Fatherland

ONE

Yesterday’s rain was a bad memory, already half-faded from the streets. The sun — the miraculous, impartial sun — bounced and glittered on the shopfronts and apartment windows.

In the bathroom, the rusted pipes clanked and groaned, the shower dangled a thread of cold water. March shaved with his father’s old cut-throat razor. Through the open bathroom window, he could hear the sounds of the city waking up: the whine and clatter of the first tram; the distant hum of the traffic on Tauentzien Strasse; the footsteps of the early risers hurrying to the big Wittenberg Platz U-bahn station; the rattle of shutters going up in the bakery across the street. It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.

His uniform was laid out in the bedroom: the body-armour of authority.

Brown shirt, with black leather buttons. Black tie. Black breeches. Black jackboots (the rich smell of polished leather).

Black tunic: four silver buttons; three parallel silvered threads on the shoulder tabs; on the left sleeve, a red-white-and-black swastika armband; on the right, a diamond enclosing the gothic letter “K”, for Kriminalpolizei.

Black Sam Browne belt. Black cap with silver .death’s head and Party eagle. Black leather gloves.

March stared at himself in the mirror, and a Sturm-bannfuhrer of the Waffen-SS stared back. He picked up his service pistol, a 9mm Luger, from the dressing table, checked the action, and slotted it into his holster. Then he stepped out into the morning.

“Sure you have enough?”

Rudolf Halder grinned at March’s sarcasm and unloaded his tray: cheese, ham, salami, three hard-boiled eggs, a pile of black bread, milk, a cup of steaming coffee. He arranged the dishes in a neat row on the white linen tablecloth.

“I understand that breakfasts provided by the Reich Main Security Office are not normally so lavish.”

They were in the dining room of the Prinz Friedrich Karl Hotel in Dorotheen Strasse, midway between Kripo headquarters and Halder’s office in the Reichsarchiv. March used it regularly. The Friedrich Karl was a cheap stopover for tourists and salesmen, but it did a good breakfast. Dangling limply from a pole over the entrance was a European flag — the twelve gold stars of the European Community nations, on a dark-blue background. March guessed that the manager, Herr Brecker, had bought it second-hand and hung it there in an effort to drum up some foreign custom. It did not appear to have worked. A glance around the restaurant’s shabby clientele and bored staff suggested little danger of being overheard.

As usual, people gave March’s uniform a wide berth. Every few minutes, the walls shook as a train pulled into the Friedrich Strasse station.

“Is that all you’re having?” asked Halder. “Coffee?” He shook his head. “Black coffee, cigarettes and whisky. As a diet: not good. Now I think of it, I haven’t seen you eat a decent meal since you and Klara split.” He cracked one of his eggs and began removing pieces of shell.

March thought: of all of us, Halder has changed the least. Beneath the layer of fat, behind the slackened muscle of incipient middle age, there lurked still the ghost of the gangling recruit, straight from university, who had joined the U-174 more than twenty years before. He had been a wireless operator — a bad one, rushed through training and into service at the start of 1942, when losses were at their height, and Donitz was ransacking Germany for replacements. Then as now, he wore wire-framed glasses and had thin ginger hair which stuck out at the back in a duck’s tail. During a voyage, while the rest of the men grew beards, Halder sprouted orange tufts on his cheeks and chin, like a moulting cat. The fact that he was in the U-boat service at all was a ghastly mistake, a joke. He was clumsy, barely capable of changing a fuse. He had been designed by nature to be an academic, not a submariner, and he passed each voyage in a sweat of fear and seasickness.

Yet he was popular. U-boat crews were superstitious, and somehow the word got around that Rudi Halder brought good luck. So they looked after him, covering his mistakes, letting him have an extra half-hour to groan and thrash around on his bunk. He became a sort of mascot. When peace came, astonished to find that he had survived, Halder resumed his studies at the history faculty of Berlin University. In 1958 he had joined the team of academics working at the Reichsarchiv on the official history of the war. He had come full circle, spending his days hunched in a subterranean chamber in Berlin, piecing together the same grand strategy of which he had once been a tiny, frightened component. The U-boat Service: Operations and Tactics, 1939-46 had been published in 1963. Now Halder was helping compile the third volume of the history of the German Army on the Eastern Front.

“It’s like working at the Volkswagen works in Fallersleben,” said Halder. He took a bite out of his egg and chewed for a while. “I do the wheels, Jaeckel does the doors, Schmidt drops in the engine.”

“How long is it going to take?”

“Oh, forever, I should think. Resources no object. This is the Arch of Triumph in words, remember? Every shot, every skirmish, every snowflake, every sneeze. Someone is even going to write the Official History of the Official Histories. Me, I’ll do another five years.” “And then?”

Halder brushed egg crumbs from his tie. “A chair in a small university somewhere in the south. A house in the country with Use and the kids. A couple of books, respectfully reviewed. My ambitions are modest. If nothing else, this kind of work gives you a sense of perspective about your own mortality. Talking of which…’From his inside pocket he pulled a sheet of paper. “With the compliments of the Reichsarchiv.”

It was a photocopy of a page from an old Party directory. Four passport-sized portraits of uniformed officials, each accompanied by a brief biography, Brun, Brunner. Buch. And Buhler.

Halder said: “Guide to the Personalities of the NSDAP. 1951 edition.”

“I know it well.”

“A pretty bunch, you’ll agree.”

The body in the Havel was Buhler’s, no question of it. He stared up at March through his rimless spectacles, prim and humourless, his lips pursed. It was a bureaucrat’s face, a lawyer’s face; a face you might see a thousand times and never be able to describe; sharp in the flesh, fudged in memory; the face of a machine-man.

“As you will see,” resumed Halder, “a pillar of National Socialist respectability. Joined the Party in ’22 — that’s as respectable as they come. Worked as a lawyer with Hans Frank, the Fuhrer’s own attorney. Deputy President of the Academy of German Law.”

“ ‘State Secretary, General Government, 1939,’ ” read March.” ‘SS-Brigadefuhrer.’ ” Brigadefuhrer, by God. He took out a notebook and began to write.

“Honorary rank,” said Halder, his mouth full of food. “I doubt if he ever fired a shot in anger. He was strictly a desk man. When Frank was sent out as Governor in 39 to run what was left of Poland, he must have taken his old legal partner, Buhler, with him, to be chief bureaucrat. You should try some of this ham. Very good.”

March was scribbling quickly. “How long was Buhler in the East?”

Twelve years, I guess. I checked the Guide for 1952. There’s no entry for Buhler. So ’51 must have been his last year.”

March stopped writing and tapped his teeth with his pen. “Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes?”

There was a telephone booth in the foyer. He rang the Kripo switchboard and asked for his own extension. A voice growled: “Jaeger.”

“Listen, Max.” March repeated what Halder had told him. “The Guide mentions a wife.” He held up the sheet of paper to the booth’s dim electric light and squinted at it. “Edith Tulard. Can you find her? To get the body positively identified.”

“She’s dead.”

“What?”

“She died more than ten years ago. I checked with the SS records bureau — even honorary ranks have to give next of kin. Buhler had no kids, but I’ve traced his sister. She’s a widow, seventy-two years old, named Elizabeth Trinkl. Lives in Furstenwalde.” March knew it: a small town about forty-five minutes” drive south-east of Berlin. “The local cops are bringing her straight to the morgue.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Another thing. Buhler had a house on Schwanen-werder.”

So that explained the location of the body. “Good work, Max.” March rang off and made his way back to the dining room.

Halder had finished his breakfast. He threw down his napkin as March returned and leaned back in his chair. “Excellent. Now I can almost tolerate the prospect of sorting through fifteen hundred signals from Kleist’s First Panzer Army.” He began picking his teeth. “We should meet up more often. Use is always saying: When are you going to bring Zavi round?” He leaned forward. “Listen: there’s a woman at the archives, working on the history of the Bund deutscher Madel in Bavaria, 1935 to 1950. A stunner. Husband disappeared on the Eastern front last year, poor devil. Anyway: you and she. What about it? We could have you both round, say next week?”

March smiled. “You’re very kind.”

“That’s not an answer.”

True.” He tapped the photocopy. “Can I keep this?”

Halder shrugged. “Why not?”

“One last thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“State Secretary to the General Government. What would he have done, exactly?”

Halder spread his hands. The backs were thick with freckles, wisps of reddish-gold hair curled from his cuffs. “He and Frank had absolute authority. They did whatever they liked. At that time, the main priority would have been resettlement.”

March wrote “resettlement” in his notebook, and ringed it. “How did that happen?”

“What is this? A seminar?” Halder arranged a triangle of plates in front of him — two smaller ones to the left, a larger one to the right. He pushed them together so they touched. “All this is Poland before the war. After ’39, the western provinces” — he tapped the small plates — “were brought into Germany. Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and Reichsgau Wartheland.” He detached the large plate. “And this became the General Government. The rump state. The two western provinces were Germanised. It’s not my field, you understand, but I’ve seen some figures. In 1940, they set a target density of one hundred Germans per square kilometre. And they managed it in the first three years. An incredible operation, considering the war was still on.”

“How many people were involved?”

“One million. The SS eugenics bureau found Germans in places you’d never have dreamed of — Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia. If your skull had the proper measurements and you came from the right village — you were just given a ticket.”

“And Buhler?”

“Ah. Well. To make room for a million Germans in the new Reichsgaue, they had to move out a million Poles.”

“And they went to the General Government?”

Halder turned his head and glanced around furtively, to make sure he was not overheard — “the German look”, people called it. “They also had to cope with the Jews being expelled from Germany and the western territories -France, Holland, Belgium.”

“Jews?”

“Yes, yes. Keep your voice down.” Halder was speaking so quietly, March had to lean across the table to hear. “You can imagine — it was chaos. Overcrowding. Starvation. Disease. From what one can gather, the place is still a shit-hole, despite what they say.”

Every week the newspapers and television carried appeals from the East Ministry for settlers willing to move to the General Government. “Germans! Claim your birthright! A farmstead — free! Income guaranteed for the first five years.” The advertisements showed happy colonists living in luxury. But word of the real story had filtered back — an existence conditioned by poor soil, back-breaking work, and drab satellite towns to which the Germans had to return at dusk for fear of attack from local partisans. The General Government was worse than the Ukraine; worse than Ostland; worse, even, than Muscovy.

A waiter came over to offer more coffee. March waved him away. When the man was out of earshot, Halder continued in the same low tone: “Frank ran everything from Wawel Castle in Krakau. That would have been where Buhler was based. I have a friend who works in the official archives there. God, he has some stories… Apparently, the luxury was incredible. Like something out of the Roman Empire. Paintings, tapestries, looted treasures from the church, jewellery. Bribes in cash and bribes in kind, if you know what I mean.” Halder’s blue eyes shone at the thought, his eyebrows danced.

“And Buhler was involved in this?”

“Who knows? If not, he must have been about the only one who wasn’t.”

“That would explain why he had a house on Schwanen-werder.”

Halder whistled softly. “There you are then. We had the wrong sort of war, my friend. Cooped up in a stinking metal coffin two hundred metres under the Atlantic, when we could have been in a Silesian castle, sleeping on silk with a couple of Polish girls for company.”

There was more March would have liked to ask him but he had no time. As they were leaving, Halder said: “So you’ll come round to dinner with my BdM woman?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Maybe we can persuade her to wear her uniform.” Standing outside the hotel, with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his long scarf wrapped twice around his neck, Halder looked even more like a student. Suddenly he struck his forehead with the flat of his hand. “I clean forgot! I meant to tell you. My memory … A couple of Sipo guys were round at the Archiv last week asking about you.”

March felt his smile shrink. The Gestapo? What did they want?” He managed to keep his tone light, off-hand.

“Oh, the usual sort of stuff. "What was he like during the war? Does he have any strong political views? Who are his friends?" What’s going on, Zavi? You up for promotion or something?”

“I must be.” He told himself to relax. It was probably only a routine check. He must remember to ask Max if he had heard anything about a new screening.

“Well, when they’ve made you head of the Kripo, don’t forget your old friends.”

March laughed. “I won’t.” They shook hands. As they parted, March said: “I wonder if Buhler had any enemies.”

“Oh yes,” said Halder, “of course.”

“Who were they then?”

Halder shrugged. “Thirty million Poles, for a start.”

The only person on the second floor at Werderscher Markt was a Polish cleaning woman. Her back was to March as he came out of the lift. All he could see was a large rump resting on the soles of a pair of black rubber boots, and the red scarf tied round her hair bobbing as she scrubbed the floor. She was singing softly to herself in her native language. As she heard him approach she stopped and turned her head to the wall. He squeezed past her and went into his office. When the door had closed he heard her begin singing again.

It was not yet nine. He hung his cap by the door and unbuttoned his tunic. There was a large brown envelope on his desk. He opened it and shook out the contents, the scene-of-crime photographs. Glossy colour pictures of Buhler’s body, sprawled like a sunbather’s at the side of the lake.

He lifted the ancient typewriter from the top of the filing cabinet and carried it across to his desk. From a wire basket he took two pieces of much-used carbon paper, two flimsy sheets and one standard report form, arranged them in order, and wound them into the machine. Then he lit a cigarette and stared at the dead plant for a few minutes. He began to type.

March pulled the report out of the typewriter, signed it, and left it with a messenger in the foyer on his way out.

