Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  I nodded sadly, appreciating his keen eyes in a moment of utter detachment. “You should have stayed being a cop. I don’t need lenses in my glasses to know you had a clearer vocation for that. You’re the best French cop I’ve met since I came to France.”

  The priest stiffened a little as he now realized where he was and who he was with. “I suppose you’re going to try and kill me now.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “I should be easy enough to kill.”

  “Yes. I have a gun. And it seems to me that there’s no one else in here who’s going to raise any objections. But the day I start shooting priests is the day I probably shoot myself, too. Besides, what would be the point?”

  “So it’s like I thought. You’re not really a murderer.”

  “Best stick with being a priest. You make an even worse psychologist.”

  “Meaning what? That you really did kill someone?”

  “Sure, I’ve killed men. But not since the war. Just for the record, I didn’t murder anyone on the Blue Train. I was framed.”

  “I see. My, you’re in a spot, aren’t you?”

  I pointed at the ossuary. “It could be worse. I might be one of them.”

  “We could pray together if you like.”

  “There’s even less point to that than there is in killing you. But I am going to have to make you swear on that Bible that you’ll give me a head start. Twelve hours should see me comfortably across the old German border into the Saarland. Twelve hours before you call a cop and tell them I was here. That’s all I ask, Father.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to agree to that?”

  I took out my gun.

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll crack you on the head with this, tie you up, and leave you in here with your friends, the bones. Or maybe I’ll just set fire to your church. I’m German, you see. In the war we did a lot of that. So one more church really won’t make a difference to my eternal soul. Only I think you’d be more comfortable just doing what I said. Twelve hours doesn’t seem much to ask.”

  The priest looked at his watch. “Twelve hours?”

  “Twelve hours.”

  I handed him the Bible and he made the oath as I directed. Then he shook my hand again and wished me luck and told me he’d pray for me.

  “I’ll take the luck,” I said. “It always worked better for me than the prayer.”

  I went out of the church, collected my bicycle, and rode off, but not before I had dumped all my onions in a grass verge. With a hard ride for Saar in front of me I could do without the extra weight. And it was only now that I perceived my stupidity; the priest had been right. My hands and shoes could have given the game away at any time. I thought I’d been so clever, when all the time I’d been courting disaster. But none of this was quite as stupid as what I’d just done. Never put your faith in a priest. There’s not one of them who can be trusted within reach of a good Latin dictionary and a wealthy church donor.

  THIRTY-THREE

  April 1939

  I managed to sleep for several hours. Somehow the proximity of Hitler’s study door did not interfere with that. I was ready to collapse and I think I could have slept through a night on Bald Mountain. I was awoken by the telephone ringing in my room. I glanced at my watch. It was long past midnight.

  “Hey, boss,” said Friedrich Korsch. “It’s me.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “There was some paperwork in Flex’s desk drawer. A lease agreement. It looks as if our friend was renting a garage in Berchtesgaden. On Maximilianstrasse. It’s owned by a local Nazi businessman named Dr. Waechter. A lawyer.”

  “Pick me up outside the Berghof in ten minutes. We’ll go and take a look at it. See if we can’t find something there.”

  “You’re forgetting that I’m not cleared to enter the Leader’s Territory.”

  “Then go back to the Villa Bechstein. I’ll meet you there. Did you call Hermann?”

  “On his way down to Berchtesgaden now.”

  I went out of my room and downstairs to the hallway. The house was even colder than before but one or two servants wearing overcoats were still around; Kannenberg had told me that they were practicing being up at this late hour for when Hitler was there. All I wanted to do was find a bed and sleep. I resisted the temptation to pop a couple of Pervitin and hoped for the best.

  It was a short walk from the Berghof to the Villa. The sloping road was made treacherous by snow and ice and I was glad of the Hanwag boots that I was wearing on my feet. In the guardhouse at the bottom of the road the SS man was so surprised to see someone on foot and coming down the hill from the Berghof that he fell off his stool. He must have thought I was Barbarossa awoken from his thousand-year sleep inside the mountain; either that or he’d been asleep himself.

  I found Friedrich Korsch waiting in a car at the Villa and together we drove down the mountain into Berchtesgaden. Maximilianstrasse ran from the hill behind the outsized main railway station to a point just below the local castle, which was a nice shade of icing pink. The garage address on the receipt Korsch had found was opposite the Franciscan monastery and immediately next to Rothman’s Silver, which appeared to have gone out of business. The monastery looked like it was doing fine. On the shop window was the faint outline of a yellow star that had been cleaned off but only—I imagined—after the departure of Herr Rothman and his family from Berchtesgaden. Small towns like Berchtesgaden were harder on Jews than big cities; in small towns everyone knew who and where the Jews were, but in a big city, Jews could disappear. I wondered if, like Gerdy Troost’s friend Dr. Wasserstein, Rothman had gone to live in Berlin or, perhaps, left Germany altogether. I knew what I would have done.

