Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  “Herr Ambros,” I said. He didn’t answer, so I picked up a length of wood and threw it near him just in case he was underneath a car or a tractor; but of course I knew he wasn’t. If the man had been alive he would have been summoned by the noise of the DKW starting up. Reluctant to risk tearing my suit by climbing over the fence I went back to the door. It wasn’t locked. With so little real theft in this part of Germany—except, of course, the kind that Bormann and his people were guilty of—few bothered locking their front doors.

  Death doesn’t always have a smell, but it often has a distinctive feel, as if the silent wraith that has just crept away with a man’s soul brushes against the edge of your own, like an invisible man on a crowded U-Bahn train. It can be unnerving at times. It was like that here and I almost didn’t go any farther into the house out of a reluctance to witness what I might see. You would think a Murder Commission detective would be used to looking at terrible things. But the truth is, you never are. Every horrible murder is horrible in its own way and the pictures of these can never be erased from your mind; even at the best of times my own memories often resemble a series of uglier paintings by George Grosz and Otto Dix. I sometimes ask myself if my temperament might have been very different if I hadn’t seen so many crime scenes.

  I forced myself to walk through a house that looked as if it was already accustomed to violent death. A rabbit lay half-skinned on the kitchen table while the walls of the hallway and the sitting room were full of various animal trophies—deer, badgers, foxes; it might have been my imagination, but they were all looking quite pleased with the way things had turned out. The probable author of their collective misfortune was history. I knew that as soon as I walked into the house. Udo Ambros was lying on the stone floor of the kitchen with his feet through the open door, although to be honest I wasn’t absolutely sure it was him. A shotgun blast to the head at close range has a capacity to make nonsense of things like a man’s identity. I’ve seen decapitated men at Plötzensee who had more of a head to speak of than Udo Ambros. There’s no such thing as a cry for help when the suicide involves a shotgun; the victim always means it. Pieces of skull and brain and gouts of blood had made such a mess of the kitchen that it resembled a direct hit on a trench at Verdun and, had I not been standing in the dead man’s own kitchen, the only reason I could have recognized him at all would have been the Good Luck from Berchtesgaden Salt Mines badge he was wearing in the lapel of his bloodstained Tracht jacket. A whole piece of his face, including the eye, was sticking to the tiled wall above the stove like a piece of a mural by Picasso or the relief on a Roman fountain. I swallowed hard, as if to remind myself I had a neck to which a head was attached, but kept on looking all the same.

  I lifted up the dead man’s shirt and put my hand on his chest; the body was quite cold and I guessed he must have been dead for at least eight hours. He was still clutching the shotgun, which lay between his outstretched legs like the sword on a Templar’s tomb. I wrested the gun from his dead fingers. It was a Merkel side-by-side with a Kersten bolting mechanism, one of the more desirable German shotguns. I broke it open to reveal two red Brenneke slugs in the barrels, only one of which had been discharged. Not that it would have needed two; an ordinary shotgun cartridge filled with buckshot would certainly have done the job, but a slug that could have brought down a charging wild boar was making absolutely sure of it, like using a three-kilo hammer to crack an egg. I’d seen these slugs before, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember exactly where. I’d seen so much lately that I didn’t know where I’d left my own arsehole. The only question was, why had he done it? The man I’d met the previous day hadn’t looked as if he’d had much on his mind except the enjoyment of my own discomfort; then again, he must have known I’d trace the Mannlicher carbine to him eventually. And when I did, things would have gone very badly for Udo Ambros. Very badly indeed. The Gestapo would have made quite sure of that. I hadn’t cared to think about what might happen to Karl Flex’s murderer when I caught him but I knew the Nazis well enough to be sure it could so easily have been something worse than the falling ax.

