The Mercedes flew down the slip road and joined the moonlit Autobahn. The road gleamed like a wide river. Behind them, sweeping round to follow, he pictured a dragon’s tail of lights and guns.
He was the head. He was pulling them after him — away from her, along the empty highway towards the east.
TWO
Pain and exhaustion stalked him. To keep awake he talked.
“I suppose,” he said, “we have Krause to thank for this.”
Neither of them had spoken for almost an hour. The only sounds were the hum of the engine and the drumming of the wheels on the concrete road. Jaeger jumped at March’s voice. “Krause?”
“Krause mixed up the rotas, ordered me to Schwanen-werder instead of you.”
“Krause!” Jaeger scowled. His face was a stage demon’s, painted green by the glow of the instrument panel. All the troubles in his life could be traced back to Krause!
“The Gestapo fixed it so you’d be on duty on Monday night, didn’t they? What did they tell you? ‘There’ll be a body in the Havel, Sturmbannfuhrer. No hurry about identifying it. Lose the file for a few days…’ ”
Jaeger muttered: “Something like that.”
“And then you overslept, and by the time you got to the Markt on Tuesday I’d taken over the case. Poor Max. Never could get up in the mornings. The Gestapo must have loved you. Whom were you dealing with?”
“Globocnik.”
“Globus himself!” March whistled. “I bet you thought it was Christmas! What did he promise you, Max? Promotion? Transfer to the Sipo?”
“Fuck you, March.”
“So then you kept him informed of everything I was doing. When I told you Jost had seen Globus with the body at the lakeside, you passed it along and Jost disappeared. When I called you from Stuckart’s apartment, you warned them where we were and we were arrested. They searched the woman’s apartment the next morning because you told them she had something from Stuckart’s safe. They left us together in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse so you could do their interrogation for them—”
Jaeger’s right hand flashed across from the steering wheel and grabbed the gun barrel, twisting it up and away, but March’s fingers were caught around the trigger and squeezed it.
The explosion in the enclosed space tore their eardrums. The car swerved across the Autobahn and up on to the grass strip separating the two carriageways and they were bouncing along the rough track. For an instant, March thought he had been hit, then he thought that Jaeger had been hit. But Jaeger had both hands on the wheel and was fighting to control the Mercedes and March still had the gun. Cold air was rushing into the car through a jagged hole in the roof.
Jaeger was laughing like a madman and saying something but March was still deaf from the shot. The car skidded off the grass and rejoined the Autobahn.
In the shock of the blast, March had been thrown against his shattered hand and had almost blacked-out, but the stream of freezing air pummelled him back into consciousness. He had a frantic desire to finish his story -1 only knew for certain you’d betrayed me when Krebs showed me the wire-tap: I knew because you were the only person I’d told about the telephone kiosk in Billow Strasse, how Stuckart called the girl — but the wind whipped away his words. In any case, what did it matter?
In all this, the irony was Nightingale. The American had been an honest man; his closest friend, the traitor.
Jaeger was still grinning like a lunatic, talking to himself as he drove, the tears glistening on his plump cheeks.
Just after five they pulled off the autobahn into an all-night filling station. Jaeger stayed in the car and told the attendant through the open window to fill the tank. March kept the Luger pressed to Jaeger’s ribs, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him. He had dwindled. He was just a sack of flesh in a uniform.
The young man who operated the pumps looked at the hole in the roof and looked at them — two SS- Sturmbannfuhrer in a brand-new Mercedes — bit his lip, and said nothing.
Through the line of trees separating the service area from the autobahn, March could see the occasional passing headlight. But of the cavalcade he knew was following them: no sign. He guessed they must have halted a kilometre back, to wait and see what he planned to do next.
When they were back on the road, Jaeger said: “I never meant any harm to come to you, Zavi.”
March, who had been thinking of Charlie, grunted.
“Globocnik is a police general, for God’s sake. If he tells you: ‘Jaeger! Look the other way!’ — you look the other way, right? I mean, that’s the law, isn’t it? We’re policemen. We have to obey the law!”
Jaeger took his eyes off the road long enough to glance at March, who said nothing. He returned his attention to the Autobahn.
Then, when he ordered me to tell him what you’d found out — what was I supposed to do?”
“You could have warned me.”
“Yes? And what would you have done? I know you: you’d have carried on anyway. And where would that have left me — me, and Hannelore and the kids? We’re not all made to be heroes, Zavi. There have to be people like me, so people like you can look so clever.”
They were driving towards the dawn. Over the low wooded hills ahead of them was a pale glow, as if a distant city was on fire.
“Now I suppose they’ll kill me, for allowing you to pull the gun on me. They’ll say I let you do it. They’ll shoot me. Jesus, it’s a joke, isn’t it?” He looked at March with wet eyes. “It’s a joke!”
“It’s a joke,” said March.
It was light by the time they crossed the Oder. The grey river stretched either side of the high steel bridge. A pair of barges crossed in the centre of the slow-moving water, and hooted a loud good morning to one another.
The Oder: Germany’s natural frontier with Poland. Except there was no longer any frontier; there was no Poland.
March stared straight ahead. This was the road down which the Wehrmacht’s Tenth Army had rolled in September 1939. In his mind, he saw again the old newsreels: the horse-drawn artillery, the Panzers, the marching troops …Victory had seemed so easy. How they had cheered!
There was an exit sign to Gleiwitz, the town where the war had started.
Jaeger was moaning. “I’m shattered, Zavi. I can’t drive much longer.”
March said, “Not far now.”
He thought of Globus. “There’s nothing there any more, not even a brick. Nobody will ever believe it. And shall I tell you something? Part of you can’t believe it either.” That had been his worst moment, because it was true.
A Totenburg — a Citadel of the Dead — stood on a bare hilltop not far from the road: four granite towers, fifty metres high, set in a square, enclosing a bronze obelisk. For a moment as they passed, the weak sun glinted on the metal, like a reflecting mirror. There were dozens of such tumuli between here and the Urals — imperishable memorials to the Germans who had died — were dying, would die — for the conquest of the East. Beyond Silesia, across the Steppes, the Autobahnen were built on ridges to keep them clear of the winter’s snows — deserted highways ceaselessly swept by the wind…
