Fatherland

ONE

The grey BMW drove south down Saarland Strasse, past the slumbering hotels and deserted shops of central Berlin. At the dark mass of the Museum fur Volkerkunde it turned left, into Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, towards the headquarters of the Gestapo.

There was a hierarchy in cars, as in everything. The Orpo were stuck with tinny Opels. The Kripo had Volkswagens — four-door versions of the original KdF-wagen, the round-backed workers” car which had been stamped out by the million at the Fallersleben works. But the Gestapo were smarter. They drove BMW 1800s -sinister boxes with growling, souped-up engines and dull grey bodywork.

Sitting in the back seat next to Max Jaeger, March kept his eyes on the man who had arrested them, the commander of the raid on Stuckart’s apartment. When they had been led up from the basement into the foyer he had given them an immaculate Fuhrer-salute. “Sturmbannfuhrer Karl Krebs, Gestapo!” That had meant nothing to March. It was only now, in the BMW, in profile, that he recognised him. Krebs was one of the two SS officers who had been with Globus at Buhler’s villa.

He was about thirty years old with an angular, intelligent face, and without the uniform he could have been anything — a lawyer, a banker, a eugenicist, an executioner. That was how it was with young men of his age. They had come off an assembly line of Pimpf, Hitler Youth, National Service and Strength-Through-Joy. They had heard the same speeches, read the same slogans, eaten the same one-pot meals in aid of Winter Relief. They were the regime’s workhorses, had known no authority but the Party, and were as reliable and commonplace as the Kripo’s Volkswagens.

The car drew up and almost at once Krebs was on the pavement, opening the door. “This way, gentlemen. Please.”

March hauled himself out and looked down the street. Krebs might be as polite as a scoutmaster, but ten metres back, the doors of a second BMW were opening even before it stopped and armed plain-clothes men were emerging. That was how it had been since their discovery at Fritz-Todt Platz. No rifle-butts in the belly, no oaths, no handcuffs. Just a telephone call to headquarters, followed by a quiet request to “discuss these matters further”. Krebs had also asked them to surrender their weapons. Polite, but behind the politeness, always, the threat.

Gestapo headquarters were in a grand, five-storey Wilhelmine construction that faced north and never saw the sun. Years ago, in the days of the Weimar Republic, the museum-like building had housed the Berlin School of Arts. When the secret police took over, the students had been forced to burn their modernist paintings in the courtyard. Tonight, the high windows were shielded by thick net curtains, a precaution against terrorist attack. Behind the gauze, as if in fog, chandeliers burned.

March had made it a policy in life never to cross the threshold, and until this night he had succeeded. Three stone steps ran up into an entrance hall. More steps, and then a large, vaulted foyer: a red carpet on a stone floor, the hollow resonance of a cathedral. It was busy. The early hours of the morning were always busy for the Gestapo. From the depths of the building came the muffled echo of bells ringing, footsteps, a whistle, a shout. A fat man in the uniform of an Obersturmfuhrer picked his nose and regarded them without interest.

They walked on, down a corridor lined with swastikas and marble busts of the Party leadership — Goring, Goebbels, Bormann, Frank, Ley and the rest — modelled after Roman senators. March could hear the plainclothes guards following. He glanced at Jaeger, but Max was staring fixedly ahead, jaw clenched.

More stairs, another passage. The carpet had given way to linoleum. The walls were dingy. March guessed they were somewhere near the back of the building, on the second floor.

“If you would wait here,” said Krebs. He opened a stout wooden door. Neon stuttered into life. He stood aside to allow them to file in. “Coffee?”

“Thank you.”

And he was gone. As the door closed, March saw one of the guards, arms folded, take up station in the corridor outside. He half-expected to hear a key turn in the lock, but there was no sound.

They had been put in some sort of interview room. A rough wooden table stood in the centre of the floor, one chair either side of it, half a dozen others pushed up against the walls. There was a small window. Opposite it was a reproduction of Josef Vietze’s portrait of Reinhard Heydrich in a cheap plastic frame. On the floor were small brown stains which looked to March like dried blood.

Prinz-Albrecht Strasse was Germany’s black heart, as famous as the Avenue of Victory and the Great Hall, but without the tourist coaches. At number eight: the Gestapo. At number nine: Heydrich’s personal headquarters. Around the corner: the Prinz-Albrecht Palace itself, headquarters of the SD, the Party’s intelligence service. A complex of underground passages linked the three.

Jaeger muttered something and collapsed into a chair. March could think of nothing adequate to say so he looked out of the window. It commanded a clear view of the palace grounds running behind the Gestapo building — the dark clumps of the bushes, the ink-pool of the lawn, the skeletal branches of the limes raised in claws against the sky. Away to the right, lit up through the bare trees, was the concrete and glass cube of the Europa-Haus, built in the 1920s by the Jewish architect Mendelsohn. The Party had allowed it to stand as a monument to his “pygmy imagination’: dropped among Speer’s granite monoliths, it was just a toy. March could remember a Sunday afternoon tea with Pili in its roof-garden restaurant. Ginger beer and Obsttorte mit Sahne, the little brass band playing-what else? -selections from The Merry Widow, the elderly women with their elaborate Sunday hats, their little fingers crooked over the bone china.

Most were careful not to look at the black buildings beyond the trees. For others, the proximity of Prinz-Albrecht Strasse seemed to provide a frisson of excitement, like picnicking next to a prison. Down in the cellar the Gestapo was licensed to practise what the Ministry of Justice called “heightened interrogation”. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor. There had been a conversation in Werderscher Markt a few weeks ago. Someone had heard a rumour about the torturers” latest trick: a thin glass catheter inserted into the suspect’s penis, then snapped.

He shook his head, pinched the bridge of his nose, tried to clear his mind. Think. He had left a paper-trail of clues, any one of which would have been enough to lead the Gestapo to Stuckart’s apartment. He had requested Stuckart’s file. He had discussed the case with Fiebes. He had rung Luther’s home. He had gone looking for Charlotte Maguire.

He worried about the American woman. Even if she had managed to get clear of Fritz-Todt Platz, the Gestapo could pull her in tomorrow. “Routine questions, Fraulein… What is this envelope, please?… How did you come by it?… Describe the man who opened the safe…” She was tough, with an actressy self-confidence, but in their hands she would not last five minutes.

March rested his forehead against the cold pane of glass. The window was bolted shut. There was a sheer drop of fifteen metres to the ground.

Behind him, the door opened. A swarthy man in shirt sleeves, stinking of sweat, came in and set two mugs of coffee on the table.

Jaeger, who had been sitting with his arms folded, looking at his boots, asked: “How much longer?”

The man shrugged — an hour? a night? a week? — and left. Jaeger tasted the coffee and pulled a face. “Pig’s piss.” He lit a cigar, swilling the smoke around his mouth, before sending it billowing across the room.

He and March stared at one another. After a while, Max said: “You know, you could have got out.”

“And left you to it? Hardly fair.” March tried the coffee. It was lukewarm. The neon light was flickering, fizzing, making his head throb. This was what they did to you. Left you until two or three in the morning, until your body was at its weakest, your defences at their most vulnerable. He knew this part of the game as well as they did.

He swallowed the filthy coffee and lit a cigarette. Anything to keep awake. Guilt about the woman, guilt about his friend.

“I’m a fool. I shouldn’t have involved you. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.” Jaeger waved away the smoke. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “You have to let me carry my share of the blame, Zavi. Good Party Comrade Jaeger, here. Brownshirt. Blackshirt. Every goddamn shirt. Twenty years dedicated to the sacred cause of keeping my arse clean.” He grasped March’s knee. “I have favours to call in. I’m owed.”

His head was bent. He was whispering. “They have you marked down, my friend. A loner. Divorced. They’ll flay you alive. Me, on the other hand? The great conformer Jaeger. Married to a holder of the Cross of German Motherhood. Bronze Class, no less. Not so good at the job, maybe—”

That’s not true.”

“—but safe. Suppose I didn’t tell you yesterday morning the Gestapo had taken over the Buhler case. Then when you got back I said let’s check out Stuckart. They look at my record. They might buy that, coming from me.”

“It’s good of you.”

“Christ, man — forget that.”

“But it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is beyond favours and clean sheets, don’t you see? What about Buhler and Stuckart? They were in the Party before we were even born. And where were the favours when they needed them?”

“You really think the Gestapo killed them?” Jaeger looked scared.

March put his fingers to his lips and gestured to the picture. “Say nothing to me you wouldn’t say to Heydrich,” he whispered.

The night dragged by in silence. At about three o’clock, Jaeger pushed some of the chairs together, lay down awkwardly, and closed his eyes. Within minutes, he was snoring. March returned to his post at the window.

He could feel Heydrich’s eyes drilling into his back. He tried to ignore it, failed, and turned to confront the picture. A black uniform, a gaunt white face, silver hair -not a human countenance at all but a photographic negative of a skull; an X-ray. The only colour was in the centre of that death-mask face: those tiny pale blue eyes, like splinters of winter sky. March had never met Heydrich, or seen him; had only heard the stories. The press portrayed him as Nietzsche’s Superman sprung to life. Heydrich in his pilot’s uniform (he had flown combat missions on the Eastern front). Heydrich in his fencing gear (he had fenced for Germany in the Olympics). Heydrich with his violin (he could reduce audiences to tears by the pathos of his playing). When the aircraft carrying Heinrich Himmler had blown up in mid-air two years ago, Heydrich had taken over as Reichsfuhrer-SS. Now he was said to be in line to succeed the Fuhrer. The whisper around the Kripo was that the Reich’s chief policeman liked beating up prostitutes.

March sat down. A numbing tiredness was seeping through him, a paralysis: the legs first, then the body, at last the mind. Despite himself, he drifted into a shallow sleep. Once, far away, he thought he heard a cry — human and forlorn — but it might have been a dream. Footsteps echoed in his mind. Keys turned. Cell doors clanged.

He was jerked awake by a rough hand.

“Good morning, gentlemen. I hope you had some rest?”

It was Krebs.

March felt raw. His eyes were gritty in the sickly neon. Through the window the sky was pearl-grey with the approaching morning.

Jaeger grunted and swung his legs to the floor. “Now what?”

“Now we talk” said Krebs. “Come.”

“Who is this kid,” grumbled Jaeger to March under his breath, “to push us about?” But he was wary enough to keep his voice low.

They filed into the corridor and March wondered again what game was being played. Interrogation is a night-time art. Why leave it until the morning? Why give them a chance to regain their strength, to concoct a story?

Krebs had recently shaved. His skin was studded with pinpricks of blood. He said: “Washroom on the right. You will wish to clean yourselves.” It was an instruction rather than a question.

In the mirror, red-eyed and unshaven, March looked more convict than policeman. He filled the basin, rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie, splashed icy water on his face, his forearms, the nape of his neck, let it trickle down his back. The cold sting brought him back to life.

Jaeger stood alongside him. “Remember what I said.”

March quickly turned the taps back on. “Be careful.”

“You think they wire the toilet?”

“They wire everything.”

Krebs conducted them downstairs. The guards fell in behind them. To the cellar? They clattered across the vestibule — quieter now than when they had arrived — and out into the grudging light.

Not the cellar.

Waiting in the BMW was the driver who had brought them from Stuckart’s apartment. The convoy moved off, north into the rush-hour traffic which was already building up around Potsdamer Platz. In the big shops, the windows piously displayed large, gilt-framed photographs of the Fuhrer — the official portrait from the mid-1950s, by the English photographer, Beaton. Twigs and flowers garlanded the frames, the traditional decoration heralding the Fuhrer’s birthday. Four days to go, each of which would see a fresh sprouting of swastika banners. Soon the city would be a forest of red, white and black.

Jaeger was gripping the arm rest, looking sick. “Come on, Krebs,” he said, in a wheedling voice. “We’re all the same rank. You can tell us where we’re going.”

Krebs made no reply. The dome of the Great Hall loomed ahead. Ten minutes later, when the BMW turned left on to the East-West Axis, March guessed their destination.

It was almost eight by the time they arrived. The iron gates of Buhler’s villa had been swung wide open. The grounds were filled with vehicles, dotted with black uniforms. One SS trooper was sweeping the lawn with a proton-magnetometer. Behind him, jammed into the ground, was a trail of red flags. Three more soldiers were digging holes. Drawn up on the gravel were Gestapo BMWs, a lorry, and a large armoured security van of the sort used for transporting gold bullion.

March felt Jaeger nudge him. Parked in the shadows beside the house, its driver leaning against the bodywork, was a bulletproof Mercedes limousine. A metal pennant hung above the radiator grille: silver SS lightning flashes on a black background; in one corner, like a cabbalistic symbol, the gothic letter K.

TWO

The head of the Reich Kriminalpolizei was an old man. His name was Artur Nebe, and he was a legend.

Nebe had been head of the Berlin detective force even before the Party came to power. He had a small head and the sallow, scaly skin of a tortoise. In 1954, to mark his sixtieth birthday, the Reichstag had voted him a large estate, including four villages, near Minsk in the Ostland, but he had never even been to look at it. He lived alone with his bed-ridden wife in Charlottenburg, in a large house marked by the smell of disinfectant and the whisper of pure oxygen. It was sometimes said that Heydrich wanted to get rid of him, to put his own man in charge of the Kripo, but dared not. “Onkel Artur” they called him in Werderscher Markt. Uncle Artur. He knew everything.

March had seen Nebe from a distance but never met him. Now he was sitting at Buhler’s grand piano, picking out a high note with a single, yellowish claw. The instrument was untuned, the sound discordant in the dusty air.

At the window, his broad back to the room, stood Odilo Globus.

Krebs brought his heels together and saluted. “Heil Hitler! Investigators March and Jaeger.”

Nebe continued to tap the piano key.

“Ah!” Globus turned round. The great detectives.”

Close up, he was a bull in uniform. His neck strained at his collar. His hands hung at his sides, bunched in angry red fists. There was a mass of scar tissue on his left cheek, mottled crimson. Violence crackled around him in the dry air, like static electricity. Every time Nebe struck a note, he winced. He wants to punch the old man, thought March, but he can’t. Nebe outranked him.

“If the Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer has finished his recital,” said Globus, through his teeth, “we can begin.”

Nebe’s hand froze over the keyboard. “Why would anyone have a Bechstein, and leave it untuned?” He looked at March. “Why would he do that?”

“His wife was the musician, sir,” said March. “She died eleven years ago.”

“And nobody played in all that time?” Nebe closed the lid quietly over the keys and drew his finger through the dust. “Curious.”

Globus said: “We have much to do. Early this morning I reported certain matters to the Reichsfuhrer. As you know, Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer, it is on his orders that this meeting is taking place. Krebs will put the position of the Gestapo.”