  After a while I looked around for a suicide note and found one inside an envelope on the mantelpiece above a wood fire that was still warm to the touch. It was about now I started to wonder why a man who was planning to blow his head off would bother to build a large fire and start skinning a rabbit and pour a full cup of coffee that was still on the table, and I hoped that the note would explain all that.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. I HAVE KILLED MYSELF BECAUSE IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THAT BERLIN COPPER TRACES THE NUMBER ON THAT MANNLICHER CARBINE AND GETS ME FOR THE MURDER OF KARL FLEX AND I DON’T WANT TO DIE, STARVED TO DEATH IN DACHAU LIKE JOHANN BRANDNER. FLEX WAS A BASTARD AND EVERYONE KNOWS HE HAD IT COMING. I LEAVE MY GUNS AND MY MOTORCYCLE TO MY OLD FRIENDS AND FELLOW HUNTSMEN, JOHANNES GEIGER AND JOHANN DIESBACH, AND THE REST OF MY STUFF TO ANY OF THEM WHO WANTS IT. SIGNED UDO AMBROS.

  But the suicide note asked as many questions as it answered. It was the first one I’d seen that was entirely written in neat capital letters, almost as if Ambros had been keen to make sure that everything was quite clear and understood by the proper authorities; but it also managed to obscure something very important: the true handwriting of the man who’d written the note, which might have enabled me to determine absolutely—with the opinion of the huntsman Johannes Geiger, perhaps—that Ambros had indeed penned it. As it was, I had my doubts. Not least because there was a spot of blood on the corner of the paper about the size of a pinhead. Laboratory analysis might have proved that this was the rabbit’s blood and not a man’s, but the rabbit itself looked to have been properly drained and bled before the skinning had begun. I would have bet a small fortune that the blood had arrived on the notepaper from the head of Udo Ambros. Nothing unusual about that perhaps, except that the note had been inside an envelope. I wandered around the house opening creaky cupboards and smelly drawers and being generally nosy. Meanwhile I asked myself if Johann Brandner, my leading suspect, was dead after all—as the suicide note had alleged. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the Gestapo and the SS had lied about a death in Dachau, even to the criminal police. Death in Dachau might have been a normal occurrence but it was often treated by the authorities as something secret, to be hidden not just from concerned families but from everyone else as well. The few people who knew exactly what went on in Dachau were, I knew, the subject of a so-called Leader Order; and the only reason I knew about this was because Heydrich had once told me about it before sending me to Dachau himself. He was thoughtful like that. On the other hand, it was quite possible that Johann Brandner had returned to Berchtesgaden in secret, killed Udo Ambros, and hoped to put me off the scent by mentioning that he was dead in the suicide note. Being dead is a pretty good alibi for anyone who’s in trouble with the law, but in Nazi Germany it was an existential hazard.

  Having seen a gun cupboard in the hallway behind the front door, I searched for keys and eventually found a set on a chain in the dead man’s trouser pocket. Which was when I started to become convinced that Udo Ambros had been murdered. Inside the gun cupboard were a couple of rifles, another shotgun, a Luger pistol, some rifle ammunition, and several boxes of Rottweil shotgun cartridges. Rottweil was owned by a company called RWS and after searching the entire house and the outbuildings I discovered that these were the only cartridges I could find anywhere; the two Brenneke slugs used to kill Ambros were made by Sellier & Bellot and the only two I ever found were the two in the gun, which strongly suggested to me that the murderer had probably brought his own ammunition. Perhaps he’d looked for some cartridges belonging to Ambros, realized they were safely locked away in the gun cupboard, and then been obliged to use the ones in his own pocket or ammunition belt. Which strongly suggested that the murder had not been one carefully planned beforehand; quite possibly the two men had met quite amicably and argued about something before the killer had slipped t
he two slugs into the victim’s gun and then shot him. Which also suggested that they were friends, or at least acquaintances. And given the contents of the suicide note, what else but my investigation and the provenance of the Mannlicher carbine would they have been arguing about?

  There were no bloody footprints leading out of the kitchen and through the house, which made me wonder about the reddish bootprints in the snow on the path outside the front door. How had they got there? It didn’t seem at all likely that the killer would have gone out the back door and climbed over the fence. Besides, the only prints on the snow outside the kitchen door belonged to the horse. With every light switched on, I went carefully through the house, but there wasn’t anything even resembling a footprint. I grabbed Ambros’s coat and went outside. I was never a detective much given to getting down on my hands and knees. For one thing, I didn’t have many suits and the ones I had weren’t the kind to take any punishment. For another, it never seemed worth a fingertip search given that most murders these days were committed by the people I was working for. Even so I dropped the coat beside one of the size-forty-five bootprints and took a closer look. The prints looked like they were from a pair of Hanwag boots, just like the ones I was wearing on my own feet. And the prints weren’t really red at all. They were pink. And it wasn’t blood that had stained the snow. It was salt. The highest quality pink salt. The kind that gourmet cooks were fond of using.

