Fatherland by Robert Harris Page B

conscientious fellow, five minutes up the road you decide you had better go back for a second look. And then you discover the body. And only then do you call the cops."
    He grasped Jost's hands and pulled him to his feet. "Run with me," he commanded.
    "I can't—"
    "Run!"
    Jost broke into an unwilling shuffle. Their feet clattered on the flagstones.
    "Now describe what you can see. You're coming out of the woods and you're on the lake path—"
    "Please—"
    "Tell me!"
    "I... I see... a car..." Jost's eyes were closed. "Then three men . . . It's raining fast, they have coats, hoods—
    like monks... Their heads are down... Coming up the slope from the lake . . . I. . . I'm scared. ... I cross the road and run up into the trees so they don't see me ..."
    "Go on."
    "They get into the car and drive off _ I wait, and then
    I come out of the woods and I find the body . . ."
    "You've missed something."
    "No, I swear—"
    "You see a face. When they get into the car, you see a face."
    "No . . ."
    "Tell me whose face it is, Jost. You can see it. You know who it is. Tell me."
    "Globus!" shouted Jost. "I see Globus!"

4

    The package he had taken from Buhler's mailbox lay unopened on the front seat next to him. Perhaps it's a bomb, thought March as he started the Volkswagen. There had been a blitz of parcel bombs over the past few months, blowing off the hands and faces of half a dozen government officials. He might just make page three of the Tageblatt : INVESTIGATOR DIES IN MYSTERIOUS BLAST OUTSIDE BARRACKS.
    He drove around Schlachtensee until he found a delicatessen, where he bought a loaf of black bread, some Westphalian ham and a quarter bottle of Scotch whisky. The sun still shone; the air was fresh. He pointed the car westward, back toward the lakes. He was going to do something he had not done for years. He was going to have a picnic.
    After Göring had been made Chief Reich Huntsman in 1934, there had been some attempt to lighten the Grunewald. Chestnut and linden, beech, birch and oak, had all been planted. But the heart of it—as it had been a thousand years ago, when the plains of northern Europe were still forest—the heart remained the hilly woods of melan choly pine. From these forests, five centuries before Christ, the warring German tribes had emerged; and to these forests, twenty-five centuries later, mostly on weekends, in their campers and their trailers, the victorious German tribes returned. The Germans were a race of forest dwellers. You could make a clearing in your mind, if you liked; the trees just waited to reclaim it.
    March parked, took his provisions and Buhler's mail bomb, or whatever it was, and walked carefully up a steep path into the forest. Five minutes' climb brought him to a spot that commanded a clear view of the Havel and of the smoky blue slopes of trees receding into the distance. The pines smelled strong and sweet in the warmth. Above his head, a large jet rumbled across the sky, making its approach to the Berlin airport. As it disappeared, the noise died, until at last the only sound was birdsong.
    March did not want to open the parcel yet. It made him uneasy. So he sat on a large stone—no doubt casually deposited here by the municipal authorities for this very purpose—took a swig of whisky and began to eat.
    Of Odilo Globocnik—Globus—March knew little, and that only by reputation. His fortunes had swung like a weathercock over the past thirty years. An Austrian by birth, a builder by profession, he had become Party leader in Carinthia in the mid-1950s, and ruler of Vienna. Then there had been a period of disgrace connected with illegal currency speculation, followed by a restoration, as a police chief in the General Government when the war started—he must have known Buhler there, thought March. At the end of the war, there had been a second fall to—where was it?—Trieste, he seemed to remember. But with Himmler's death Globus had come back to Berlin, and now he held some