with the assurance of a sleepwalker” — and he smiled.
Ahead of them, searchlights picked out the eagle on top of the Great Hall. It seemed to hang in the sky, a golden bird of prey hovering over the capital.
She noticed his grin. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing.” He turned right at the European Parliament. The flags of the twelve member nations were lit by spots. The swastika which flew above them was twice the size of the other standards. “Tell me about Stuckart. How well did you know him?”
“Hardly at all. I met him through my parents. My father was at the Embassy here before the war. He married a German, an actress. She’s my mother. Monika Koch, did you ever hear of her?”
“No. I don’t believe so.” Her German was flawless. She must have spoken it since childhood; her mother’s doing, no doubt.
“She’d be sorry to hear that. She seems to think she was a big star over here. Anyway, they both knew Stuckart slightly. When I arrived in Berlin last year, they gave me a list of people to go and talk to — contacts. Half of them turned out to be dead, one way or another. Most of the rest didn’t want to meet me. American journalists don’t make healthy company, if you know what I mean. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead. What was Stuckart like?”
“Awful.” Her lighter flared in the darkness; she inhaled deeply. “He made a grab at me, even though this woman of his was in the apartment at the same time. That was just before Christmas. I kept away from him after that. Then, last week, I got a message from my office in New York. They wanted a piece for Hitler’s seventy-fifth birthday, talking to some of the people who knew him from the old days.”
“So you rang Stuckart?”
“Right.”
“And arranged to meet him on Sunday, and when you got there, he was dead?”
“If you know it all,” she said irritably, “why do you need to talk to me again?”
“I don’t know it all, Fraulein. That’s the point.”
After that, they drove in silence.
Fritz Todt-Platz was a couple of blocks from the Avenue of Victory. Laid out in the mid-1950s as part of Speer’s redevelopment of the city, it was a square of expensive-looking apartment buildings, erected around a small memorial garden. In the centre stood an absurdly heroic statue of Todt, the creator of the Autobahnen, by Professor Thorak.
“Which one was Stuckart’s?”
She pointed to a block on the other side of the square. March drove round and parked outside it.
“Which floor?”
“Fourth.”
He looked up. The fourth floor was in darkness. Good.
Todt’s statue was floodlit. In the reflected light, her face was white. She looked as if she was about to be sick. Then he remembered the photographs Fiebes had shown him of the corpses — Stuckart’s skull had been a crater, like a guttered candle — and he understood.
She said: “I don’t have to do this, do I?”
“No. But you will.”
“Why?”
“Because you want to know what happened as much as I do. That’s why you’ve come this far”
She stared at him again, then stubbed out her cigarette, twisting it and breaking it in the ashtray. “Let’s do it quickly. I want to get back to my friends.”
The keys to the building were still in the envelope which March had removed from Stuckart’s file. There were five in all. He found the one that fitted the front door and let them into the foyer. It was vulgarly luxurious, in the new imperial style — white marble floor, crystal chandeliers, nineteenth-century gilt chairs with red plush upholstery, the air scented with dried flowers. No porter, thankfully: he must have gone off duty. Indeed, the entire building seemed deserted. Perhaps the tenants had left for their second homes in the country. Berlin could be unbearably crowded in the week before the Fuhrertag. The smart set always fled the capital.
“Now what?”
“Just tell me what happened.”
The porter was at the desk, here,” she said. “I asked for Stuckart. He directed me to the fourth floor. I couldn’t take the elevator, it was being repaired. There was a man working on it. So I walked.”
“What time was this?”
“Noon. Exactly.”
They climbed the stairs.
She went on: “I had just reached the second floor when two men came running towards me.”
“Describe them, please.”
“It all happened too quickly for me to get a very good look. Both in their thirties. One had a brown suit, the other had a green anorak. Short hair. That’s about it.”
“What did they do when they saw you?”
They just pushed past me. The one in the anorak said something to the other, but I couldn’t hear what it was. There was a lot of drilling going on from the elevator shaft. After that, I carried on up to Stuckart’s apartment and rang the bell. There was no reply.”
“So what did you do?”
“I walked down to the porter and asked him to open Stuckart’s door, to check he was okay.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. “There was something about those two men. I had a hunch. You know: that feeling when you knock on a door and nobody answers but you’re sure someone’s in.”
“And you persuaded the porter to open the door?”
“I told him I’d call the police if he didn’t. I said he would have to answer to the authorities if anything had happened to Doctor Stuckart.”
Shrewd psychology, thought March. After thirty years of being told what to do, the average German was careful not to take final responsibility for anything, even for not opening a door. “And then you found the bodies?”
She nodded. The porter saw them first. He screamed and I came running.”
“Did you mention the two men you’d seen on the stairs? What did the porter say?”
“He was too busy throwing up to talk at first. Then he just insisted he’d seen nobody. He said I must have imagined it.”
“Do you think he was lying?”
She considered this. “No, I don’t. I think he genuinely didn’t see them. On the other hand, I don’t see how he could have missed them.”
They were still on the second floor landing, at the point at which she said the men had passed her. March walked back down the flight of stairs. She waited for a moment, then followed him. At the foot of the steps a door led off to the first floor corridor.
He said, half to himself: They could have hidden along here, I suppose. Where else?”
They continued down to the ground floor. Here there were two more doors. One led to the foyer. March tried the other. It was unlocked. “Or they could have got out down here.”
Bare concrete steps, neon-lit, led down to the basement. At the bottom was a long passage, with doors off it. March opened each in turn. A lavatory. A store-room. A generator room. A bomb shelter.
Under the 1948 Reich Civil Defence Law, every new building had to be equipped with a bomb shelter; those beneath offices and apartment blocks were also required to have their own generators and air-filtration systems. This one was particularly well-appointed: bunk beds, a storage cupboard, a separate cubicle with toilet facilities. March carried a metal chair across to the air vent, set into the wall two and a half metres above the ground. He grasped the metal cover. It came away easily in his hands. All the screws had been removed.
The Ministry of Construction specifies an aperture with a diameter of half a metre,” said March. He unbuckled his belt and hung it and his pistol over the back of the chair. “If only they appreciated the difficulties that gives us. Would you mind?”
