Prussian Blue
Page 20
I cycled through the evening and into the night, but not very used to the effort of it, I managed only about fifteen kilometers an hour. Being a schoolboy with a bicycle never felt so strenuous; then again, Berlin is very flat and a perfect place to cycle anywhere, as long as it’s near Berlin. Before the war you could go for kilometer after kilometer without encountering so much as a bump in the road.
At nine o’clock it was too dark to travel any farther and, in a crummy little village called Château-Salins, I finally had to admit my exhaustion and stop to give my eyes and my backside a rest. I regarded the pink Hotel de Ville next to the town hall on Rue de Nancy with longing, imagining the excellent dinner and the soft bed I might have enjoyed there, but I would have been required to show them an identity card or a passport and I was keen to avoid leaving any kind of a paper trail that the French police—and by extension the Stasi—could pick up. I wheeled the heavy Lapierre through the streets until, on the tattered edge of town, I saw a field covered with hay bales in the moonlight, and I learned that they had a soft bed free for the night that did not require me to show any identification at all. And there, in hay still warm from the heat of the day and with only a few insects for company, I ate the bread and cheese I’d bought in Chaumont—I even ate a raw onion, too—drank a bottle of beer, smoked my last Camel, and slept as well as any man ever slept who had no job, no home, no friends, no wife, nor any notion of a future. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
TWENTY-SIX
April 1939
When I returned to the Berghof from the Villa Bechstein I discovered another loud argument in progress—this one between Arthur Kannenberg, the house manager, and a voice that Hermann Kaspel quickly identified as belonging to Hitler’s local adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner. They were in the Great Hall at the time but the main door was open and from where we were standing, on the stairway immediately above, we could hear almost every bitter word. The Great Hall’s double-height ceiling made certain of that. I daresay it was an excellent room for a piano recital or even a small opera by Wagner, assuming there is such a thing, but this was already quite a performance. It seemed that Brückner was a ladies’ man, and Kannenberg, who was unprepossessing to say the least, suspected the handsome officer of making a pass at his wife, Freda, in the winter garden, which seemed unlikely to anyone who’d seen Freda, or for that matter the winter garden: it was freezing in there.
“You stay away from her, do you hear?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If you have a question about the running of this house, you come to me, not her. She’s had enough of your filthy remarks.”
“Like what? What am I supposed to have said?”
“You know damn well, Brückner. How you’re not getting enough in the bedroom department.”
“I don’t have to answer your filthy accusations,” shouted Brückner. “Besides, no one gets more out of this place than you, Kannenberg. Everyone knows that you’re making a very nice kickback on all of the food and beverage that comes into this house.”
“That’s a damn lie,” said Kannenberg.
“You’re a lousy crook. Everyone knows that. Even the Leader. You think he doesn’t notice? He knows all your little scams. How you charge some of his guests for late-night room service. Or a packet of sneaky cigarettes. Hitler just turns a blind eye for now. But it won’t always be like that.”
“This is very rich coming from someone whose girlfriend had to be compensated by the Leader to the tune of forty thousand reichmarks because you refused to marry her. And if that wasn’t bad enough, everyone knows you put pressure on poor Sophie to give you half that money, to help pay your debts.”
“That money was for some hand-painted ceramics she did, which were a gift for Eva.”
“Forty thousand seems like a lot of money for a coffee service and some oven tiles.”
“To an uncultured oaf like you, perhaps. But those ceramics were a private commission from Adolf Hitler himself. Sophie did give me some money afterwards, but it was in repayment of an old debt incurred after the car accident when I paid all of her medical bills.”
“An accident that would never have happened if you hadn’t been drunk. You can be sure the Leader knows that, too, Brückner.”
“I expect it was you who told him.”
“No, actually, I think it was Sophie Stork herself. She’s none too fond of you since she found out you tried to screw the local mayor’s sister. Not to mention the gamekeeper’s wife, Mrs. Geiger. And Mrs. Högl. I bet that every woman on this mountain has an interesting tale about your wandering hands.”
“Every woman except your wife. That ought to tell you something, you fat little swine.”
“You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns out that the person who shot Karl Flex was really aiming at you, Brückner. He was standing right next to you, after all. There must be a lot of men in Berchtesgaden who would pay to see you dead. Me included.”
“But there’s just one wife who’d like to see you dead, I expect, Kannenberg.”
“This is interesting,” observed Kaspel. “And just when we thought we had a good motive, too.”
“The dead are usually better off than the poor bastards they leave behind,” I said. “With any homicide it’s not just the victim who gets killed. Plenty of reputations get murdered, too.”
“Just stay away from Freda,” shouted Kannenberg. “If you know what’s good for you.”
“That sounds like a threat,” said Brückner.
“It’s our job, Hermann,” I added. “To murder reputations. To turn everything upside down. And not to give a damn how much damage we cause so long as we catch the killer. It used to be that catching the killer was all that mattered. These days, most of the time, it really doesn’t matter at all.”
