Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  “That’s an unfortunate side effect of the magic potion,” said Kaspel. “It does give a man the point.”

  “Not me, Hermann. Karl Flex. He had a dose of jelly. Remember the Protargol? The question is, where did he get it? The jelly, I mean. If it comes to that, where did he get the Protargol?”

  “There is a place,” said Kaspel. “The P-Barracks. But it’s supposed to be under the medical supervision of a doctor from Salzburg.”

  “It’s a barrack. You mean it’s under the control of the Obersalzberg Administration?”

  Kaspel went to the drawing room door and closed it carefully.

  “Not exactly. Yes, it’s the P&Z workers who are going to the P-Barracks, yes. But I really don’t see someone like Hans Weber or Professor Fich running a bunch of whores, do you?”

  “So who then?”

  Kaspel shook his head.

  “Keep talking,” I said. “This is starting to get interesting.”

  “It’s about six kilometers from here, at the Gartenauer Insel, in Unterau, on the north bank of the River Ache. About twenty girls work there. But it’s strictly workers only, and off limits for anyone in uniform. I’m not sure if that would have included Karl Flex. I haven’t been there myself but I know some SS men in Berchtesgaden who have, if only because there’s always trouble at the P-Barracks.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The workers get drunk while they’re waiting for a particular girl. Then they fight about which girl they want and then the local SS have to restore order. It’s always busy, day and night.”

  “If the place is making two hundred marks an hour, sixteen hours a day,” said Korsch, “then that’s three thousand a day. Twenty thousand a week.”

  “Assuming that Bormann is keeping at least half—” I said.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Kaspel.

  “Are you saying he doesn’t know about it?”

  “No. From what I’ve heard it was his idea. To set the place up. But—”

  “Then perhaps it was Karl Flex who collected the cash from these girls for his master, the Lord of the Obersalzberg. As well as a little taste of what was on offer. Which in itself provides a possible motive for murder. Pimps get murdered all the time. Horst Wessel, for example. He was just an SA pimp murdered by a good friend of his whore’s landlady.”

  Kaspel was looking slightly sick.

  “True story,” I said. “Happened right on my patch, in Alexanderplatz. I helped my then boss, Chief Inspector Teichmann, crack that case. You can forget all the crap in the Nazi song. It was a simple dispute about an eighteen-year-old snapper. Wessel wasn’t much older. So that’s where we’re going next. To the P-Barracks in Unterau.” I looked around as I heard the RSD men returning the ladders outside the window. “As soon as we’ve had a look at the Villa Bechstein’s roof.”

  “I swear, you’re going to get me killed, Gunther.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just watch where you’re putting your feet. It looks slippery up there.”

  TWENTY

  April 1939

  Rolf Müller, the local roofer, was a primitive, round-shouldered, good-humored sort of fellow with a full head of reddish hair that looked dyed but probably wasn’t, glasses that were almost opaque with dirt and grime, and an abstracted manner that seemed to mark him out as one who was always alone on a rooftop. He seemed to have a propensity for conversations with himself from which he saw no reason to exclude anyone else who happened along, me included, and to this extent, he was like a character from a play by Heinrich von Kleist whose misunderstandings and detachment from reality are the stuff of comedy. Emil Jannings would have played him in a movie. His hands and face were covered in boils. He looked like a careless beekeeper.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he told me when I found him tying one of the returned ladders to the scaffolding tower. “It’s not that they’re bad. Not a bit of it. It’s just that they don’t give a second thought for anyone else. Which if they did, they wouldn’t do it in the first place, see? It comes of being in uniform, I reckon. Not that I was like that myself when I was in uniform. But it’s that particular uniform, I think. And that cap badge. The skull and crossbones. It’s just like them Prussian kings and the old-life cavalry that guarded them. Nothing mattered to those cavalrymen except the person of the emperor. It’s like they think the human part of you doesn’t matter anymore, when it does. It really does, you know.”

  Gradually I grasped that he was talking about the RSD men who’d borrowed his ladders and I offered him an apology for the inconvenience he’d suffered, not to mention a little of the money I’d had from Heydrich and a cigarette from my own case.

  “I had no idea that the ladder they’d borrow would be yours. So there’s five reichsmarks for you. And my regret for what happened this morning, Herr Müller.”

