Fatherland

stared into the SS cadet's eyes. "Why are you lying to me?"
    Jost jerked his head back. "What?"
    "You say you left the barracks at five-thirty. You called the cops at five past six. Schwanenwerder is three kilometers from the barracks. You're fit: you run every day. You do not dawdle: it is raining hard. Unless you suddenly developed a limp, you must have arrived at the lake quite some time before six. So there are—what?—twenty minutes out of thirty-five unaccounted for in your statement. What were you doing, Jost?"
    The young man looked stricken. "Maybe I left the barracks later. Or maybe I did a couple of circuits of the running track there first—"
    " 'Maybe, maybe.'" March shook his head sadly. "These are facts that can be checked, and I warn you: it will go hard for you if I have to find out the truth and bring it to you, rather than the other way around. You are a homosexual, yes?"
    "Herr Sturmbannführer! For God's sake—"
    March put his hands on Jost's shoulders. "I don't care. Perhaps you run alone every morning so you can meet some fellow in the Grunewald for twenty minutes. That's your business. It's no crime in my book. All I'm interested in is the body. Did you see something? What did you really do?"
    Jost shook his head. "Nothing. I swear." Tears were welling in his wide, pale eyes.
    "Very well." March released him. "Wait downstairs. I'll arrange transport to take you back to Schlachtensee." He opened the door. "Remember what I said: better you tell me the truth now than I find it out for myself later."
    Jost hesitated, and for a moment March thought he might say something, but then he walked out into the corridor and was gone.
    March phoned the basement garage and ordered a car. He hung up and stared out of the grimy window at the wall opposite. The black brick glistened under the film of rainwater pouring down from the upper stories. Had he been too hard on the boy? Probably. But sometimes the truth could only be ambushed, taken unguarded in a surprise attack. Was Jost lying? Certainly. But then if he were a homosexual, he could scarcely afford not to lie: anyone found guilty of "anticommunity acts" went straight to a labor camp. SS men arrested for homosexuality were attached to punishment battalions on the eastern front; few returned.
    March had seen a score of young men like Jost in the past year. There were more of them every day. Rebelling against their parents. Questioning the state. Listening to American radio stations. Circulating their crudely printed copies of proscribed books—Günter Grass and Graham Greene, George Orwell and J. D. Salinger. Chiefly, they protested against the war—the seemingly endless struggle against the American-backed Soviet guerrillas, which had been grinding on east of the Urals for twenty years.
    He felt suddenly ashamed of his treatment of Jost and considered going down to apologize to him. But then he decided, as he always did, that his duty to the dead came first His penance for his morning's bullying would be to put a name to the body in the lake.
    The duty room of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei occupies most of Werderscher-Markt's third floor. March mounted the stairs two at a time. Outside the entrance, a guard armed with a machine gun demanded his pass. The door opened with a thud of electronic bolts.
    An illuminated map of Berlin takes up half the far wall. A galaxy of stars, orange in the semidarkness, marks the capital's 122 police stations. To its left is a second map, even larger, depicting the entire Reich. Red lights pinpoint those towns big enough to warrant their own Kripo divisions. The center of Europe glows crimson. Further east, the lights gradually thin until, beyond Moscow, there are only a few isolated sparks, winking like camp fires in the blackness. It is a planetarium of crime.
    Krause, the duty officer for the Berlin Gau, sat on a raised platform beneath the display. He was on the telephone as March approached and raised his hand in greeting. Before him, a dozen women in starched white shirts sat in glass partitions, each wearing a headset with a microphone attached. What they must hear! A sergeant from a Panzer division comes home from a tour in the East. After a family supper, he takes out his pistol, shoots his wife and each of his three children in turn. Then he splatters his skull across the ceiling. A hysterical neighbor calls the cops. And the news comes here—is controlled, evaluated, reduced—before being passed downstairs