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 “fifty-four. Another in “fifty-five. Then one a year in “fifty-seven, “fifty-nine, “sixty, “sixty-one, “sixty-two. Intruders probably planned to kill Luther in “sixty-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 “sixty-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
“Kulmhof!” 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
Time 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 Obergruppen-fuhrer 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.
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.