  “Thank you, sir, I’m sure, but I’d rather not have the money and not have the extra work, nor the worry, any morning. Don’t smoke. I know they’re only ladders to a man like you, sir. But without them ladders I’m stranded, see? And suppose I’d been up there when they took them? Now where would I be?”

  “Still on the roof?”

  “Exactly. Freezing up there.” He pulled a face at the very thought of the cold. “And out of business. Permanently. It’s the cold that gets you on this job. My knees are almost shot to pieces now. But for them, I could probably work for P&Z and make three times the money I make repairing roofs.”

  Eager to shut him up, I showed him my brass warrant disc, which in retrospect was a mistake as he formed the immediate impression that the missing ladders were being treated as theft by a police commissar, even though it was now obvious to us both that nothing at all had been stolen.

  “No need for any law here,” he mumbled. “The ladders are back. I wouldn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Especially with yourself, sir. I’m sure they didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “I understand that. But I need to get up onto the roof and look for something.”

  Rolf Müller eyed the rifle slung over my shoulder uncertainly.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not planning to shoot anyone. Not today.”

  “If you were, that’d be the rifle to do it with. The most successful bolt-action rifle ever made, the old G98. Saved my life on more than one occasion, that rifle.”

  “And mine. The ladders?”

  “Certainly. Always happy to help an officer of the law. I’m a good German, I am. You know, I almost became a policeman myself. But that was in Rosenheim many years ago. And I’m glad I didn’t because of Mayor Gmelch. I never liked him much. Now, Hermann Göring, he’s a different page in another book. He’s from Rosenheim. We were in the same infantry regiment, you know. Me and him. Of course I was just a ranker, but—”

  “The ladders,” I said. “Could you finish tying them onto the tower so we can climb there and take a look?”

  “I haven’t repaired the roof yet. Nor the chimney pot. It was that fearful wind the other night that brought the old one down.”

  “Just tie the ladders on, please,” insisted Kaspel. “We’re in a hurry.”

  Ten minutes later we were up on the Villa Bechstein’s rooftop, crawling carefully along a horizontal ladder that led up to the side of the dormer window on the eastern side of the house, where it had been secured earlier. A piece of old carpet was laid across several rungs near the end of the ladder and it was plain from the number of cigarette ends on the snow that the gunman had been lying there for a good while. I bagged a few just to impress Kaspel. And then I spotted another empty brass 8 mm cartridge. I bagged that, too.

  Even without binoculars I could clearly make out the Berghof terrace. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and put my eye behind the sights, and the crosshairs on the head of the SS man I’d used as a head model. I was never a great shot with a rifle, but with a
sniper’s scope on a G98 and five bullets in the stripper clip this was a shot even I could have made. It always gives me a strange feeling to get a bead on a man through a rifle scope. Couldn’t pull the trigger on a fellow like that, myself. Even a Tommy. Too much like murder. I wasn’t the only person who felt that way: snipers and flamethrower operators—in the trenches, they were always singled out for special treatment when they were captured.

  “Did you warn everyone what’s about to happen?” I asked Kaspel.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Right, then.”

  I opened the breech on the Mauser, thumbed the clip down the way I’d done a thousand times before, and pushed a live round up the spout. Then I pointed the rifle straight up at the Bavarian blue sky and pulled the trigger five times. The Mauser Gewehr 98 was a nice smooth weapon and an accurate one, too, but quiet it wasn’t, especially with a whole mountain range to bounce the sound off. You might just as well have tried to ignore the crack of doom.

  “Hard not to hear that,” said Kaspel.

  “Exactly.”

  We came back down the ladders with the optimistic aim of questioning Rolf Müller again and found him still talking, as if our previous conversation hadn’t actually ended.

  “Johann. Johann Lochner. That was his name. Been trying to remember it. He was shot through the lungs. This mate of mine in the trenches. With a Gewehr rifle. They say there’s another war on the way but I reckon people would be a lot less keen on one if they saw what a rifle bullet that’s moving at the speed of sound can do to a man. The mess it can make. They should have to see a man drowning in his own blood, the politicians, before they start another.”

  It was hard to argue with that, so I nodded sadly and let him go on in this vein for another minute before I drew him back to the events of the day before.

  “Why didn’t you come yesterday?” I asked.

  “I told Herr Winkelhof about that. In advance. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know. He did. You ask him.”

  “Just answer the question, please,” said Kaspel.

  “I had a doctor’s appointment. I’ve got this back, you see. And these knees. That’s a lifetime of building work for you. Anyway, I wanted the doctor to give me some painkillers. For the pain.”