  FORTY

  April 1939

  At Rothman’s garage in Berchtesgaden, the Maserati was parked on the street again and Friedrich Korsch was seated in the passenger seat surrounded by several small boys who had gathered around to admire the car. But the biggest small boy was probably Korsch himself. Puffing a cigarette happily, he looked like he’d just won the German Grand Prix. Next to the Maserati was a Paulaner beer truck that hadn’t been there before. Paulaner was the biggest brand of beer in Bavaria. When he saw me, Korsch climbed out of the Maserati, threw away the cigarette—which was promptly acquired by one of his young admirers—and came to the window of my car.

  “You fetched the Krauss brothers?” I said.

  “In the back of the truck. I was lucky. They were about to be transferred to do hard labor in Flossenbürg.”

  “Good work.”

  “Not entirely. They say they’ll only open the safe if we let them go at the Italian border.”

  “What does Heydrich have to say about that?”

  “He’s fine with it. If they open the safe, they can walk. There’s just one problem, boss.”

  “What?”

  “These two yids don’t trust us to keep our word.”

  “How about if we sign a letter, something on paper, a guarantee—?”

  “They don’t like that idea either.”

  “That’s a pity.”

  “Can you blame them? This is Berchtesgaden. Remember? If the Chancellor’s own word isn’t worth shit—”

  “Strictly speaking, that was Munich, but I know what you mean. It sets a bad example for the rest of us.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “We have to get into that safe. I’ve a good idea it’s the key to everything, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Look, I’d better speak to the brothers myself. Maybe we can come to an arrangement. What sort of condition are they in?”

  “A bit dirty. I fed them both on the road from Dachau. And they had some beers in the truck, which ought to have put them in a better mood by now. But considering where they were, not too bad, really.”

  “Bring them into the garage, Friedrich. We’ll talk there.”

  The two brothers were Jews from the Scheunenviertel, a slum district in the center of Berlin with a substantial Jewish population from Eastern Europe and, before the Nazis, one of the most feared neighborhoods in the city, a place where few policemen ever dared to tread. To make an arrest, the cops from the Alex used to have to go in there in substantial numbers, and sometimes with an armored car. That was how the brothers had been arrested the first time, after a series of burglaries carried out in Berlin’s biggest and best hotels, including the Adlon. It was said that they’d even burgled Hitler’s suite at the Kaiserhof just before he became chancellor of Germany, and stolen his gold pocket watch and some love letters, but it was probably just one of the many stories about the Krauss brothers that had helped to make them notorious. Where Adolf Hitler was concerned, truth was a concept that only a Cretan would have recognized, and I suspect even he’d long forgotten where he’d hidden it. After Franz and Erich Sass—two Berlin bank robbers from the ’20s whose careers had reportedly inspired them—the Krauss brothers had been the most famous career criminals in Germany, and their burglary of the police museum at the Alex to recover their own tools made them almost legendary. They were small and dark and immensely strong but after several months in Dachau the clothes they were wearing were at least two sizes too big. They’d changed in the back of the truck and their prison clothes, with green triangles signifying they were career criminals, were still in their hands as if they didn’t know what to do with them or didn’t dare to throw them away.

  I had an idea they were originally from Poland, where their father had been a famous rabbi, but if they were still religious it wasn’t obvious; they were tough-looking men whose skill was not unlocking the secrets of the Zohar and the Kabbalah, but other people’s safes. It was said that they could open a gnat’s arse with a paper clip and that the gnat wouldn’t even notice.