The old woman was sitting erect on a hard wooden bench in the Seydel Strasse mortuary. She wore a brown tweed suit, brown hat with a drooping feather, sturdy brown shoes and grey woollen stockings. She was staring straight ahead, a handbag clasped in her lap, oblivious to the medical orderlies, the policemen, the grieving relatives passing in the corridor. Max Jaeger sat beside her, arms folded, legs outstretched, looking bored. As March arrived, he took him to one side.

“Been here ten minutes. Hardly spoken.”

“In shock?”

“I suppose.”

“Let’s get it over with.”

The old woman did not look up as March sat on the bench beside her. He said softly: “Frau Trinkl, my name is March. I am an investigator with the Berlin Kriminal-polizei. We have to complete a report on your brother’s death, and we need you to identify his body. Then we’ll take you home. Do you understand?”

Frau Trinkl turned to face him. She had a thin face, thin nose (her brother’s nose), thin lips. A cameo brooch gathered a blouse of frilly purple at her bony throat.

“Do you understand?” he repeated.

She gazed at him with clear grey eyes, unreddened by crying. Her voice was clipped and dry: “Perfectly.”

They moved across the corridor into a small, windowless reception room. The floor was made of wood blocks. The walls were lime green. In an effort to lighten the gloom, someone had stuck up tourist posters given away by the Deutsche Reichsbahn Gesellschaft: a night-time view of the Great Hall, the Fuhrer Museum at Linz, the Starnberger See in Bavaria. The poster which had hung on the fourth wall had been torn down, leaving pockmarks in the plaster, like bullet holes.

A clatter outside signalled the arrival of the body. It was wheeled in, covered by a sheet, on a metal trolley. Two attendants in white tunics parked it in the centre of the floor — a buffet lunch awaiting its guests. They left and Jaeger closed the door.

“Are you ready?” asked March. She nodded. He turned back the sheet and Frau Trinkl stationed herself at his shoulder. As she leaned forward, a strong smell — of peppermint lozenges, of perfume mingled with camphor, an old lady’s smell — washed across his face. She stared at the corpse for a long time, then opened her mouth as if to say something, but all that emerged was a sigh. Her eyes closed. March caught her as she fell.

“It’s him,” she said. “I haven’t set eyes on him for ten years, and he’s fatter, and I’ve never seen him before without his spectacles, not since he was a child. But it’s him.” She was on a chair under the poster of Linz, leaning forward with her head between her knees. Her hat had fallen off. Thin strands of white hair hung down over her face. The body had been wheeled away.

The door opened and Jaeger returned carrying a glass of water, which he pressed into her skinny hand. “Drink this.” She held it for a moment, then raised it to her lips and took a sip. “I never faint,” she said. “Never.” Behind her, Jaeger made a face.

“Of course,” said March. “I need to ask some questions. Are you well enough? Stop me if I tire you.” He took out his notebook. “Why had you not seen your brother for ten years?”

“After Edith died — his wife — we had nothing in common. We were never close in any case. Even as children. I was eight years older than him.”

“His wife died some time ago?”

She thought for a moment. “In ’53, I think. Winter. She had cancer.”

“And in all the time since then you never heard from him? Were there any other brothers and sisters?”

“No. Just the two of us. He did write occasionally. I had a letter from him on my birthday two weeks ago.” She fumbled in her handbag and produced a single sheet of notepaper — good quality, creamy and thick, with an engraving of the Schwanenwerder house as a letterhead. The writing was copperplate, the message as formal as an official receipt: “My dear sister! Heil Hitler! I send you greetings on your birthday. I earnestly hope that you are in good health, as I am. Josef.” March refolded it and handed it back. No wonder nobody missed him.

“In his other letters, did he ever mention anything worrying him?”

“What had he to be worried about?” She spat out the words. “Edith inherited a fortune in the war. They had money. He lived in fine style, I can tell you.”

“There were no children?”

“He was sterile.” She said this without emphasis, as if describing his hair colour. “Edith was so unhappy. I think that was what killed her. She sat alone in that big house — it was cancer of the soul. She used to love music — she played the piano beautifully. A Bechstein, I remember. And he -he was such a cold man.”

Jaeger grunted from the other side of the room: “So you didn’t think much of him?”

“No, I did not. Not many people did.” She turned back to March. “I have been a widow for twenty-four years. My husband was a navigator in the Luftwaffe, shot down over France. I was not left destitute — nothing like that. But the pension… very small for one who was used to something a little better. Not once in all that time did Josef offer to help me.”

“What about his leg?” It was Jaeger again, his tone antagonistic. He had clearly decided to take Buhler’s side in this family dispute. “What happened to that?” His manner suggested he thought she might have stolen it.

The old lady ignored him and gave her answer to March. “He would never speak of it himself, but Edith told me the story. It happened in 1951, when he was still in the General Government. He was travelling with an escort on the road from Krakau to Kattowitz when his car was ambushed by Polish partisans. A landmine, she said. His driver was killed. Josef was lucky only to lose a foot. After that, he retired from government service.”

“And yet he still swam?” March looked up from his notebook. “You know that we discovered him wearing swimming trunks?”

She gave a tight smile. “My brother was a fanatic about everything, Herr March, whether it was politics or health. He did not smoke, he never touched alcohol, and he took exercise every day, despite his … disability. So, no: I am not in the least surprised that he should have been swimming.” She set down her glass and picked up her hat. “I would like to go home now, if I may.”

March stood up and held out his hand, helping her to her feet. “What did Doctor Buhler do after 1951? He was only -what? — in his early fifties?”

That is the strange thing.” She opened her handbag and took out a small mirror. She checked her hat was on straight, tucking stray hairs out of sight with nervous, jerky movements of her fingers. “Before the war, he was so ambitious. He would work eighteen hours a day, every day of the week. But when he left Krakau, he gave up. He never even returned to the law. For more than ten years after poor Edith died, he just sat alone in that big house all day and did nothing.”

Two floors below, in the basement of the morgue, SS Surgeon August Eisler of Kriminalpolizei Department VD2 (Pathology) was going about his business with his customary clumsy relish. Buhler’s chest had been opened in the standard fashion: a Y incision, a cut from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, a straight line down to the pubic bone. Now Eisler had his hands deep inside the stomach, green gloves sheened with red, twisting, cutting, pulling. March and Jaeger leaned against the wall by the open doorway, smoking a couple of Jaeger’s cigars.

“Have you seen what your man had for lunch?” said Eisler. “Show them, Eck.”

Eisler’s assistant wiped his hands on his apron and held up a transparent plastic bag. There was something small and green in the bottom.

“Lettuce. Digests slowly. Stays in the intestinal tract for hours.”

March had worked with Eisler before. Two winters ago, with snow blocking the Unter den Linden and ice skating competitions on the Tegeler See, a barge master named Kempf had been pulled out of the Spree, almost dead with cold. He had expired in the ambulance on the way to hospital. Accident or murder? The time at which he had fallen into the water was crucial. Looking at the ice extending two metres out from the banks, March had estimated fifteen minutes as the maximum time he could have survived in the water. Eisler had said forty-five and his view had prevailed with the prosecutor. It was enough to destroy the alibi of the barge’s second mate, and hang him.

Afterwards, the prosecutor- a decent, old-fashioned sort — had called March into his office and locked the door.

Then he’d shown him Eisler’s “evidence’: copies of documents stamped geheime Reichssache — Top Secret State Document — and dated Dachau, 1942. It was a report of freezing experiments carried out on condemned prisoners, restricted to the department of the SS Surgeon-General. The men had been handcuffed and dumped in tanks of icy water, retrieved at intervals to have their temperatures taken, right up to the point at which they died. There were photographs of heads bobbing between floating chunks of ice, and charts showing heat-loss, projected and actual. The experiments had lasted two years and been conducted, among others, by a young Untersturmfuhrer, August Eisler. That night, March and the prosecutor had gone to a bar in Kreuzberg and got blind drunk. Next day, neither of them mentioned what had happened. They never spoke to one another again.

“If you expect me to come out with some fancy theory, March, forget it.”

Td never expect that.”

Jaeger laughed. “Nor would I.”

Eisler ignored their mirth. “It was a drowning, no question about it. Lungs full of water, so he must have been breathing when he went into the lake.”

“No cuts?” asked March. “Bruises?”

“Do you want to come over here and do this job? No? Then believe me: he drowned. There are no contusions to the head to indicate he was hit or held under.”

“A heart attack? Some kind of seizure?”

“Possible,” admitted Eisler. Eck handed him a scalpel. “I won’t know until I’ve completed a full examination of the internal organs.”

“How long will that take?”

“As long as it takes.”

Eisler positioned himself behind Buhler’s head. Tenderly, he stroked the hair towards him, off the corpse’s forehead, as if soothing a fever. Then he hunched down low and jabbed the scalpel through the left temple. He drew it in an arc across the top of the face, just below the hairline. There was a scrape of metal and bone. Eck grinned at them. March sucked a lungful of smoke from his cigar.

Eisler put the scalpel into a metal dish. Then he bent down once more and worked his forefingers into the deep cut. Gradually, he began peeling back the scalp. March turned his head away and closed his eyes. He prayed that no one he loved, or liked, or even vaguely knew, ever had to be desecrated by the butcher’s work of an autopsy.

Jaeger said: “So what do you think?”

Eisler had picked up a small, hand-sized circular saw. He switched it on. It whined like a dentist’s drill.

March took a final puff on his cigar. “I think we should get out of here.”

They made their way down the corridor. Behind them, from the autopsy room, they heard the saw’s note deepen as it bit into the bone.

TWO

Half an hour later, Xavier March was at the wheel of . one of the Kripo’s Volkswagens, following the curving path of the Havelchaussee, high above the lake. Sometimes the view was hidden by trees. Then he would round a bend, or the forest would thin, and he would see the water again, sparkling in the April sun like a tray of diamonds. Two yachts skimmed the surface — children’s cut-outs, white triangles brilliant against the blue.

He had the window wound down, his arm resting on the sill, the breeze plucking at his sleeve. On either side, the bare branches of the trees were flecked with the green of late spring. In another month, the road would be nose-to-tail with cars: Berliners escaping from the city to sail or swim, or picnic, or simply to lie in the sun on one of the big public beaches. But today there was still enough of a chill in the air, and winter was still close enough, for March to have the road to himself. He passed the red-brick sentinel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Tower and the road began to drop to lake level.

Within ten minutes he was at the spot where the body had been discovered. In the fine weather it looked utterly different. This was a tourist spot, a vantage-point known as the Grosse Fenster: the Picture Window. What had been a mass of grey yesterday was now a gloriously clear view, across eight kilometres of water, right up to Spandau.

He parked, and retraced the route Jost had been running when he discovered the body — down the woodland track, a sharp right turn, and along the side of the lake. He did it a second time; and a third. Satisfied, he got back into the car and drove over the low bridge on to Schwanenwerder. A red and white pole blocked the road. A sentry emerged from a small hut, a clipboard in his hand, a rifle slung across his shoulder.

“Your identification, please.”

March handed his Kripo ID through the open window. The sentry studied it and returned it. He saluted. “That’s fine, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

“What’s the procedure here?”

“Stop every car. Check the papers and ask where they’re going. If they look suspicious, we ring the house, see if they’re expected. Sometimes we search the car. It depends whether the Reichsminister is in residence.”

“Do you keep a record?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do me a favour. Look and see if Doctor Josef Buhler had any visitors on Monday night.”

The sentry hitched his rifle and went back into his hut. March could see him turning the pages of a ledger. When he returned he shook his head. “Nobody for Doctor Buhler all day.”

“Did he leave the island at all?”

“We don’t keep a record of residents, sir, only visitors. And we don’t check people going, only coming.”

“Right.” March looked past the guard, across the lake. A scattering of seagulls swooped low over the water, crying. Some yachts were moored to a jetty. He could hear the clink of their masts in the wind.

“What about the shore. Is that watched at all?”

The guard nodded. "The river police have a patrol every couple of hours. But most of those houses have enough sirens and dogs to guard a KZ. We just keep the sightseers away.”

KZ: pronounced kat-set. Less of a mouthful than Konzentrationslager. Concentration camp.

There was a sound of powerful engines gunning in the distance. The guard turned to look up the road behind him, towards the island.

“One moment, sir.”

Round the bend, at high speed, came a grey BMW with its headlights on, followed by a long black Mercedes limousine, and then another BMW. The sentry stepped back, pressed a switch, the barrier rose, and he saluted. As the convoy swept by, March had a glimpse of the Mercedes’s passengers — a young woman, beautiful, an actress perhaps, or a model, with short blonde hair; and, next to her, staring straight ahead, a wizened old man, his rodent-like profile instantly recognisable. The cars roared off towards the city.

“Does he always travel that quickly?” asked March.

The sentry gave him a knowing look. “The Reichs-minister has been screen-testing, sir. Frau Goebbels is due back at lunchtime.”

“Ah. All is clear.” March turned the key in the ignition and the Volkswagen came to life. “Did you know that Doctor Buhler was dead?”

“No, sir.” The sentry gave no sign of interest. “When did that happen?”

“Monday night. He was washed up a few hundred metres from here.”

“I heard they’d found a body.”

“What was he like?”

“I hardly noticed him, sir. He didn’t go out much. No visitors. Never spoke. But then, a lot of them end up like that out here.”

“Which was his house?”

“You can’t miss it. It’s on the east side of the island. Two large towers. It’s one of the biggest.”

“Thanks.”

