“Until Saturday night?”
Until Saturday night. She had been in the telephone kiosk no more than thirty seconds when he rang. Now all the arrogance was gone from his voice.
“Charlotte?” He had placed heavy, emphasis on the second syllable. Shar-lott-e. “Forgive this melodrama. Your telephone is tapped.”
They say every foreigner’s line is tapped.”
This is true. When I was in the Ministry, I used to see transcripts. But public boxes are safe. I am in a public box now. I came on Thursday and took the number of the one you are in. It is serious, you see. I need to contact the authorities in your country.”
“Why not talk to the Embassy?”
The Embassy is not safe.”
He had sounded terrified. And tight. Definitely, he had been drinking.
“Are you saying you want to defect?”
A long silence. Then there had been a noise behind her. A sound of metal tapping on glass. She had turned to discover, in the rain and the dark, a man, with his hands cupped round his eyes, peering into the kiosk, looking like a deep-sea diver. She must have let out a cry or something because Stuckart had got very frightened.
“What was that? What is it?”
“Nothing. Just someone wanting to use the phone.”
“We must be quick. I deal only with your father, not the Embassy.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Come to me tomorrow and I will tell you everything. Shar-lott-e, I will make you the most famous reporter in the world.”
“Where? What time?”
“My apartment. Noon.”
“Is that safe?”
“Nowhere is safe.”
And then he had rung off. Those were the last words she had heard Stuckart speak.
She finished her cigarette, ground it under her foot.
The rest he knew, more or less. She had found the bodies, called the police. They had taken her to the big city station in Alexander Plate, where she had sat in a blank-walled room for more than three hours, going crazy. Then she had been driven to another building, to give a statement to some creepy SS man in a cheap wig, whose office had been more like that of a pathologist than a detective.
March smiled at the description of Fiebes.
She had already made up her mind not to tell the Polizei about Stuckart’s call on Saturday night, for an obvious reason. If she had hinted that she had been preparing to help Stuckart defect, she would have been accused of “activities incompatible with her status as a journalist”, and arrested. As it was, they had decided to deport her anyway. So it goes.
THE authorities were planning a fireworks display in the Tiergarten, to commemorate the Fuhrer’s birthday. An area of the park had been fenced off, and pyrotechnicians in blue overalls were laying their surprises, watched by a curious crowd. Mortar tubes, sandbagged emplacements, dug-outs, kilometres of cable: these looked more like the preparations for an artillery bombardment than for a celebration. Nobody paid any attention to the SS-Sturmbannfuhrer and the woman in the blue plastic coat.
He scribbled on a page of his notebook.
“These are my telephone numbers — office and home. Also, here are the numbers of a friend of mine called Max Jaeger. If you can’t get hold of me, call him.” He tore out the page and gave it to her. “If anything suspicious happens, anything worries you — it doesn’t matter what the time is — call”
“What about you? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to try to get to Zurich tonight. Check out this bank account first thing tomorrow.”
He knew what she would say even before she opened her mouth.
“I’ll come with you.”
“You will be much safer here.”
“But it’s my story, too.”
She sounded like a spoilt child. “It’s not a story, for God’s sake.” He bit back his anger. “Look. A deal. Whatever I find out, I swear I’ll tell you. You can have it all.”
“It’s not as good as being there.”
“It’s better than being dead.”
“They wouldn’t do anything like that abroad.”
“On the contrary, that is exactly where they would do it. If something happens here, they are responsible. If something happens abroad…” He shrugged. “Prove it.”
THEY parted in the centre of the Tiergarten. He strode briskly across the grass, towards the humming city. As he walked, he took the envelope out of his pocket, squeezed it to check the key was still in it and — on impulse — raised it to his nose. Her scent. He looked over his shoulder. She was walking through the trees with her back to him. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared; disappeared, reappeared — a tiny birdlike figure — bright blue plumage against the dreary wood.
FIVE
The door to March’s apartment hung off its hinges like a broken jaw. He stood on the landing, listening, his pistol drawn. The place was silent, deserted.
Like Charlotte Maguire’s, his apartment had been searched, but by hands of greater malevolence. Everything had been tipped into a heap in the centre of the sitting room — clothes and books, shoes and old letters, photographs and crockery and furniture — the detritus of a life. It was as if someone had intended to make a bonfire but had been distracted at the last minute, before they could apply the torch.
Wedged upright on top of the pyre was a wooden-framed photograph of March, aged twenty, shaking hands with the commander of the U-Boot Waffe, Admiral Donitz. Why had it been left like that? What point was being made? He picked it up, carried it over to the window, blew dust off it. He had forgotten he even had it. Doenitz liked to come aboard every boat before it left Wilhelmshaven: an awesome figure, ramrod, iron-gripped, gruff. “Good hunting,” he had barked at March. He growled the same to everyone. The picture showed five young crewmen lined up beneath the conning tower to meet him. Rudi Halder was to March’s left. The other three had died later that year, trapped in the hull of U-175.
Good hunting.
He tossed the picture back on the pile.
It had taken time to do all this. Time, and anger, and the certainty of not being disturbed. It must have happened while he was under guard in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It could only have been the work of the Gestapo. He remembered a line of graffiti scrawled by White Rose on a wall near Werderscher Markt: “A police state is a country run by criminals”.
They had opened his mail. A couple of bills, long overdue — they were welcome to them — and a letter from his ex-wife, dated Tuesday. He glanced through it. She had decided he was not to see Pili in future. It upset the boy too much. She hoped he would agree this was for the best. If necessary, she would be willing to swear a deposition before the Reich Family Court, giving her reasons. She trusted this would not be necessary, both for his sake and the boy’s. It was signed “Klara Eckart”. So she had gone back to her maiden name. He screwed it up and threw it next to the photograph, with the rest of the rubbish.
The bathroom at least had been left intact. He showered and shaved, inspecting himself in the mirror for damage. It felt worse than it looked: a large bruise developing nicely on his chest, more on the back of his legs and at the base of his spine; a livid mark at his throat. Nothing serious. What was it his father used to say — his paternal balm for all the batterings of childhood? “You’ll live, boy.” That was it. “You’ll live!”
Naked, he went back into the sitting room and searched through the wreckage, pulling out clean clothes, a pair of shoes, a suitcase, a leather hold-all. He feared they might have taken his passport but it was there, at the bottom of the mound. It had been issued in 1961, when March had gone to Italy to bring back a gangster being held in Milan. His younger self stared up at him, fatter-cheeked, half-smiling. My God, he thought, I have aged ten years in three.