Fatherland

An illuminated map of Berlin takes up half the far wall. A galaxy of stars, orange in the semi-darkness, marks the capital’s one hundred and twenty-two police stations. To its left is a second map, even larger, depicting the entire Reich. Red lights pinpoint those towns big enough to warrant their own Kripo divisions. The centre of Europe glows crimson. Further east, the lights gradually thin until, beyond Moscow, there are only a few isolated sparks, winking like camp fires in the blackness. It is a planetarium of crime.

Krause, the Duty Officer for the Berlin Gau, sat on a raised platform beneath the display. He was on the telephone as March approached and raised his hand in greeting. Before him, a dozen women in starched white shirts sat in glass partitions, each wearing a headset with a microphone attached. What they must hear! A sergeant from a Panzer division comes home from a tour in the East. After a family supper, he takes out his pistol, shoots his wife and each of his three children in turn. Then he splatters his skull across the ceiling. An hysterical neighbour calls the cops. And the news comes here — is controlled, evaluated, reduced — before being passed downstairs to that corridor with cracked green linoleum, stale with cigarette smoke.

Behind the Duty Officer, a uniformed secretary with a sour face was making entries on the night incident board. There were four columns: crime (serious), crime (violent), incidents, fatalities. Each category was further quartered: time reported, source of information, detail of report, action taken. An average night of mayhem in the world’s largest city, with its population often million, was reduced to hieroglyphics on a few square metres of white plastic.

There had been eighteen deaths since ten o’clock the previous night. The worst incident- JH 2D 4K-was three adults and four children killed in a car smash in Pankow just after 11. No action taken; that could be left to the Orpo. A family burned to death in a house-fire in Kreuzberg, a stabbing outside a bar in Wedding, a woman beaten to death in Spandau. The record of March’s” own disrupted morning was last on the list: 06:07 [O] (that meant notification had come from the Orpo) 1H Havel/March. The secretary stepped back and recapped her pen with a sharp click.

Krause had finished his telephone call and was looking defensive. “I’ve already apologised, March.”

“Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say: the last forty-eight hours.”

“No problem.” Krause looked relieved and swivelled round in his chair to the sour-faced woman. “You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything’s come in in the last hour.” He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. Td have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place — you know how it is.”

March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a grey cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of colour: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a foetus, was an island, linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.

Schwanenwerder.

“Does Goebbels still have a place there?”

Krause nodded. “And the rest.”

It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred metres away.

Krause said: “The local Orpo call it ‘the pheasant run’.”

March smiled: ‘golden pheasants’ was street slang for the Party leadership.

“It’s not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep.”

Helga had returned. “Persons reported missing since Sunday morning,” she announced, “and still unaccounted for.” She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. “Plenty to keep you busy there.” He seemed to find this amusing. “You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He’s the one who should be looking after this business, remember?”

Thanks. I’ll make a start at least.”

Krause shook his head. “You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You’re on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?”

March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. “You forget yourself, comrade,” he said. “Arbeit macht frei.” The slogan of the labour camps. Work Makes You Free.

He turned and made his way back through the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. “See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?”