Fatherland (25 page)

March opened the back door and ushered in Charlie, then slipped in after her. The Swiss policeman executed a rapid three-point turn and accelerated away toward the city. Zaugg's bodyguards had already disappeared; the gates were banging shut behind them.

March twisted around to stare out of the rear window. "Are all your bankers as well protected as that?"

"Depends who they do business with." The policeman adjusted his mirror to look at them. He was in his late forties, with bloodshot eyes. "Are you planning any further adventures, Herr March? A brawl somewhere, perhaps? It would help if we had a little warning next time."

"I thought you were supposed to be following us, not guarding us."

" 'Follow and protect as necessary': those are our orders. That's my partner in the car behind, by the way. It's been a fucking long day. Excuse my language, Fräulein— they never said there'd be a woman involved."

"Can you drop us back at the hotel?" asked March.

The policeman grumbled. "So now I'm to add chauffeur to my list of duties?" He switched on his radio and spoke to his partner. "Panic over. We're going back to the Baur au Lac."

Charlie had her notebook open on her lap and was writing. "Who are these people?"

March hesitated but then thought: what does it matter?

"This officer and his partner are members of the Swiss police, here to ensure I don't attempt to defect while outside the borders of the Reich. And also to ensure that I return in one piece."

"Always a pleasure, assisting our German colleagues," grunted a voice from the front.

Charlie said, "There's a danger you might not?"

"Apparently."

"Jesus." She wrote something down. He looked away. Off to their left, a couple of kilometers across the See, the lights of Zürich formed a yellow ribbon on the dark water. His breath misted the window.

Zaugg must have been returning from his office. It was late, but the burghers of Zürich worked hard for their money—twelve or fourteen hours a day was common. The banker's house could be reached only by traveling this road, which ruled out the most effective security precaution: varying his route each night. And See-Strasse, bounded on one side by the lake and with several dozen streets leading off the other, was a security man's nightmare. That explained something.

"Did you notice his car?" he said to Charlie. "How heavy it was, the noise its tires made? You see those often in Berlin. That Bentley was armor plated." He ran his hand through his hair. "Two bodyguards, a pair of prison gates, remote cameras and a bombproof car. What kind of banker is that?"

He could not see her face properly in the shadows, but he could feel her excitement beside him. She said, "We've got the letter of authorization, remember? Whatever kind of banker he is—he's
our
banker now."

They ate at a restaurant in the old town—a place with thick linen napkins and heavy silver cutlery, where the waiters lined up behind them and whipped the covers from their plates like a troupe of conjurers performing a trick. If the hotel had cost him half a month's salary, this meal would cost him the other half, but March didn't care.

She was unlike any other woman he had met. She was not one of the homebodies of the Party's Women's League, all "
Kinder, Kirche und Küche
"—her husband's supper always ready on the table, his uniform freshly pressed, five children asleep upstairs. And while a good National Socialist girl abhorred cosmetics, nicotine and alcohol, Charlie Maguire made liberal use of all three. Her dark eyes soft in the candlelight, she talked almost without pause of New York, foreign reporting, her father's days in Berlin, the wickedness of Joseph Kennedy, politics, money, men, herself.

She had been born in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1939 ("The last spring of peace, my parents called it—in all senses"). Her father had recently returned from Berlin to work at the State Department. Her mother hadbeen trying to make a success as an actress, but after 1941 was lucky simply to escape internment. In the 1950s, after the war, Michael Maguire had gone to Omsk, capital of what was left of Russia, to serve in the U.S. Embassy. It was considered too dangerous a place to take four children.
Charlotte
had been left behind to be educated at expensive schools in Virginia;
Charlie
had dropped out at seventeen—spitting and swearing and rebelling against everything in sight.

"I went to New York. Tried to be an actress. That didn't work. Tried to be a journalist. That suited me better. Enrolled at Columbia—to my father's great relief. And then—what do you know?—I start an affair with Teacher." She shook her head. "How stupid can you get?" She blew out a jet of cigarette smoke. "Is there any more wine in there?"

He poured out the last of the bottle, ordered another. It seemed to be his turn to say something. "Why Berlin?"

"A chance to get away from New York. My mother being German made it easier to get a visa. I have to admit: World European Features is not quite as grand as it sounds. Two men in an office on the wrong side of town with a telex machine. To be honest, they were happy to take anyone who could get a visa out of Berlin. Even me." She looked at him with shining eyes. "I didn't know he was married, you see. The teacher." She snapped her fingers. "Basic failure of research there, wouldn't you say?"

"When did it end?"

"Last year. I came to Europe to show them all I could do it. Him especially. That's why I felt so sick about being expelled. God, the thought of facing them all again .. ." She sipped her wine. "Perhaps I've got a father fixation. How old are you?"

"Forty-two."

"Right in my age range." She smiled at him over the rim of her glass. "You'd better watch out. Are you married?" "Divorced."

"Divorced! That's promising. Tell me about her."

Her frankness kept catching him off guard. "She was—" he began, and corrected himself. "She's—" He stopped. How did you summarize someone you had been married to for nine years, divorced from for seven, who had just denounced you to the authorities? "She's not like you" was all he could think to say.

"Meaning?"

"She doesn't have ideas of her own. She's concerned about what people think. She has no curiosity. She's bitter."

"About you?"

"Naturally."

"Is she seeing anyone else?"

"Yes. A Party bureaucrat. Much more suitable than me."

"And you? Do you have anyone?"

