Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  The police gave a pretty good description, including the dark glasses I was wearing. Of Bernie Gunther there was no mention; then again, Bernie Gunther didn’t have any papers, so I was hardly likely to be using that name. The newspaper story didn’t have my picture but it did print the license plate of my motorcar, which meant that I would certainly have to ditch the Citroën, and soon. I thought that if I could drive as far as Dijon, which was another hundred kilometers to the north, then, in a proper city like that, I might get a bus or a train somewhere else heading northeast, perhaps even to Germany. At that hour I had good reason to hope that the police in that sleepy part of France might still be having a coffee and cigarette themselves. Even so, I thought it probably wiser to stay off the quicker N7 and so chose the more scenic D974 through Chagny and Beaune to take me into Dijon. This was the heart of France’s Burgundy region, where some of the finest wines in the world are made, not to mention some of the most expensive ones. Erich Mielke had certainly appreciated them back at the Hotel Ruhl in Nice. I didn’t intend to stop before Djion but in Nuits-Saint-Georges, I saw a pharmacy and, because my eyes were hurting so much, I stopped to buy some collyrium. A bottle of red Burgundy might have done me a bit more good; at least it would have matched my eyes.

  In the car, I used the eyewash and was about to drive away when I noticed the gendarme in my rearview mirror; he was walking slowly toward my car and it was obvious he was going to speak to me. I paused. The worst thing to do would be to start the engine and drive away quickly. Cops don’t like squealing tires—it makes them think you’ve got something to hide—and the gun in the glove box was not an option. So I sat there as coolly as I could manage, given that I was now a wanted man, and waited for him to reach my window. I wound it down and looked up as best as I was able as the cop bent down.

  “You see that sign?”

  “Er no, I had something in my eye and stopped so that I could get some eyewash in that pharmacy.” I showed him the bottle of collyrium to substantiate my story.

  “If you’d read that sign, sir, you’d know that this street is less than ten meters wide. Which means that since your car has an odd-numbered license plate you can only park here on an odd-numbered date. Today’s the eighteenth of October. That’s an even date.”

  As a policeman I’d been obliged to enforce some stupid, arbitrary laws in my time—in Germany it was strictly forbidden to deny a chimney sweep access to your house, and you could be arrested for tuning your piano at night—but this seemed like such an absurd system of parking that I almost laughed in the flic’s face. Instead I apologized in my best French accent and explained that I was just about to move the car anyway. And with that I was on my way once more, although now very much aware that my French accent was not nearly as good as I supposed, and that it would probably not be long before the gendarme connected me and the sight of my sore eyes with the fugitive German murderer from the famous Blue Train. When it wants to be, the organization of the French police is superb; after all, there are so many of them. Sometimes it seems that there are more policemen in the French Republic than there are nobles and hereditary titles. And I didn’t underestimate their capacity to catch a wanted German fugitive, only their capacity to catch any wanted Vichy war criminals. Always supposing that such men, and women, ever existed, of course. So I turned the car around and, in full sight of the gendarme, drove south out of Nuits-Saint-Georges, before finding another way to head north again.

  About ten kilometers farther on, in Gevrey-Chambertin, I saw a sign for the local railway station and finally abandoned the car in a gentle grove of beech trees on the strangely named Rue Aquatique. The road extended for at least a kilometer through a very dry-looking vineyard and couldn’t have looked less aquatic if it had led through the Ténéré desert. I might have parked in front of the station, but I didn’t want to make it too easy for the police to follow my trail. So, carrying my holdall and following the sign, I walked west, beyond another large vineyard. It was an oddly depressing landscape. It was hard to believe that such a place could give birth to so much liquid luxury. Gevrey-Chambertin was just endless vineyards and an even more endless expanse of clouds and blue sky punctuated by the occasional black squiggle that was a bird; it didn’t make me want to set up an easel to paint a picture of my place in the world, just shoot myself. No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there’s nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.

  The sun went behind some clouds and it began to rain gently. I bought a ticket for Dijon and sat on the empty platform. The station looked like it hadn’t changed since the First Republic. Even the washing hanging limply on the line outside the kitchen door looked as if it had been there awhile. At least the trains were moving. Several of them roared through the tiny station before finally one stopped and I boarded it. And only now did I perceive the enormous handicap that was my own appearance, whose reflection I’d started to examine critically in the carriage window. If there is one thing that nature abhors more than a vacuum it’s a man wearing sunglasses indoors or when it’s raining. If I kept the glasses on I looked like the invisible man, only a little less inconspicuous. If I took them off I looked like the creature from the black lagoon but only after he’d pulled a long night on the shorts. The other people on the train were already giving me those sideways glances reserved for the recently bereaved or men who belong in a Nuremberg courtroom dock alongside Hermann Göring. After a while I decided to take them off—maybe a little extra light would be good for the whites of my eyes; it couldn’t do them any harm. I lit a cigarette and let the smoke gently soothe my fraying nerves. I think I even tried to smile at a stout woman with a snot-nosed child who was seated on the opposite side of the aisle. She didn’t smile back, but then if I’d had a child who looked like hers I wouldn’t have smiled much myself. They say your children are your real future; if that was so I didn’t give much for her chances.

