Fatherland

charmed and consulted a typed sheet. For a moment, the issue hung in the balance—and then, yes, as it happened, Fräulein, he did have something. Something for someone with eyes as pretty as yours, of course . . . Your driver's license, please . . .
    She handed it over. It had been issued the previous year in the name of Voss, Magda, age twenty-four, of Mariendorf, Berlin. It was the license of the girl murdered on her wedding day five days ago—the license Max Jaeger had left in his desk, along with all the other papers from the Spandau shootings.
    March looked away, forcing himself to study an old aerial photograph of the Tempelhof airfield. BERLIN was painted in huge white letters along the runway. When he glanced back, the agent was entering details of the license on the rental form, laughing at some witticism of his own.
    As a strategy it was not without risk. In the morning, a copy of the rental agreement would be forwarded automatically to the police, and even the Orpo would wonder why a murdered woman was hiring a car. But tomorrow was Sunday, Monday was the Führertag , and by Tuesday—the earliest the Orpo was likely to pull its finger out of its backside—March reckoned he and Charlie would either be safe or arrested—or dead.
    Ten minutes later, with a final exchange of smiles, she was given the keys to a four-door black Opel with ten thousand kilometers on the odometer. Five minutes after that, March joined her in the parking lot. He navigated while she drove. It was the first time he had seen her behind the wheel: another side of her. In the busy traffic she displayed an exaggerated caution that he felt did not come naturally.
    The lobby of the Prinz Friedrich Karl was deserted: the guests were out for the night. As they passed through it toward the stairs, the receptionist kept her head down. They were just another of Herr Brecker's little scams— best not to know too much.
    Their room had not been searched. The cotton threads hung where March had wedged them between door and frame. Inside, when he pulled Luther's case out from beneath the bed, the single strand of hair was still laced through the lock.

    Charlie stepped out of her dress and wrapped a towel around her shoulders.
    In the bathroom at the end of the hallway, a naked bulb lit a grimy sink. A bath stood on tiptoe, on iron claws.
    March walked back to the bedroom, shut himself in and once more propped the chair up against the door. He piled the contents of the case onto the dressing table—the map, the various envelopes, the minutes and memoranda, the reports, including the one with the rows of statistics, typed on the machine with the extra large letters. Some of the paper crackled with age. He remembered how he and Charlie had sat during the sunlit afternoon with the rumble of traffic outside; how they had passed the evidence backward and forward to each other—at first with excitement, then stunned, disbelieving, silent, until at last they had come to the pouch with the photographs.
    Now he needed to be more systematic. He pulled up a chair, cleared a space and opened the exercise book. He
    tore out thirty pages. At the top of each sheet he wrote the year and the month, beginning with July 1941 and ending in January 1944. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. Then he began to work his way through the heap of papers, making notes in his clear script.
    A railway timetable, badly printed on yellowing wartime paper:

    TRAIN      DEPARTURE            ARRIVAL
    DATE      NO.          FROM                      TIME        TO                        TIME
    1/26     Da 105    Theresienstadt                      Auschwitz
    1/27     Lp 106     Auschwitz                               Theresienstadt
    1/29     Da 13       Berlin                      1720        Auschwitz          1048
                  Da 107    Theresienstadt                      Auschwitz
    1/30     Lp 108     Auschwitz                               Theresienstadt
    1/31     Lp 14       Auschwitz                               Zamocz
    2/1        Da 109    Theresienstadt                      Auschwitz
    2/2        Da 15       Berlin