A treaty?
March broke the seal, using the key. He lifted the lid. The interior released a scent of mingled must and incense.
Another tram passed. Zaugg was still humming, jingling his keys.
Inside the cardboard box was an object wrapped in an oilcloth. March lifted it out and laid it flat on the desk. He drew back the cloth: a panel of wood, scratched and ancient; one of the corners was broken off. He turned it over.
Charlie was next to him. She murmured: ‘It’s beautiful.’
The edges of the panel were splintered, as if it had been wrenched from its setting. But the portrait itself was perfectly preserved. A young woman, exquisite, with pale brown eyes, was glancing to the right, a string of black beads looped twice around her neck. In her lap, in long, aristocratic fingers, she held a small animal with white fur. Not a dog, exactly; more like a weasel.
Charlie was right. It was beautiful. It seemed to suck in the light from the vault and radiate it back. The girl’s pale skin glowed – luminous, like an angel’s.
‘What does it mean?’ whispered Charlie.
‘God knows.’ March felt vaguely cheated. Was the deposit box no more than an extension of Buhler’s treasure chamber? ‘How much do you know about art?’
‘Not much. But there is something familiar about it. May I?’ She took it, held it at arm’s length. ‘It’s Italian, I think. You see her costume – the way the neckline of her dress is cut square, the sleeves. I’d say Renaissance. Very old, and very genuine.’
‘And very stolen. Put it back.’
‘Do we have to?’
‘Of course. Unless you can think of a good story for the Zollgrenzschutz at Berlin Airport.’
Another painting: that was all! Cursing under his breath, March ran the oilcloth through his hands, checked the cardboard container. He turned the safety deposit box on its end and shook it. Nothing. The empty metal mocked him. What had he hoped for? He did not know. But something to give him a better clue than this.
‘We must leave,’ he said.
‘One minute.’
Charlie propped the panel up against the box. She crouched and took half-a-dozen photographs. Then she rewrapped the picture, replaced it in its container, and locked the box.
March called: ‘We’ve finished here, Herr Zaugg. Thank you.’
Zaugg reappeared with the security guard – a fraction too quickly, March thought. He guessed the banker had been straining to overhear them.
Zaugg rubbed his hands. ‘All is to your satisfaction, I trust?’
‘Perfectly.’
The guard slid the box back into the cavity, Zaugg locked the door, and the girl with the weasel was re-interred in darkness. ‘We have boxes here which have lain untouched for fifty years or more . . .’ Was that how long it would be before she saw the light again?
They rode the elevator in silence. Zaugg shepherded them out at street-level. ‘And so we say goodbye.’ He shook hands with each of them in turn.
March felt he had to say something more, should try one final tactic. ‘I feel I must warn you, Herr Zaugg, that two of the joint holders of this account have been murdered in the past week, and that Martin Luther himself has disappeared.’
Zaugg did not even blink. ‘Dear me, dear me. Old clients pass away and new ones’ – he gestured to them – ‘take their place. And so the world turns. The only thing you can be sure of, Herr March, is that – whoever wins – still standing when the smoke of battle clears will be the banks of the cantons of Switzerland. Good day to you.’
They were out on the street and the door was closing when Charlie shouted: ‘Herr Zaugg!’
His face appeared and before he could withdraw it, the camera clicked. His eyes were wide, his little mouth popped into a perfect O of outrage.
ZÜRICH’S lake was misty-blue, like a picture from a fairy-story – a landscape fit for sea-monsters and heroes to do battle in. If only the world had been as we were promised, thought March. Then castles with pointed turrets would have risen through that haze.
He was leaning against the damp stone balustrade outside the hotel, his suitcase at his feet, waiting for Charlie to settle her bill.
He wished he could have stayed longer – taken her out on the water, explored the city, the hills; had dinner in the old town; returned to his room each night, to make love, to the sound of the lake . . . A dream. Fifty metres to his left, sitting in their cars, his guardians from the Swiss Polizei yawned.