  “And who else did you tell that you weren’t coming yesterday?”

  “Herr Winkelhof. He knew I wasn’t coming. I did tell him.”

  “Yes,” I said, patiently. “But who else? Your wife, perhaps?”

  “Not married, sir. Never met the right woman. Or the wrong one, neither, depending on how you look at it.”

  “Then you were in the beer house,” I said.

  “Yes, sir. How did you know?”

  “It was just a guess,” I said, eyeing his considerable belly. “Which beer house was that, Herr Müller?”

  “The Hofbräuhaus, sir. On Bräuhausstrasse. Nice place. Very friendly. You should try it while you’re visiting down here. From wherever it is you’re from.”

  “Were there many people in there that night?”

  “Oh yes, sir. Berchtesgadener beer is the best in Bavaria, sir. You ask anyone.”

  “So someone could easily have overheard you saying that you weren’t going to work the next day.”

  “Easily, sir. And they wouldn’t have to try too hard to hear me, neither. I’m not what you’d call a closemouthed man. Especially with a pot of beer in my hand. I like to talk.”

  “I noticed that.”

  I thought carefully about asking the next question, and then asked it anyway. Lesson one of Liebermann von Sonnenberg’s famous book on how to be a detective is that you have to learn patience; at the very least you needed to be very patient to finish that book without throwing it at him. Certainly the Nazis thought so, which is why he was now serving, obscurely, in the Gestapo.

  “Are any of those people handy with a rifle?”

  “Everyone around here likes to hunt now and then. Ibex, chamois, red deer, roe deer, marmot, capercaillie, a few wild pigs—there’s lots to shoot for the pot around here. Not that we’re allowed much, these days. Best shooting’s up here.”

  “And when it’s not for the pot? Have any of them expressed an interest in shooting at men?”

  Müller’s eyes moved to the side like a guilty hound; he stared at the ground for a moment and shook his head silently. It was the silence that surprised me, not him denying that he knew anything.

  “You know the sort of thing I’m talking about,” I said. “I’d like to shoot that Fritz, or I wish someone would put a bullet in this fellow’s head. The sort of thing that sounds like an idle threat over a few beers and that no one takes seriously until someone actually stops being idle and goes and does it.”

  Müller shrugged and shook his head again. For a man who liked to talk, especially to himself—when you’re a self-employed roofer, who else is going to answer?—and who’d already talked a great deal, his silence was the most eloquent thing he’d said all morning. This was the kind of detail that von Sonnenberg should have put in his book, the sort of thing detectives get a nose for. If he didn’t know exactly who had taken a shot at Flex, then almost certainly he knew lots of people who’d like to have done so.

  “All right,” I said. “That’s all. Thanks for your help, Herr Müller.”

  “By the way,” said Kaspel, “did the doctor sort you out? Your knees, or your back, or whatever it was that took you there?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s a good doctor, that Dr. Brandt.”

  I looked at Kaspel. Brandt wasn’t exactly an uncommon name in Germany. Nevertheless I felt obliged to ask the obvious question. Sometimes they’re the best ones.

  “That wouldn’t be Dr. Karl Brandt, would it?”

  “I don’t know his first name, sir. Young fellow. Handsome, with it. Married to a champion swimmer, he is. Not that there’s much swimming round here in the winter, mind. But there is in summer. The Königssee is a lovely place to swim. Cold though. Even in August, it’s cold. That’s glacier water, you see. Like swimming in the ice age.”

  “You mean the Dr. Karl Brandt who’s in the SS, don’t you?” said Kaspel.

  “That’s right, sir. The Leader’s doctor. When the Leader’s not here Dr. Brandt runs a clinic out of the local theater in Antenberg. Keep his hand in, he says. Likes to give something back to the community for its hospitality. Very popular with local people, he is. They both are, him and the wife. Although they’re not from round here. He’s from Mulhouse, I believe, which is as good as being French, in my book. Not that I hold that against the doctor, since he is, quite obviously, thoroughly and completely German, through and through.”

  Kaspel and I walked back to the front door of the Villa Bechstein.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “About Brandt, I mean.”

  “I thought so, too. But I don’t see him crawling around that rooftop in the snow. Do you?”

