“Uncle Erich gave them to me. He collected them.”
Pili flung himself on the bed and began to turn the pages. “What do the captions say, papa?” He gave March the magazine and sat close to him, holding on to his arm.
“ ‘The sapper has worked his way right up to the wire obstacles protecting the machine gun position,’ ” read March. “ ‘A few spurts of flame and the deadly stream of burning oil has put the enemy out of action. The flame throwers must be fearless men with nerves of steel.’ ”
“And that one?”
This was not the farewell March had envisaged, but if it was what the boy wanted… He ploughed on: “ ‘I want to fight for the new Europe: so say three brothers from Copenhagen with their company leader in the SS training camp in Upper Alsace. They have fulfilled all the conditions relating to questions of race and health and are now enjoying the manly open-air life in the camp in the woods.’ ”
“What about these?”
He was smiling. “Come on, Pili. You’re ten years old.
You can read these easily.”
“But I want you to read them. Here’s a picture of a U-boat, like yours. What does it say?”
He stopped smiling and put down the magazine. There was something wrong here. What was it? He realised: the silence. For several minutes now, nothing had happened in the street outside -not a car, not a footstep, not a voice. Even the lawnmower had stopped. He saw Pili’s eyes flick to the window, and he understood.
Somewhere in the house: a tinkle of glass. March scrambled for the door, but the boy was too quick for him -rolling off the bed, grabbing his legs, curling himself around his father’s feet in a foetal ball, a parody of childish entreaty. “Please don’t go, papa,” he was saying, “please…” March’s fingers grasped the door-handle but he couldn’t move. He was anchored, mired. I have dreamed this before, he thought. The window imploded behind them, showering their backs with glass — now real uniforms with real guns were filling the bedroom — and suddenly March was on his back gazing up at the little plastic warplanes bobbing and spinning crazily at the ends of their invisible wires.
He could hear Pili’s voice: “It’s going to be all right, papa. They’re going to help you. They’ll make you better. Then you can come and live with us. They promised…”
THREE
His hands were cuffed tight behind his back, wrists outwards. Two SS men propped him against the wall, against the map of the Eastern front, and Globus stood before him. Pili had been hustled away, thank God. “I have waited for this moment,” said Globus, “as a bridegroom waits for his bride”, and he punched March in the stomach, hard. March folded, dropped to his knees, dragging the map and all its little pins down with him, thinking he would never breathe again. Then Globus had him by the hair and was pulling him up, and his body was trying to retch and suck in oxygen at the same time and Globus hit him again and he went down again. This process was repeated several times. Finally, while he was lying on the carpet with his knees drawn up, Globus planted his boot on the side of his head and ground his toe into his ear. “Look,” he said, “I’ve put my foot on shit” and from a long way away, March heard the sound of men laughing.
“Where’s the girl?”
“What girl?”
Globus slowly extended his stubby fingers in front of March’s face, then brought his hand arcing down in a karate blow to the kidneys.
This was much worse than anything else — a blinding white flash of pain that shot straight through him and put him on the floor again, retching bile. And the worst was to know that he was merely in the foothills of a long climb. The stages of torture stretched before him, ascending as notes on a scale, from the dull bass of a blow in the belly, through the middle register of kidney-punches, onwards and upwards to some pitch beyond the range of the human ear, a pinnacle of crystal.
“Where’s the girl?”
“What…girl…?”
They disarmed him, searched him, then they half-pushed, half-dragged him out of the bungalow. A little crowd had gathered in the road. Klara’s elderly neighbours watched as he was bundled, head bowed, into the back of the BMW. He glimpsed briefly along the street four or five cars with revolving lights, a lorry, troops. What had they been expecting? A small war? Still no sign of Pili. The handcuffs forced him to sit hunched forward. Two Gestapo men were jammed on the back seat, one on either side of him. As the car pulled away, he could see some of the old folks already shuffling back into their houses, back to the reassuring glow of their television sets.
He was driven north through the holiday traffic, up into Saarland Strasse, east into Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. Fifty metres past the main entrance to Gestapo headquarters, the convoy swung right, through a pair of high prison gates, into a brick courtyard at the back of the building.
He was pulled out of the car and through a low entrance, down steep concrete steps. Then his heels were scraping along the floor of an arched passage. A door, a cell, and silence.
They left him alone, to allow his imagination to go to work — standard procedure. Very well. He crawled into a corner and rested his head against the damp brick. Every minute which passed was another minute’s travelling time for her. He thought of Pili, of all the lies, and clenched his fists.
The cell was lit by a weak bulb above the door, imprisoned in its own rusty metal cage. He glanced at his wrist, a useless reflex, for they had taken away his watch. Surely she could not be far from Nuremberg by now? He tried to fill his mind with images of the Gothic spires — St Lorenz, St Sebaldus, St Jakob…
Every limb — every part of him to which he could put a name — ached, yet they could not have worked him over for more than five minutes, and still they had managed not to leave a mark on his face. Truly, he had fallen into the hands of experts. He almost laughed, but that hurt his ribs, so he stopped. *”
He was taken along the passage to an interview room: whitewashed walls, a heavy oak table with a chair on each side; in the corner, an iron stove. Globus had disappeared, Krebs was in command. The handcuffs were removed. Standard procedure again — first the hard cop, then the soft. Krebs even attempted a joke: “Normally, we would arrest your son and threaten him as well, to encourage your cooperation. But in your case, we know that such a course would be counter-productive.” Secret policeman’s humour! He leaned back in his chair, smiling, and pointed his pencil.’Nevertheless. A remarkable boy.”
“ ‘Remarkable’ — your word.” At some point during his beating, March had bitten his tongue. He talked now as if he had spent a week in a dentist’s chair.
“Your ex-wife was given a telephone number last night,” said Krebs, “in case you attempted contact. The boy memorised it. The instant he saw you, he called. He’s inherited your brains, March. Your initiative. You should feel some pride.”
“At this moment, my feelings towards my son are indeed strong.”
Good, he thought, let’s keep this up. Another minute, another kilometre.
But Krebs was already down to business, turning the pages of a thick folder. “There are two issues here, March. One: your general political reliability, going back over many years. That does not concern us today — at least, not directly. Two: your conduct over the past week — specifically, your involvement in the attempts of the late Party Comrade Luther to defect to the United States.”
“I have no such involvement.”
“You were questioned by an officer of the Ordnungs-polizei in Adolf Hitler Platz yesterday morning — at the exact time the traitor Luther was planning to meet the American journalist, Maguire, together with an official of the