  Trying to look on the bright side of things, I told myself that not driving the car anymore would give my neck and shoulders a much-needed break—that I might start to feel normal again and I’d be able to rest my eyes. I closed them, and for once they didn’t hurt. I even managed to doze off in the thirty minutes it took for that little train to crawl into Dijon and I awoke feeling almost refreshed. At the very least it was the best I’d felt since jumping off the train in Saint-Raphaël. This feeling did not last, however. As soon as I got off the train and entered the main entrance hall I saw several policemen, more than seemed normal even in France, and I was very glad I’d removed my sunglasses which, under the shade of the dirty glass roof, would certainly have marked me out as someone suspicious. But they weren’t interested in people arriving off the local trains; they seemed to be grouped near the platforms for trains arriving from Lyon and trains departing for Strasbourg. It was a good call and one I’d probably have made myself if I’d been with the French police: Strasbourg was just a couple of hours away, and only a few kilometers from the German border—given the impending Treaty of Rome, perhaps even closer than that—and probably where any sensible German fugitive now in Dijon would have headed.

  It had stopped raining, so I went outside and sat in the park opposite the station while I tried to calculate my next step. A tramp was seated on a nearby bench and he served to remind me once more that if I was to move freely among law-abiding men I would have to look like one first, which meant I needed something to make my eyes appear to be the eyes of someone respectable. So I changed into my only clean shirt and walked south for a while on Rue Nodot until I came to an optician’s shop. I thought for a moment and then went and found the tramp again, and offered him two hundred francs to help me out. Then I put my sunglasses on and returned to the shop on the Rue Nodot.

  The optician was a smiling, benign sort of man, whose arms were too short for his otherwise neat, buttoned white cotton jacket. The glasses he was wearing on the end of his nose were rimless and almost invisible, quite t
he opposite effect from the one I was hoping to achieve. There was a light smell of antiseptic in the air, which the hyacinth on the marble mantelpiece was doing its drooping best to dispel.

  “I’ve lost my glasses,” I explained. “And I need a replacement pair as soon as possible. All I have are these prescription sunglasses without which I’d be quite short-sighted, I’m afraid. But I can’t keep walking around with these on, and in this weather.” I smiled. “Perhaps you could show me some frames.”

  “Yes, of course. What kind of style were you looking for, monsieur?”

  “I prefer a heavy frame. Much like these sunglasses of mine. Yes, I think I’d like to have tortoiseshell or black, if you have them.”

  The optician—Monsieur Tilden—smiled back and opened several drawers that were full of dark-framed glasses. It was like looking into Groucho’s bedside table.

  “These are all heavier frames,” he said, selecting a pair, cleaning them quickly with a green cloth, and then handing them to me. “Try these on.”

  They were exactly like my own sunglasses, except that they were filled with plain glass, and hence perfect in every way for my present needs. I turned to the mirror and swapped them for my sunglasses, careful not to let Monsieur Tilden see my bloodshot eyes. The frames were perfect. Now all I had to do was steal them. It was at this point, right on cue, that my accomplice came lurching through the shop door.

  “I think I need some spectacles,” he said biliously. “My eyes are not what they were. Can’t see straight. Leastways, not when I’m sober.” For a moment he studied the Snellen eye chart as if it were a language he could speak fluently, and then he belched quietly. A strong smell of cider and perhaps something worse filled the shop and even the hyacinth looked like it was about to admit defeat. “I like to read the newspaper, you see. To keep myself informed about what is happening in this benighted world of ours.”

  The tramp was not someone the poor optician considered to be a likely customer but in the time it took Monsieur Tilden to persuade the man to leave, I’d swapped the frames I’d selected for my own sunglasses, closed the drawer from which they came, apologized, and then left—as if driven away by the tramp’s ripe smell. I walked back to the park, where several minutes later the tramp returned to receive the second half of his fee, and my thanks.