March exchanged glances with Jaeger. It had gone up as far as Heydrich.

Krebs had a typed memorandum. In his precise, expressionless voice he began to read.

“Notification of Doctor Josef Buhler’s death was received by teleprinter message at Gestapo Headquarters from the Night Duty Officer of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei at two-fifteen yesterday morning, April fifteenth.

“At eight-thirty, in view of Party Comrade Buhler’s honorary SS rank of Brigadefuhrer, the Reichsfuhrer was personally informed of his demise.”

March had his hands clasped behind his back, his nails digging into his palms. In Jaeger’s cheek, a muscle fluttered.

“At the time of his death, the Gestapo was completing an investigation into the activities of Party Comrade Buhler. In view of this, and in view of the deceased’s former position in the General Government, the case was redesignated a matter of state security, and operational control was passed to the Gestapo.

“However, due to an apparent breakdown in liaison procedures, this redesignation was not communicated to Kripo Investigator Xavier March, who effected an illegal entry to the deceased’s home”

The Gestapo was investigating Buhler? March struggled to keep his gaze fixed on Krebs, his expression impassive.

“Next: the death of Party Comrade Wilhelm Stuckart. Inquiries by the Gestapo indicated that the cases of Stuckart and Buhler were linked. Once again, the Reichsfuhrer was informed. Once again, investigation of the matter was transferred to the Gestapo. And once again, Investigator March, this time accompanied by Investigator Max Jaeger, conducted his own inquiries at the home of the deceased.

“At zero-zero-twelve, sixteenth April, Investigators March and Jaeger were apprehended by myself at Party Comrade Stuckart’s apartment block. They agreed to accompany me to Gestapo Headquarters, pending clarification of this matter at a higher level.

“Signed, Karl Krebs, Sturmbannfuhrer.

“I have dated it and timed it at six this morning.”

Krebs folded the memorandum and handed it to the head of the Kripo. Outside, a spade rang on gravel.

Nebe slipped the paper into his inside pocket. “So much for the record. Naturally, we shall prepare a minute of our own. Now, Globus: what is this really about? You are desperate to tell us, I know.”

“Heydrich wanted you to see for yourself.”

“See what?”

“What your man here missed on his little freelance excursion yesterday. Follow me, please.”

It was in the cellar, although even if March had smashed the padlock on the entrance and forced his way down, he doubted if he would have found it. Past the usual household rubbish — broken furniture, discarded tools, rolls of filthy carpet bound with rope — was a wood-panelled wall. One of the panels was false.

“We knew what we were looking for, you see.” Globus rubbed his hands. “Gentlemen, I guarantee you will never have clapped eyes on the likes of this in your entire lives.”

Beyond the panel was a chamber. When Globus turned on the lights, it was indeed dazzling: a sacristy; a jewelbox. Angels and saints; clouds and temples; high-cheeked noblemen in white furs and red damask; sprawling pink flesh on perfumed yellow silk; flowers and sunrises and Venetian canals…

“Go in,” said Globus. “The Reichsfuhrer is anxious that you should see it properly.”

It was a small room — four metres square, March guessed -with a bank of spotlights built into the ceiling, directed on to the paintings which covered every wall. In the centre was an old-fashioned swivel chair, of the sort a nineteenth-century clerk might have had in a counting-house. Globus placed a gleaming jackboot on the arm and kicked, sending it spinning.

“Imagine him, sitting here. Door locked. Like a dirty old man in a brothel. We found it yesterday afternoon. Krebs?”

Krebs took the floor. “An expert is on his way this morning from the Fuhrermuseum in Linz. We had Professor Braun of the Kaiser Friedrich, here in Berlin, give us a preliminary assessment last night.”

He consulted his sheaf of notes.

“At the moment, we know we have Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael, Portrait of a Young Man by Rembrandt, Christ Carrying the Cross by Rubens, Guardi’s Venetian Palace, Krakau Suburbs by Bellotto, eight Canalettos, at least thirty-five engravings by Durer and Kulmbach, a Gobelin. The rest he could only guess at.”

Krebs reeled them off as if they were dishes in a restaurant. He rested his pale ringers on an altar-piece of gorgeous colours, raised on planks at the end of the room.

This is the work of the Nuremberg artist, Viet Stoss, commissioned by the King of Poland in 1477. It took ten years to complete. The centre of the triptych shows the Virgin asleep, surrounded by angels. The side panels show scenes from the lives of Jesus and Mary. The predella” — he pointed to the base of the altar-piece- “shows the genealogy of Christ.”

Globus said: “Sturmbannfuhrer Krebs knows of these things. He is one of our brightest officers.”

“I’m sure” said Nebe. “Most interesting. And where did it all come from?”

Krebs began: “The Viet Stoss was removed from the Church of Our Lady in Krakau in November 1939—”

Globus interrupted: “It came from the General Government. Warsaw, mainly, we think. Buhler recorded it as either lost or destroyed. God alone knows how much else the corrupt swine got away with. Think what he must have sold just to buy this place!”

Nebe reached out and touched one of the canvases: the martyred Saint Sebastian, bound to a Doric pillar, arrows jutting from his golden skin. The varnish was cracked, like a dried river bed, but the colours beneath — red, white, purple, blue — were bright still. The painting gave off a faint smell of must and incense — the scent of pre-war Poland, of a nation vanished from the map. Some of the panels, March saw, had powdery lumps of masonry attached to their edges — traces of the monastery and castle walls from which they had been wrenched.

Nebe was rapt before the saint. “Something in his expression reminds me of you, March.” He traced the body’s outline with his fingertips and gave a wheezing laugh. “ ‘The willing martyr.’ What do you say, Globus?”

Globus grunted. “I don’t believe in saints. Or martyrs.” He glared at March.

“Extraordinary,” murmured Nebe, “to think of Buhler, of all people, with these…”

“You knew him?” March blurted out the question.

“Slightly, before the war. A committed National Socialist, and a dedicated lawyer. Quite a combination. A fanatic for detail. Like our Gestapo colleague here.”

Krebs gave a slight bow. "The Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer is kind.”

“The point is this” said Globus, irritably. “We have known about Party Comrade Buhler for some time. Known about his activities in the General Government. Known about his associates. Unfortunately, at some point last week, the bastard found out we were on to him.”

“And killed himself?” Nebe asked. “And Stuckart?”

The same. Stuckart was a complete degenerate. He not only helped himself to beauty on canvas. He liked to taste it in the flesh. Buhler had the pick of what he wanted in the East. What were those figures, Krebs?”

“A secret inventory was compiled in 1940 by the Polish museum authorities. We now have it. Art treasures removed from Warsaw alone: two thousand seven hundred paintings of the European school; ten thousand seven hundred paintings by Polish artists; fourteen hundred sculptures.”

Globus again: “We’re digging up some of the sculptures in the garden right now. Most of this stuff went where it was intended: the Fuhrermuseum, Reichsmarschall Goring’s museum at Carinhall, galleries in Vienna, Berlin. But there’s a big discrepancy between the Polish lists of what was taken and our lists of what we got. It worked like this. As State Secretary, Buhler had access to everything. He would ship the stuff under escort to Stuckart at the Interior Ministry. Everything legal-looking. Stuckart would arrange for it to be stored, or smuggled out of the Reich to be exchanged for cash, jewels, gold — anything portable and non-traceable”

March could see that Nebe was impressed, despite himself. His little eyes were drinking in the art. “Was anyone else of high rank involved?”

“You are familiar with the former Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Ministry, Martin Luther?”

“Of course.”

“He is the man we seek.”

“Seek? He is missing?”

“He failed to return from a business trip three days ago.”

“I take it you are certain of Luther’s involvement in this affair?”

“During the war, Luther was head of the Foreign Ministry’s German Department.”

“I remember. He was responsible for Foreign Ministry liaison with the SS, and with us at the Kripo.” Nebe turned to Krebs. “Another fanatical National Socialist. You would have appreciated his — ah — enthusiasm. A rough fellow, though. Incidentally, at this point, I should like to state, for the record, my astonishment at his involvement in anything criminal.”

Krebs produced his pen. Globus went on: “Buhler stole the art. Stuckart received it. Luther’s position at the Foreign Ministry gave him the opportunity to travel freely abroad. We believe he smuggled certain items out of the Reich, and sold them.”

“Where?”

“Switzerland, mainly. Also Spain. Possibly Hungary.”

“And when Buhler came back from the General Government -when was that?”

He looked at March, and March said: “In 1951.”

“In 1951, this became their treasure chamber.”

Nebe lowered himself into the swivel chair and spun round, slowly, inspecting each wall in turn. “Extraordinary. This must have been one of the best collections of art in private hands anywhere in the world.”

“One of the best collections in criminal hands,” cut in Globus.

“Ach.” Nebe closed his eyes. “So much perfection in one space deadens the senses. I need air. Give me your arm, March.”

As he stood, March could hear the ancient bones cracking. But the grip on his forearm was steel.

Nebe walked with a stick — tap, tap, tap — along the verandah at the back of the villa.

“Buhler drowned himself. Stuckart shot himself. Your case seems to be resolving itself rather conclusively, Globus, without requiring anything so embarrassing as a trial. Statistically, I should say Luther’s chances of survival look rather poor.”

“As it happens, Herr Luther does have a heart condition. Brought on by nervous strain during the war, according to his wife.”

“You surprise me.”

“According to his wife, he needs rest, drugs, quiet- none of which will he be getting at the moment, wherever he is.”

“This business trip…”

“He was supposed to return from Munich on Monday. We’ve checked with Lufthansa. There was nobody called Luther on any Munich flights that day.”

“Maybe he’s fled abroad.”

“Maybe. I doubt it. We’ll hunt him down eventually, wherever he is.”

Tap, tap. March admired Nebe’s nimbleness of mind. As Police Commissioner for Berlin in the 1930s, he had written a treatise on criminology. He remembered seeing it on Koth’s shelves in the fingerprint section on Tuesday night. It was still a standard text.

“And you, March.” Nebe halted and swung round. “What is your view of Buhler’s death?”

Jaeger, who had been silent since their arrival at the villa, butted in anxiously: “Sir, if I might say, we were merely collecting data—”

Nebe rapped the stone with his stick. The question was not addressed to you.”

March wanted a cigarette, badly. “I have only preliminary observations,” he began. He ran his hand through his hair. He was out of his depth here; a long way out. It was not where to start, he thought, but where to end. Globus had folded his arms and was staring at him.

“Party Comrade Buhler” he began, “died some time between six o’clock on Monday evening and six o’clock the following morning. We await the autopsy report, but cause of death was almost certainly drowning- his lungs were full of fluid, indicating he was breathing when he entered the water. We also know, from the sentry on the causeway, that Buhler received no visitors during those crucial twelve hours.”

Globus nodded. Thus: suicide.”

“Not necessarily, Herr Obergruppenfuhrer. Buhler received no visitors by land. But the woodwork on the jetty has been recently scraped, suggesting a boat may have moored there.”

“Buhler’s boat,” said Globus.

“Buhler’s boat has not been used for months; maybe, years.”

Now he held the attention of his small audience, March felt a rush of exhilaration; a sense of release. He was starting to talk quickly. Slow down, he told himself, be careful.

“When I inspected the villa yesterday morning, Buhler’s guard dog was locked in the pantry, muzzled. The whole of one side of its head was bleeding. I ask myself: why would a man intending to commit suicide do that to his dog?”

“Where is this animal now?” asked Nebe.

“My men had to shoot it,” said Globus. The creature was deranged.”

“Ah. Of course. Goon, March.”

“I think Buhler’s assailants landed late at night, in darkness. If you recall, there was a storm on Monday night. The lake would have been choppy — that explains the damage to the jetty. I think the dog was alerted, and they clubbed it senseless, muzzled it, took Buhler unawares.”

“And threw him in the lake?”

“Not immediately. Despite his disability, according to his sister, Buhler was a strong swimmer. You could see that by the look of him: his shoulders were well-developed. But after he had been cleaned up, I inspected his body in the morgue. There was bruising here” — March touched his cheeks — “and on the gums at the front of his mouth. On the kitchen table yesterday was a bottle of vodka, most of it gone. I think the autopsy report will show alcohol in Buhler’s bloodstream. I think they forced him to drink, stripped him, took him out on their boat, and dumped him over the side.”

“Intellectual pigshit,” said Globus. “Buhler probably drank the vodka to give him the guts to kill himself.”

“According to his sister, Party Comrade Buhler was a teetotaller.”

There was a long silence. March could hear Jaeger breathing heavily. Nebe was gazing out across the lake. Eventually, Globus muttered: “What this fancy theory doesn’t explain is why these mysterious killers didn’t just put a bullet in Buhler’s brain and have done with it.”

“I would have thought that was obvious,” said March. They wanted to make it look like suicide. But they bungled it.”

“Interesting” murmured Nebe. “If Buhler’s suicide was faked, then it is logical to suppose that Stuckart’s was, also.”

Because Nebe was still staring at the Havel, March did not realise at first that the remark was a question, addressed to him.

That was my conclusion. That was why I visited Stuckart’s apartment last night. Stuckart’s murder, I think, was a three-man operation: two in the flat; one in the foyer, pretending to repair the elevator. The noise from his electric drill was supposed to mask the sound of the shot, giving the killers time to get away before the body was discovered.”

“And the suicide note?”

“Forged, perhaps. Or written under duress. Or…”

He stopped himself. He was thinking aloud, he realised-a potentially fatal activity. Krebs was staring at him.

“Is that it?” asked Globus. “Are the Grimms” fairy stories over for the day? Excellent. Some of us have work to do. Luther is the key to this mystery, gentlemen. Once we have him, all will be explained.”

Nebe said: “If his heart condition is as bad as you say, we need to move quickly. I shall arrange with the Propaganda Ministry for Luther’s picture to be carried in the press and on television.”

“No, no. Absolutely not.” Globus sounded alarmed. The Reichsfuhrer has expressly forbidden any publicity. The last thing we need is a scandal involving the Party leadership, especially now, with Kennedy coming. God in heaven, can you imagine what the foreign press would make of this? No. I assure you, we can catch him without alerting the media. What we need is a confidential flash to all Orpo patrols; a watch on the main railway stations, ports, airports, border crossings…Krebs can handle that.”

Then I suggest he does so.”

“At once, Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer.” Krebs gave a slight bow to Nebe and trotted off along the verandah, into the house.

“I have business to attend to in Berlin,” said Nebe. “March here will act as Kripo liaison officer until Luther is caught.”

Globus sneered. That will not be necessary.”

“Oh, but it will. Use him wisely, Globus. He has a brain. Keep him informed. Jaeger: you can return to your normal duties.”

Jaeger looked relieved. Globus seemed about to say something, but thought better of it.

