March tilted back in his chair and stared up at the tangle of pipes chasing one another like snakes across the ceiling.
And then he remembered.
He pitched himself forward, on to his feet.
Next to the entrance were loosely bound volumes of the Berliner Tageblatt, the Volkischer Beobachter and the SS paper, Das Schwarzes Korps. He wrenched back the pages of the Tageblatt, back to yesterday’s issue, back to the obituaries. There it was. He had seen it last night.
Party Comrade Wilhelm Stuckart, formerly State Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior, who died suddenly of heart failure on Sunday, 13 April, will be remembered as a dedicated servant of the National Socialist cause…
The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He was aware of the Registrar staring at him. “Are you ill, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer?”
“No. I’m fine. Do me a favour, will you?” He picked up a file requisition slip and wrote out Stuckart’s full name and date of birth. “Will you see if there’s a file on this person?”
She looked at the slip and held out a hand. “ID.”
He gave her his identity card. She licked her pencil and entered the twelve digits of March’s service number on to the requisition form. By this means a record was kept of which Kripo investigator had requested which file, and at what time. His interest would be there for the Gestapo to see, a full eight hours after he had been ordered off the Buhler case. Further evidence of his lack of National Socialist discipline. It could not be helped.
The Registrar had pulled out a long wooden drawer of index cards and was marching her square-tipped fingers along the tops of them. “Stroop,” she murmured. “Strunck. Struss. Stulpnagel…”
March said: “You’ve gone past it.”
She grunted and pulled out a slip of pink paper. “ ‘Stuckart, Wilhelm.’ ” She looked at him. “There is a file. It’s out.”
“Who has it?”
“See for yourself.”
March leaned forwards. Stuckart’s file was with Sturm-bannfuhrer Fiebes of Kripo Department VB3. The sexual crimes division.
The whisky and the dry air had given him a thirst. In the corridor outside the Registry was a water-cooler. He poured himself a drink and considered what to do.
What would a sensible man have done? That was easy. A sensible man would have done what Max Jaeger did every day. He would have put on his hat and coat and gone home to his wife and children. But for March that was not an option. The empty apartment in Ansbacher Strasse, the quarrelling neighbours and yesterday’s newspaper, these held no attractions for him. He had narrowed his life to such a point, the only thing left was his work. If he betrayed that, what else was there?
And there was something else, the instinct that propelled him out of bed every morning into each unwelcoming day, and that was the desire to know. In police work, there was always another junction to reach, another corner to peer around. Who were the Weiss family, and what had happened to them? Whose was the body in the lake? What linked the deaths of Buhler and Stuckart? It kept him going, his blessing or his curse, this compulsion to know. And so, in the end, there was no choice.
He tossed the paper cup into the waste bin, and went upstairs.
SIX
Walther Fiebes was in his office, drinking schnapps. Watching him from a table beneath the window was a row of five human heads — white plaster casts with hinged scalps, all raised like lavatory seats, displaying their brains in red and grey sections — the five strains which made up the German Empire.
Placards announced them from left to right, in descending order of acceptability to the authorities. Category One: Pure Nordic. Category Two: Predominantly Nordic or Phalic. Category Three: Harmonious Bastard with Slight Alpine Dinaric or Mediterranean Characteristics. These groups qualified for membership of the SS. The others could hold no public office and stared reproachfully at Fiebes. Category Four: Bastard of Predominantly East-Baltic or Alpine Origin. Category Five: Bastard of Extra-European Origin.
March was a One/Two; Fiebes, ironically, a borderline Three. But then, the racial fanatics were seldom the blue-eyed Aryan supermen — they, in the words of Das Schwarzes Korps, were “too inclined to take their membership of the Volk for granted”. Instead, the swampy frontiers of the German race were patrolled by those less confident of their blood-worthiness. Insecurity breeds good border guards. The knock-kneed Franconian schoolmaster, ridiculous in his Lederhosen; the Bavarian shopkeeper with his pebble glasses; the red-haired Thuringian accountant with a nervous tic and a predilection for the younger members of the Hitler Youth; the lame and the ugly, the runts of the national litter — these were the loudest defenders of the Volk.
So it was with Fiebes — the myopic, stooping, buck-toothed, cuckolded Fiebes — whom the Reich had blessed with the one job he really wanted. Homosexuality and miscegenation had replaced rape and incest as capital offences. Abortion, “an act of sabotage against Germany’s racial future”, was punishable by death. The permissive 1960s were showing a strong increase in such sex crimes. Fiebes, a sheet-sniffer by temperament, worked all the hours the Fuhrer sent and was as happy, in Max Jaeger’s words, as a pig in horseshit.
But not today. Now, he was drinking in the office, his eyes were moist, and his bat’s-wing toupee hung slightly askew.
March said: “According to the newspapers, Stuckart died of heart failure.” Fiebes blinked.
“But according to the Registry, the file on Stuckart is out to you.”
“I cannot comment.”
“Of course you can. We are colleagues.” March sat down and lit a cigarette. “I take it we are in the familiar business of 'sparing the family embarrassment'.”
Fiebes muttered: “Not just the family.” He hesitated. “Could I have one of those?”
“Sure.” March gave him a cigarette and flicked his lighter. Fiebes took an experimental draw, like a schoolboy.
“This affair has left me pretty well shaken, March, I don’t mind admitting. The man was a hero to me.”
“You knew him?”
“By reputation, naturally. I never actually met him. Why? What is your interest?”
“State security. That is all I can say. You know how it is.”
“Ah. Now I understand.” Fiebes poured himself another large helping of schnapps. “We’re very much alike, March, you and I.”
“We are?”
“Sure. You’re the only investigator who’s in this place as often as I am. We’ve got rid of our wives, our children — all that shit. We live for the job. When it goes well, we’re well. When it goes badly…’His head fell forward. Presently, he said: “Do you know Stuckart’s book?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
Fiebes opened a desk drawer and handed March a battered, leather-bound volume. A Commentary on the German Racial Laws. March leafed through it. There were chapters on each of the three Nuremberg Laws of 1935: the Reich Citizenship Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People. Some passages were underlined in red ink, with exclamation marks beside them. “For the avoidance of racial damage, it is necessary for couples to submit to medical examination before marriage.”
“Marriage between persons suffering from venereal disease, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy or ‘genetic