As he drove down the causeway, March checked in his mirror. The sentry stood looking after him for a few seconds, then hitched his rifle again, turned and walked slowly back to his hut.

Schwanenwerder was small, less than a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, with a single loop of road running one-way, clockwise. To reach Buhler’s property, March had to travel three-quarters of the way round the island. He drove cautiously, slowing almost to a halt each time he glimpsed one of the houses off to his left.

The place had been named after the famous colonies of swans which lived at the southern end of the Havel. It had become fashionable towards the end of the last century. Most of its buildings dated from then: large villas, steep-roofed and stone-fronted in the French style, with long drives and lawns, protected from prying eyes by high walls and trees. A piece of the ruined Tuileries Palace stood incongruously by the roadside — a pillar and a section of arch carted back from Paris by some long-dead Wilhelmine businessman. No one stirred. Occasionally, through the bars of a gate, he saw a guard dog, and — once — a gardener raking leaves. The owners were either at work in the city, or away, or lying low.

March knew the identities of a few of them: Party bosses; a motor industry tycoon, grown fat on the profits of slave labour immediately after the war; the managing director of Wertheim’s, the great department store on Potsdamer Platz that had been confiscated from its Jewish owners more than thirty years before; an armaments manufacturer; the head of an engineering conglomerate building the great Autobahnen into the eastern territories. He” wondered how Buhler could have afforded to keep such wealthy company, then he remembered Halder’s description: luxury like the Roman Empire …

“KP17, this is KHQ. KP17, answer please!” A woman’s urgent voice filled the car. March picked up the radio handset concealed under the dashboard.

“This is KP17. Go ahead.”

“KP17, I have Sturmbannfuhrer Jaeger for you.”

He had arrived outside the gates to Buhler’s villa. Through the metalwork, March could see a yellow curve of drive and the towers, exactly as the sentry had described.

“You said trouble” boomed Jaeger, “and we’ve got it.”

“Now what?”

“I hadn’t been back here ten minutes when two of our esteemed colleagues from the Gestapo arrived. ‘In view of Party Comrade Buhler’s prominent position, blah blah blah, the case has been redesignated a security matter.’ ”

March thumped his hand against the steering wheel. “Shit!”

“ "All documents to be handed over to the Security Police forthwith, reports required from investigating officers on current status of inquiry, Kripo inquiry to be closed, effective immediately.

“When did this happen?”

“It’s happening now. They’re sitting in our office.”

“Did you tell them where I am?”

“Of course not. I just left them to it and said I’d try and find you. I’ve come straight to the control room.” Jaeger’s voice dropped. March could imagine him turning his back on the woman operator. “Listen, Zavi, I wouldn’t recommend any heroics. They mean serious business, believe me. The Gestapo will be swarming over Schwanenwerder any minute.”

March stared at the house. It was utterly still, deserted. Damn the Gestapo.

He made up his mind at that moment. He said: “I can’t hear you, Max. I’m sorry. The line is breaking up. I haven’t been able to understand anything you’ve said. Request you report radio fault. Out.” He switched off the receiver.

About fifty metres before the house, on the right side of the road, March had passed a gated track leading into the woods that covered the centre of the island. Now he put the Volkswagen into reverse gear, rapidly backed up to it, and parked. He trotted back to Buhler’s gates. He did not have much time.

They were locked. That was to be expected. The lock itself was a solid metal block a metre and a half off the ground. He wedged the toe of his boot into it and stepped up. There was a row of iron spikes, thirty centimetres apart, running along the top of the gate, just above his head. Gripping one in either hand, he hauled himself up until he was in a position to swing his left leg over. A hazardous business. For a moment he sat astride the gate, recovering his breath. Then he dropped down to the gravel driveway on the other side.

The house was large and of a curious design. It had three storeys capped by a steep roof of blue slate. To the left were the two stone towers the sentry had described. These were attached to the main body of the house, which had a balcony with a stone balustrade running the entire length of the first floor. The balcony was supported by pillars. Behind these, half-hidden in the shadows, was the main entrance. March started towards it. Beech trees and firs grew in untended profusion along the sides of the drive. The borders were neglected. Dead leaves, unswept since the winter, blew across the lawn.

He stepped between the pillars. The first surprise. The front door was unlocked.

March stood in the hall and looked round. There was an oak staircase to the right, two doors to the left, a gloomy passage straight ahead which he guessed led to the kitchen.

He tried the first door. Behind it was a panelled dining room. A long table and twelve high-backed carved chairs. Cold and musty from disuse.

The next door led to the drawing room. He continued his mental inventory. Rugs on a polished wooden floor. Heavy furniture upholstered in rich brocade. Tapestries on the wall — good ones, too, if March was any judge, which he wasn’t. By the window was a grand piano on which stood two large photographs. March tilted one towards the light, which shone weakly through the dusty leaded panes. The frame was heavy silver, with a swastika motif. The picture showed Buhler and his wife on their wedding day, coming down a flight of steps between an honour guard of SA men holding oak boughs over the happy couple. Buhler was also in SA uniform. His wife had flowers woven into her hair and was — to use a favourite expression of Max Jaeger — as ugly as a box of frogs. Neither was smiling.

March picked up the other photograph, and immediately felt his stomach lurch. There was Buhler again, slightly bowing this time, and shaking hands. The man who was the object of this obeisance had his face half-turned to the camera, as if distracted in mid-greeting by something behind the photographer’s shoulder. There was an inscription. March smeared his finger through the grime on the glass to decipher the crabbed writing. To Party Comrade Buhler,” it read. “From Adolf Hitler. 17 May 1945.”

Suddenly, March heard a noise. A sound like a door being kicked, followed by a whimper. He replaced the photograph and went back into the hall. The noise was coming from the end of the passage.

He drew his pistol and edged down the corridor. As he had suspected, it gave on to the kitchen. The noise came again. A cry of terror and a drumming of feet. There was a smell, too — of something filthy.

At the far end of the kitchen was a door. He reached out and grasped the handle and then, with a jerk, pulled the door open. Something huge leapt out of the darkness. A dog, muzzled, eyes wide in terror, went crashing across the floor, down the passage, into the hall and out through the open front door. The larder floor was stinking-thick with faeces and urine and food which the dog had pulled down from the shelves but been unable to eat.

After that, March would have liked to have stopped for a few minutes to steady himself. But he had no time. He put the Luger away and quickly examined the kitchen. A few greasy plates in the sink. On the table, a bottle of vodka, nearly empty, with a glass next to it. There was a door to a cellar, but it was locked; he decided not to break it down. He went upstairs. Bedrooms, bathrooms — everywhere had the same atmosphere of shabby luxury; of a grand lifestyle gone to seed. And everywhere, he noticed, there were paintings — landscapes, religious allegories, portraits — most of them thick with dust. The place had not been properly cleaned for months, maybe years.

The room which must have been Buhler’s study was on the top floor of one of the towers. Shelves of legal text books, case studies, decrees. A big desk with a swivel chair next to a window overlooking the back lawn of the house. A long sofa with blankets draped beside it, which appeared to have been regularly slept on. And more photographs. Buhler in his lawyer’s robes. Buhler in his SS uniform. Buhler with a group of Nazi big-wigs, one of whom March vaguely recognised as Hans Frank, in the front row of what might have been a concert. All the pictures seemed to be at least twenty years old.

March sat at the desk and looked out of the window. The lawn led down to the Havel’s edge. There was a small jetty with a cabin cruiser moored to it and, beyond that, a clear view of the lake, right across to the opposite shore. Far in the distance, the Kladow-Wannsee ferry chugged by.

He turned his attention to the desk itself. A blotter. A heavy brass inkstand. A telephone. He stretched his hand towards it.

It began to ring.

His hand hung motionless. One ring. Two. Three. The stillness of the house magnified the sound; the dusty air vibrated. Four. Five. He flexed his fingers over the receiver. Six. Seven. He picked it up.

“Buhler?” The voice of an old man more dead than alive; a whisper from another world. “Buhler? Speak to me. Who is that?”

March said:’A friend.”

Pause. Click.

Whoever it was had hung up. March replaced the receiver. Quickly, he began opening the desk drawers at random. A few pencils, some notepaper, a dictionary. He pulled the bottom drawers right out, one after the other, and put his hand into the space.

There was nothing.

There was something.

At the very back, his fingers brushed against an object small and smooth. He pulled it out. A small notebook bound in black leather, an eagle and swastika in gold lettering on the cover. He flicked through it. The Party diary for 1964. He slipped it into his pocket and replaced the drawers.

Outside, Buhler’s dog was going crazy, running from side to side along the water’s edge, staring across the Havel, whinnying like a horse. Every few seconds it would get down on its hind legs, before resuming its desperate patrol. He could see now that almost the whole of its right side was matted with dried blood. It paid no attention to March as he walked down to the lake.

The heels of his boots rang on the planks of the wooden jetty. Through the gaps between the rickety boards he could see the muddy water a metre below, lapping in the shallows. At the end of the jetty he stepped down into the boat. It rocked with his weight. There were several centimetres of rainwater on the aft deck, clogged with dirt and leaves, a rainbow of oil on the surface. The whole boat stank of fuel. There must be a leak. He stooped and tried the small door to the cabin. It was locked. Cupping his hands, he peered through the window, but it was too dark to see.

He jumped out of the boat and began retracing his steps. The wood of the jetty was weathered grey, except in one place, along the edge opposite the boat. Here there were orange splinters; a scrape of white paint. March was bending to examine the marks when his eye was caught by something pale gleaming in the water, close to the place where the jetty left the shore. He walked back and knelt, and by holding on with his left hand and stretching down as far as he could with his right, he was just able to retrieve it. Pink and chipped, like an ancient china doll, with leather straps and steel buckles, it was an artificial foot.

The dog heard them first. It cocked its head, turned, and trotted up the lawn towards the house. At once, March dropped his discovery back into the water and ran after the wounded animal. Cursing his stupidity, he worked his way round the side of the house until he stood in the shadow of the towers and could see the gate. The dog was leaping up at the iron work, grunting through its muzzle. On the other side, March could make out two figures standing looking at the house. Then a third appeared with a large pair of bolt-cutters which he clamped on to the lock. After ten seconds of pressure, it gave way with a loud crack.

The dog backed away as the three men filed into the grounds. Like March, they wore the black uniforms of the SS. One seemed to take something from his pocket and walked towards the dog, hand outstretched, as if offering it a treat. The animal cringed. A single shot exploded the silence, echoing round the grounds, sending a flock of rooks cawing into the air above the woods. The man bolstered his revolver and gestured at the corpse to one of his companions, who seized it by the hind legs and dragged it into the bushes.

All three men strode towards the house. March stayed behind the pillar, slowly edging round it as they came up the drive, keeping himself out of sight. It occurred to him that he had no reason to hide. He could tell the Gestapo men he had been searching the property, that he had not received Jaeger’s message. But something in their manner, in the casual ruthlessness with which they had disposed of the dog, warned him against it. They had been here before.

As they came closer, he could make out their ranks. Two Sturmbannfuhrer and an Obergruppenfuhrer — a brace of majors and a general. What matter of state security could demand the personal attention of a full Gestapo general? The Obergruppenfuhrer was in his late fifties, built like an ox, with the battered face of an ex-boxer. March recognised him from the television, from newspaper photographs.

Who was he?

Then he remembered. Odilo Globocnik. Familiarly known throughout the SS as Globus. Years ago he had been Gauleiter of Vienna. It was Globus who had shot the dog.

“You — ground floor,” said Globus. “You — check the back.”

They drew their guns and disappeared into the house. March waited half a minute, then set off for the gate. He skirted the perimeter of the garden, avoiding the drive, picking his way instead, almost bent double, through the tangled shrubbery. Five metres from the gate, he paused for breath. Built into the right-hand gatepost, so discreet it was scarcely noticeable, was a rusty metal container — a mail box — in which rested a large brown package.

This is madness, he thought. Absolute madness.

He did not run to the gate: nothing, he knew, attracts the human eye like sudden movement. Instead he made himself stroll from the bushes as if it were the most natural thing in the world, tugged the package from the mail box, and sauntered out of the open gate.

He expected to hear a shout from behind him, or a shot. But the only sound was the rustle of the wind in the trees. When he reached his car, he found his hands were shaking.

THREE

“Why do we believe in Germany and the Fuhrer?”

“Because we believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created in His world, and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom He has sent us.”

“Whom must we primarily serve?”

“Our people and our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.”

“Why do we obey?”

“From inner conviction, from belief in Germany, in the Fuhrer, in the Movement and the SS, and from loyalty.”

“Good!” The instructor nodded. “Good. Reassemble in thirty-five minutes on the south sports field. Jost: stay behind. The rest of you: dismissed!”

With their cropped hair and their loose-fitting light-grey drill uniforms, the class of SS cadets looked like convicts. They filed out noisily, with a scraping of chairs and a stamping of boots on the rough wooden floor. A large portrait of the late Heinrich Himmler smiled down on them, benevolently. Jost looked forlorn, standing to attention, alone in the centre of the classroom. Some of the other cadets gave him curious glances as they left. It had to be Jost, you could see them thinking. Jost: the queer, the loner, always the odd one out. He might well be due another beating in the barracks tonight.

The instructor nodded towards the back of the classroom. “You have a visitor.”

March was leaning against a radiator, arms folded, watching. “Hello again, Jost,” he said.

