“No, sir.”
“Because he had a submarine engine hooked up to a Polish basement during the war, and used the exhaust fumes to kill people. Globus likes killing people. He’d like to kill you. You should remember that.” Nebe released March’s arm. “Now, we must say goodbye.”
He rapped on the glass partition with the top of his cane. The driver came round and opened March’s door.
“I would offer you a lift into central Berlin, but I prefer travelling alone. Keep me informed. Find Luther, March. Find him before Globus gets to him.”
The door slammed. The engine whispered. As the limousine crunched across the gravel, March could barely make out Nebe — just a green silhouette behind the bulletproof glass.
He turned to find Globus watching him.
The SS general started walking towards him, holding a Luger outstretched.
He is crazy, thought March. He is just about crazy enough to shoot me on the spot, like Buhler’s dog.
But all Globus did was hand him the gun. Tour pistol, Sturmbannfuhrer. You will need it.” And then he came very close — close enough for March to smell the sour odour of garlic sausage on his hot breath. “You have no witness” was all he whispered. “You have no witness. Not any more.”
MARCH ran.
He ran out of the grounds and across the causeway and off, up, into the woods — right the way through them, until he came to the autobahn which formed the Grunewald’s eastern boundary.
There he stopped, his hands clutching his knees, his breath coming in sobs, as beneath him the traffic hurtled towards Berlin.
Then he was off again, despite the pain in his side, more of a trot now, over the bridge, past the Nikolassee S-bahn station, down Spanische Alice towards the barracks.
His Kripo ID got him past the sentries, his appearance -red-eyed, breathless, with more than a day’s growth of beard — suggestive of some terrible emergency which brooked no discussion. He found the dormitory block. He found Jost’s bed. The pillow was gone, the blankets had been stripped. All that remained was the ironwork and a hard, brown mattress. The locker was bare.
A solitary cadet, polishing his boots a few beds away, explained what had happened. They had come for Jost in the night. There were two of them. He was to be sent East, they said, for “special training”. He had gone without a word — seemed to have been expecting it. The cadet shook his head in amazement: Jost of all people. The cadet was jealous. They all were. He would see some real fighting.
THREE
The telephone kiosk stank of urine and ancient cigarette smoke, a used condom had been trodden into the dirt.
“Come on, come on,” whispered March. He rapped a one-Reichsmark piece against the cloudy glass and listened to the electronic purr of her telephone ringing, unanswered. He let it ring for a long time before he hung up.
Across the street a grocery store was opening. He crossed and bought a bottle of milk and some warm bread which he gulped down beside the road, conscious all the time of the shop’s owner watching him from the window. It occurred to him that he was living like a fugitive already — stopping to grab food only when he happened across it, devouring it in the open, always on the move. Milk trickled down his chin. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. His skin felt like sandpaper.
He checked again to see if he was being followed. On this side of the street, a uniformed nanny pushed a baby carriage. On the other, an old woman had gone into the telephone kiosk. A schoolboy hurried towards the Havel, clutching a toy yacht. Normal, normal…
March, the good citizen, dropped the milk bottle into a waste bin and set off down the suburban road.
“You have no witness. Not any more…”
He felt a great rage against Globus, the greater for being fuelled by guilt. The Gestapo must have seen Jost’s statement in the file on Buhler’s death. They would have checked with the SS academy and discovered that March had been back to re-interrogate him yesterday afternoon; That would have set them scurrying in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. So his visit to the barracks had been Jost’s death warrant. He had indulged his curiosity — and killed a man.
And now the American girl was not answering her telephone. What might they do to her? An army truck overtook him, the draught sucked at him, and a vision of Charlotte Maguire lying broken in the gutter bubbled in his mind. “The Berlin authorities deeply regret this tragic accident…The driver of the vehicle concerned is still being sought…’He felt like the carrier of a dangerous disease. He should carry a placard: keep clear of this man, he is contagious.
Circulating endlessly in his head, fragments of conversation-
Artur Nebe: “Find Luther, March. Find him before Globus gets to him…”
Rudi Halder: “A couple of Sipo guys were round at the Archiv last week asking about you…”
Nebe again: “There is a complaint here from your ex-wife; one from your son…”
He walked for half an hour along the blossoming streets, past the high hedges and picket fences of prosperous suburban Berlin. When he reached Dahlem, he stopped a student to ask directions. At the sight of March’s uniform, the young man bowed his head. Dahlem was a student quarter. The male undergraduates, like this one, let their hair grow a few centimetres over their collars; some of the women wore jeans — God only knew where they got them. White Rose, the student resistance movement which had flowered briefly in the 1940s until its leaders were executed, was suddenly alive again. “Ihr Geist lebt weiter” said the graffiti: their spirit lives on. Members of White Rose grumbled about conscription, listened to banned music, circulated seditious magazines, were harassed by the Gestapo. The student gestured vaguely in response to March’s question, his arms laden with books, and was glad to be on his way.
LUTHER’S house was close to the Botanischer Garten, set back from the road — a nineteenth-century country mansion at the end of a sickle of white gravel. Two men sat in an unmarked grey BMW, parked opposite the drive. The car and its colour branded them at once. There would be two more watching the back, and at least one cruising the neighbourhood streets. March walked past and saw one of the Gestapo watchers turn to the other and speak.
Somewhere, a motor mower was whining; the smell of freshly cut grass hung over the drive. The house and grounds must have cost a fortune — not as much as Buhler’s villa, perhaps, but not far off it. The red box of a newly installed burglar alarm jutted beneath the eaves.
He rang the bell and felt himself come under inspection through the spy hole in the centre of the heavy door. After half a minute the door opened to reveal an English maid in a black and white uniform. He gave her his ID and she disappeared to check with her mistress, her feet flapping on the polished wooden floor. She returned to show March into the darkened drawing room. A sweet-smelling smog of eau de cologne lay over the scene. Frau Marthe Luther sat on a sofa, clutching a handkerchief. She looked up at him -glassy blue eyes cracked by minute veins.
“What news?”
“None, madam. I’m sorry to say. But you may be sure that no effort is being spared to find your husband.” Truer than you know, he thought.
She was a woman fast losing her attractiveness but gamely staging a fighting retreat. Her tactics, though, were ill-advised: unnaturally blonde hair, a tight skirt, a silk blouse undone just a button too far, to display fat, milky-white cleavage. She looked every centimetre a third wife. A romantic novel lay open, face down, on the embroidered cushion next to her. The Kaisers Ball by Barbara Cartland.