by Philip Kerr
“As you wish, Commissar. You’re the detective.”
I nodded gratefully but the truth was I had my doubts about this. After what had happened during the night I felt as if every time I stopped moving a disembodied hand chalked just a bit more of a thick white line around my still twitching body, like a corpse discovered on the floor of the palace during Belshazzar’s feast. Uncovering the secrets of Hitler’s mountain, I wasn’t much more than another murder waiting to happen. Someone had taken a considerable risk in trying to kill me, twice. Possibly they would try again. And it was unfortunate that the man Heydrich had sent to watch my back would, if his master ordered him to, put a hole in it without a moment’s hesitation. The one thing about the Nazis you could always rely on was that they were not to be relied upon. None of them. Not ever.
THIRTY-EIGHT
October 1956
Two hours later, in the nothing town of Puttelange-aux-Lacs, I perceived the full extent of my folly and the consequences of trusting a Catholic priest. The police were at the crossroads on the other side of a small bridge and it was fortunate for me I saw them first. The blue flashing lights helped; they might as well have erected a red neon sign. I had no choice but to wheel my bicycle off the Rue de Nancy, remove my holdall from the luggage rack, and drop the machine on the other side of a disused, rusted gate set between two redundant brick posts that stood on the edge of an empty field like the last teeth in some vagrant’s carious mouth. Satisfied that the bicycle could not be seen from the road, I walked across an unfenced field in the opposite direction, chucking away my war medal, my glasses, and my beret while I did so, hoping to approach the main road to Sarreguemines and, immediately beyond that, the old German border, from a less observed direction. But I soon realized this would not be possible. The road running through the center of town was full of police cars and it was clear to me that the priest of Saint Hippolyte had given me up when I saw him sitting in one of these cars with a cigarette in his face and enjoying a joke with the gendarmes. So much for his Bible oath, I thought, and concluded he must have been one of those casuistic Catholics for whom reason is a way of explaining the world for their own convenience rather than a simple capacity for making sense of things. Which is to say almost all of them, of course. He didn’t see me turn around and walk southeast, in the opposite direction, toward Strasbourg, although I was almost tempted to go straight back to Bérig-Vintrange and burn down his church like a true SS man. Instead I reached the outskirts of town in a few minutes and concealed myself in the back of an old blue van without wheels that was abandoned in the overgrown drive of a large empty house. I’d wait for dusk, when I figured I had a better chance of traveling unnoticed. There was some strong-smelling straw on the floor and behind the van’s closed doors I was able to relax a little. It would have been a simple matter for the police to have surrounded me, but oddly, I wasn’t that worried by my situation. As long as I remained quiet and didn’t smoke, no one but the mice would ever have known I was hiding there. I thought I could probably circumvent the police once it was dark—hopefully they were still looking for a man on a bicycle wearing a beret—and get on the road to the Saarland again. I estimated that it was about thirty kilometers to the old border. Of course, now that I was on foot it would take me longer to get there but sitting in the back of an old van made me wonder if perhaps I could find a place in another van, or a truck, one going northeast as far as Germany, perhaps. I resolved to try.
For two or three hours I actually managed to sleep and when I awoke, feeling cold and stiff as if I were already in my unmarked grave, I picked the straw carefully off my clothes, lit a cigarette to chase off my hunger pangs, pocketed my gun, and, leaving the holdall behind—it was only going to draw attention to the fact that I was traveling somewhere—I walked back into town, where I found fewer police around. I tramped very slowly along the main road, which was also the road to Freyming-Merlebach, another Alsatian border town, and considered the dwindling number of options that were now available to me. I was quickly running out of ideas on how to deflect attention from myself and, deciding that fugitives are seldom ever intoxicated, and that real drunks never seem to be in a hurry, I went into a wine shop opposite the local town hall and bought a bottle of cheap red Burgundy. Besides the appearance of having an open bottle in my hand, like a true clochard, the effect of the wine was good for my fraying nerves and after several mouthfuls I was almost able to see the comedy in my situation. It seems to me that people don’t really drink to escape their existence but to see its funny side instead; mine was beginning to resemble one of those delightful films starring Jacques Tati. The idea that the Stasi—the true heirs to the Gestapo—were using the French police to do their dirty work struck me as history repeating itself in the Marxian sense, which is to say, first as tragedy and then as farce. So, wine bottle in hand, I kept walking vaguely north hoping that I might pick up my pace as soon as I was out of town. In front of the police station I pretended to stand there indecisively, as if I had no particular place to go and even toasted two of the gendarmes with cigarettes in their faces and who were keeping a keen eye out for nothing much except their own tobacco smoke and the odd pretty girl.
