He looked back at the house. His mother, a firm believer in ghosts, used to tell him that brickwork and plaster soaked up history, stored what they had witnessed, like a sponge. Since then March had seen his share of places in which evil had been done and he did not believe it. There was nothing especially wicked about Am grossen Wannsee 56/58. It was just a large, businessman’s mansion, now converted into a girls” school. So what were the walls absorbing now? Teenage crushes? Geometry lessons? Exam nerves?
He pulled out Heydrich’s invitation. “A discussion followed by luncheon.” Starting at noon. Ending at — what? — three or four in the afternoon. It would have been growing dark by the time they left. Yellow lamps in the windows; mist from the lake. Fourteen men. Well-fed; maybe some of them tipsy on the Gestapo’s wine. Cars to take them back to central Berlin. Chauffeurs who had waited a long time outside, with cold feet and noses like icicles…
And then, less than five months later, in Zurich in the heat of midsummer, Martin Luther had marched into the offices of Hermann Zaugg, banker to the rich and frightened, and opened an account with four keys.
“I wonder why he was empty-handed.”
“What?” She was distracted. He had interrupted her thoughts.
“I always imagined Luther carrying a small suitcase of some sort. Yet when he came down the steps to meet you, he was empty-handed.”
“Perhaps he had stuffed everything into his pockets.”
“Perhaps.” The Havel looked solid; a lake of mercury. “But he must have landed from Zurich with luggage of some sort. He had spent the night out of the country. And he had collected something from the bank.”
The wind stirred in the trees. March looked round. “He was a suspicious old bastard after all. It would have been in his character to have kept back the really valuable material. He wouldn’t have risked giving the Americans everything at once — otherwise how could he have bargained?”
A jet passed low overhead, dropping towards the airport, the pitch of its engines descending with it. Now that was a sound which did not exist in 1942…
Suddenly he was on his feet, lifting her down to join him, and then he was striding up the lawn towards the house and she was following — stumbling, laughing, shouting at him to slow down.
HE parked the Volkswagen beside the road in Schlachten-see and sprinted into the telephone kiosk. Max Jaeger was not replying, neither at Werderscher Markt nor at his home. The lonely purr of the unanswered phone made March want to reach someone, anyone.
He tried Rudi Halder’s number. Perhaps he could apologise, somehow hint it had been worth the risk. Nobody was in. He looked at the receiver. What about Pili? Even the boy’s hostility would be contact of a sort. But in the bungalow in Lichtenrade there was no response either.
The city had shut down on him.
He was halfway out of the kiosk when, on impulse, he turned back and dialled the number of his own apartment. On the second ring, a man answered.
“Yes?” It was the Gestapo: Krebs’s voice. “March? I know it’s you! Don’t hang up!”
He dropped the receiver as if it had bitten him.
HALF an hour later he was pushing through the scuffed wooden doors into the Berlin city morgue. Without his uniform he felt naked. A woman cried softly in one corner, a female police auxiliary sitting stiffly beside her, embarrassed at this display of emotion in an official place. He showed the attendant his ID and asked after Martin Luther. The man consulted a set of dog-eared notes.
“Male, mid-sixties, identified as Luther, Martin. Brought in just after midnight. Railway accident.”
“What about the shooting this morning, the one in the Plate?”
The attendant sighed, licked a nicotined forefinger and turned a page. “Male, mid-sixties, identified as Stark, Alfred. Came in an hour ago.”
That’s the one. How was he identified?”
“ID in his pocket.”
“Right.” March moved decisively towards the elevator, forestalling any objection. “I’ll make my own way down.”
It was his misfortune, when the elevator doors opened, to find himself confronted by Doctor August Eisler.
“March!” Eisler looked shocked and took a pace backwards. “The word is, you’ve been arrested.”
“The word is wrong. I’m working under cover.”
Eisler was staring at his civilian suit. “What as? A pimp?” This amused the SS surgeon so much he had to take off his spectacles and wipe his eyes. March joined in his laughter.
“No, as a pathologist. I’m told the pay is good and the hours are non-existent.”
Eisler stopped smiling. “You can say that. I’ve been here since midnight.” He dropped his voice. “A very senior man. Gestapo operation. Hush hush.” He tapped the side of his long nose. “I can say nothing.”
“Relax, Eisler. I am aware of the case. Did Frau Luther identify the remains?”
Eisler looked disappointed. “No,” he muttered. “We spared her that.”
“And Stark?”
“My, my, March — you are well-informed. I’m on my way to deal with him now. Would you care to join me?”
In his mind March saw again the exploding head, the thick spurt of blood and brain. “No. Thank you.”
“I thought not. What was he shot with? A Panzerfaust?”
“Have they caught the killer?”
“You’re the investigator. You tell me. "Don’t probe too deeply" was what I heard.”
“Stark’s effects. Where are they?”
“Bagged and ready to go. In the property room.”
“Where’s that?”
“Follow the corridor. Fourth door on the left.” March set off. Eisler shouted after him: “Hey March! Save me a couple of your best whores!” The pathologist’s high-pitched laughter pursued him down the passage.
The fourth door on the left was unlocked. He checked to make sure he was unobserved, then let himself in.
It was a small storeroom, three metres wide, with just enough room for one person to walk down the centre. On either side of the gangway were racks of dusty metal shelving heaped with bundles of clothing wrapped in thick polythene. There were suitcases, handbags, umbrellas, artificial legs, a pushchair — grotesquely twisted — hats…From the morgue the deceased’s belongings were usually collected by the next-of-kin. If the circumstances were suspicious, they would be taken away by the investigators, or sent direct to the forensic laboratories in Schonweld. March began inspecting the plastic tags, each of which recorded the time and place of death and the name of the victim. Some of the stuff here went back years — pathetic bundles of rags and trinkets, the final bequests of corpses nobody cared about, not even the police.
How typical of Globus not to admit to his mistake. The infallibility of the Gestapo must be preserved at all costs! Thus Stark’s body continued to be treated as Luther’s, while Luther would go to a pauper’s grave as the drifter, Stark.
March tugged at the bundle closest to the door, turned the label to the light. 18.4.64. Adolf Hitler PL Stark, Alfred.
So Luther had left the world like the lowest inmate of a KZ — violently, half-starved, in someone else’s filthy clothes, his body unhonoured, with a stranger picking over his belongings after his death. Poetic justice — about the only sort of justice to be found.
He pulled out his pocket knife and slit the, bulging plastic. The contents spilled over the floor like guts.
He did not care about Luther. All he cared about was how, in the hours between midnight and nine that morning, Globus had discovered Luther was still alive.
Americans!
He tore away the last of the polythene.
The clothes stank of shit and piss, of vomit and sweat- of every odour the human body nurtures. God only knew what parasites the fabric harboured. He went through the pockets. They were empty. His hands itched. Don’t give up hope. A left-luggage ticket is a small thing — tightly rolled, no bigger than a matchstick; an incision in a coat collar would conceal it. With his knife he hacked at the lining of the long brown overcoat, matted with congealing blood, his fingers turning brown and slippery …