Fatherland

Fatherland Read Free

Book: Fatherland Read Free
Author: Robert Harris
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robbery, violent assault, rape and mixed marriage, all the way up to murder. Bodies in lakes—who they were and how they had gotten there—they were Kripo business.
    The elevator stopped at the second floor. The corridor was lit like an aquarium. Weak neon bounced off green linoleum and green-washed walls. There was the same smell of polish as in the lobby, but here it was spiced with lavatory disinfectant and stale cigarette smoke. Twenty doors of frosted glass, some half open, lined the hallway. These were the investigators' offices. From one came the sound of a solitary finger picking at a typewriter; in another, a telephone rang unanswered.
    "'The nerve center in the ceaseless war against the criminal enemies of National Socialism,'" said March, quoting a recent headline in the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter . He paused, and when Jost continued to look blank he explained, "A joke."
    "Sorry?"
    "Forget it."
    He pushed open a door and switched on the light. His office was little more than a gloomy cupboard, a cell, its solitary window opening on to a courtyard of blackened brick. One wall was shelved: tattered, leather-bound volumes of statutes and decrees, a handbook on forensic science, a dictionary, an atlas, a Berlin street guide, telephone directories, box files with labels gummed to them—''Braune," "Hundt," "Stark," "Zadek"—every one a bureaucratic tombstone memorializing some long- forgotten victim. Another side of the office was taken up by four filing cabinets. On top of one was a spider plant, placed there by a middle-aged secretary two years before at the height of an unspoken and unrequited passion for Xavier March. It was now dead. That was all the furniture, apart from two wooden desks pushed together beneath the window. One was March's; the other belonged to Max Jaeger.
    March hung his overcoat on a peg by the door. He preferred not to wear a uniform when he could avoid it, and this morning he had used the rainstorm on the Havel as an excuse to dress in gray trousers and a thick blue sweater. He pushed Jaeger's chair toward Jost. "Sit down. Coffee?"
    "Please."
    There was a machine in the corridor. "We've got fucking photographs . Can you believe it? Look at that." Along the passage March could hear the voice of Fiebes of VB3—the sexual crimes division—toasting of his latest success. "Her maid took them. Look, you can see every hair. The girl should turn professional."
    What would this be? March thumped the side of the coffee machine and it ejected a plastic cup. Some officer's wife, he guessed, and a Polish laborer shipped in from the General Government to work in the garden. It was usually a Pole—a dreamy, soulful Pole plucking at the heart of a wife whose husband was away at the front. It sounded as if they had been photographed in flagrante by some jealous girl from the Bund deutscher Mädel , anxious to please the authorities. This was a sexual crime, as defined in the 1935 Race Defilement Act.
    He gave the machine another thump.
    There would be a hearing in the People's Court, salaciously recorded in Der Stürmer as a warning to others. Two years in Ravensbrück for the wife. Demotion and disgrace for the husband. Twenty-five years for the Pole, if he was lucky; death if he was not.
    "Fuck!" A male voice muttered something, and Fiebes, a weasel inspector in his mid-fifties whose wife had run off with an SS ski instructor ten years before, gave a shout of laughter. March, a cup of black coffee in either hand, retreated to his office and slammed the door behind him as loudly as he could with his foot.

    Reichskriminalpolizei
    Werderscher-markt 5-6
    Berlin
    Statement of Witness
    My name is Hermann Friedrich Jost. I was born on 2-23-45 in Dresden. I am a cadet at the Sepp Dietrich Academy, Berlin. At 0530 this morning, I left for my regular training run. I prefer to run alone. My normal route takes me west through the Grunewald Forest to the Havel, north along the lakeshore to the

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