Many years ago, when March was a young detective in the Hamburg Kripo, he had been ordered to escort a prisoner serving a life-sentence for robbery, who had been given a special day-pass. The man’s trial had been in the papers; his childhood sweetheart had seen the publicity and written to him; had visited him in gaol; agreed to marry him. The affair had touched that streak of sentimentality that runs so strong in the German psyche. There had been a public campaign to let the ceremony go ahead. The authorities had relented. So March took him to his wedding, stood handcuffed beside him throughout the service and even during the wedding pictures, like an unusually attentive best man.
The reception had been in a grim hall next to the church. Towards the end, the groom had whispered that there was a storeroom with a rug in it, that the priest had no objections . . . And March – young husband that he was – had checked the storeroom and seen there were no windows and had left the man and his wife alone for twenty minutes. The priest – who had worked as a chaplain in Hamburg’s docks for thirty years, and seen most things – had given March a grave wink.
On the way back to prison, as the high walls came into view, March had expected the man to be depressed, to plead for extra time, maybe even dive for the door. Not at all. He had sat smiling, finishing his cigar. Standing by the Zürich See, March realised how he had felt. It had been sufficient to know that the possibility of another life existed; one day of it had been enough.
He felt Charlie come up beside him. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
A SHOP at Zürich airport was piled high with brightly coloured gifts – cuckoo clocks, toy skis, ashtrays glazed with pictures of the Matterhorn, and chocolates. March picked out one of the musical boxes with ‘Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Führer, 1964’ written on the lid and took it to the counter where a plump middle-aged woman was waiting.
‘Could you wrap this and send it for me?’
‘No problem, sir. Write down where you want it to go.’
She gave him a form and a pencil and March wrote Hannelore Jaeger’s name and address. Hannelore was even fatter than her husband, a lover of chocolates. He hoped Max would see the joke.
The assistant wrapped the box swiftly in brown paper, with skilled fingers.
‘Do you sell many of these?’
‘Hundreds. You Germans certainly love your Führer.’
‘We do, it is true.’ He was looking at the parcel. It was wrapped exactly like the one he had taken from Buhler’s mailbox. ‘You don’t, I suppose, keep a record of the places to which you send these packages?’
‘That would be impossible.’ She addressed it, stuck on a stamp, and added it to the pile behind her.
‘Of course. And you wouldn’t remember serving an elderly German here, about four o’clock on Monday afternoon? He had thick glasses and runny eyes.’
Her face was suddenly hard with suspicion. ‘What are you? A policeman?’
‘It’s of no importance.’ He paid for the chocolates, and also for a mug with ‘I LOVE ZÜRICH’ printed on the side.
Luther would not have come all the way to Switzerland to put that painting in the bank vault, thought March. Even as a retired Foreign Ministry official, he could never have smuggled a package that size, stamped top secret, past the Zollgrenzschutz. He must have come here to retrieve something, to take it back to Germany. And as it was the first time he had visited the vault for twenty-one years, and as there were three other keys, and as he trusted nobody, he must have had doubts about whether that other thin
g would still be here.
He stood looking at the departure lounge and tried to imagine the elderly man hurrying into the terminal building, clutching his precious cargo, his weak heart beating sharply against his ribs. The chocolates must have been a message of success: so far, my old comrades, so good. What could he have been carrying? Not paintings or money, surely; they had plenty of both in Germany.
‘Paper.’
‘What?’ Charlie, who had been waiting for him in the concourse, turned round in surprise.
‘That must have been the link. Paper. They were all civil servants. They lived their lives by paper, on paper.’
He pictured them in wartime Berlin – sitting in their offices at night, circulating memos and minutes in a perpetual bureaucratic paper chase, building themselves a paper fortress. Millions of Germans had fought in the war: in the freezing mud of the Steppes, or in the Libyan desert, or in the clear skies over southern England, or – like March – at sea. But these old men had fought their war – had bled and expended their middle age – on paper.