“You go near her again, Brückner, and I’ll tell your current girlfriend just what kind of movies it was you used to make when you were at film school in Munich.”
“You know, Hermann, I wish I had five marks for every time I’ve finished an investigation having come to the conclusion that the dead man had it coming and the murderer was actually a decent sort of fellow. And I expect that’s what’s going to happen here.”
“You’re a swine,” said Brückner. “I pity Freda, having to be married to a prick like you, Kannenberg. It’s just as well you play the accordion because I don’t see you amusing her in any useful husbandly way.”
“Your days as an adjutant are numbered on this mountain. You may have stood beside Hitler in the beginning—”
“That’s right, Kannenberg. Since before the Munich putsch. Can you say the same? You should always remember the saying: ‘He who is close to the Leader cannot be a bad person.’”
“Maybe so. But he now regards you as a liability. I’d be very surprised if you last another summer up here. It’s not like we’re about to run short of SS adjutants.”
“If I do go, you can be sure I’ll take you down with me, Kannenberg. It might almost be worth it, just to see your ugly face when you fall.”
With this remark the argument ended, although it was unclear exactly why. Maybe they remembered the secret microphones. We heard footsteps in the entrance hall and quickly made ourselves scarce, although not before discovering that many others in the Berghof had also been shamelessly eavesdropping. Our excuse was better perhaps; cops are paid to be nosy. For everyone else it was just a bit of entertainment because there is nothing in life quite as entertaining as other peoples’ pain.
We went into my first-floor-bedroom office and closed the door so that if either man came to look for us, we might pretend to have heard nothing. I fed some wood into the green-tiled stove and warmed my hands. I was feeling the chill after listening to Brückner and Kannenberg at each other’s throats.
“No love lost there,” observed Kaspel.
I went back to the table and picked up one of two envelopes I’d found addressed to me, removing the sheet of paper inside and reading what was handwritten there.
“With five shots fired,” said Kaspel, “and four that missed, maybe the killer was aiming for Wilhelm Brückner. I’m sure the oil filter on the end of the barrel can hardly have helped with the shooter’s accuracy.”
“And if not Brückner then perhaps someone else, someone other than Flex. Why not, indeed? I certainly don’t think that Bruno Schenk is about to win any popularity contests. For that matter, I doubt any of his colleagues are. You know, maybe it really didn’t matter who he shot as long as he shot someone on that terrace. Have you thought about that? This is the list of names I asked Schenk to compile at breakfast. People that Bormann’s cack-handed lackeys have managed to seriously upset since the great Leader made Obersalzberg his Alpine home away from home. There are over thirty names written here, along with the various reasons they might bear a grudge.” My eyes alighted on one particular name. “Including Rolf Müller, our witless roofing contractor at the Villa Bechstein.”
“You’re joking.”
I handed Kaspel the sheet of paper.
“I wish I was. It seems he had a small cottage behind what is now Göring’s adjutants’ house, and was none too happy when it was forcibly acquired for less than its market value. Even uttered a few half threats. Frankly, I’m a little surprised that Schenk could make sense of anything that man said.”
“Müller must have had plenty of opportunity,” said Kaspel. “But somehow I don’t see him as a killer.”
“Sometimes opportunity is all it takes to make a man into an assassin. Being in the right place at the right time, with a gun. Which is probably why Bormann forbids guns at the Berghof, at least when Hitler’s here.”
The telephone rang and while Kaspel answered it I started to search the chintzy room. Behind the chintzy curtains, underneath the chintzy cushions and the chintzy chairs, even up on the wrought-iron chandelier with its chintzy lampshades. Everything about that room resembled the parlor of an old lady suffering from green color blindness; it was like being inside a bottle of Chartreuse. It took only a minute or two to find but, having been warned by Heydrich and then Kaspel that the house was wired for sound, I knew what I was looking for. Behind a small drawing of Hitler on the chintzy wall was a dull metallic microphone. It was about the size of the mouthpiece in a telephone. I left the microphone in place, but it was easily disconnected from the power supply and rendered harmless. I looked for some more but found only the one and concluded that one per room was probably enough for any surveillance team to manage. Especially a team of eavesdroppers already deafened and blinded by all that chintz.
When after several minutes Kaspel finished his call, he said, “I wish you hadn’t done that. If a man knows always to check what he says, then he can’t go wrong. But if we think we can speak freely in here, we might just do the same somewhere else, and then where will we be? I’ll tell you where. In jail.”
“Sorry, but I can’t do this any other way, Hermann. When our job is to look for the truth, it strikes me as odd that we daren’t speak it in the very place where we’re working. Who was on the phone?”
“The Munich Gestapo. The local photographer, Johann Brandner, the one who used to have a business up here on the mountain? The poor bastard who was sent to Dachau when he complained about the compulsory purchase of his premises? He was released a month ago and is now living in Salzburg. Coincidence, or what?”
“His name is also here.” I showed him Schenk’s list.
