Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  SIX

  April 1939

  “It’s high time they arrested you, Gunther,” said a sharp voice from on high. “There’s no place for lefties like you in this city’s police force.”

  I looked up and caught sight of a familiar uniformed figure descending the wide stone stairs like a late arrival at the Leader’s Ball; but if Heidi Hobbin had ever owned a glass slipper she’d have taken it off and stuck the heel in my eye. There weren’t many women in the Berlin police force: Elfriede Dinger—who subsequently married Ernst Gennat, not long before he died—and Police Commissioner Heidi Hobbin, who was also known as Heidi the Horrible, but not because she was ugly—she was actually quite a looker—it was just that she enjoyed bossing men around, mercilessly. At least one of them must have enjoyed it, too, because I later learned that Heidi was the mistress of Kripo boss Arthur Nebe. Dominant women: that’s one particular perversion I’ve never really understood.

  “I hope you’re taking him straight to Dachau,” Heidi told the two Gestapo men who were escorting me down the back stairs toward the Police Praesidium’s Dircksenstrasse exit. She was accompanied by an ambitious young district court councilor, a friend of mine from the Ministry of Justice, called Max Merten. “It’s the very least that he deserves.”

  After Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in January 1933, I was never what you’d call popular around the Alex. When Bernhard Weiss was purged from the Kripo because he was a Jew it was inevitable that the men from his Murder Commission were always going to be regarded with suspicion by our new Nazi bosses—especially if they were center-left SPD supporters like me. All the same, hers was an easy mistake to have made; even with the Gestapo on their best behavior and summoning me politely—almost—on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders, to their headquarters, they still managed to give the appearance of two men making an arrest. But Heidi didn’t know this and was still laboring under the misapprehension that I was being taken into custody. Considering she was supposed to be a cop, she never was very observant.

  Enjoying the prospect of her imminent disappointment, I stopped and touched the brim of my hat. “Kind of you to say so, ma’am,” I said.

  Heidi’s eyes narrowed as she regarded me as if I were an unflushed lavatory. Max Merten tipped his bowler hat politely.

  “You’re a troublemaker, Gunther,” said Heidi. “And you always have been, with your smart remarks. Quite frankly I have no idea why Heydrich and Nebe believed they needed you back at the Alex in the first place.”

  “Someone has to do the thinking around here now that the police dogs have been sacked.”

  Merten grinned. It was a joke I’d heard him make on more than one occasion.

  “That’s exactly the kind of remark I’m talking about. And which I for one will certainly not miss.”

  “Will you tell the commissioner the good news?” I asked one of the Gestapo men. “Or shall I?”

  “Commissar Gunther isn’t actually under arrest,” said one of the Gestapo men.

  I smiled. “You hear that?”

  “What do you mean, ‘not actually’?”

  “General Heydrich has summoned him to an urgent meeting in his office at Prinz Albrechtstrasse.”

  Heidi’s face fell. “What about?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” said the Gestapo man. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Commissioner. We don’t have time for this. The general doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “That’s right,” I said, and looking at my watch, I tapped it urgently. “We really don’t have time for this. I’ve got an important meeting to attend. With the general. Perhaps later, if there’s time, I’ll drop by your office and tell you what it was he wanted to consult me about. But only if Heydrich thinks it appropriate. You know what he’s like about security and confidentiality. Then again, perhaps you don’t. It’s not everyone he takes into his confidence. By the way, Commissioner Hobbin, where is your office? I’ve forgotten.”

  The Gestapo glanced at each other and tried, without success, to suppress a grin. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they had a sense of humor, albeit a dark one, and this was the sort of status-conscious joke that any power-minded Nazi—which was more or less all of them—could understand and appreciate. The young magistrate—he couldn’t have been much more than thirty—Max Merten, was trying harder at not smiling. I winked at him. I liked Max; he was from Berlin-Lichterfelde and at one stage he’d been considering a career in the police, until I talked him out of it.

  Meanwhile Heidi Hobbin made a small, tight fist that strongly resembled her pugnacious personality, turned abruptly away, and then started back up the stairs and, reasoning that my laughter would only make her even more angry, I let out a loud guffaw and was pleased to hear my escorts do the same.

  “Must be nice, working for Heydrich,” said one, slapping me on the back by way of congratulation.

  “Yes,” said his partner, “even the bosses have to go careful with you, eh? You can tell them to go where the pepper grows, right?”

  I smiled uncomfortably and followed them both down to the side door of the Alex. I wouldn’t ever have described the secret security service boss as my friend. Men such as Heydrich didn’t have friends; they had functionaries, and sometimes myrmidons, such as I was, for I had little doubt that Heydrich had another unpleasant job that he thought only Bernhard Gunther could do. No one ever had to go more carefully in Germany than former SPD members who now worked for Heydrich—especially now, given the recent invasion of what remained of Czechoslovakia after Munich, which had made another war seem almost inevitable.