“What’s all the fuss about?” I asked. In the dying light I hoped they couldn’t see my red eyes.
“We’re looking for an escaped murderer,” said one.
“There’s a lot of them about,” I said. “After the war we had you’d think there would be less murder, but it doesn’t seem that way. Human life is cheap after what the Germans did.”
“It’s a German we’re looking for.”
I spat and then took a swig from my bottle. “It figures. Most of the Nazis got away with it, you know.”
I walked on until I reached the corner of the next road where a young policeman wearing a rather strong cologne I recognized as Pino Silvestre was twirling a baton. He eyed me with complete indifference as I proceeded slowly up the road toward what looked like a public park, but at the last minute he let out a shout and I turned on my heel and faced him insolently before putting the bottle to my lips.
“You going to the park?” he asked.
“I was thinking about it.”
“Not with the bottle, you’re not. There’s no drinking allowed in the park.”
I nodded dully and walked back down toward the main road, as if I’d changed my mind about the park. As I passed the cop again, he said, “You should know that if you live around here.”
I toasted him with the bottle as if being sarcastic but of course a real drunk would have argued with the cop and told him where to shove his baton; instead I said nothing and, much too meekly perhaps, carried on my meandering way.
“Where are you from anyway?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before.”
“Bérig-Vintrange,” I said, and carried on walking. It wasn’t a good place to have picked and if I could have remembered one I’d certainly have mentioned another of the other, closer villages I had cycled through on the way to Puttelange-aux-Lacs.
“You’ve missed the last bus,” he said.
“Story of my life.” I hiccupped without turning round.
“If I catch you sleeping on the street I’ll arrest you,” he said.
“You won’t,” I said. “I shall walk home.”
“But it’s twenty kilometers. Take you at least four hours.”
“Then I’ll be home before midnight.”
Several seconds passed and just as I thought I might have got away with it, the young cop shouted again. I assumed he was going to ask for my identity card and I took off running. I was fitter than I’d been for a long time; the bicycling and the fresh air had been good for me and I was pleasantly surprised that I could run as fast as I did. Of course, that might have been the effect of the wine, which I now tossed over a fence into someone’s garden as I sprinted down a narrow path, vaulted a wooden gate into
a yard, and pounded along a cinder track like an escaped horse, before deviating sharply right and into the small cemetery at the back of the local church. I heard the cop shout again and I crouched down behind one of the larger headstones for a moment to get my bearings and catch my breath. I could hear more shouting in the distance and a whistle and the sound of engines starting and I knew I was just minutes away from being caught. I ran up to Rue Mozart and then right onto the road to Sarreguemines, which suited me very well. In the distance I could see a large copse of trees and I thought that if only I could reach it in time, I might lie still in the shrubbery, like a smart fox, and let the hunt pass me by. After a minute’s hard running I reached the trees and not a moment too soon since I could now hear the sound of approaching police sirens. To protect my face I backed quickly into a thick hedge and then dropped flat on my front to find cover, narrowly missing impaling myself on an old rusting draw harrow. Fortunately the ground was bone dry and, crawling through the undergrowth, I found an excellent place in which to conceal myself—an empty drainpipe behind a thick laurel bush. I might never have found it at all but for a rabbit that ran into the pipe when it saw me. I quickly lit a match to inspect my new hiding place. The pipe was about a meter high and half a meter wide and evidently someone had been in there before because lying on the ground were several old copies of Clins d’Oeil de Paris, a pornographic magazine that wasn’t one with which I was familiar. I threw the match away and waited. A few minutes later I heard the sound of a man crashing through the undergrowth and caught the smell of Pino Silvestre. It was the same cop who had challenged me, of course. I heard the whine of brakes urgently applied and running footsteps on the road. Meanwhile the cop nearest to me yelled out that I might as well give myself up, as it was only a matter of time before I was caught and that things would go better for me if I handed myself in. But when he blundered straight past my hiding place I knew this wasn’t true. I even saw his polished black boots as he walked by, cursing the bushes as he pushed his way through them. My hand tightened on the gun; I wasn’t quite convinced I would use it in order to avoid arrest. It was one thing killing an East German policeman who had tried to hang me; it was something else to kill a young French cop wearing too much aftershave. He stood there for a while, less than half a meter from my hiding place, swore again, and lit a cigarette. The cigarette smelled good after the aftershave and you know things are getting desperate when you silently take a deep breath of air in the hope that some of the nicotine’s calming effect will drift your way. I thought I could probably wait things out in my drainpipe for a while as long as the French police didn’t bring dogs. I hoped they would not have dogs. If they had dogs with noses, I was finished. After a while the cop shouted to his colleagues who shouted something back and he walked off, but not before dropping the cigarette on the ground. I waited for several seconds before reaching for the butt and then smoking it myself. As perfect pleasures go, it’s hard to beat smoking the cigarette of a very determined policeman you’ve just managed to elude.
Gradually the police search receded and after several minutes’ silence I risked peering through the bush. The cop with the pungent aftershave had gone. I waited another couple of minutes with my heart in my mouth and then crept out of my hiding place so I could go to the edge of the copse and look up the road to Sarreguemines. I could just see some lights flashing helpfully in the distance but in the dark it would be easy for me to make my getaway before the police fetched some tracker dogs and returned in force to search the trees. I reckoned my best direction was west, along the road to Freyming-Merlebach, which was the opposite way from Sarreguemines. So, hugging the bushes for cover, I walked back into Puttelange-aux-Lacs and then picked up the D656 out of town. After walking a few hundred meters I saw a hotel restaurant called La Chaumiere, where a number of people were having dinner in the floodlit garden. I watched them a little enviously for a minute or two, wishing I might have been doing something as ordinary as eating a meal in a nice restaurant. I watched the cars they’d left in the car park. One of these, a green Renault Frégate with beige upholstery, still had the keys in the ignition and I calculated that I might enjoy the safe use of it for at least an hour, and perhaps even longer, until dinner was ended—an hour before the police were informed and more roadblocks could be set up.
It was a nice little car, very modern, with a radio. I didn’t listen to it; instead I drove slowly through Hoste and Cappel, before deviating north at Barst, and motoring through Marienthal and Petit Ebersviller. It took me less than thirty minutes to reach Freyming-Merlebach, where I steered off the main road and down a long neglected farm track before dumping the car carefully under the branches of a very large weeping willow. I was now just a few kilometers from the old German border and a sort of freedom. Freyming-Merlebach was mostly shops and little white bungalows with very few public buildings of any note; more important, however, the town of Karlsbrunn was indicated on a signpost and it couldn’t have looked more welcome. I walked north, up Rue Saint-Nicolas with a smile on my face as if I’d just completed an Olympic marathon in the gold-medal position.
The Saar might have been a département of France but the people there were Germans. Just to be among my own countrymen again would feel like a kind of victory in itself. I’d been away from Germany for too long. There’s nothing like living in France to make a German feel like he’s a very long way from home. But about halfway up the street, I saw a group of four or five men in front of the big bay window of a brightly lit bar and there was something about them that made me pause in a doorway opposite and watch them for a couple of minutes before I could even think of walking on. They were military-sized, with military haircuts, and wearing cheap, mass-produced gray suits of the kind no self-respecting Frenchman would ever have worn. Their shoes were weapons-grade with thick soles made to stamp on East German faces. The ties they were wearing looked as if they were made of cardboard and the fists they squeezed experimentally on the end of their circus-strongman arms were as big as beer mugs. As I watched them, a man who was speaking on the telephone by the door finished his call and came out of the bar smoking a cigarette. He shouted something in German. So close to the old German border, this wasn’t at all remarkable. There were probably many other Germans in Freyming-Merlebach. But it did seem remarkable that the man with the cigarette and the eye patch who was doing all the shouting was Friedrich Korsch.
THIRTY-NINE
April 1939
Udo Ambros lived on Aschauerstrasse in Berchtesgaden, about half a kilometer farther on from the home of Dr. Waechter, the lawyer who owned the exiled Jew’s garage containing the red Maserati. Ambros’s isolated house enjoyed a spectacular view of the Watzmann and backed onto a thick forest but it wasn’t much of a place—certainly nothing to compare with Dr. Waechter’s; just a largish, two-story Alpine building that was little better than a poorly built barn, with a corrugated iron roof, a rusting wire fence, an abandoned water trailer, and a pile of near-fossilized wood stacked under a row of long icicles hanging from the black eaves like the teeth of some extinct mountain carnivore. A red DKW motorcycle stood on the snow-covered path along which were a series of footprints that contrasted strongly with my own; these others were reddish, even blood-colored, which raised a question in my head as to exactly how they got that way. A piebald horse was watching me carefully from the top of a long sloping field and a crudely carved bear stood guard by the front door; from the angle of his head and the snarling, aggrieved expression on his face he looked as if he had taken a bullet to the neck. There were only two windows, both of them on the ground floor. I glanced in one but I might just as easily have been looking through a fog, the glass was so grimy. Not that the dirty net curtains helped much, either. I knocked at the door and waited but no one answered. The relentless silence of the valley felt as if it had been ordained by the local gods and it was unnerving, as if the whole of nature was desperately afraid of waking Wotan while he was taking a well-deserved
nap with Fricka on a nearby mountaintop. Living somewhere like this would, I knew, have driven me as mad as King Ludwig. Berliners like me were not meant for empty places like this. We like the sound of noise more than we care for the noise of silence, which is always a little too long and loud for our cynical metropolitan ears. The true hallmarks of civilization are clamor, hubbub, and commotion. Give me pandemonium every time. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of dung and wood smoke. The smell of coal suits me a lot better; my smoker’s cough works better when there’s some sulfur dioxide and heavy metals in the damp atmosphere.
I might have concluded that the assistant huntsman was not at home if it hadn’t been for the motorcycle. The cylinder of the 500-cc engine was cold to the touch but rocking the bike revealed the fuel tank was almost full. I kick-started it in the hope that the sound might summon its owner and the engine roared into life at only the second time of asking, all of which implied that the machine was regularly ridden and most probably the preferred method of transport for Udo Ambros; but only the piebald came to the edge of the fence to see what was happening, fixing me with the kind of wary, black-eyed, who-the-hell-are-you kind of look I normally only get from single women in bars. After a minute or more I allowed the bike to stall, walked back to the front door, knocked a second time, and peered through the window again. I don’t know what I expected to see in there. A man hiding from me? Some firelight, perhaps? A witch with a cauldron full of stolen children? I turned around and went to question the mare in the hope that she might give me a clue where Ambros was to be found; and without hesitating, she did. As soon as I reached the fence she turned away and following her with my eyes for a few seconds I saw a man’s legs sticking out of a door at the side of the house.