They walked across the vast parade ground. In one corner, a batch of new recruits was being harangued by an SS Hauptscharfuhrer. In another, a hundred youths in black tracksuits stretched, twisted and touched their toes in perfect obedience to shouted commands. Meeting Jost here reminded March of visiting prisoners in jail. The same institutionalised smell, of polish and disinfectant and boiled food. The same ugly concrete blocks of buildings. The same high walls and patrols of guards. Like a KZ, the Sepp Dietrich Academy was both huge and claustrophobic; an entirely self-enclosed world.

“Can we go somewhere private?” asked March.

Jost gave him a contemptuous look. There is no privacy here. That’s the point.” They took a few more paces. “I suppose we could try the barracks. Everyone else is eating.”

They turned, and Jost led the way into a low, grey-painted building. Inside, it was gloomy, with a strong smell of male sweat. There must have been a hundred beds, laid out in four rows. Jost had guessed correctly: it was deserted. His bed was two-thirds of the way down, in the centre. March sat on the coarse brown blanket and offered Jost a cigarette.

“It’s not allowed in here.”

March waved the packet at him. “Go ahead. Say I ordered you.”

Jost took it, gratefully. He knelt, opened the metal locker beside the bed, and began searching for something to use as an ashtray. As the door hung open, March could see inside: a pile of paperbacks, magazines, a framed photograph.

“May I?”

Jost shrugged. “Sure.”

March picked up the photograph. A family group, it reminded him of the picture of the Weisses. Father in an SS uniform. Shy-looking mother in a hat. Daughter: a pretty girl with blonde plaits; fourteen, maybe. And Jost himself: fat-cheeked and smiling, barely recognisable as the harrowed, cropped figure now kneeling on the stone barracks floor.

Jost said: “Changed, haven’t I?”

March was shocked, and tried to hide it. Tour sister?” he asked.

“She’s still at school.”

“And your father?”

“He runs an engineering business in Dresden now. He was one of the first into Russia in ’41. Hence the uniform.”

March peered closely at the stern figure. “Isn’t he wearing the Knight’s Cross?” It was the highest decoration for bravery.

“Oh yes,” said Jost. “An authentic war hero.” He took the photograph and replaced it in the locker. “What about your father?”

“He was in the Imperial Navy” said March. “He was wounded in the First War. Never properly recovered.”

“How old were you when he died?”

“Seven.”

“Do you still think about him?”

“Everyday.”

“Did you go into the Navy?”

“Almost. I was in the U-boat service.”

Jost shook his head slowly. His pale face had flushed pink. “We all follow our fathers, don’t we?”

“Most of us, maybe. Not all.”

They smoked in silence for a while. Outside, March could hear the physical training session still in progress. “One, two, three… One, two, three…”

“These people,” said Jost, and shook his head. “There’s a poem by Erich Kastner- "Marschliedchen".” He closed his eyes and recited:

The young man’s sudden passion made March uncomfortable. “When was that written?”

“1932.”

“I don’t know it.”

“You wouldn’t. It’s banned.”

There was a silence, then March said: “We now know the identity of the body you discovered. Doctor Josef Buhler. An official of the General Government. An SS-Brigadefuhrer.”

“Oh God.” Jost rested his head in his hands.

“It has become a more serious matter, you see. Before coming to you, I checked with the sentries” office at the main gate. They have a record that you left the barracks at five-thirty yesterday morning, as usual. So the times in your statement make no sense.”

Jost kept his face covered. The cigarette was burning down between his fingers. March leaned forward, took it, and stubbed it out. He stood.

“Watch,” he said. Jost looked up and March began jogging on the spot.

"This is you, yesterday, right?” March made a show of exhaustion, puffing out his cheeks, wiping his brow with his forearms. Despite himself, Jost smiled. “Good,” said March. He continued jogging. “Now you’re thinking about some book, or how awful your life is, when you come through the woods and on to the path by the lake. It’s pissing with rain and the light’s not good, but off to your left you see something…”

March turned his head. Jost was watching him intently.

“…Whatever it is, it’s not the body…”

“But…”

March stopped and pointed at Jost. “Don’t dig yourself any deeper into the shit, is my advice. Two hours ago I went back and checked the place where the corpse was found -there’s no way you could have seen it from the road.”

He resumed jogging. “So: you see something, but you don’t stop. You run past. But being a conscientious fellow, five minutes up the road you decide you had better go back for a second look. And then you discover the body. And only then do you call the cops.”

He grasped Jost’s hands and pulled him to his feet. “Run with me,” he commanded.

“I can’t…”

“Run!”

Jost broke into an unwilling shuffle. Their feet clattered on the flagstones.

“Now describe what you can see. You’re coming out of the woods and you’re on the lake path…”

“Please tell me!”

“I … I see … a car…” Jost’s eyes were closed. “…Then three men… It’s raining fast, they have coats, hoods — like monks…Their heads are down…Coming up the slope from the lake … I… I’m scared … I cross the road and run up into the trees so they don’t see me…”

“Goon.”

“They get into the car and drive off…I wait, and then I come out of the woods and I find the body…”

“You’ve missed something.”

“No, I swear…”

“You see a face. When they get into the car, you see a face.”

“No…”

“Tell me whose face it is, Jost. You can see it. You know it. Tell me.”

“Globus!” shouted Jost. “I see Globus.”

FOUR

The package he had taken from Buhler’s mailbox lay unopened on the front seat next to him. Perhaps it was a bomb, thought March, as he started the Volkswagen. There had been a blitz of parcel bombs over the past few months, blowing off the hands and faces of half a dozen government officials. He might just make page three of the Tageblatt: “Investigator Dies in Mysterious Blast Outside Barracks”.

He drove around Schlachtensee until he found a delicatessen, where he bought a loaf of black bread, some Westphalian ham and a quarter-bottle of Scotch whisky. The sun still shone; the air was fresh. He pointed the car westwards, back towards the lakes. He was going to do something he had not done for years. He was going to have a picnic.

After Goring had been made Chief Reich Huntsman in 1934, there had been some attempt to lighten the Grunewald. Chestnut and linden, beech, birch and oak had all been planted. But the heart of it — as it had been a thousand years ago, when the plains of northern Europe were still forest — the heart remained the hilly woods of melancholy pine. From these forests, five centuries before Christ, the warring German tribes had emerged; and to these forests, twenty-five centuries later, mostly at weekends, in their campers and their trailers, the victorious German tribes returned. The Germans were a race of forest-dwellers. Make a clearing in your mind, if you liked; the trees just waited to reclaim it.

March parked and took his provisions and Buhler’s mail bomb, or whatever it was, and walked carefully up a steep path into the forest. Five minutes climbing brought him to a spot which commanded a clear view of the Havel and of the smoky blue slopes of trees, receding into the distance. The pines smelled strong and sweet in the warmth. Above his head, a large jet rumbled across the sky, making its approach to Berlin Airport. As it disappeared, the noise , died, until at last the only sound was birdsong.

March did not want to open the parcel yet. It made him uneasy. So he sat on a large stone — no doubt casually deposited here by the municipal authorities for this very purpose — took a swig of whisky, and began to eat.

Of Odilo Globocnik-Globus-March knew little, and that only by reputation. His fortunes had swung like a weathercock over the past thirty years. An Austrian by birth, a builder by profession, he had become Party leader in Carinthia in the mid-1930s, and ruler of Vienna. Then there had been a period of disgrace, connected with illegal currency speculation, followed by a restoration, as a police chief in the General Government when the war started — he must have known Buhler there, thought March. At the end of the war, there had been a second fall to — where was it? -Trieste, he seemed to remember. But with Himmler’s death Globus had come back to Berlin, and now he held some unspecified position within the Gestapo, working directly for Heydrich.

That smashed and brutal face was unmistakable, and, despite the rain and the poor light, Jost had recognised it at once. A portrait of Globus hung in the Academy’s Hall of Fame, and Globus himself had delivered a lecture to the awestruck cadets — on the police structures of the Reich -only a few weeks earlier. No wonder Jost had been so frightened. He should have called the Orpo anonymously, and cleared out before they arrived. Better still, from his point of view, he should not have called them at all.

March finished his ham. He took the remains of the bread, broke it into pieces, and scattered the crumbs across the forest floor. Two blackbirds, which had watched him eat, emerged cautiously from the undergrowth and began pecking at them.

He took out the pocket diary. Standard issue to Party members, available in any stationers. Useful information at the beginning. The names of the Party hierarchy: government ministers, kommissariat bosses, gauleiters.

Public holidays: Day of National Reawakening, 30 January; Potsdam Day, 21 March; Fuhrer’s birthday, 20 April; National Festival of the German People, 1 May… Map of the Empire with railway journey times: Berlin-Rovno, sixteen hours; Berlin-Tim’s, twenty-seven hours; Berlin-Ufa, four days…

The diary itself was a week to two pages, the entries so sparse that at first March thought it was blank. He went through it carefully. There was a tiny cross against 7 March. For 1 April, Buhler had written “My sister’s birthday”. There was another cross against 9 April. On 11 April, he had noted “Stuckart/Luther, morning — 10”. Finally, on 13 April, the day before his death, Buhler had drawn another small cross. That was all.

March wrote down the dates in his notebook. He began a new page. The death of Josef Buhler. Solutions. One: the death was accidental, the Gestapo had learned of it some hours before the Kripo were informed, and Globus was merely inspecting the body when Jost passed by. Absurd. Very well. Two: Buhler had been murdered by the Gestapo, and Globus had carried out the execution. Absurd again. The “Night and Fog” order of 1941 was still in force. Buhler could have been bundled away quite legally to some secret death in a Gestapo cell, his property confiscated by the state. Who would have mourned him? Or questioned his disappearance?

And so, three: Buhler had been murdered by Globus, who had covered his tracks by declaring the death a matter of state security, and by taking over the investigation himself. But why had the Kripo been allowed to get involved at all? What was Globus’s motive? Why was Buhler’s body left in a public place?

March leaned back against the stone and closed his eyes. The sun on his face made the darkness blood red. A warm haze of whisky enveloped him.

He could not have been asleep more than half an hour, when he heard a rustle in the undergrowth beside him and felt something touch his sleeve. He was awake in an instant, in time to see the white tail and the hindquarters of a deer darting into the trees. A rural idyll, ten kilometres from the heart of the Reich! Either that, or the whisky. He shook his head and picked up the package.

Thick brown paper, neatly wrapped and taped. Indeed, professionally wrapped and taped. Crisp lines and sharp creases, an economy of materials used and effort expended. A paradigm of a parcel. No man March had ever met could have produced such an object — it must have been wrapped by a woman. Next, the postmark. Three Swiss stamps, showing tiny yellow flowers on a green background. Posted in Zurich at 1600 hours on 13.4.64. That was the day before yesterday.

He felt his palms begin to sweat as he unwrapped it with exaggerated care, first peeling off the tape and then slowly, centimetre by centimetre, folding back the paper. He lifted it fractionally. Inside was a box of chocolates.

Its lid showed flaxen-haired girls in red check dresses dancing around a maypole in a flowery meadow. Behind them, white-peaked against a fluorescent blue sky, rose the Alps. Overprinted in black gothic script was the legend: “Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Fuhrer, 1964”. But there was something odd about it. The box was too heavy just to contain chocolates.

He took out a penknife and cut round the cellophane cover. He set the box gently on the log. With his face turned away and his arm fully extended, he lifted the lid with the point of the blade. Inside, a mechanism began to whirr. Then this:

Only the tune, of course, not the words; but he knew them well enough. Standing alone on a hill in the Grunewald Forest, March listened as the box played the waltz-duet from Act Three of The Merry Widow.

FIVE

The streets on the way back into central Berlin seemed unnaturally quiet and when March reached Werderscher Markt he discovered the reason. A large noticeboard in the foyer announced there would be a government statement at four-thirty. Personnel were to assemble in the staff canteen. Attendance: compulsory. He was just in time.

They had developed a new theory at the Propaganda Ministry, that the best time to make big announcements was at the end of the working day. News was thus received communally, in a comradely spirit: there was no opportunity for private scepticism or defeatism. Also, the broadcasts were always timed so that the workers went home slightly early — at four-fifty, say, rather than five -fostering a sense of contentment, subliminally associating the regime with good feelings. That was how it was these days. The snow-white Propaganda palace on Wilhelm Strasse employed more psychologists than journalists.

The Werderscher Markt staff were filing into the canteen: officers and clerks and typists and drivers, shoulder to shoulder in a living embodiment of the National Socialist ideal. The four television screens, one in each corner, were showing a map of the Reich with a swastika superimposed, accompanied by selections from Beethoven. Occasionally, a male announcer would break in excitedly: “People of Germany, prepare yourselves for an important statement!” In the old days, on the radio, you got only the music. Progress again.

How many of these events could March remember? They stretched away behind him, islands in time. In ’38, he had been called out of his classroom to hear that German troops were entering Vienna and that Austria had returned to the Fatherland. The headmaster, who had been gassed in the First War, had wept on the stage of the little gymnasium, watched by a gaggle of uncomprehending boys.

In ’39, he had been at home with his mother in Hamburg. A Friday morning, 11 o’clock, the Fuhrer’s speech relayed live from the Reichstag: “I am from now on just the first soldier of the German Reich. I have once more put on that uniform that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off until victory is secured, or I will not survive the outcome.” A thunder of applause. This time his mother had wept — a hum of misery as her body rocked backwards and forwards. March, seventeen, had looked away in shame, sought out the photograph of his father -splendid in the uniform of the Imperial German Navy -and he had thought: Thank God. War at last. Maybe now I will be able to live up to what you wanted.

