Fatherland

sentence, typed beneath, identified the bearer as a joint holder of account number 2402. The letter was dated July 8, 1942. It was signed Hermann Zaugg, Director.
    March read it through again. He was not surprised that Stuckart had kept it locked in his safe: it was illegal for a German citizen to possess a foreign bank account without the permission of the Reichsbank. The penalty for noncompliance was death.
    He said, "I was worried about you. I tried to call you a couple of hours ago, but there was no answer."
    "I was out doing research."
    "Research?"
    She grinned again.
    At March's suggestion, they went for a walk in the Tiergarten, the traditional rendezvous for Berliners with secrets to discuss. Even the Gestapo had yet to devise a means of bugging a park. Daffodils poked through the rough grass at the foot of the trees. Children fed the ducks on the Neuersee.
    Getting out of Stuckart's apartment building had been easy, she said. The air shaft had emerged into the alley almost at ground level. There had been no SS men; they had all been at the front. So she had simply walked down the side of the building to the street at the rear and caught a taxi home. She had stayed up half the night waiting for him to call, rereading the letter until she knew it by heart. When by nine o'clock she had still heard nothing, she had decided not to wait.
    She wanted to know what had happened to him and
    Jaeger. He told her only that they had been taken to Gestapo headquarters and released that morning.
    "Are you in trouble?"
    "Yes. Now tell me what you discovered."
    She had gone first to the public library in Nollendorf-Platz—she had nothing better to do now that her press accreditation had been withdrawn. In the library was a directory of European banks. Zaugg & Cie. still existed. The bank's premises remained in Bahnhof-Strasse. From the library she had gone to the U.S. Embassy to see Henry Nightingale.
    "Nightingale?"
    "You met him last night."
    March remembered: the young man in the sport jacket and the button-down shirt, with his hand on her arm. "You didn't tell him anything?"
    "Of course not. Anyway, he's discreet. We can trust him."
    "I prefer to make my own judgments about whom I can trust." He felt disappointed in her. "Is he your lover?"
    She stopped in her tracks. "What kind of a question is that?"
    "I have more at stake in this than you have, Fräulein. Much more. I have a right to know."
    "You have no right to know at all. " She was furious.
    "All right." He held up his hands. The woman was impossible. "Your business."
    They resumed walking.
    Nightingale, she explained, was an expert in Swiss commercial matters, having dealt with the affairs of several German refugees in the United States trying to extract their money from banks in Zürich and Geneva.
    It was almost impossible.
    In 1934, a Gestapo agent named Georg Hannes Thomae had been sent to Switzerland by Reinhard Heydrich to find out the names of as many German account holders as possible. Thomae had set up house in Zürich, begun affairs with several lonely female cashiers, be friended minor bank officials. When the Gestapo had suspicions that a certain individual had an illegal account, Thomae would visit the bank posing as an intermediary and try to deposit money. The moment any cash was accepted, Heydrich knew an account existed. Its holder was arrested and tortured into revealing the details, and soon the bank would receive a detailed cable requesting, in proper form, the repatriation of all assets.
    The Gestapo's war against the Swiss banks had become increasingly sophisticated and extensive. Telephone calls, cables and letters between Germany and Switzerland were intercepted as a matter of routine. Clients were executed or sent to concentration camps. In Switzerland, there was an outcry. Finally, the Swiss National Assembly rushed through a new banking code making it illegal for banks to disclose any details of their clients' holdings, on pain of imprisonment. Georg Thomae was exposed and expelled.
    Swiss banks had come to regard doing business with German citizens as too dangerous and time consuming to countenance. Communication with clients was virtually impossible. Hundreds of accounts had simply been abandoned by their terrified owners. In any case, respectable bankers had no desire to become involved in these life-and-death transactions. The publicity was damaging. By 1939 the once lucrative German numbered-account business had collapsed.
    "Then