“Walk me to my car, March. Good day to you, Globus.”

When they were round the corner, Nebe said: “You are not telling the truth, are you? Or at least, not all of it. That is good. Get in the car. We need to talk.”

The driver saluted and opened the rear door. Nebe manoeuvred himself painfully into the back seat. March got in the other side.

“At six o’clock this morning, this arrived at my house by courier.” Nebe unlocked his briefcase and pulled out a file, a couple of centimetres thick. “It’s all about you, Sturmbannfuhrer. Flattering, isn’t it, to merit such attention?”

The windows of the Mercedes were tinted green. In the half-light, Nebe looked like a lizard in a reptile house.

“Born, Hamburg, 1922; father died of wounds, 1929; mother killed in a British air raid, 1942; joined the Navy, 1939; transferred to the U-boat service, 1940; decorated for bravery and promoted, 1943; given command of your own boat, 1946 — one of the youngest U-boat commanders in the Reich. A glittering career. And then it all starts going wrong.”

Nebe leafed through the file. March stared at the green lawn, the green sky.

“No police promotions for ten years. Divorced, 1957. And then the reports start. Blockwart: persistent refusal to contribute to Winter-Relief. Party officials at Werderscher Markt: persistent refusal to join the NSDAP. Overheard in the canteen making disparaging comments about Himmler. Overheard in bars, overheard in restaurants, overheard in corridors…”

Nebe was pulling pages out.

“Christmas 1963 — you start asking round about some Jews who used to live in your apartment. Jews! Are you mad? There is a complaint here from your ex-wife; one from your son…”

“My son? My son is ten years old…”

“Quite old enough to form a judgement, and be listened to — as you know.”

“May I ask what it is I am supposed to have done to him?”

“ "Shown insufficient enthusiasm for his Party activities." The point is, Sturmbannfuhrer, that this file has been ten years maturing in the Gestapo registry — a little here, a little there, year in, year out, growing like a tumour in the dark. And now you’ve made a powerful enemy, and he wants to use it.”

Nebe put the folder back in his briefcase.

“Globus?”

“Globus, yes. Who else? He asked to have you transferred to Colombia House last night, pending court martial from the SS.” Colombia House was the private SS prison in General-Pape Strasse. “I have to tell you, March, there is easily enough here to send you to a KZ. After that, you’re beyond help — from me or anybody else.”

“What stopped him?”

“To start court-martial proceedings against a serving Kripo officer, he first had to get permission from Heydrich. And Heydrich referred it to me. So what I said to our beloved Reichsfuhrer was this. ‘This fellow Globus,’ I said, ‘is obviously terrified that March has got something on him, so he wants him done away with.’ ‘I see,’ says the Reichsfuhrer, ‘so what do you suggest?’ ‘Why not,’ say I, ‘give him until the Fuhrertag to prove his case against Globus? That’s four days.’ ‘All right,’ says Heydrich. ‘But if he’s not come up with anything by then, Globus can have him.’ ” Nebe gave a smile of contentment. Thus are the affairs of the Reich arranged between colleagues of long standing.”

“I suppose I must thank the Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer.”

“Oh no, don’t thank me.” Nebe was cheerful. “Heydrich genuinely wonders if you do have something on Globus. He would like to know. So would I. Perhaps for a different reason.” He seized March’s arm again — the same fierce grip — and hissed: These bastards are up to something, March. What is it? You find out. You tell me. Don’t trust anyone. That’s how your Uncle Artur has lasted as long as he has. Do you know why some of the old-timers call Globus "the submarine"?”

“No, sir.”

“Because he had a submarine engine hooked up to a Polish basement during the war, and used the exhaust fumes to kill people. Globus likes killing people. He’d like to kill you. You should remember that.” Nebe released March’s arm. “Now, we must say goodbye.”

He rapped on the glass partition with the top of his cane. The driver came round and opened March’s door.

“I would offer you a lift into central Berlin, but I prefer travelling alone. Keep me informed. Find Luther, March. Find him before Globus gets to him.”

The door slammed. The engine whispered. As the limousine crunched across the gravel, March could barely make out Nebe — just a green silhouette behind the bulletproof glass.

He turned to find Globus watching him.

The SS general started walking towards him, holding a Luger outstretched.

He is crazy, thought March. He is just about crazy enough to shoot me on the spot, like Buhler’s dog.

But all Globus did was hand him the gun. Tour pistol, Sturmbannfuhrer. You will need it.” And then he came very close — close enough for March to smell the sour odour of garlic sausage on his hot breath. “You have no witness” was all he whispered. “You have no witness. Not any more.”

March ran.

He ran out of the grounds and across the causeway and off, up, into the woods — right the way through them, until he came to the autobahn which formed the Grunewald’s eastern boundary.

There he stopped, his hands clutching his knees, his breath coming in sobs, as beneath him the traffic hurtled towards Berlin.

Then he was off again, despite the pain in his side, more of a trot now, over the bridge, past the Nikolassee S-bahn station, down Spanische Alice towards the barracks.

His Kripo ID got him past the sentries, his appearance -red-eyed, breathless, with more than a day’s growth of beard — suggestive of some terrible emergency which brooked no discussion. He found the dormitory block. He found Jost’s bed. The pillow was gone, the blankets had been stripped. All that remained was the ironwork and a hard, brown mattress. The locker was bare.

A solitary cadet, polishing his boots a few beds away, explained what had happened. They had come for Jost in the night. There were two of them. He was to be sent East, they said, for “special training”. He had gone without a word — seemed to have been expecting it. The cadet shook his head in amazement: Jost of all people. The cadet was jealous. They all were. He would see some real fighting.

THREE

The telephone kiosk stank of urine and ancient cigarette smoke, a used condom had been trodden into the dirt.

“Come on, come on,” whispered March. He rapped a one-Reichsmark piece against the cloudy glass and listened to the electronic purr of her telephone ringing, unanswered. He let it ring for a long time before he hung up.

Across the street a grocery store was opening. He crossed and bought a bottle of milk and some warm bread which he gulped down beside the road, conscious all the time of the shop’s owner watching him from the window. It occurred to him that he was living like a fugitive already — stopping to grab food only when he happened across it, devouring it in the open, always on the move. Milk trickled down his chin. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. His skin felt like sandpaper.

He checked again to see if he was being followed. On this side of the street, a uniformed nanny pushed a baby carriage. On the other, an old woman had gone into the telephone kiosk. A schoolboy hurried towards the Havel, clutching a toy yacht. Normal, normal…

March, the good citizen, dropped the milk bottle into a waste bin and set off down the suburban road.

“You have no witness. Not any more…”

He felt a great rage against Globus, the greater for being fuelled by guilt. The Gestapo must have seen Jost’s statement in the file on Buhler’s death. They would have checked with the SS academy and discovered that March had been back to re-interrogate him yesterday afternoon; That would have set them scurrying in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. So his visit to the barracks had been Jost’s death warrant. He had indulged his curiosity — and killed a man.

And now the American girl was not answering her telephone. What might they do to her? An army truck overtook him, the draught sucked at him, and a vision of Charlotte Maguire lying broken in the gutter bubbled in his mind. “The Berlin authorities deeply regret this tragic accident…The driver of the vehicle concerned is still being sought…’He felt like the carrier of a dangerous disease. He should carry a placard: keep clear of this man, he is contagious.

Circulating endlessly in his head, fragments of conversation—

Artur Nebe: “Find Luther, March. Find him before Globus gets to him…”

Rudi Halder: “A couple of Sipo guys were round at the Archiv last week asking about you…”

Nebe again: “There is a complaint here from your ex-wife; one from your son…”

He walked for half an hour along the blossoming streets, past the high hedges and picket fences of prosperous suburban Berlin. When he reached Dahlem, he stopped a student to ask directions. At the sight of March’s uniform, the young man bowed his head. Dahlem was a student quarter. The male undergraduates, like this one, let their hair grow a few centimetres over their collars; some of the women wore jeans — God only knew where they got them. White Rose, the student resistance movement which had flowered briefly in the 1940s until its leaders were executed, was suddenly alive again. “Ihr Geist lebt weiter” said the graffiti: their spirit lives on. Members of White Rose grumbled about conscription, listened to banned music, circulated seditious magazines, were harassed by the Gestapo. The student gestured vaguely in response to March’s question, his arms laden with books, and was glad to be on his way.

Luther’s house was close to the Botanischer Garten, set back from the road — a nineteenth-century country mansion at the end of a sickle of white gravel. Two men sat in an unmarked grey BMW, parked opposite the drive. The car and its colour branded them at once. There would be two more watching the back, and at least one cruising the neighbourhood streets. March walked past and saw one of the Gestapo watchers turn to the other and speak.

Somewhere, a motor mower was whining; the smell of freshly cut grass hung over the drive. The house and grounds must have cost a fortune — not as much as Buhler’s villa, perhaps, but not far off it. The red box of a newly installed burglar alarm jutted beneath the eaves.

He rang the bell and felt himself come under inspection through the spy hole in the centre of the heavy door. After half a minute the door opened to reveal an English maid in a black and white uniform. He gave her his ID and she disappeared to check with her mistress, her feet flapping on the polished wooden floor. She returned to show March into the darkened drawing room. A sweet-smelling smog of eau de cologne lay over the scene. Frau Marthe Luther sat on a sofa, clutching a handkerchief. She looked up at him -glassy blue eyes cracked by minute veins.

“What news?”

“None, madam. I’m sorry to say. But you may be sure that no effort is being spared to find your husband.” Truer than you know, he thought.

She was a woman fast losing her attractiveness but gamely staging a fighting retreat. Her tactics, though, were ill-advised: unnaturally blonde hair, a tight skirt, a silk blouse undone just a button too far, to display fat, milky-white cleavage. She looked every centimetre a third wife. A romantic novel lay open, face down, on the embroidered cushion next to her. The Kaisers Ball by Barbara Cartland.

She returned his identity card and blew her nose. “Will you sit down? You look exhausted. Not even time to shave! Some coffee? Sherry, perhaps? No? Rose, bring coffee for the Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. And perhaps I might fortify myself with just the smallest sherry.”

Perched uneasily on the edge of a deep, chintz-covered armchair, his notebook open on his knee, March listened to Frau Luther’s woeful tale. Her husband? A very good man, short-tempered — yes, maybe, but that was his nerves, poor thing. Poor, poor thing — he had weepy eyes, did March know that?

She showed him a photograph: Luther at some Mediterranean resort, absurd in a pair of shorts, scowling, his eyes swollen behind the thick glasses.

On she went: a man of that age — he would be sixty-nine in December, they were going to Spain for his birthday. Martin was a friend of General Franco — a dear little man, had March ever met him?

No: a pleasure denied.

Ah, well. She couldn’t bear to think what might have happened, always so careful about telling her where he was going, he had never done anything like this. It was such a help to talk, so sympathetic…

There was a sigh of silk as she crossed her legs, the skirt rising provocatively above a plump knee. The maid reappeared and set down coffee cup, cream jug and sugar bowl in front of March. Her mistress was provided with a glass of sherry, and a crystal decanter, three-quarters empty.

“Did you ever hear him mention the names Josef Buhler or Wilhelm Stuckart?”

A little crack of concentration appeared in the cake of makeup: “No, I don’t recall…No, definitely not.”

“Did he go out at all last Friday?”

“Last Friday? I think — yes. He went out early in the morning.” She sipped her sherry. March made a note.

“And when did he tell you he had to go away?”

That afternoon. He returned about two, said something had happened, that he had to spend Monday in Munich. He flew on Sunday afternoon, so he could stay overnight and be up early.”

“And he didn’t tell you what it was about?”

“He was old-fashioned about that sort of thing. His business was his business, if you see what I mean.”

“Before the trip, how did he seem?”

“Oh, irritable, as usual”. She laughed — a girlish giggle. “Yes, perhaps he was a little more preoccupied than normal. The television news always depressed him — the terrorism, the fighting in the East. I told him to pay no attention — no good will come of worrying, I said — but things…yes, they preyed on his mind.” She lowered her voice. “He had a breakdown during the war, poor thing. The strain…”

She was about to cry again. March cut in: “What year was his breakdown?”

“I believe it was in ’43. That was before I knew him, of course.”

“Of course.” March smiled and bowed his head. “You must have been at school.”

“Perhaps not quite at school…” The skirt rose a little higher.

“When did you start to become alarmed for his safety?”

“When he didn’t come home on Monday. I was awake all night.”

“So you reported him missing on Tuesday morning?”

“I was about to, when Obergruppenfuhrer Globocnik arrived.”

March tried to keep the surprise out of his voice: “He arrived before you even told the Polizei? What time was that?”

“Soon after nine. He said he needed to speak to my husband. I told him the situation. The Obergruppenfuhrer took it very seriously.”

“I’m sure he did. Did he tell you why he needed to speak to Herr Luther?”

“No. I assumed it was a Party matter. Why?” Suddenly, her voice had a harder edge. “Are you suggesting my husband had done something wrong?”

“No, no…”

She straightened her skirt over her knees, smoothed it out with ring-encrusted fingers. There was a pause and then she said: “Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, what is the purpose of this conversation?”

“Did your husband ever visit Switzerland?”

“He used to, occasionally, some years ago. He had business there. Why?”

“Where is his passport?”

“It is not in his study. I checked. But I have been over this with the Obergruppenfuhrer. Martin always carried his passport with him. He said he never knew when he might need it. That was his Foreign Ministry training. Really, there is nothing unusual about that, really…”

“Forgive me, madam.” He pressed on. The burglar alarm. I noticed it on my way in. It looks new.”

She glanced down at her lap. “Martin had it installed last year. We had intruders.”

Two men?”

She looked up at him with surprise. “How did you know?”

That was a mistake. He said: “I must have read the report in your husband’s file.”

“Impossible.” Surprise had been replaced in her voice by suspicion. “He never reported it.”

“Why not?”

She was on the point of making a blustering reply -’What business is it of yours?” or something of the sort — but then she saw the expression in March’s eyes and changed her mind. She said, in a resigned voice: “I pleaded with him, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. But he wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t tell me why.”

“What happened?”

“It was last winter. We were planning to stay in for the evening. Some friends called at the last minute and we went out to dinner, at Horcher’s. When we got back, there were two men in this room.” She looked around as if they might still be hiding somewhere. “Thank God our friends came in with us. If we’d been alone … When they saw there were four of us, they jumped out of that window.” She pointed behind March’s shoulder.

“So he put in an alarm system. Did he take any other precautions?”