He had been at sea for the next few broadcasts. Victory over Russia in the spring of ’43 — a triumph for the Fuhrer’s strategic genius! The Wehrmacht summer offensive of the year before had cut Moscow off from the Caucasus, separating the Red armies from the Baku oilfields. Stalin’s war machine had simply ground to a halt for want of fuel.

Peace with the British in ’44 — a triumph for the Fuhrer’s counter-intelligence genius! March remembered how all U-boats had been recalled to their bases on the Atlantic coast to be equipped with a new cipher system: the treacherous British, they were told, had been reading the Fatherland’s codes. Picking off merchant shipping had been easy after that. England was starved into submission. Churchill and his gang of war-mongers had fled to Canada.

Peace with the Americans in ’46 — a triumph for the Fuhrer’s scientific genius! When America defeated Japan by detonating an atomic bomb, the Fuhrer had sent a V-3 rocket to explode in the skies over New York to prove he could retaliate in kind if struck. After that, the war had dwindled to a series of bloody guerilla conflicts at the fringes of the new German Empire. A nuclear stalemate which the diplomats called the Cold War.

But still the broadcasts had gone on. When Goering had died in ’51, there had been a whole day of solemn music before the announcement was made. Himmler had received similar treatment when he was killed in an aircraft explosion in ’62. Deaths, victories, wars, exhortations for sacrifice and revenge, the dull struggle with the Reds on the Urals front with its unpronounceable battlefields and offensives — Oktyabr’skoye, Polunochnoye, Alapayevsk…

March looked at the faces around him. Forced humour, resignation, apprehension. People with brothers and sons and husbands in the East. They kept glancing at the screens.

“People of Germany, prepare yourselves for an important statement!”

What was coming now?

The canteen was almost full. March was pressed up against a pillar. He could see Max Jaeger a few metres away, joking with a bosomy secretary from VA(1), the legal department. Max spotted him over her shoulder and gave him a grin. There was a roll of drums. The room was still. A newsreader said: “We are now going live to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.”

A bronze relief glittered in the television lights. A Nazi eagle, clutching the globe, shot rays of illumination, like a child’s drawing of a sunrise. Before it, with his thick black eyebrows and shaded jowls, stood the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Drexler. March suppressed a laugh: you would have thought that, in the whole of Germany, Goebbels could have found one spokesman who did not look like a convicted criminal.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brief statement for you from the Reich Ministry for Foreign Affairs.” He was addressing an audience of journalists, who were off-camera. He put on a pair of glasses and began to read.

“In accordance with the long-standing and well-documented desire of the Fuhrer and People of the Greater German Reich to live in peace and security with the countries of the world, and following extensive consultations with our allies in the European Community, the Reich Ministry for Foreign Affairs, on behalf of the Fuhrer, has today issued an invitation to the President of the United States of America to visit the Greater German Reich for personal discussions aimed at promoting greater understanding between our two peoples. This invitation has been accepted. We understand that the American administration has indicated this morning that Herr Kennedy intends to meet the Fuhrer in Berlin in September. Heil Hitler! Long live Germany!”

The picture faded to black and another drum roll signalled the start of the national anthem. The men and women in the canteen began to sing. March pictured them at that moment all over Germany — in shipyards and steelworks and offices and schools — the hard voices and the high merged together in one great bellow of acclamation rising to the heavens.

His own lips moved in conformity with the rest, but no sound emerged.

“More fucking work for us,” said Jaeger. They were back in their office. He had his feet on the desk and was puffing at a cigar. “If you think the Fuhrertag is a security nightmare -forget it. Can you imagine what it will be like with Kennedy in town as well?”

March smiled. “I think, Max, you are missing the historic dimension of the occasion.”

“Screw the historic dimension of the occasion. I’m thinking about my sleep. The bombs are already going off like fire crackers. Look at this.”

Jaeger swung his legs off the desk and rummaged through a pile of folders. “While you were playing around by the Havel, some of us were having to do some work.”

He picked up an envelope and tipped out the contents. It was a PPD file. Personal Possessions of the Deceased. From a mound of papers he pulled out two passports and handed them to March. One belonged to an SS officer, Paul Hahn; the other to a young woman, Magda Voss.

Jaeger said: “Pretty thing, isn’t she? They’d just married. Were leaving the reception in Spandau. On their way to their honeymoon. He’s driving. They turn into Nawener Strasse, A lorry pulls out in front of them. Guy jumps out the back with a gun. Our man panics. Goes into reverse. Wham! Up the kerb, straight into a lamp-post. While he’s trying to get back into first gear — bang! — shot in the head. End of groom. Little Magda gets out of the car, tries to make a run for it. Bang! End of bride. End of honeymoon. End of every fucking thing. Except it isn’t, because the families are still back at the reception toasting the newly-weds and nobody bothers to tell them what’s happened for another two hours.”

Jaeger blew his nose on a grimy handkerchief. March looked again at the girl’s passport. She was pretty: blonde and dark-eyed; now dead in the gutter at twenty-four.

“Who did it?” He handed the passports back.

Jaeger counted off on his fingers. “Poles. Latvians. Estonians. Ukrainians. Czechs. Croats. Caucasians.

Georgians. Reds. Anarchists. Who knows? Nowadays it could be anybody. The poor idiot stuck up an open invitation to the reception on his barracks noticeboard. The Gestapo reckon a cleaner, a cook, someone like that, saw it and passed on the word. Most of these barracks ancillaries are foreigners. They were all taken away this afternoon, poor bastards.”

He put the passports and identity cards back into the envelope and tossed it into a desk drawer.

“How did it go with you?”

“Have a chocolate.” March handed the box to Jaeger, who opened it. The tinny music filled the office.

“Very tasteful.”

“What do you know about it?”

“What? The Merry Widow? The Fuhrer’s favourite operetta. My mother was mad about it.”

“So was mine.”

Every German mother was mad about it. The Merry Widow by Franz Lehar. First performed in Vienna in 1905: as sugary as one of the city’s cream cakes. Lehar had died in 1948, and Hitler had sent a personal representative to his funeral.

“What else is there to say?” Jaeger took a chocolate in one of his great paws and popped it into his mouth. “Who are these from? A secret admirer?”

“I took them from Buhler’s mailbox.” March bit into a chocolate and winced at the sickly taste of liquid cherry. “Consider: you have no friends, yet someone sends you an expensive box of chocolates from Switzerland. With no message. A box that plays the Fuhrer’s favourite tune. Who would do that?” He swallowed the other half of the chocolate. “A poisoner, perhaps?”

“Oh Christ!” Jaeger spat the contents of his mouth into his hand, pulled* out his handkerchief and began wiping the brown smears of saliva from his fingers and lips. “Sometimes I have my doubts about your sanity.”

“I am systematically destroying state evidence” said March. He forced himself to eat another chocolate. “No, worse than that: I am consuming state evidence, thereby committing a double offence. Tampering with justice while enriching myself.”

Take some leave, man. I’m serious. You need a rest. My advice is to go down and dump those fucking chocolates in the trash as fast as possible. Then come home and have supper with me and Hannelore. You look as if you haven’t had a decent meal in weeks. The Gestapo have taken the file. The autopsy report is going straight to Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It’s over. Done. Forget it.”

“Listen, Max.” March told him about Jost’s confession, about how Jost had seen Globus with the body. He pulled out Buhler’s diary. “These names written here. Who are Stuckart and Luther?”

“I don’t know.” Jaeger’s face was suddenly drawn and hard. “What’s more, I don’t want to know.”

A steep flight of stone steps led down to the semi-darkness. At the bottom, March hesitated, the chocolates in his hand. A doorway to the left led out to the cobbled centre courtyard, where the rubbish was collected from large, rusty bins. To the right, a dimly lit passage led to the Registry.

He tucked the chocolates under his arm and turned right.

The Kripo Registry was housed in what had once been a warren of rooms next to the boilerhouse. The closeness of the boilers and the web of hot water pipes criss-crossing the ceiling kept the place permanently hot. There was a reassuring smell of warm dust and dry paper, and in the poor light, between the pillars, the wire racks of files and reports seemed to stretch to infinity.

The Registrar, a fat woman in a greasy tunic who had once been a wardress at the prison in Plotzensee, demanded his ID. He handed it to her, as he had done more than once a week for the past ten years. She looked at it, as she always did, as if she had never seen it before, then at his face, then back, then returned it, and gave an upward tilt of her chin, something between an acknowledgement and a sneer. She wagged her finger. “And no smoking,” she said, for the five-hundredth time.

From the shelf of reference books next to her desk he selected Wer Ist’s?, the German Who’s Who — a red-bound directory a thousand pages thick. He also took down the smaller, Party publication, Guide to the Personalities of the NSDAP, which included passport-sized photographs of each entrant. This was the book Halder had used to identify Buhler that morning. He lugged both volumes across to a table, and switched on the reading light. In the distance the boilers hummed. The Registry was deserted.

Of the two books, March preferred the Party’s Guide. This had been published more or less annually since the mid-1930s. Often, during the dark, quiet afternoons of the winter, he had come down to the warmth to browse through old editions. It intrigued him to trace how the faces had changed. The early volumes were dominated by the grizzled ex-Freikorps red-baiters, men with necks wider than their foreheads. They stared into the camera, scrubbed and ill at ease, like nineteenth-century farmhands in their Sunday best. But by the 1950s, the beer-hall brawlers had given way to the smooth technocrats of the Speer type — well-groomed university men with bland smiles and hard eyes.

There was one Luther. Christian name: Martin. Now here, comrades, is an historic name to play with. But this Luther looked nothing like his famous namesake. He was pudding-faced with black hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. March took out his notebook.

The details were sparse, but clear enough for March to guess his type. Chippy and aggressive, a rough-and-tumble street politician. And an opportunist. Like thousands of others, Luther had rushed to join the Party a few weeks after Hitler had come to power.

He flicked through the pages to Stuckart, Wilhelm, Doctor of Law. The photograph was a professional studio portrait, the face cast in a film star’s brooding half-shadow. A vain man, and a curious mixture: curly grey hair, intense eyes, straight jawline — yet a flabby, almost voluptuous mouth. He took more notes.

Here was a character quite different from Luther. An intellectual; an alter Kampfer, like Buhler; a high-flyer. To be Mayor of Stettin, a port city of nearly 300,000, at the age of thirty-one… Suddenly, March realised he had read all this before, very recently. But where? He could not remember. He closed his eyes. Come on.

Wer Ist’s added nothing new, except that Stuckart was unmarried whereas Luther was on his third wife. He found a clean double-page in his notebook and drew three columns; headed them Buhler, Luther and Stuckart; and began making lists of dates. Compiling a chronology was a favourite tool of his, a method of finding a pattern in what seemed otherwise to be a fog of random facts.

They had all been born in roughly the same period. Buhler was sixty-four; Luther, sixty-eight; Stuckart, sixty-one. They had all become civil servants in the 1930s -Buhler in 1939, Luther in 1936, Stuckart in 1935. They had all held roughly .similar ranks — Buhler and Stuckart had been state secretaries; Luther, an under state secretary. They had all retired in the 1950s — Buhler in 1951, Luther in 1955, Stuckart in 1953. They must all have known one another. They had all met at 10 am the previous Friday. Where was the pattern?

March tilted back in his chair and stared up at the tangle of pipes chasing one another like snakes across the ceiling.

And then he remembered.

He pitched himself forward, on to his feet.

Next to the entrance were loosely bound volumes of the Berliner Tageblatt, the Volkischer Beobachter and the SS paper, Das Schwarzes Korps. He wrenched back the pages of the Tageblatt, back to yesterday’s issue, back to the obituaries. There it was. He had seen it last night.

The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He was aware of the Registrar staring at him. “Are you ill, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer?”

“No. I’m fine. Do me a favour, will you?” He picked up a file requisition slip and wrote out Stuckart’s full name and date of birth. “Will you see if there’s a file on this person?”

She looked at the slip and held out a hand. “ID.”

He gave her his identity card. She licked her pencil and entered the twelve digits of March’s service number on to the requisition form. By this means a record was kept of which Kripo investigator had requested which file, and at what time. His interest would be there for the Gestapo to see, a full eight hours after he had been ordered off the Buhler case. Further evidence of his lack of National Socialist discipline. It could not be helped.

The Registrar had pulled out a long wooden drawer of index cards and was marching her square-tipped fingers along the tops of them. “Stroop,” she murmured. “Strunck. Struss. Stulpnagel…”

March said: “You’ve gone past it.”

She grunted and pulled out a slip of pink paper. “ ‘Stuckart, Wilhelm.’ ” She looked at him. “There is a file. It’s out.”

“Who has it?”

“See for yourself.”

March leaned forwards. Stuckart’s file was with Sturm-bannfuhrer Fiebes of Kripo Department VB3. The sexual crimes division.

The whisky and the dry air had given him a thirst. In the corridor outside the Registry was a water-cooler. He poured himself a drink and considered what to do.

What would a sensible man have done? That was easy. A sensible man would have done what Max Jaeger did every day. He would have put on his hat and coat and gone home to his wife and children. But for March that was not an option. The empty apartment in Ansbacher Strasse, the quarrelling neighbours and yesterday’s newspaper, these held no attractions for him. He had narrowed his life to such a point, the only thing left was his work. If he betrayed that, what else was there?