Kaspel glanced over the contents and nodded. “It seems he didn’t always have an eye just for shooting a good picture. According to the Gestapo, before he was a photographer he was a Jäger with a Shützen battalion in the Bavarian Third Corps. A sharpshooter, no less.”
“I hate to say it, but we’d better have the Salzburg Gestapo check if he’s still at his last known address. I think we just found our number one suspect, Hermann. I don’t believe in coincidence very much.”
“Yes, boss.” He pointed at the first name on the list. “Hey, wait a minute. Schuster-Winkelhof,” he said. “Isn’t that the name of the butler at the Villa Bechstein—Herr Winkelhof?”
“Yes, it is,” I said unhappily. “Frankly, I’m a little surprised that your own name isn’t on that list.”
“It does seem fairly comprehensive. I think thirty names is almost half of all the people in Obersalzberg who were dispossessed of their homes. Conducting interviews, checking out alibis—this is going to take us forever.”
“That’s why we got the Pervitin. So it won’t take as long as that. Or if it does, then perhaps we won’t notice.” I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get a break. With the serial number on that Mannlicher. Or those field glasses. Did you take a look at them? They’re good ones. Ten by fifty. He probably used them to spot his target first. A good sniper always uses field glasses.”
“Any prints?”
“I already checked. There’s nothing. He wore gloves. I’m sure of it. Wouldn’t you? It’s cold on the villa’s rooftop.”
Kaspel opened the webbing case and took out the binoculars. “Serial number 121519. Made by Friedrich Busch, of Rathenow.”
“It’s a small town west of Berlin that’s famous for its optical instruments. Anyway, Korsch is checking these and the carbine.”
“Can you trust him? In general. I mean, do you think he’s a spy?”
“I trust him. As far as something like that goes. Friedrich is a good man. But tell me about the oil filter sound suppressor. You said you’d seen one before.”
“It was actually a fellow called Johannes Geiger who told me about it. Said he’d seen a rifle adapted like that once. In the forest underneath the Kehlstein. Abandoned next to the carcass of a dead deer. Must have been a poacher. But we never managed to find out who actually owned it.”
“Johannes Geiger,” I said.
“Yes, he’s actually called the chief hunter, but everyone calls him the gamekeeper. Mostly he shoots the local cats. At least the ones that stray into the Leader’s Territory. Hitler hates cats, on account of the fact that they hunt the local birds. Which he loves, of course.”
“Thus the ornithologist.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t tell me Geiger’s name is on that list, too.”
“No. But the initials JG are marked on the inside of the lid of that binoculars case.”
“So they are.”
“Didn’t Arthur Kannenberg just accuse Brückner of trying to screw the gamekeeper’s wife?”
“Yes, he did.” Kaspel shook his head and tried to stifle a yawn. “I feel exhausted just thinking about all this. It’s at times like these I realize I was never much of a detective. Not like you, Gunther. I didn’t have the patience for it. I think I’m going to need some more magic potion.”
I tossed him my tube of Pervitin. He took two tablets, broke them into a fine white powder with the butt of his gun, and sucked it up with a rolled banknote into one nostril and then the other. As before he spent the next minute or two stalking noisily around the room, rubbing his nose and punching the air and blinking furiously.
“Christ, I can’t believe we’re here, in Hitler’s own house,” Kaspel said. “The fucking Berghof. That his study is just across the hall. I mean, Jesus Christ, Gunther. Talk about sacred ground. I mean, we should pull off our shoes or something.” It was almost as much of a performance as the one we’d overheard in the Great Hall.
“Being RSD I’d have thought you’d been in here before, Hermann.”
“What gave you that idea? No, it’s only Rattenhuber or Högl who ever get to come into the Berghof. They’re Bavarians, you see. It’s only Bavarians that Hitler really trusts.
Rattenhuber is from Munich. And Högl is from Dingolfing. I don’t know where Brückner is from. But he was in a Bavarian infantry regiment. Hitler hates Berliners. Doesn’t trust them. Thinks they’re all reds, so it’s just as well he’s not going to meet you, Gunther. It’s people like you who give us Berliners a bad name. No, this is the first time I’ve ever been through the front door of this house.”
“Help yourself to a souvenir, if you see one, Hermann. Take that crappy watercolor that was on the wall, if you like. I certainly shan’t tell anyone.”
“Aren’t you even a little bit impressed by the fact that you’re here?”
“Sure.” I picked up the Leica and took his picture. “If I were any more impressed with being in this place I’d take off like a hot air balloon and not land until they shot me down over Paris.”
“You’re a sarcastic bastard, you know that?”
“I thought you knew that. I’m from Berlin.”
“Do you want me to take a picture of you?” he asked.
“No, thanks. I’m hoping to forget that I was ever here. It already seems like a bad dream. But then, so does everything else that’s happened since we strolled into the Sudetenland.”
Kaspel wet his finger, wiped away the remains of the powdered Pervitin, and then licked it slowly.
“Do you always take it like that?” I asked him. “Like a human Electrolux?”