Charlie was shaking her head. ‘You’re making no sense.’
‘I know. To myself, perhaps. I bought you this.’
She unwrapped the mug and laughed, clasped it to her heart.
‘I shall treasure it.’
THEY walked quickly through passport control. Beyond the barrier, March turned for a final look. The two Swiss policemen were watching from the ticket desk. One of them – the one who had rescued them outside Zaugg’s villa – raised his hand. March waved in return.
Their flight number was being called for the last time: ‘Passengers for Lufthansa flight 227 to Berlin must report immediately . . .’
He let his arm fall back and turned towards the departure gate.
TWO
o whisky on this flight, but coffee – plenty of it, strong and black. Charlie tried to read a newspaper but fell asleep. March was too excited to rest.
He had torn a dozen blank pages from his notebook, had ripped them in half and half again. Now he had them spread out on the plastic table in front of him. On each he had written a name, a date, an incident. He reshuffled them endlessly – the front to the back, the back to the middle, the middle to the beginning – a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke billowing, his head in the clouds. To the other passengers, a few of whom stole curious glances, he must have looked like a man playing a particularly demented form of patience.
JULY 1942. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht has launched Operation ‘Blue’: the offensive which will eventually win Germany the war. America is taking a hammering from the Japanese. The British are bombing the Ruhr, fighting in North Africa. In Prague, Reinhard Heydrich is recovering from an assassination attempt.
So: good days for the Germans, especially those in the conquered territories. Elegant apartments, girlfriends, bribes – packing cases of plunder to send back home. Corruption from high to low; from corporal to Kommissar; from alcohol to altar-pieces. Buhler, Stuckart and Luther have an especially good racket in play. Buhler requisitions art treasures in the General Government, sends them under cover to Stuckart at the Interior Ministry – quite safe, for who would dare tamper with the mail of such powerful servants of the Reich? Luther smuggles the objects abroad to sell – safe again, for who would dare order the head of the Foreign Ministry’s German Division to open his bags? All three retire in the 1950s, rich and honoured men.
And then, in 1964: catastrophe.
March shuffled his bits of paper, shuffled them again.
On Friday, 11 April, the three conspirators gather at Buhler’s villa: the first piece of evidence which suggests a panic . . .
No. That was not right. He leafed back through his notes, to Charlie’s account of her conversation with Stuckart. Of course.
On Thursday, 10 April, the day before the meeting, Stuckart stands in Bülow Strasse and notes the number of the telephone in the booth opposite Charlotte Maguire’s apartment. Armed with that, he goes to Buhler’s villa on Friday. Something so terrible threatens to overwhelm them that the three men contemplate the unthinkable: defection to the United States of America. Stuckart lays out the procedure. They cannot trust the Embassy, because Kennedy has stuffed it with appeasers. They need a direct link with Washington. Stuckart has it: Michael Maguire’s daughter. It is agreed. On Saturday, Stuckart telephones the girl to arrange a meeting. On Sunday, Luther flies to Switzerland: not to fetch pictures or money, which they have in abundance in Berlin, but to collect something put there in the course of three visits, between the summer of 1942 and the spring of 1943.
But already it is too late. By the time Luther has made the withdrawal, sent the signal from Zürich, landed in Berlin, Buhler and Stuckart are dead. And so he decides to disappear, taking with him whatever he removed from the vault in Zürich.
March sat back and contemplated his half-finished puzzle. It was a version of events, as valid as any other.
Charlie sighed and stirred in her sleep, twisted to rest her head on his shoulder. He kissed her hair. Today was Friday. The Führertag was Monday. He had only the weekend left. ‘Oh, my dear Fräulein Maguire,’ he murmured. ‘I fear we have been looking in the wrong place.’
‘LADIES and gentlemen, we shall shortly be beginning our descent to Flughafen Hermann Goering. Please return your seats to the upright position and fold away the tables in front of you . . .’
