Fatherland

offered him a light. Relax. Take your time. Has this happened to you before?"
    "Once." The man exhaled and looked gratefully at the cigarette. "It happens here every three or four months. The derelicts sleep under the wagons to keep out of the rain, poor devils. Then, when the engines start, instead of staying where they are, they try to get out of the way." He put his hand to his eyes. "I must have backed up over him, but I never heard a thing. When I looked back up the track, there he was—just a heap of rags."
    "Do you get many derelicts in this yard?"
    "Always a couple of dozen. The Reichsbahnpolizei try to keep them away, but the place is too big to patrol properly. Look over there. Some of them are making a run for it."
    He pointed across the tracks. At first, March could make out nothing, except a line of cattle cars. Then, almost invisible in the shadow of the train, he spotted a movement—a shape, running jerkily, like a marionette; then another; then more. They ran along the sides of the wagons, darted into the gaps between the trucks, waited, then scampered out again toward the next patch of cover.
    Globus had his back to them. Oblivious to their presence, he was still talking to Krebs, smacking his right fist into the palm of his left hand.
    March watched as the stick figures worked their way to safety—then suddenly the rails were vibrating, there was a rush of wind and the view was cut off by the sleeper train to Rovno, accelerating out of Berlin. The wall of double-decker dining cars and sleeping compartments took half a minute to pass, and by the time it had cleared the little colony of drifters had vanished into the orangey dark.

SATURDAY, APRIL 18

    Most of you know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side. Or five hundred. Or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time— apart from some exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never to be written and is never to be written.

HEINRICH HIMMLER,

secret speech to senior SS officers,

Poznan, October 4, 1943

1

    A crack of light showed beneath her door. Inside her apartment a radio was playing. Lovers' music—soft strings and low crooning, appropriate for the night. A party? Was this how Americans behaved in the presence of danger? He stood alone on the tiny landing and looked at his watch. It was almost two. He knocked, and after a few moments the volume was turned down. He heard her voice.
    "Who is it?"
    "The police."
    A second or two elapsed, then there was a clatter of bolts and chains and the door opened. She said, "You're very funny," but her smile was a false one, pasted on for his benefit. In her dark eyes exhaustion showed, and also—was it?—fear? He bent to kiss her, his hands resting lightly on her waist, and immediately felt a pricking of desire. My God, he thought, she's turning me into a six- teen-year-old . . .
    Somewhere in the apartment: a footstep. He looked up. Over her shoulder, a man loomed in the doorway of the bathroom. He was a couple of years younger than March: brown brogues, sport jacket, a bowtie, a white sweater pulled on casually over a business shirt. Charlie stiffened in March's embrace and gently broke free of him. "You remember Henry Nightingale?"
    He straightened, feeling awkward. "Of course. The bar in Potsdamer-Strasse."
    Neither man made a move toward the other. The American's face was a mask.
    March stared at Nightingale and said softly, "What's going on here, Charlie?"
    She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. "Don't say anything. Not here. Something's happened." Then, loudly, "Isn't this interesting, the three of us?" She took March's arm and guided him toward the bathroom. "I think you should come into my parlor."
    In the bathroom, Nightingale assumed a proprietorial air. He turned on the cold water taps above the basin and the bath, increased the volume of the radio. The program had changed. Now the clapboard walls vibrated to the strains of "German jazz"—a watery syncopation, officially approved, from which all traces of "Negroid influences" had been erased. When he had arranged everything to his satisfaction, Nightingale perched on the edge of the bathtub. March sat next to him. Charlie squatted on the floor.
    She opened the meeting. "I told Henry about my visitor the other morning. The one you had the fight with. He thinks the Gestapo may have