  Outside, on Dircksenstrasse, I lit my last cigarette and hurried into the backseat of a waiting Mercedes. The morning air was freezing due to a fall of spring snow but the car was warm, which was just as well as I’d forgotten my coat, such was the urgency of the summons; one moment I’d been staring out of my corner office window at the model train set below that was Alexanderplatz and the next—with no explanations needed or supplied—I was sitting in the back of the car, heading west along Unter den Linden and rehearsing a form of words that might enable me to body-swerve the particular job Heydrich had in mind for me. I was just a bit too scrupulous and questioning to make a good myrmidon. Intransigence was futile, of course; like Achilles, the general was not someone who could easily be deflected. You might just as well have tried to fend off a Greek hero’s javelin with a Meissen dinner plate.

  Unter den Linden was choked with traffic and pedestrians and there were even a few cars parked in front of the government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse, but Prinz Albrechtstrasse was always the quietest street in Berlin and for much the same reason that the remoter parts of the Carpathian Mountains were avoided by all sensible Transylvanians. Like Castle Dracula, number 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse contained its own pale-faced prince of darkness, and whenever I approached the neo-baroque entrance I couldn’t help but think that the two naked ladies who adorned the broken segmental pediment were actually a pair of vampire sisters married to Heydrich who wandered the building at night in search of some clothes and a good meal.

  Inside, the huge building was all high arched windows, vaulted ceilings, stone balustrades, swastikas, busts of the Antichrist, and bare of much in the way of furniture and human feelings. A few wooden seats were arranged along the plain white walls as in a railway station, and the only sounds were whispered voices, footsteps hurrying through the marble-floored corridors, and the reverberating echo of an occasional door slammed hard on hope in some remote corner of eternity. No one but Dante and perhaps Virgil went into that place of woe without wondering if they would ever come out again.

  Located on the second floor of the building, Heydrich’s office was not much bigger than my flat. The room was all grand space, cold white simplicity and neat order—more like a parade ground than an office; with no discernible personal touches, it had the quality of making
Nazism seem clean and stainless and, in my eyes at least, summed up the moral void that lay at the heart of the new Germany. There was a thick, gray carpet on the polished wooden floor, some decorative inlaid pillars, several high windows, and a bespoke rolltop desk that was home to a regiment of rubber stamps and a switchboard. Behind the desk were two sets of tall double doors and between these a half-empty bookcase on which stood an empty goldfish bowl. Immediately above the goldfish bowl was a framed photograph of Himmler, almost as if the bespectacled Reichsführer-SS was himself a strange species of creature that could live in and out of water. Which is another word for a reptile. Beside a large map of Germany on the wall was an arrangement of leather sofas and armchairs and it was on one of these that I found the general with three other officers, including his adjutant, Hans-Hendrik Neumann, Kripo boss Arthur Nebe, and Nebe’s deputy, Paul Werner—a beetle-browed state prosecutor from Heidelberg who hated me no less than Heidi Hobbin hated me. Heydrich and Nebe were both possessed of stronger profiles, but while Heydrich’s was the kind of head that belonged on a banknote, Arthur Nebe’s belonged in a pawnshop. Nazi racial experts were keen on using calipers to measure noses to scientifically determine Jewishness and I wasn’t the only cop at the Alex who wondered if either man had ever submitted himself to a test and if so, what the result had been. Hans-Hendrik Neumann looked like a cut-price Heydrich. With his fair hair and high forehead, he possessed an interesting nose that was sharp but still had some growing up to do before it could ever match his master’s beaky schnoz.

  No one got up from their seats and no one but me gave the Hitler salute, which Nebe must have especially enjoyed, given how long we’d known and distrusted each other. As usual, giving the salute made me feel like a hypocrite but hypocrisy has its positive side—what Darwin or one of his early followers would have called survival of the fittest.

  “Gunther, at last you’re here,” said Heydrich. “Sit down, please.”

  “Thank you, sir. And may I say, General, what a great pleasure it is to see you again. I’ve missed these little talks we used to have.”

  Heydrich grinned, almost enjoying my insolence.

  “Gentlemen, I must confess that there are times when I do believe in a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and Bernhard Gunther.”

  “I think you and I might just be the directors of that providence, sir,” said Nebe. “If it wasn’t for us, this man would have bitten the grass by now.”

  “Yes, perhaps you’re right, Arthur. But I can always use a useful man, and he’s nothing if not that. In fact, I think his greatest virtue is his usefulness.” Heydrich stared up at me as if he was genuinely looking for an answer. “Why is that, do you think?”

  “Are you asking me, sir?” I sat down and glanced at the silver cigarette box on the coffee table in front of us. I was dying for a smoke. Nerves, I suppose. Heydrich could do that to you. Two minutes in his company and he was already on my case.

  “Yes. I rather think I am.” He shrugged. “Go ahead. You can speak quite freely.”

