FOUR
n 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, burnt-out iron bedsteads, overturned tramcars, 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 millimetres, 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 fibre 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.’ Krebs’s hand hovered a centimetre above the notes.
‘It depends 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 is 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 is 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”?’
‘Crystallised 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 centres.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Krebs dropped the notes on 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 child 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 labour 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 catalogue the treasures.’
‘But you must have realised 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 cataloguing 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 in to 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 tip-off from the American Embassy.’
Krebs snorted. ‘What sort of crap is that? He knew because of a wire-tap.’
‘That cannot be . . .’
‘Why can’t it be? 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 Geheime Reichssache
G745,275
23:51
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 fetch you. We’ll 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 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 archipelagos 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 o
f 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 programme 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 am 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 organised 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 ʼfifty-four. Another in ʼfifty-five. Then one a year in ʼfifty-seven, ʼfifty-nine, ʼsixty, ʼsixty-one, ʼsixty-two. Intruders probably planned to kill Luther in ʼsixty-three, and he hired security guards. But time passed and nothing happened, so he assumed it was just a coincidence.’
‘That’s enough, March.’
‘By ʼsixty-three, 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 the ninth – another cross! Buhler’s old colleague from the General Government, Schongarth, has slipped 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 in the papers. For a moment they lay smouldering on the coals, then ignited into yellow flame as the key turned in the cell door.
FIVE
ulmhof!’ he shouted at Globus when the pain became too bad. ‘Belzec! Treblinka!’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’ Globus grinned at his two assistants.
‘Majdanek! Sobibor! Auschwitz/Birkenau!’ He held up the names like a shield to ward off the blows.
‘What am I supposed to do? Shrivel up and die?’ Globus squatted on his haunches and grabbed March by the ears, twisting his face towards him. ‘They’re just names, March. There’s nothing there any more, not even a brick. Nobody will ever believe it. And shall I tell you something? Part of you can’t believe it either.’ Globus spat in his face – a gobbet of greyish-yellow phlegm. ‘That’s how much the world will care.’ He thrust him away, bouncing his head against the stone floor.
‘Now. Again. Where’s the girl?’
SIX
ime crawled on all fours, broken-backed. He was shivering. His teeth chattered like a clockwork toy.
Other prisoners had been here years before him. In lieu of tombstones they had scratched on the cell’s walls with splintered fingernails. ‘J.F.G. 22.2.57’. ‘Katja’. ‘H.K. May 44’. Someone had got no further than half the letter ‘E’ before strength or time or will had run out on them. Yet still this urge to write . . .
None of the marks, he noticed, was more than a metre above the floor.
The pain in his hand was making him feverish. He had hallucinations. A dog ground his fingers between its jaws. He closed his eyes and wondered what time was doing now. When he had last asked Krebs it had been – what? – almost six. Then they had talked for perhaps another half-hour. After that there had been his second session with Globus – infinite. Now this stretch alone in his cell, slithering in and out of the light, tugged one way by exhaustion, the other by the dog.
The floor was warm to his cheek, the smooth stone dissolved.
HE dreamed of his father – his childhood dream – the stiff figure in the photograph come to life, waving from the deck of the ship as it pulled out of harbour, waving until he had dwindled to a stick-figure, until he disappeared. He dreamed of Jost, running on the spot, intoning his poetry in his solemn voice: ‘You throw food to the beast in man/That it may grow . . .’ He dreamed of Charlie.
But most often he dreamed he was back in Pili’s bedroom at that dreadful instant when he understood what the boy had done out of kindness – kindness! – when his arms were reaching for the door but his legs were trapped – and the window was exploding and rough hands were dragging at his shoulders . . .
THE jailer shook him awake.
‘On your feet!’
He was curled up tight on his left side, foetus-like – his body raw, his joints welded. The guard’s push awoke the dog and he was sick. There was nothing in him to bring up, but his stomach convulsed anyway, for old time’s sake. The cell retreated a long way and came rushing back. He was pulled upright. The jailer swung a pair of handcuffs. Next to him stood Krebs, thank God, not Globus.
Krebs looked at him with distaste and said to the guard: ‘You’d better put them on at the front.’
His wrists were locked before him, his cap was stuffed on his head, and he was marched, hunched forward, along the passage, up the steps, into the fresh air.
A cold night, and clear. The stars sprayed across the sky above the courtyard. The buildings and the cars were silver-edged in the moonlight. Krebs pushed him into the back seat of a Mercedes and climbed in after him. He nodded to the driver: ‘Columbia House. Lock the doors.’
As the bolts slid home in the door beside him, March felt a flicker of relief.
‘Don’t raise your hopes,’ said Krebs. ‘The Obergruppenführer is still waiting for you. We have more modern technology at Columbia, that’s all.’
They pulled out through the gates, looking to any who saw them like two SS officers and their chauffeur. A guard saluted.
&nb
sp; Columbia House was three kilometres south of Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. The darkened government buildings quickly yielded to shabby office blocks and boarded-up warehouses. The area close to the prison had been scheduled for redevelopment in the nineteen-fifties, and here and there Speer’s bulldozers had made destructive forays. But the money had run out before anything could be built to replace what they had knocked down. Now, overgrown patches of derelict land gleamed in the bluish light like the corners of old battlefields. In the dark side-streets between them dwelt the teeming colonies of East European gastarbeiter.
March was sitting stretched out, his head resting on the back of the leather seat, when Krebs suddenly leaned towards him and shouted: ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ He turned to the driver: ‘He’s pissing himself. Pull over here.’
The driver swore, and braked hard.
‘Open the doors!’
Krebs got out, came round to March’s side, and yanked him out. ‘Quickly! We haven’t got all night!’ To the driver: ‘One minute. Keep the engine running.’
Then March was being pushed – stumbling across rough stones, down an alley, into the doorway of a disused church, and Krebs was unlocking the handcuffs.
‘You’re a lucky man, March.’
‘I don’t understand . . .’
Krebs said: ‘You’ve got a favourite uncle.’
Tap, tap, tap. From the darkness of the church. Tap, tap, tap.
‘YOU should have come to me at once, my boy,’ said Artur Nebe. ‘You would have spared yourself such agony.’ He brushed March’s cheek with his fingertips. In the heavy shadows, March could not make out the detail of his face, only a pale blur.
‘Take my pistol.’ Krebs pressed the Luger into March’s left hand. ‘Take it! You tricked me. Got hold of my gun. Understand?’
He was dreaming, surely? But the pistol felt solid enough . . .
Nebe was still talking – a low, urgent voice. ‘Oh March, March. Krebs came to me this evening – shocked! so shocked! – told me what you had. We all suspected it, of course, but never had the proof. Now you’ve got to get it out. For all our sakes. You’ve got to stop these bastards . . .’