The background first.” Koth was enjoying himself too much to be hurried. “We had to go back a long way to get a match. A very long way. But we got one. Perfect. No mistake. Your man has a record all right. He was arrested just once in his life. By our colleagues in Munich, forty years ago. To be precise, on the ninth of November 1923.”
There was a silence. Five, six, seven seconds elapsed.
“Ah! I can tell that even you appreciate the significance of the date.”
“An alter Kampfer.” March reached down beside his chair for his cigarettes. “His name?”
“Indeed. An old comrade. Arrested with the Fuhrer after the Burgerbraukeller Putsch. You have fished out of the lake one of the glorious pioneers of the National Socialist Revolution.” Koth laughed again. “A wiser man might have left him where he was.”
“What is his name?”
AFTER Koth had rung off, March paced around the apartment for five minutes, smoking furiously. Then he made three calls. The first was to Max Jaeger. The second was to the Duty Officer at Werderscher Markt. The third was to a Berlin number. A man’s voice, slurred with sleep, answered just as March was about to give up.
“Rudi? It’s Xavier March.”
“Zavi? Are you crazy? It’s midnight.”
“Not quite.” March patrolled the faded carpet, the body of the telephone in one hand, the receiver tucked beneath his chin. “I need your help.”
“For God’s sake!”
“What can you tell me about a man named Josef Buhler?”
THAT night, March had a dream. He was at the lakeshore again in the rain and there was the body, face down in the mud. He pulled at the shoulder — pulled hard — but he could not move it. The body was grey-white lead. But when he turned to leave, it grabbed his leg, and began pulling him towards the surface of the lake. He scrabbled at the earth, trying to dig his fingers into the soft mud, but there was nothing to hold on to. The corpse’s grip was immensely strong. And as they went under, its face became Pili’s, contorted with rage, grotesque in its shame, screaming “I hate you … I hate you … I hate you …"
detente, s.f. 1 (a) Relaxation, loosening, slackening (of something that is taut); relaxing (of muscles), (b) Easing (of political situation).
Yesterday’s rain was a bad memory, already half-faded from the streets. The sun — the miraculous, impartial sun — bounced and glittered on the shopfronts and apartment windows.
In the bathroom, the rusted pipes clanked and groaned, the shower dangled a thread of cold water. March shaved with his father’s old cut-throat razor. Through the open bathroom window, he could hear the sounds of the city waking up: the whine and clatter of the first tram; the distant hum of the traffic on Tauentzien Strasse; the footsteps of the early risers hurrying to the big Wittenberg Platz U-bahn station; the rattle of shutters going up in the bakery across the street. It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.
His uniform was laid out in the bedroom: the body-armour of authority.
Brown shirt, with black leather buttons. Black tie. Black breeches. Black jackboots (the rich smell of polished leather).
Black tunic: four silver buttons; three parallel silvered threads on the shoulder tabs; on the left sleeve, a red-white-and-black swastika armband; on the right, a diamond enclosing the gothic letter “K”, for Kriminalpolizei.
Black Sam Browne belt. Black cap with silver .death’s head and Party eagle. Black leather gloves.
March stared at himself in the mirror, and a Sturm-bannfuhrer of the Waffen-SS stared back. He picked up his service pistol, a 9mm Luger, from the dressing table, checked the action, and slotted it into his holster. Then he stepped out into the morning.
“SURE you have enough?”
Rudolf Halder grinned at March’s sarcasm and unloaded his tray: cheese, ham, salami, three hard-boiled eggs, a pile of black bread, milk, a cup of steaming coffee. He arranged the dishes in a neat row on the white linen tablecloth.
“I understand that breakfasts provided by the Reich Main Security Office are not normally so lavish.”
They were in the dining room of the Prinz Friedrich Karl Hotel in Dorotheen Strasse, midway between Kripo headquarters and Halder’s office in the Reichsarchiv. March used it regularly. The Friedrich Karl was a cheap stopover for tourists and salesmen, but it did a good breakfast. Dangling limply from a pole over the entrance was a European flag — the twelve gold stars of the European Community nations, on a dark-blue background. March guessed that the manager, Herr Brecker, had bought it second-hand and hung it there in an effort to drum up some foreign custom. It did not appear to have worked. A glance around the restaurant’s shabby clientele and bored staff suggested little danger of being overheard.
