“Did you see anyone else, Jost?” March spoke in a kindly tone, like an uncle.
“Nobody, sir. There’s a telephone box in the picnic area, half a kilometre back. I called, then came here and waited until the police arrived. There wasn’t a soul on the road.”
March looked again at the body. It was very fat. Maybe 110 kilos.
“Let’s get him out of the water.” He turned towards the road. Time to raise our sleeping beauties.” Ratka, shifting from foot to foot in the downpour, grinned.
It was raining harder now, and the Kladow side of the lake had virtually disappeared. Water pattered on the leaves of the trees and drummed on the car roofs. There was a heavy rain-smell of corruption: rich earth and rotting vegetation. March’s hair was plastered to his scalp, water trickled down the back of his neck. He did not notice. For March, every case, however routine, held — at the start, at least — the promise of adventure.
He was forty-two years old — slim, with grey hair and cool grey eyes that matched the sky. During the war, the Propaganda Ministry had invented a nickname for the men of the U-boats — the “grey wolves” — and it would have been a good name for March, in one sense, for he was a determined detective. But he was not by nature a wolf, did not run with the pack, was more reliant on brain than muscle, so his colleagues called him “the fox” instead.
U-boat weather!
He flung open the door of the white Skoda, and was hit by a gust of hot, stale air from the car heater.
“Morning, Spiedel!” He shook the police photographer’s bony shoulder. Time to get wet.” Spiedel jerked awake. He gave March a glare.
The driver’s window of the other Skoda was already being wound down as March approached it. “All right, March. All right.” It was SS-Surgeon August Eisler, a Kripo pathologist, his voice a squeak of affronted dignity. “Save your barrack-room humour for those who appreciate it.”
They gathered at the water’s edge, all except Doctor Eisler, who stood apart, sheltering under an ancient black umbrella he did not offer to share. Spiedel screwed a flash bulb on to his camera and carefully planted his right foot on a lump of clay. He swore as the lake lapped over his shoe.
“Shit!”
The flash popped, freezing the scene for an instant: the white faces, the silver threads of rain, the darkness of the woods. A swan came scudding out of some nearby reeds to see what was happening, and began circling a few metres away.
“Protecting her nest,” said the young SS man.
“I want another here.” March pointed. “And one here.”
Spiedel cursed again and pulled his dripping foot out of the mud. The camera flashed twice more.
March bent down and grasped the body under the armpits. The flesh was hard, like cold rubber, and slippery.
“Help me.”
The Orpo men each took an arm and together, grunting with the effort, they heaved, sliding the corpse out of the water, over the muddy bank and on to the sodden grass. As March straightened, he caught the look on Jost’s face.
The old man had been wearing a pair of blue swimming trunks which had worked their way down to his knees. In the freezing water, the genitals had shriveled to a tiny clutch of white eggs in a nest of black pubic hair.
The left foot was missing.
It had to be, thought March. This was a day when nothing would be simple. An adventure, indeed.
“Herr Doctor. Your opinion, please.”
With a sigh of irritation, Eisler daintily stepped forward, removing the glove from one hand. The corpse’s leg ended at the bottom of the calf. Still holding the umbrella, Eisler bent stiffly and ran his fingers around the stump.
“A propeller?” asked March. He had seen bodies dragged out of busy waterways — from the Tegler See and the Spree in Berlin, from the Alster in Hamburg — which looked as if butchers had been at them.
“No.” Eisler withdrew his hand. “An old amputation. Rather well done in fact.” He pressed hard on the chest with his fist. Muddy water gushed from the mouth and bubbled out of the nostrils. “Rigor mortis fairly advanced. Dead twelve hours. Maybe less.” He pulled his glove back on.
A diesel engine rattled somewhere through the trees behind them.
“The ambulance,” said Ratka. They take their time.”
March gestured to Spiedel. Take another picture.”
Looking down at the corpse, March lit a cigarette. Then he squatted on his haunches and stared into the single open eye. He stayed that way a long while. The camera flashed again. The swan reared up, flapped her wings, and turned towards the centre of the lake in search of food.
TWO
Kripo headquarters lie on the other side of Berlin, a twenty-five-minute drive from the Havel. March needed a statement from Jost, and offered to drop him back at his barracks to change, but Jost said no: he would sooner make his statement quickly. So once the body had been stowed aboard the ambulance and dispatched to the morgue, they set off in March’s little four-door Volkswagen through the rush-hour traffic.
It was one of those dismal Berlin mornings, when the famous Berliner-luft seems not so much bracing as merely raw, the moisture stinging the face and hands like a thousand frozen needles. On the Potsdamer Chaussee, the spray from the wheels of the passing cars forced the few pedestrians close to the sides of the buildings. Watching them through the rain-flecked window, March imagined a city of blind men, feeling their way to work.
It was all so normal. Later, that was what would strike him most. It was like having an accident: before it, nothing out of the ordinary; then, the moment; and after it, a world that was changed forever. For there was nothing more routine than a body fished out of the Havel. It happened twice a month — derelicts and failed businessmen, reckless kids and lovelorn teenagers; accidents and suicides and murders; the desperate, the foolish, the sad.
The telephone had rung in his apartment in Ansbacher Strasse shortly after six-fifteen. The call had not woken him. He had been lying in the semi-darkness with his eyes open, listening to the rain. For the past few months he had slept badly.
“March? We’ve got a report of a body in the Havel.” It was Krause, the Kripo’s Night Duty Officer. “Go and take a look, there’s a good fellow.”
March had said he was not interested.
“Your interest or lack of it is beside the point.”
“I am not interested,” said March, “because I am not on duty. I was on duty last week, and the week before.” And the week before that, he might have added. This is my day off. Look again at your list.”
There had been a pause at the other end, then Krause had come back on the line, grudgingly apologetic. “You are in luck, March. I was looking at last week’s rota. You can go back to sleep. Or…” He had sniggered: “Or whatever else it was you were doing.”
A gust of wind had slashed rain against the window, rattling the pane.
There was a standard procedure when a body was discovered: a pathologist, a police photographer and an investigator had to attend the scene at once. The investigators worked off a rota kept at Kripo headquarters in Werderscher Markt.
“Who is on today, as a matter of interest?”
“Max Jaeger.”
Jaeger. March shared an office with Jaeger. He had looked at his alarm clock and thought of the little house in Pankow where Max lived with his wife and four daughters: during the week, breakfast was just about the only time he saw them. March, on the other hand, was divorced and lived alone. He had set aside the afternoon to
