Fatherland (6 page)

World news. In London it had been announced that King Edward and Queen Wallis were to pay a state visit to the Reich in July "further to strengthen the deep bonds of respect and affection between the peoples of Great Britain and the German Reich." In Washington, it was believed that President Kennedy's latest victory in the U.S. primaries had strengthened his chances of winning a second term . . .

The paper slipped from March's fingers and onto the floor.

Half an hour later, the telephone rang.

"So sorry to wake you." Koth was sarcastic. "I had the

"For God's sake!"

"What can you tell me about a man named Josef Buhler?"

That night, March had a dream. He was at the lakeshore again in the rain and there was the body, facedown in the mud. He pulled at the shoulder—pulled hard—but he could not move it. The body was gray-white lead. But when he turned to leave, it grabbed his leg and began pulling him toward the surface of the lake. He scrabbled at the earth, trying to dig his fingers into the soft mud, but there was nothing to hold on to. The corpse's grip was immensely strong. And as they went under, its face became Pili's, contorted with rage, grotesque in its shame, screaming "I hate you ... I hate you ... I hate you .. ."

détente
, n.f. 1 (a) Relaxation, loosening, slackening (of something that is taut); relaxing (of muscles), (b) Easing (of political situation).

Yesterday's rain was a bad memory, already half faded from the streets. The sun—the miraculous, impartial sun—bounced and glittered on the shopfronts and apartment windows.

In the bathroom, the rusted pipes clanked and groaned, the shower dangled a thread of cold water. March shaved with his father's old cutthroat razor. Through the open bathroom window, he could hear the sounds of the city waking up: the whine and clatter of the first tram; the distant hum of the traffic on Tauentzien-Strasse; the footsteps of the early risers hurrying to the big Wittenberg- Platz U-bahn station; the rattle-of shutters going up in the bakery across the street. It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.

His uniform was laid out in the bedroom: the body armor of authority.

Brown shirt, with black leather buttons. Black tie. Black breeches. Black jackboots (the rich smell of polished leather).

Black tunic: four silver buttons; three parallel silvered threads on the collar tabs; on the left sleeve, a red-white- and-black swastika armband; on the right, a diamond enclosing the Gothic letter "K," for Kriminalpolizei.

Black Sam Browne belt. Black cap with silver death's head and Party eagle. Black leather gloves.

March stared at himself in the mirror, and a Sturmbannführer of the SS stared back. He picked up his service pistol, a 9mm Luger, from the dressing table, checked the action and slotted it into his holster. Then he stepped out into the morning.

"Sure you have enough?"

Rudolf Halder grinned at March's sarcasm and unloaded his tray: cheese, ham, salami, three hard-boiled eggs, a pile of black bread, milk, a cup of steaming coffee. He arranged the dishes in a neat row on the white linen tablecloth.

"I understand that breakfasts provided by the Reich Main Security Office are not normally so lavish."

They were in the dining room of the Prinz Friedrich Karl Hotel in Dorotheen-Strasse, midway between Kripo headquarters and Halder's office in the Reichsarchiv. March used it regularly. The Friedrich Karl was a cheap stopover for tourists and salesmen, but it did a good breakfast. Dangling limply from a pole over the entrance was a European flag—the twelve gold stars of the European Community nations on a dark blue background. March guessed that the manager, Herr Brecker, had bought it secondhand and hung it there in an effort to drum up some foreign custom. It did not appear to have worked. A glance around the restaurant's shabby clientele and bored staff suggested little danger of being overheard.

As usual, people gave March's uniform a wide berth. Every few minutes, the walls shook as a train pulled into the Friedrich-Strasse station.

"Is that all you're having?" asked Halder. "Coffee?" He shook his head. "Black coffee, cigarettes and whisky. As a diet: not good. Now I think of it, I haven't seen you eat a decent meal since you and Klara split." He cracked one of his eggs and began removing pieces of shell.

March thought, Of all of us, Halder has changed the least. Beneath the layer of fat, behind the slackened muscle of incipient middle age, there lurked still the ghost of the gangling recruit, straight from university, who had joined the U-174 more than twenty years before. He had been a wireless operator—a bad one, rushed through training and into service at the start of 1942, when losses were at their height and Dönitz was ransacking Germany for replacements. Then as now, he had worn wire-framed glasses and had thin red hair, which stuck out at the back in a duck's tail. During a voyage, while the rest of the men had grown beards, Halder had sprouted orange tufts on his cheeks and chin, like a molting cat. The fact that he was in the U-boat service at all was a ghastly mistake, a joke. He was clumsy, barely capable of changing a fuse. He had been designed by nature to be an academic, not a submariner, and he passed each voyage in a sweat of fear and seasickness.

Yet he was popular. U-boat crews were superstitious, and somehow the word got around that Rudi Halder brought good luck. So they looked after him, covering his mistakes, letting him have an extra half hour to groan and thrash around on his bunk. He became a sort of mascot. When peace came, astonished to find that he had survived, Halder resumed his studies at the history faculty of Berlin University. In 1958 he had joined the team of academics working at the Reichsarchiv on the official history of the war. He had come full circle, spending his days hunched in a subterranean chamber in Berlin, piecing together the same grand strategy of which he had once been a tiny, frightened component.
The U-boat Service: Operations and Tactics, 1939-46
had been published in 1963. Now Halder was helping to compile the third volume of the history of the German Army on the eastern front.

