Fatherland - Страница 3

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He pushed open a door and switched on the light. His office was little more than a gloomy cupboard, a cell, its solitary window opening on to a courtyard of blackened brick. One wall was shelved: tattered, leather-bound volumes of statutes and decrees, a handbook on forensic science, a dictionary, an atlas, a Berlin street guide, telephone directories, box files with labels gummed to them — “Braune”, “Hundt”, “Stark”, “Zadek” — every one a bureaucratic tombstone, memorialising some long-forgotten victim. Another side of the office was taken up by four filing cabinets. On top of one was a spider plant, placed there by a middle-aged secretary two years ago at the height of an unspoken and unrequited passion for Xavier March. It was now dead. That was all the furniture, apart from two wooden desks pushed together beneath the window. One was March’s; the other belonged to Max Jaeger.

March hung his overcoat on a peg by the door. He preferred not to wear uniform when he could avoid it, and this morning he had used the rainstorm on the Havel as an excuse to dress in grey trousers and a thick blue sweater. He pushed Jaeger’s chair towards Jost. “Sit down. Coffee?”

“Please.”

There was a machine in the corridor. “We’ve got fucking photographs. Can you believe it? Look at that.” Along the passage March could hear the voice of Fiebes of VB3 — the sexual crimes division — boasting of his latest success. “Her maid took them. Look, you can see every hair. The girl should turn professional.”

What would this be? March thumped the side of the coffee machine and it ejected a plastic cup. Some officer’s wife, he guessed, and a Polish labourer shipped in from the General Government to work in the garden. It was usually a Pole; a dreamy, soulful Pole, plucking at the heart of a wife whose husband was away at the front. It sounded as if they had been photographed in flagrante by some jealous girl from the Bund deutscher Madel, anxious to please the authorities. This was a sexual crime, as defined in the 1935 Race Defilement Act.

He gave the machine another thump.

There would be a hearing in the People’s Court, salaciously recorded in Der Sturmer as a warning to others. Two years in Ravensbruck for the wife. Demotion and disgrace for the husband. Twenty-five years for the Pole, if he was lucky; death if he was not.

“Fuck!” A male voice muttered something and Fiebes, a weaselly inspector in his mid-fifties whose wife had run off with an SS ski instructor ten years before, gave a shout of laughter. March, a cup of black coffee in either hand, retreated to his office and slammed the door behind him as loudly as he could with his foot.

...

Reichskriminalpolizei Werderscher Markt 5/6

Berlin

STATEMENT OF WITNESS

My name is Hermann Friedrich Jost. I was born on 23.2.45 in Dresden. I am a cadet at the Sepp Dietrich Academy, Berlin. At 05.30 this morning, I left for my regular training run. I prefer to run alone. My normal route takes me west through the Grunewald Forest to the Havel, north along the lakeshore to the Lindwerder Restaurant, then south to the barracks in Schlachtensee. Three hundred metres north of the Schwanenwerder causeway, I saw an object lying in the water at the edge of the lake. It was the body of a male. I ran to a telephone half a kilometre along the lake-path and informed the police. I returned to the body and waited for the arrival of the authorities. During all this time it was raining hard and I saw nobody.

I am making this statement of my own free will in the presence of Kripo investigator Xavier March.

SS-Schutze H. F. Jost.

08.24/14.4.64

March leaned back in his chair and studied the young man as he signed his statement. There were no hard lines to his face. It was as pink and soft as a baby’s, with a clamour of acne around the mouth, a whisper of blond hair on the upper lip. March doubted if he shaved.

“Why do you run alone?”

Jost handed back his statement. “It gives me a chance to think. It is good to be alone once in the day. One is not often alone in a barracks.”

“How long have you been a cadet?”

“Three months.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Enjoy it!” Jost turned his face to the window. “I had just begun studying at the university at Gottingen when my call-up came through. Let us say, it was not the happiest day of my life.”

“What were you studying?”

“Literature.”

“German?”

“What other sort is there?” Jost gave one of his watery smiles. “I hope to go back to the university when I have served my three years. I want to be a teacher; a writer. Not a soldier.”