  “That’s a York,” said Joseph Krauss, inspecting the safe. “From Pennsylvania, America. You don’t see many American nuts like that in Germany. Last one of these I saw was in a jeweler’s shop on Unter den Linden. A better shop than this one, too. Of course, that was when we still stole from Jewish businesses, but we gave that up when you Nazi momzers started doing it, too. Now, it could be a three-number combination, or a four. But you have to hope it’s a three, which will take less effort to puzzle. I could drill it, of course, but that will take a lot more time and besides you have to drill it in the right place, and to do that you need to have seen the other side of the door and studied the mechanics of the lock. Maybe you’ll find some other shmegegge to drill it for you. But he might not know where to drill and leave it ongepotchket and then you might never get it open.” Joseph Krauss shook his head and looked sad. “Not that you do have to drill it, like I say. But I tell you honestly, the talent needed to open this safe by feel is rare. There are maybe three people in the whole of Europe who could puzzle it to order and my brother Karl is one of them. All he needs is that rubber mallet on the wall, in case it needs a good zetz. But that’s not your main problem, Commissar.”

  I nodded. “I know. Assistant Korsch told me. You don’t trust us to let you go after you’ve cracked the nut.”

  “S’right. No offense, Commissar. You’re both from the same Kiez as us, I can tell. Berliners are not like Bavarians. These people are like mud. But you’re not going to make schlemiels of us. What’s to stop you from sending us straight back to Dachau when we’ve cracked it? I tell you honestly, Commissar, it’s been driving the two of us crazy. What to do? It’s a real tsutcheppenish. You need us enough to say you’ll pay our price, but we don’t trust you enough to pay it when we’ve done the job. How can we do business like this? Without trust? Impossible. Isn’t that right, Karl?”

  But Karl Krauss was already giving himself the safecracker’s manicure—brushing the ends of his fingers on the sleeve of his ill-fitting suit. “I’d love to help you gentlemen,” he said. “I tell you honestly, I could use the practice. It’s been a while since I cracked a nut. I’ve missed it, so I have. But my brother is right. There’s no basis here for trust.” He pulled a sad face, as if a deal was still a long way off for us. “What’s in there, anyway? Maybe if you told us. You must figure something important, otherwise you’d never have brought us here. All this way. At such short notice. And with such impor
tant people oiling our way out of that horrible place. General Heydrich, no less. Piorkowski looked like he was going to shit when he heard that man’s geshaltn name.”

  “Alex Piorkowski is the camp commandant at Dachau,” explained Korsch. “A real bastard, if you ask me.”

  “The man’s a golem,” said Joe Krauss. “A monster.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you honestly, gentlemen, I have absolutely no idea what’s inside the nut. But I’m hoping what’s in there will help prove that a local Nazi official was corrupt. He’s dead but there could be evidence in there that will take a few others down with him. Papers, documents, ledgers, that’s what I’m hoping for. But if there’s any money or jewelry in there, it’s yours. To keep. All of it. That and the Maserati sports car parked in the street. You can drive it anywhere you like. And I give you my word that we won’t come after you. Or prevent your exit. You can hear me make the call to the border police to let you through. If necessary I’ll even drive you there myself.”

  “I’m liking this more now.” Karl Krauss shrugged. “That red Italian job? It’s a nice car. But even in Italy it’s just a noodge. Not a car for gonifs like us. We’ve never been the kind to flash the money around when we had it. That’s how you get pinched. We gay avek in a car like that and the whole world sees, and hears, too, probably. A military brass band couldn’t make more noise than that car. So if we do this job for you we’ll take the beer truck. Who notices such a thing in this part of the world?”

  “Then that’s agreed. The truck is yours.”

  “But suppose there’s nothing in the safe. Which means you’re disappointed. What then, Commissar? You’ll still let us go? It’s difficult, like my brother Joe says. To have all this trouble for nothing.”

  “Give him the keys to the truck now,” I told Korsch. “And the car. Take both, for all I care. Drive in opposite directions. But please open that safe. You can be halfway to Italy in the time it takes for me to get over my disappointment. Not that I pay much attention to things like that these days. To be disappointed you’ve got to believe in something in the first place, and I haven’t believed in anything of late. And certainly very little since 1933. The only reason I’m still a cop is not because I believe in the law or a moral order but because the Nazis wanted it that way. They had me back because they need a glove puppet they can use to ask the wrong questions, at the right time. Which makes me as bad as them, probably.”