Krebs interrupted: ‘Forgive me, sir, our time is almost gone.’ He pointed. ‘Down there, March. Can you see? A car.’
Parked under a broken street lamp at the far end of the alley March could just see a low shape, could hear a motor running.
‘What is this?’ He looked from one man to the other.
‘Walk to the car and get in. We’ve no more time. I count to ten, then I yell.’
‘Don’t fail us, March.’ Nebe squeezed his cheek. ‘Your uncle is an old man, but he hopes to live long enough to see those bastards hang. Go on. Get the papers out. Get them published. We’re risking everything, giving you a chance. Take it. Go.’
Krebs said: ‘I’m counting: one, two, three . . .’
March hesitated, started to walk, then broke into a loping run. The car door was opening. He looked back. Nebe had already disappeared into the dark. Krebs had cupped his hands to his mouth and was starting to shout.
March turned and struggled towards the waiting car where a familiar voice was calling: ‘Zavi! Zavi!’
PART SEVEN
FÜHRERTAG
The railway to Krakau continues north-east past Auschwitz (348 kilometres from Vienna), an industrial town of 12,000 inhabitants, the former capital of the Piast Duchies of Auschwitz and Zator (Hotel Zator 20 bedrooms), whence a secondary railway runs via Skawina to Krakau (69 kilometres in three hours) . . .
Baedeker’s General Government, 1943
ONE
idnight peals of bells rang out to welcome the day. Drivers whipped past, flashing their headlights, hammering their horns, leaving a smear of sound hanging over the road behind them. Factory hooters called to one another across Berlin, like stationary trains.
‘My dear old friend, what have they done to you?’
Max Jaeger was trying to concentrate on driving, but every few seconds his head would swivel to the right, in horrified fascination, to the passenger seat beside him.
He kept repeating it: ‘What have they done to you?’
March was in a daze, uncertain what was dream and what reality. He had his back half-turned and was staring out of the rear window. ‘Where are we going, Max?’
‘God alone knows. Where do you want to go?’
The road behind was clear. March carefully pulled himself round to look at Jaeger. ‘Didn’t Nebe tell you?’
‘Nebe said you’d tell me.’
March looked away, at the buildings sliding by. He did not see them. He was thinking of Charlie in the hotel room in Waldshut. Awake, alone, waiting for him. There were still more than eight hours to go. He and Max would have the Autobahnen almost to themselves. They could probably make it.
‘I was at the Markt,’ Jaeger was saying. ‘This was about nine. The telephone rings. It’s Uncle Artur. “Sturmbannführer! How good a friend is Xavier March?” “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do,” I said – by this time, the word was out about where you were. He said, very quietly: “All right, Sturmbannführer, we’ll see how good a friend you are. Kreuzberg. Corner of Axmann-weg, north of the abandoned church. Wait from quarter to midnight to quarter past. And not a word to anyone or you’ll be in a KZ by morning.” That was it. He hung up.’
There was a sheen of sweat on Jaeger’s forehead. He glanced from the road to March and back again. ‘Fuck it, Zavi. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m scared. I’m heading south. Is that okay?’
‘You’re doing fine.’
‘Aren’t you glad to see me?’ asked Jaeger.
‘Very glad.’
March felt faint again. He twisted his body and wound down the window with his left hand. Above the sound of the wind and the tyres: a noise. What was it? He put his head out and looked up. He could not see it, but he could hear it overhead. The clatter of a helicopter. He closed the window.
He remembered the telephone transcript. ‘What do I want? What do you think I want? Asylum in your country . . .’
The car’s dials and gauges shone a soft green in the darkness. The upholstery smelled of fresh leather.
He said: ‘Where did you get the car, Max?’ It was a Mercedes he saw: the latest model.
‘From the pool at Werderscher Markt. A beauty, yes? She’s got a full tank. We can go anywhere you want. Anywhere at all.’
March began to laugh then. Not very hard and not for very long because his aching ribs soon forced him to stop. ‘Oh Max, Max,’ he said, ‘Nebe and Krebs are such good liars, and you’re so lousy, I almost feel sorry for them, having to have you on their team.’
