Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  Kaspel grinned. “That’s a pretty fair description of your investigative task, yes. You’re going to need to keep your cards so close to your chest, you’ll be lucky to see what suit they are.”

  “Heydrich wanted me to find some dirt on Bormann. It sounds like this could be what he wanted. Have you told him any of this?”

  “No. But none of this will come as a big surprise to Heydrich. It was Bormann who helped Himmler to buy his house. That’s not in Obersalzberg but in Schönau, about fifteen minutes from here. The Schneewinkellehen. The place used to be owned by Sigmund Freud. Figure that one out. Anyway, Heydrich is certainly not going to try and take Bormann to task for doing something his own boss has done, too.”

  “Good point. He did ask me to see if there’s any truth in a rumor that Bormann’s being blackmailed by his own brother. I imagine Heydrich wants to know what Albert has on his brother so he can blackmail him as well.”

  “Now, what that might be, I don’t know. All I know is that Albert Bormann has the other ear of Adolf Hitler, which means he is almost as powerful down here as Martin Bormann. You have to hand it to Hitler. He certainly knows how to divide and rule.”

  We stopped at a checkpoint and once again presented our credentials to the frozen SS guard. A searchlight illuminating our car also showed me the size of the security fence.

  “It wouldn’t be easy to get over that,” I said. “Even with a rifle in your hand.”

  “There’s ten kilometers of that fence,” said Kaspel. “With thirty separate gates, each with Zeiss-Ikon security locks. But the fence is often damaged by rock slides and avalanches and—well, sabotage. Even when it’s undamaged this perimeter fence doesn’t mean shit. Oh, it looks good and it makes the road secure enough and I expect it makes Hitler feel safe, but everyone in the RSD is well aware that all those tunnels and private salt mines mean there are plenty of locals who can come and go as they please inside the perimeter. And what’s more, they do. It’s like Swiss cheese inside this mountain, Gunther. Hitler banned all hunting behind the perimeter wire fence because he’s fond of little furry animals but that doesn’t stop people hunting there with total impunity. The best game to be had around here is in the Leader’s Territory and the chances are that your shooter is some local peasant who accessed the area through an old salt mine tunnel that his fucked-up, inbred family has been using for hundreds of years. He was probably looking to pot a couple of rabbits or a deer but he settled for a rat instead.”

  “Thanks for telling me all that, Hermann. I appreciate your honesty.” I grinned. “Some beautiful scenery, a dead body, a lot of lies, and a dumbhead of a cop. You know, all we need is a pretty girl and a fat man and I think it’s safe to say that we have the ingredients for a Mack Sennett comedy. That’s why I’m here in Obersalzberg, I guess. Because the Almighty enjoys a damn good laugh. Believe me, I should know. They say there’s a grace in this world and forgiveness, only I don’t see it, because my own fucked-up, falling-over, full-of-shit life has been keeping my dear Father in heaven amused since January 1933. To be honest, I’m beginning to hope he chokes on it.”

  Kaspel pursed his lips and shook his head. “You know, I’ve been twisting my brain for the reason General Heydrich should have sent you down here to Obersalzberg, Gunther. And maybe I’m starting to get a glimpse of his reason. You might just be in possession of a darker spirit than any of us.”

  “Hermann? You’ve been away from Berlin for too long. You ever wonder why we have a black bear on our coat of arms? Because he’s got a sore head, that’s why. Everyone in Berlin is like me. That’s why everyone else in Germany loves the place so much.”

  SIXTEEN

  April 1939

  We arrived on the northern side of the Berghof, where we were greeted on the stairs leading up to the terrace by a man I’d first met many years before. Arthur Kannenberg had once owned a garden restaurant in Berlin-West, near Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called Pfuhl’s Weinund. But it went belly-up in the crash and the last I’d heard of Kannenberg he’d left Berlin and gone to work in Munich, managing the officers’ mess in the Nazi Party HQ. A small, round man with pale skin, very pink lips, hyperthyroidic eyes, and dressed in a gray Tracht jacket, he greeted me warmly.