And there was something else, the instinct that propelled him out of bed every morning into each unwelcoming day, and that was the desire to know. In police work, there was always another junction to reach, another corner to peer around. Who were the Weiss family, and what had happened to them? Whose was the body in the lake? What linked the deaths of Buhler and Stuckart? It kept him going, his blessing or his curse, this compulsion to know. And so, in the end, there was no choice.

He tossed the paper cup into the waste bin, and went upstairs.

SIX

Walther Fiebes was in his office, drinking schnapps. Watching him from a table beneath the window was a row of five human heads — white plaster casts with hinged scalps, all raised like lavatory seats, displaying their brains in red and grey sections — the five strains which made up the German Empire.

Placards announced them from left to right, in descending order of acceptability to the authorities. Category One: Pure Nordic. Category Two: Predominantly Nordic or Phalic. Category Three: Harmonious Bastard with Slight Alpine Dinaric or Mediterranean Characteristics. These groups qualified for membership of the SS. The others could hold no public office and stared reproachfully at Fiebes. Category Four: Bastard of Predominantly East-Baltic or Alpine Origin. Category Five: Bastard of Extra-European Origin.

March was a One/Two; Fiebes, ironically, a borderline Three. But then, the racial fanatics were seldom the blue-eyed Aryan supermen — they, in the words of Das Schwarzes Korps, were “too inclined to take their membership of the Volk for granted”. Instead, the swampy frontiers of the German race were patrolled by those less confident of their blood-worthiness. Insecurity breeds good border guards. The knock-kneed Franconian schoolmaster, ridiculous in his Lederhosen; the Bavarian shopkeeper with his pebble glasses; the red-haired Thuringian accountant with a nervous tic and a predilection for the younger members of the Hitler Youth; the lame and the ugly, the runts of the national litter — these were the loudest defenders of the Volk.

So it was with Fiebes — the myopic, stooping, buck-toothed, cuckolded Fiebes — whom the Reich had blessed with the one job he really wanted. Homosexuality and miscegenation had replaced rape and incest as capital offences. Abortion, “an act of sabotage against Germany’s racial future”, was punishable by death. The permissive 1960s were showing a strong increase in such sex crimes. Fiebes, a sheet-sniffer by temperament, worked all the hours the Fuhrer sent and was as happy, in Max Jaeger’s words, as a pig in horseshit.

But not today. Now, he was drinking in the office, his eyes were moist, and his bat’s-wing toupee hung slightly askew.

March said: “According to the newspapers, Stuckart died of heart failure.” Fiebes blinked.

“But according to the Registry, the file on Stuckart is out to you.”

“I cannot comment.”

“Of course you can. We are colleagues.” March sat down and lit a cigarette. “I take it we are in the familiar business of "sparing the family embarrassment".”

Fiebes muttered: “Not just the family.” He hesitated. “Could I have one of those?”

“Sure.” March gave him a cigarette and flicked his lighter. Fiebes took an experimental draw, like a schoolboy.

“This affair has left me pretty well shaken, March, I don’t mind admitting. The man was a hero to me.”

“You knew him?”

“By reputation, naturally. I never actually met him. Why? What is your interest?”

“State security. That is all I can say. You know how it is.”

“Ah. Now I understand.” Fiebes poured himself another large helping of schnapps. “We’re very much alike, March, you and I.”

“We are?”

“Sure. You’re the only investigator who’s in this place as often as I am. We’ve got rid of our wives, our children — all that shit. We live for the job. When it goes well, we’re well. When it goes badly…’His head fell forward. Presently, he said: “Do you know Stuckart’s book?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

Fiebes opened a desk drawer and handed March a battered, leather-bound volume. A Commentary on the German Racial Laws. March leafed through it. There were chapters on each of the three Nuremberg Laws of 1935: the Reich Citizenship Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People. Some passages were underlined in red ink, with exclamation marks beside them. “For the avoidance of racial damage, it is necessary for couples to submit to medical examination before marriage.”

“Marriage between persons suffering from venereal disease, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy or ‘genetic infirmities’ (see 1933 Sterilisation Law) will be permitted only after production of a sterilisation certificate.” There were charts: “An Overview of the Admissibility of Marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans”, The Prevalence of Mischling of the First Degree”.

It was all gobbledygook to Xavier March.

Fiebes said: “Most of it is out of date now. A lot of it refers to Jews, and the Jews, as we know” — he gave a wink — “have all gone east. But Stuckart is still the bible of my calling. This is the foundation stone.”

March handed him the book. Fiebes cradled it like a baby. “Now what I really need to see”, said March, “is the file on Stuckart’s death.”

He was braced for an argument. Instead, Fiebes merely made an expansive gesture with his bottle of schnapps. “Go ahead.”

The Kripo file was an ancient one. It went back more than a quarter of a century. In 1936, Stuckart had become a member of the Interior Ministry’s “Committee for the Protection of German Blood” — a tribunal of civil servants, lawyers and doctors who considered applications for marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. Shortly afterwards, the police had started receiving anonymous allegations that Stuckart was providing marriage licences in exchange for cash bribes. He had also apparently demanded sexual favours from some of the women involved.

The first name complainant was a Dortmund tailor, a Herr Maser, who had protested to his local Party office that his fiancee had been assaulted. His statement had been passed to the Kripo. There was no record of any investigation. Instead, Maser and his girlfriend had been dispatched to concentration camps. Various other stories from informants, including one from Stuckart’s wartime Block-wart, were included in the file. No action had ever been taken.

In 1953, Stuckart had begun a liaison with an eighteen-year-old Warsaw girl, Maria Dymarski. She had claimed German ancestry back to 1720 in order to marry a Wehrmacht captain. The conclusion of the Interior Ministry’s experts was that the documents were forged. The following year, Dymarski had been given a permit to work as a domestic servant in Berlin. Her employer’s name was listed as Wilhelm Stuckart.

March looked up. “How did he get away with it for ten years?”

“He was an Obergruppenfuhrer, March. You don’t make complaints about a man like that. Remember what happened to Maser when he complained? Besides, nobody had any evidence — then.”

“And there is evidence now?”

“Look in the envelope.’”

Inside the file, in a manila envelope, were a dozen colour photographs, of startlingly good quality, showing Stuckart and Dymarski in bed. White bodies against red satin sheets. The faces — contorted in some shots, relaxed in others — were easy to identify. They were all taken from the same position, alongside the bed. The girl’s body, pale and undernourished, looked fragile beneath the man’s. In one shot she sat astride him — thin white arms clasped behind her head, face tilted towards the camera. Her features were broad, Slavic. But with her shoulder-length hair dyed blonde she could have passed as a German.

“These weren’t taken recently?”

“About ten years ago. He turned greyer. She put on a bit of weight. She looked more of a tart as she got older.”

“Do we have any idea where they are?” The background was a blur of colours. A brown wooden bedhead, red-and-white striped wallpaper, a lamp with a yellow shade; it could have been anywhere.

“It’s not his apartment — at least, not the way it’s decorated now. A hotel, maybe a whorehouse. The camera is behind a two-way mirror. See the way they sometimes seem to be staring into the camera? I’ve seen that look a hundred times. They’re checking themselves in the mirror.”

March examined each of the pictures again. They were glossy and unscratched — new prints from old negatives. The sort of pictures a pimp might try and sell you in a back street in Kreuzberg.

“Where did you find them?”

“Next to the bodies.”

Stuckart had shot his mistress first. According to the autopsy report, she had lain, fully clothed, face down on the bed in Stuckart’s apartment in Fritz Todt-Platz. He had put a bullet in the back of her head with his SS Luger (if that was so, thought March, it was probably the first time the old pen-pusher had ever used it). Traces of impacted cotton and down in the wound suggested he had fired the bullet through a pillow. Then he had sat on the edge of the bed and apparently shot himself through the roof of his mouth. In the scene-of-crime photographs neither body was recognisable. The pistol was still clutched in Stuckart’s hand. “He left a note,” said Fiebes, “on the dining room table.”

“By this action I hope to spare embarrassment to my family, the Reich and the Fuhrer. Heil Hitler! Long live Germany! Wilhelm Stuckart.”

“Blackmail?”

“Presumably.”

“Who found the bodies?”

“This is the best part.” Fiebes spat out each word as if it were poison: “An American woman journalist.”

Her statement was in the file: Charlotte Maguire, aged 25, Berlin representative of an American news agency, World European Features.

“A real little bitch. Started shrieking about her rights the moment she was brought in. Rights!” Fiebes took another swig of schnapps. “Shit, I suppose we have to be nice to the Americans now, do we?”

March made a note of her address. The only other witness questioned was the porter who worked in Stuckart’s apartment block. The American woman claimed to have seen two men on the stairs immediately before the discovery of the bodies; but the porter insisted there had been no one.

March looked up suddenly. Fiebes jumped. “What is it?”

“Nothing. A shadow at your door, perhaps.”

“My God, this place…” Fiebes flung open the frosted glass door and peered both ways along the corridor. While his back was turned, March detached the envelope pinned to the back of the file and slipped it into his pocket.

“Nobody.” He shut the door. “You’re losing your nerve, March.”

“An over-active imagination has always been my curse.” He closed the folder and stood up.

Fiebes swayed, squinting. “Don’t you want to take it with you? Aren’t you working on this with the Gestapo?”

“No. A separate matter.”

“Oh.” He sat down heavily. “When you said "state security", I assumed… Doesn’t matter. Out of my hands. The Gestapo have taken it over, thank God. Obergruppenfuhrer Globus has assumed responsibility. You must have heard of him? A thug, it is true, but he’ll sort it out.”

The information bureau at Alexander Platz had Luther’s address. According to police records, he still lived in Dahlem. March lit another cigarette, then dialled the number. The telephone rang for a long time — a bleak, unfriendly echo, somewhere in the city. Just as he was about to hang up, a woman answered.

“Yes?”

“Frau Luther?”

“Yes.” She sounded younger than he had expected. Her voice was thick, as if she had been crying.

“My name is Xavier March. I am an investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei. May I speak to your husband?”

“I’m sorry … I don’t understand. If you’re from the Polizei, surely you know…”

“Know? Know what?”

That he is missing. He disappeared on Sunday.” She started to cry.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” March balanced his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray.

God in heaven, another one.

“He said he was going on a business trip to Munich and would be back on Monday.” She blew her nose. “But I have already explained all this. Surely you know that this matter is being dealt with at the very highest level. What…?”

She broke off. March could hear a conversation at the other end. There was a man’s voice in the background: harsh and questioning. She said something he could not hear, then came back on the line.

“Obergruppenfuhrer Globocnik is with me now. He would like to talk to you. What did you say your name was?”

March replaced the receiver.

On his way out, he thought of the call at Buhler’s place that morning. An old man’s voice:

“Buhler? Speak to me. Who is that?”

“A friend.”

Click.

SEVEN

Bulow Strasse runs west to east for about a kilometre, through one of the busiest quarters of Berlin, close to the Gotenland railway station. The American woman’s address proved to be an apartment block midway down.

It was seedier than March had expected: five storeys high, black with a century of traffic fumes, streaked with bird shit. A drunk sat on the pavement next to the entrance, turning his head to follow each passer-by. On the opposite side of the street was an elevated section of the U-bahn. As he parked, a train was pulling out of the Billow Strasse station, its red and yellow carriages riding blue-white flashes of electricity, vivid in the gathering dark.

Her apartment was on the fourth floor. She was not in. “Henry,” read a note written in English and pinned to her door, “I’m in the bar on Potsdamer Strasse. Love, Charlie.”

March knew only a few words of English — but enough to grasp the sense of the message. Wearily, he descended the stairs. Potsdamer Strasse was a long street, with many bars.

“I’m looking for Fraulein Maguire,” he said to the concierge in the hall. “Any idea where I might find her?”

It was like throwing a switch: “She went out an hour ago, Sturmbannfuhrer. You’re the second man to ask. Fifteen minutes after she went out, a young chap came looking for her. Another foreigner — smartly dressed, short hair. She won’t be back until after midnight, that much I can promise you.”

March wondered how many of her other tenants the old lady had informed on to the Gestapo.

“Is there a bar she goes to regularly?”

“Heini’s, round the corner. That’s where all the damned foreigners go.”

“Your powers of observation do you credit, madam.”

By the time he left her to her knitting five minutes later, March was laden with information about “Charlie” Maguire. He knew she had dark hair, cut short; that she was small and slim; that she was wearing a raincoat of shiny blue plastic “and high heels, like a tart’; that she had lived here six months; that she stayed out all hours and often got up at noon; that she was behind with the rent; that he should see the bottles of liquor the hussy threw out… No, thank you, madam, he had no desire to inspect them, that would not be necessary, you have been most helpful…

He turned right along Bulow Strasse. Another right took him to Potsdamer Strasse. Heini’s was fifty metres up on the left. A painted sign showed a landlord with an apron and a handlebar moustache, carrying a foaming stein of beer. Beneath it, part of the red neon lettering had burnt out: Hei s.

The bar was quiet, except for one comer, where a group of six sat around a table, talking loudly in English accents. She was the only woman. She was laughing and ruffling an older man’s hair. He was laughing, too. Then he saw March and said something and the laughter stopped. They watched him as he approached. He was conscious of his uniform, of the noise of his jackboots on the polished wooden floor.

“Fraulein Maguire, my name is Xavier March of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei.” He showed her his ID. “I would like to speak with you, please.”

She had large dark eyes, glittering in the bar lights.

“Go ahead.”

