Читаем Fatherland полностью

Someone in a neighbouring garden had lit a bonfire. Pungent white smoke — wet wood and dead leaves — drifted across the lawn at the back of the house. A wide flight of steps flanked by stone lions with frozen snarls led down to the lawn. Beyond the grass, through the trees, lay the dull, glassy surface of the Havel. They were facing south. Schwanenwerder, less than half a kilometre away, would be just visible from the upstairs windows. When Buhler bought his villa in the early 1950s, had the proximity of the two sites been a motive -was he the villain being drawn back to the scene of his crime? If so, what crime was it exactly?

March bent and dug up a handful of soil, sniffed at it, let it run through his fingers. The trail had gone cold years ago.

AT the bottom of the garden were a couple of wooden barrels, green with age, used by the gardener to collect rainwater. March and Charlie sat on them side by side, legs dangling, looking across the lake. He was in no hurry to move on. Nobody would look for them here. There was something indescribably melancholy about it all — the silence, the dead leaves blowing across the lawn, the smell of the smoke — something that was the opposite of spring. It spoke of autumn, of the end of things.

He said: “Did I tell you that before I went away to sea, there were Jews in our town? When I got back, they were all gone. I asked about it. People said they had been evacuated to the East. For resettlement.”

“Did they believe that?”

“In public, of course. Even in private it was wiser not to speculate. And easier. To pretend it was true.”

“Did you believe it?”

“I didn’t think about it.

“Who cares?” he said suddenly. “Suppose everyone knew all the details. Who would care? Would it really make any difference?”

“Someone thinks so,” she reminded him. That’s why everyone who attended Heydrich’s conference is dead. Except Heydrich.”

He looked back at the house. His mother, a firm believer in ghosts, used to tell him that brickwork and plaster soaked up history, stored what they had witnessed, like a sponge. Since then March had seen his share of places in which evil had been done and he did not believe it. There was nothing especially wicked about Am grossen Wannsee 56/58. It was just a large, businessman’s mansion, now converted into a girls” school. So what were the walls absorbing now? Teenage crushes? Geometry lessons? Exam nerves?

He pulled out Heydrich’s invitation. “A discussion followed by luncheon.” Starting at noon. Ending at — what? — three or four in the afternoon. It would have been growing dark by the time they left. Yellow lamps in the windows; mist from the lake. Fourteen men. Well-fed; maybe some of them tipsy on the Gestapo’s wine. Cars to take them back to central Berlin. Chauffeurs who had waited a long time outside, with cold feet and noses like icicles…

And then, less than five months later, in Zurich in the heat of midsummer, Martin Luther had marched into the offices of Hermann Zaugg, banker to the rich and frightened, and opened an account with four keys.

“I wonder why he was empty-handed.”

“What?” She was distracted. He had interrupted her thoughts.

“I always imagined Luther carrying a small suitcase of some sort. Yet when he came down the steps to meet you, he was empty-handed.”

“Perhaps he had stuffed everything into his pockets.”

“Perhaps.” The Havel looked solid; a lake of mercury. “But he must have landed from Zurich with luggage of some sort. He had spent the night out of the country. And he had collected something from the bank.”

The wind stirred in the trees. March looked round. “He was a suspicious old bastard after all. It would have been in his character to have kept back the really valuable material. He wouldn’t have risked giving the Americans everything at once — otherwise how could he have bargained?”

A jet passed low overhead, dropping towards the airport, the pitch of its engines descending with it. Now that was a sound which did not exist in 1942…

Suddenly he was on his feet, lifting her down to join him, and then he was striding up the lawn towards the house and she was following — stumbling, laughing, shouting at him to slow down.

HE parked the Volkswagen beside the road in Schlachten-see and sprinted into the telephone kiosk. Max Jaeger was not replying, neither at Werderscher Markt nor at his home. The lonely purr of the unanswered phone made March want to reach someone, anyone.

He tried Rudi Halder’s number. Perhaps he could apologise, somehow hint it had been worth the risk. Nobody was in. He looked at the receiver. What about Pili? Even the boy’s hostility would be contact of a sort. But in the bungalow in Lichtenrade there was no response either.

The city had shut down on him.

He was halfway out of the kiosk when, on impulse, he turned back and dialled the number of his own apartment. On the second ring, a man answered.

“Yes?” It was the Gestapo: Krebs’s voice. “March? I know it’s you! Don’t hang up!”

He dropped the receiver as if it had bitten him.