Jaeger stared ahead. ‘They’ve pumped you full of drugs, Zavi. They’ve hurt you. You’re confused, believe me.’
‘If they’d picked any other driver but you, I might almost have fallen for it. But you . . . Tell me, Max: why is the road behind so empty? I suppose, if you’re following a shiny new car that’s packed with electronics and transmitting a signal, you needn’t come closer than a kilometre. Especially if you can use a helicopter.’
‘I risk my life,’ whined Jaeger, ‘and this is my reward.’
March had Krebs’s Luger in his hand – his left hand, it was awkward to hold. Nevertheless he managed a convincing enough show of digging the barrel into the thick folds of Jaeger’s neck. ‘Krebs gave me his gun. To add that essential touch of authenticity. Not loaded, I’m sure. But do you want to take that risk? I think not. Keep your left hand on the wheel, Max, and your eyes on the road, and with your right hand give me your Luger. Very slowly.’
‘You’ve gone mad.’
March increased the pressure. The barrel slid up the sweaty skin and came to rest just behind Jaeger’s ear.
‘All right, all right . . .’
Jaeger gave him the gun.
‘Excellent. Now, I’m going to sit with this pointed at your fat belly, and if you try anything, Max – anything – I’ll put a bullet in it. And if you have any doubts about that, just sit there and work it out. And you’ll conclude I’ve got nothing to lose.’
‘Zavi . . .’
‘Shut up. Just keep driving on this road until we reach the outer Autobahn.’
He hoped Max could not see his hand trembling. He rested the gun in his lap. It was good, he reassured himself. Really good. It proved they had not picked her up. Nor had they discovered where she was. Because if they had managed either, they would never have resorted to this.
TWENTY-FIVE kilometres south of the city, the lights of the Autobahn looped across the darkness like a necklace. Great slabs of yellow thrust out of the ground bearing in black the names of the Imperial cities: clockwise from Stettin, through Danzig, Königsberg, Minsk, Posen, Krakau, Kiev, Rostov, Odessa, Vienna; then up through Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Hanover to Hamburg.
At March’s direction, they turned anti-clockwise. Twenty kilometres later, at the Friedersdorf intersection, they forked right.
Another sign: Liegnitz, Breslau, Kattowitz . . .
The stars arched. Little flecks of luminous cloud shone above the trees.
THE Mercedes flew down the slip road and joined the moonlit Autobahn. The road gleamed like a wide river. Behind them, sweeping round to follow, he pictured a dragon’s tail of lights and guns.
He was the head. He was pulling them after him – away from her, along the empty highway towards the east.
TWO
ain and exhaustion stalked him. To keep awake he talked.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘we have Krause to thank for this.’
Neither of them had spoken for almost an hour. The only sounds were the hum of the engine and the drumming of the wheels on the concrete road. Jaeger jumped at March’s voice. ‘Krause?’
‘Krause mixed up the rotas, ordered me to Schwanenwerder instead of you.’
‘Krause!’ Jaeger scowled. His face was a stage demon’s, painted green by the glow of the instrument panel. All the troubles in his life could be traced back to Krause!
‘The Gestapo fixed it so you’d be on duty on Monday night, didn’t they
? What did they tell you? “There’ll be a body in the Havel, Sturmbannführer. No hurry about identifying it. Lose the file for a few days . . .”’
Jaeger muttered: ‘Something like that.’
‘And then you overslept, and by the time you got to the Markt on Tuesday I’d taken over the case. Poor Max. Never could get up in the mornings. The Gestapo must have loved you. Whom were you dealing with?’
‘Globocnik.’
‘Globus himself!’ March whistled. ‘I bet you thought it was Christmas! What did he promise you, Max? Promotion? Transfer to the Sipo?’
‘Fuck you, March.’