  I still had Flex’s door keys and after trying them out found one that fit the lock in the garage door. We opened it and switched on a bare lightbulb to reveal a bright red Maserati—the one with the side exhaust—and polished to absolute perfection. With a bonnet as long as a coffin, the car was a tight fit in the garage. The starter handle had been removed and the front of the Italian car was resting against a mattress laid out against the back wall, so that the car could be pressed right up against it without damaging the front, in order that the garage doors might be closed and locked.

  “It certainly doesn’t look as though anyone was here before us,” I observed. There was a whole set of mechanic’s tools on the wall but nothing was missing from that. “Then again, there’s not much to search. Only the car.”

  “But what a car,” said Korsch. “This would explain the pictures at the house in Buchenhohe.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t say I paid much attention to them.” I peered through a connecting door into the empty shop.

  “They were all about motor racing.” He pointed to a picture of Rudolf Caracciola on the wall. “Grand Prix posters. Drivers. It seems our friend Flex was an enthusiast. I bet this car was Flex’s pride and joy.”

  “If that was the case then why not keep it up at the house in Buchenhohe?”

  “Are you kidding? There’s no garage up there, that’s why. The man wanted to keep the snow off this pristine beauty. And I don’t blame him. Besides, this thing doesn’t have a hood. Perfect for summer but perhaps not so good in winter.” Korsch walked around the car smoothing the bodywork with his hand. “It’s a 26M sport. Built in 1930. Two-point-five liter, straight eight, two hundred horsepower. Must have cost a few marks.”

  “You know about cars?”

  “I was a mechanic before I joined the force, boss. At the Mercedes garage in Berlin west.”

  The Maserati was parked over an inspection pit, which Korsch quickly inspected and reported was empty of anything but sump oil. Meanwhile I opened the car’s trunk and then the glove box. As well as two pairs of goggles, a couple of leather helmets, and some driving gauntlets, there were maps of Germany and Swit
zerland and a receipt for the Hotel Bad Horn on Lake Constance. I even unbuckled the straps on the bonnet and searched beside the engine and found nothing much there, either. The keys were still in the car and Korsch couldn’t resist sitting in the driver’s seat and gripping the steering wheel.

  “I’d love to own a car like this,” he said.

  “Well, if you stay here on Hitler’s mountain and manage to figure out a nice lucrative racket for a man like Martin Bormann, then maybe you’ll be able to afford one. But I don’t know that this tells us very much. Except that he liked to drive to Switzerland.”

  “It tells us that Flex had good taste in cars. It tells us that he was making serious money. It tells us what he spent his money on. It tells us that no one we’ve talked to so far has mentioned this car, so maybe he didn’t drive it that often. Maybe not many people knew about it. Or even about this garage.” He turned the wooden wheel wistfully. “Can I start it?”

  “Be my guest,” I said. “Drive it around the town for all I care.”

  We pushed the car back from the mattress and retrieved the starter handle from the tiny trunk. We were just about to turn over the engine when the mattress toppled onto the Maserati’s sloping bonnet. I went to lift it up again.

  “Wait a minute,” I told Korsch. “I think there’s something on the wall behind this mattress.”

  We pushed the car farther back along the stone floor until it was halfway out the door and onto the street, and tugged the mattress away to reveal an old York wall safe with a combination lock. It was a big one, too—at least as big as a car door. I tried the small round handle but the door remained firmly closed.

  “Must have belonged to the shop,” said Korsch. “A nice way of hiding it, too. With this car.”

  “I wouldn’t mind betting that this is what the person who searched Flex’s house was looking for,” I said.

  “I’ll buy that,” said Korsch. “I mean, who’s looking for a safe after you see something as eye-catching as this?”

  “Looks like we’re going to need the previous owner, Jacob Rothman,” I said. “Or perhaps the man whom Flex was renting this place from. Dr. Waechter. For the combination.”

  “Waechter is at 29 Locksteinstrasse, Berchtesgaden. That’s a couple of kilometers from here.”

  “So let’s go and wake him up.” I smiled, imagining some greedy fat Nazi lawyer who’d taken advantage of the Rothmans’ situation. I was already imagining the pleasure I was going to take in that interview.

  “We could take the Maserati.”

  “Why not? That’s bound to wake everyone up.” I smiled at that idea, too; there was something about the quiet complacency of Berchtesgaden that needed a disturbance of the kind that only an eight-cylinder Grand Prix Maserati could achieve.

  We left a note for Hermann Kaspel on the garage door, telling him to wait there for our return. And a few seconds later we’d managed to start the car and Korsch was driving us through the streets of Berchestgaden and up the hill north, toward the Katzmann and the Austrian border. In spite of the cold wind in our faces—the windscreens were the fold-down, hardly-worth-having type—Korsch was grinning from ear to ear.

  “I love this car,” he shouted. “Just listen to that engine. One plug per cylinder, twin overhead camshaft.”

