Fatherland

March sca

“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 ru

“ ‘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 Sturmba

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.

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, ru

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.