  “Well, I think that sometimes a harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”

  Heydrich laughed. “You’re right. Arthur, we are the directors of providence where this fellow is concerned.” Heydrich flipped open the lid of the silver cigarette box. “Do smoke, Gunther, please; I insist. I like to encourage a man’s vices. Especially yours. I have a feeling that one day they might be even more useful than your virtues. In fact, I’m sure of it. Turning you into my stooge is going to be one of my long-term projects.”

  SEVEN

  April 1939

  I took a cigarette from the silver box, fired it up, crossed my legs, and directed my smoke at the moldings on the high ceiling of Heydrich’s office. I’d said enough for the moment. When you sit down with the devil it’s wise not to insult him more than you have to. The devil was wearing a uniform that was the same color as his heart: black. So were the others. It was only me who was wearing a lounge suit, which helped to persuade me that somehow I was different from them—better, perhaps. It was only later on, in the war, that I formed the conclusion that perhaps I wasn’t much better after all. For me, prudence and good intentions always seemed to take precedence over conscience.

  “Correctly, you assume a certain license because of your presence here in my office,” said Heydrich. “I daresay you have already formed the conclusion that you are about to be useful to me again.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “I wouldn’t make too much of that, Gunther. I find I have a very short memory where favors are concerned.”

  Heydrich’s voice was quite high-pitched for so large a man, almost as if his riding breeches were too tight.

  “I’ve found it’s generally wise to forget quite a bit I used to believe was important, myself, General. In fact, more or less everything I used to believe in, now I come to think about it.”

  Heydrich smiled his thinnest smile, which was almost as narrow as his pale blue eyes. Otherwise his long face remained so devoid of expression he resembled a burn victim at the Charité.

  “You’ll have to forget quite a bit after this job, Gunther. Almost everything. With the exception of the men in this room you’ll be forbidden to discuss this case with anyone. Yes, I think we must now call this a case. Don’t you agree, Arthur?”

  “Yes, sir. I do. After all, a crime has been committed. A murder. A very uncommon kind of murder, given the place where it has occurred and the absolute importance of the person to whom he will be reporting.”

  “Oh? Who’s that?” I asked.

  “No less a figure than the Leader’s deputy chief of staff, Martin Bormann himself,” said Nebe.

  “Martin Bormann, eh? Can’t say that I’ve heard of him. But I assume he must be someone important, given the man he works for.”

  “Please don’t allow that ignorance to interfere with your appreciation of the paramount importance of this case,” explained Heydrich. “Bormann may not occupy any governmental position, but his close proximity to the Leader makes him one of the most powerful men in Germany. He has asked me to send him my best detective. And since Ernst Gennat is not well enough to travel any distance, right now that would appear to be you.”

  I nodded. My old mentor, Gennat, had cancer and was rumored to have less than six months to live although, given my present situation, that was beginning to seem like a long time; Heydrich was not someone who had a tolerance of failure. Once before, he’d sent me to Dachau, and he could easily do it again. It was time for my body-swerve. “What about Georg Heuser?” I asked. “Aren’t you forgetting him? He’s a good detective. And altogether better qualified than I am. For one thing, he’s a Party member.”

  “Yes, he is a good detective,” agreed Nebe. “But right now Heuser has some explaining to do about those qualifications he’s claimed. Something to do with pretending to have a PhD in law.”

  “Really?” I tried to tamp down a smile. I was one of the few detectives at the Alex who was not a doctor of law, and so this news was rather satisfying to someone who only had his Abitur. “You mean he’s not a doctor after all?”

  “Yes, I thought that would please you, Gunther. He’s suspended, pending an inquiry.”

  “That is a pity, sir.”

  “We could hardly send a man like that to Martin Bormann,” said Nebe.

  “Of course, I could send Werner here,” said Heydrich. “It’s true his skills lie more in crime prevention than in detection. But I shouldn’t like to lose him if he screws this up. The plain fact of the matter is you’re expendable and you know it. Werner is not. He’s essential to the development of radical criminology in the new Germany.”

  “Since you put it like that, sir, I can see your point.” I looked at Werner and nodded. He was the same rank as me—a commissar, which meant I could speak to him with greater license. “I think I read your paper, Paul. Juve
nile delinquency as the product of criminal heredity—wasn’t that your last offering?”

  Werner removed the cigarette from his mouth and smiled. With his dark, shifty eyes, swarthy features, and trophy-handle ears, he looked no less criminal than almost anyone I’d ever arrested.

  “So you do read these things in the Murder Commission? I’m surprised. Actually, I’m surprised you read anything at all.”

  “Sure I do. Your papers on criminology are essential reading. Only, I seem to remember that most of the juvenile delinquents you identified were Gypsies, not ethnic Germans.”

  “And you disagree with that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “On what basis?”

  “It’s not been my experience, that’s all. Berlin criminals come in all shades and sizes. In my eyes, poverty and ignorance always seemed to be a better explanation for the reason why one Fritz picks the pocket of another than his race, or how big his nose might be. Besides, you look like you’ve got a touch of the Gypsy yourself, Paul. How about it? You a Sinti?”