Fatherland (8 page)

Two floors below, in the basement of the morgue, SS-Surgeon August Eisler of Kriminalpolizei Department VD
₂
(Pathology) was going about his business with his customary clumsy relish. Buhler's chest had been opened in the standard fashion: a
Y
incision, a cut from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, a straight line down to the pubic bone. Now Eisler had his hands deep inside the stomach, green gloves sheened with red, twisting, cutting, pulling. March and Jaeger leaned against the wall by the open doorway, smoking a couple of Jaeger's cigars.

"Have you seen what your man had for lunch?" said Eisler. "Show them, Eck."

Eisler's assistant wiped his hands on his apron and held up a transparent plastic bag. There was something small and green in the bottom.

"Lettuce. Digests slowly. Stays in the intestinal tract for hours."

March had worked with Eisler before. Two winters ago, with snow blocking Unter den Linden and ice-skating competitions on the Tegelersee, a bargemaster named Kempf had been pulled out of the Spree, almost dead with cold. He had expired in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Accident or murder? The time at which he had fallen into the water was crucial. Looking at the ice extending two meters out from the banks, March had estimated fifteen minutes as the maximum time he could have survived in the water. Eisler had said forty-five, and his view had prevailed with the prosecutor. It was enough to destroy the alibi of the barge's second mate and hang him.

Afterward, the prosecutor—a decent, old-fashioned sort—had called March into his office and locked the door. Then he'd shown him Eisler's "evidence": copies of documents stamped
Geheime Reichssache
—Top Secret State Document—and dated Dachau, 1942. There were reports of freezing experiments carried out on condemned prisoners, restricted to the department of the SS surgeon general. The men had been handcuffed and dumped into tanks of icy water, retrieved at intervals to have their temperatures taken, right up to the point at which they died. There were photographs of heads bobbing between floating chunks of ice, and charts showing heat loss, projected and actual. The experiments had lasted two years and been conducted, among others, by a young
Untersturmführer
, August Eisler. That night, March and the prosecutor had gone to a bar in Kreuzberg and gotten blind drunk. Next day, neither of them mentioned what had happened. They never spoke to each other again.

"If you expect me to come out with some fancy theory, March, forget it."

"I'd never expect that."

Jaeger laughed. "Nor would I."

Eisler ignored their mirth. "It was a drowning, no question about it. Lungs full of water, so he must have been breathing when he went into the lake."

"No cuts?" asked March. "Bruises?"

"Do you want to come over here and do this job? No?

Then believe me: he drowned. There are no contusions to the head to indicate he was hit or held under."

"A heart attack? Some kind of seizure?"

"Possible," admitted Eisler. Eck handed him a scalpel. "I won't know until I've completed a full examination of the internal organs."

"How long will that take?"

"As long as it takes."

Eisler positioned himself behind Buhler's head. Tenderly, he stroked the hair toward him, off the corpse's forehead, as if soothing a fever. Then he hunched down low and jabbed the scalpel through the left temple. He drew it in an arc across the top of the face, just below the hairline. There was a scrape of metal and bone. Eck grinned at them. March sucked a lungful of smoke from his cigar.

Eisler put the scalpel into a metal dish. Then he bent down once more and worked his forefingers into the deep cut. Gradually, he began peeling back the scalp. March turned his head away and closed his eyes. He prayed that no one he loved, or liked, or even vaguely knew, ever had to be desecrated by the butcher's work of an autopsy.

Jaeger said, "So what do you think?"

Eisler had picked up a small, hand-sized circular saw. He switched it on. It whined like a dentist's drill.

March took a final puff on his cigar. "I think we should get out of here."

They made their way down the corridor. Behind them, from the autopsy room, they heard the saw's note deepen as it bit into the bone.

Half an hour later, Xavier March was at the wheel of one of the Kripo's Volkswagens, following the curving path of the Havel-Chaussee, high above the lake. Sometimes the view was hidden by trees. Then he would round a bend, or the forest would thin, and he would see the water again, sparkling in the April sun like a tray of diamonds. Two yachts skimmed the surface—children's cutouts, white triangles brilliant against the blue.

He had the window wound down, his arm resting on the sill, the breeze plucking at his sleeve. On either side, the bare branches of the trees were flecked with the green of late spring. In another month, the road would be nose to tail with cars: Berliners escaping from the city to sail or swim or picnic, or simply to lie in the sun on one of the big public beaches. But today there was still enough of a chill in the air, and winter was still close enough, for March to have the road to himself. He passed the red brick sentinel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Tower and the road began to drop to lake level.

Within ten minutes he was at the spot where the body had been discovered. In the fine weather it looked utterly
different. This was a tourist spot, a vantage point known as the
Grosses Fenster
: the Picture Window. What had been a mass of gray yesterday was now a gloriously clear view across eight kilometers of water, right up to Spandau.

He parked and retraced the route Jost had been running when he discovered the body—down the woodland track, a sharp right turn and along the side of the lake. He did it a second time, and a third. Satisfied, he got back into the car and drove over the low bridge onto Schwanenwerder. A red-and-white pole blocked the road. A sentry emerged from a small hut, a clipboard in his hand, a rifle slung across his shoulder.

"Your identification, please."

March handed his Kripo ID through the open window. The sentry studied it and returned it. He saluted. "That's fine, Herr Sturmbannführer."

"What's the procedure here?"

"Stop every car. Check the papers and ask where they're going. If they look suspicious, we phone the house, see if they're expected. Sometimes we search the car. It depends on whether the Reichsminister is in residence."

"Do you keep a record?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do me a favor. Look and see if Doctor Josef Buhler had any visitors on Monday night."