"It's like working at the Volkswagen works in Fallersleben," said Halder. He took a bite out of his egg and chewed for a while. "I do the wheels, Jaeckel does the doors, Schmidt drops in the engine."

"How long is it going to take?"

"Oh, forever, I should think. Resources no object. This is the Arch of Triumph in words, remember? Every shot, every skirmish, every snowflake, every sneeze. Someone is even going to write the Official History of the Official Histories. Me, I'll do another five years."

"And then?"

Halder brushed egg crumbs from his tie. "A chair in a small university somewhere in the south. A house in the country with Ilse and the kids. A couple of books, respectfully reviewed. My ambitions are modest. If nothing else, this kind of work gives you a sense of perspective about your own mortality. Speaking of which—" From his inside pocket he pulled a sheet of paper. "With the compliments of the Reichsarchiv."

It was a photocopy of a page from an old Party directory. Four passport-sized portraits of uniformed officials, each accompanied by a brief biography. Brün. Brunner. Buch. And Buhler.

Halder said, "
Guide to the Personalities of the NSDAP. 1951 edition
."

"I know it well."

"A pretty bunch, you'll agree."

The body in the Havel had been Buhler's, no question of it. He stared up at March through his rimless spectacles, prim and humorless, his lips pursed. It was a bureaucrat's face, a lawyer's face; a face you might see a thousand times and never be able to describe; sharp in the flesh, fudged in memory; the face of a machine man.

"As you will see," resumed Halder, "a pillar of National Socialist respectability. Joined the Party in '22— that's as respectable as they come. Worked as a lawyer with Hans Frank, the Führer's own attorney. Deputy president of the Academy of German Law."

" 'State secretary, General Government, 1939,' " read

March." 'SS-Brigadeführer.' "
Brigadeführer
, by God. He took out a notebook and began to write.

"Honorary rank," said Halder, his mouth full of food. "I doubt if he ever fired a shot in anger. He was strictly a desk man. When Frank was sent out as governor in '39 to run what was left of Poland, he must have taken his old legal partner, Buhler, with him, to be chief bureaucrat. You should try some of this ham. Very good."

March was scribbling quickly. "How long was Buhler in the East?"

"Twelve years, I guess. I checked the
Guide
for 1952. There's no entry for Buhler. So '51 must have been his last year."

March stopped writing and tapped his teeth with his pen. "Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes?"

There was a telephone booth in the foyer. He-rang the Kripo switchboard and asked for his own extension. A voice growled "Jaeger."

"Listen, Max." March repeated what Halder had told him. "The
Guide
mentions a wife." He held up the sheet of paper to the booth's dim electric light and squinted at it. "Edith Tulard. Can you find her? To get the body positively identified."

"She's dead."

"What?"

"She died more than ten years ago. I checked with the SS records bureau—even honorary ranks have to give next of kin. Buhler had no kids, but I've traced his sister. She's a widow, seventy-two years old, named Elisabeth Trinkl. Lives in Fürstenwalde." March knew it: a small town about forty-five minutes' drive southeast of Berlin. "The local cops are bringing her straight to the morgue."

"I'll meet you there."

"Another thing. Buhler had a house on Schwanenwerder."

So that explained the location of the body. "Good work, Max." March hung up and made his way back to the dining room.

Halder had finished his breakfast. He threw down his napkin as March returned and leaned back in his chair. "Excellent. Now I can almost tolerate the prospect of sorting through fifteen hundred signals from Kleist's First Panzer Army." He began picking his teeth. "We should meet up more often. Ilse is always saying, 'When are you going to bring Zavi around?' " He leaned forward. "Listen: there's a woman at the archives working on the history of the
Bund deutscher Mädel
in Bavaria, 1935 to 1950. A stunner. Husband disappeared on the eastern front last year, poor devil. Anyway: you and she. What about it? We could have you both around, say, next week?"

March smiled. "You're very kind."

"That's not an answer."

"True." He tapped the photocopy. "Can I keep this?"

Halder shrugged. "Why not?"

"One last thing."

"Go ahead."

"State secretary to the General Government. What would he have done, exactly?"

Halder spread his hands. The backs were thick with freckles, wisps of reddish-gold hair curled from his cuffs. "He and Frank had absolute authority. They did whatever they liked. At that time, the main priority would have been resettlement."

March wrote "Resettlement" in his notebook and circled it. "How did that happen?"

"What is this? A seminar?" Halder arranged a triangle of plates in front of him—two smaller ones to the left, a larger one to the right. He pushed them together so they touched. "All this is Poland before the war. After '39, the western provinces"—he tapped the small plates—"were brought into Germany. Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and Reichsgau Wartheland." He detached the large plate. "And this became the General Government. The rump state. The two western provinces were Germanized. It's not my field, you understand, but I've seen some figures.