“He hired a security guard. Four of them, in fact. They worked shifts. He kept them on until after Christmas. Then he decided he didn’t trust them any more. He was so frightened, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

“Of what?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

Out came the handkerchief. Another helping of sherry was sloshed from the decanter. Her lipstick had left thick pink smears around the rim of her glass. She was sliding towards the edge of tears again. March had misjudged her. She was frightened for her husband, true. But she was more frightened now that he might have been deceiving her. The shadows were chasing one another across her mind, and in her eyes they left their trails. Was it another woman? A crime? A secret? Had he fled the country? Gone for good? He felt sorry for her, and for a moment considered warning her of the Gestapo’s case against her husband. But why add to her misery? She would know soon enough. He hoped the state would not confiscate the house.

“Madam, I have intruded too long.” He closed his notebook and stood. She clutched his hand, peered up at him.

“I’m never going to see him again, am I?”

“Yes,’he said.

No, he thought.

It was a relief to leave the dark and sickly room and escape into the fresh air. The Gestapo men were still sitting in the BMW. They watched him leave. He hesitated for a second, and then turned right, towards the Botanischer Garten railway station.

Four security guards!

He could begin to see it now. A meeting at Buhler’s villa on Friday morning, attended by Buhler, Stuckart and Luther. A panicky meeting, old men in a sweat of fear- and with good reason. Perhaps they had each been given a separate task. At any rate, on Sunday, Luther had flown to Zurich. March was sure it was he who must have sent the chocolates from Zurich airport on Monday afternoon, maybe just as he was about to board another aircraft. What were they? Not a present: a signal. Was their arrival meant to be taken as a sign that his task had been completed successfully? Or that he had failed?

March checked over his shoulder. Yes, now he was being followed, he was almost certain. They would have had time to organise while he was in Luther’s house. Which were their agents? The woman in the green coat? The student on his bicycle? Hopeless. The Gestapo were too good for him to spot. There would be three or four of them, at least. He lengthened his stride. He was nearing the station.

Question: did Luther return to Berlin from Zurich on Monday afternoon, or did he stay out of the country? On balance, March inclined to the view that he had returned. That call to Buhler’s villa yesterday morning — “Buhler? Speak to me. Who is that?” — that had been Luther, he was sure. So: assume Luther posted the packages just before he boarded his flight, say around five o’clock. He would have landed in Berlin about seven that evening. And disappeared.

The Botanischer Garten station was on the suburban electric line. March bought a one-Mark ticket and lingered around the barrier until the train approached. He boarded it and then, just as the doors sighed shut, jumped off, and sprinted over the metal foot-bridge to the other platform. Two minutes later he got on to the south-bound train, only to leap out at Lichterfelde, and re-cross the tracks. The station was deserted. He let the first north-bound train go by, caught the second, and settled into his seat. The only other occupant of the carriage was a pregnant woman. He gave her a smile; she looked away. Good.

Luther, Luther. March lit a cigarette. Hearing seventy with a nervous heart and rheumy eyes. Too paranoid to trust even your wife. They came for you six months earlier, and by luck you escaped. Why did you make a run for it from Berlin airport? Did you come through customs and decide to call your confederates? In Stuckart’s apartment, the telephone would have rung unanswered, next to the silent, blood-washed bedroom. In Schwanenwerder, if Eisler’s estimate of the time of death was accurate, Buhler must already have been surprised by his killers. Had they let the telephone ring? Or had one of them answered it, while the others held Buhler down?

Luther, Luther: something happened to make you run for your life — out into the freezing rain of that Monday night.

He got out at Gotenland station. It was yet another piece of architectural fantasy come true — mosaic floors, polished stone, stained glass windows thirty metres high. The regime closed churches and compensated by building railway termini to look like cathedrals.

Gazing down from the overhead walkway on to the thousands of hurrying passengers, March almost gave in to despair. Myriad lives — each with its own secrets and plans and dreams, its individual luggage of guilt — criss-crossed beneath him, not one touching the other, separate and distinct. To think that he, alone, could possibly track down one old man among so many — for the first time, the idea struck him as fantastic, absurd.

But Globus could do it. Already, March could see, the police patrols had been increased in strength. That must have happened in the last half-hour. The Orpo men were scrutinising every male over sixty. A derelict without papers was being led away, complaining.

Globus! March turned away from the handrail and stepped on to the descending escalator, in search of the one person in Berlin who might be able to save his life.

FOUR

To travel on the central U-bahn line is, in the words of the Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Cultural Enlightenment, to take a trip through German history. Berlin-Gotenland, Billow Strasse, Nollendorf Platz, Wittenberg Platz, Nurnberger Platz, Hohenzollern Platz — the stations succeed one another like pearls on a string.

The carriages which work this line are pre-war. Red cars for smokers, yellow for non-smokers. Hard wooden seats have been rubbed shiny by three decades of Berlin backsides. Most passengers stand, holding on to the worn leather hand-grips, swaying with the rhythm of the train. Signs urge them to turn informer. The fare-dodger’s profit is the Berliner’s loss! Notify the authorities of all wrongdoing!”

“Has he given up his seat to a woman or veteran? Penalty for failure: 25 Reichsmarks!”

March had bought a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt from a platform kiosk and was leaning next to the doors, skimming through it. Kennedy and the Fuhrer, the Fuhrer and Kennedy — that was all there was to read. The regime was clearly investing heavily in the success of the talks. That could only mean that things in the East were even worse than everyone thought. “A permanent state of war on the Eastern front will help to form a sound race of men,” the Fuhrer had once said, “and will prevent us relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself.” But people had grown soft. What else was the point of victory? They had Poles to dig their gardens and Ukrainians to sweep their streets, French chefs to cook their food and English maids to serve it. Having tasted the comforts of peace they had lost their appetite for war.

Way down on an inside page, in type so small it was barely readable, was Buhler’s obituary. He was reported as having died in a “bathing accident”.

March stuffed the paper into his pocket and got out at Billow Strasse. From the open platform he could see across to Charlotte Maguire’s apartment. A shape moved against the curtain. She was at home. Or, rather, someone was at home.

The concierge was not in her chair, and when he knocked on the apartment door there was no reply. He knocked again, more loudly.

Nothing.

He walked away from the door and clattered down the first flight of steps. Then he stopped, counted to ten, and crept back up again, sideways, with his back pressed to the wall — one step, pause; another step, pause — wincing whenever he made a noise, until he stood once more outside the door. He drew his pistol.

Minutes passed. Dogs barked, cars and trains and planes went by, babies cried, birds sang: the cacophony of silence. And at one point, inside the apartment, loud above it all, a floorboard creaked.

The door opened a fraction.

March spun, rammed into it with his shoulder. Whoever was on the other side was knocked back by the force of the blow. And then March was in and on him, pushing him through the tiny hall and into the sitting room. A lamp toppled to the floor. He tried to bring up the gun, but the man had grabbed his arms. And now it was he who was being pushed backwards. The back of his legs made contact with a low table and he toppled over, cracking his head on something, the Luger skittering across the floor.

Well, now, this was quite funny, and in other circumstances March might have laughed. He had never been very good at this sort of thing, and now — having started with the advantage of surprise — he was on his back, unarmed, with his head in the fireplace and his legs still resting on top of the coffee table, in the position of a pregnant woman undergoing an internal examination.

His assailant fell on top of him, winding him. One gloved hand clawed at his face, the other seized his throat. March could neither see nor breathe. He twisted his head from side to side, chewed on the leather hand. He flailed at the other man’s head with his fists, but could put no force behind his blows. What was on him was not human. It had the remorseless power of machinery. It was grinding him. Steel fingers had found that artery — the one March could never remember, let alone locate — and he felt himself surrendering to the force, the rushing blackness obliterating the pain. So, he thought, I have walked the earth and come to this.

A crash. The hands slackened, withdrew. March came swimming back into the fight, at least as a spectator. The man had been knocked sideways, hit on the head by a chair of tubular steel. Blood masked his face, pulsing from a cut above his eye. Crash. The chair again. With one arm, the man tried to ward off the blows, with the other he wiped frantically at his blinded eyes. He began shuffling on his knees for the door, a devil on his back — a hissing, spitting fury, claws scrabbling to find his eyes. Slowly, as if carrying an immense weight, he raised himself on one leg, then the other. All he wanted now was to get away. He blundered into the door frame, turned and hammered his tormentor against it — once, twice.

Only then did Charlie Maguire let him go.

Clusters of pain, bursting like fireworks: his head, the backs of his legs, his ribs, his throat. “Where did you learn to fight?”

He was in the tiny kitchen, bent over the sink. She was mopping blood from the cut on the back of his head.

Try growing up as the only girl in a family with three brothers. You learn to fight. Hold still.”

“I pity the brothers. Ah.” March’s head hurt the most. The bloody water dripping into the greasy plates a few centimetres from his face made him feel sick. “In Hollywood, I think, it is traditional for the man to rescue the girl.”

“Hollywood is full of shit.” She applied a fresh cloth. “This is quite deep. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

“No time.”

“Will that man come back?”

“No. At least, not for a while. Supposedly, this is still a clandestine operation. Thank you.”

He held the cloth to the back of his head and straightened. As he did so, he discovered a new pain, at the base of his spine.

“ "A clandestine operation"?” she repeated. “You don’t think he could have been an ordinary thief?”

“No. He was a professional. An authentic, Gestapo-trained professional.”

“And I beat him!” The adrenalin had given lustre to her skin; her eyes sparkled. Her only injury was a bruise on her shoulder. She was more attractive than he remembered. Delicate cheek bones, a strong nose, full lips, large brown eyes. She had brown hair, cut to the nape of her neck, which she wore swept back behind her ears.

“If his orders had been to kill you, he would have done so.”

“Really? Then why didn’t he?” Suddenly she sounded angry.

“You’re an American. A protected species, especially at the moment.” He inspected the cloth. The flow of blood had stopped. “Don’t underrate the enemy, Fraulein.”

“Don’t underrate me. If I hadn’t come home, he’d have killed you.”

He decided to say nothing. She clearly kept her temper on a hair-trigger.

The apartment had been thoroughly ransacked. Her clothes hung out of their drawers, papers had been spilled across the desk and on to the floor, suitcases had been upended. Not, he thought, that it could have been very neat before: the dirty dishes in the sink, the profusion of bottles (most of them empty) in the bathroom, the yellowing copies of the New York Times and Time, their pages sliced to ribbons by the German censors, stacked haphazardly around the walls. Searching it must have been a nightmare. Weak light filtered in through dirty net curtains. Every few minutes the walls shook as the trains passed.

This is yours, I take it?” She pulled out the Luger from beneath a chair and held it up between finger and thumb.

“Yes. Thank you.” He took it. She had a gift for making him feel stupid. “Is anything missing?”

“I doubt it.” She glanced around. “I’m not sure I’d know if there was.”

The item I gave you last night…?”

“Oh that? It was here on the mantelpiece.” She ran her hand along it, frowning. “It was here…”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was grinning.

“Don’t worry, Sturmbannfuhrer. It’s stayed close to my heart. Like a love-letter.”

She turned her back on him, unbuttoning her shirt. When she turned round, she had the envelope in her hand. He took it over to the window. It was warm to his touch.

It was long and slim, made of thick paper — a rich creamy-blue with brown specks of age, like liver spots. It was luxurious, hand-made, redolent of another age. There was no name or address.

Inside the envelope was a small brass key and a letter, on matching blue paper, as thick as cardboard. Printed in the top right-hand corner, in flowery copperplate, was: Zaugg Cie, Bankiers, Bahnhof Strasse 44, Zurich. A single sentence, typed beneath, identified the bearer as a joint holder of account number 2402. The letter was dated 8 July 1942. It was signed Hermann Zaugg, Director.

March read it through again. He was not surprised Stuckart had kept it locked in his safe: it was illegal for a German citizen to possess a foreign bank account without the permission of the Reichsbank. The penalty for non-compliance was death.

He said: “I was worried about you. I tried to call you a couple of hours ago, but there was no answer.”

“I was out, doing research.”

“Research?”

She grinned again.

At March’s suggestion, they went for a walk in the Tiergarten, the traditional rendezvous for Berliners with secrets to discuss. Even the Gestapo had yet to devise a means of bugging a park. Daffodils poked through the rough grass at the foot of the trees. Children fed the ducks on the Neuer See.

Getting out of Stuckart’s apartment block had been easy, she said. The air shaft had emerged into the alley almost at ground level. There were no SS men. They were all round the front. So she had simply walked down the side of the building, to the street at the rear, and caught a taxi home. She had stayed up half the night waiting for him to call, rereading the letter until she knew it off by heart. When, by nine o’clock, she had still heard nothing, she decided not to wait.

She wanted to know what had happened to him and Jaeger. He told her only that they had been taken to Gestapo headquarters and released that morning.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Yes. Now tell me what you discovered.”

She had gone first to the public library in Nollendorf Platz — she had nothing better to do now her press accreditation had been withdrawn. In the library was a directory of European banks. Zaugg Cie still existed. The bank’s premises remained in Bahnhof Strasse. From the library she had gone to the US Embassy to see Henry Nightingale.

“Nightingale?”

“You met him last night.”

March remembered: the young man in the sports jacket and the button-down shirt, with his hand on her arm. “You didn’t tell him anything?”

“Of course not. Anyway, he’s discreet. We can trust him.”

“I prefer to make my own judgements about whom I can trust.” He felt disappointed in her. “Is he your lover?”

She stopped in her tracks. “What kind of a question is that?”

“I have more at stake in this than you have, Fraulein. Much more. I have a right to know.”

“You have no right to know at all.” She was furious.

“All right.” He held up his hands. The woman was impossible,’Your business.”

They resumed walking.

Nightingale, she explained, was an expert in Swiss commercial matters, having dealt with the affairs of several German refugees in the United States trying to extract their money from banks in Zurich and Geneva.

It was almost impossible.

In 1934, a Gestapo agent named Georg Hannes Thomae had been sent to Switzerland by Reinhard Heydrich to find out the names of as many German account-holders as possible. Thomae set up house in Zurich, began affairs with several lonely female cashiers, befriended minor bank officials. When the Gestapo had suspicions that a certain individual had an illegal account, Thomae would visit the bank posing as an intermediary and try to deposit money. The moment any cash was accepted, Heydrich knew an account existed. Its holder was arrested, tortured into revealing the details, and soon the bank would receive a detailed cable requesting, in proper form, the repatriation of all assets.

The Gestapo’s war against the Swiss banks became increasingly sophisticated and extensive. Telephone calls, cables and letters between Germany and Switzerland were intercepted as a matter of routine. Clients were executed or sent to concentration camps. In Switzerland, there was an outcry. Finally, the Swiss National Assembly rushed through a new Banking Code making it illegal for banks to disclose any details of their clients” holdings, on pain of imprisonment. Georg Thomae was exposed and expelled.

