It was too dangerous to drive to Buhler’s villa so he stopped at the end of the causeway with the engine running. She leaned out to take a picture of the road leading to the island. The red and white pole was down. No sign of the sentry.
“Is that it?” she asked. “Life won’t pay much for these.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps there is another place.”
Numbers fifty-six to fifty-eight Am grossen Wannsee turned out to be a large nineteenth-century mansion with a pillared facade. It no longer housed the German headquarters of Interpol. At some point in the years since the war it had become a girls” school. March looked this way and that, up and down the leafy street where the blossom was in full pink bloom, and tried the gate. It was unlocked. He gestured to Charlie to join him.
“We are Herr and Frau March,” he said, as he pushed open the gate. “We have a daughter…”
Charlie nodded. “Yes, of course, Heidi. She is seven. With braids—”
“She is unhappy at her present school. This one was recommended. We wanted to look around…” They stepped into the grounds. March closed the gates behind them.
She said: “Naturally, if we are trespassing, we apologise…”
“But surely Frau March does not look old enough to have a sevenyear-old daughter?”
“She was seduced at an impressionable age by a handsome investigator…”
“A likely story.”
The gravel drive looped around a circular flower bed. March tried to picture it as it might have looked in January 1942. A dusting of snow on the ground, perhaps, or frost. Bare trees. A couple of guards shivering by the entrance. The government cars, one after the other, crunching over the icy gravel. An adjutant saluting and stepping forward to open the doors. Stuckart: handsome and elegant. Buhler: his lawyer’s notes carefully arranged in his briefcase. Luther: blinking behind his thick spectacles. Did their breath hang in the air after them? And Heydrich. Would he have arrived first, as host? Or last, to demonstrate his power? Did the cold impart colour even to those pale cheeks?
The house was barred and deserted. While Charlie took a picture of the entrance, March picked his way through a small shrubbery to peer through a window. Rows of dwarf-sized desks with dwarf-sized chairs up-ended and stacked on top. A pair of blackboards from which the pupils were being taught the Party’s special grace. On one:
On the other:
Childish paintings decorated the walls — blue meadows, green skies, clouds of sulphur-yellow. Children’s art was perilously close to degenerate art; such perversity would have to be knocked out of them …March could smell the school-smell even from here: the familiar compound of chalk dust, wooden floors and stale, institutional food. He turned away.
Someone in a neighbouring garden had lit a bonfire. Pungent white smoke — wet wood and dead leaves — drifted across the lawn at the back of the house. A wide flight of steps flanked by stone lions with frozen snarls led down to the lawn. Beyond the grass, through the trees, lay the dull, glassy surface of the Havel. They were facing south. Schwanenwerder, less than half a kilometre away, would be just visible from the upstairs windows. When Buhler bought his villa in the early 1950s, had the proximity of the two sites been a motive -was he the villain being drawn back to the scene of his crime? If so, what crime was it exactly?
March bent and dug up a handful of soil, sniffed at it, let it run through his fingers. The trail had gone cold years ago.
At the bottom of the garden were a couple of wooden barrels, green with age, used by the gardener to collect rainwater. March and Charlie sat on them side by side, legs dangling, looking across the lake. He was in no hurry to move on. Nobody would look for them here. There was something indescribably melancholy about it all — the silence, the dead leaves blowing across the lawn, the smell of the smoke — something that was the opposite of spring. It spoke of autumn, of the end of things.
He said: “Did I tell you that before I went away to sea, there were Jews in our town? When I got back, they were all gone. I asked about it. People said they had been evacuated to the East. For resettlement.”
“Did they believe that?”
“In public, of course. Even in private it was wiser not to speculate. And easier. To pretend it was true.”
“Did you believe it?”
“I didn’t think about it.
“Who cares?” he said suddenly. “Suppose everyone knew all the details. Who would care? Would it really make any difference?”
“Someone thinks so,” she reminded him. That’s why everyone who attended Heydrich’s conference is dead. Except Heydrich.”
He looked back at the house. His mother, a firm believer in ghosts, used to tell him that brickwork and plaster soaked up history, stored what they had witnessed, like a sponge. Since then March had seen his share of places in which evil had been done and he did not believe it. There was nothing especially wicked about Am grossen Wannsee 56/58. It was just a large, businessman’s mansion, now converted into a girls” school. So what were the walls absorbing now? Teenage crushes? Geometry lessons? Exam nerves?
He pulled out Heydrich’s invitation. “A discussion followed by luncheon.” Starting at noon. Ending at — what? — three or four in the afternoon. It would have been growing dark by the time they left. Yellow lamps in the windows; mist from the lake. Fourteen men. Well-fed; maybe some of them tipsy on the Gestapo’s wine. Cars to take them back to central Berlin. Chauffeurs who had waited a long time outside, with cold feet and noses like icicles…
And then, less than five months later, in Zurich in the heat of midsummer, Martin Luther had marched into the offices of Hermann Zaugg, banker to the rich and frightened, and opened an account with four keys.
“I wonder why he was empty-handed.”
“What?” She was distracted. He had interrupted her thoughts.
“I always imagined Luther carrying a small suitcase of some sort. Yet when he came down the steps to
