Fatherland

polite as a scoutmaster, but ten meters back, the doors of a second BMW were opening even before it stopped and armed plainclothesmen were emerging. That was how it had been since their discovery at Fritz-Todt-Platz. No rifle butts in the belly, no oaths, no handcuffs. Just a telephone call to headquarters, followed by a quiet request to "discuss these matters further." Krebs had also asked them to surrender their weapons. Polite, but behind the politeness, always the threat.
    Gestapo headquarters was in a grand five-story Wilhelmine construction that faced north and never saw the sun. Years ago, in the days of the Weimar Republic, the museumlike building had housed the Berlin School of Arts. When the secret police had taken over, the students had been forced to burn their modernist paintings in the courtyard. Tonight, the high windows were shielded by thick net curtains, a precaution against terrorist attack. Behind the gauze, as if in fog, chandeliers burned.
    March had made it a policy in life never to cross the threshold of this building, and until this night he had succeeded. Three stone steps ran up into an entrance hall. More steps, and then a large, vaulted foyer: a red carpet on a stone floor, the hollow resonance of a cathedral. It was busy. The early hours of the morning were always busy for the Gestapo. From the depths of the building came the muffled echo of bells ringing, footsteps, a whistle, a shout. A fat man in the uniform of an Obersturmführer picked his nose and regarded them without interest.
    They walked on, down a corridor lined with swastikas and marble busts of the Party leadership—Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, Frank, Ley and the rest—modeled after Roman senators. March could hear the plainclothes guards following. He glanced at Jaeger, but Max was staring fixedly ahead, jaw clenched.
    More stairs, another hallway. The carpet had given way to linoleum. The walls were dingy. March guessed they were somewhere near the back of the building, on the second floor.
    "If you would wait here," said Krebs. He opened a stout wooden door. Fluorescent tubes stuttered into life. He stood aside to allow them to file in. "Coffee?"
    "Thank you."
    And he was gone. As the door closed, March saw one of the guards, arms folded, take up station in the corridor outside. He half expected to hear a key turn in the lock, but there was no sound.
    They had been put into some sort of interview room. A rough wooden table stood in the center of the floor, one chair on either side of it, half a dozen others pushed up against the walls. There was a small window. Opposite it was a reproduction of Josef Vietze's portrait of Reinhard Heydrich in a cheap plastic frame. On the floor were small brown stains that looked to March like dried blood.
    Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse was Germany's black heart, as famous as the Avenue of Victory and the Great Hall, but without the tourist coaches. At number eight: the Gestapo. At number nine: Heydrich's personal headquarters. Around the corner: the Prinz-Albrecht Palace itself, headquarters of the SD, the Party's intelligence service. A complex of underground passages linked the three.
    Jaeger muttered something and collapsed into a chair. March could think of nothing adequate to say, so he looked out of the window. It commanded a clear view of the palace grounds running behind the Gestapo building—the dark clumps of the bushes, the inkpool of the lawn, the skeletal branches of the limes raised in claws against the sky. Away to the right, lit up through the bare trees, was the concrete-and-glass cube of the Europa-Haus, built in the 1920s by the Jewish architect Mendelsohn. The Party had allowed it to stand as a monument to his "pygmy imagination." Dropped among Speer's granite monoliths, it was just a toy. March could remember a Sunday afternoon tea with Pili in its roof- garden restaurant. Ginger beer and Obsttorte mit Sahne , the little brass band playing—what else?—selections from The Merry Widow , the elderly women with their elaborate Sunday hats, their little fingers crooked over the bone china.
    Most were careful not to look at the black buildings beyond the trees. For others, the proximity of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse seemed to provide a frisson of excitement, like picnicking next to a prison. Down in the cellar the Gestapo was licensed to practice what the Ministry of Justice called "heightened interrogation." The rules had been drawn up by civilized men in warm offices, and they