  “Bernie,” he said, shaking my hand, “it’s good you see you again.”

  “Arthur. This is a surprise. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m the house manager here at the Berghof. Herr Bormann told me to expect you. So here I am, at your service.”

  “Thanks, Arthur, but I’m sorry if that meant you had to stay up so late.”

  “Actually I’m used to it. The Leader is a bit of a night owl, to be honest. Which means I have to be one, too. Anyway, I wanted to make sure everything was arranged to your satisfaction. We’ve made an office for you in one of the spare rooms on the second floor.”

  Kaspel made himself scarce while I followed Kannenberg under a covered walkway and then entered a vestibule through a heavy oak door.

  “Are you still playing that accordion of yours, Arthur?”

  “Sometimes. When the Leader asks me to.”

  With its low ceilings, dim lighting, red marble columns, and vaulted arches, the lobby area resembled the crypt in a church. Homely, it wasn’t. Kannenberg led the way upstairs and we walked down an impressively wide corridor that was lined with pictures. He showed me into a quiet room with a cream-colored tile stove painted with green figures. The walls were clad in sanded spruce and a wooden seat was built around a corner with a rectangular table. On the floor were several rugs and a wrought-iron basket full of logs for the wood-burning stove. There were two phones and a filing cabinet, and everything I’d asked for, including fur-lined Hanwag boots. Seeing them I sat down and put them on immediately; my feet were freezing.

  “This will do very nicely,” I said, standing up and stamping around the room for a moment to test my new boots.

  Kannenberg switched on a table lamp, lowered his voice, and leaned closer.

  “Anything you need while you’re here—and I do mean anything—you come to me, all right? Don’t ask any of these SS adjutants. You ask them a question, they’ll want to clear the answer with someone else first. You come to me and I will sort you out. Just like we were back in Berlin. Coffee, alcohol, pills, something to eat, cigarettes. Only, don’t for Christ’s sake smoke in the house. The Leader’s girlfriend, she smokes in her room with the window open and she thinks he doesn’t smell it, but he does and it drives him mad. She’s here now and just because he’s away she thinks she can get away with it. But I can smell it in the morning. You’re just across the hall from his private study so please, Bernie, if you want a cigarette, take it outside. And make sure you pick up your butts. Anyway, I’ll take you around the house in the morning. But for now, let me show you how close you are to him. Just to make the point about the cigarettes.”

  We were standing in the doorway and Kannenberg opened the opposite door and switched on a light to let me peek inside the Leader’s study. It was a spacious room, with French windows, a green carpet, lots of bookshelves, a big desk, and a fireplace. On the desk was a pair of chest expanders, and above the fireplace was a painting of a pink-faced Frederick the Great when he was still a young man and probably just the crown prince. He was wearing a blue velvet coat and holding a sword and a telescope as if he were expecting to admire the view from the Leader’s French window. I know I was.

  “You see? You’re just across the hall.”

  Kannenberg picked up the chest expanders and put them in a desk drawer.

  “He needs these because his right arm gets all the exercise,” he explained sheepishly. “Makes his left arm weaker.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “He’s a great man, Bernie.” He glanced around the study, almost as if it were some sort of shrine. “One day, this room, his study, will be a place of pilgrimage. Thousands o
f people already come here in the summer just to catch a glimpse of him. That’s why they had to buy the Türken Inn, to give him some peace and quiet. This is what this place is meant to be all about. Peace and quiet. Well, it was, until yesterday morning’s tragedy. Let’s hope you can quickly restore things to how they were, before.”

  Kannenberg switched out the light and stepped back into the hall.

  “Were you there, Arthur? When Karl Flex was shot?”

  “Yes, I saw the whole thing. Weber and the others were just about to adjourn to the new Platterhof Hotel to see how far things had progressed with the building work there, when it happened.”

  “Weber?”

  “Hans Weber, the lead engineer from P&Z. I was standing about a meter away from Dr. Flex, I suppose. Not that I realized what had happened for a moment or two. Mainly because of the hat he was wearing.”

