Fatherland

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.