“Of course. And you wouldn’t remember serving an elderly German here, about four o’clock on Monday afternoon? He had thick glasses and runny eyes.”
Her face was suddenly hard with suspicion. “What are you? A policeman?”
“It’s of no importance.” He paid for the chocolates, and also for a mug with “i LOVE ZURICH” printed on the side.
Luther would not have come all the way to Switzerland to put that painting in the bank vault, thought March. Even as a retired Foreign Ministry official, he could never have smuggled a package that size, stamped top secret, past the Zollgrenzschutz. He must have come here to retrieve something, to take it back to Germany. And as it was the first time he had visited the vault for twenty-one years, and as there were three other keys, and as he trusted nobody, he must have had doubts about whether that other thing would still be here.
He stood looking at the departure lounge and tried to imagine the elderly man hurrying into the terminal building, clutching his precious cargo, his weak heart beating sharply against his ribs. The chocolates must have been a message of success: so far, my old comrades, so good. What could he have been carrying? Not paintings or money, surely; they had plenty of both in Germany.
“Paper.”
“What?” Charlie, who had been waiting for him in the concourse, turned round in surprise.
“That must have been the link. Paper. They were all civil servants. They lived their lives by paper, on paper.”
He pictured them in wartime Berlin — sitting in their offices at night, circulating memos and minutes in a perpetual bureaucratic paper chase, building themselves a paper fortress. Millions of Germans had fought in the war: in the freezing mud of the Steppes, or in the Libyan desert, or in the clear skies over southern England, or — like March — at sea. But these old men had fought their war — had bled and expended their middle age — on paper.
Charlie was shaking her head. “You’re making no sense.”
“I know. To myself, perhaps. I bought you this.”
She unwrapped the mug and laughed; clasped it to her heart.
“I shall treasure it.”
THEY walked quickly through passport control. Beyond the barrier, March turned for a final look. The two Swiss policemen were watching from the ticket desk. One of them — the one who had rescued them outside Zaugg’s villa — raised his hand. March waved in return.
Their flight number was being called for the last time: “Passengers for Lufthansa flight 227 to Berlin must report immediately…”
He let his arm fall back and turned towards the departure gate.
No whisky on this flight, but coffee — plenty of it, strong and black. Charlie tried to read a newspaper but fell asleep. March was too excited to rest.
He had torn a dozen blank pages from his notebook, had ripped them in half and half again. Now he had them spread out on the plastic table in front of him. On each he had written a name, a date, an incident. He reshuffled them endlessly — the front to the back, the back to the middle, the middle to the beginning — a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke billowing, his head in the clouds. To the other passengers, a few of whom stole curious glances, he must have looked like a man playing a particularly demented form of patience.
JULY 1942. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht has launched Operation “Blue’: the offensive which will eventually win Germany the war. America is taking a hammering from the Japanese. The British are bombing the Ruhr, fighting in North Africa. In Prague, Reinhard Heydrich is recovering from an assassination attempt.
So: good days for the Germans, especially those in the conquered territories. Elegant apartments, girlfriends, bribes — packing cases of plunder to send back home. Corruption from high to low; from corporal to Kommissar; from alcohol to altar-pieces. Buhler, Stuckart and Luther have an especially good racket in play. Buhler requisitions art treasures in the General Government, sends them under cover to Stuckart at the Interior Ministry — quite safe, for who would dare tamper with the mail of such powerful servants of the Reich? Luther smuggles the objects abroad to sell — safe again, for who would dare order the head of the Foreign Ministry’s German Division to open his bags? All three retire in the 1950s, rich and honoured men.
And then, in 1964: catastrophe.
March shuffled his bits of paper, shuffled them again.
On Friday, 11 April, the three conspirators gather at Buhler s villa: the first piece of evidence which suggests a panic…
No. That was not right. He leafed back through his notes, to Charlie’s account of her conversation with Stuckart. Of course.
