Fatherland

chocolate. "No, worse than that: I am consuming state evidence, thereby committing a double offense. Tampering with justice while enriching myself."
    "Take some leave, man. I'm serious. You need a rest. My advice is to go down and dump those fucking chocolates in the trash as fast as possible. Then come home and have supper with me and Hannelore. You look as if you haven't had a decent meal in weeks. The Gestapo has taken the file. The autopsy report is going straight to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. It's over. Done. Forget it."
    "Listen, Max." March told him about Jost's confession, about how Jost had seen Globus with the body. He pulled out Buhler's diary. "These names written here. Who are Stuckart and Luther?"
    "I don't know." Jaeger's face was suddenly drawn and hard. "What's more, I don't want to know."

    A steep flight of stone steps led down to the semidarkness. At the bottom, March hesitated, the chocolates in his hand. A doorway to the left led out to the cobbled center courtyard, where the rubbish was collected from large, rusty bins. To the right, a dimly lit passage led to the Registry.
    He tucked the chocolates under his arm and turned right.
    The Kripo Registry was housed in what had once been a warren of rooms next to the boilerhouse. The closeness of the boilers and the web of hot water pipes crisscrossing the ceiling kept the place permanently hot. There was a reassuring smell of warm dust and dry paper, and in the poor light, between the pillars, the wire racks of files and reports seemed to stretch to infinity.
    The registrar, a fat woman in a greasy tunic who had once been a wardress at the prison in Plötzensee, demanded his ID. He handed it to her as he had done more than once a week for the past ten years. She looked at it as she always did, as if she had never seen it before, then at his face, then back, then returned it and gave an upward tilt of her chin, something between an acknowledgment and a sneer. She wagged her finger. "And no smoking," she said, for the five hundredth time.
    From the shelf of reference books next to her desk he selected Wer Ist's? , the German Who's Who —a red-bound directory a thousand pages thick. He also took down the smaller Party publication, Guide to the Personalities of the NSDAP , which included passport-sized photographs of each entrant. This was the book Halder had used to identify Buhler that morning. He lugged both volumes across to a table and switched on the reading light. In the distance the boilers hummed. The Registry was deserted.
    Of the two books, March preferred the Party's Guide . This had been published more or less annually since the mid-1950s. Often, during the dark, quiet afternoons of the winter, he had come down to the warmth to browse through old editions. It intrigued him to trace how the faces had changed. The early volumes were dominated by the grizzled ex- Freikorps Red-baiters, men with necks wider than their foreheads. They stared into the camera, scrubbed and ill at ease, like nineteenth-century farmhands in their Sunday best. But by the 1950s, the beer-hall brawlers had given way to the smooth technocrats of the Speer type—well-groomed university men with bland smiles and hard eyes.
    There was one Luther. Christian name: Martin. Now here, comrades, is a historic name to play with. But this Luther looked nothing like his famous namesake. He was pudding-faced with black hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. March took out his notebook.

    Born: December 16, 1895, Berlin. Served in the German Army transport division, 1914-18. Profession: furniture remover. Joined the NSDAP and the SA on March 1, 1933. Sat on the Berlin City Council for the Dahlem district. Entered the Foreign Office, 1936. Head of Abteilung Deutschland—the "German Division"—of the Foreign Office until retirement in 1955. Promoted to under state secretary, July 1941.
    The details were sparse but clear enough for March to guess his type. Chippy and aggressive, a rough-and-tumble street politician. And an opportunist. Like thousands of others, Luther had rushed to join the Party a few weeks after Hitler had come to power.
    He flicked through the pages to Stuckart, Wilhelm, Doctor of Law. The photograph was a professional studio portrait, the face cast in a film star's brooding half shadow. A vain man, and a curious mixture: curly gray hair, intense eyes, straight jawline—yet a flabby, almost voluptuous mouth. He took more notes.

    Born November 16, 1902, Wiesbaden.