“No. Listen. I was thinking! Yesterday, when I was coming through the airport, I thanked God you stopped me trying to bring the painting back with us to Berlin. Remember the queues? They searched every bag. How could Luther have got anything past the Zollgrenzschutz?”
March considered this, massaging his temples. “A good question,” he said eventually. “Maybe,” he added a minute later, “the best question I ever heard.”
At the Flughafen Hermann Goring the statue of Hanna Reitsch was steadily oxidising in the rain. She stared across the concourse outside the departure terminal with rust-pitted eyes.
“You’d better stay with the car,” said March. “Do you drive?”
She nodded. He dropped the keys in her lap. “If the Flughafen Polizei try to move you on, don’t argue with them. Drive off and come round again. Keep circling. Give me twenty minutes.”
Then what?”
“I don’t know.” His hand fluttered in the air. “Improvise.”
He strode into the airport terminal. The big digital clock above the passport control zone flicked over: 13:22. He glanced behind him. He could measure his freedom probably in minutes. Less than that, if Globus had issued a general alert, for nowhere in the Reich was more heavily patrolled than the airport.
He kept thinking of Krebs in his apartment, and Eisler: “The word is, you’ve been arrested.”
A man with a souvenir bag from the Soldiers” Hall looked familiar. A Gestapo watcher? March abruptly changed direction and headed into the toilets. He stood at the urinal, pissing air, his eyes fixed on the entrance. Nobody came in. When he emerged, the man had gone.
“Last call for Lufthansa flight two-zero-seven to Tiflis…”
He went to the central Lufthansa desk and showed his ID to one of the guards. “I need to speak to your head of security. Urgently.”
“He may not be here, Sturmbannfuhrer.”
“Look for him.”
The guard was gone a long time. 13:27 said the clock. 13:28. Perhaps he was calling the Gestapo. 13:29. March put his hand in his pocket and felt the cold metal of the Luger. Better to make a stand here than crawl around the stone floor in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse spitting teeth into your hand.
13:30.
The guard returned. “This way, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer. If you please.”
Friedman had joined the Berlin Kripo at the same time as March. He had left it five years later, one step ahead of a corruption investigation. Now he wore hand-made English suits, smoked duty-free Swiss cigars, and made five times his official salary by methods long suspected but never proved. He was a merchant prince, the airport his corrupt little kingdom.
When he realised March had come not to investigate him but to beg a favour he was almost ecstatic. His excellent mood persisted as he led March along a passage away from the terminal building. “And how is Jaeger? Spreading chaos I suppose? And Fiebes? Still jerking-off over pictures of Aryan maidens and Ukrainian window- cleaners? Oh, how I miss you all, I don’t think! Here we are.” Friedman transferred his cigar from his hand to his mouth and tugged at a large door. “Behold the cave of Aladdin!”
The metal slid open with a crash to reveal a small hangar stuffed with lost and abandoned property. The things people leave behind,” said Friedman. “You would not believe it. We even had a leopard once.”
“A leopard? A cat?”
“It died. Some idle bastard forgot to feed it. It made a good coat.” He laughed and snapped his fingers and from the shadows an elderly, stoop-shouldered man appeared — a Slav, with wide-set, fearful eyes.
“Stand up straight, man. Show respect.” Friedman gave him a shove that sent him staggering backwards. The Sturmbannfuhrer here is a good friend of mine. He’s looking for something. Tell him, March.”
“A case, perhaps a bag,” said March. “The last flight from Zurich on Monday night, the thirteenth. Either left on the aircraft, or in the baggage reclaim area.”
“Got that? Right?” The Slav nodded. “Well go on then!” He shuffled away and Friedman gestured to his mouth. “Dumb. Had his tongue cut out in the war. The ideal worker!” He laughed and clapped March on the shoulder. “So. How goes it?”
“Well enough.”
“Civilian clothes. Working the weekend. Must be something big.”
“It may be.”
This is the Martin Luther character, right?” March made no reply. “So you’re dumb, too. I see.” Friedman flicked cigar ash on the clean floor. “Fair enough by me. A brown-pants job. Possibly?”
“A what?”
“Zollgrenzschutz expression. Someone plans to bring in something they shouldn’t. They get to the customs shed, see the security, start shitting themselves. Drop whatever it is and run.”
“But this is special, yes? You don’t open every case every day?”
“Just in the week before the Fuhrertag.”
“What about the lost property, do you open that?”
“Only if it looks valuable!” Friedman laughed again. “No. A jest. We haven’t the manpower. Anyway, it’s been X-rayed, remember-no guns, no explosives. So we just leave it here, wait for someone to claim it. If no one’s turned up in a year, then we open it, see what we’ve got.”
“Pays for a few suits, I suppose.”
“What?” Friedman plucked at his immaculate sleeve. “These poor rags?” There was a sound and he turned round. “Looks like you’re in luck, March.”
The Slav was returning, carrying something. Friedman took it from him and weighed it in his hand. “Quite light. Can’t be gold. What do you think it is, March? Drugs? Dollars? Contraband silk from the East? A treasure map?”
“Are you going to open it?” March touched the gun in his pocket. He would use it if he had to.
Friedman appeared shocked. “This is a favour. One friend to another. Your business.” He handed the case to March. “You’ll remember that, Sturmbannfuhrer, won’t you? A favour? One day you’ll do the same for me, comrade to comrade?”
The case was of the sort that doctors carry, with brass-reinforced corners and a stout brass lock, dull with age. The brown leather was scratched and faded, the heavy stitching dark, the hand-grip worn smooth like a brown pebble by years of carrying, until it felt like an extension of the hand. It proclaimed reliability and reassurance; professionalism; quiet wealth. It was certainly pre-war, maybe even pre—
Great War- built to last a generation or two. Solid. Worth a lot.
All this March absorbed on the walk back to the Volkswagen. The route avoided the Zollgrenzschutz - another favour from Friedman.
Charlie fell upon it like a child upon a birthday present and swore with disappointment when she found it locked. As March drove out of the airport perimeter she fished in her own bag and retrieved a pair of nail scissors. She picked desperately at the lock, the blades making ineffective scrabblings on the brass.
March said: “You’re wasting your time. I’ll have to break it open. Wait till we get there.”
She shook the bag with frustration. “Get where?”
He ran a hand through his hair.
A good question.
Every room in the city was booked. The Eden with its roof-garden cafe, the Bristol on Unter den Linden, the Kaiserhof in Mohren Strasse — all had stopped taking reservations months ago. The monster hotels with a thousand bedrooms and the little rooming houses dotted around the railway termini were filled with uniforms. Not just the SA and the SS, the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, but all the others besides: the National Socialist Empire War Association, the German Falconry Order, the National Socialist Leadership Schools…
Outside the most famous and luxurious of all Berlin’s hotels — the Adlon, on the corner of Pariser Platz and