  “Hat? I haven’t seen any hat.”

  “It was a little Tyrolean green hat with feathers. Like something a local peasant would wear. It was only when his hat fell off that anyone realized the extent of his injuries. It was as if his head had exploded from inside, Bernie. Like when an egg you’re boiling just bursts open. I expect someone threw the hat away because it was soaked with blood.”

  “Do you think you could find that hat?”

  “I could certainly try.”

  “Please do. Was anyone else wearing a hat?”

  “I don’t think so. And if they were it wouldn’t have been like that one. It wasn’t what you’d call a gentleman’s hat. I think Flex wore it because he thought it made him look like one of the locals. Or a character.”

  “And was he? A character?”

  “I really couldn’t say.” But Kannenberg caught my eye and, placing a forefinger over his lips, he shook his head meaningfully.

  “I know it’s very late, Arthur, but I’d appreciate it if you could accompany me onto the terrace for a few moments and explain exactly what happened. Just so that I can build a picture in my mind.”

  We went downstairs.

  “It’s this way. Through the Great Hall.”

  “How about that wife of yours? Freda. Is she here, too?”

  “She is. And she’ll fix you a big Berlin-sized breakfast in the morning. Whatever and whenever you want.”

  The Great Hall was an oversized rectangle with a red-carpeted floor on two levels and a larger version of the hall on top of the Kehlstein. On one side was a red marble fireplace and on the northern side, the huge panoramic window. It was the sort of room where a medieval king might have given banquets and administered a rough kind of justice. Thrown a condemned man out of that window, perhaps; according to Kannenberg, the window was powered by an electric motor to wind it up and down, like a cinema screen. There was another grand piano, a huge tapestry of Frederick the Great, again, and by the window a marble-topped table and an enormous globe, which did little to assuage any fears I had about Nazi Germany’s territorial ambitions. Hitler’s devotion to the example of Frederick the Great persuaded me that he must have often stood beside that globe and wondered just where he might send Germany’s armies next. We crossed the upper level, and exited the Berghof through the winter garden which, in stark contrast to the Great Hall, looked like my late grandmother’s sitting room. Outside, on the freezing terrace, the arc lights were shining brightly and several RSD men, including Kaspel, were awaiting my arrival.

  “So,” said Kannenberg, heading straight for the low wall that bordered the terrace, “Dr. Flex was standing here, I think. Next to Brückner. One of Hitler’s adjutants.”

  “Was Brückner wearing a uniform?”

  “No. Everyone was looking at the Untersberg—that’s the mountain that can be seen on the other side of the valley. Everyone except Dr. Flex, that is. He was looking in the opposite direction. Straight up at the Hoher Göll. Like I am now.”

  “You’re sure about that, Arthur?”

  “Absolutely. I know because he was looking at me. I wasn’t really part of their discussion. I was just sort of hanging around waiting for Huber or Dimroth—he’s the head engineer from Sager & Woerner—to tell me that they were finished breakfast. Or that they were ready to go to the Platterhof. But it could just as easily have been Flex who told me. And at the moment he fell I was looking right at him as if that’s what he was going to say.”

  “So he’s taller than everyone else, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And wearing a little green Tyrolean hat. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And facing you, instead of down the valley.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re standing where?”

  Kannenberg crossed the terrace and stood in front of the winter garden’s window. “Here. Just here.”

  “Thank you, Arthur. We’ll take it from here. You go to bed, like a good fellow, and I’ll see you later on today.”

  “And if there’s time you can tell me about Berlin. I miss it sometimes.”

  “Oh, and Arthur? See if you can find me a pair of gloves. My hands are freezing.”

  I went back inside to fetch the camera from my office on the first floor where I’d left it, and then returned to the terrace where Kaspel was now smoking a cigarette. Seeing me he stubbed it out very carefully on the wall and then placed the butt in his coat pocket. I smiled and shook my head. If I hadn’t thought Hitler was crazy before coming to the Berghof, I did now. Where was the harm in a few lousy cigarettes? I took a short walk around the terrace and then came back to Kaspel.

