Authors: Robert Harris
He said, "You've been lying to me."
She said, "You've been lying to
me
. That makes us even."
"This is dangerous. I beg you, you have no idea—"
"What I do know is this: my career could have ended because of what happened in this apartment. I could be fired when I get back to New York. I'm being thrown out of this lousy country, and I want to find out why."
"How do I know I can trust you?"
"How do I know I can trust
you
?"
They stood like that for perhaps half a minute: he with his hand to his hair, she with the silver paper knife still pointed at him. Outside, across the Platz, a clock began to chime. March looked at his watch. It was already ten.
"We have no time for this." He spoke quickly. "Here are the keys to the apartment. This one opens the door downstairs. This one is for the main door up here. This fits
the bedside cabinet. That's a desk key. This one"—he held it up—"this, I think, is the key to a safe. Where is it?"
"I don't know." Seeing his look of disbelief, she added, "I swear."
They searched in silence for ten minutes, shifting furniture, pulling up rugs, looking behind paintings. Suddenly she said, "This mirror is loose."
It was a small antique looking glass, maybe thirty centimeters square, above the table on which she had opened the letters. March grasped the ormolu frame. It gave a little but would not come away from the wall.
"Try this." She gave him the knife.
She was right. Two thirds down the left-hand side, behind the lip of the frame, was a tiny lever. March pressed it with the tip of the paper knife and felt something yield. The mirror was on a hinge. It swung open to reveal a safe.
He inspected it and swore. The key was not enough. There was also a combination lock.
"Too much for you?" she asked.
"'In adversity,' " quoted March, " 'the resourceful officer will always discover opportunity.'"
He picked up the telephone.
Across a distance of five thousand kilometers, President Kennedy flashed his famous smile. He stood behind a cluster of microphones, addressing a crowd in a football stadium. Banners of red, white and blue streamed behind him—"Reelect Kennedy!" "Four More in Sixty-four!" He shouted something March did not understand and the crowd cheered back.
"What's he talking about?"
The television cast a blue glow in the darkness of Stuckart's apartment. The woman translated: " 'The Germans have their system and we have ours. But we are all citizens of one planet. And as long as our two nations remember that, I sincerely believe: we can have peace.' Cue loud applause from dumb audience."
She had kicked off her shoes and was lying full length on her stomach in front of the set.
"Ah. Here's the serious bit." She waited until he finished speaking, then translated again: "He says he plans to raise human rights questions during his visit in the fall." She laughed and shook her head. "God, Kennedy is so full of shit. The only thing he really wants to raise is his vote in November."
" 'Human rights'?"
"The thousands of dissidents you people lock up in camps. The millions of Jews who vanished in the war. The torture. The killing. Sorry to mention them, but we have this bourgeois notion that human beings have rights. Where have you been the last twenty years?"
The contempt in her voice jolted him. He had never properly spoken to an American before, had only encountered the occasional tourist—and those few had been chaperoned around the capital, shown only what the Propaganda Ministry wanted them to see, like Red Cross officials on a KZ inspection. Listening to her now, it occurred to him that she probably knew more about his country's recent history than he did. He felt he should make some sort of defense but did not know what to say.
"You talk like a politician" was all he could manage. She did not bother to reply.
He looked again at the figure on the screen. Kennedy projected an image of youthful vigor, despite his spectacles and balding head.
"Will he win?" he asked.
She was silent. For a moment he thought she had decided not to speak to him. Then she said, "He will now. He's in good shape for a man of seventy-five, wouldn't you say?"
"Indeed." March was standing a meter back from the window, smoking a cigarette, alternately watching the television and watching the square. Traffic was sparse— mostly people returning from dinner or the cinema. A young couple held hands under the statue of Todt. They might be Gestapo; it was hard to tell.
"The millions of Jews who vanished in the war..."
He was risking court-martial simply by talking to her. Yet her mind must be a treasure house, full of ill-considered objects that meant nothing to her but would be gold to him. If he could somehow overcome her furious resentment, pick his way around the propaganda . . .
No. A ridiculous thought. He had problems enough as it was.
A solemn blond newsreader filled the screen; behind her, a composite picture of Kennedy and the Führer and the single word DÉTENTE.
Charlotte Maguire had helped herself to a glass of Scotch from Stuckart's liquor cabinet. Now she raised it to the television in mock salute. "To Joseph P. Kennedy: President of the United States—appeaser, anti-Semite, gangster and sonofabitch. May you roast in hell."
The clock outside struck ten-thirty, ten forty-five, eleven.
She said, "Maybe this friend of yours had second thoughts."
March shook his head. "He'll come."
A few moments later, a battered blue Skoda entered the square. It made one slow circuit of the Platz, then came around again and parked opposite the apartment block. Max Jaeger emerged from the driver's side; from the other came a small man in a shabby sport jacket and trilby, carrying a doctor's bag. He squinted up at the fourth floor and backed away, but Jaeger took his arm and propelled him toward the entrance.
In the stillness of the apartment, a buzzer sounded.
"It would be best," said March, "if you didn't speak."
She shrugged. "As you like."
He went into the hall and picked up the intercom.
"Hello, Max."
He pressed a switch and unlocked the door. The corridor was empty. After a minute, a soft ping signaled the arrival of the elevator and the little man appeared. He scuttled down the hallway and into Stuckart's foyer without uttering a word. He was in his fifties and carried with him, like bad breath, the reek of the back streets—of furtive deals and triple-entry accounting, of card tables folded away at the sound of a tread on the stairs. Jaeger followed close behind.
When the man saw March was not alone, he shrank back into the corner.
