His face appeared and before he could withdraw it, the camera clicked. His eyes were wide, his little mouth popped into a perfect O of outrage.
ZURICH’S lake was misty-blue, like a picture from a fairy-story — a landscape fit for sea-monsters and heroes to do battle in. If only the world had been as we were promised, thought March. Then castles with pointed turrets would have risen through that haze.
He was leaning against the damp stone balustrade outside the hotel, his suitcase at his feet, waiting for Charlie to settle her bill.
He wished he could have stayed longer — taken her out on the water, explored the city, the hills; had dinner in the old town; returned to his room each night, to make love, to the sound of the lake … A dream. Fifty metres to his left, sitting in their cars, his guardians from the Swiss Polizei yawned.
Many years ago, when March was a young detective in the Hamburg Kripo, he had been ordered to escort a prisoner serving a life-sentence for robbery, who had been given a special day-pass. The man’s trial had been in the papers; his childhood sweetheart had seen the publicity and written to him; had visited him in gaol; agreed to marry him. The affair had touched that streak of sentimentality that runs so strong in the German psyche. There had been a public campaign to let the ceremony go ahead. The authorities had relented. So March took him to his wedding, stood handcuffed beside him throughout the service and even during the wedding pictures, like an unusually attentive best man.
The reception had been in a grim hall next to the church. Towards the end, the groom had whispered that there was a storeroom with a rug in it, that the priest had no objections… And March — young husband that he was -had checked the storeroom and seen there were no windows and had left the man and his wife alone for twenty minutes. The priest — who had worked as a chaplain in Hamburg’s docks for thirty years, and seen most things — had given March a grave wink.
On the way back to prison, as the high walls came into view, March had expected the man to be depressed, to plead for extra time, maybe even dive for the door. Not at all. He had sat smiling, finishing his cigar. Standing by the
Zurich See, March realised how he had felt. It had been sufficient to know that the possibility of another life existed; one day of it had been enough.
He felt Charlie come up beside him. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
A SHOP at Zurich airport was piled high with brightly coloured gifts — cuckoo clocks, toy skis, ashtrays glazed with pictures of the Matterhorn, and chocolates. March picked out one of the musical boxes with “Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Fuhrer, 1964” written on the lid and took it to the counter where a plump middle-aged woman was waiting.
“Could you wrap this and send it for me?”
“No problem, sir. Write down where you want it to go.”
She gave him a form and a pencil and March wrote Hannelore Jaeger’s name and address. Hannelore was even fatter than her husband, a lover of chocolates. He hoped Max would see the joke.
The assistant wrapped the box swiftly in brown paper, with skilled fingers.
“Do you sell many of these?”
“Hundreds. You Germans certainly love your Fuhrer.”
“We do, it is true.” He was looking at the parcel. It was wrapped exactly like the one he had taken from Buhler’s mailbox. “You don’t, I suppose, keep a record of the places to which you send these packages?”
“That would be impossible.” She addressed it, stuck on a stamp, and added it to the pile behind her.
“Of course. And you wouldn’t remember serving an elderly German here, about four o’clock on Monday afternoon? He had thick glasses and runny eyes.”
Her face was suddenly hard with suspicion. “What are you? A policeman?”
“It’s of no importance.” He paid for the chocolates, and also for a mug with “i LOVE ZURICH” printed on the side.
Luther would not have come all the way to Switzerland to put that painting in the bank vault, thought March. Even as a retired Foreign Ministry official, he could never have smuggled a package that size, stamped top secret, past the Zollgrenzschutz. He must have come here to retrieve something, to take it back to Germany. And as it was the first time he had visited the vault for twenty-one years, and as there were three other keys, and as he trusted nobody, he must have had doubts about whether that other thing would still be here.
He stood looking at the departure lounge and tried to imagine the elderly man hurrying into the terminal building, clutching his precious cargo, his weak heart beating sharply against his ribs. The chocolates must have been a message of success: so far, my old comrades, so good. What could he have been carrying? Not paintings or money, surely; they had plenty of both in Germany.
“Paper.”
“What?” Charlie, who had been waiting for him in the concourse, turned round in surprise.
“That must have been the link. Paper. They were all civil servants. They lived their lives by paper, on paper.”
He pictured them in wartime Berlin — sitting in their offices at night, circulating memos and minutes in a perpetual bureaucratic paper chase, building themselves a paper fortress. Millions of Germans had fought in the war: in the freezing mud of the Steppes, or in the Libyan desert, or in the clear skies over southern England, or — like March — at sea. But these old men had fought their war — had bled and expended their middle age — on paper.
Charlie was shaking her head. “You’re making no sense.”
“I know. To myself, perhaps. I bought you this.”
She unwrapped the mug and laughed; clasped it to her heart.
“I shall treasure it.”
THEY walked quickly through passport control. Beyond the barrier, March turned for a final look. The two Swiss policemen were watching from the ticket desk. One of them — the one who had rescued them outside Zaugg’s villa — raised his hand. March waved in return.
Their flight number was being called for the last time: “Passengers for Lufthansa flight 227 to Berlin must report immediately…”
He let his arm fall back and turned towards the departure gate.
TWO
No whisky on this flight, but coffee — plenty of it, strong and black. Charlie tried to read a newspaper but fell asleep. March was too excited to rest.
He had torn a dozen blank pages from his notebook, had ripped them in half and half again. Now he had them spread out on the plastic table in front of him. On each he had written a name, a date, an incident. He reshuffled them endlessly — the front to the back, the back to the middle, the middle to the beginning — a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke billowing, his head in the clouds. To the other passengers, a few of whom stole curious glances, he must have looked like a man playing a particularly demented form of patience.
JULY 1942. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht has launched Operation “Blue’: the offensive which will eventually win Germany the war. America is taking a hammering from the Japanese. The British are bombing the Ruhr, fighting in North Africa. In Prague, Reinhard Heydrich is recovering from an assassination attempt.
So: good days for the Germans, especially those in the conquered territories. Elegant apartments, girlfriends, bribes — packing cases of plunder to send back home. Corruption from high to low; from corporal to Kommissar; from alcohol to altar-pieces. Buhler, Stuckart and Luther have an especially good racket in play. Buhler requisitions art treasures in the General Government, sends them under cover to Stuckart at the Interior Ministry — quite safe, for who would dare tamper with the mail of such powerful servants of the Reich? Luther smuggles the objects abroad to sell — safe again, for who would dare order the head of the Foreign Ministry’s German Division to open his bags? All three retire in the 1950s, rich and honoured men.