Fatherland

Globus was merely inspecting the body when Jost passed by. Absurd.
    Very well. Two: Buhler had been murdered by the Gestapo, and Globus had carried out the execution. Absurd again. The "Night and Fog" order of 1941 was still in effect. Buhler could have been bundled away quite legally to some secret death in a Gestapo cell, his property confiscated by the state. Who would have mourned him? Or questioned his disappearance?
    And so, three: Buhler had been murdered by Globus, who had covered his tracks by declaring the death a matter of state security and by taking over the investigation himself. But why had the Kripo been allowed to get involved at all? What was Globus's motive? Why had Buhler's body been left in a public place?
    March leaned back against the stone and closed his eyes. The sun on his face made the darkness bloodred. A warm haze of whisky enveloped him.
    He could not have been asleep more than half an hour when he heard a rustle in the undergrowth beside him and felt something touch his sleeve. He was awake in an instant, in time to see the white tail and hindquarters of a deer darting into the trees. A rural idyll ten kilometers from the heart of the Reich! Either that, or the whisky. He shook his head and picked up the package.
    Thick brown paper, neatly wrapped and taped. Indeed, professionally wrapped and taped. Crisp lines and sharp creases, an economy of materials used and effort expended. A paradigm of a package. No man March had ever met could have produced such an object—it must have been wrapped by a woman. Next, the postmark. Three Swiss stamps showing tiny yellow flowers on a green background. Posted in Zürich at 1600 hours on 4/13/64. The day before yesterday.
    He felt his palms begin to sweat as he unwrapped the package with exaggerated care, first peeling off the tape and then slowly, centimeter by centimeter, folding back the paper. He lifted it fractionally. Inside was a box of chocolates.
    Its lid showed flaxen-haired girls in red-checked dresses dancing around a maypole in a flowery meadow. Behind them, white-peaked against a fluorescent-blue sky, rose the Alps. Overprinted in black Gothic script was the legend, "Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Führer,
    1964." But there was something odd about it. The box was too heavy to contain just chocolates.
    He took out a penknife and cut round the cellophane cover. He set the box gently on the log. With his face turned away and his arm fully extended, he lifted the lid with the point of the blade. Inside, a mechanism began to whir. Then this:

Love unspoken

Faith unbroken

All life through

Strings are playing

Hear them saying

"I love you."

Now the echo answers

"Say you'll want me too."

All the world's in love with love

And I love you.

    Only the tune, of course, not the words; but he knew them well enough. Standing alone on a hill in the Grunewald Forest, March listened as the box played the waltz duet from Act Three of The Merry Widow.

5

    The streets on the way back into central Berlin seemed unnaturally quiet, and when March reached Werderscher-Markt he discovered the reason. A large notice board in the foyer announced there would be a government statement at 4:30. Personnel were to assemble in the staff canteen. Attendance: compulsory. He was just in time.
    They had developed a new theory at the Propaganda Ministry that the best time to make big announcements was at the end of the working day. News was thus received communally, in a comradely spirit: there was no opportunity for private skepticism or defeatism. Also, the broadcasts were always timed so that the workers could go home slightly early—at 4:50, say, rather than 5:00— fostering a sense of contentment, subliminally associating the regime with good feelings. That was how it was these days. The snow-white propaganda palace on Wilhelmstrasse employed more psychologists than journalists.
    The Werderscher-Markt staff were filing into the canteen: officers and clerks, typists and drivers, shoulder to shoulder in a living embodiment of the National Socialist ideal. The four television screens, one in each corner, were showing a map of the Reich with a swastika superimposed, accompanied by selections from Beethoven. Occasionally, a male announcer would break in excitedly: "People of Germany, prepare yourselves for an important statement!" In the old days, on the radio, you got only the music. Progress again.
    How many of these events could March remember? They stretched