Authors: Robert Harris
Footsteps in the darkness. Voices. "Where is the woman?" Kick.
"What was the information?" Kick.
"What did you steal?" Kick. Kick.
A jackboot stamped on his fingers, twisted, ground them into the stone.
When he came to again, he was lying in the corner, his broken hand resting on the floor next to him like a stillborn baby left beside its mother. A man—Krebs, perhaps—was squatting in front of him, saying something. He tried to focus.
"What is this?" Krebs's mouth was saying. "What does it mean?"
The Gestapo man was breathless, as if he had been running up and down stairs. With one hand he grasped March's chin, twisting his face to the light. In the other he held a sheaf of papers.
"What does it mean, March? They were hidden in the front of your car. Taped underneath the dashboard. What does it mean?"
March pulled his head away and turned his face to the darkening wall.
Tap, tap, tap
. In his dreams.
Tap, tap, tap.
Sometime later—he could not be more accurate than that, for time was beyond measurement, now speeding, now slowing to an infinitesimal crawl—a white jacket appeared above him. A flash of steel. A thin blade poised vertically before his eyes. March tried to back away, but fingers locked around his wrist, the needle was jabbed into a vein. At first, when his hand was touched, he howled, but then he felt the fluid spreading through his veins and the agony subsided.
The torture doctor was old and hunchbacked, and it seemed to March, who brimmed with gratitude toward him, that he must have lived in the basement for many years. The grime had settled in his pores, the darkness
hung in pouches beneath his eyes. He did not speak. He cleaned the wound, painted it with a clear liquid that smelled of hospitals and morgues, and bound it tightly in a white crepe bandage. Then, still without speaking, he and Krebs helped March to his feet. They put him back into his chair. An enamel mug of sweet, milky coffee was set on the table before him. A cigarette was slipped into his good hand.
In his mind March had built a wall Behind it he placed Charlie in her speeding car. It was a high wall, made of everything his imagination could collect—boulders, concrete blocks, burned-out iron bedsteads, overturned tram- cars, suitcases, prams—and it stretched in either direction across the sunlit German countryside like a postcard of the Great Wall of China. In front of it, he patrolled the ground.
He would not let them beyond the wall.
Everything else, they could have.
Krebs was reading March's notes. He sat with both elbows on the table, his chin resting on his knuckles. Occasionally he removed a hand to turn a page, replaced it, went on reading. March watched him. After his coffee and his cigarette and with the pain dulled, he felt almost euphoric.
Krebs finished and momentarily closed his eyes. His complexion was white, as always. Then he straightened the pages and laid them in front of him, alongside March's notebook and Buhler's diary. He adjusted them by millimeters into a line of parade-ground precision. Perhaps it was the effect of the drug, but suddenly March was seeing
everything so clearly—how the ink on the cheap pages had spread slightly, each letter sprouting minute hairs; how badly Krebs had shaved: that clump of black stubble in the fold of skin below his nose. In the silence he actually believed he could hear the dust falling, pattering across the table.
"Have you killed me, March?"
"Killed you?"
"With these." His hand hovered a centimeter above the notes.
"It depends on who knows you have them."
"Only some cretin of an
Unterscharführer
who works in the garage. He found them when we brought in your car. He gave them directly to me. Globus doesn't know a thing—yet."
"Then that's your answer."
Krebs started rubbing his face vigorously, as if drying himself. He stopped, his hands pressed to his cheeks, and stared at March through his spread fingers. "What's happening here?"
"You can read."
"I can read, but I don't understand." Krebs snatched up the pages and leafed through them. "Here, for example—what is 'Zyklon B'?"
"Crystallized hydrogen cyanide. Before that, they used carbon monoxide. Before that, bullets."
"And here—'Auschwitz/Birkenau.' 'Kulmhof.' 'Belzec.' Treblinka.' 'Majdanek.' 'Sobibor.'"
"The killing grounds."
"These figures: eight thousand a day . . ."
