Fatherland Page 6

  ‘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 Schwanenweder.’

  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 Archly 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.

  To: Chief, VB3(a)

  SUBJECT: Unidentified body (male)

  FROM: X. March, SS-Sturmbannführer 15.4.64

  I beg to report the following.

  1. At 06.28 yesterday, I was ordered to attend the recovery of a body from the Havel. The body had been discovered by SS-Schütze Hermann Jost at 06.02 and reported to the Ordnungspolizei (statement attached).

  2. No male of the correct description having been reported missing, I arranged for the fingerprints of the subject to be checked against records.

  3. This has enabled the subject to be identified as Doctor Josef Buhler, a Party member with the honorary rank of SS-Brigadeführer. The subject served as State Secretary in the General Government, 1939–51.

  4. A preliminary investigation at the scene by SS-Sturmbannführer Doctor August Eisler indicated the likely cause of death as drowning, and the likely time of death some time on the night of 13 April.

  5. The subject lived on Schwanenwerder, close to where the body was found.

  6. There were no obvious suspicious circumstances.

  7. A full autopsy examination will be carried out following formal identification of the subject by next-of-kin.

  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 Kriminalpolizei. 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 Führer 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 w
as 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 ʼ53, 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 Untersturmführer, 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.’

  ‘I’d 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 a
nd 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

  alf 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.