my share of the blame, Zavi. Good Party Comrade Jaeger, here. Brownshirt. Blackshirt. Every goddamn shirt. Twenty years dedicated to the sacred cause of keeping my arse clean.” He grasped March’s knee. “I have favours to call in. I’m owed.”
His head was bent. He was whispering. “They have you marked down, my friend. A loner. Divorced. They’ll flay you alive. Me, on the other hand? The great conformer Jaeger. Married to a holder of the Cross of German Motherhood. Bronze Class, no less. Not so good at the job, maybe—”
That’s not true.”
“—but safe. Suppose I didn’t tell you yesterday morning the Gestapo had taken over the Buhler case. Then when you got back I said let’s check out Stuckart. They look at my record. They might buy that, coming from me.”
“It’s good of you.”
“Christ, man — forget that.”
“But it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because this is beyond favours and clean sheets, don’t you see? What about Buhler and Stuckart? They were in the Party before we were even born. And where were the favours when they needed them?”
“You really think the Gestapo killed them?” Jaeger looked scared.
March put his fingers to his lips and gestured to the picture. “Say nothing to me you wouldn’t say to Heydrich,” he whispered.
The night dragged by in silence. At about three o’clock, Jaeger pushed some of the chairs together, lay down awkwardly, and closed his eyes. Within minutes, he was snoring. March returned to his post at the window.
He could feel Heydrich’s eyes drilling into his back. He tried to ignore it, failed, and turned to confront the picture. A black uniform, a gaunt white face, silver hair -not a human countenance at all but a photographic negative of a skull; an X-ray. The only colour was in the centre of that death-mask face: those tiny pale blue eyes, like splinters of winter sky. March had never met Heydrich, or seen him; had only heard the stories. The press portrayed him as Nietzsche’s Superman sprung to life. Heydrich in his pilot’s uniform (he had flown combat missions on the Eastern front). Heydrich in his fencing gear (he had fenced for Germany in the Olympics). Heydrich with his violin (he could reduce audiences to tears by the pathos of his playing). When the aircraft carrying Heinrich Himmler had blown up in mid-air two years ago, Heydrich had taken over as Reichsfuhrer-SS. Now he was said to be in line to succeed the Fuhrer. The whisper around the Kripo was that the Reich’s chief policeman liked beating up prostitutes.
March sat down. A numbing tiredness was seeping through him, a paralysis: the legs first, then the body, at last the mind. Despite himself, he drifted into a shallow sleep. Once, far away, he thought he heard a cry — human and forlorn — but it might have been a dream. Footsteps echoed in his mind. Keys turned. Cell doors clanged.
He was jerked awake by a rough hand.
“Good morning, gentlemen. I hope you had some rest?”
It was Krebs.
March felt raw. His eyes were gritty in the sickly neon. Through the window the sky was pearl-grey with the approaching morning.
Jaeger grunted and swung his legs to the floor. “Now what?”
“Now we talk” said Krebs. “Come.”
“Who is this kid,” grumbled Jaeger to March under his breath, “to push us about?” But he was wary enough to keep his voice low.
They filed into the corridor and March wondered again what game was being played. Interrogation is a night-time art. Why leave it until the morning? Why give them a chance to regain their strength, to concoct a story?
Krebs had recently shaved. His skin was studded with pinpricks of blood. He said: “Washroom on the right. You will wish to clean yourselves.” It was an instruction rather than a question.
In the mirror, red-eyed and unshaven, March looked more convict than policeman. He filled the basin, rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie, splashed icy water on his face, his forearms, the nape of his neck, let it trickle down his back. The cold sting brought him back to life.
Jaeger stood alongside him. “Remember what I said.”
March quickly turned the taps back on. “Be careful.”
“You think they wire the toilet?”
“They wire everything.”
Krebs conducted them downstairs. The guards fell in behind them. To the cellar? They clattered across the vestibule — quieter now than when they had arrived — and out into the grudging light.
Not the cellar.
Waiting in the BMW was the driver who had brought them from Stuckart’s apartment. The convoy moved off, north into the rush-hour traffic which was already building up around Potsdamer Platz. In the big shops, the windows piously displayed large, gilt-framed photographs of the Fuhrer — the official portrait from the mid-1950s, by the English photographer, Beaton. Twigs and flowers garlanded the frames, the traditional decoration heralding the Fuhrer’s birthday. Four days to go, each of which would see a fresh sprouting of swastika banners. Soon the city would be a forest of red, white and black.
Jaeger was gripping the arm rest, looking sick. “Come on, Krebs,” he said, in a wheedling voice. “We’re all the same rank. You can tell us where we’re going.”
Krebs made no reply. The dome of the Great Hall loomed ahead. Ten minutes later, when the BMW turned left on to the East-West Axis, March guessed their destination.
It was almost eight by the time they arrived. The iron gates of Buhler’s villa had been swung wide open. The grounds were filled with vehicles, dotted with black uniforms. One SS trooper was sweeping the lawn with a proton-magnetometer. Behind him, jammed into the ground, was a trail of red flags. Three more soldiers were digging holes. Drawn up on the gravel were Gestapo BMWs, a lorry, and a large armoured security van of the sort used for transporting gold bullion.
March felt Jaeger nudge him. Parked in the shadows beside the house, its driver leaning against the bodywork, was a bulletproof Mercedes limousine. A metal pennant hung above the radiator grille: silver SS lightning flashes on a black background; in one corner, like a cabbalistic symbol, the gothic letter K.
TWO
The head of the Reich Kriminalpolizei was an old man. His name was Artur Nebe, and he was a legend.
Nebe had been head of the Berlin detective force even before the Party came to power. He had a small head and the sallow, scaly skin of a tortoise. In 1954, to mark his sixtieth birthday, the Reichstag had voted him a large estate, including four villages, near Minsk in the Ostland, but he had never even been to look at it. He lived alone with his bed-ridden wife in Charlottenburg, in a large house marked by the smell of disinfectant and the whisper of pure oxygen. It was sometimes said that Heydrich wanted to get rid of him, to put his own man in charge of the Kripo, but dared not. “Onkel Artur” they called him in Werderscher Markt. Uncle Artur. He knew everything.
March had seen Nebe from a distance but never met him. Now he was sitting at Buhler’s grand piano, picking out a high note with a single, yellowish claw. The instrument was untuned, the sound discordant in the dusty air.
At the window, his broad back to the room, stood Odilo Globus.
