travellers with stout ankles and cloche hats. Innocent days”. March took up a position by the entrance to the terminal and pretended to study the photographs as Charlie approached the car rentals desk.
Suddenly, she was smiling, making apologetic gestures with her hands — playing to perfection the lady in distress.
She had missed the flight, her family was waiting …The rental agent was charmed, and consulted a typed sheet. For a moment, the issue hung in the balance- and then, yes, as it happened, Fraulein, he did have something. Something for someone with eyes as pretty as yours, of course …Your driving licence, please …
She handed it over. It had been issued the previous year in the name of Voss, Magda, aged twenty-four, of Mariendorf, Berlin. It was the licence of the girl murdered on her wedding day five days ago — the licence Max Jaeger had left in his desk, along with all the other papers from the Spandau shootings.
March looked away, forcing himself to study an old aerial photograph of the Tempelhof airfield. BERLIN was painted in huge white letters along the runway. When he glanced back, the agent was entering details of the licence on the rental form, laughing at some witticism of his own.
As a strategy it was not without risk. In the morning, a copy of the rental agreement would be forwarded automatically to the Polizei, and even the Orpo would wonder why a murdered woman was hiring a car. But tomorrow was Sunday, Monday was the Fuhrertag, and by Tuesday -the earliest the Orpo were likely to pull their fingers out of their backsides — March reckoned he and Charlie would either be safe or arrested, or dead.
Ten minutes later, with a final exchange of smiles, she was given the keys to a four-door black Opel, with ten thousand kilometres on the clock. Five minutes after that, March joined her in the parking lot. He navigated while she drove. It was the first time he had seen her behind the wheel: another side of her. In the busy traffic she displayed an exaggerated caution which he felt did not come naturally.
SKETCH OF INSTALLATION BY MARTIN LUTHER
[Dated 15 July 1943; handwritten; 1 page]
<see 05.05.Sketch.gif>
The lobby of the Prince Friedrich Karl was deserted: the guests were out for the night. As they passed through it towards the stairs the receptionist kept her head down. They were just another of Herr Brecker’s little scams — best not to know too much.
Their room had not been searched. The cotton threads hung where March had wedged them between door and frame. Inside, when he pulled Luther’s case out from beneath the bed, the single strand of hair was still laced through the lock.
Charlie stepped out of her dress and wrapped a towel around her shoulders.
In the bathroom at the end of the passage, a naked bulb lit a grimy sink. A bath stood on tiptoe, on iron claws.
March walked back to the bedroom, shut himself in, and once more propped the chair up against the door. He piled the contents of the case on the dressing table — the map, the various envelopes, the minutes and memoranda, the reports, including the one with the rows of statistics, typed on the machine with the extra-large letters. Some of the paper crackled with age. He remembered how he and Charlie had sat during the sunlit afternoon, with the rumble of traffic outside; how they had passed the evidence backwards and forwards to one another — at first with excitement, then stunned, disbelieving, silent, until at last they came to the pouch with the photographs.
Now he needed to be more systematic. He pulled up a chair, cleared a space, and opened the exercise book. He tore out thirty pages. At the top of each sheet he wrote the year and the month, beginning with July 1941 and ending in January 1944. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. Then he began to work his way through the heap of papers, making notes in his clear script.
A railway timetable — badly printed on yellowing wartime paper:
…and so on, until, in the second week of February, a new destination appeared. Now almost all the times had been worked out to the minute:
…and so on again, until the end of the month.
A rusty paper clip had mottled the edge of the timetable. Attached to it was a telegraphic letter from the General Management, Directorate East, of the German Reich Railways, dated Berlin, 13 January 1943. First, a list of recipients:
Reich Railway Directorates
Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Halle (S), Karlsruhe, Konigsberg (Pr), Linz, Mainz, Oppeln, East in Frankfurt (O), Posen, Vienna
General Directorate of East Railway in Krakau
Reichsprotektor, Group Railways in Prague
General Traffic Directorate Warsaw
Reich Traffic Directorate Minsk
Then, the main text:
Subject: Special trains for resettlers during the period from 20 January to 28 February 1943.
We enclose a compilation of the special trains (Vd, Rm, Po, Pj and Da) agreed upon in Berlin on 15 January 1943 for the period from 20 January 1943 to 28 February 1943 and a circulatory plan for cars to be used in these trains.
Train formation is noted for each recirculation and attention is to be paid to these instructions. After each full trip cars are to be well cleaned, if necessary fumigated, and upon completion of the programme prepared for further use. Number and kinds of cars are to be determined upon dispatch of the last train and are to be reported to me by telephone with confirmation on service cards.
[Signed] Dr Jacobi
33 Bfp 5 Bfsv Minsk 9 Feb. 1943
March flicked back to the timetable and read it through again. Theresienstadt/Auschwitz, Auschwitz/Theresienstadt, Bialystok/Treblinka, Treblinka/Bialystok: the syllables drummed in his tired brain like the rhythm of wheels on a railway track.
He ran his finger down the columns of figures, trying to decipher the message behind them. So: a train would be loaded in the Polish town of Bialystok at breakfast time. By lunchtime, it would be at this hell, Treblinka. (Not all the journeys were so brief- he shuddered at the thought of the seventeen hours from Berlin to Auschwitz.) In the afternoon, the cars would be unloaded at Treblinka and fumigated. At nine o’clock that evening they would return to Bialystok, arriving in the early hours, ready to be loaded up again at breakfast.
On 12 February, the pattern breaks. Instead of going back to Bialystok, the empty train is sent to Grodno. Two days in the sidings there, and then — in the dark, long before dawn — the train is once more heading back, fully laden, to Treblinka. It arrives at lunchtime. Is unloaded. And that night begins rattling back westwards again, this time to Scharfenweise.
What else could an investigator of the Berlin Kriminal-polizei deduce from this document?