  “Hey, I just had a thought,” Kaspel said. “If he was facing up the mountain and the shot hit him in the back of the head, then—”

  “Exactly.” I pointed into the darkness that lay beyond the terrace, to the north, toward Berchtesgaden at the bottom of the mountain. “The shooter was down there somewhere, Hermann. Not in the woods, or up there. No wonder you didn’t find anything. The shooter was never there.” I glanced around the terrace and saw a neat stack of wooden dowelling in the corner. I fetched a length and carried it to the edge of the terrace. “The question is, where exactly was he positioned? Where would a man with a rifle get the sort of cover he’d need to avoid discovery long enough to take a shot at this terrace?”

  I handed Kaspel the wooden dowelling. “Flex was taller than me. About the size of that man there.” I pointed at one of the sleepy-looking SS men awaiting our orders, who was also the tallest. “You. You’re about the same height as Flex. Come here. Come on, Germany awake, right?”

  The SS man moved smartly toward the wall.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Dornberger, sir. Walter Dornberger.”

  “Walter, I want you to take off your helmet and turn to face away from the valley. And I want you to pretend to be the man who was shot. If you don’t mind, I want to borrow your head for a moment. Hermann? You hold the dowelling in position alongside his head, where I tell you.”

  “Right you are,” said Kaspel.

  I put my finger at the bottom of the SS man’s skull. “Entry wound about here. Exit wound about six to eight centimeters higher. Perhaps more. But it’s hard to be more accurate, given the skull damage. If we had the dead man’s hat, of course, we would have an actual bullet hole, which might enable us to plot the bullet’s trajectory.”

  It was at this moment that Kannenberg returned carrying a hat with a four-cord rope band and a pin that was a fisherman’s fly. Made of green loden wool, and with a two-inch brim, the hat was heavily stained with blood. On the inside especially it looked as if someone had used it as a gravy boat. But it was quite dry and a small hole was clearly visible in the crown where the assassin’s rifle bullet had exited.

  “This is the hat,” explained Kannenberg. “I found it on the floor by the incinerator.”

  “Well done, Arthur. Now we’re getting so
mewhere.”

  This time Kannenberg waited to see what I was about to do with the SS man and the dowelling and the gnome’s hat I was holding. I pushed the dowelling through the hole and then asked the SS man if he wouldn’t mind putting the hat on his head for a moment.

  “Now, then,” I told Kaspel. “Lower the end of the dowelling a few centimeters to where we thought the bullet entered Flex’s skull. That’s it.”

  Quickly I took some photographs and then inspected both ends of the dowelling—one pointing up at the wooden balcony immediately above the terrace and the other pointing over the edge of the wall and down the valley.

  After a moment or two I removed the green hat from the SS man’s blond head and laid it on the ground.

  “Arthur? I’m going to need you to show Walter here where you found the hat. Walter? I want you to go to the incinerator, get down on your hands and knees, and see if you can’t find a spent bullet. And Arthur? I’m going to need a ladder so that I can climb up and take a closer look at that balcony.”

  “Right away, Bernie,” said Kannenberg.

  “We’re going to see if we can find the spent bullet up there in the woodwork on that balcony,” I explained. “One single silver bullet.”

  “Why silver?” asked Kaspel.

  I didn’t answer but the truth was I couldn’t see the point of anyone shooting a rifle bullet at the terrace of Hitler’s private residence unless it was made of a melted-down silver crucifix.

  SEVENTEEN

  April 1939

  We didn’t find a single bullet lodged in the woodwork of the Berghof’s second-floor balcony because by the time it was light, we’d found four of them. Before gouging out these bullets with my Boker knife I marked each of their positions with a piece of Lohmann tape and then photographed them. I was beginning to wish I’d asked for a photographer as well as a Leica, but the truth was I was hoping to pocket the Leica when the case was over and sell it when I was back in Berlin. When you’re working for people who are mostly thieves and murderers, a little of it comes off on your hands now and then.