Fatherland (12 page)

He flicked through the pages to Stuckart, Wilhelm, Doctor of Law. The photograph was a professional studio portrait, the face cast in a film star's brooding half shadow. A vain man, and a curious mixture: curly gray hair, intense eyes, straight jawline—yet a flabby, almost voluptuous mouth. He took more notes.

Born November 16, 1902, Wiesbaden. Studied law and economics at Munich and Frankfurt-am-Main universities. Graduated magna cum laude, June 1928. Joined the Party in Munich, 1922. Various SA and SS positions. Mayor of Stettin, 1933. State secretary, Ministry of the Interior, 1935-53. Publication: A Commentary on the German Racial Laws (1936). Promoted to honorary SS-Obergruppenführer, 1944. Returned to private legal practice, 1953.

Here was a character quite different from Luther. An intellectual; an alter Kämpfer, like Buhler; a high flyer. To be mayor of Stettin, a port city of nearly 300,000, at the age of thirty-one... Suddenly March realized he had read all this before, very recently. But where? He could not remember. He closed his eyes.
Come on.

Wer Ist's?
added nothing new except that Stuckart was unmarried whereas Luther was on his third wife. He found a clean double page in his notebook and drew three columns; headed them
Buhler, Luther
and
Stuckart
; and began making lists of dates. Compiling a chronology was a favorite tool of his, a method of finding a pattern in what seemed otherwise to be a fog of random facts.

They had all been born in roughly the same period. Buhler was sixty-four; Luther, sixty-eight; Stuckart, sixty- one. They had all become civil servants in the 1930s— Buhler in 1939, Luther in 1936, Stuckart in 1935. They had all held roughly similar ranks—Buhler and Stuckart had been state secretaries; Luther, an under state secretary. They had all retired in the 1950s—Buhler in 1951, Luther in 1955, Stuckart in 1953. They must all have known one another. They had all met at 10 a.m. the previous Friday. Where was the pattern?

March tilted back in his chair and stared up at the tangle of pipes chasing one another like snakes across the ceiling.

And then he remembered. He pitched himself forward onto his feet. Next to the entrance were loosely bound volumes of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, the
Völkischer Beobachter
and the SS paper,
Das Schwarze Korps
. He wrenched back the pages of the
Tageblatt
, back to yesterday's issue, back to the obituaries. There it was. He had seen it last night.

Party Comrade Wilhelm Stuckart, formerly state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior, who died suddenly of heart failure on Sunday, April 13, will be remembered as a dedicated servant of the National Socialist cause . . .

The ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He was aware of the registrar staring at him.

"Are you ill, Herr Sturmbannführer?"

"No. I'm fine. Do me a favor, will you?" He picked up a file requisition slip and wrote out Stuckart's full name and date of birth. "Will you see if there's a file on this person?"

She looked at the slip and held out a hand. "ID." He gave her his identity card. She licked her pencil and entered the twelve digits of March's service number onto

the requisition form. By this means a record was kept of which Kripo investigator had requested which file, and at what time. His interest would be there for the Gestapo to see, a full eight hours after he had been ordered off the Buhler case. Further evidence of his lack of National Socialist discipline. It could not be helped.

The registrar had pulled out a long wooden drawer of index cards and was marching her square-tipped fingers along the tops of them. "Stroop," she murmured. "Strunck. Struss. Stülpnagel. . ."

March said, "You've gone past it."

She grunted and pulled out a slip of pink paper. " 'Stuckart, Wilhelm.' " She looked at him. "There is a file. It's out."

"Who has it?"

"See for yourself."

March leaned forward. Stuckart's file was with Sturmbannführer Fiebes of Kripo Department VB
₃
: the sexual crimes division.

The whisky and the dry air had given him a thirst. In the corridor outside the Registry was a water cooler. He poured himself a drink and considered what to do.

What would a sensible man have done? That was easy. A sensible man would have done what Max Jaeger did every day. He would have put on his hat and coat and gone home to his wife and children. But for March that was not an option. The empty apartment in Ansbacher-Strasse, the quarreling neighbors and yesterday's newspaper, these held no attractions for him. He had narrowed his life to such a point that the only thing left was his work. If he betrayed that, what else was there?

And there was something else, the instinct that propelled him out of bed every morning into each unwelcoming day, and that was the desire to know. In police work, there was always another junction to reach, another corner to peer around. Who were the Weiss family, and what had happened to them? Whose was the body in the lake? What linked the deaths of Buhler and Stuckart? It kept him going, his blessing or his curse, this compulsion to
know
. And so, in the end, there was no choice.

He tossed the paper cup into the trash can and went upstairs.

Walter Fiebes was in his office drinking schnapps. Watching him from a table beneath the window was a row of five human heads—white plaster casts with hinged scalps, all raised like lavatory seats, displaying their brains in red and gray sections—the five strains that made up the German Empire.

Placards announced them from left to right, in descending order of acceptability to the authorities. Category One: Pure Nordic. Category Two: Predominantly Nordic or Phalic. Category Three: Harmonious Bastard with Slight Alpine Dinaric or Mediterranean Characteristics. These groups qualified for membership in the SS. The others could hold no public office and stared reproachfully at Fiebes. Category Four: Bastard of Predominantly East Baltic or Alpine Origin. Category Five: Bastard of Extra-European Origin.

March was a One/Two; Fiebes, ironically, a borderline Three. But then, the racial fanatics were seldom the blue- eyed Aryan supermen—they, in the words of
Das Schwarzes Korps
, were "too inclined to take their membership in the
Volk
for granted." Instead, the swampy

frontiers of the German race were patrolled by those less confident of their bloodworthiness. Insecurity breeds good border guards. The knock-kneed Franconian schoolmaster, ridiculous in his
Lederhosen
; the Bavarian shopkeeper with his pebble glasses; the red-haired Thuringian accountant with a nervous tic and a predilection for the younger members of the Hitler Youth; the lame and the ugly, the runts of the national litter—these were the loudest defenders of the
Volk
.

