Rath was horrified. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Remarque.’
‘Remarque? That’s propaganda, isn’t it? Roddeck never mentioned anything like that in his novel.’
‘First, Roddeck is a liar. Second, as a lieutenant he wouldn’t have much cause to defend himself in hand-to-hand combat.’
‘Perhaps he just chose not to write about it.’
‘Well, Remarque did, but no one in Germany will read him.’
‘If that’s the sort of stuff he writes, maybe it’s better that way.’ He took her hand and they strolled on. Gazing into the spring landscape he tried to dispel the terrible images she had planted in his mind.
By now they had four carefree days in Paris behind them. The church wedding as well as the party afterwards had gone without a hitch. No rows, no political discussions, and no bridal kidnappings. Without Greta’s help that day, Rath would never have known where Paul and Charly had gone. Instinctively she had guided him to the Poststadion, where they saw the runaways getting out of a taxi. Football, of course. Even Fritze understood that Charly wanted to watch the game. As usual, Gereon Rath had been the last to know. It had turned into a lovely evening, even if the German eleven, having competed well enough to take a first-half lead, had been trounced 5-1 by the Scots.
Like the civil ceremony, the reception that followed the church wedding in St Norbert’s (a no-frills affair thanks to Pastor Warszawski) saw the newlyweds make an early departure, although on this occasion it was planned. At Charly’s request they celebrated in the Tiergarten, in the Charlottenhof restaurant, and the two witnesses, Paul and Greta, accompanied them to Bahnhof Zoo. They spent their wedding night in a sleeper cabin belonging to the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, trundling across the Rhine to alight from the Northern Express on Sunday afternoon in Paris Gare du Nord, a city devoid of swastikas.
Only in Paris did Rath realise how much Berlin had changed. Savouring their time, they were almost able to forget everything that had happened in Germany. Then, without having particularly discussed it, they hired a car from a garage near the Canal Saint-Martin, a pitch-black Citroën Rosalie that gleamed like a huge insect in the daylight, and took to the road.
It was about three hours before the landscape between Amiens and Cambrai changed, and Rath started seeing familiar-looking village names. Then at some point, the sign: Neuville 3km. He parked. They got out.
Now, strolling across this war-marked landscape, they sought to gain their bearings. The descriptions from Roddeck’s novel were out of date, but, all of a sudden, in the midst of this scarcely populated terrain, far from the nearest village, they realised where they were. The stone was visible from afar, though the forest Roddeck had written about must have fallen in the final two years of the war. Here, too, they found only furry down, a few bushes, young birch. It would be decades before nature reclaimed its territory, but it would. In the end, nature always won.
The stone, a huge erratic boulder, would have withstood any artillery fire in history and was the perfect marker for a hoard of gold. Silently they scouted the terrain. Rath couldn’t help thinking about what had happened here sixteen years before, how many versions there were, and how all the witnesses but one were now dead.
Back in the car they drove to Neuville. The village was smaller than he imagined from Roddeck’s description. The church that had been destroyed by British artillery fire had been rebuilt, and houses again stood on top of the old cellars and foundation walls. There wasn’t a single pre-war building that hadn’t been at least partly repaired, or, in some instances, completely restored. This place, truly, had been made good, just as nature all around the village stood in defiance to the ravages of war. They saw many fertile fields, even the odd fruit tree.
The village school was housed in a new building. Rath parked outside, suspecting it had been built on the foundations of its predecessor, in which Roddeck’s unit had been billeted. The lieutenant himself had stayed in a bank director’s villa on the edge of the village. Engel, contrary to the novel’s claims, had taken up quarters with his driver in a little house next to the school.
There was no longer any trace of the building Thelen had described. Only the cellar remained, spilling over with debris and anything else that couldn’t be used for rebuilding. Signs warned against entering the site, but Rath climbed down anyway. His French had always been lousy.
Charly looked around anxiously, but it was lunch time and there wasn’t a soul to be seen save one or two curious faces at their windows. No one took exception to a stranger descending into the cellar and working his way through the rubble. The Citroën was brand new and had Paris plates. Possibly some official from the capital was at work.
Rath tried to imagine how the house might have looked prior to its destruction, when stairs would have led down to the cellar. Then he saw the half-landing protruding from a mound of bricks. If this was the remains of the old staircase then… yes… here was the charred beam!
Thelen’s description: a brick under the cellar stairs, that’s where he stowed everything before we set off on our rounds.
Rath pulled the beam aside and cleared more debris, until he could access the brickwork under the stairs. He jolted each brick until, at last, one yielded. Pulling it out he discovered a hollow space and reached inside, thinking it had all been in vain as he grasped something cool, hard, metallic.
Removing the tin can from its hiding place he opened it, finding an unfinished, handwritten letter and a dark notebook like those he had seen weeks before in a villa on the banks of the Rhine.
He heard footsteps and started, and saw Charly’s quizzical face. She had overcome her reluctance to ignore the No Trespass signs. He showed her his find, she opened the book, and together they leafed through to the final page, the final entry.
17th March 1917, early morning
What a night! I haven’t slept a wink. There is no time to relate everything that has happened in the last twelve hours, but I will make up for it once we have effected our retreat and reached the Siegfried Line. When calm has been restored at last. The loyal Thelen has made coffee, and now I see Staff Sergeant Grimberg, our demolition expert, approaching from the other side of the road in his usual high spirits. It is time to inspect the trenches he has prepared, which we will now cede to the enemy, a final, deadly greeting from the German Reich! For now I must lay down my pen. I will write again soon.
The inspiration for the hit TV series
1929: When a car is hauled out of the canal with a mutilated corpse inside, Detective Inspector Gereon Rath claims the case. Soon his inquiries drag him ever-deeper into Weimar Berlin’s underworld of cocaine, prostitution, gunrunning and shady politics.
‘The first in a series that’s been wildly popular cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimer Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.’
1930: Silent movie actress Betty Winter is killed on set after a lighting system falls on her. Inspector Gereon Rath suspects sabotage. Talkies are destroying careers in a world already bubbling with studio wars and sexual politics. Then another actress is found dead, this time with her vocal cords removed.