“Where? What time?”
“My apartment. Noon.”
“Is that safe?”
“Nowhere is safe.”
And then he had rung off. Those were the last words she had heard Stuckart speak.
She finished her cigarette, ground it under her foot.
The rest he knew, more or less. She had found the bodies, called the police. They had taken her to the big city station in Alexander Plate, where she had sat in a blank-walled room for more than three hours, going crazy. Then she had been driven to another building, to give a statement to some creepy SS man in a cheap wig, whose office had been more like that of a pathologist than a detective.
March smiled at the description of Fiebes.
She had already made up her mind not to tell the Polizei about Stuckart’s call on Saturday night, for an obvious reason. If she had hinted that she had been preparing to help Stuckart defect, she would have been accused of “activities incompatible with her status as a journalist”, and arrested. As it was, they had decided to deport her anyway. So it goes.
The authorities were planning a fireworks display in the Tiergarten, to commemorate the Fuhrer’s birthday. An area of the park had been fenced off, and pyrotechnicians in blue overalls were laying their surprises, watched by a curious crowd. Mortar tubes, sandbagged emplacements, dug-outs, kilometres of cable: these looked more like the preparations for an artillery bombardment than for a celebration. Nobody paid any attention to the SS- Sturmbannfuhrer and the woman in the blue plastic coat.
He scribbled on a page of his notebook.
“These are my telephone numbers — office and home. Also, here are the numbers of a friend of mine called Max Jaeger. If you can’t get hold of me, call him.” He tore out the page and gave it to her. “If anything suspicious happens, anything worries you — it doesn’t matter what the time is — call”
“What about you? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to try to get to Zurich tonight. Check out this bank account first thing tomorrow.”
He knew what she would say even before she opened her mouth.
“I’ll come with you.”
“You will be much safer here.”
“But it’s my story, too.”
She sounded like a spoilt child. “It’s not a story, for God’s sake.” He bit back his anger. “Look. A deal. Whatever I find out, I swear I’ll tell you. You can have it all.”
“It’s not as good as being there.”
“It’s better than being dead.”
“They wouldn’t do anything like that abroad.”
“On the contrary, that is exactly where they would do it. If something happens here, they are responsible. If something happens abroad…” He shrugged. “Prove it.”
They parted in the centre of the Tiergarten. He strode briskly across the grass, towards the humming city. As he walked, he took the envelope out of his pocket, squeezed it to check the key was still in it and — on impulse — raised it to his nose. Her scent. He looked over his shoulder. She was walking through the trees with her back to him. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared; disappeared, reappeared — a tiny birdlike figure — bright blue plumage against the dreary wood.
FIVE
The door to March’s apartment hung off its hinges like a broken jaw. He stood on the landing, listening, his pistol drawn. The place was silent, deserted.
Like Charlotte Maguire’s, his apartment had been searched, but by hands of greater malevolence. Everything had been tipped into a heap in the centre of the sitting room — clothes and books, shoes and old letters, photographs and crockery and furniture — the detritus of a life. It was as if someone had intended to make a bonfire but had been distracted at the last minute, before they could apply the torch.
Wedged upright on top of the pyre was a wooden-framed photograph of March, aged twenty, shaking hands with the commander of the U-Boot Waffe, Admiral Donitz. Why had it been left like that? What point was being made? He picked it up, carried it over to the window, blew dust off it. He had forgotten he even had it. Doenitz liked to come aboard every boat before it left Wilhelmshaven: an awesome figure, ramrod, iron-gripped, gruff. “Good hunting,” he had barked at March. He growled the same to everyone. The picture showed five young crewmen lined up beneath the conning tower to meet him. Rudi Halder was to March’s left. The other three had died later that year, trapped in the hull of U-175.
Good hunting.
He tossed the picture back on the pile.
It had taken time to do all this. Time, and anger, and the certainty of not being disturbed. It must have happened while he was under guard in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It could only have been the work of the Gestapo. He remembered a line of graffiti scrawled by White Rose on a wall near Werderscher Markt: “A police state is a country run by criminals”.
They had opened his mail. A couple of bills, long overdue — they were welcome to them — and a letter from his ex-wife, dated Tuesday. He glanced through it. She had decided he was not to see Pili in future. It upset the boy too much. She hoped he would agree this was for the best. If necessary, she would be willing to swear a deposition before the Reich Family Court, giving her reasons. She trusted this would not be necessary, both for his sake and the boy’s. It was signed “Klara Eckart”. So she had gone back to her maiden name. He screwed it up and threw it next to the photograph, with the rest of the rubbish.
The bathroom at least had been left intact. He showered and shaved, inspecting himself in the mirror for damage. It felt worse than it looked: a large bruise developing nicely on his chest, more on the back of his legs and at the base of his spine; a livid mark at his throat. Nothing serious. What was it his father used to say — his paternal balm for all the batterings of childhood? “You’ll live, boy.” That was it. “You’ll live!”
Naked, he went back into the sitting room and searched through the wreckage, pulling out clean clothes, a pair of shoes, a suitcase, a leather hold-all. He feared they might have taken his passport but it was there, at the bottom of the mound. It had been issued in 1961, when March had gone to Italy to bring back a gangster being held in Milan. His younger self stared up at him, fatter-cheeked, half-smiling. My God, he thought, I have aged ten years in three.
He brushed down his uniform and put it back on, together with a clean shirt, and packed his suitcase. As he bent to snap it shut his eye was caught by something in the empty grate. The photograph of the Weiss family was lying face down. He hesitated, picked it up, folded it into a small square — exactly as he had found it five years earlier — and slipped it into his wallet. If he was stopped and searched, he would say they were his family.
Then he took a last look round and left, closing the broken door behind him as best he could.
At the main branch of the Deutschebank, in Wittenberg Platz, he asked how much he held in his account.
“Four thousand two hundred and seventy-seven Reichsmarks and thirty-eight pfennigs.”
“I’ll take it.”
“All of it, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer?” The teller blinked at him through wire-framed spectacles. “You are closing the account?”
“All of it.”
March watched him count out forty-two one-hundred Mark notes, then stuffed them into his wallet, next to the photograph. Not much in the way of life savings.
This is what no promotions and seven years of alimony do to you.