"That's the total they could destroy at Auschwitz/Birkenau using the four gas chambers and crematoria."
"And this eleven million?"
"Eleven million is the total number of European Jews they were after. Maybe they succeeded. Who knows? I don't see many around, do you?"
"Here: the name 'Globocnik' . . ."
"Globus was SS and police leader in Lublin. He built the killing centers."
"I didn't know." Krebs dropped the notes onto the table as if they were contagious. "I didn't know any of this."
"Of course you knew! You knew every time someone made a joke about 'going East,' every time you heard a mother tell her children to behave or they'd go up the chimney. We knew when we moved into their houses, when we took over their property, their jobs. We knew but we didn't have the facts." He pointed to the notes with his left hand. "Those put flesh on the bones. Put bones where there was just clear air."
"I meant: I didn't know that Buhler, Stuckart and Luther were involved in this. I didn't know about Globus . . ."
"Sure. You just thought you were investigating an art robbery."
"It's true! It's true!" repeated Krebs. "Wednesday morning—can you remember back that far?—I was investigating corruption at the Deutsche Arbeitsfront: the sale of labor permits. Then, out of the blue, I am summoned to see the Reichsführer, one to one,. He tells me retired civil servants have been discovered in a colossal art fraud. The potential embarrassment for the Party is huge. Obergruppenführer Globocnik is in charge. I am to go at once to Schwanenwerder and take my orders from him."
"Why you?"
"Why not? The Reichsführer knows of my interest in art. We have spoken of these matters. My job was simply to catalog the treasures."
"But you must have realized that Globus killed Buhler and Stuckart?"
"Of course. I'm not an idiot. I know Globus's reputation as well as you. But Globus was acting on Heydrich's orders, and if Heydrich had decided to let him loose, to spare the Party a public scandal—who was I to object?"
"Who were you to object?" repeated March.
"Let's be clear, March. Are you saying their deaths had nothing to do with the fraud?"
"Nothing. The fraud was a coincidence that became a useful cover story, that's all."
"But it made sense. It explained why Globus was acting as state executioner, and why he was desperate to head off an investigation by the Kripo. On Wednesday night I was still cataloging the pictures on Schwanenwerder when he called in a rage—about you. Said you'd been officially taken off the case, but you'd broken into Stuckart's apartment. I was to go and bring you in, which I did. And I tell you: if Globus had had his way, that would have been the end of you right there, but Nebe wouldn't have it. Then, on Friday night, we found what we thought was Luther's body in the railway yard, and that seemed to be the end of it."
"When did you discover the corpse wasn't Luther's?"
"Around six on Saturday morning. Globus telephoned me at home. He said he had information Luther was still alive and was planning to meet the American journalist at nine."
"He knew this," asserted March, "because of a tipoff from the American Embassy."
Krebs snorted. "What sort of crap is that? He knew because of a wire tap."
"That can't be—"
"Why can't it? See for yourself." Krebs opened one of his folders and extracted a single sheet of flimsy brown paper. "It was rushed over from the wire tappers in Charlottenburg in the middle of the night."
March read:
Forschungsamt
Top Secret State Document
G745,275
2351 hours
Male:
You say: What do I want? What do you think I want? Asylum in your country.
Female: Tell me where you are.
Male:
I can pay.
Female:
[Interrupts.]
Male:
I have information. Certain facts.
Female: Tell me where you are. I'll come and get you. Well go to the embassy.
Male:
Too soon. Not yet.
Female:
When?
Male:
Tomorrow morning. Listen to me. Nine o'clock. The Great Hall. Central steps. Have you got that?
Once more he could hear her voice; smell her; touch her.
In a recess of his mind, something stirred.
He slid the paper back across the table to Krebs, who returned it to the folder and resumed, "What happened next, you know. Globus had Luther shot the instant he appeared—and, let me be honest, that shocked me. To do such a thing in a public place ... I thought: this man is mad. Of course, I didn't know then quite why he was so anxious that Luther shouldn't be taken alive." He stopped abruptly, as if he had forgotten where he was, the role he was supposed to be playing. He finished quickly, "We searched the body and found nothing. Then we came after you."