"Who's the woman?" He appealed to Jaeger. "You never said anything about a woman. Who's the woman?"
"Shut up, Willi," said Max. He gave him a gentle push into the living room.
March said, "Never mind her, Willi. Look at this."
He switched on the lamp, angling it upward.
Willi Stiefel took in the safe at a glance. "English," he said. "Casing: one and a half centimeters, high-tensile steel. Fine mechanism. Eight-figure code. Six, if you're lucky." He appealed to March: "I beg you, Herr Sturmbannführer. It's the guillotine for me next time."
"It'll be the guillotine for you this time," said Jaeger, "if you don't get on with it."
"Fifteen minutes, Herr Sturmbannführer. Then I'm out of here. Agreed?"
March nodded. "Agreed."
Stiefel gave the woman a last, nervous look. Then he removed his hat and jacket, opened his case and took out a pair of thin rubber gloves and a stethoscope.
March took Jaeger over to the window and whispered, "Did he take much persuading?"
"What do you think? But then I told him he was still covered by Forty-two. He saw the light."
Paragraph forty-two of the Reich Criminal Code stated that all "habitual criminals and offenders against morality" could be arrested on suspicion that they might commit an offense. National Socialism taught that criminality was in the blood—something you were born with, like musical talent or blond hair. Thus the character of the criminal rather than his crime determined the sentence. A gangster stealing a few marks after a fistfight could be sentenced to death, on the grounds that he "displayed an inclination toward criminality so deep rooted that it precluded his ever becoming a useful member of the folk community." But the next day, in the same court, a loyal
Party member who had shot his wife for an insulting remark might merely be bound over to keep the peace.
Stiefel could not afford another arrest. He had recently served nine years in Spandau for a bank robbery. He had no choice but to cooperate with the Polizei, whatever they asked him to be—informant, agent provocateur or safe- breaker. These days, he ran a watch repair business in Wedding and swore he was going straight: a protestation of innocence that was hard to believe, watching him now. He had placed the stethoscope against the safe door and was twisting the dial a digit at a time. His eyes were closed as he listened for the click of the lock's tumblers falling into place.
Come on, Willi
. March rubbed his hands. His fingers were numb with apprehension.
"Jesus Christ," said Jaeger under his breath. "I hope you know what you're doing."
"I'll explain later."
"No, thanks. I told you: I don't want to know."
Stiefel straightened and let out a long sigh. "One," he said. One was the first digit of the combination.
Like Stiefel, Jaeger kept glancing at the woman. She was sitting demurely on one of the gilt chairs, her hands folded in her lap. "A
foreign
woman, for God's sake!"
"Six."
So it went on, one digit every few minutes, until, at 11:35, Stiefel said to March, "The owner: when was he born?"
"Why?"
"It would save time. I think he's set this with the date of his birth. So far, I've got one-one-one-six-one-nine. The eleventh month, sixteenth day, nineteen . .
March checked his notes from Stuckart's
Wer Ist's?
entry.
"Nineteen hundred two."
"Zero-two." Stiefel tried the combination, then smiled. "It's usually the owner's birthday," he said, "or the Führer's birthday or the Day of National Reawakening." He pulled open the door.
The safe was small: a twenty-centimeter cube containing no bank notes or jewelry, just paper—old paper, most of it. March piled it onto the table and began rifling through it.
"I'd like to leave now, Herr Sturmbannführer."
March ignored him. Tied up in red ribbon were the title deeds to a property in Wiesbaden—the family home, by the look of it. There were stock certificates. Hoesch, Siemens, Thyssen: the companies were standard, but the sums invested looked astronomical. Insurance papers. One human touch: a photograph of Maria Dymarski in a 1950s cheesecake pose.
Suddenly, from the window, Jaeger gave a shout of warning: "Here they come, you fucking, fucking fool!"
An unmarked gray BMW was driving around the square, fast, followed by an army truck. The vehicles swerved to a halt outside, blocking the street. A man in a belted leather coat leaped out of the car. The tailgate of the truck was kicked down and SS troops carrying automatic rifles began jumping out.
"Move! Move!" yelled Jaeger. He began pushing Charlie and Stiefel toward the door.
With shaking fingers, March worked his way through the remaining papers. A blue envelope, unmarked. Something heavy in it. The flap of the envelope was open. He saw a letterhead in copperplate—Zaugg & Cie., Bankiers—and stuffed it into his pocket.
The buzzer from the door downstairs began sounding in long urgent bursts.
"They must know we're up here!"
Jaeger said, "Now what?" Stiefel had turned gray. The woman stood like a statue. She did not seem to know what was going on.
"The basement!" shouted March. "They might just miss us. Get the elevator!"
The other three ran out into the corridor. He began
stuffing the papers back into the safe, slammed it shut, twirled the dial, pushed the mirror back into place. There was no time to do anything about the broken seal on the apartment door. They were holding the lift for him. He squeezed in and they began their descent.
Third floor, second floor . . .
March prayed it would not stop at the ground floor. It did not. It opened on to the empty basement. Above their heads they could hear the heels of the storm troopers on the marble slabs.
"This way!" He led them into the bomb shelter. The grating from the air vent was where he had left it, leaning against the wall.
Stiefel needed no telling. He ran to the air shaft, lifted his bag above his head and tossed it in. He grabbed at the brickwork, tried to haul himself after it, his feet scrabbling for a purchase on the smooth wall. He was yelling over his shoulder, "Help me!" March and Jaeger seized his legs and heaved. The little man wriggled headfirst into the hole and was gone.
Coming closer—the ring and scrape of boots on concrete. The SS had found the entrance to the basement. A man was shouting.