“In private, please.”

“I’ve nothing more to say.” She turned to the man whose hair she had ruffled and murmured something March did not understand. They all laughed. March did not move.

Eventually, a younger man in a sports jacket and a button-down shirt stood up. He pulled a card from his breast pocket and held it out.

“Henry Nightingale. Second Secretary at the United States Embassy. I’m sorry, Herr March, but Miss Maguire has said all she has to say to your colleagues.”

March ignored the card.

The woman said: “If you’re not going to go, why don’t you join us? This is Howard Thompson of the New York Times.” The older man raised his glass. This is Bruce Fallen of United Press. Peter Kent, CBS. Arthur Haines, Reuters. Henry, you’ve met. Me, you know, apparently. We’re just having a little drink to celebrate the great news. Come on. The Americans and the SS — we’re all friends now.”

“Careful, Charlie,” said the young man from the Embassy.

“Shut up, Henry. Oh, Christ, if this man doesn’t move soon, I’ll go and talk to him out of sheer boredom. Look—” There was a crumpled sheet of paper on the table in front of her. She tossed it to March. "That’s what I got for getting mixed up in this. My visa’s withdrawn for "fraternising with a German citizen without official permission". I was supposed to leave today, but my friends here had a word with the Propaganda Ministry and got me a week’s extension. Wouldn’t have looked good, would it? Throwing me out on the day of the great news.”

March said: “It’s important.”

She stared at him, a cool look. The Embassy man put his hand on her arm. “You don’t have to go.”

That seemed to make up her mind. “Will you shut up, Henry?” She shook herself free and pulled her coat over her shoulders. “He looks respectable enough. For a Nazi. Thanks for the drink.” She downed the contents of her glass — whisky and water, by the look of it — and stood up. “Let’s go.”

The man called Thompson said something in English.

“I will, Howard. Don’t worry.”

Outside, she said: “Where are we going?”

“My car.”

“Then where?”

“Doctor Stuckart’s apartment.”

“What fun.”

She was small. Even clattering on her high heels, she was several centimetres short of March’s shoulder. He opened the door of the Volkswagen for her and, as she bent to get in, he smelled the whisky on her breath, and also cigarettes — French, not German — and perfume: something expensive, he thought.

The Volkswagen’s 1300 cc engine rattled behind them. March drove carefully: west along Billow Strasse, around the Berlin-Gotenland station, north up the Avenue of Victory. The captured artillery from the Barbarossa campaign lined the boulevard, barrels tilted towards the stars. Normally this section of the capital was quiet at night, Berliners preferring the noisy cafes behind the K-damm, or the jumbled streets of Kreuzberg. But on this evening, people were everywhere — standing in groups, admiring the guns and the floodlit buildings, strolling and window shopping.

“What kind of person wants to go out at night and look at guns?” She shook her head in wonderment.

Tourists,” said March. “By the twentieth, there’ll be more than three million of them.”

It was risky, taking the American woman back to Stuckart’s place, especially now Globus knew someone from the Kripo was looking for Luther. But he needed to see the apartment, to hear the woman’s story. He had no plan, no real idea of what he might find. He recalled the Fuhrer’s words — “I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker” — and he smiled.

Ahead of them, searchlights picked out the eagle on top of the Great Hall. It seemed to hang in the sky, a golden bird of prey hovering over the capital.

She noticed his grin. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing.” He turned right at the European Parliament. The flags of the twelve member nations were lit by spots. The swastika which flew above them was twice the size of the other standards. “Tell me about Stuckart. How well did you know him?”

“Hardly at all. I met him through my parents. My father was at the Embassy here before the war. He married a German, an actress. She’s my mother. Monika Koch, did you ever hear of her?”

“No. I don’t believe so.” Her German was flawless. She must have spoken it since childhood; her mother’s doing, no doubt.

“She’d be sorry to hear that. She seems to think she was a big star over here. Anyway, they both knew Stuckart slightly. When I arrived in Berlin last year, they gave me a list of people to go and talk to — contacts. Half of them turned out to be dead, one way or another. Most of the rest didn’t want to meet me. American journalists don’t make healthy company, if you know what I mean. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead. What was Stuckart like?”

“Awful.” Her lighter flared in the darkness; she inhaled deeply. “He made a grab at me, even though this woman of his was in the apartment at the same time. That was just before Christmas. I kept away from him after that. Then, last week, I got a message from my office in New York. They wanted a piece for Hitler’s seventy-fifth birthday, talking to some of the people who knew him from the old days.”

“So you rang Stuckart?”

“Right.”

“And arranged to meet him on Sunday, and when you got there, he was dead?”

“If you know it all,” she said irritably, “why do you need to talk to me again?”

“I don’t know it all, Fraulein. That’s the point.”

After that, they drove in silence.

Fritz Todt-Platz was a couple of blocks from the Avenue of Victory. Laid out in the mid-1950s as part of Speer’s redevelopment of the city, it was a square of expensive-looking apartment buildings, erected around a small memorial garden. In the centre stood an absurdly heroic statue of Todt, the creator of the Autobahnen, by Professor Thorak.

“Which one was Stuckart’s?”

She pointed to a block on the other side of the square. March drove round and parked outside it.

“Which floor?”

“Fourth.”

He looked up. The fourth floor was in darkness. Good.

Todt’s statue was floodlit. In the reflected light, her face was white. She looked as if she was about to be sick. Then he remembered the photographs Fiebes had shown him of the corpses — Stuckart’s skull had been a crater, like a guttered candle — and he understood.

She said: “I don’t have to do this, do I?”

“No. But you will.”

“Why?”

“Because you want to know what happened as much as I do. That’s why you’ve come this far”

She stared at him again, then stubbed out her cigarette, twisting it and breaking it in the ashtray. “Let’s do it quickly. I want to get back to my friends.”

The keys to the building were still in the envelope which March had removed from Stuckart’s file. There were five in all. He found the one that fitted the front door and let them into the foyer. It was vulgarly luxurious, in the new imperial style — white marble floor, crystal chandeliers, nineteenth-century gilt chairs with red plush upholstery, the air scented with dried flowers. No porter, thankfully: he must have gone off duty. Indeed, the entire building seemed deserted. Perhaps the tenants had left for their second homes in the country. Berlin could be unbearably crowded in the week before the Fuhrertag. The smart set always fled the capital.

“Now what?”

“Just tell me what happened.”

The porter was at the desk, here,” she said. “I asked for Stuckart. He directed me to the fourth floor. I couldn’t take the elevator, it was being repaired. There was a man working on it. So I walked.”

“What time was this?”

“Noon. Exactly.”

They climbed the stairs.

She went on: “I had just reached the second floor when two men came running towards me.”

“Describe them, please.”

“It all happened too quickly for me to get a very good look. Both in their thirties. One had a brown suit, the other had a green anorak. Short hair. That’s about it.”

“What did they do when they saw you?”

They just pushed past me. The one in the anorak said something to the other, but I couldn’t hear what it was. There was a lot of drilling going on from the elevator shaft. After that, I carried on up to Stuckart’s apartment and rang the bell. There was no reply.”

“So what did you do?”

“I walked down to the porter and asked him to open Stuckart’s door, to check he was okay.”

“Why?”

She hesitated. “There was something about those two men. I had a hunch. You know: that feeling when you knock on a door and nobody answers but you’re sure someone’s in.”

“And you persuaded the porter to open the door?”

“I told him I’d call the police if he didn’t. I said he would have to answer to the authorities if anything had happened to Doctor Stuckart.”

Shrewd psychology, thought March. After thirty years of being told what to do, the average German was careful not to take final responsibility for anything, even for not opening a door. “And then you found the bodies?”

She nodded. The porter saw them first. He screamed and I came running.”

“Did you mention the two men you’d seen on the stairs? What did the porter say?”

“He was too busy throwing up to talk at first. Then he just insisted he’d seen nobody. He said I must have imagined it.”

“Do you think he was lying?”

She considered this. “No, I don’t. I think he genuinely didn’t see them. On the other hand, I don’t see how he could have missed them.”

They were still on the second floor landing, at the point at which she said the men had passed her. March walked back down the flight of stairs. She waited for a moment, then followed him. At the foot of the steps a door led off to the first floor corridor.

He said, half to himself: They could have hidden along here, I suppose. Where else?”

They continued down to the ground floor. Here there were two more doors. One led to the foyer. March tried the other. It was unlocked. “Or they could have got out down here.”

Bare concrete steps, neon-lit, led down to the basement. At the bottom was a long passage, with doors off it. March opened each in turn. A lavatory. A store-room. A generator room. A bomb shelter.

Under the 1948 Reich Civil Defence Law, every new building had to be equipped with a bomb shelter; those beneath offices and apartment blocks were also required to have their own generators and air-filtration systems. This one was particularly well-appointed: bunk beds, a storage cupboard, a separate cubicle with toilet facilities. March carried a metal chair across to the air vent, set into the wall two and a half metres above the ground. He grasped the metal cover. It came away easily in his hands. All the screws had been removed.

The Ministry of Construction specifies an aperture with a diameter of half a metre,” said March. He unbuckled his belt and hung it and his pistol over the back of the chair. “If only they appreciated the difficulties that gives us. Would you mind?”

He took off his jacket and handed it to the woman, then mounted the chair. Reaching into the shaft, he found something hard to hold on to, and pulled himself in. The filters and the fan had both been removed. By working his shoulders against the metal casing he was able to move slowly forwards. The darkness was complete, He choked on the dust. His hands, stretched out in front of him, touched metal, and he pushed. The outside cover yielded and crashed to the ground. The night air rushed in. For a moment, he felt an almost overpowering urge to crawl out into it, but instead he wriggled backwards and lowered himself into the basement shelter. He landed, dusty and grease-smeared.

The woman was pointing his pistol at him.

“Bang, bang,” she said. “You’re dead.” She smiled at his alarm: “American joke.”

“Not funny.” He took the Luger and put it back in his holster.

“Okay,” she said, “here’s a better one. Two murderers are seen by a witness leaving a building and it takes the police four days to work out how they did it. I’d say that was funny, wouldn’t you?”

“It depends on the circumstances.” He brushed the dust off his shirt. “If the police found a note beside one of the victims in his own handwriting, saying it was suicide, I could understand why they wouldn’t bother looking any further.”

“But then you come along and you do look further.”

“I’m the curious type.”

“Clearly.” She smiled again. “So Stuckart was shot and the murderers tried to make it look like suicide?” He hesitated. “It’s a possibility.”

He regretted the words the moment he uttered them. She had led him into disclosing more than was wise about Stuckart’s death. Now a faint light of mockery played in her eyes. He cursed himself for underrating her. She had the cunning of a professional criminal. He considered taking her back to the bar and going on alone, but dismissed the idea. It was no good. To know what had happened, he needed to see it through her eyes.

He buttoned his tunic. “Now we must inspect Party Comrade Stuckart’s apartment.”

That, he was pleased to see, knocked the smile off her face. But she did not refuse to go with him. They climbed the stairs, and it struck him again that she was almost as anxious to see Stuckart’s flat as he was.

They took the elevator to the fourth floor. As they stepped out, he heard, along the corridor to their left, a door being opened. He grabbed the American’s arm and steered her round the corner, out of sight. When he looked back, he could see a middle-aged woman in a fur coat heading for the elevator. She was carrying a small dog.

“You’re hurting my arm.”

“Sorry.” He was hiding from shadows. The woman talked quietly to the dog and disappeared into the lift. March wondered whether Globus had retrieved the file from Fiebes yet, whether he had discovered that the keys were missing. They would have to hurry.

The door to Stuckart’s apartment had been sealed that day, close to the handle, with red wax. A note informed the curious that these premises were now under the jurisdiction of the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, and that entry was forbidden. March pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves and broke the seal. The key turned easily in the lock.

He said: “Don’t touch anything.”

More luxury, to match the building: elaborate gilt mirrors, antique tables and chairs with fluted legs and ivory damask upholstery, a carpet of royal blue with Persian rugs. The spoils of war, the fruits of Empire.

“Now tell me again what happened.”

“The porter opened the door. We came into the hall.” Her voice had risen. She was trembling. “He shouted and there was no reply, so we both came right in. I opened that door first.”

It was the sort of bathroom March had seen only in glossy magazines. White marble and brown smoky mirrors, a sunken bathtub, twin basins with gold taps… Here, he thought, was the hand of Maria Dymarski, leafing through German Vogue at the Ku-damm hairdressers, while her Polish roots were bleached Aryan white.

Then, I came into the sitting room…”

March switched on the light. One wall consisted of tall windows, looking out over the square. The other three had large mirrors. Wherever he turned, he could see images of himself and the girl: the black uniform and the shiny blue coat incongruous among the antiques. Nymphs were the decorative conceit. Fashioned in gilt, they draped themselves around the mirrors; cast in bronze, they supported table lamps and clocks. There were paintings of nymphs and statues of nymphs; wood nymphs and water nymphs; Amphitrite and Thetis.

“I heard him scream. I went to help…”

March opened the door of the bedroom. She turned away. Blood in half-light looks black. Dark shapes, twisted and grotesque, leapt up the walls and across the ceiling, like the shadows of trees.

They were on the bed, yes?”

She nodded.

“What did you do?”

“Rang the police.”

“Where was the porter?”

“In the bathroom.”

“Did you look at them again?”

“What do you think?” She brushed her sleeve angrily across her eyes.

“All right, Fraulein. It’s enough. Wait in the sitting room.”