Swiss banks came to regard doing business with German citizens as too dangerous and time-consuming to countenance. Communication with clients was virtually impossible. Hundreds of accounts had simply been abandoned by their terrified owners. In any case, respectable bankers had no desire to become involved in these life-and-death transactions. The publicity was damaging. By 1939 the once-lucrative German numbered-account business had collapsed.

“Then came the war,” said Charlie. They had reached the end of the Neuer See and were walking back. From beyond the trees came the hum of the traffic on the East-West Axis. The dome of the Great Hall rose above the trees. Berliners joked that the only way to avoid seeing it was to live inside it.

“After 1939, the demand for Swiss accounts increased dramatically, for obvious reasons. People were desperate to get their property out of Germany. So banks like Zaugg devised a new kind of deposit account. For a fee of 200 Francs, you received a box and a number, a key and a letter of authorisation.”

“Exactly like Stuckart.”

“Right. You simply needed to show up with the letter and the key, and it was all yours. No questions. Each account could have as many keys and letters of authorisation as the holder was prepared to pay for. The beauty of it was — the banks were no longer involved. One day, if she could get the travel permit, some little old lady might turn up with her life savings. Ten years later, her son could turn up with a letter and a key and walk off with his inheritance.”

“Or the Gestapo might turn up…”

“…and if they had the letter and the key, the bank could give them everything. No embarrassments. No publicity. No breaking the Banking Code.”

These accounts — they still exist?”

The Swiss Government banned them at the end of the war, under pressure from Berlin, and no new ones have been allowed since. But the old ones — they still exist, because the terms of the original agreement have to be honoured. They’ve become valuable in their own right. People sell them on to one another. According to Henry, Zaugg developed quite a speciality in them. God knows what he’s got locked in those boxes.”

“Did you mention Stuckart’s name to this Nightingale?”

“Of course not. I told him I was writing a piece for Fortune about "the lost legacies of the war".”

“Just as you told me you were going to interview Stuckart for an article about "the Fuhrer’s early years"?”

She hesitated, and said quietly: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His head was throbbing, his ribs still ached. What did he mean? He lit a cigarette to give himself time to think.

“People who encounter violent death — they try to forget it, run away. Not you. Last night your eagerness to go back to Stuckart’s apartment, the way you opened his letters. This morning: turning up information about Swiss banks…”

He stopped speaking. An elderly couple passed on the footpath, staring at them. He realised they must look an odd pair: an SS Sturmbannfuhrer, unshaven and slightly bashed around, and a woman who was clearly a foreigner. Her accent might be perfect, but there was something about her, in her expression, her clothes, her stance — something which betrayed that she was not German.

“Let’s walk this way.” He led her off the path, towards the trees.

“Can I have one of those?”

In the shadows, as he lit her a cigarette, she cupped the flame. Reflections of the fire danced in her eyes.

“All right.” She took a pace back, hugging herself as if she were cold. “It’s true my parents knew Stuckart before the war. It’s true I went to see him before Christmas. But I didn’t call him. He called me.”

“When?”

“On Saturday. Late.”

“What did he say?”

She laughed. “Oh no, Sturmbannfuhrer. In my business information is a commodity, exchangeable on the open market. But I’m willing to trade.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Why you had to break into that apartment last night. Why you are keeping secrets from your own people. Why the Gestapo almost killed you an hour ago.”

“Oh that…’He smiled. He felt weary. He leaned his back against the rough bark of the tree and stared across the park. It seemed to him he had nothing to lose.

Two days ago” he began, “I fished a body out of the Havel.”

He told her everything. He told her about Buhler’s death and Luther’s disappearance. He told her what Jost had seen, and what had happened to him. He told her about Nebe and Globus, about the art treasures and the Gestapo file. He even told her about Pili’s statement. And -something he had noticed about criminals confessing, even those who knew that their confessions would one day hang them — when he finished, he felt better.

She was silent a long time. That’s fair,” she said. “I don’t know how this helps, but this is what happened to me.”

She had gone to bed early on Saturday night. The weather had been foul — the start of that great bank of rain that had washed over the city for three days. She was not feeling sociable, had not for weeks. You know how it is. Berlin can get to you like that. Make you feel small and hopeless in the shade of those vast grey buildings; the endless uniforms; the unsmiling bureaucrats.

The phone went about eleven-thirty, just as she was drifting off to sleep. A man’s voice. Taut. Precise. There is a telephone booth opposite your apartment. Go to it. I shall call you there in five minutes. If the booth is occupied, please wait.”

She had not recognised who it was, but something in the man’s tone had told her it was not a joke. She had dressed, grabbed her coat, hobbled down the stairs, into the street, trying to pull on her shoes and walk at the same time. The rain had hit her like a slap across the face. Across the street, outside the station, was an old wooden telephone kiosk -empty, thank God.

It was while she was waiting for the call that she remembered where she had first heard the voice.

“Go back a bit,” said March. “Your first meeting with Stuckart. Describe it.”

That was before Christmas. She had called him cold. Explained who she was. He seemed reluctant, but she had persisted, so he had invited her over for tea. He had a shock of white curly hair and one of those orangey tans, as if he had spent a long time in the sun, or under an ultraviolet lamp. The woman, Maria, was also in the apartment, but behaved like a maid. She served some tea then left them to it. Usual chat: how is your mother? Very well, thank you.

Ha, that was a joke.

She flicked ash from the end of her cigarette.

“My mother’s career died when she left Berlin. My arrival buried it. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a great demand for German actresses in Hollywood during the war.”

And then he had asked about her father, in a gritted-teeth kind of a way. And she had been able to take great pleasure in saying: very well, thank you. He had retired in “sixty-one, when Kennedy took over. Deputy Under-Secretary of State Michael Maguire. God bless the United States of America. Stuckart had met him through Mom, had known him when he was at the Embassy here.

March interrupted: “When was that?”

“Thirty-seven to “thirty-nine.”

“Goon.”

Well, then he had wanted to know about the job and she had told him. World European Features: he had never heard of them. Not surprising, she said: nobody had. That sort of thing. Polite interest, you know. So when she left she gave him her card, and he had bent to kiss her hand, had lingered over it, made a meal of it, made her feel sick. He had patted her bottom on the way out. And that had been that, she was glad to say. Five months: nothing.

“Until Saturday night?”

Until Saturday night. She had been in the telephone kiosk no more than thirty seconds when he rang. Now all the arrogance was gone from his voice.

“Charlotte?” He had placed heavy, emphasis on the second syllable. Shar-lott-e. “Forgive this melodrama. Your telephone is tapped.”

They say every foreigner’s line is tapped.”

This is true. When I was in the Ministry, I used to see transcripts. But public boxes are safe. I am in a public box now. I came on Thursday and took the number of the one you are in. It is serious, you see. I need to contact the authorities in your country.”

“Why not talk to the Embassy?”

The Embassy is not safe.”

He had sounded terrified. And tight. Definitely, he had been drinking.

“Are you saying you want to defect?”

A long silence. Then there had been a noise behind her. A sound of metal tapping on glass. She had turned to discover, in the rain and the dark, a man, with his hands cupped round his eyes, peering into the kiosk, looking like a deep-sea diver. She must have let out a cry or something because Stuckart had got very frightened.

“What was that? What is it?”

“Nothing. Just someone wanting to use the phone.”

“We must be quick. I deal only with your father, not the Embassy.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Come to me tomorrow and I will tell you everything. Shar-lott-e, I will make you the most famous reporter in the world.”

“Where? What time?”

“My apartment. Noon.”

“Is that safe?”

“Nowhere is safe.”

And then he had rung off. Those were the last words she had heard Stuckart speak.

She finished her cigarette, ground it under her foot.

The rest he knew, more or less. She had found the bodies, called the police. They had taken her to the big city station in Alexander Plate, where she had sat in a blank-walled room for more than three hours, going crazy. Then she had been driven to another building, to give a statement to some creepy SS man in a cheap wig, whose office had been more like that of a pathologist than a detective.

March smiled at the description of Fiebes.

She had already made up her mind not to tell the Polizei about Stuckart’s call on Saturday night, for an obvious reason. If she had hinted that she had been preparing to help Stuckart defect, she would have been accused of “activities incompatible with her status as a journalist”, and arrested. As it was, they had decided to deport her anyway. So it goes.

The authorities were planning a fireworks display in the Tiergarten, to commemorate the Fuhrer’s birthday. An area of the park had been fenced off, and pyrotechnicians in blue overalls were laying their surprises, watched by a curious crowd. Mortar tubes, sandbagged emplacements, dug-outs, kilometres of cable: these looked more like the preparations for an artillery bombardment than for a celebration. Nobody paid any attention to the SS-Sturmbannfuhrer and the woman in the blue plastic coat.

He scribbled on a page of his notebook.

“These are my telephone numbers — office and home. Also, here are the numbers of a friend of mine called Max Jaeger. If you can’t get hold of me, call him.” He tore out the page and gave it to her. “If anything suspicious happens, anything worries you — it doesn’t matter what the time is — call”

“What about you? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to try to get to Zurich tonight. Check out this bank account first thing tomorrow.”

He knew what she would say even before she opened her mouth.

“I’ll come with you.”

“You will be much safer here.”

“But it’s my story, too.”

She sounded like a spoilt child. “It’s not a story, for God’s sake.” He bit back his anger. “Look. A deal. Whatever I find out, I swear I’ll tell you. You can have it all.”

“It’s not as good as being there.”

“It’s better than being dead.”

“They wouldn’t do anything like that abroad.”

“On the contrary, that is exactly where they would do it. If something happens here, they are responsible. If something happens abroad…” He shrugged. “Prove it.”

They parted in the centre of the Tiergarten. He strode briskly across the grass, towards the humming city. As he walked, he took the envelope out of his pocket, squeezed it to check the key was still in it and — on impulse — raised it to his nose. Her scent. He looked over his shoulder. She was walking through the trees with her back to him. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared; disappeared, reappeared — a tiny birdlike figure — bright blue plumage against the dreary wood.

FIVE

The door to March’s apartment hung off its hinges like a broken jaw. He stood on the landing, listening, his pistol drawn. The place was silent, deserted.

Like Charlotte Maguire’s, his apartment had been searched, but by hands of greater malevolence. Everything had been tipped into a heap in the centre of the sitting room — clothes and books, shoes and old letters, photographs and crockery and furniture — the detritus of a life. It was as if someone had intended to make a bonfire but had been distracted at the last minute, before they could apply the torch.

Wedged upright on top of the pyre was a wooden-framed photograph of March, aged twenty, shaking hands with the commander of the U-Boot Waffe, Admiral Donitz. Why had it been left like that? What point was being made? He picked it up, carried it over to the window, blew dust off it. He had forgotten he even had it. Doenitz liked to come aboard every boat before it left Wilhelmshaven: an awesome figure, ramrod, iron-gripped, gruff. “Good hunting,” he had barked at March. He growled the same to everyone. The picture showed five young crewmen lined up beneath the conning tower to meet him. Rudi Halder was to March’s left. The other three had died later that year, trapped in the hull of U-175.

Good hunting.

He tossed the picture back on the pile.

It had taken time to do all this. Time, and anger, and the certainty of not being disturbed. It must have happened while he was under guard in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It could only have been the work of the Gestapo. He remembered a line of graffiti scrawled by White Rose on a wall near Werderscher Markt: “A police state is a country run by criminals”.

They had opened his mail. A couple of bills, long overdue — they were welcome to them — and a letter from his ex-wife, dated Tuesday. He glanced through it. She had decided he was not to see Pili in future. It upset the boy too much. She hoped he would agree this was for the best. If necessary, she would be willing to swear a deposition before the Reich Family Court, giving her reasons. She trusted this would not be necessary, both for his sake and the boy’s. It was signed “Klara Eckart”. So she had gone back to her maiden name. He screwed it up and threw it next to the photograph, with the rest of the rubbish.

The bathroom at least had been left intact. He showered and shaved, inspecting himself in the mirror for damage. It felt worse than it looked: a large bruise developing nicely on his chest, more on the back of his legs and at the base of his spine; a livid mark at his throat. Nothing serious. What was it his father used to say — his paternal balm for all the batterings of childhood? “You’ll live, boy.” That was it. “You’ll live!”

Naked, he went back into the sitting room and searched through the wreckage, pulling out clean clothes, a pair of shoes, a suitcase, a leather hold-all. He feared they might have taken his passport but it was there, at the bottom of the mound. It had been issued in 1961, when March had gone to Italy to bring back a gangster being held in Milan. His younger self stared up at him, fatter-cheeked, half-smiling. My God, he thought, I have aged ten years in three.

He brushed down his uniform and put it back on, together with a clean shirt, and packed his suitcase. As he bent to snap it shut his eye was caught by something in the empty grate. The photograph of the Weiss family was lying face down. He hesitated, picked it up, folded it into a small square — exactly as he had found it five years earlier — and slipped it into his wallet. If he was stopped and searched, he would say they were his family.

Then he took a last look round and left, closing the broken door behind him as best he could.

At the main branch of the Deutschebank, in Wittenberg Platz, he asked how much he held in his account.

“Four thousand two hundred and seventy-seven Reichsmarks and thirty-eight pfennigs.”

“I’ll take it.”

“All of it, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer?” The teller blinked at him through wire-framed spectacles. “You are closing the account?”

“All of it.”

March watched him count out forty-two one-hundred Mark notes, then stuffed them into his wallet, next to the photograph. Not much in the way of life savings.

This is what no promotions and seven years of alimony do to you.

The teller was staring at him. “Did the Herr Sturmbannfuhrer say something?”

He had given voice to his thoughts. He must be going mad. “No. Sorry. Thank you.”

March picked up his suitcase, went out into the square and caught a taxi to Werderscher Markt.

Alone in his office, he did two things. He rang the headquarters of Lufthansa and asked the head of security- a former Kripo investigator he knew, called Friedman — to check if the airline had carried a passenger by the name of Martin Luther on any of its Berlin-Zurich flights on Sunday or Monday.

“Martin Luther, right?” Friedman was greatly amused. “Anyone else you want, March? Emperor Charlemagne? Herr von Goethe?”

“It’s important.”

“It’s always important. Sure. I know.” Friedman promised to find out the information at once. “Listen. When you get tired of chasing ambulances, there’s always a job for you here if you want it.”

“Thanks. I may well.”

After he hung up, March took the dead plant down from the filing cabinet. He lifted the atrophied roots out of the pot, put in the brass key, replaced the plant, and returned the pot to its old position.

Five minutes later, Friedman called him back.

Arthur Nebe’s suite of offices was on the fourth floor- all cream carpets and cream paintwork, recessed lighting and black leather, sofas. On the walls were prints of Thorak’s sculptures. Herculean figures with gargantuan torsos rolled boulders up steep hills, in celebration of the building of the Autobahnen; Valkyries fought the triple demons Ignorance, Bolshevism and Slav. The immensity of Thorak’s statuary was a whispered joke. “Thorax” they called him: “The Herr Professor is not receiving visitors today — he is working in the left ear of the horse.”

