Fatherland

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.”