Fatherland

his guardians from the Swiss police yawned.
    Many years ago, when March had been a young detective in the Hamburg Kripo, he had been ordered to escort a prisoner serving a life sentence for robbery, who had been given a special day pass. The man's trial had been in the papers; his childhood sweetheart had seen the publicity and written to him; had visited him in jail; had agreed to marry him. The affair had touched that streak of sentimentality that runs so strong in the German psyche. There had been a public campaign to let the ceremony go ahead. The authorities had relented. So March had taken him to his wedding, had stood handcuffed beside him throughout the service and even during the wedding pictures, like an unusually attentive best man.
    The reception had been in a grim hall next to the church. Toward the end, the groom had whispered that there was a storeroom with a rug in it, that the priest had no objections . . . And March—young husband that he was—had checked the storeroom and seen that there were no windows and had left the man and his wife alone for twenty minutes. The priest—who had worked as a chaplain in Hamburg's docklands for thirty years and seen most things—had given March a grave wink.
    On the way back to prison, as the high walls came into view, March had expected the man to be depressed, to plead for extra time, maybe even to dive for the door. Not at all. He had sat smiling, finishing his cigar. Standing by the Zürichsee, March realized how he had felt. It had been sufficient to know that the possibility of another life existed; one day of it had been enough.
    He felt Charlie come up beside him. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

    A shop at Zürich airport was piled high with brightly colored gifts—cuckoo clocks, toy skis, ashtrays glazed with pictures of the Matterhorn, chocolates. March picked out one of the musical boxes with "Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Führer, 1964" written on the lid and took it to the counter, where a plump middle-aged woman was waiting.
    "Could you wrap this and send it for me?"
    "No problem, sir. Write down where you want it to go"
    She gave him a form and a pencil and March wrote Hannelore Jaeger's name and address. Hannelore was even fatter than her husband, and a lover of chocolates. He hoped Max would see the joke.
    The assistant wrapped the box swiftly in brown paper, with skilled fingers.
    "Do you sell many of these?"
    "Hundreds. You Germans certainly love your Führer."
    "We do, it's true." He was looking at the parcel. It was wrapped exactly like the one he had taken from Buhler's mailbox. "You don't, I suppose, keep a record of the places to which you send these packages?"
    "That would be impossible." She addressed it, stuck on a stamp and added it to the pile behind her.
    "Of course. And you wouldn't remember serving an elderly German here, about four o'clock on Monday afternoon? He had thick glasses and runny eyes."
    Her face was suddenly hard with suspicion. "What are you? A policeman?"
    "It's of no importance." He paid for the chocolates, and also for a mug with I LOVE ZÜRICH printed on the side.
    Luther would not have come all the way to Switzerland to put that painting in the bank vault, thought March. Even as a retired Foreign Ministry official, he could never have smuggled a package that size, stamped top secret, past the Zollgrenzschutz. He must have come here to retrieve something, to take it back to Germany. And as it was the first time he had visited the vault for twenty-one years, and as there were three other keys, and as he trusted nobody, he must have had doubts about whether that other thing would still be here.
    He stood looking at the departure lounge and tried to imagine the elderly man hurrying into the terminal building, clutching his precious cargo, his weak heart beating sharply against his ribs. The chocolates must have been a message of success: so far, my old comrades, so good. What could he have been carrying? Not paintings or money, surely; they had plenty of both in Germany.
    "Paper."
    "What?" Charlie, who had been waiting for him in the concourse, turned around in surprise.
    "That must have been the link. Paper. They were all civil servants. They lived their lives by paper, on paper."
    He pictured them in wartime Berlin—sitting in their offices at night, circulating memos and minutes in a perpetual bureaucratic paper chase, building themselves a paper fortress. Millions of Germans had fought in the war: