by Philip Kerr
“Good. Because if you do, then I should certainly have to mention it to Deputy Chief of Staff Martin Bormann, and he would take a very dim view of a matter like this. The dimmest view possible. Do I make myself clear, Dr. Waechter?”
“Yes, Herr Commissar. Very clear indeed.”
“This is a matter of national security. So keep your mouth shut. People have ended up in Dachau for much less.”
As we walked back to the car, Korsch laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Natural causes,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a good one, boss.”
“It’s how Bormann wants this thing played,” I said. “Besides, they were natural causes. I don’t know what else you could call it. When someone blows your brains out with a rifle then naturally you die.”
THIRTY-FOUR
April 1939
Back at Rothman’s Silver in Maximilianstrasse there was no sign of Hermann Kaspel, and the note I’d left for him, threaded through the door handle like a scroll, remained untouched. If the cat in the doorway of the Franciscan monastery opposite knew what had happened to him, it didn’t say; you can’t trust cats, especially when they’re with the Franciscans. Korsch returned the Maserati to the garage and, reluctantly, locked it up again. But his mind was still in the car.
I looked at my watch. “Are you sure Kaspel had the right address?”
“Absolutely,” said Korsch. “I heard him repeat it. Besides, it’s not like you can get lost in a place like this.”
“Jacob Rothman did.” I stamped my feet against the cold. “He should have been here by now. Something must have delayed him. If we go back to the Villa Bechstein via the road to Buchenhohe then maybe we’ll see him. There won’t be many cars on the road at this time of night. Perhaps he broke down.”
“Not in that car he was driving,” said Korsch.
“Why do you say so?”
“I was listening to that engine when you pulled up outside Flex’s house yesterday evening. It’s a 170 and it sounds as sweet as a nut. Anyway, all these cars from the Obersalzberg car pool—they’re much too well-looked after to break down. You know what I think? I think he fell asleep again. One of the RSD sergeants was telling me that once that magic potion wears off, you could sleep for a thousand years.”
“I guess maybe that’s what happened to Barbarossa. He just stopped taking the pills.” I yawned; all our talk of sleep and pills was making me sleepy again.
We drove along the river in the direction of Unterau and the P-Barracks before turning east onto Bergwerkstrasse and driving up the mountain again. A group of workers from Polensky & Zöllner were widening the road where it ran alongside the River Ache in case anyone wanted to drive a tank up there; to me the road already looked quite wide enough. I caught some of their toothless peasant faces in the big headlights of the 170. They looked like they were only a couple of pitchforks and firebrands short of being a mob bent on lynching the monster in the Berghof. Bormann must have figured a tank might stop them. I hoped he was wrong about that.
“We have to get into that safe,” I said. “We also need to keep quiet about it. So maybe it wasn’t very smart to drive around in that car.”
“Fun though. For me, anyway.”
“It won’t be fun if I don’t find this shooter, and soon.”
“I suppose it’s beyond a local locksmith.”
“It is unless his name is Houdini. No, I think we’re going to need a professional nutcracker.” I thought for a moment. “Whatever happened to the Krauss brothers? Those boys could open anything with a lock. Including the Police Museum.”
The Krauss brothers’ burglary of the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz—to recover their professional tools confiscated by the police—was still the stuff of near legend and, at least until the Nazis took control of the place, about the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to the Berlin police.
“The last I heard they were in the cement. Doing five years in Stadelheim Prison.”
“Not like them to get caught.”
“I don’t think they were caught, boss. From what I heard they moved from Berlin to Munich to escape their reputation as the best safecrackers in Germany, and were promptly arrested by the Bavarian Gestapo and thrown in prison on some trumped-up charge.” Korsch lit a cigarette and laughed. “That’s how the Nazis keep the crime rate down. They don’t actually wait for anyone to commit a crime before they throw them in jail.”
“Then we need to have Heydrich get the brothers out so we can bring them down here to crack that safe.”
“Perhaps we only need one brother.”
“Forget it. Joseph doesn’t unlock his own back door without the nod from Karl. And vice versa. Make that your next job, Friedrich. Go to Munich and get them out. I’ll send Heydrich a telex to organize it. And then bring them both here. In secret. And by the way, while you’re there I want you to ask the police if they have any address for a Jew called Wasserstein. Dr. Karl Wasserstein. I’ll give you the address before you go.”
“Who is he?”
“A friend of someone called Gerdy Troost. She’s staying at the Berghof and she’s anxious to find out what happened to him.”
I shifted down into a lower gear and steered the big Mercedes around the next corner. A few meters farther up the road I saw two football-sized headlights and braked hard.
“Christ,” I said. “Well, now we know.”
On a slope about ten meters above us was a black Mercedes 170. It looked as if it swerved in front of a narrow stone bridge and careered down a steep hillside, flattening several small trees before finally it had overturned and then hit a large wedge-shaped rock, which appeared to have cut the front of the car in half, almost. It looked like a dead beetle. The headlights were still on but the wheels had long stopped turning and the dry air was thick with the smell of spilled gasoline. Wisely, Friedrich Korsch retrieved the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it out on his sole before dropping it safely into his coat pocket. I switched off the engine and we jumped out to look for Hermann Kaspel.
“Hermann,” I yelled. “Where are you, Hermann? Hermann, are you okay?” But instinctively I knew he wasn’t.
What struck me immediately was the deafening silence. There was just the sound of our anxious breath and our thick boots as we scrambled up the wintry slope toward the wrecked car, and the snow freezing hard on the hillside and a light breeze in the frigid trees. Everything in nature was holding its breath. Clouds shifted ominously in the moonlit sky as if something terrible was about to be revealed. There was a dull thud and I looked around to see a heap of snow slipping off a branch. My heart was in my mouth. I’d seen a few car accidents in my time with the Berlin police. Bad accidents. Nothing ever quite prepares you for the sight of what can happen to the human body when a car suddenly encounters a solid immovable object at high speed. But this was as bad as anything I’d seen since the trenches. The car looked as if the imaginary Big Bertha shell fired from the angular church in Buchenhohe had landed right in front of it. Metal never looked so mangled. The driver’s door was hanging open like a farm gate. Kaspel wasn’t in the car but it was easy enough to follow where he’d gone. For one thing there was a perfectly severed leg still wearing a riding boot and a piece of his trousers beside the door; from there Kaspel had crawled away on his stomach, leaving a wide trail of dark blood in the snow.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Korsch turned quickly away, knowing the brutal truth of what we saw, and walked back to the overturned car.
Hermann Kaspel must have known he was going to die. He’d managed to sit up and lean against the trunk of a tree and light a last cigarette with shaking hands—the ground was strewn with spent matches—before he’d bled to death. The butt was still in his mouth and cold to the touch, and his bluish hands were gripped around the neat stump of his left thigh—so neat it looked like a skille
d surgeon had used a saw to amputate his leg—as if he’d tried in vain to stop the flow of blood. His skin was as cold as the snow he was seated on and I guessed he’d been dead for at least half an hour. The heart pumps several liters of blood a minute and when the femoral artery is cut like that you bleed out in less time than it takes to finish one cigarette. Unlike his leg, his pale semi-frozen face was completely unmarked. He stared straight ahead of him and over my shoulder, and if I’d spoken to him I thought he might almost have answered, so clear were his eyes. The glint in the irises was just a reflection of the headlights of course but all the same it was strange how alive he still looked. I don’t know why, but I wiped some of the frost off his eyebrows and hair and then I sat with him and lit a cigarette myself. I’d often done something like that during the war, when you stayed with a man and waited patiently for him to die, sometimes holding his hand, or with an arm around his shoulders. We always figured the spirit hangs around the body for a while before it finally disappears. Mostly you put the cigarette in his mouth and let him mix a few puffs with his last breaths. A nail could cure everything, from a mild case of shell shock to a severed leg. Anyone who’d been in the war knew that. And even though you knew tobacco might be bad for you, you also knew that bullets and shrapnel were worse and that if you’d escaped them, then a few cigarettes really didn’t count as any kind of risk worth taking seriously. There was much I wanted to tell Hermann Kaspel but mostly it was that I’d misjudged him and that he’d been a good comrade and that’s the best you can say to a man when he’s dead or going to die. Even if it’s not true. The truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Never was. But I had learned to like and admire Hermann Kaspel. I was also thinking of his poor wife, whom I’d never met, and wondering who was going to tell her, and I decided I couldn’t trust Högl or Rattenhuber to make a decent job of it. Each of them was about as sensitive as Kaspel’s severed leg and every bit as detached. I would have to tell her myself even though I could ill afford the time that would take. After a while I got up and walked back down to the upturned car and Friedrich Korsch.
“I told him to slow down,” I said, “the last time I was driving with him. Frankly, he scared the shit out of me when he was behind the wheel of that car. It was the meth, I think. The magic potion. It made him drive too fast. He joked that it would kill him. And now it has.”
Korsch shook his head. “It wasn’t the meth that killed him, boss,” he said. “I’m pretty sure of that. And it wasn’t his lousy driving. It wasn’t even black ice on the road, although that hardly helped. And those are winter tires, with a thicker tread than summer ones. Almost new, by the look of them. Like I said before, the RSD’s cars are extremely well-looked after.”
“So what are you saying? He crashed his car, didn’t he?”
“He crashed the car because his brakes had failed. And the brakes failed because someone deliberately cut the hydraulic hoses that feed the brakes. Someone who knew what they were doing.”
I hadn’t heard of anyone ever doing such a thing, so I shook my head in slow disbelief. “Are you sure?”
“I told you, I used to work for Mercedes-Benz. I know the leads and the hoses on this car like I know the veins on my own cock. But even I might not have noticed something wrong if the car hadn’t overturned like this. The 170 has a four-wheel hydraulic-drum brake system, which relies on hydraulic fluid, right? Liquids aren’t easily compressible, so when you start to brake you apply pressure on the fluid’s chemical bonds. Without that fluid there’s no braking force at all, which means the brakes fail. You can see from the oblique angle of the cut on this cable supplying fluid to the drums that it didn’t break and it didn’t detach; it’s been neatly cut with a knife or a pair of wire cutters. There’s no fluid left in them. The fact is, the poor bastard didn’t stand a chance. This car weighs the best part of one thousand kilos. From here to Buchenhohe is maybe five kilometers of winding mountain road. I’m amazed he managed to keep the car on the road for as long as he did. Hermann Kaspel was murdered, boss. Someone must have cut the brakes while the car was parked outside his house. One of his neighbors, I expect. And here’s another thing you might want to consider, Commissar. It looks like you’ve been a lot closer to solving who killed Karl Flex than perhaps you’d ever thought. Because whoever murdered poor Kaspel here almost certainly intended to murder you, too. They must have hoped you’d be in the car with him when it went off the road. You see, if they kill you and him, then this investigation is ended. Make no mistake, Bernie. Someone in Obersalzberg or Berchtesgaden wants you dead.”
THIRTY-FIVE
April 1939
We left the scene of the accident and drove up the winding mountain road to Hermann Kaspel’s address in Buchenhohe, parking our own car a short distance away so that we wouldn’t wake his widow. There were no lights burning in the house, for which I was grateful, otherwise I might have felt obliged to go in and give the poor woman the bad news then and there. She was obviously asleep and unaware of the terrible tragedy that had overtaken her, which was just as well. The bringer of bad news certainly doesn’t look any better at four o’clock in the morning, especially when he looks like me. Besides, all I wanted to do now was take a look at the spot in front of the house where Kaspel’s car had been parked, while the crime scene was still relatively fresh. And keeping our voices down, we inspected the space with our flashlights.
“You can still smell the glycol,” said Korsch, squatting down and touching the wet ground with his fingertips. “Most brake fluid is just glycol-ether based. Especially in a cold climate like this one. You see where it’s melted the snow when it poured onto the ground?”
“It’s just like you said, Friedrich.”
“No question about it. Hermann Kaspel was murdered. Just as surely as if someone put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.” Korsch stood up and lit a cigarette. “You’re lucky to be alive, boss. If you’d been in that car, you’d probably be dead, too.”
I glanced up at the cold sky. The veil of earlier clouds had lifted to reveal heaven’s great black canopy and, as I frequently did, I remembered the trenches, Verdun, and the freezing nights on sentry duty when I must have looked at every star in the sky, steadily reflecting upon my own imminent mortality. I was never afraid of dying when I looked up at the heavens; from cosmic dust we had come and to cosmic dust we would all return. I don’t know that I thought much about the moral law within me; perhaps it was, after all, an extravagance beyond the horizon of my vision. That and the fact that it was a pain in the neck to keep looking up that way, not to mention dangerous.
Korsch walked a few meters away from the house and collected a length of old green-gingham curtain material he’d seen lying on the side of the road. It was only lightly dusted with snow but the edge was stained with brake fluid. On a backstreet in Berlin it would hardly have been unusual but in such a scrupulously tidy place as Obersalzberg, where even the flowers in the window boxes were standing neatly to attention, it seemed worthy of note.
“My guess is that he used this to lie on,” said Korsch. “While he was underneath Kaspel’s car. Careless to leave it here like this.”
“Perhaps he had to,” I said. “Perhaps he was disturbed.” There was a maker’s mark on the curtain lining, which told us only that it had been made a long way away, at a branch of Horten’s department store—the DeFaKa, in Dortmund. “If we could find the pair to this, then we might be in business as far as identifying Hermann’s murderer is concerned. But somehow I don’t see anyone allowing us to search every house on Hitler’s mountain to look for a length of old curtain. As I’m often reminded, some of these people are Hitler’s friends.”
As we walked away from the house my boots kicked a piece of metal lying on the road, which caught my flashlight, and I bent down to pick it up. For a moment I thought I’d found the knife used to cut the brake lines, but I soon realized that the object in my fingers wouldn’t have cut any
thing. Made of rounded metal, it was thin and smooth and curved, about twenty centimeters long and less than ten millimeters in diameter, and resembled a misshapen table utensil—a spatula or a longish spoon without a bowl, perhaps.
“Is it something that fell off the bottom of the car?” I asked, handing it to Friedrich Korsch and letting him examine the object for a moment.
“No. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. This is stainless steel. And much too clean to have come off any car.”
As we returned to the car, I slipped the object into my jacket pocket and told myself that I’d ask someone about it later, although quite who I might ask I had no idea; it didn’t look like the kind of object that could easily be identified.
Friedrich Korsch dropped me back at the Villa Bechstein and, almost immediately, left for Munich to spring the Krauss brothers from Stadelheim Prison. I helped myself to a large brandy in the drawing room, toasted Kaspel’s memory, and then walked back up the hill toward the Berghof. The sentry was awake this time but just as surprised as before to see someone on foot at that time of night. According to all the newspapers and magazines, Hitler loved to walk all over Obersalzberg, but I saw little evidence that he or anyone else for that matter walked anywhere other than to the next armchair in the Great Hall or the Berghof terrace. I walked on, past the Berghof to the Türken Inn, where the local RSD was headquartered. Everything was quiet and it was hard to believe that on a frozen hillside only a few kilometers away was the body of a man who had been murdered. The Türken was another Alpine-chalet-style building made of white stone and black wood, except that it had its own parade ground with an absurdly tall flagpole flying an SS flag, and an excellent view of Bormann’s house nearby. There was a little stone sentry box out front that resembled a granite sarcophagus and I had the guard escort me to the duty officer. Almost mummified with cold, he was glad to move some blood around his polished black helmet. By contrast the RSD duty officer in the Türken was tucked up in an office heated by a nice fire, a small cooking stove, and a heartwarming picture in Berliner Illustrated News of Göring proudly holding his baby daughter, Edda. I envied him that much, anyway. On the office table was a dinner plate with a loaf of bread, some butter, and a chunk of Velveeta, which reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was fortunate that I’d recently lost my appetite. There’s nothing like seeing a man you know cut in half to stop you feeling hungry; but seeing a coffeepot steaming on the stove, I helped myself before coming to the point of my being in that office. The coffee tasted good. It tasted even better with sugar. There was always plenty of sugar on Hitler’s mountain. If there had been a bottle I might have helped myself to that, too. The officer was an SS-Untersturmführer, which is to say a lieutenant with just three pips on his collar and a pimple on his neck; he was about twelve years old and as green as his shoulder straps and, with his glasses and his pink cheeks, his membership in a master race looked all too provisional. His name was Dietrich.