Nebe’s adjutant, Otto Beck, a smooth-faced graduate of Heidelberg and Oxford, looked up as March came into the outer office.

March said: “I need to speak with the Oberstgruppenfuhrer.”

“He is seeing nobody.”

“He will see me.”

“He will not.”

March leaned very close to Beck’s face, his fists on his desk. “Ask.”

Behind him, he heard Nebe’s secretary say: “Shall I call security?”

“One moment, Ingrid.” It was fashionable among the graduates of the SS academy in Oxford to affect an English coolness. Beck flicked an invisible speck from the sleeve of his tunic. “And what name is it?”

“March.”

“Ah. The famous March.” Beck picked up the telephone. “Sturmbannfuhrer March is demanding to see you, Herr Oberstgruppenfuhrer.” He looked at March and nodded. “Very well.”

Beck pressed a button concealed beneath the desk, releasing the electronic bolts. “Five minutes, March. He has an appointment with the Reichsfuhrer.”

The door to the inner office was solid oak, six centimetres thick. Inside, the blinds were tightly drawn against the day. Nebe was curled over his desk in a puddle of yellow light, studying a typed list through a magnifying glass. He turned one vast and blurry fish eye upon his visitor.

“What have we here…?” He lowered the glass. “Sturmbannfuhrer March. Empty-handed, I assume?”

“Unfortunately.”

Nebe nodded. “I learn from the duty office that the police stations of the Reich are even now being filled to overflowing with elderly beggars, ancient drunkards who have lost their papers, absconding geriatrics… Enough to keep Globus busy until Christmas.” He leaned back in his chair. “If I know Luther, he is far too cunning to show himself yet. He will wait a few days. That must be your hope.”

“I have a favour to ask.”

“Proceed.”

“I wish to leave the country.”

Nebe let out a shout of laughter. He pounded the desk with both hands. “Your file is compendious, March, but nowhere does it mention your sense of humour. Excellent! Who knows? You may yet survive. Some KZ commandant may adopt you as a pet.”

“I wish to go to Switzerland.”

“Of course. The scenery is spectacular.”

“I have had a call from Lufthansa. Luther flew to Zurich on Sunday afternoon, and returned to Berlin on the last flight on Monday night. I believe he had access to a numbered bank account.”

Nebe’s laughter had dwindled to an occasional snort. “On what evidence?”

March placed the envelope on Nebe’s desk. “I removed this from Stuckart’s apartment last night.”

Nebe opened it and inspected the letter through the magnifying glass. He glanced up. “Should there not be a key with this?”

March was staring at the paintings behind Nebe’s head -Schmutzler’s “Farm Girls Returning From the Fields”, Padua’s “The Fuhrer Speaks” — ghastly, orthodox muck.

“Ah. I see.” Nebe sat back again, stroking his cheek with the glass. “If I don’t allow you to go, I don’t get the key. I could of course turn you over to the Gestapo, and they could persuade you to disgorge the key — probably quite quickly. But then it would be Globus and Heydrich who would learn the contents of the deposit box, rather than me.

He was silent for a while. Then he dragged himself to his feet and hobbled across to the blinds. He opened the slats a fraction and peered out. March could see his eyes moving slowly from side to side.

At last he said: “A tempting bargain. But why is it that I have this vision of myself, waving you off with a white handkerchief from the tarmac of Hermann Goring Airport, and of you never coming back?”

“I suppose giving you my word that I would return would be of no use?”

“The suggestion demeans our intelligence.”

Nebe went back to his desk and read the letter again. He pressed a switch on his desk. “Beck.”

The adjutant appeared. “March — give him your passport. Now, Beck, get that to the Interior Ministry and have them issue an immediate twenty-four-hour exit visa, starting at six tonight and expiring at six tomorrow.”

Beck glanced at March, then slid out of the office.

Nebe said: This is my offer. The Head of the Swiss Criminal Police, Herr Streuli, is a good friend of mine. From the moment you step off the aircraft until the moment you reboard it, his people will be watching you. Do not attempt to evade them. If you fail to return tomorrow, you will be arrested and deported. If you try to make a run to Bern, to enter a foreign embassy, you will be stopped. In any case, there is nowhere for you to go. After yesterday’s happy announcement, the Americans will simply toss you back over the border to us. The British, French and Italians will do what we tell them. Australia and Canada will obey the Americans. There are the Chinese, I suppose, but if I were you I’d sooner take my chances in a KZ. And the moment you return to Berlin, you will tell me everything you have discovered. Good?”

March nodded.

“Good. The Fuhrer calls the Swiss "a nation of hotel-keepers". I recommend the Baur au Lac on Tal Strasse, overlooking the See. Most luxurious. A fine place for a condemned man to spend a night.”

Back in his office, a parody of a tourist, March booked his hotel room and reserved a plane seat. Within the hour, he had his passport back. The visa had been stamped inside: the ubiquitous eagle and garlanded swastika, the blank spaces for the dates filled in by a crabbed and bureaucratic hand.

The duration of an exit visa was in direct ratio to the applicant’s political reliability. Party bosses got ten years; Party members, five; citizens with unblemished records, one; the dregs of the camps naturally got nothing at all. March had been given a day-pass to the outside world. He was down there among the Untouchables of society — the grumblers, the parasites, the work-shy, the crypto-criminal.

He rang the Kripo’s economic investigation division and asked for the resident Swiss expert. When he mentioned Zaugg’s name and asked if the division had any information, the man at the other end laughed. “How long do you have?”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Hold, please.” The man put down the phone and went to fetch the file.

Zaugg Cie had been founded in 1877 by a Franco-German financier, Louis Zaugg. Hermann Zaugg, the signatory of Stuckart’s letter, was the founder’s grandson. He was still listed as the bank’s chief director. Berlin had followed his activities for more than two decades. During the 1940s, Zaugg had dealt extensively with German nationals of dubious reliability. He was currently suspected of harbouring millions of Reichsmarks in cash, art, bullion, jewellery and precious stones — all of which rightfully should have been confiscated, but to none of which could the Finance Ministry gain access. They had been trying for years.

“What do we have on Zaugg personally?”

“Only the bare details. He’s fifty-four, married, with one son. Has a mansion on the Zurichsee. Very respectable. Very private. Plenty of powerful friends in the Swiss government.”

March lit a cigarette and grabbed a scrap of paper. “Give me that address again.”

Max Jaeger arrived as March was writing him a note. He pushed open the door with his backside, came in carrying a stack of files, looking sweaty. Nearly two days” growth of beard gave him a menacing air.

“Zavi, thank Christ.” He peered over the top of the paperwork. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Where have you been?”

“Around. What’s this? Your memoirs?”

“The Spandau shootings. You heard Uncle Artur this morning.” He mimicked Nebe’s reedy voice. “ ‘Jaeger, you can return to normal duties.’ ”

He dropped the files on his desk. The window rattled. Dust shot across the office. “Statements of witnesses and wedding guests. Autopsy report — they dug fifteen bullets out of that poor bastard.” He stretched, rubbed his eyes with his fists. “I could sleep for a week. I tell you: I’m too old for scares like last night. My heart won’t stand it.” He broke off. “Now what the hell are you doing?”

March had lifted the dead plant from its pot and was retrieving the key to the safety deposit box.

“I have a plane to catch in two hours.”

Jaeger looked at his suitcase. “Don’t tell me — a holiday! A little balalaika music on the shores of the Black Sea…” He folded his arms and kicked out his legs in a dance, Russian-style.

March shook his head, smiling. “Do you feel like a beer?”

“Do I feel like a beer?” Jaeger had danced out of the door before March could turn round.

The little bar in Ob-wall Strasse was run by a retired Orpo man called Fischer. It smelled of smoke and sweat, stale beer and fried onions. Most of its clientele were policemen. Green and black uniforms clustered around the bar, or lurked in the dimness of the wood-panelled booths.

The Fox and the Bear were greeted warmly.

Taking a vacation, March?”

“Hey Jaeger! Stand a little closer to the razor next time!”

Jaeger insisted on buying the drinks. March took a booth in the corner, stowed his suitcase under the table, lit a cigarette. There were men here he had known for a decade. The drivers from Rahnsdorf with their poker schools and dirty stories. The heavy drinkers from Serious Crimes in Worth Strasse. He would not miss them. Walther Fiebes sat alone at the bar, moping over a bottle of schnapps.

Jaeger returned and raised his glass. “Prost!”

“Prost.”

Max wiped the foam from his lips. “Good sausages, good engines, good beer- Germany’s three gifts to the world.” He always said this when they had a drink, and March always lacked the heart to point it out. “So. What’s this about a plane?” For Jaeger, the word seemed to conjure images of all that was exotic in the world. The furthest he had ever travelled from Berlin was to a family camp on the Black Sea — a holiday last summer near Gotenburg, organised by Strength-Through-Joy.

March turned his head slightly, glanced from side to side. The German look. The booths on either side were unoccupied. Shouts of laughter came from the bar.

“I have to go to Switzerland. Nebe’s given me a twenty-four-hour visa. That key you saw just now in the office -1 took it from Stuckart’s safe last night. It opens a safety deposit box in Zurich.”

Jaeger’s eyes opened wide. "That must be where they keep the art stuff. Remember what Globus said this morning: they smuggled it out and sold it in Switzerland.”

There’s more to it than that. I’ve been speaking to the American girl again. It seems that Stuckart called her at home on Saturday night, wanting to defect.”

Defect. The unmentionable act. It hung in the air between them.

Jaeger said: “But the Gestapo must know that already, Zavi. Surely her phone is tapped?”

March shook his head. “Stuckart was too clever for that. He used the call box opposite her apartment.” He sipped his beer. “You see how it goes, Max? I feel like a man descending stairs in the dark. First, the body in the lake turns out to be an alter Kampfer. Then, his death is linked to Stuckart’s. Last night, my one witness to Globus’s involvement — the cadet, Jost — was taken away by the SS, on Globus’s orders. Now it turns out that Stuckart wanted to defect. What comes next?”

“You’ll fall down those stairs and break your neck, my friend. That’s what comes next.”

“A fair prediction. And you don’t know the worst of it.”

March told him about the Gestapo dossier. Jaeger looked stricken. “Jesus Christ. What are you going to do?”

“I thought of trying to stay out of the Reich. I even withdrew all my money from the bank. But Nebe’s right: no other country would touch me.” March finished his drink. “Would you do something for me?”

“Name it.”

"The American woman’s apartment was broken in to this morning. Could you ask the Orpo in Schoneberg to take a look occasionally -I’ve left the address on my desk. Also, I’ve given her your telephone number, in case of trouble.”

“No problem.”

“And can you look after this for Pili?” He handed Jaeger an envelope containing half the cash he had withdrawn from the bank. “It’s not much, but I may need the rest.

Hang on to it until he’s old enough to know what to do with it”

“Oh come on, man!” Max leaned across and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s not as bad as that? Is it? Surely?”

March stared at him. After a second or two, Jaeger grunted and looked away. “Yes. Well…’He tucked the envelope into his pocket. “My God,” he said with sudden vehemence, “if a lad of mine denounced me to the Gestapo, I’d be giving him something all right — and it wouldn’t be money.”

“It’s not the boy’s fault, Max.”

Fault, thought March. How could you fault a ten-year-old? The boy needed a father-figure. That was what the Party provided -stability, companionship, something to believe in — all the things March should have given him and hadn’t. Besides, the Pimpf expected the young to transfer their allegiance from their family to the state. No, he would not — could not — blame his son.

Gloom had settled over Jaeger. “Another beer?”

“Sorry.” March stood. “I have to go. I owe you.”

Jaeger lurched to his feet as well. “When you get back, Zavi, come and stay with us for a couple of days. The younger girls are at a Bund deutscher Madel camp for the week — you can have their room. We can work something out for the court martial.”

“Harbouring an asocial — that won’t go down well with your local Party.”

“Fuck my local Party.”

This was said with feeling. Jaeger stuck out his hand, and March shook it — a great, calloused paw.

“Look after yourself, Zavi.”

“Look after yourself, Max.”

SIX

Drawn up on the runways of the Flughafen Hermann Goring, shimmering through the haze of fuel, was the new generation of passenger jets: the blue and white Boeings of Pan-American, the red, white and black swastika-decked Junkers of Lufthansa.

Berlin has two airports. The old Tempelhof aerodrome near the city centre handles short-haul, internal flights. International traffic passes through Hermann Goring in the north-western suburbs. The new terminal buildings are long, low edifices of marble and glass, designed — of course — by Speer. Outside the arrivals hall stands a statue of Hanna Reitsch, Germany’s leading aviatrix, made of melted-down Spitfires and Lancasters. She scans the sky for intruders. A sign behind her says WELCOME TO BERLIN, CAPITAL OF THE GREATER GERMAN REICH, in five languages.

March paid the taxi driver, tipped him, and walked up the ramp towards the automatic doors. The air here was cold and man-made: drenched with aviation fuel, torn by the screams of throttling engines. Then the doors opened, hissed shut behind him, and suddenly he was in the sound-proofed bubble of the departure terminal.

“Lufthansa flight 401 to New York. Passengers are requested to make their way to gate number eight for boarding…”

“Final call for Lufthansa flight 014 to Theoderichshafen. Passengers…”

March went first to the Lufthansa sales desk to pick up his ticket, then to the check-in where his passport was scrutinised carefully by a blonde with “Gina” pinned to her left breast, a swastika badge in her lapel.

“Does the Herr Sturmbannfuhrer wish to check in any luggage?”

“No thank you. I have only this.” He patted his small suitcase.

She returned his passport with his boarding card folded inside it. Accompanying this act was a smile as bright and cheerless as neon.

“Boarding in thirty minutes. Have a good flight, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

Thank you, Gina.”

“You are welcome.”

“Thank you.”

They were bowing like a pair of Japanese businessmen. Air travel was a new world to March, a strange land with its own impenetrable rituals.

He followed the signs to the lavatory, selected the cubicle furthest from the wash-basins, locked the door, opened the suitcase, took out the leather hold-all. Then he sat down and tugged off his boots. White light gleamed on chrome and tile.

When he had stripped to his shorts, he put the boots and his uniform into the hold-all, stuffed his Luger into the middle of the bag, zipped it up and locked it.

Five minutes later he emerged from the cubicle transformed. In a light grey suit, white shirt, pale blue tie and soft brown shoes, the Aryan Superman had turned back into a normal citizen. He could see the transformation reflected in people’s eyes. No more frightened glances. The attendant at the left-luggage area where he deposited the hold-all was surly. He handed March the ticket.