The sentry hitched his rifle and went back into his hut. March could see him turning the pages of a ledger. When he returned he shook his head. "Nobody for Doctor Buhler all day."

"Did he leave the island at all?"

"We don't keep a record of residents, sir, only visitors. And we don't check people going, only coming."

"Right." March looked past the guard, across the lake. A scattering of seagulls swooped low over the water, crying. Some yachts were moored to a jetty. He could hear the clink of their masts in the wind.

"What about the shore? Is that watched at all?"

The guard nodded. "The river police have a patrol every couple of hours. But most of those houses have enough sirens and dogs to guard a KZ. We just keep the sightseers away."

KZ: pronounced
kah-tsett
. Less of a mouthful than
Konzentrationslager
. Concentration camp.

There was a sound of powerful engines gunning in the distance. The guard turned to look up the road behind him, toward the island.

"One moment, sir."

Around the bend, at high speed, came a gray BMW with its headlights on, followed by a long black Mercedes limousine and then another BMW. The sentry stepped back and pressed a switch, the barrier rose and he saluted. As the convoy swept by, March had a glimpse of the Mercedes' passengers—a young woman, beautiful, an actress perhaps, or a model, with short blond hair; and next to her, staring straight ahead, a wizened old man, his rodentlike profile instantly recognizable. The cars roared off toward the city.

"Does he always travel that quickly?" asked March.

The sentry gave him a knowing look. "The Reichsminister has been screen-testing, sir. Frau Goebbels is due back at lunchtime."

"Ah. All is clear." March turned the key in the ignition and the Volkswagen came to life. "Did you know that Doctor Buhler is dead?"

"No, sir." The sentry gave no sign of interest. "When did that happen?"

"Monday night. He was washed up a few hundred meters from here."

"I heard they'd found a body."

"What was he like?"

"I hardly noticed him, sir. He didn't go out much. No visitors. Never spoke. But then, a lot of them end up like that out here."

"Which was his house?"

"You can't miss it. It's on the east side of the island. Two large towers. It's one of the biggest."

"Thanks."

As he drove down the causeway, March checked in his mirror. The sentry stood looking after him for a few seconds, then hitched his rifle again, turned and walked slowly back to his hut.

Schwanenwerder was small, less than a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide, with a single loop of road running one-way clockwise. To reach Buhler's property, March had to travel three quarters of the way around the island. He drove cautiously, slowing almost to a halt each time he glimpsed one of the houses off to his left.

The place had been named after the famous colonies of swans that lived at the southern end of the Havel. It had become fashionable toward the end of the last century. Most of its buildings dated from then: large villas, steep roofed and stone fronted in the French style, with long drives and lawns, protected from prying eyes by high walls and trees. A piece of the ruined Tuileries Palace stood incongruously by the roadside—a pillar and a section of arch carted back from Paris by some long-dead Wilhelmine businessman. No one stirred. Occasionally, through the bars of a gate, he saw a guard dog, and—once—a gardener raking leaves. The owners were at work in the city, or away, or lying low.

March knew the identities of a few of them: party bosses; a motor industry tycoon, grown fat on the profits of slave labor immediately after the war; the managing director of Wertheim's, the great department store on Potsdamer-PIatz, which had been confiscated from its Jewish owners more than thirty years before; an armaments manufacturer; the head of an engineering conglomerate building the great Autobahnen into the eastern territories. He wondered how Buhler could have afforded to keep such wealthy company. Then he remembered Halder's description: luxury like the Roman Empire . . .

"KP
₁₇
, this is KHQ. KP
₁₇
, answer, please!" A
woman's urgent voice filled the car. March picked up the radio handset concealed under the dashboard.

"This is KP
₁₇
. Go ahead."

"KP
₁₇
, I have Sturmbannführer Jaeger for you."

He had arrived outside the gates to Buhler's villa. Through the metalwork, March could see a yellow curve of drive and the towers, exactly as the sentry had described.

"You said trouble," boomed Jaeger. "And we've got it."

"Now what?"

"I hadn't been back here ten minutes when two of our esteemed colleagues from the Gestapo arrived. 'In view of Party Comrade Buhler's prominent position, blah blah blah, the case has been redesignated a security matter.' "

March thumped his hand against the steering wheel. "Shit!"

" 'All documents to be handed over to the Security Police forthwith, reports required from investigating officers on current status of inquiry, Kripo inquiry to be closed, effective immediately.'"

"When did this happen?"

"It's happening now. They're sitting in our office."

"Did you tell them where I am?"

"Of course not. I just left them to it and said I'd try to find you. I've come straight to the control room." Jaeger's voice dropped. March could imagine him turning his back on the woman operator. "Listen, Zavi, I wouldn't recommend any heroics. They mean serious business, believe me. The Gestapo will be swarming over Schwanenwerder any minute."

March stared at the house. It was utterly still, deserted. Damn the Gestapo.

He made up his mind at that moment. He said, "I can't hear you, Max. I'm sorry. The line is breaking up. I haven't been able to understand anything you've said. Request you report radio fault. Out." He switched off the receiver.

About fifty meters before the house, on the right side of the road, March had passed a gated track leading into the woods that covered the center of the island. Now he put the Volkswagen into reverse gear, rapidly backed up to it and parked. He trotted back to Buhler's gates. He did not have much time.

They were locked. That was to be expected. The lock itself was a solid metal block a meter and a half off the ground. He wedged the toe of his boot into it and stepped up. There was a row of iron spikes, thirty centimeters apart, running along the top of the gate, just above his head. Gripping one in either hand, he hauled himself up until he was in a position to swing his left leg over. A hazardous business. For a moment he sat astride the gate, recovering his breath. Then he dropped down to the gravel driveway on the other side.