  Leaving the rifle in the hallway, we returned to the car just as a gardener turned up and started to take some tools out of his van. I closed my eyes and put my ear into the cold air. All I could hear was nature’s lingering mountain silence, a persistent and very audible hush, which felt more like the subaural gasp of thousands of tiny Alpine tumults and commotions.

  “It’s so very still in this place,” I said. “So very quiet after Berlin, don’t you think?” I shrugged. “I guess I’m just a city boy through and through. Every so often I like to hear a tram bell and a taxi engine. Reminds me I’m actually alive. Up here on Hitler’s mountain—well, you might easily forget something important like that.”

  “You get used to it. But I guess that’s why the Leader likes it so much.”

  “Strange that it should be so quiet and yet no one heard five shots fired from a G98. I can’t figure that at all.”

  Meanwhile, the gardener had laid a big log onto a
sawhorse near the bottom of the ladder and was now filling a chain saw with gasoline.

  “You the gardener here?” I asked the man before he started the chain saw.

  “One of them. Head gardener is Herr Bühler.”

  “Do you cut logs with that every morning?”

  “Have to. They burn a lot of wood in that house. Maybe fifteen or twenty baskets a day.”

  “That much?”

  “At this time of year, I’m cutting logs almost every day.”

  “And always with that?”

  “The Festo? Absolutely. From my point of view this is the best thing a German ever invented. I’d be lost without this machine.”

  “And here? On this same spot?”

  He pointed at the pile of logs. “This is where the wood is.”

  “Rolf Müller, the roofer,” I said. “How well do you know him?”

  The gardener grinned sheepishly. “Well enough to start this chain saw when I see him coming. I’m not much for talking myself. But Rolf—he does like to talk. Only, it’s a little hard to know about what, sometimes.”

  “True. Have you ever seen anyone other than Rolf Müller up on that roof?”

  “No, sir. Never.”

  We watched the gardener start the chain saw. It sounded exactly like the Alba 200 motorcycle I’d owned just after I got married. And was probably every bit as dangerous.

  “Maybe there’s the reason nobody heard anything, right there,” shouted Kaspel.

  “Maybe,” I said, and took a deep breath. I felt as if I had a chain saw revving impatiently in my chest. That was the methamphetamine. The dry mountain cold was easier to ignore.

  TWENTY-ONE

  October 1956

  After a poor night’s sleep I awoke beside a silent guard of swaying poplars, unnourished, light-headed, and ravenously hungry. I was as cold and stiff as an English princess who believes she might be head-over-heels in love with someone other than herself. I tried a few shoulder stretches and succeeded only in making my half-strangled neck sore. I ought to have felt a little more hope for the day on seeing the sun rise above the misty fields of open countryside, I suppose, but I didn’t. Instead, at that early waking hour I was one of the undead, the outlawed, the damned; but I had only myself to blame for that. I would surely have been in England by now if I’d gone along with Mielke’s plan. So I started up the Citroën and drove on for about an hour until, in a little town called Tournus, I saw a café and a tabac that were opening up. I stopped the car beside a malodorous public lavatory, where I washed and shaved, and bought a couple of French newspapers and a packet of Camels before heading next door for a coffee and a croissant and a smoke. I was becoming more French than I might ever have believed possible. It was a sunny morning so nobody was paying much attention to me or my sunglasses, or my grimy shirt; this was provincial France after all, where grimy shirts are the prevailing style. But I’d already made page three of France Dimanche. I suppose there wasn’t yet another breathless story they could print that week about Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim getting a divorce. God might have created woman. Monsieur Vadim had merely tried his best to make her happy. I could have told him not to bother. Gentlemen prefer blondes but blondes don’t know what they prefer until they get a strong sense that they’re not going to get it. The next best thing to Bardot and Vadim’s matrimonial convulsions was a double murder on the Blue Train between Nice and Marseilles, and that was me. I had to hand it to Friedrich Korsch. It had been inspired of my former criminal assistant to kill the train guard as well as Gene Kelly. I hadn’t seen that coming. Now the French police had an even better reason to look for me other than one dead German tourist called Holm Runge, which seemed to be the dead Stasi man’s real name—the man I’d battered on the head. The French police prefer to investigate murder when it involves their own citizens; they like to take things personally. According to the paper, the police were anxious to speak to a man called Walter Wolf in connection with the murders. Formerly a hotel concierge on the Riviera, he was also known as Bertolt Gründgens, which was of course the name in my shiny new passport. The man was believed to be armed and dangerous, and German. The police would probably like that, too.