“Don’t lose it. If you do, don’t bother coming back.” He jerked his head to the sign behind him: “Warning! Items returned on production of ticket only!”

At the passport control zone March lingered, noting the security. Barrier one: checking of boarding cards, unobtainable without the proper visa. Barrier two: re-checking of the visas themselves. Three members of the Zollgrenzschutz, the border protection police, were stationed on either side of the entrance, carrying submachine guns. The elderly man in front of March was scrutinised with particular care, the customs officer speaking to someone on the telephone before waving him through. They were still looking for Luther.

When March’s turn came, he saw how his passport baffled the customs man. An SS-Sturmbannfuhrer with only a twenty-four-hour visa? The normal signals of rank and privilege, usually so clear, were too confused to read. Curiosity and servility warred in the customs man’s face. Servility, as usual, won.

“Enjoy your journey, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

On the other side of the barrier, March resumed his study of airport security. All luggage was scanned by X-ray. He was frisked, then asked to open his case. Each item was inspected — the sponge bag unzipped, the shaving foam uncapped and sniffed. The guards worked with the care of men who knew that, if an aircraft was lost to hijackers or to a terrorist bomb during their watch, they would spend the next five years in a KZ.

Finally he was clear of the checks. He patted his inside pocket to make sure Stuckart’s letter was still there, turned the little brass key over in his other hand. Then he went to the bar and had a large whisky and a cigarette.

He boarded the Junkers ten minutes before take-off.

It was the day’s last flight from Berlin to Zurich and the cabin was full of businessmen and bankers in dark three-piece suits reading pink financial newspapers. March had a seat next to the window. The place beside his was empty. He stowed his suitcase in a compartment above his head, settled back and closed his eyes. Inside the plane, a Bach cantata was playing. Outside, the engines started. They climbed the scale, from hum to brittle whine, one coming in after another like a chorus. The aircraft jolted slightly and began to move.

For thirty-three hours out of the past thirty-six March had been awake. Now the music bathed him, the vibrations lulled him. He slept.

He missed the safety demonstration. The take-off barely penetrated his dreams. Nor did he notice the person slip into the seat beside him.

Not until they were cruising at 10,000 metres and the pilot was informing them that they were passing over Leipzig did he open his eyes. The stewardess was leaning towards him, asking him if he wanted a drink. He started to say “A whisky”, but was too distracted to finish his reply. Sitting next to him, pretending to read a magazine, was Charlotte Maguire.

The Rhine slid beneath them, a wide curve of molten metal in the dying sun. March had never see it from the air. “Dear Fatherland, no danger thine: Firm stands thy watch along the Rhine.” Lines from his childhood, hammered out on an untuned piano in a draughty gymnasium. Who had written them? He could not remember.

Crossing the river was a signal that they had passed out of the Reich and into Switzerland. In the distance: mountains, grey-blue and misty; below: neat rectangular fields and dark clumps of pine forests; steep red roofs and little white churches.

When he woke she had laughed at the surprise on his face. You may be used to dealing with hardened criminals, she had said, and with the Gestapo and the SS. But you’ve never come up against the good old American press.

He had sworn, to which she had responded with a wide-eyed look, mock-innocent, like one of Max Jaeger’s daughters. An act, deliberately done badly, which made it naturally an even better act, turning his anger against him, making him part of the play.

She had then insisted on explaining everything, whether he wanted to listen or not, gesturing with a plastic tumbler of whisky. It had been easy, she said. He had told her he was flying to Zurich that night. There was only one flight. At the airport she had informed the Lufthansa desk that she was supposed to be with Sturmbannfuhrer March. She was late: could she please have the seat next to him? When they agreed, she knew he must be on board.

“And there you were, asleep,” she concluded, “like a babe.”

“And if they had said they had no passenger called March?”

“I would have come anyway.” She was impatient with his anger. “Listen, I already have most of the story. An art fraud. Two senior officials dead. A third on the run. An attempted defection. A secret Swiss bank account. At worst, alone, I’d have picked up some extra colour in Zurich. At best I might have charmed Herr Zaugg into giving me an interview.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Don’t look so worried, Sturmbannfuhrer- I’ll keep your name out of it.”

Zurich is only twenty kilometres south of the Rhine. They were descending quickly. March finished his Scotch and set the empty container on the stewardess’s outstretched tray.

Charlotte Maguire drained her own glass in one and placed it next to his. “We have whisky in common, Herr March, at least.” She smiled.

He turned to the window. This was her skill, he thought: to make him look stupid, a Teutonic flat-foot. First, she had failed to tell him about Stuckart’s telephone call. Then she had manoeuvred him into letting her join in his search of Stuckart’s apartment. This morning, instead of waiting for him to contact her, she had talked to the American diplomat, Nightingale, about Swiss banks. Now this. It was like having a child forever at your heels — a persistent, intelligent, embarrassing, deceitful, dangerous child. Surreptitiously he felt his pockets again, to check he still had the letter and key. She was not beyond stealing them while he was asleep.

The Junkers was coming in to land. Like a film gradually speeding up, the Swiss countryside began rushing past: a tractor in a field, a road with a few headlights in the smoky dusk, and then — one bounce, two — they were touching down.

Zurich airport was not how he had imagined it. Beyond the aircraft and hangars were wooded hillsides, with no evidence of a city. For a moment, he wondered if Globus had discovered his mission and had arranged for the plane to be diverted. Perhaps they had been set down in some remote airbase in southern Germany? But then he saw Z0RICH on the terminal building.

The instant the plane had taxied to a halt, the passengers — professional commuters, most of them — rose as one. She was on her feet, too, pulling down her case and that ridiculous blue coat. He reached past her.

“Excuse me.”

She shrugged on the coat. “Where now?”

“I am going to my hotel, Fraulein. What you do is your concern.”

He managed to squeeze in front of a fat Swiss who was cramming documents into a leather attache case. The manoeuvre left her trapped some way behind him. He did not look back as they shuffled down the aisle and off the aircraft.

He walked briskly through the arrivals hall to passport control, overtaking most of the other passengers to station himself near the head of the queue. Behind him, he heard a commotion as she tried to catch up.

The Swiss border official, a serious young man with a drooping moustache, leafed through his passport.

“Business or pleasure, Herr March?”

“Business.” Definitely business.

“One moment.”

The young man picked up the telephone, dialled three digits, turned away from March and whispered something into the receiver. He said: “Yes. Yes. Of course.” Then he hung up and returned the passport to March.

There were two of them waiting for him by the baggage carousel. He spotted them from fifty metres away: bulky figures with close-cropped hair, wearing stout black shoes and belted fawn raincoats. Policemen — they were the same the world over. He walked past them without a glance and sensed rather than saw them falling in behind him.

He went unchallenged through the green customs channel and out into the main concourse. Taxis. Where were taxis?

Clip-clop, clip-clop. Coming up behind him.

The air outside was several degrees colder than in Berlin. Clip-clop, clip-clop. He wheeled round. There she was, in her coat, clutching her case, balanced on her high heels.

“Go away, Fraulein. Do you understand me? Do you need it in writing? Go back to America and publish your stupid story. I have business to attend to.”

Without waiting for her reply, he opened the rear door of the waiting taxi, threw in his case, climbed in after it. “Baur au Lac,” he said to the driver.

They pulled out of the airport and on to the highway, heading south towards the city. The day had almost gone. Craning his neck to look out of the back window, March could see a taxi tucked in ten metres behind them, with an unmarked white Mercedes following it. Christ, what a comedy this was turning into. Globus was chasing Luther, he was chasing Globus, Charlie Maguire was chasing him, and now the Swiss police were on the tails of both of them. He lit a cigarette.

“Can’t you read?” said the driver. He pointed to a sign:

“Welcome to Switzerland” muttered March. He wound down the window a few centimetres, and the cloud of blue smoke was plucked into the chilly air.

Zurich was more beautiful than he had expected. Its centre reminded him of Hamburg. Old buildings clustered around the edge of the wide lake. Trams in a livery of green and white rattled along the front, past well-lit shops and cafes. The driver was listening to the Voice of America. In Berlin it was a blur of static; here, it was clear. “I wanna hold your hand,” sang a youthful English voice. “I wanna hold your ha-a-and!” A thousand teenage girls screamed.

The Baur au Lac was a street’s-width from the lake. March paid the taxi driver in Reichsmarks — every country on the continent accepted Reichsmarks, it was Europe’s common currency — and went inside. It was as luxurious as Nebe had promised. His room cost him half a month’s salary. “A fine place for a condemned man to spend a night…” As he signed the register he glimpsed a flash of blue at the door, swiftly followed by the fawn raincoats. I am like a movie star, thought March, as he caught the elevator. Everywhere I go, I have two detectives and a brunette in tow.

He spread a map of the city on the bed and sat down beside it, sinking into the spongy mattress. He had so little time. The broad expanse of the Zurich See thrust up into the complex of streets, like a blue blade. According to his Kripo file, Hermann Zaugg had a place on See Strasse. March found it. See Strasse ran alongside the eastern shore of the lake, about four kilometres south of the hotel.

Someone tapped softly on the door. A man’s voice called his name.

Now what? He strode across the room, flung open the door. A waiter was in the corridor, holding a tray. He looked startled.

“Sorry, sir. With the compliments of the lady in room 277, sir.”

“Yes. Of course.” March stood aside to let him through. The waiter came in hesitantly, as if he thought March might hit him. He set down the tray, lingered fractionally for a tip and then, when none was forthcoming, left. March locked the door behind him.

On the table was a bottle of Glenfiddich, with a one-word note. “Detente?”

He stood at the window, his tie loosened, sipping the malt whisky, looking out across the Zurich See. Traceries of yellow lanterns were strung around the black water; on the surface, pinpricks of red, green and white bobbed and winked. He lit yet another cigarette, his millionth of the week.

People were laughing in the drive beneath his window. A light moved across the lake. No Great Hall, no marching bands, no uniforms. For the first time in — what was it? — a year, at least — he was away from the iron and granite of Berlin. So. He held up his glass and studied the pale liquid. There were other lives, other cities.

He noticed, along with the bottle, that she had ordered two glasses.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the telephone. He drummed his fingers on the little table.

Madness.

She had a habit of thrusting her hands deep into her pockets and standing with her head on one side, half-smiling. On the plane, he remembered, she had been wearing a red wool dress with a leather belt. She had good legs, in black stockings. And when she was angry or amused, which was most of the time, she would flick at the hair behind her ear.

The laughter outside drifted away.

“Where have you been the past twenty years?” Her contemptuous question to him in Stuckart’s apartment.

She knew so much. She danced around him.

“The millions of Jews who vanished in the war…”

He turned her note over in his fingers, poured himself another drink and lay back on the bed. Ten minutes later he lifted the receiver and spoke to the operator.

“Room 277.”

Madness, madness.

They met in the lobby, beneath the fronds of a luxuriant palm. In the opposite corner a string quartet scraped its way through a selection from Die Fledermaus.

March said: The Scotch is very good.”

“A peace offering.”

“Accepted. Thank you.” He glanced across at the elderly cellist. Her stout legs were held wide apart, as if she were milking a cow. “God knows why I should trust you.”

“God knows why I should trust you.”

“Ground rules,” he said firmly. “One: no more lies. Two: we do what I say, whether you want to or not. Three: you show me what you plan to print, and if I ask you not to write something, you take it out. Agreed?”

“It’s a deal.” She smiled and offered him her hand. He took it. She had a cool, firm grip. For the first time he noticed she had a man’s watch around her wrist.

“What changed your mind?” she asked.

He released her hand. “Are you ready to go out?” She was still wearing the red dress.

“Yes.”

“Do you have a notebook?”

She tapped her coat pocket. “Never travel without one.”

“Nor do I. Good. Let’s go.”

Switzerland was a cluster of lights in a great darkness, enemies all around it: Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany north and east. Its survival was a source of wonder: “the Swiss miracle”, they called it.

Luxembourg had become Moselland, Alsace-Lorraine was Westmark; Austria was Ostmark. As for Czechoslovakia — that bastard child of Versailles had dwindled to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia — vanished from the map. In the East, the German Empire was carved four ways into the Reichskommissariats Ostland, Ukraine, Caucasus, Muscovy.

In the West, twelve nations — Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland — had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.

In all this, Switzerland alone was neutral. That had not been the Fuhrer’s intention. But by the time the Wehrmacht’s planners had designed a strategy to subdue the Swiss state the stalemate of the Cold War had begun. It remained a patch of no man’s land, increasingly useful to both sides as the years went by, a place to meet and deal in secret.

“There are only three classes of citizen in Switzerland,” the Kripo’s expert had told March. “American spies, German spies, and Swiss bankers trying to get hold of their money.”

Over the past century those bankers had settled around the northern rim of the Zurich See like a rich crust; a tide-mark of money. As on Schwanenwerder, their villas presented to the world a blank face of high walls and stout gates, backed by dense screens of trees.

March leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “Slow down here”

They were quite a cavalcade by now: March and Charlie in a taxi, followed by two cars, each occupied by a Swiss policeman. Bellerive Strasse turned into See Strasse. March counted off the numbers.

“Pull over here.”

The taxi swerved up on to the kerb. The police cars overtook them; a hundred metres down the road, their brake lights glowed.

Charlie looked around. “Now what?”

“Now we take a look at the home of Doctor Hermann Zaugg.”

March paid the taxi driver, who promptly turned and set off back towards the city centre. The road was quiet.

All the villas were well-protected, but Zaugg’s — the third they came to — was a fortress. The gates were solid metal, three metres high, flanked on either side by a stone wall. A security camera scanned the entrance. March took Charlie’s arm and they strolled past, like lovers taking the air. They crossed the road and waited in a driveway on the other side. March looked at his watch. It was just after nine o’clock. Five minutes passed. He was about to suggest they leave when, with a clank and a hum of machinery, the gates began to swing open.

Charlie whispered: “Someone’s coming out.”

“No.” He nodded up the road. “Coming in.”

The limousine was big and powerful: a British car, a Bentley, finished in black. It came from the direction of the city, travelling rapidly, swerved, and swung into the drive. A chauffeur and another man in the front; in the back, a flash of silver hair — Zaugg’s, presumably. March just had time to notice how low the bodywork hung to the ground. Then, one after another, the tyres were absorbing the impact as the Bentley bounced over the kerb — whump, whump, whump, whump — and it was gone.

The gates started to close, then stopped halfway. Two men appeared from the direction of the house, walking fast.

“You!” one of them shouted. “Both of you! Stay where you are!” He strode into the road. March seized Charlie by the elbow. At that instant, one of the police cars began reversing towards them, gearbox howling. The man glanced to his right, hesitated, and retreated.

