat — but not much.

Before March had moved in it had been occupied by the widow of a Luftwaffe general. She had lived in it since the war and had let it go to ruin. On his second weekend, redecorating the bedroom, he had stripped off the mildewed wallpaper and found tucked behind it a photograph, folded up very small. A sepia portrait, all misty browns and creams, dated 1929, taken by a Berlin studio. A family stood before a painted backdrop of trees and fields. A dark-haired woman gazed at a baby in her arms. Her husband stood proud behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder. Next to him, a little boy. He had kept it on the mantelpiece ever since.

The boy was Pili’s age, would be March’s age today.

Who were these people? What had happened to the child? For years he had wondered, but hesitated — he always had plenty at the Markt to stretch his mind, without finding fresh mysteries to unravel. Then, just before last Christmas, for no reason he could properly define — a vague and growing uneasiness that happened to coincide with his birthday, no more than that — he had started to seek an answer.

The landlord’s records showed that the apartment had been rented between 1928 and 1942 to one Weiss, Jakob. But there was no police file on any Jakob Weiss. He was not registered as having moved, or fallen sick, or died. Calls to the records bureaux of the Army, Navy and Luftwaffe confirmed he had not been conscripted to fight. The photographer’s studio had become a television rental shop, its records lost. None of the young people in the landlord’s office remembered the Weisses. They had vanished. Weiss. White. A blank. By now, in his heart, March knew the truth — perhaps had always known it — but he went round one evening with the photograph even so, like a policeman, seeking witnesses, and the other tenants in the house had looked at him as if he were crazy even for asking. Except one.

“They were Jews.” the crone in the attic had said as she closed the door in his face.

Of course. The Jews had all been evacuated to the east during the war. Everyone knew that. What had happened to them since was not a question anyone asked in public -or in private either, if they had any sense, not even an SS-Sturmbannfuhrer.

And that, he could see now, was when his relationship with Pili had started to go bad; the time when he had started to wake up before it was light, and to volunteer for every case that came along.

March stood for a few minutes without switching on the lights, looking down at the traffic heading south to Wittenberg Platz. Then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a large whisky. Monday’s Berliner Tageblatt was lying by the sink. He carried it back with him into the sitting room.

March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter.

COUNTDOWN TO TOKYO OLYMPICS. US MAY COMPETE FOR FIRST TIME IN 28 YEARS. GERMAN ATHLETES STILL LEAD WORLD. Then the advertisements. GERMAN FAMILIES! PLEASURE BECKONS IN GOTENLAND, RIVIERA OF THE REICH! French perfume, Italian silks, Scandinavian furs, Dutch cigars, Belgian coffee, Russian caviar, British televisions -the cornucopia of Empire spilled across the pages. Births, marriages and deaths:

And the lonely hearts:

Arts pages: Zarah Leander, still going strong, in Woman of Odessa, now showing at the Gloria-Palast: the epic story of the resettlement of the South Tyrolese. A piece by the music critic attacking the “pernicious, Negroid wailings” of a group of young Englishmen from Liverpool, playing to packed audiences of German youth in Hamburg. Herbert von Karajan to conduct a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — the European anthem — at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the Fuhrer’s birthday.

Editorial on the student anti-war demonstrations in Heidelberg: TRAITORS MUST BE SMASHED BY FORCE! The Tageblatt always took a firm line.

Obituary: some old Bonze from the Ministry of the Interior. “A lifetime’s service to the Reich …"

Reich news: SPRING THAW BRINGS FRESH FIGHTING ON SIBERIAN FRONT! GERMAN TROOPS SMASH IVAN TERROR GROUPS! In Rovno, capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, five terrorist leaders had been executed for organising the massacre of a family of German settlers. There was a photograph of the Reich’s latest nuclear submarine, the Grossadmiral Donitz, at its new base in Trondheim.

World news: In London it had been announced that King Edward and Queen Wallis were to pay a state visit to the Reich in July “further to strengthen the deep bonds of respect and affection between the peoples of Great Britain and the German Reich”. In Washington, it was believed that President Kennedy’s latest victory in the US primaries had strengthened his chances of winning a second term…

The paper slipped from March’s fingers and on to the floor.

Half an hour later, the telephone rang.

“So sorry to wake you.” Koth was sarcastic. “I had the impression this was supposed to be priority. Shall I call back tomorrow?”

“No, no.” March was wide awake.

This you will love. This is beautiful.” For the first time in his life, March heard Koth chuckle. “Now, you are not playing a joke on me? This is not some little trick you and Jaeger have worked out between you?”

“Who is it?”

The background first.” Koth was enjoying himself too much to be hurried. “We had to go back a long way to get a match. A very long way. But we got one. Perfect. No mistake. Your man has a record all right. He was arrested just once in his life. By our colleagues in Munich, forty years ago. To be precise, on the ninth of November 1923.”

There was a silence. Five, six, seven seconds elapsed.

“Ah! I can tell that even you appreciate the significance of the date.”

“An alter Kampfer.” March reached down beside his chair for his cigarettes. “His name?”

“Indeed. An old comrade. Arrested with the Fuhrer after the Burgerbraukeller Putsch. You have fished out of the lake one of the glorious pioneers of the National Socialist Revolution.” Koth laughed again. “A wiser man might have left him where he was.”

“What is his name?”

After Koth had rung off, March paced around the apartment for five minutes, smoking furiously. Then he made three calls. The first was to Max Jaeger. The second was to the Duty Officer at Werderscher Markt. The third was to a Berlin number. A man’s voice, slurred with sleep, answered just as March was about to give up.

“Rudi? It’s Xavier March.”

“Zavi? Are you crazy? It’s midnight.”

“Not quite.” March patrolled the faded carpet, the body of the telephone in one hand, the receiver tucked beneath his chin. “I need your help.”

“For God’s sake!”

“What can you tell me about a man named Josef Buhler?”

That night, March had a dream. He was at the lakeshore again in the rain and there was the body, face down in the mud. He pulled at the shoulder — pulled hard — but he could not move it. The body was grey-white lead. But when he turned to leave, it grabbed his leg, and began pulling him towards the surface of the lake. He scrabbled at the earth, trying to dig his fingers into the soft mud, but there was nothing to hold on to. The corpse’s grip was immensely strong. And as they went under, its face became Pili’s, contorted with rage, grotesque in its shame, screaming “I hate you … I hate you … I hate you …"