March scanned his statement. “If you are so anti-military, what are you doing in the SS?” He guessed the answer.

“My father. He was a founder member of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. You know how it is: I am his only son; it was his dearest wish.”

“You must hate it.”

Jost shrugged. “I survive. And I have been told -unofficially, naturally — that I will not have to go to the front. They need an assistant at the officer school in Bad Tolz to teach a course on the degeneracy of American literature. That sounds more my kind of thing: degeneracy.”

He risked another smile. “Perhaps I shall become an expert in the field.”

March laughed and glanced again at the statement. Something was not right here, and now he saw it. “No doubt you will.” He put the statement to one side and stood up. “I wish you luck with your teaching.”

“Am I free to go?”

“Of course.”

With a look of relief, Jost got to his feet. March grasped the door handle. “One thing.” He turned and stared into the SS cadet’s eyes. “Why are you lying to me?”

Jost jerked his head back. “What… ?”

“You say you left the barracks at five-thirty. You call the cops at five past six. Schwanenwerder is three kilometres from the barracks. You are fit: you run every day. You do not dawdle: it is raining hard. Unless you suddenly developed a limp, you must have arrived at the lake quite some time before six. So there are — what? — twenty minutes out of thirty-five unaccounted for in your statement. What were you doing, Jost?”

The young man looked stricken. “Maybe I left the barracks later. Or maybe I did a couple of circuits of the running track there first…”

“ ‘Maybe, maybe…’ ” March shook his head sadly. These are facts that can be checked, and I warn you: it will go hard for you if I have to find out the truth and bring it to you, rather than the other way round. You are a homosexual, yes?”

“Herr Sturmbannfuhrer! For God’s sake …”

March put his hands on Jost’s shoulders. “I don’t care. Perhaps you run alone every morning so you can meet some fellow in the Grunewald for twenty minutes. That’s your business. It’s no crime in my book. All I’m interested in is the body. Did you see something? What did you really do?”

Jost shook his head. “Nothing. I swear.” Tears were welling in his wide, pale eyes.

“Very well.” March released him. “Wait downstairs. I’ll arrange transport to take you back to Schlachtensee.” He opened the door. “Remember what I said: better you tell me the truth now than I find it out for myself later.”

Jost hesitated, and for a moment March thought he might say something, but then he walked out into the corridor and was gone.

March rang down to the basement garage and ordered a car. He hung up and stared out of the grimy window at the wall opposite. The black brick glistened under the film of rainwater pouring down from the upper storeys. Had he been too hard on the boy? Probably. But sometimes the truth could only be ambushed, taken unguarded in a surprise attack. Was Jost lying? Certainly. But then if he was a homosexual, he could scarcely afford not to lie: anyone found guilty of’anti-community acts” went straight to a labour camp. SS men arrested for homosexuality were attached to punishment battalions on the Eastern front; few returned.

March had seen a score of young men like Jost in the past year. There were more of them every day. Rebelling against their parents. Questioning the state. Listening to American radio stations. Circulating their crudely printed copies of proscribed books — Gunter Grass and Graham Greene, George Orwell and J. D. Salinger. Chiefly, they protested against the war — the seemingly endless struggle against the American-backed Soviet guerillas, which had been grinding on east of the Urals for twenty years.

He felt suddenly ashamed of his treatment of Jost, and considered going down to apologise to him. But then he decided, as he always did, that his duty to the dead came first. His penance for his morning’s bullying would be to put a name to the body in the lake.

The Duty Room of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei occupies most of Werderscher Markt’s third floor. March mounted the stairs two at a time. Outside the entrance, a guard armed with a machine gun demanded his pass. The door opened with a thud of electronic bolts.

An illuminated map of Berlin takes up half the far wall. A galaxy of stars, orange in the semi-darkness, marks the capital’s one hundred and twenty-two police stations. To its left is a second map, even larger, depicting the entire Reich. Red lights pinpoint those towns big enough to warrant their own Kripo divisions. The centre of Europe glows crimson. Further east, the lights gradually thin until, beyond Moscow, there are only a few isolated sparks, winking like camp fires in the blackness. It is a planetarium of crime.