The car skidded to a halt. The window was wound down. A weary voice said: “For fuck’s sake, get in.”

March opened the back door and ushered in Charlie, then slipped in after her. The Swiss policeman executed a rapid three-point turn, and accelerated away towards the city. Zaugg’s bodyguards had already disappeared; the gates were banging shut behind them.

March twisted round to stare out of the rear window. “Are all your bankers as well-protected as that?”

“Depends who they do business with.” The policeman adjusted his mirror to look at them. He was in his late forties, with bloodshot eyes. “Are you planning any further adventures, Herr March? A brawl somewhere, perhaps? It would help if we had a little warning next time.”

“I thought you were supposed to be following us, not guarding us.”

“ "Follow and protect as necessary": those are our orders. That’s my partner in the car behind, by the way. It’s been a fucking long day. Excuse my language, Fraulein — they never said there’d be a woman involved.”

“Can you drop us back at the hotel?” asked March.

The policeman grumbled. “So now I am to add chauffeur to my list of duties?” He switched on his radio and spoke to his partner. “Panic over. We’re going back to the Baur au Lac.”

Charlie had her notebook open on her lap and was writing. “Who are these people?”

March hesitated but then thought: what does it matter? “This officer and his partner are members of the Swiss Polizei, here to ensure I don’t attempt to defect while outside the borders of the Reich. And also to ensure I return in one piece.”

“Always a pleasure, assisting our German colleagues,” grunted a voice from the front.

Charlie said: “There’s a danger you might not?”

“Apparently.”

“Jesus.” She wrote something down. He looked away. Off to their left, a couple of kilometres across the See, the lights of Zurich formed a yellow ribbon on the dark water. His breath misted the window.

Zaugg must have been returning from his office. It was late, but the burghers of Zurich worked hard for their money — twelve or fourteen hours a day was common. The banker’s house could only be reached by travelling this road, which ruled out the most effective security precaution: varying his route each night. And See Strasse, bounded on one side by the lake, and with several dozen streets leading off the other, was a security man’s nightmare. That explained something.

“Did you notice his car?” he said to Charlie. “How heavy it was, the noise its tyres made? You see those often in Berlin. That Bentley was armour-plated.” He ran his hand through his hair. Two bodyguards, a pair of prison gates, remote cameras and a bomb-proof car. What kind of banker is that?”

He could not see her face properly in the shadows, but he could feel her excitement beside him. She said: “We’ve got the letter of authorisation, remember? Whatever kind of banker he is — he’s our banker now.”

SEVEN

They ate at a restaurant in the old town — a place with thick linen napkins and heavy silver cutlery, where the waiters lined up behind them and whipped the covers from their plates like a troupe of conjurers performing a trick. If the hotel had cost him half a month’s salary, this meal would cost him the other half, but March didn’t care.

She was unlike any other woman he had met. She was not one of the homebodies of the Party’s Women’s League, all “Kinder, Kirche und Kuche” — her husband’s supper always ready on the table, his uniform freshly pressed, five children asleep upstairs. And while a good National Socialist girl abhorred cosmetics, nicotine and alcohol, Charlie Maguire made liberal use of all three. Her dark eyes soft in the candlelight, she talked almost without pause of New York, foreign reporting, her father’s days in Berlin, the wickedness of Joseph Kennedy, politics, money, men, herself.

She had been born in Washington DC in the spring of 1939. (The last spring of peace, my parents called it — in all senses.’) Her father had recently returned from Berlin to work at the State Department. Her mother was trying to make a success as an actress, but after 1941 was lucky simply to escape internment. In the 1950s, after the war, Michael Maguire had gone to Omsk, capital of what was left of Russia, to serve in the US Embassy. It was considered too dangerous a place to take four children. Charlotte had been left behind to be educated at expensive schools in Virginia; Charlie had dropped out at seventeen — spitting arid swearing and rebelling against everything in sight.

“I went to New York. Tried to be an actress. That didn’t work. Tried to be a journalist. That suited me better. Enrolled at Columbia — to my father’s great relief. And then — what do you know? — I start an affair with Teacher.” She shook her head. “How stupid can you get?” She blew out a jet of cigarette smoke. “Is there any more wine in there?”

He poured out the last of the bottle, ordered another. It seemed to be his turn to say something. “Why Berlin?”

“A chance to get away from New York. My mother being German made it easier to get a visa. I have to admit: World European Features is not quite as grand as it sounds. Two men in an office on the wrong side of town with a telex machine. To be honest, they were happy to take anyone who could get a visa out of Berlin. Even me.” She looked at him with shining eyes. “I didn’t know he was married, you see. The teacher.” She snapped her fingers. “Basic failure of research there, wouldn’t you say?”

“When did it end?”

“Last year. I came to Europe to show them all I could do it. Him especially. That’s why I felt so sick about being expelled. God, the thought effacing them all again She sipped her wine. “Perhaps I’ve got a father-fixation. How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

“Bang in my age range.” She smiled at him over the rim of her glass. “You’d better watch out. Are you married?”

“Divorced.”

“Divorced! That’s promising. Tell me about her.”

Her frankness kept catching him off-guard. “She was,” he began, and corrected himself. “She is…” He stopped. How did you summarise someone you were married to for nine years, divorced from for seven, who had just denounced you to the authorities? “She is not like you,” was all he could think to say.

“Meaning?”

“She does not have ideas of her own. She is concerned about what people think. She has no curiosity. She is bitter.”

“About you?”

“Naturally.”

“Is she seeing anyone else?”

“Yes. A Party bureaucrat. Much more suitable than me.”

“And you? Do you have anyone?”

A klaxon sounded in March’s mind. Dive, dive, dive. He had had two affairs since his divorce. A teacher who had lived in the apartment beneath his, and a young widow who taught history at the university — another friend of Rudi Halder’s: he sometimes suspected Rudi had made it his mission in life to find him a new wife. The liaisons had drifted on for a few months, until both women had tired of the last-minute calls from Werderscher Markt: “Something’s come up, I’m sorry…”

Instead of answering her, March said: “So many questions. You should have been a detective.”

She made a face at him. “So few answers. You should have been a reporter.”

The waiter poured more wine. After he had moved away, she said: “You know, when I met you, I hated you on sight.”

“Ah. The uniform. It blots out the man.”

“That uniform does. When I looked for you on the plane this afternoon I barely recognised you.”

It occurred to March that here was another reason for his good mood: he had not caught a glimpse of his black silhouette in a mirror, had not seen people shrinking away at his approach.

Tell me,” he said, “what do they say of the SS in America?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh come on, March. Please. Don’t let’s ruin a good evening.”

“I mean it. I’d like to know.” He had to coax her into answering.

“Well, murderers,” she said eventually. “Sadists. Evil personified. All that. You asked for it. Nothing personal intended, you understand? Any other questions?”

“A million. A lifetime’s worth.”

“A lifetime! Well go ahead. I have nothing planned.”

He was momentarily dumbfounded, paralysed by choice. Where to start?

The war in the East,” he said. “In Berlin we hear only of victories. Yet the Wehrmacht has to ship the coffins home from the Urals front at night, on special trains, so nobody sees how many dead there are.”

“I read somewhere that the Pentagon estimates a hundred thousand Germans killed since 1960. The Luftwaffe is bombing the Russian towns flat day after day and still they keep coming back at you. You can’t win because they’ve nowhere else to go. And you daren’t use nuclear weapons in case we retaliate and the world blows up.”

“What else?” He tried to think of recent headlines. “Goebbels says German space technology beats the Americans every time.”

“Actually, I think that’s true. Peenemunde had satellites in orbit years ahead of ours.”

“Is Winston Churchill still alive?”

“Yes. He’s an old man now. In Canada. He lives there. So does the Queen.” She noticed his puzzlement. “Elizabeth claims the English throne from her uncle.”

“And the Jews?” said March. “What do the Americans say we did to them?”

She was shaking her head. “Why are you doing this?”

“Please. The truth.”

The truth? How do I know what the truth is?” Suddenly she had raised her voice, was almost shouting. People at the next table were turning round. “We’re brought up to think of Germans as something from outer space. Truth doesn’t enter into it.”

“Very well then. Give me the propaganda.”

She glanced away, exasperated, but then looked back with an intensity that made it difficult for him to meet her eyes. “All right. They say you scoured Europe for every living Jew — men, women, children, babies. They say you shipped them to ghettos in the East where thousands died of malnutrition and disease. Then you forced the survivors farther East, and nobody knows what happened after that. A handful escaped over the Urals into Russia. I’ve seen them on TV. Funny old men, most of them; a bit crazy. They talk about execution pits, medical experiments, camps that people went into but never came out of. They talk about millions of dead. But then the German ambassador comes along in his smart suit and tells everyone it’s all just communist propaganda. So nobody knows what’s true and what isn’t. And I’ll tell you something else — most people don’t care.” She sat back in her chair. “Satisfied?”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” She reached for her cigarettes, then stopped and looked at him again. “That’s why you changed your mind at the hotel about bringing me along, isn’t it? Nothing to do with whisky. You wanted to pick my brains.” She started to laugh. “And I thought I was using you.”

After that, they got on better. Whatever poison there was between them had been drawn. He told her about his father and how he had followed him into the Navy, about how he had drifted into police work and found a taste for it — a vocation, even.

She said: “I still don’t understand how you can wear it.”

“What?”

“That uniform.”

He poured himself another glass of wine. “Oh, there’s a simple answer to that. In 1936, the Kriminalpolizei was merged into the SS; all officers had to accept honorary SS rank. So I have a choice: either I am an investigator in that uniform, and try to do a little good; or I am something else without that uniform, and do no good at all.”

And the way things are going, I shall soon not have that choice, he thought.

She tilted her head to one side and nodded. “I can see that. That seems fair.”

He felt impatient, sick of himself. “No it’s not. It’s bullshit, Charlie.” It was the first time he had called her that since she had insisted on it at the beginning of the dinner; using it sounded like a declaration. He hurried on: "That’s the answer I’ve given everybody, including myself, for the past ten years. Unfortunately, even I have stopped believing it.”

“But what happened — the worst of what happened — was during the war, and you weren’t around. You told me: you were at sea.”

He looked down at his plate, silent. She went on: “And anyway, wartime is different. All countries do wicked things in wartime. My country dropped an atom bomb on Japanese civilians — killed a quarter of a million people in an instant. And the Americans have been allies of the Russians for the past twenty years. Remember what the Russians did?”

There was truth in what she said. One by one, as they advanced eastwards, beginning with the bodies of 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest, the Germans had discovered the mass graves of Stalin’s victims. Millions had died in the famines, purges, deportations of the 1930s. Nobody knew the exact figure. The execution pits, the torture chambers, the gulags inside the Arctic Circle — all were now preserved by the Germans as memorials to the dead, museums of Bolshevik evil. Children were taken round them; ex-prisoners acted as guides. There was a whole school of historical studies devoted to investigating the crimes of communism. Television showed documentaries on Stalin’s holocaust — bleached skulls and walking skeletons, bulldozed corpses and the earth-caked rags of women and children bound with wire and shot in the back of the neck.

She put her hand on his. The world is as it is. Even I see that.”

He spoke without looking at her. “Yes. Fine. But everything you’ve said, I’ve already heard. "It was a long time ago." "That was war." "The Ivans were worst of all." "What can one man do?" I’ve listened to people whisper that for ten years. That’s all they ever do, by the way. Whisper.”

She withdrew her hand and lit another cigarette, turning the little gold lighter over and over in her fingers. “When I first came to Berlin, and my parents gave me that list of people they knew in the old days, there were lots of theatre people on it, artists — friends of my mother. I suppose quite of few them, in the way of things, must have been Jews, or homosexuals. And I went looking for them. All of them had gone, of course. That didn’t surprise me. But they hadn’t just vanished. It was as if they’d never existed.”

She tapped the lighter gently against the tablecloth. He noticed her fingers — slim, unmanicured, unadorned.

“Of course, there were people living in the places my mother’s friends used to live in. Old people, often. They must have known, mustn’t they? But they just looked blank. They were watching television, having tea, listening to music. There was nothing left at all.”

March said: “Look at this.”

He pulled out his wallet, took out the photograph. It looked incongruous amid the plushness of the restaurant — a relic from someone’s attic, rubbish from a flea market stall.

He gave it to her. She studied it. A strand of hair fell over her face and she brushed it away. “Who are they?”

“When I moved into my apartment after Klara and I split, it hadn’t been decorated for years. I found that tucked behind the wallpaper in the bedroom. I tell you, I took that place to pieces, but that was all there was. Their surname was Weiss. But who are they? Where are they now? What happened to them?”

He took the photograph, folded it into quarters, put it back in his wallet.

“What do you do,” he said, “if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can’t do anything about it, it was a long time ago?”

She was looking at him in a different way. “I suppose you go crazy.”

“Or worse. Sane.”

She insisted, despite his protests, on paying half the bill. It was almost midnight by the time they left the restaurant. They walked in silence towards the hotel. Stars arched across the sky; at the bottom of the steep cobbled street, the lake waited.

She took his arm. “You asked me if that man at the Embassy -Nightingale — if he was my lover.”

That was rude of me. I’m sorry.”

“Would you have been disappointed if I’d said he was?”

He hesitated.

She went on: “Well he isn’t. He’d like to be. Sorry. That sounds like boasting.”

“It doesn’t at all. I’m sure many would like to be.”

“I hadn’t met anyone…”

Hadn’t…

She stopped. “I’m twenty-five. I go where I like. I do what I like. I choose whom I like.” She turned to him, touched him lightly on the cheek with a warm hand. “God, I hate getting this sort of thing out of the way, don’t you?”

She drew his head to hers.

How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head — enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear.

Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind -whatever happened now.

His feet danced on the cobblestones. He slipped his arm around her. He had so many questions.

“Wait, wait” she was laughing, holding on to him. “Enough. Stop. I’m starting to worry you only want me for my mind.”

In his hotel room, she unknotted his tie and reined him to her once more, her mouth soft on his. Still kissing him, she smoothed the jacket from his shoulders, unbuttoned his shirt, parted it. Her hands skimmed over his chest, around his back, across his stomach.

She knelt and tugged at his belt.

He closed his eyes and coiled his fingers in her hair.

After a few moments he pulled away gently, and knelt to face her, lifted her dress. Freed from it, she threw back her head and shook her hair. He wanted to know her completely. He kissed her throat, her breasts, her stomach; inhaled her scent, felt the firm flesh stretching smooth and taut beneath his hands, her soft skin on his tongue.

Later she guided him on to the bed and settled herself above him. The only light was cast by the lake. Rippling shadows all around them. When he opened his mouth to say something, she put a finger to his lips.