Carefully, so as not to wake her, March withdrew his shoulder from beneath Charlie’s head, gathered up his pieces of paper, and made his way, unsteadily, towards the back of the aircraft. A boy in the uniform of the Hitler Youth emerged from the lavatory and held the door open, politely. March nodded, went inside and locked it behind him. A dim light flickered.
The tiny compartment stank of stale air, endlessly recycled; of cheap soap; of faeces. He lifted the lid of the metal lavatory basin and dropped in the paper. The aircraft pitched and shook. A warning light pinged. ATTENTION! RETURN TO YOUR SEAT! The turbulence made his stomach lurch. Was this how Luther had felt, as the aircraft dropped towards Berlin? The metal was clammy to the touch. He pulled a lever and the lavatory flushed, his notes sucked from sight in a whirlpool of blue water.
Lufthansa had stocked the toilet not with towels but with moist little paper handkerchiefs, impregnated with some sickly liquid. March wiped his face. He could feel the heat of his skin through the slippery fabric. Another vibration, like a U-boat being depth-charged. They were falling fast. He pressed his burning forehead to the cool mirror. Dive, dive, dive . . .
SHE was awake, dragging a comb through her thick hair. ‘I was beginning to think you had jumped.’
‘It’s true, the thought did enter my mind.’ He fastened his seatbelt. ‘But you may be my salvation.’
‘You say the nicest things.’
‘I said “may be”.’ He took her hand. ‘Listen. Are you sure Stuckart told you he came on Thursday to check out that telephone opposite your apartment?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I remember it made me realise: this man is serious, he’s done his homework.’
‘That’s what I think. The question is, was Stuckart acting on his own – trying to set up his own private escape route – or was ringing you a course of action he had discussed with the others?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Very much. Think about it. If he agreed it with the others on Friday, it means Luther may know who you are, and know the procedure for contacting you.’
She pulled her hand back in surprise. ‘But that’s crazy. He’d never trust me.’
‘You’re right, it’s crazy.’ They had dropped through one layer of cloud; beneath them was another. March could see the tip of the Great Hall poking through it, like the top of a helmet. ‘But suppose Luther is still alive down there, what are his options? The airport is being watched. So are the docks, the railway stations, the border. He can’t risk going direct to the American Embassy, not after what’s happened about Kennedy??
?s visit. He can’t go home. What can he do?’
‘I don’t believe it. He could have called me Tuesday or Wednesday. Or Thursday morning. Why would he wait?’
But he could hear the doubt in her voice. He thought: You don’t want to believe it. You thought you were clever, looking for your story in Zürich, but all the time your story might actually have been looking for you, in Berlin.
She had turned away from him, to stare through the window.
March felt suddenly deflated. In truth, he hardly knew her, despite everything. He said: ‘The reason he would have waited is to try and find something better to do, something safer. Who knows? Maybe he’s found it.’
She did not answer.
THEY landed in Berlin, in a thin drizzle, just before two o’clock. At the end of the runway, as the Junkers turned, the moisture scudded across the window, leaving threads of droplets. The swastika above the terminal building hung limp in the wet.
There were two queues at passport control: one for German and European Community nationals, one for the rest of the world.
‘This is where we part,’ said March. He had persuaded her, with some difficulty, to let him carry her case. Now he handed it back. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Go back to my apartment, I guess, and wait for the telephone to ring. What about you?’
‘I thought I would arrange myself a history lesson.’ She looked at him, uncomprehending. He said: ‘I’ll call you later.’
‘Be sure you do.’
A vestige of the old mistrust had returned. He could see it in her eyes, felt her searching it out in his. He wanted to say something, to reassure her. ‘Don’t worry. A deal is a deal.’
She nodded. An awkward silence. Then abruptly she stood on tiptoe and brushed her cheek against his. She was gone before he could think of a response.
THE line of returning Germans shuffled one at a time, in silence, into the Reich. March waited patiently with his hands clasped behind his back while his passport was scrutinised. In these last few days before the Führer’s birthday, the border checks were always more stringent, the guards more jittery.