Fatherland

kidney punches, onward and upward to some pitch beyond the range of the human ear, a pinnacle of crystal.
    "Where's the girl?"
    "What. . . girl?"
    They disarmed him, searched him, then they half pushed, half dragged him out of the bungalow. A little crowd had gathered in the road. Klara's elderly neighbors watched as he was bundled, head bowed, into the back of the BMW. He glimpsed briefly along the street four or five cars with revolving lights, a lorry, troops. What had they been expecting? A small war? Still no sign of Pili. The handcuffs forced him to sit hunched forward. Two Gestapo men were jammed into the backseat, one on either side of him. As the car pulled away, he could see some of the old folks already shuffling back into their houses, back to the reassuring glow of their television sets.
    He was driven north through the holiday traffic, up into Saarland-Strasse, east into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Fifty meters past the main entrance to Gestapo headquarters, the convoy swung right, through a pair of high prison gates and into a brick courtyard at the back of the building.
    He was pulled out of the car and through a low entrance, down steep concrete steps. Then his heels were scraping along the floor of an arched hallway. A door, a cell. . . silence.
    They left him alone to allow his imagination to go to work—standard procedure. Very well. He crawled into a corner and rested his head against the damp brick. Every minute that passed was another minute's traveling time for her. He thought of Pili, of all the lies, and clenched his fists.
    The cell was lit by a weak bulb above the door, imprisoned in its own rusty metal cage. He glanced at his wrist, a useless reflex, for they had taken away his watch. Surely she could not be far from Nuremberg by now? He tried to fill his mind with images of the Gothic spires—St. Lorenz, St. Sebaldus, St. Jakob... Every limb—every part of him to which he could put a name—ached, yet they could not have worked him over for more than five minutes, and still they had managed not to leave a mark on his face. Truly, he had fallen into the hands of experts. He almost laughed, but that hurt his ribs, so he stopped.
    He was taken along the hallway to an interview room: whitewashed walls, a heavy oak table with a chair on each side; in the corner, an iron stove. Globus had disappeared; Krebs was in command. The handcuffs were removed. Standard procedure again—first the hard cop, then the soft. Krebs even attempted a joke: "Normally, we would arrest your son and threaten him as well, to encourage your cooperation. But in your case, we know that such a course would be counterproductive." Secret policeman's humor! He leaned back in his chair, smiling, and pointed his pencil. "Nevertheless. A remarkable boy."
    " 'Remarkable'—your word." At some point during his beating, March had bitten his tongue. He talked now as if he had spent a week in a dentist's chair.
    "Your ex-wife was given a telephone number last night," said Krebs, "in case you attempted contact. The boy memorized it. The instant he saw you, he called. He's inherited your brains, March. Your initiative. You should feel some pride."
    "At this moment, my feelings toward my son are indeed strong."
    Good, he thought, let's keep this up. Another minute, another kilometer.
    But Krebs was already down to business, turning the pages of a thick folder. "There are two issues here, March. One: your general political reliability, going back over many years. That does not concern us today—at least, not directly. Two: your conduct over the past week—specifically, your involvement in the attempts of the late Party Comrade Luther to defect to the United States."
    "I have no such involvement."
    "You were questioned by an officer of the Ordnungspolizei in Adolf-Hitler-Platz yesterday morning—at the exact time the traitor Luther was planning to meet the American journalist, Maguire, together with an official of the United States Embassy."
    How did they know that? "Absurd."
    "Do you deny you were in the Platz?"
    "No. Of course not."
    "Then why were you there?"
    "I was following the American woman."
    Krebs was making notes. "Why?"
    "She was the person who discovered the body of Party Comrade Stuckart. I was also naturally suspicious of her, in her role as an agent of the bourgeois democratic press."
    "Don't piss me about, March."
    "All right. I had insinuated myself into her company. I thought: if she can stumble across the corpse