Fatherland
INVESTIGATOR DIES IN MYSTERIOUS BLAST OUTSIDE BARRACKS.
He drove around Schlachtensee until he found a delicatessen, where he bought a loaf of black bread, some Westphalian ham and a quarter bottle of Scotch whisky. The sun still shone; the air was fresh. He pointed the car westward, back toward the lakes. He was going to do something he had not done for years. He was going to have a picnic.
After Göring had been made Chief Reich Huntsman in 1934, there had been some attempt to lighten the Grunewald. Chestnut and linden, beech, birch and oak, had all been planted. But the heart of it—as it had been a thousand years ago, when the plains of northern Europe were still forest—the heart remained the hilly woods of melan choly pine. From these forests, five centuries before Christ, the warring German tribes had emerged; and to these forests, twenty-five centuries later, mostly on weekends, in their campers and their trailers, the victorious German tribes returned. The Germans were a race of forest dwellers. You could make a clearing in your mind, if you liked; the trees just waited to reclaim it.
March parked, took his provisions and Buhler's mail bomb, or whatever it was, and walked carefully up a steep path into the forest. Five minutes' climb brought him to a spot that commanded a clear view of the Havel and of the smoky blue slopes of trees receding into the distance. The pines smelled strong and sweet in the warmth. Above his head, a large jet rumbled across the sky, making its approach to the Berlin airport. As it disappeared, the noise died, until at last the only sound was birdsong.
March did not want to open the parcel yet. It made him uneasy. So he sat on a large stone—no doubt casually deposited here by the municipal authorities for this very purpose—took a swig of whisky and began to eat.
Of Odilo Globocnik—Globus—March knew little, and that only by reputation. His fortunes had swung like a weathercock over the past thirty years. An Austrian by birth, a builder by profession, he had become Party leader in Carinthia in the mid-1950s, and ruler of Vienna. Then there had been a period of disgrace connected with illegal currency speculation, followed by a restoration, as a police chief in the General Government when the war started—he must have known Buhler there, thought March. At the end of the war, there had been a second fall to—where was it?—Trieste, he seemed to remember. But with Himmler's death Globus had come back to Berlin, and now he held some unspecified position within the Gestapo, reporting directly to Heydrich.
That smashed and brutal face was unmistakable, and despite the rain and the poor light, Jost had recognized it at once. A portrait of Globus hung in the Academy's Hall of Fame, and Globus himself had delivered a lecture to the awestruck cadets—on the police structures of the Reich— only a few weeks earlier. No wonder Jost had been so frightened. He should have called the Orpo anonymously and cleared out before they arrived. Better still, from his point of view, he should not have called them at all.
March finished his ham. He took the remains of the bread, broke it into pieces and scattered the crumbs across the forest floor. Two blackbirds that had watched him eat emerged cautiously from the undergrowth and began pecking at them.
He took out the pocket diary. Standard issue to Party members, available in any stationer's. Useful information at the beginning. The names of the Party hierarchy: government ministers, Kommissariat bosses, Gauleiters.
Public holidays: Day of National Reawakening, January 30; Potsdam Day, March 21; Führer's birthday, April 20; National Festival of the German People, May 1, . . .
Map of the Empire with railway journey times: Berlin- Rovno, sixteen hours; Berlin-Tiflis, twenty-seven hours; Berlin-Ufa, four days . . .
The diary itself was a week to two pages, the entries so sparse that at first March thought it was blank. He went through it carefully. There was a tiny cross on March 7. For April 1, Buhler had written "My sister's birthday." There was another cross on April 9. On April 11, he had noted "Stuckart/Luther, 10 a.m." Finally, on April 13, the day before his death, Buhler had drawn another small cross. That was all.
March wrote down the dates in his notebook. He began a new page. The death of Josef Buhler. Solutions. One: the death was accidental, the Gestapo had learned of it some hours before the Kripo was informed and
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