So it was with Fiebes—the myopic, stooping, buck- toothed, cuckolded Fiebes—whom the Reich had blessed with the one job he really wanted. Homosexuality and miscegenation had replaced rape and incest as capital offenses. Abortion, "an act of sabotage against Germany's racial future," was punishable by death. The permissive 1960s were showing a strong increase in such sex crimes. Fiebes, a sheet sniffer by temperament, worked all the hours the Führer sent and was as happy, in Max Jaeger's words, as a pig in horseshit.

But not today. Now, he was drinking in the office, his eyes were moist and his bat-wing toupee hung slightly askew.

March said, "According to the newspapers, Stuckart died of heart failure."

Fiebes blinked.

"But according to the Registry, the file on Stuckart is out to you."

"I cannot comment."

"Of course you can. We are colleagues." March sat down and lit a cigarette. "I take it we're in the familiar business of 'sparing the family embarrassment.' "

Fiebes muttered, "Not just the family." He hesitated. "Could I have one of those?"

"Sure." March gave him a cigarette and flicked his lighter. Fiebes took an experimental draw, like a schoolboy.

"This affair has left me pretty well shaken, March, I don't mind admitting. The man was a hero to me."

"You knew him?"

"By reputation, naturally. I never actually
met
him. Why? What is your interest?"

"State security. That is all I can say. You know how it is."

"Ah. Now I understand." Fiebes poured himself another large helping of schnapps. "We're very much alike, , March, you and I."

"We are?"

"Sure. You're the only investigator who's in this place as often as I am. We've got rid of our wives, our children—all that shit. We live for the job. When it goes well, we're well. When it goes badly..." His head fell forward. Presently he said, "Do you know Stuckart's book?"

"Unfortunately, no."

Fiebes opened a desk drawer and handed March a battered, leather-bound volume:
A Commentary on the German Racial Laws
. March leafed through it. There were chapters on each of the three Nuremberg Laws of 1935: the Reich Citizenship Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People. Some passages were underlined in red ink, with exclamation marks beside them. "For the avoidance of racial damage, it is necessary for couples to submit to medical examination before marriage." "Marriage between persons suffering from venereal disease, feeblemindedness, epilepsy or genetic infirmities (see 1933 Sterilization Law) will be permitted only after production of a sterilization certificate." There were charts: "An Overview of the Admissibility of Marriage Between Aryans and Non-Aryans," 'The Prevalence of
Mischlinge
of the First Degree."

It was all gobbledygook to Xavier March.

Fiebes said, "Most of it is out of date now. A lot of it refers to Jews, and the Jews, as we know"—he gave a wink—"have all gone east. But Stuckart is still the bible of my calling. This is the foundation stone."

March handed him the book. Fiebes cradled it like a

baby. "Now what I really need to see," said March, "is the file on Stuckart's death."

He was braced for an argument. Instead, Fiebes merely made an expansive gesture with his bottle of schnapps. "Go ahead."

The Kripo file was an ancient one. It went back more than a quarter of a century. In 1936, Stuckart had become a member of the Interior Ministry's Committee for the Protection of German Blood—a tribunal of civil servants, lawyers and doctors who considered applications for marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. Shortly afterward, the police had started receiving anonymous allegations that Stuckart was providing marriage licenses in exchange for cash bribes. He had also apparently demanded sexual favors from some of the women involved.

The first named complainant was a Dortmund tailor, a Herr Maser, who had protested to his local Party office that his fiancée had been assaulted. His statement had been passed to the Kripo. There was no record of any investigation. Instead, Maser and his girlfriend had been dispatched to concentration camps. Various other stories from informants, including one from Stuckart's wartime
Blockwart
, were included in the file. No action had ever been taken.

In 1953, Stuckart had begun a liaison with an eighteen- year-old Warsaw girl, Maria Dymarski. She had claimed German ancestry back to 1720 in order to marry a Wehrmacht captain. The conclusion of the Interior Ministry's experts was that the documents had been forged. The following year, Dymarski had been given a permit to work as a domestic servant in Berlin. Her employer's name was listed as Wilhelm Stuckart.

March looked up. "How did he get away with it for ten years?"

"He was an Obergruppenführer, March. You don't make complaints about a man like that. Remember what
happened to Maser when he complained? Besides, nobody had any evidence—then."

"And there is evidence now?"

"Look in the envelope."

Inside the file, in a manila envelope, were a dozen color photographs of startlingly good quality, showing Stuckart and Dymarski in bed. White bodies against red satin sheets. The faces—contorted in some shots, relaxed in others—were easy to identify. They were all taken from the same position, alongside the bed. The girl's body, pale and undernourished, looked fragile beneath the man's. In one shot she sat astride him—thin white arms clasped behind her head, face tilted toward the camera. Her features were broad, Slavic. But with her shoulder-length hair dyed blond she could have passed as a German.

"These weren't taken recently?"

"About ten years ago. He turned grayer. She put on a bit of weight. She looked like more of a tart as she got older."

"Do we have any idea where they are?" The background was a blur of colors. A brown wooden bedhead, red-and-white-striped wallpaper, a lamp with a yellow shade; it could have been anywhere.

"It's not his apartment—at least, not the way it's decorated now. A hotel, maybe a whorehouse. The camera is behind a two-way mirror. See the way they sometimes seem to be staring into the camera? I've seen that look a hundred times. They're checking themselves in the mirror."

March examined each of the pictures again. They were glossy and unscratched—new prints from old negatives. The sort of pictures a pimp might try to sell you in a back street in Kreuzberg.