Fatherland - Страница 4

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Krause, the Duty Officer for the Berlin Gau, sat on a raised platform beneath the display. He was on the telephone as March approached and raised his hand in greeting. Before him, a dozen women in starched white shirts sat in glass partitions, each wearing a headset with a microphone attached. What they must hear! A sergeant from a Panzer division comes home from a tour in the East. After a family supper, he takes out his pistol, shoots his wife and each of his three children in turn. Then he splatters his skull across the ceiling. An hysterical neighbour calls the cops. And the news comes here — is controlled, evaluated, reduced — before being passed downstairs to that corridor with cracked green linoleum, stale with cigarette smoke.

Behind the Duty Officer, a uniformed secretary with a sour face was making entries on the night incident board. There were four columns: crime (serious), crime (violent), incidents, fatalities. Each category was further quartered: time reported, source of information, detail of report, action taken. An average night of mayhem in the world’s largest city, with its population often million, was reduced to hieroglyphics on a few square metres of white plastic.

There had been eighteen deaths since ten o’clock the previous night. The worst incident- JH 2D 4K-was three adults and four children killed in a car smash in Pankow just after 11. No action taken; that could be left to the Orpo. A family burned to death in a house-fire in Kreuzberg, a stabbing outside a bar in Wedding, a woman beaten to death in Spandau. The record of March’s” own disrupted morning was last on the list: 06:07 [O] (that meant notification had come from the Orpo) 1H Havel/March. The secretary stepped back and recapped her pen with a sharp click.

Krause had finished his telephone call and was looking defensive. “I’ve already apologised, March.”

“Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say: the last forty-eight hours.”

“No problem.” Krause looked relieved and swivelled round in his chair to the sour-faced woman. “You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything’s come in in the last hour.” He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. Td have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place — you know how it is.”

March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a grey cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of colour: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a foetus, was an island, linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.

Schwanenwerder.

“Does Goebbels still have a place there?”

Krause nodded. “And the rest.”

It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred metres away.

Krause said: “The local Orpo call it ‘the pheasant run’.”

March smiled: ‘golden pheasants’ was street slang for the Party leadership.

“It’s not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep.”

Helga had returned. “Persons reported missing since Sunday morning,” she announced, “and still unaccounted for.” She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. “Plenty to keep you busy there.” He seemed to find this amusing. “You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He’s the one who should be looking after this business, remember?”

Thanks. I’ll make a start at least.”

Krause shook his head. “You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You’re on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?”

March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. “You forget yourself, comrade,” he said. “Arbeit macht frei.” The slogan of the labour camps. Work Makes You Free.

He turned and made his way back through the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. “See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?”

March arrived back in his office just as Max Jaeger was hanging up his coat. “Zavi!” Jaeger spread his arms wide. “I got a message from the Duty Room. What can I say?” He wore the uniform of an SS Sturmbannfuhrer. The black tunic still bore traces of his breakfast.

“Put it down to my soft old heart,” said March. “And don’t get too excited. There was nothing on the corpse to identify it and there are a hundred people missing in Berlin since Sunday. It’ll take hours just to go through the list. And I’ve promised to take my boy out this afternoon, so you’ll be on your own with it.”

He lit a cigarette and explained the details: the location, the missing foot, his suspicions about Jost. Jaeger took it in with a series of grunts. He was a shambling, untidy hulk of a man, two metres tall, with clumsy hands and feet. He was fifty, nearly ten years older than March, but they had shared an office since 1959 and sometimes worked as a team. Colleagues in Werderscher Markt joked about them behind their backs: the Fox and the Bear. And maybe there was something of the old married couple about them, in the way they bickered with and covered for each other.

“This is the ‘missing’ list.” March sat down at his desk and unrolled the print-out: names, dates of birth, times of disappearance, addresses of informants. Jaeger leaned over his shoulder. He smoked stubby fat cigars and his uniform reeked of them. “According to the good doctor Eisler, our man probably died some time after six last night, so the chances are nobody missed him until seven or eight at the earliest. They may even be waiting to see if he shows up this morning. So he may not be on the list. But we have to consider two other possibilities, do we not? One: he went missing some time before he died. Two — and we know from hard experience this is not impossible — Eisler has screwed up the time of death.”

“The guy isn’t fit to be a vet,” said Jaeger.

March counted swiftly. “One hundred and two names. I’d put the age of our man at sixty.”

“Better say fifty, to be safe. Twelve hours in the drink and nobody looks their best.”

True. So we exclude everyone on the list born after 1914. That should bring it down to a dozen names. Identification couldn’t be much easier: was grandpa missing a foot?” March folded the sheet, tore it in two, and handed one half to Jaeger. “What are the Orpo stations around the Havel?”

“Nikolassee,” said Max. “Wannsee. Kladow. Gatow. Pichelsdorf-but that’s probably too far north.”

Over the next half hour, March called each of them in turn, including Pichelsdorf, to see if any clothing had been handed in, or if some local derelict matched the description of the man in the lake. Nothing. He turned his attention to his half of the list. By eleven-thirty he had exhausted every likely name. He stood up and stretched.

“Mister Nobody.”

Jaeger had finished calling ten minutes earlier and was staring out of the window, smoking. “Popular fellow, isn’t he? Makes even you looked loved.” He removed his cigar and picked some shreds of loose tobacco from his tongue. “I’ll see if the Duty Room have received any more names. Leave it to me. Have a good time with Pili.”

The late morning service had just ended in the ugly church opposite Kripo headquarters. March stood on the other side of the street and watched the priest, a shabby raincoat over his vestments, locking the door. Religion was officially discouraged in Germany. How many worshippers, March wondered, had braved the Gestapo’s spies to attend? Half-a-dozen? The priest slipped the heavy iron key into his pocket and turned round. He saw March looking at him, and immediately scuttled away, eyes cast down, like a man caught in the middle of an illegal transaction. March buttoned his trenchcoat and followed him into the filthy Berlin morning.

THREE

Construction of the Arch of Triumph was commenced in 1946 and work was completed in time for the Day of National Reawakening in 1950. The inspiration for the design came from the Fuhrer and is based upon original drawings made by him during the Years of Struggle.”

The passengers on the tour bus — at least those who could understand — digested this information. They raised themselves out of their seats or leaned into the aisle to get a better view. Xavier March, half-way down the bus, lifted his son on to his lap. Their guide, a middle-aged woman clad in the dark green of the Reich Tourist Ministry, stood at the front, feet planted wide apart, back to the windscreen. Her voice over the address system was thick with cold.

The Arch is constructed of granite and has a capacity of two million, three hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-five cubic metres.” She sneezed. “The Arc de Triomphe in Paris will fit into it forty-nine times.”

For a moment, the Arch loomed over them. Then, suddenly, they were passing through it — an immense, stone-ribbed tunnel, longer than a football pitch, higher than a fifteen-storey building, with the vaulted, shadowed roof of a cathedral. The headlights and tail-lights of eight lanes of traffic danced in the afternoon gloom.

The Arch has a height of one hundred and eighteen metres. It is one hundred and sixty-eight metres wide and has a depth of one hundred and nineteen metres. On the inner walls are carved the names of the three million soldiers who fell in defence of the Fatherland in the wars of 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1946.”