  For me the driving pleasure was entirely sadistic; in that little Bavarian town, Flex’s car sounded as if a Messerschmitt had lost its way in the valley, like one of the drones from the Landlerwald apiary. At midday the car would have been loud enough; but at almost one a.m., a bass alphorn would have seemed quieter. When we got to Waechter’s address, just around the corner from the local hospital in Locksteinstrasse, I told Korsch to rev the engine a bit, just to make sure his neighbors were awake.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because when Rothman and his family were obliged to leave town I doubt any of these people lost any sleep about it.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Korsch, and grinning again, he hit the gas pedal several times before allowing the engine revs to drop. “That’s what I like about you, boss. You’re such a bastard sometimes.”

  Korsch switched off the engine and followed me up the path.

  The house was a large wooden one with a wraparound wooden balcony and a covered stairway up the side; it was the kind of place where they grew leather shorts in window boxes. All it lacked was a couple of clockwork figures with beers in their hands. I knocked loudly on the front door but the lights had already come on thanks to the Maserati. The man who came to the door was fat and very white, although that was probably with rage at being woken up. He was wearing a red silk dressing gown and had neat gray hair and a little gray mustache that was bristling indignantly. It looked like a whole regiment of tiny soldiers getting ready to march off his face and onto mine to deliver me with a set of stiff ears. He started to bluster and yell about the noise like a tyrannical schoolmaster but soon piped down when I showed him my warrant disc although I’d much prefer to have slapped him with one of the skis on the wall.

  “Police Commissar Gunther.” I pushed past him the way I’d seen the Gestapo often do and we stood in his hallway out of the cold, idly picking up photographs and opening a few drawers. I came straight to the point.

  “Rothman’s Silver on Maximilianstrasse,” I said curtly. “You’re the current owner, I believe.”

  “That’s correct. I acquired the property when the previous owners vacated it last November.”

  He made it sound as if they’d done this willingly. But I recognized the significance of this date, of course. November 1938. Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Jewish businesses and synagogues all over Germany had been attacked, had been on November 9. It went without question that Jacob Rothman would have been obliged to sell his property at a knockdown price, which is to say that when you’ve been knocked down in the street on a regular basis you begin to know you’re not welcome.

  “That would be Herr Jacob Rothman, right?”

  “Couldn’t this have waited until morning?”

  “No, it couldn’t,” I said coldly. “The garage next door to the property. That’s yours, too, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been renting it to Dr. Karl Flex.”

  “That’s correct. Twenty marks a month. In cash. At least until I find a new tenant for the shop.”

  “There’s a safe, in the back wall. It’s my guess it was used by Rothman to store his silver. Do you have the combination?”

  “No. It was on a piece of paper that I gave to Dr. Flex, with the keys. I’m afraid I didn’t make a copy. Look, surely he’d be the best person to ask about this, not me.”

  “The fact that I’m asking you means I can’t ask him.”

  “Why?”

  “What about Rothman himself?” I said, ignoring Waechter’s question. “Would you happen to know where he went after leaving Berchtesgaden? Munich, perhaps? Or somewhere else?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He left no forwarding address?”

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  “What do you mean—a pity? He’s a Jew. And even if he had left an address, I’m afraid I’m not in the business of forwarding mail to some greedy Jew. I’ve got much better things to do.”

  “I thought as much. And yes, it is a pity. For me. You see, that Jew could have saved me a lot of time. Maybe even helped to solve a crime. That’s the trouble with pogroms. One day you realize that the people you’ve been persecuting have something you urgently need. That I need. That Martin Bormann needs.”

  “There was nothing in the safe when the Rothmans left. It was empty. I checked.”

  “Oh, I bet you did. Well, it’s locked now and no one seems to have the number.”

  “Is there something important inside it?”

  “It’s a safe.
There’s usually something important inside a safe, especially when it’s locked. Anyway, it seems that Dr. Flex won’t be paying you any more rent for the garage. I’d say your agreement is over. Permanently.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “My God. The poor fellow.”

  “Yes. Poor fellow. That’s what everyone says.”

  “What happened to him? How?”

  “It was natural causes,” I said. Now that I’d drawn a blank on the combination with both Waechter and Rothman, the last thing I needed was for anyone to know that the safe in the garage even existed, and I was already thinking that it hadn’t been the cleverest thing I’d done since arriving in Obersalzberg to drive around in a car that had been kept hidden in a garage that perhaps only a few people knew Flex was renting. Certainly I didn’t want the same person who’d already burgled Flex’s house trying the same with the garage. For all I knew, that person might even know the safe combination. There was only one thing for it. Much as I hated doing this, I needed to scare Waechter into silence about the garage, the safe, Flex’s death, everything.

  “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Then you understand the need for confidentiality in a case like this.”

  “Of course.”

  “Under no circumstances are you to mention anything to anyone about Karl Flex, the garage you’ve been renting to him, or the fact that there’s a safe in that building. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Herr Commissar. I can assure you I won’t mention anything.”