Fatherland

a dozen other cars. A line of black figures was starting toward him.
    He turned and continued walking.

    She's pulling up at the border crossing—now. The swastika flag flaps over the customs post The guard takes her passport. "For what purpose are you leaving Germany, Fräulein?" "To attend a friend's wedding. In Zürich." He looks from the passport photograph to her face and back again, checks the dates on the visa. "You are traveling alone?" "My fiancé was supposed to be with me, but he's been delayed in Berlin. Doing his duty, Officer. You know how it is." Smiling, natural . . . That's it, my darling. Nobody can do this better than you.
    He had his eyes on the ground. There must be something.

    One guard questions her, another circles the car. "What luggage are you carrying, please?" "Just overnight clothes. And a wedding present." She puts on a puzzled expression: "Why? Is there a problem? Would you like me to unpack?" She starts to open the door . . .
    Oh, Charlie, don't overplay it. The guards exchange looks. . .
    Then he saw it. Almost buried at the base of a sapling: a streak of red. He bent and picked it up, turned it over in his hand. The brick was pitted with yellow lichen, scorched by explosives, crumbling at the corners. But it was solid enough. It existed. He scraped at the lichen with his thumb and the carmine dust crusted beneath his fingernail like dried blood. As he stooped to replace it, he saw others, half hidden in the pale grass—ten, twenty, a hundred . . .
    A pretty girl, a blonde, a fine day, a holiday... The guard checks the sheet again. It says here only that Berlin is anxious to trace an American, a brunette. "No, Fräulein"—he gives her back her passport and winks at the other guard—"a search will not be necessary." The barrier lifts. "Heil Hitler!" he says. "Heil Hitler," she replies.
    Go on, Charlie. Go on . . .

    It is as if she hears him. She turns her head toward the East, toward him, to where the sun is fresh in the sky, and as the car moves forward she seems to dip her head in acknowledgment. Across the bridge: the white cross of Switzerland. The morning light glints on the Rhine. . .
    She had escaped. He looked up at the sun and he knew it—knew it for an absolute, certain fact.
    "Stay where you are!"
    The black shape of the helicopter flapped above him.
    Behind him, shouts—much closer now—metallic, robotlike commands:
    "Drop your weapon!"
    "Stay where you are!"
    "Stay where you are!"
    He took off his cap and threw it, sent it skimming across the grass the way his father used to skim flat stones across the sea. Then he tugged the gun from his waistband, checked to make sure it was loaded and moved toward the silent trees.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

    Many of the characters whose names are used in this novel actually existed. Their biographical details are correct up to 1942. Their subsequent fates, of course, were different.
    Josef Buhler, state secretary in the General Government, was condemned to death in Poland and executed in 1948.
    Wilhelm Stuckart was arrested at the end of the war and spent four years in detention. He was released in 1949 and lived in West Berlin. In December 1953 he was killed in a car "accident" near Hanover: the "accident" was probably arranged by a vengeance squad hunting down those Nazi war criminals still at large.
    Martin Luther attempted to oust the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in a power struggle in 1943. He failed and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he attempted suicide. He was released in 1945, shortly before the end of the war, and died in a local hospital of heart failure in May 1945.
    Odilo Globocnik was captured by a British patrol at Weissensee, Carinthia, on May 31, 1945. He committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule.
    Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague by Czech agents in the summer of 1942.
    Artur Nebe's fate, typically, is more mysterious. He is believed to have been involved in the July 1944 plot against Hitler, to have gone into hiding on an island in the Wannsee and to have been betrayed by a rejected mistress. Officially, he was executed in Berlin on March 21, 1945. However, he is said subsequently to have been sighted in Italy and Ireland.
    Those named as having attended the Wannsee Conference all did so. Alfred Meyer committed suicide in 1945. Roland Freisler was killed in an air raid in 1945. Friedrich Kritzinger died at liberty after a severe illness. Adolf Eichmann was