The human body contains six litres of blood: sufficient to paint a large apartment. March tried to avoid looking at the bed and the walls as he worked — opening the cupboard doors, feeling the lining of every item of clothing, skimming every pocket with his gloved hands. He moved on to the bedside cabinets. These had been unlocked and searched before. The contents of the drawers had been emptied out for inspection, then stuffed back haphazardly — a typical, clumsy Orpo job, destroying more clues than it uncovered.

Nothing, nothing. Had he risked everything for this?

He was on his knees, with his arm stretched beneath the bed, when he heard it. It took a second for the sound to register.

“I’m sorry” she said, when he rushed in. “I shouldn’t have touched it.”

He took the chocolate box from her, carefully, and closed the lid on its tune.

“Where was it?”

“On that table.”

Someone had collected Stuckart’s mail for the past three days and had inspected it, neatly slicing open the envelopes, pulling out the letters. They were heaped up next to the telephone. He had not noticed them when he came in. How had he missed them? The chocolates, he could see, had been wrapped exactly as Buhler’s had been, postmarked Zurich, 16.00 hours, Monday afternoon.

Then he saw she was holding a paper knife.

“I told you not to touch anything.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Do you think this is a game?” She’s crazier than I am. “You’re going to have to leave.” He tried to grab her, but she twisted free.

“No way.” She backed away, pointing the knife at him. “I reckon I have as much right to be here as you do. You try and throw me out and I’ll scream so loudly I’ll have every Gestapo man in Berlin hammering on that door.”

“You have a knife, but I have a gun.”

“Ah, but you daren’t use it.”

March ran his hand through his hair. He thought: You believed you were so clever, finding her, persuading her to come back. And all the time, she wanted to come. She’s looking for something … He had been an idiot.

He said: “You’ve been lying to me.”

She said: “You’ve been lying to me. That makes us even.”

This is dangerous. I beg you, you have no idea…”

“What I do know is this: my career could have ended because of what happened in this apartment. I could be fired when I get back to New York. I’m being thrown out of this lousy country, and I want to find out why.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

They stood like that for perhaps half a minute: he with his hand to his hair, she with the silver paper knife still pointed at him. Outside, across the Platz, a clock began to chime. March looked at his watch. It was already ten.

“We have no time for this.” He spoke quickly. “Here are the keys to the apartment. This one opens the door downstairs. This one is for the main door up here. This fits the bedside cabinet. That is a desk key. This one” — he held it up- “this, I think, is the key to a safe. Where is it?”

“I don’t know.” Seeing his look of disbelief, she added: “I swear.”

They searched in silence for ten minutes, shifting — furniture, pulling up rugs, looking behind paintings. Suddenly she said: "This mirror is loose.”

It was a small antique looking glass, maybe thirty centimetres square, above the table on which she had opened the letters. March grasped the ormolu frame. It gave a little but would not come away from the wall.

Try this.” She gave him the knife.

She was right. Two-thirds down the left-hand side, behind the lip of the frame, was a tiny lever. March pressed it with the tip of the paper knife, and felt something yield. The mirror was on a hinge. It swung open to reveal the safe.

He inspected it and swore. The key was not enough. There was also a combination lock.

“Too much for you?” she asked.

“ ‘In adversity,’ ” quoted March, “ ‘the resourceful officer will always discover opportunity.’ ” He picked up the telephone.

EIGHT

Across a distance of five thousand kilometres, President Kennedy flashed his famous smile. He stood behind a cluster of microphones, addressing a crowd in a football stadium. Banners of red, white and blue streamed behind him — “Re-elect Kennedy!” Tour More in Sixty-Four!” He shouted something March did not understand and the crowd cheered back.

“What is he talking about?”

The television cast a blue glow in the darkness of Stuckart’s apartment. The woman translated. “ ‘The Germans have their system and we have ours. But we are all citizens of one planet. And as long as our two nations remember that, I sincerely believe: we can have peace.’ Cue loud applause from dumb audience.”

She had kicked off her shoes and was lying full-length on her stomach in front of the set.

“Ah. Here’s the serious bit.” She waited until he finished speaking, then translated again. “He says he plans to raise human rights questions during his visit in the Fall.” She laughed and shook her head. “God, Kennedy is so full of shit. The only thing he really wants to raise is his vote in November.”

“ "Human rights"?”

“The thousands of dissidents you people lock up in camps. The millions of Jews who vanished in the war. The torture. The killing. Sorry to mention them, but we have this bourgeois notion that human beings have rights. Where have you been the last twenty years?”

The contempt in her voice jolted him. He had never properly spoken to an American before, had only encountered the occasional tourist — and those few had been chaperoned around the capital, shown only what the Propaganda Ministry wanted them to see, like Red Cross officials on a KZ inspection. Listening to her now it occurred to him she probably knew more about his country’s recent history than he did. He felt he should make some sort of defence but did not know what to say.

“You talk like a politician,” was all he could manage. She did not even bother to reply.

He looked again at the figure on the screen. Kennedy projected an image of youthful vigour, despite his spectacles and balding head.

“Will he win?” he asked.

She was silent. For a moment, he thought she had decided not to speak to him. Then she said: “He will now. He looks in good shape for a man of seventy-five, wouldn’t you say?”

“Indeed.” March was standing a metre back from the window smoking a cigarette, alternately watching the television and watching the square. Traffic was sparse -mostly people returning from dinner or the cinema. A young couple held hands under the statue of Todt. They might be Gestapo; it was hard to tell.

The millions of Jews who vanished in the war… He was risking court martial simply by talking to her. Yet her mind must be a treasure house, full of ill-considered objects which meant nothing to her but would be gold to him. If he could somehow overcome her furious resentment, pick his way around the propaganda…

No. A ridiculous thought. He had problems enough as it was.

A solemn blonde newsreader filled the screen; behind her, a composite picture of Kennedy and the Fuhrer and the single word “Detente”.

Charlotte Maguire had helped herself to a glass of Scotch from Stuckart’s drinks cabinet. Now she raised it to the television in mock salute. To Joseph P. Kennedy: President of the United States — appeaser, anti-Semite, gangster and sonofabitch. May you roast in hell.”

The clock outside struck ten-thirty, ten forty-five, eleven.

She said: “Maybe this friend of yours had second thoughts.”

March shook his head. “He’ll come.”

A few moments later, a battered blue Skoda entered the square. It made one slow circuit of the Platz, then came round again and parked opposite the apartment block. Max Jaeger emerged from the driver’s side; from the other came a small man in a shabby sports jacket and trilby, carrying a doctor’s bag. He squinted up at the fourth floor and backed away, but Jaeger took his arm and propelled him towards the entrance.

In the stillness of the apartment, a buzzer sounded.

“It would be best,” said March, “if you didn’t speak.”

She shrugged. “As you like.”

He went into the hall and picked up the intercom.

“Hello, Max.”

He pressed a switch and unlocked the door. The corridor was empty. After a minute, a soft ping signalled the arrival of the elevator and the little man appeared. He scuttled down the passage and into Stuckart’s hall without uttering a word. He was in his fifties and carried with him, like bad breath, the reek of the back-streets — of furtive deals and triple-entry accounting, of card-tables folded away at the sound of a tread on the stairs. Jaeger followed close behind.

When the man saw March was not alone, he shrank back into the corner.

“Who’s the woman?” He appealed to Jaeger. “You never said anything about a woman. Who’s the woman?”

“Shut up, Willi,” said Max. He gave him a gentle push into the drawing room.

March said: “Never mind her, Willi. Look at this.”

He switched on the lamp, angling it upwards.

Willi Stiefel took in the safe at a glance. “English,” he said. “Casing: one and a half centimetres, high-tensile steel. Fine mechanism. Eight-figure code. Six, if you’re lucky.” He appealed to March: “I beg you, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. It’s the guillotine for me next time.”

“It’ll be the guillotine for you this time,” said Jaeger, “if you don’t get on with it.”

“Fifteen minutes, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. Then I’m out of here. Agreed?”

March nodded. “Agreed.”

Stiefel gave the woman a last, nervous look. Then he removed his hat and jacket, opened his case, and took out a pair of thin rubber gloves and a stethoscope.

March took Jaeger over to the window, and whispered: “Did he take much persuading?”

“What do you think? But then I told him he was still covered by Forty-two. He saw the light.”

Paragraph Forty-two of the Reich Criminal Code stated that all “habitual criminals and offenders against morality” could be arrested on suspicion that they might commit an offence. National Socialism taught that criminality was in the blood: something you were born with, like musical talent or blond hair. Thus the character of the criminal rather than his crime determined the sentence. A gangster stealing a few Marks after a fist-fight could be sentenced to death, on the grounds that he “displayed an inclination towards criminality so deep-rooted that it precluded his ever becoming a useful member of the folk community”. But the next day, in the same court, a loyal Party member who had shot his wife for an insulting remark might merely be bound over to keep the peace.

Stiefel could not afford another arrest. He had recently served nine years in Spandau for a bank robbery. He had no choice but to co-operate with the Polizei, whatever they asked him to be — informant, agent provocateur, or safebreaker. These days, he ran a watch repair business in Wedding and swore he was going straight: a protestation of innocence it was hard to believe, watching him now. He had placed the stethoscope against the safe door and was twisting the dial a digit at a time. His eyes were closed as he listened for the click of the lock’s tumblers falling into place.

Come on, Willi. March rubbed his hands. His fingers were numb with apprehension.

“Jesus Christ,” said Jaeger, under his breath. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I’ll explain later.”

“No thanks. I told you: I don’t want to know.”

Stiefel straightened and let out a long sigh. “One,” he said. One was the first digit of the combination.

Like Stiefel, Jaeger kept glancing at the woman. She was sitting demurely on one of the gilt chairs, her hands folded in her lap. “A foreign woman, for God’s sake!”

“Six.”

So it went on, one digit every few minutes, until, at 11.35, Stiefel said to March: The owner: when was he born?”

“Why?”

“It would save time. I think he’s set this with the date of his birth. So far, I’ve got one-six-one-one-one-nine. The sixteenth of the eleventh, nineteen…”

March checked his notes from Stuckart’s Wer Ist’s? entry.

“Nineteen hundred and two.”

“Zero-two.” Stiefel tried the combination, then smiled. “It’s usually the owner’s birthday,” he said, “or the Fuhrer’s birthday, or the Day of National Reawakening.” He pulled open the door.

The safe was small: a fifteen-centimetre cube containing no bank notes or jewellery, just paper — old paper, most of it. March piled it on to the table and began rifling through it.

Td like to leave now, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”

March ignored him. Tied up in red ribbon were the title deeds to a property in Wiesbaden — the family home, by the look of it. There were stock certificates. Hoesch, Siemens, Thyssen: the companies were standard, but the sums invested looked astronomical. Insurance papers. One human touch: a photograph of Maria Dymarski, in a 1950s cheesecake pose.

Suddenly, from the window, Jaeger gave a shout of warning: “Here they come, you fucking, fucking fool!”

An unmarked grey BMW was driving round the square, fast, followed by an army truck. The vehicles swerved to a halt outside, blocking the street. A man in a belted leather coat leapt out of the car. The tailgate of the lorry was kicked down and SS troops carrying automatic rifles began jumping out.

“Move! Move!” yelled Jaeger. He began pushing Charlie and Stiefel towards the door.

With shaking fingers, March worked his way through the remaining papers. A blue envelope, unmarked. Something heavy in it. The flap of the envelope was open. He saw a letterhead in copperplate — Zaugg Cie, Bankiers — and stuffed it into his pocket.

The buzzer from the door downstairs began sounding in long, urgent bursts.

They must know we’re up here!”

Jaeger said: “Now what?” Stiefel had turned grey. The woman stood motionless. She did not seem to know what was going on.

The basement,” shouted March. “They might just miss us. Get the elevator.”

The other three ran out into the corridor. He began stuffing the papers back into the safe, slammed it shut, twirled the dial, pushed the mirror back into place. There was no time to do anything about the broken seal on the apartment door. They were holding the lift for him. He squeezed in and they began their descent.

Third floor, second floor …

March prayed it would not stop at the ground floor. It did not. It opened on to the empty basement. Above their heads they could hear the heels of the stormtroopers on the marble floor.

This way!” He led them into the bomb shelter. The grating from the air vent was where he had left it, leaning against the wall.

Stiefel needed no telling. He ran to the air shaft, lifted his bag above his head and tossed it in. He grabbed at the brickwork, tried to haul himself after it, his feet scrabbling for a purchase on the smooth wall. He was yelling over his shoulder: “Help me!” March and Jaeger seized his legs and heaved. The little man wriggled head first into the hole and was gone.

Coming closer — the ring and scrape of boots on concrete. The SS had found the entrance to the basement. A man was shouting.

March to Charlie: “You next.”

“I’ll tell you something,” she said, pointing at Jaeger. “He’ll never make it.”

Jaeger’s hands went to his waist. It was true. He was too fat. “I’ll stay. I’ll think of something. You two get out.”

“No.” This was turning into a farce. March took the envelope from his pocket and pressed it into Charlie’s hand. Take this. We may be searched.”

“And you?” She had her stupid shoes in one hand, was already mounting the chair.

“Wait until you hear from me. Tell nobody.” He grabbed her, locked his hands just below her knees, and threw. She was so light, he could have wept.

The SS were in the basement. Along the passage — the crash of doors flung open.

March swung the grating back into place and kicked away the chair.