Fatherland

to that corridor with cracked green linoleum, stale with cigarette smoke.
    Behind the duty officer, a uniformed secretary with a sour face was making entries cm the night incident board. There were four columns: crime (serious), crime (violent), incidents, fatalities. Each category was further quartered: time reported, source of information, detail of report, action taken. An average night of mayhem in the world's largest city, with its population of ten million, was reduced to hieroglyphics on a few square meters of white plastic.
    There had been eighteen deaths since ten the previous night. The worst incident— 1H 2D 4K —was three adults and four children killed in a car crash in Pankow just after eleven. No action taken; that could be left to the Orpo. A family burned to death in a house fire in Kreuzberg, a stabbing outside a bar in Wedding, a woman beaten to death in Spandau. The record of March's own disrupted morning was last on the list: 0607 hours (O) (that meant notification had come from the Orpo) 1H Havel/March . The secretary stepped back and recapped her pen with a sharp click.
    Krause had finished his telephone call and was looking defensive. "I've already apologized, March."
    "Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say, the past forty-eight hours."
    "No problem." Krause looked relieved and swiveled around in his chair to the sour-faced woman. "You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything's come in in the past hour." He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. "I'd have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place—you know how it is."
    March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a gray cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of color: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a fetus, was an island linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.
    Schwanenwerder.
    "Does Goebbels still have a place there?"
    Krause nodded. "And the rest."
    It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred meters away.
    Krause said, "The local Orpo call it 'the pheasant run.' "
    March smiled: "golden pheasants" was street slang for the Party leadership.
    "It's not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep."
    Helga had returned. "Persons reported missing since Sunday morning," she announced, "and still unaccounted for." She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. "Plenty to keep you busy there." He seemed to find this amusing. "You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He's the one who should be looking after this business, remember?"
    "Thanks. I'll make a start, at least."
    Krause shook his head. "You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You're on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?"
    March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. "You forget yourself, comrade," he said. " Arbeit macht frei ." The slogan of the labor camps: Work makes you free.
    He turned and made his way back through the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. "See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?"
    March arrived back in his office just as Max Jaeger was hanging up his coat. "Zavi!" Jaeger spread his arms wide. "I got a message from the duty room. What can I say?" He wore the uniform of an SS-Sturmbannführer. The black tunic still bore traces of his breakfast.
    "Put it down to my soft old heart," said March. "And don't get too excited. There was nothing on the corpse to identify it and there are a hundred people missing in Berlin since Sunday. It'll take hours just to go through the list. And I've promised to take my boy out this afternoon, so you'll be on your own with it."
    He lit a cigarette and explained the details: the location, the missing foot, his suspicions about Jost. Jaeger took it in with a series of grunts. He was a shambling, untidy hulk of a man, two meters tall, with clumsy hands and feet. He was fifty, nearly ten years older than March, but they had shared an