Fatherland

“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.