Fatherland

his customary clumsy relish. Buhler's chest had been opened in the standard fashion: a Y incision, a cut from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, a straight line down to the pubic bone. Now Eisler had his hands deep inside the stomach, green gloves sheened with red, twisting, cutting, pulling. March and Jaeger leaned against the wall by the open doorway, smoking a couple of Jaeger's cigars.
    "Have you seen what your man had for lunch?" said Eisler. "Show them, Eck."
    Eisler's assistant wiped his hands on his apron and held up a transparent plastic bag. There was something small and green in the bottom.
    "Lettuce. Digests slowly. Stays in the intestinal tract for hours."
    March had worked with Eisler before. Two winters ago, with snow blocking Unter den Linden and ice-skating competitions on the Tegelersee, a bargemaster named Kempf had been pulled out of the Spree, almost dead with cold. He had expired in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Accident or murder? The time at which he had fallen into the water was crucial. Looking at the ice extending two meters out from the banks, March had estimated fifteen minutes as the maximum time he could have survived in the water. Eisler had said forty-five, and his view had prevailed with the prosecutor. It was enough to destroy the alibi of the barge's second mate and hang him.
    Afterward, the prosecutor—a decent, old-fashioned sort—had called March into his office and locked the door. Then he'd shown him Eisler's "evidence": copies of documents stamped Geheime Reichssache —Top Secret State Document—and dated Dachau, 1942. There were reports of freezing experiments carried out on condemned prisoners, restricted to the department of the SS surgeon general. The men had been handcuffed and dumped into tanks of icy water, retrieved at intervals to have their temperatures taken, right up to the point at which they died. There were photographs of heads bobbing between floating chunks of ice, and charts showing heat loss, projected and actual. The experiments had lasted two years and been conducted, among others, by a young Untersturmführer , August Eisler. That night, March and the prosecutor had gone to a bar in Kreuzberg and gotten blind drunk. Next day, neither of them mentioned what had happened. They never spoke to each other again.
    "If you expect me to come out with some fancy theory, March, forget it."
    "I'd never expect that."
    Jaeger laughed. "Nor would I."
    Eisler ignored their mirth. "It was a drowning, no question about it. Lungs full of water, so he must have been breathing when he went into the lake."
    "No cuts?" asked March. "Bruises?"
    "Do you want to come over here and do this job? No?
    Then believe me: he drowned. There are no contusions to the head to indicate he was hit or held under."
    "A heart attack? Some kind of seizure?"
    "Possible," admitted Eisler. Eck handed him a scalpel. "I won't know until I've completed a full examination of the internal organs."
    "How long will that take?"
    "As long as it takes."
    Eisler positioned himself behind Buhler's head. Tenderly, he stroked the hair toward him, off the corpse's forehead, as if soothing a fever. Then he hunched down low and jabbed the scalpel through the left temple. He drew it in an arc across the top of the face, just below the hairline. There was a scrape of metal and bone. Eck grinned at them. March sucked a lungful of smoke from his cigar.
    Eisler put the scalpel into a metal dish. Then he bent down once more and worked his forefingers into the deep cut. Gradually, he began peeling back the scalp. March turned his head away and closed his eyes. He prayed that no one he loved, or liked, or even vaguely knew, ever had to be desecrated by the butcher's work of an autopsy.
    Jaeger said, "So what do you think?"
    Eisler had picked up a small, hand-sized circular saw. He switched it on. It whined like a dentist's drill.
    March took a final puff on his cigar. "I think we should get out of here."
    They made their way down the corridor. Behind them, from the autopsy room, they heard the saw's note deepen as it bit into the bone.

2

    Half an hour later, Xavier March was at the wheel of one of the Kripo's Volkswagens, following the curving path of the Havel-Chaussee, high above the lake. Sometimes the view was hidden by trees. Then he would round a bend, or the forest would thin, and he would see the water again, sparkling in the April sun like a tray of diamonds. Two yachts skimmed the