March discovers scorched brick fragments at the Globus site in the closing stages of his flight, and the discovery reverses his conviction that the place has been erased beyond proof. The fragments are damaged but tangible: what had seemed impossible to verify again exists in the physical world. Their force lies not only in what they indicate about the site, but in the possibility that evidence can outlast the regime’s effort to destroy both records and witnesses.

The disappearance of witnesses

The discovery follows March’s reckoning with the fate of the men who attended the conference at Reinhard Heydrich’s invitation. Thirteen of the fourteen attendees are dead; the remaining man, Martin Luther, is missing. With the witnesses gone or unaccounted for, the distinction between a crime and a story that can be proved has become precarious.

That danger is framed earlier through a Propaganda Ministry cartoon pinned to a police notice board. It warns children not to open a parcel without knowing what is inside; March recognizes the joke as a rule for policemen as well: do not ask a question unless the answer is already known. The warning makes institutional caution resemble self-censorship. Once the question is dangerous, the absence of an answer can be made to look like the absence of a crime.

Evidence and its destruction

The novel places March’s search against an explicit account of how perpetrators intend to control the historical record. A quoted SS officer predicts that evidence will be destroyed alongside its witnesses, and that survivors’ accounts will be dismissed as too monstrous to believe. The threat is therefore twofold: physical proof may be eliminated, while testimony may remain socially powerless even if it survives.

A separate document complicates that strategy. In a sworn record dated June 4, 1942, Wilhelm Stuckart describes asking that the Führer Order be put in writing. Heydrich refuses, citing political considerations, and points Stuckart toward Adolf Hitler if he has legal reservations. The sworn statement preserves a trace of a conversation about an order that was not to be recorded in the ordinary way. It shows how documents can both expose the machinery of secrecy and remain vulnerable to the limits of what their authors could know or prove.

The site and the turning point

Before finding the fragments, March thinks of Globus and concludes that nothing remains there—not even a brick—and that nobody will believe him. He admits that part of him cannot believe it either. This is the event’s inward reversal: the threat is not only that others may reject his account, but that the disappearance of material confirmation has begun to weaken his own confidence.

Then he notices a red streak almost buried at the base of a sapling. The brick he picks up is pitted with yellow lichen, scorched by explosives, and crumbling at its corners, yet solid enough to establish its existence. As he scrapes at the lichen, carmine dust gathers beneath his fingernail; when he bends to put the fragment back, he sees more in the grass—first a handful, then dozens and hundreds. The scene changes the meaning of the landscape: apparent emptiness gives way to dispersed remains.

Meaning and consequence

The brick does not, by itself, restore the missing witnesses or settle every question about what happened. Its significance is more precise: it contradicts March’s belief that nothing material survives and gives him a basis for resisting the certainty of erasure. The remains are damaged and scattered, but their very persistence challenges the claim that there is nothing to find.

The discovery also sharpens the novel’s distinction between truth and public belief. The Propaganda Ministry’s warning about unopened parcels, the absent conference witnesses, the sworn account of an unwritten order, and the threatened destruction of evidence all describe different ways knowledge can be blocked or discredited. Against those forces, the fragments offer no easy vindication; they offer proof of existence, and with it the possibility that a witness’s account need not stand alone.