March's hand had started to throb again. He looked down and saw crimson spots soaking through the white bandage.
"What time is it?"
"Five forty-seven."
She had been gone almost eleven hours.
God, his hand . . . The specks of red were spreading, touching; forming archipelagoes of blood.
"There were four of them in it altogether," said March. "Buhler, Stuckart, Luther and Kritzinger." "Kritzinger?" Krebs made a note.
"Friedrich Kritzinger, Ministerialdirektor of the Reich Chancellery. I wouldn't write any of this down if I were you."
Krebs laid aside his pencil.
"What concerned them wasn't the extermination program itself—these were senior Party men, remember—it was the lack of a proper Führer Order. Nothing was written down. All they had were verbal assurances from Heydrich and Himmler that this was what the Führer wanted. Could I have another cigarette?"
After Krebs had given him one and he had taken a few sweet draughts, he went on, "This is conjecture, you understand?" His interrogator nodded. "I assume they asked themselves: why is there no direct written link between the Führer and this policy? And I assume their answer was: because it is so monstrous, the head of state cannot be seen to be involved. So where did this leave them? It left them in the shit. Because if Germany lost the war, they could be tried as war criminals, and if Germany won it, they might one day be made the scapegoats for the greatest act of mass murder in history."
Krebs murmured, "I'm not sure I want to know this."
"So they took out an insurance policy. They swore affidavits—that was easy: three of them were lawyers— and they removed documents whenever they could. And gradually they put together a documentary record. Either outcome was covered. If Germany won and action was taken against them, they could threaten to expose what they knew. If the Allies won, they could say: look, we opposed this policy and even risked our lives to collect information about it. Luther also added a touch of blackmail—embarrassing documents about the American ambassador to London, Kennedy. Give me those."
He nodded to his notebook and to Buhler's diary. Krebs hesitated, then slid them across the table.
It was difficult to open the notebook with only one hand . The bandage was sodden. He was smearing the pages.
"The camps were organized to make sure there were no witnesses. Special prisoners ran the gas chambers, the crematoria. Eventually, those special prisoners were themselves destroyed, replaced by others, who were also destroyed. And so on. If that could happen at the lowest level, why not the highest? Look. Fourteen people at the Wannsee conference. The first one dies in '54. Another in '55. Then one a year in '57, '59, '60, '61, '62. Intruders probably planned to kill Luther in '63, and he hired security guards. But time passed and nothing happened, so he assumed it was just a coincidence."
"That's enough, March."
"By '63, it had started to accelerate. In May, Klopfer dies. In December, Hoffmann hangs himself. In March this year, Kritzinger is blown up by a car bomb. Now Buhler is really frightened. Kritzinger is the trigger. He's the first of the group to die."
March picked up the pocket diary.
"Here—you see—he marks the date of Kritzinger's death with a cross. But after that the days go by; nothing happens; perhaps they are safe. Then, on April ninth— another cross! Buhler's old colleague from the General Government, Schöngarth, slips beneath the wheels of a U-bahn train in Zoo Station. Panic on Schwanenwerder! But by then it's too late."
"I said that's enough!"
"One question puzzled me: why were there eight deaths in the first nine years, followed by six deaths in just the last six months? Why the rush? Why this terrible risk, after the exercise of so much patience? But then, we policemen seldom lift our eyes from the mud to look at the broader picture, do we? Everything was supposed to be completed by last Tuesday, ready for the visit of our good new friends, the Americans. And that raises a further question—"
"Give me those!" Krebs pulled the diary and the notebook from March's grasp. Outside in the passage: Globus's voice . . .
"Would Heydrich have done all this on his own initiative, or was he acting on orders from a higher level? Orders, perhaps, from the same person who would not put his signature to any document?"
Krebs had the stove open and was stuffing the papers in. For a moment they lay smoldering on the coals, then ignited into yellow flame as the key turned in the cell door.