A klaxon sounded in March's mind.
Dive, dive, dive
. He had had two affairs since his divorce. A teacher who had lived in the apartment beneath his, and a young widow who taught history at the university—another friend of Rudi Halder's: he sometimes suspected Rudi had made it his mission in life to find him a new wife. The liaisons had drifted on for a few months, until both women had tired of the last-minute calls from Werderscher-Markt: "Something's come up, I'm sorry . . ."

Instead of answering her, March said, "So many questions. You should have been a detective."

She made a face at him. "So few answers.
You
should have been a reporter."

The waiter poured more wine. After he had moved away, she said, "You know, when I met you, I hated you on sight."

"Ah. The uniform. It blots out the man."

"That uniform does. When I looked for you on the plane this afternoon I barely recognized you."

It occurred to March that here was another reason for his good mood: he had not caught a glimpse of his black silhouette in a mirror, had not seen people shrinking away at his approach.

"Tell me," he said, "what do they say about the SS in America?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on, March. Please. Don't let's ruin a good evening."

"I mean it. I'd like to know." He had to coax her into answering.

"Well, murderers," she said eventually. "Sadists. Evil personified. All that. You asked for it. Nothing personal intended, you understand. Any other questions?"

"A million. A lifetime's worth."

"A lifetime! Well, go ahead. I have nothing planned."

He was momentarily dumbfounded, paralyzed by choice. Where to start?

"The war in the East," he said. "In Berlin we hear only of victories. Yet the Wehrmacht has to ship the coffins home from the Urals front at night on special trains, so nobody sees how many dead there are."

"I read somewhere that the Pentagon estimates a hundred thousand Germans killed since 1960. The Luftwaffe is bombing the Russian towns flat day after day, and still they keep coming back at you. You can't win because they don't have anywhere else to go. And you can't use nuclear weapons, in case we retaliate and the world blows up."

"What else?" He tried to think of recent headlines. "Goebbels says German space technology beats the Americans' every time."

"Actually, I think that's true. Peenemünde had satellites in orbit years ahead of ours."

"Is Winston Churchill still alive?"

"Yes. He's an old man now. In Canada. He lives there. So does the queen." She noticed his puzzlement. "Elizabeth claims the English throne from her uncle."

"And the Jews?" said March. "What do the Americans say we did to them?"

She was shaking her head. "Why are you doing this?"

"Please. The truth."

"The truth? How do I know what the truth is?" Suddenly she had raised her voice, was almost shouting. People at the next table were turning around. "We're brought up to think of Germans as something from outer space. Truth doesn't enter into it."

"Very well, then. Give me the propaganda."

She glanced away, exasperated, but then looked back with an intensity that made it difficult for him to meet her eyes. "All right. They say you scoured Europe for every living Jew—men, women, children, babies. They say you shipped them to ghettos in the East, where thousands died of malnutrition and disease. Then you forced the survivors farther east, and nobody knows what happened after that. A handful escaped over the Urals into Russia. I've seen them on TV. Funny old men, most of them a bit crazy. They talk about execution pits, medical experiments, camps that people went into but never came out of. They talk about millions of dead. But then the German ambassador comes along in his smart suit and tells everyone it's all just Communist propaganda. So nobody knows what's true and what isn't. And I'll tell you something else—most people don't care." She sat back in her chair. "Satisfied?"

"I'm sorry."

"So am I." She reached for her cigarettes, then stopped and looked at him again. "That's why you changed your mind at the hotel about bringing me along, isn't it? Nothing to do with whisky. You wanted to pick my brains." She started to laugh. "And I thought I was using you."

After that, they got on better. Whatever poison there was between them had been drawn out. He told her about his father and how he had followed him into the navy, about

how he had drifted into police work and found a taste for it—a vocation, even.

She said: "I still don't understand how you can wear it."

"What?"

"That uniform."

He poured himself another glass of wine. "Oh, there's a simple answer to that. In 1936, the Kriminalpolizei was merged into the SS; all officers had to accept honorary SS rank So I have a choice: either I'm an investigator in that uniform, and try to do a little good; or I'm something else without that uniform, and do no good at all."

And the way things are going, I shall soon not have that choice, he thought.

She tilted her head to one side and nodded. "I can see that. That seems fair."

He felt impatient, sick of himself. "No, it's not. It's bullshit, Charlie." It was the first time he had called her that since she had insisted on it at the beginning of the dinner; using it sounded like a declaration. He hurried on, "That's the answer I've given everybody, including myself, for the past ten years. Unfortunately, even I have stopped believing it."

"But what happened—the worst of what happened— was during the war, and you weren't around. You told me: you were at sea."

He looked down at his plate, silent. She went on, "And anyway, wartime is different. All countries do wicked things in wartime. My country dropped an atom bomb on Japanese civilians—killed a quarter of a million people in an instant. And the Americans have been allies of the Russians for the past twenty years. Remember what the Russians did?"

There was truth in what she said. One by one, as they had advanced eastward, beginning with the bodies of ten thousand Polish officers in the Katyn forest, the Germans had discovered the mass graves of Stalin's victims. Millions had died in the famines, purges, deportations of the
1930s. Nobody knew the exact figure. The execution pits, the torture chambers, the gulags inside the Arctic Circle— all were now preserved by the Germans as memorials to the dead, museums of Bolshevik evil. Children were taken around to see them; ex-prisoners acted as guides. There was a whole school of historical studies devoted to investigating the crimes of Communism. Television showed documentaries on Stalin's holocaust—bleached skulls and walking skeletons, bulldozed corpses and the earth- caked rags of women and children bound with wire and shot in the back of the neck.