‘So then you kept him informed of everything I was doing. When I told you Jost had seen Globus with the body at the lakeside, you passed it along and Jost disappeared. When I called you from Stuckart’s apartment, you warned them where we were and we were arrested. They searched the woman’s apartment the next morning because you told them she had something from Stuckart’s safe. They left us together in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse so you could do their interrogation for them –’
Jaeger’s right hand flashed across from the steering wheel and grabbed the gun barrel, twisting it up and away, but March’s fingers were caught around the trigger and squeezed it.
The explosion in the enclosed space tore their eardrums. The car swerved across the Autobahn and up on to the grass strip separating the two carriageways and they were bouncing along the rough track. For an instant, March thought he had been hit, then he thought that Jaeger had been hit. But Jaeger had both hands on the wheel and was fighting to control the Mercedes and March still had the gun. Cold air was rushing into the car through a jagged hole in the roof.
Jaeger was laughing like a madman and saying something but March was still deaf from the shot. The car skidded off the grass and rejoined the Autobahn.
IN the shock of the blast, March had been thrown against his shattered hand and had almost blacked-out, but the stream of freezing air pummelled him back into consciousness. He had a frantic desire to finish his story – I only knew for certain you’d betrayed me when Krebs showed me the wire-tap: I knew because you were the only person I’d told about the telephone kiosk in Bülow Strasse, how Stuckart called the girl – but the wind whipped away his words. In any case, what did it matter?
In all this, the irony was Nightingale. The American had been an honest man; his closest friend, the traitor.
Jaeger was still grinning like a lunatic, talking to himself as he drove, the tears glistening on his plump cheeks.
*
JUST after five they pulled off the autobahn into an all-night filling station. Jaeger stayed in the car and told the attendant through the open window to fill the tank. March kept the Luger pressed to Jaeger’s ribs, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him. He had dwindled. He was just a sack of flesh in a uniform.
The young man who operated the pumps looked at the hole in the roof and looked at them – two SS-Sturmbannführer in a brand-new Mercedes – bit his lip, and said nothing.
Through the line of trees separating the service area from the autobahn, March could see the occasional passing headlight. But of the cavalcade he knew was following them: no sign. He guessed they must have halted a kilometre back, to wait and see what he planned to do next.
WHEN they were back on the road, Jaeger said: ‘I never meant any harm to come to you, Zavi.’
March, who had been thinking of Charlie, grunted.
‘Globocnik is a police general, for God’s sake. If he tells you: “Jaeger! Look the other way!” – you look the other way, right? I mean, that’s the law, isn’t it? We’re policemen. We have to obey the law!’
Jaeger took his eyes off the road long enough to glance at March, who said nothing. He returned his attention to the Autobahn.
‘Then, when he ordered me to tell him what you’d found out – what was I supposed to do?’
‘You could have warned me.’
‘Yes? And what would you have done? I know you: you’d have carried on anyway. And where would that have left me – me, and Hannelore and the kids? We’re not all made to be heroes, Zavi. There have to be people like me, so people like you can look so clever.’
They were driving towards the dawn. Over the low wooded hills ahead of them was a pale glow, as if a distant city was on fire.
‘Now I suppose they’ll kill me, for allowing you to pull the gun on me. They’ll say I let you do it. They’ll shoot me. Jesus, it’s a joke, isn’t it?’ He looked at March with wet eyes. ‘It’s a joke!’
‘It’s a joke,’ said March.
IT was light by the time they crossed the Oder. The grey river stretched either side of the high steel bridge. A pair of barges crossed in the centre of the slow-moving water, and hooted a loud good morning to one another.
The Oder: Germany’s natural frontier with Poland. Except there was no longer any frontier; there was no Poland.
March stared straight ahead. This was the road down which the Wehrmacht’s Tenth Army had rolled in September 1939. In his mind, he saw again the old newsreels: the horse-drawn artillery, the Panzers, the marching troops . . . Victory had seemed so easy. How they had cheered!
There was an exit sign to Gleiwitz, the town where the war had started.
Jaeger was moaning. ‘I’m shattered, Zavi. I can’t drive much longer.’
March said, ‘Not far now.’
