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come from the Orpo) 1H Havel/March . The secretary stepped back and recapped her pen with a sharp click.
    Krause had finished his telephone call and was looking defensive. "I've already apologized, March."
    "Forget it. I want the missing list. Berlin area. Say, the past forty-eight hours."
    "No problem." Krause looked relieved and swiveled around in his chair to the sour-faced woman. "You heard the investigator, Helga. Check whether anything's come in in the past hour." He spun back to face March, red-eyed with lack of sleep. "I'd have left it an hour. But any trouble around that place—you know how it is."
    March looked up at the Berlin map. Most of it was a gray cobweb of streets. But over to the left were two splashes of color: the green of the Grunewald Forest and, running alongside it, the blue ribbon of the Havel. Curling into the lake, in the shape of a fetus, was an island linked to the shore by a thin umbilical causeway.
    Schwanenwerder.
    "Does Goebbels still have a place there?"
    Krause nodded. "And the rest."
    It was one of the most fashionable addresses in Berlin, practically a government compound. A few dozen large houses screened from the road. A sentry at the entrance to the causeway. A good place for privacy, for security, for forest views and private moorings; a bad place to discover a body. The corpse had been washed up fewer than three hundred meters away.
    Krause said, "The local Orpo call it 'the pheasant run.' "
    March smiled: "golden pheasants" was street slang for the Party leadership.
    "It's not good to leave a mess for too long on that doorstep."
    Helga had returned. "Persons reported missing since Sunday morning," she announced, "and still unaccounted for." She gave a long roll of printed-out names to Krause, who glanced at it and passed it on to March. "Plenty to keep you busy there." He seemed to find this amusing. "You should give it to that fat friend of yours, Jaeger. He's the one who should be looking after this business, remember?"
    "Thanks. I'll make a start, at least."
    Krause shook his head. "You put in twice the hours of the others. You get no promotions. You're on shitty pay. Are you crazy or what?"
    March had rolled the list of missing persons into a tube. He leaned forward and tapped Krause lightly on the chest with it. "You forget yourself, comrade," he said. " Arbeit macht frei ." The slogan of the labor camps: Work makes you free.
    He turned and made his way back through the ranks of telephonists. Behind him he could hear Krause appealing to Helga. "See what I mean? What the hell kind of a joke is that?"
    March arrived back in his office just as Max Jaeger was hanging up his coat. "Zavi!" Jaeger spread his arms wide. "I got a message from the duty room. What can I say?" He wore the uniform of an SS-Sturmbannführer. The black tunic still bore traces of his breakfast.
    "Put it down to my soft old heart," said March. "And don't get too excited. There was nothing on the corpse to identify it and there are a hundred people missing in Berlin since Sunday. It'll take hours just to go through the list. And I've promised to take my boy out this afternoon, so you'll be on your own with it."
    He lit a cigarette and explained the details: the location, the missing foot, his suspicions about Jost. Jaeger took it in with a series of grunts. He was a shambling, untidy hulk of a man, two meters tall, with clumsy hands and feet. He was fifty, nearly ten years older than March, but they had shared an office since 1959 and sometimes worked as a team. Colleagues in Werderscher-Markt joked about them behind their backs: the Fox and the Bear. And maybe there was something of the old married couple about them, in the way they bickered with and covered for each other.
    "This is the 'missing' list." March sat down at his desk and unrolled the printout: names, dates of birth, times of disappearance, addresses of informants. Jaeger leaned over his shoulder. He smoked stubby fat cigars, and his uniform reeked