His Kripo ID got him past the sentries, his appearance -red-eyed, breathless, with more than a day’s growth of beard — suggestive of some terrible emergency which brooked no discussion. He found the dormitory block. He found Jost’s bed. The pillow was gone, the blankets had been stripped. All that remained was the ironwork and a hard, brown mattress. The locker was bare.
A solitary cadet, polishing his boots a few beds away, explained what had happened. They had come for Jost in the night. There were two of them. He was to be sent East, they said, for “special training”. He had gone without a word — seemed to have been expecting it. The cadet shook his head in amazement: Jost of all people. The cadet was jealous. They all were. He would see some real fighting.
The telephone kiosk stank of urine and ancient cigarette smoke, a used condom had been trodden into the dirt.
“Come on, come on,” whispered March. He rapped a one-Reichsmark piece against the cloudy glass and listened to the electronic purr of her telephone ringing, unanswered. He let it ring for a long time before he hung up.
Across the street a grocery store was opening. He crossed and bought a bottle of milk and some warm bread which he gulped down beside the road, conscious all the time of the shop’s owner watching him from the window. It occurred to him that he was living like a fugitive already — stopping to grab food only when he happened across it, devouring it in the open, always on the move. Milk trickled down his chin. He brushed it away with the back of his hand. His skin felt like sandpaper.
He checked again to see if he was being followed. On this side of the street, a uniformed nanny pushed a baby carriage. On the other, an old woman had gone into the telephone kiosk. A schoolboy hurried towards the Havel, clutching a toy yacht. Normal, normal…
March, the good citizen, dropped the milk bottle into a waste bin and set off down the suburban road.
“You have no witness. Not any more…”
He felt a great rage against Globus, the greater for being fuelled by guilt. The Gestapo must have seen Jost’s statement in the file on Buhler’s death. They would have checked with the SS academy and discovered that March had been back to re-interrogate him yesterday afternoon; That would have set them scurrying in Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. So his visit to the barracks had been Jost’s death warrant. He had indulged his curiosity — and killed a man.
And now the American girl was not answering her telephone. What might they do to her? An army truck overtook him, the draught sucked at him, and a vision of Charlotte Maguire lying broken in the gutter bubbled in his mind. “The Berlin authorities deeply regret this tragic accident…The driver of the vehicle concerned is still being sought…’He felt like the carrier of a dangerous disease. He should carry a placard: keep clear of this man, he is contagious.
Circulating endlessly in his head, fragments of conversation-
Artur Nebe: “Find Luther, March. Find him before Globus gets to him…”
Rudi Halder: “A couple of Sipo guys were round at the Archiv last week asking about you…”
Nebe again: “There is a complaint here from your ex-wife; one from your son…”
He walked for half an hour along the blossoming streets, past the high hedges and picket fences of prosperous suburban Berlin. When he reached Dahlem, he stopped a student to ask directions. At the sight of March’s uniform, the young man bowed his head. Dahlem was a student quarter. The male undergraduates, like this one, let their hair grow a few centimetres over their collars; some of the women wore jeans — God only knew where they got them. White Rose, the student resistance movement which had flowered briefly in the 1940s until its leaders were executed, was suddenly alive again. “Ihr Geist lebt weiter” said the graffiti: their spirit lives on. Members of White Rose grumbled about conscription, listened to banned music, circulated seditious magazines, were harassed by the Gestapo. The student gestured vaguely in response to March’s question, his arms laden with books, and was glad to be on his way.
LUTHER’S house was close to the Botanischer Garten, set back from the road — a nineteenth-century country mansion at the end of a sickle of white gravel. Two men sat in an unmarked grey BMW, parked opposite the drive. The car and its colour branded them at once. There would be two more watching the back, and at least one cruising the neighbourhood streets. March walked past and saw one of the Gestapo watchers turn to the other and speak.
Somewhere, a motor mower was whining; the smell of freshly cut grass hung over the drive. The house and grounds must have cost a fortune — not as much as Buhler’s villa, perhaps, but not far off it. The red box of a newly installed burglar alarm jutted beneath the eaves.