HE thought of Globus. ‘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.’ That had been his worst moment, because it was true.
A TOTENBURG – a Citadel of the Dead – stood on a bare hilltop not far from the road: four granite towers, fifty metres high, set in a square, enclosing a bronze obelisk. For a moment as they passed, the weak sun glinted on the metal, like a reflecting mirror. There were dozens of such tumuli between here and the Urals – imperishable memorials to the Germans who had died – were dying, would die – for the conquest of the East. Beyond Silesia, across the Steppes, the Autobahnen were built on ridges to keep them clear of the winter’s snows – deserted highways ceaselessly swept by the wind . . .
THEY drove for another twenty kilometres, past the belching factory chimneys of Kattowitz, and then March told Jaeger to leave the Autobahn.
HE can see her in his mind.
She is checking out of the hotel. She says to the receptionist: ‘You’re sure there’ve been no messages?’ The receptionist smiles. ‘None, Fräulein.’ She has asked a dozen times. A porter offers to help her with her luggage, but she refuses. She sits in the car overlooking the river, reading again the letter she found hidden in her case. ‘Here is the key to the vault, my darling. Make sure she sees the light one day . . .’ A minute passes. Another. Another. She keeps looking north, towards the direction from which he should come.
At last she checks her watch. Then she nods slowly, switches on the engine and turns right into the quiet road.
NOW they were passing through industrialised countryside: brown fields bordered by straggling hedgerows; whitish grass; black slopes of coal waste; the wooden towers of old mineshafts with ghostly spinning wheels, like the skeletons of windmills.
‘What a shit-hole,’ said Jaeger. ‘What happens here?’
The road ran beside a railway track, then crossed a river. Rafts of rubbery scum drifted along the banks. They were directly downwind of Kattowitz. The air stank of chemicals and coaldust. The sky here really was a sulphur-yellow, the sun an orange disc in the smog.
They dipped, went through a blackened railway bridge, then over a rail crossing. Close, now . . . March tried to remember Luther’s crude sketch map.
They reached a junction. He hesitated.
‘Turn right.’
Past corrugated iron sheds, scraps of trees, rattling over more steel tracks . . .
He recognised a disused rail line. ‘Stop!’
Jaeger braked.
‘This is it. You can turn
off the engine.’
Such silence. Not even a birdcall.
Jaeger looked around with distaste at the narrow road, the barren fields, the distant trees. A wasteland. ‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere!’
‘What time is it?’
‘Just after nine.’
‘Turn on the radio.’
‘What is this? You want a little music? The Merry Widow?’
‘Just turn it on.’
‘Which channel?’
‘The channel doesn’t matter. If it’s nine they’ll all sound the same.’
Jaeger pressed a switch, turned a dial. A noise like an ocean breaking on a rocky shore. As he scanned the frequencies the noise was lost, came back, was lost and then came back at full strength: not the ocean, but a million human voices raised in acclamation.
‘Take out your handcuffs, Max. That’s it. Give me the key. Now attach yourself to the wheel. I’m sorry, Max.’
‘Oh, Zavi . . .’
‘Here he comes!’ shouted the commentator. ‘I can see him! Here he comes!’
HE had been walking for a little over five minutes and had almost reached the birch woods when he heard the helicopter. He looked back a kilometre, past the waving grass, along the overgrown tracks. The Mercedes had been joined on the road by a dozen other cars. A line of black figures was starting towards him.
He turned and carried on walking.
SHE is pulling up at the border crossing – now. The swastika flag flaps over the customs post. The guard takes her passport. ‘For what purpose are you leaving Germany, Fräulein?’ ‘To attend a friend’s wedding. In Zürich.’ He looks from the passport photograph to her face and back again, checks the dates on the visa. ‘You are travelling alone?’ ‘My fiancé was supposed to be with me, but he’s been delayed in Berlin. Doing his duty, officer. You know how it is.’ Smiling, natural . . . That’s it, my darling. Nobody can do this better than you.
HE had his eyes on the ground. There must be something.