  At another shop I bought a beret to help cover my head of thinning blond hair and, within just a few minutes, I managed to make myself look like a real Franzi. All I needed now was to neglect my personal hygiene, and to obtain a service medal for a war I hadn’t fought in.

  I walked back to the train station and, from a safe distance, kept a watchful eye on the Strasbourg train platform. The cops were checking everyone’s identity and even with a beret and glasses it seemed unlikely I could slip through a cordon like that. I didn’t doubt that the same level of security would be present in Strasbourg itself. But it took only a minute or two to figure out a way around the French police check: to my surprise there was no police check on trains leaving Dijon for Chaumont, which is about an hour farther north. Why not go there? I thought. And then take another train on to Nancy, from where I might hitch a ride to the German border somewhere near Saarbrücken? I daresay that in 1940 it took Hitler not much longer than a minute or two to figure out that it was simply easier to go around the back of the Maginot Line than through the front of it. It seems obvious now. Frankly, it seemed obvious then. But that’s the French for you. Adorable. I went to the ticket office and bought a ticket on the next local train bound for Chaumont.

  TWENTY-TWO

  April 1939

  “If the gardener was cutting wood with that chain saw,” I said, “and that was what covered up the sound of the shots, then would the shooter have risked him seeing the rifle when he came back down from the Villa Bechstein roof?”

  Kaspel was driving us to the P-Barracks, at the Gartenauer Insel, in Unterau. He shook his head.

  “It’s not the sort of thing you could fail to notice,” admitted Kaspel. “Equally, the gardener would surely have noticed someone other than Rolf Müller coming down from that roof. That’s what he said. Unless they’re in it together.”

  “No. I can’t believe that, either.”

  “You sound very sure about that. Why?”

  “You get a feel for these things, Hermann. Neither man was particularly nervous about answering our questions. Most of the witnesses I ever questioned, I knew within seconds if they were on the level or not. Didn’t you?”

  “You’re the commissar, not me.”

  “A man can go from being an innocent witness to being your number one suspect in the space of five seconds. Even Doctor Jekyll couldn’t manage a transformation that fast.” I shook my head. “I’d have left the rifle up on the roof. And just made my escape. For all we know he’s across the border by now and hiding somewhere in Austria. Besides, you said the RSD searched almost everyone in the vicinity immediately after the shooting. If they had found someone with a rifle they’d have arrested him and I wouldn’t be enjoying this mountain air.”

  “But if he’d left the rifle up on the roof of the Villa Bechstein, we’d have found it. And we didn’t. Just the shooter’s used brass.”

  “Then maybe he tossed it off the villa’s roof, into the woods. And picked it up later. Or maybe it’s buried in a snowdrift. Or—or, I don’t know.”

  “In which case we should probably organize a search of the Villa Bechstein’s grounds. I’ll sort it out the minute we come back from Unterau.” Kaspel paused. “Why are we going to the P-Barracks anyway? The girls are all French and Italian. Not to mention the fact that they’re whores. They’re not going to tell us a damn thing.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But let me and Heydrich’s money do the talking. Besides, I like talking to whores. Most of them have the kind of degree that you can’t get from the Humboldt University of Berlin.”

  At the foot of the mountain we turned right toward the Austrian border and Salzburg, and drove north along a flat road that always stayed close to the course of the River Ache, meandering through a giant landscape designed by God to make a man—most men, anyway—feel small and insignificant. Maybe that’s why men build churches; God must seem a little friendlier and more likely to listen to prayers in a nice warm church than on top of a cold jagged mountain. Besides, a church is a lot easier to get to on a winter’s Sunday morning. Unless you’re Hitler, of course. The air was a curious mixture of wood smoke and hops from the chimney of the Hofbräuhaus, which we soon passed on our left. A collection of large yellow buildings with green shutters and proud red-and-blue banners—none of them Nazi—it looked more like the headquarters of some rival political party than the local brewery, although in Germany beer is more than just politics, it’s a religion. My kind of religion, anyway.

  “Another thing. Rolf Müller. My guess is that he’s heard people in that beer house wishing Bormann and some of his men dead on several occasions before. And he just didn’t want to say who they were. Men who might also have overheard him mentioning his doctor’s appointment.”

  “Then it was lucky it was you who was questioning him and not Rattenhuber or Högl, otherwise right now they’d be trying to beat some names out of him in the cells underneath the Türken Inn.”

  “That’s the former hotel between Hitler’s house and Bormann’s—where the local RSD is garrisoned, right?”

  “Right. I’ve got a desk there. But I prefer to stay as far away from Bormann as possible.”

  “Would they really do that? I mean, beat some names out of him?”