Fatherland by Robert Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

were in the dining room of the Prinz Friedrich Karl Hotel in Dorotheen-Strasse, midway between Kripo headquarters and Halder's office in the Reichsarchiv. March used it regularly. The Friedrich Karl was a cheap stopover for tourists and salesmen, but it did a good breakfast. Dangling limply from a pole over the entrance was a European flag—the twelve gold stars of the European Community nations on a dark blue background. March guessed that the manager, Herr Brecker, had bought it secondhand and hung it there in an effort to drum up some foreign custom. It did not appear to have worked. A glance around the restaurant's shabby clientele and bored staff suggested little danger of being overheard.
    As usual, people gave March's uniform a wide berth. Every few minutes, the walls shook as a train pulled into the Friedrich-Strasse station.
    "Is that all you're having?" asked Halder. "Coffee?" He shook his head. "Black coffee, cigarettes and whisky. As a diet: not good. Now I think of it, I haven't seen you eat a decent meal since you and Klara split." He cracked one of his eggs and began removing pieces of shell.
    March thought, Of all of us, Halder has changed the least. Beneath the layer of fat, behind the slackened muscle of incipient middle age, there lurked still the ghost of the gangling recruit, straight from university, who had joined the U-174 more than twenty years before. He had been a wireless operator—a bad one, rushed through training and into service at the start of 1942, when losses were at their height and Dönitz was ransacking Germany for replacements. Then as now, he had worn wire-framed glasses and had thin red hair, which stuck out at the back in a duck's tail. During a voyage, while the rest of the men had grown beards, Halder had sprouted orange tufts on his cheeks and chin, like a molting cat. The fact that he was in the U-boat service at all was a ghastly mistake, a joke. He was clumsy, barely capable of changing a fuse. He had been designed by nature to be an academic, not a submariner, and he passed each voyage in a sweat of fear and seasickness.
    Yet he was popular. U-boat crews were superstitious, and somehow the word got around that Rudi Halder brought good luck. So they looked after him, covering his mistakes, letting him have an extra half hour to groan and thrash around on his bunk. He became a sort of mascot. When peace came, astonished to find that he had survived, Halder resumed his studies at the history faculty of Berlin University. In 1958 he had joined the team of academics working at the Reichsarchiv on the official history of the war. He had come full circle, spending his days hunched in a subterranean chamber in Berlin, piecing together the same grand strategy of which he had once been a tiny, frightened component. The U-boat Service: Operations and Tactics, 1939-46 had been published in 1963. Now Halder was helping to compile the third volume of the history of the German Army on the eastern front.
    "It's like working at the Volkswagen works in Fallersleben," said Halder. He took a bite out of his egg and chewed for a while. "I do the wheels, Jaeckel does the doors, Schmidt drops in the engine."
    "How long is it going to take?"
    "Oh, forever, I should think. Resources no object. This is the Arch of Triumph in words, remember? Every shot, every skirmish, every snowflake, every sneeze. Someone is even going to write the Official History of the Official Histories. Me, I'll do another five years."
    "And then?"
    Halder brushed egg crumbs from his tie. "A chair in a small university somewhere in the south. A house in the country with Ilse and the kids. A couple of books, respectfully reviewed. My ambitions are modest. If nothing else, this kind of work gives you a sense of perspective about your own mortality. Speaking of which—" From his inside pocket he pulled a sheet of paper. "With the compliments of the Reichsarchiv."
    It was a photocopy of a page from an old Party directory. Four