“He was looking straight at me…” Charlie covered her face with her hands.
“It needn’t have been me,” said Nightingale. “The leak could have come from one of you two.”
“How? We were together all night.”
“I’m sure you were.” He spat out the words and fumbled for the door. “I don’t have to take this sort of shit from you. Charlie — you’d better come back to the Embassy with me. Now. We’ll get you on a flight out of Berlin tonight and just hope to Christ no one connects you with any of this.” He waited.’Come on.”
She shook her head.
“If not for your sake, then think of your father.”
She was incredulous. “What’s my father got to do with it?”
Nightingale hauled himself out of the Volkswagen. “I should never have let myself be talked into this insanity. You’re a fool. As for him” — he nodded towards March -’he’s a dead man.”
He walked away from the car, his footsteps ricocheting around the deserted lot — loud at first, but fast becoming fainter. There was the clang of a metal door banging shut, and he was gone.
March looked at Charlie in the mirror. She seemed very small, huddled up in the back seat.
Far away: another noise. The barrier at the top of the ramp was being raised. A car was coming. March felt suddenly panicky, claustrophic. Their refuge could serve equally well as a trap.
“We can’t stay here,” he said. He switched on the engine. “We have to keep moving.”
“In that case I want to take more pictures.”
“Do you have to?”
“You assemble your evidence, Sturmbannfuhrer, and I’ll assemble mine.”
He glanced at her again. She had put aside her handkerchief and was staring at him with a fragile defiance. He took his foot off the brake. Crossing the city was risky, no question, but what else were they to do? Lie behind a locked door waiting to be caught?
He swung the car round in a circle and headed towards the exit as headlights flashed in the gloom behind them.
THREE
They parked beside the Havel and walked to the shore. March pointed to the spot where Buhler’s body had been found. Her camera clicked as Spiedel’s had four days before, but there was little left to record. A few footprints were just visible in the mud. The grass was flattened slightly where the corpse had been dragged from the water. But in a day or two these signs would disappear. She turned away from the water and drew her coat around her, shivering.
It was too dangerous to drive to Buhler’s villa so he stopped at the end of the causeway with the engine running. She leaned out to take a picture of the road leading to the island. The red and white pole was down. No sign of the sentry.
“Is that it?” she asked. “Life won’t pay much for these.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps there is another place.”
NUMBERS fifty-six to fifty-eight Am grossen Wannsee turned out to be a large nineteenth-century mansion with a pillared facade. It no longer housed the German headquarters of Interpol. At some point in the years since the war it had become a girls” school. March looked this way and that, up and down the leafy street where the blossom was in full pink bloom, and tried the gate. It was unlocked. He gestured to Charlie to join him.
“We are Herr and Frau March,” he said, as he pushed open the gate. “We have a daughter…”
Charlie nodded. “Yes, of course, Heidi. She is seven. With plaits
“She is unhappy at her present school. This one was recommended. We wanted to look around…” They stepped into the grounds. March closed the gates behind them.
She said: “Naturally, if we are trespassing, we apologise…”
“But surely Frau March does not look old enough to have a sevenyear-old daughter?”
“She was seduced at an impressionable age by a handsome investigator…”
“A likely story.”
The gravel drive looped around a circular flower bed. March tried to picture it as it might have looked in January 1942. A dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps, or frost. Bare trees. A couple of guards shivering by the entrance. The government cars, one after the other, crunching over the icy gravel. An adjutant saluting and stepping forward to open the doors. Stuckart: handsome and elegant. Buhler: his lawyer’s notes carefully arranged in his briefcase. Luther: blinking behind his thick spectacles. Did their breath hang in the air after them? And Heydrich. Would he have arrived first, as host? Or last, to demonstrate his power? Did the cold impart colour even to those pale cheeks?
The house was barred and deserted. While Charlie took a picture of the entrance, March picked his way through a small shrubbery to peer through a window. Rows of dwarf-sized desks with dwarf-sized chairs up-ended and stacked on top. A pair of blackboards from which the pupils were being taught the Party’s special grace. On one:
On the other:
Childish paintings decorated the walls — blue meadows, green skies, clouds of sulphur-yellow. Children’s art was perilously close to degenerate art; such perversity would have to be knocked out of them …March could smell the school-smell even from here: the familiar compound of chalk dust, wooden floors and stale, institutional food. He turned away.
Someone in a neighbouring garden had lit a bonfire. Pungent white smoke — wet wood and dead leaves — drifted across the lawn at the back of the house. A wide flight of steps flanked by stone lions with frozen snarls led down to the lawn. Beyond the grass, through the trees, lay the dull, glassy surface of the Havel. They were facing south. Schwanenwerder, less than half a kilometre away, would be just visible from the upstairs windows. When Buhler bought his villa in the early 1950s, had the proximity of the two sites been a motive -was he the villain being drawn back to the scene of his crime? If so, what crime was it exactly?
March bent and dug up a handful of soil, sniffed at it, let it run through his fingers. The trail had gone cold years ago.
AT the bottom of the garden were a couple of wooden barrels, green with age, used by the gardener to collect rainwater. March and Charlie sat on them side by side, legs dangling, looking across the lake. He was in no hurry to move on. Nobody would look for them here. There was something indescribably melancholy about it all — the silence, the dead leaves blowing across the lawn, the smell of the smoke — something that was the opposite of spring. It spoke of autumn, of the end of things.
He said: “Did I tell you that before I went away to sea, there were Jews in our town? When I got back, they were all gone. I asked about it. People said they had been evacuated to the East. For resettlement.”
“Did they believe that?”
“In public, of course. Even in private it was wiser not to speculate. And easier. To pretend it was true.”
“Did you believe it?”
“I didn’t think about it.
“Who cares?” he said suddenly. “Suppose everyone knew all the details. Who would care? Would it really make any difference?”
“Someone thinks so,” she reminded him. That’s why everyone who attended Heydrich’s conference is dead. Except Heydrich.”