Fatherland

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.
    Half an hour later he was pushing through the scuffed wooden doors into the Berlin city morgue. Without his uniform he felt naked. A woman was crying softly in one corner, a female police auxiliary sitting stiffly beside her, embarrassed at this display of emotion in an official place. He showed the attendant his ID and asked about Martin Luther. The man consulted a set of dogeared notes.
    "Male, mid-sixties, identified as Luther, Martin. Brought in just after midnight. Railway accident."
    "What about the shooting this morning, the one in the Platz?"
    The attendant sighed, licked a nicotined forefinger and turned a page. "Male, mid-sixties, identified as Stark, Alfred. Came in an hour ago."
    "That's the one. How was he identified?"
    "ID in his pocket."
    "Right." March moved decisively toward the elevator, forestalling any objection. "I'll make my own way down."
    It was his misfortune, when the elevator doors opened, to find himself confronted by SS surgeon August Eisler.
    "March!" Eisler looked shocked and took a pace backward. "The word is, you've been arrested."
    "The word is wrong. I'm working undercover."
    Eisler was staring at his civilian suit. "What as? A pimp?" This amused the SS surgeon so much that he had to take off his spectacles and wipe his eyes. March joined in his laughter.
    "No, a pathologist. I'm told the pay is good and the hours are nonexistent."
    Eisler stopped smiling. " You can say that. I've been here since midnight." He dropped his voice. "A very senior man. Gestapo operation. Hush-hush." He tapped the side of his long nose. "I can say nothing."
    "Relax, Eisler. I'm aware of the case. Did Frau Luther identify the remains?"
    Eisler looked disappointed. "No," he muttered. "We spared her that."
    "And Stark?"
    "My, my, March—you are well informed. I'm on my way to deal with him now. Would you care to join me?"
    In his mind March saw again the exploding head, the thick spurt of blood and brain. "No. Thank you."
    "I thought not. What was he shot with? A Panzerfaust?"
    "Have they caught the killer?"
    "You're the investigator. You tell me. 'Don't probe too deeply' was what I heard."
    "Stark's effects. Where are they?"
    "Bagged and ready to go. In the property room."
    "Where's that?"
    "Follow the corridor. Fourth door on the left."
    March set off. Eisler shouted after him, "Hey, March! Save me a couple of your best whores!" The pathologist's high-pitched laughter pursued him down the passage.
    The fourth door on the left was unlocked. He checked to make sure he was unobserved, then let himself in.
    It was a small storeroom, three meters wide, with just enough room for one person to walk down the center. On either side of the gangway were racks of dusty metal shelving heaped with bundles of clothing wrapped in thick polyurethane. There were suitcases, handbags, umbrellas, artificial legs, a wheelchair—grotesquely twisted—hats . . . From the morgue the deceased's belongings were usually collected by the next of kin. If the circumstances were suspicious, they would be taken away by the investigators or sent directly to the forensic laboratories in Schönweld. March began inspecting the plastic tags, each of which recorded the time and place of death and the name of the victim. Some of the stuff here went back years—pathetic bundles of rags and trinkets, the final bequests of corpses nobody cared about, not even the police.
    How typical of Globus not to admit to his mistake. The infallibility of the Gestapo must be preserved at all costs! Thus Stark's body would continue to be treated as Luther's, while Luther's would go to a pauper's grave as that of the drifter Stark.
    March tugged at the bundle closest to the door, turned the label to the light. 4/18/64. Adolf-Hitler-PL Stark, Alfred.
    So Luther had left the world like the lowest inmate of a KZ—violently, half starved, in someone else's filthy clothes, his body unhonored, with a stranger picking over his belongings after his death. Poetic justice—about the only sort of justice to be found.
    He pulled out his pocketknife and slit the bulging plastic. The contents spilled over the floor like guts.
    He did not care about Luther. All he cared about was how, in the hours between midnight and nine that morning, Globus had discovered that Luther was still alive.
    Americans!
    He tore