Fatherland

ground.
    March slowed for the lights at the Friedrich-Strasse intersection and turned right. Two minutes later they were parking in a space opposite the Kripo building in Werderscher-Markt.
    It was an ugly place—a heavy, soot-streaked, Wilhelmine monstrosity six stories high on the south side of the Markt. March had been coming here nearly seven days of the week for ten years. As his ex-wife had frequently complained, it had become more familiar to him than home. Inside, beyond the SS sentries and the creaky revolving door, a board announced the current state of terrorist alert. There were four codes, in ascending order of seriousness: green, blue, black and red. Today, as always, the alert was red.
    A pair of guards in a glass booth scrutinized them as they entered the foyer. March showed his identity card and signed in Jost.
    The Markt was busier than usual. The workload always tripled in the week before the Führertag . Secretaries with boxes of files clattered on high heels across the marble floor. The air smelled thickly of wet overcoats and floor polish. Groups of officers in Orpo green and Kripo black stood whispering of crime. Above their heads, from opposite ends of the lobby, garlanded busts of the Führer and the head of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, stared at each other with blank eyes.
    March pulled back the metal grille of the elevator and ushered Jost inside.
    The security forces Heydrich controlled were divided into three. At the bottom of the pecking order were the Orpo, the ordinary cops. They picked up the drunks, cruised the Autobahnen , issued the speeding tickets, made the arrests, fought the fires, patrolled the railways and the airports, answered the emergency calls, fished the bodies out of the lakes.
    At the top were the Sipo, the Security Police. The Sipo embraced both the Gestapo and the Party's own security force, the SD. Their headquarters was in a grim complex around Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, a kilometer southwest of the Markt. They dealt with terrorism, subversion, counterespionage and "crimes against the state." They had their ears in every factory and school, hospital and mess; in every town, in every village, in every street. A body in a lake would concern the Sipo only if it belonged to a terrorist or a traitor.
    And somewhere between the other two, and blurring into both, came the Kripo—Department V of the Reich Main Security Office. They investigated straightforward crime, from burglary through bank robbery, violent assault, rape and mixed marriage, all the way up to murder. Bodies in lakes—who they were and how they had gotten there—they were Kripo business.
    The elevator stopped at the second floor. The corridor was lit like an aquarium. Weak neon bounced off green linoleum and green-washed walls. There was the same smell of polish as in the lobby, but here it was spiced with lavatory disinfectant and stale cigarette smoke. Twenty doors of frosted glass, some half open, lined the hallway. These were the investigators' offices. From one came the sound of a solitary finger picking at a typewriter; in another, a telephone rang unanswered.
    "'The nerve center in the ceaseless war against the criminal enemies of National Socialism,'" said March, quoting a recent headline in the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter . He paused, and when Jost continued to look blank he explained, "A joke."
    "Sorry?"
    "Forget it."
    He pushed open a door and switched on the light. His office was little more than a gloomy cupboard, a cell, its solitary window opening on to a courtyard of blackened brick. One wall was shelved: tattered, leather-bound volumes of statutes and decrees, a handbook on forensic science, a dictionary, an atlas, a Berlin street guide, telephone directories, box files with labels gummed to them—''Braune," "Hundt," "Stark," "Zadek"—every one a bureaucratic tombstone memorializing some long- forgotten victim. Another side of the office was taken up by four filing cabinets. On top of one was a spider plant, placed there by a middle-aged secretary two years before at the height of an unspoken and unrequited passion for Xavier March. It was now dead. That was all the furniture, apart from two wooden desks pushed together beneath the window. One was March's; the other belonged to Max Jaeger.
    March hung his overcoat on a peg by the door. He preferred not to wear a uniform when he could avoid it, and this morning he had used the rainstorm on the