by Philip Kerr
“They are smart,” I said. “It’s only in stupid little towns like Berchtesgaden that people believe in all that subhuman horseshit that Julius Streicher peddles in Der Stürmer. You know that as well as I do. There was no one smarter than Bernhard Weiss. Best chief of Kripo we ever had. I learned more from that Jew than I did from my own mother. What irritates me most about the Nazis is not that I’m supposed to hate the Jews, Friedrich. And I don’t. Hate them. No more than I hate anyone else these days. What I find a lot harder to deal with is that I’m supposed to love Germans and everything German. That’s a tall order for any Berliner. Especially now that Hitler’s in charge.”
We returned the red Maserati to the garage, locked up, and took the ledger and the bankbooks to the nearby Hofbräuhaus, where, at a quiet corner table under a gloomy picture of the Leader, we ordered tall beers and long sausage with mustard and sauerkraut and, after paying the homage that was due to a waitress with a low-cut Bavarian-style blouse and cleavage that looked like a celebrated geological feature, we settled down to our rather less compelling financial study. Most of the men in the beer house were smoking pipes and wearing smelly leather shorts and trying to pretend they weren’t interested in the local geology; it was obvious that they were but they were as slow as ancient glaciers and had less chance with the waitress than a deaf kid with scabies. If I’d not been on a case myself I’d have given her some city-smart story about how she was special and how I was in love with her already and maybe she would have believed it, because that is usually all it takes these days. In Germany love is as rare as a Jew with a telephone. And Hitler wasn’t the only man who could be cynical. Meanwhile, I discovered that the bankbooks contained a more plausible story that was much easier to understand and relate than what was in the ledger. I could almost see the silent movie that would have illustrated it.
“So,” I said, “it would seem that as regular as shit, on the first Monday of every month, Karl Flex took that lovely red Maserati out of the Rothman garage and drove all the way from here to St. Gallen in Switzerland, where he paid lots of cash into two separate accounts at the Wegelin Bank & Co., which, according to this passbook, purports to be the oldest in the country. One of the passbooks is in Karl Flex’s name and the other is in Martin Bormann’s. And will you look at these amounts? Christ, I never felt so poor until I came to Berchtesgaden. Karl Flex had over two hundred thousand Swiss francs in his personal account. But Bormann’s account has millions. Can you believe it? With this amount of money the Nazis really don’t need to conquer Poland by force of German arms. They could buy all the damn living space Hitler says we need for half of what Bormann’s got put aside for a rainy day. Frankly, I wish he would; then maybe the Poles wouldn’t put up as much of a fight.”
I showed Korsch the bottom line in the second NSDAP passbook and he whistled quietly over the creamy head on his white beer. “This explains the hotel bill we found in the car,” he said. “Remember? The Hotel Bad Horn? On Lake Constance? Lake Constance isn’t very far from St. Gallen. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes according to that map we found in the Maserati.”
“Right. So after he paid the cash into the bank in St. Gallen, he must have driven to Lake Constance, checked into a suite, eaten an expensive dinner, and then driven back here to Germany the very next day. Maybe took that missing whore from P-Barracks and made a nice weekend of it. Who knows? Maybe he left her there. Meanwhile, the cash kept on rolling in. Did you ever think you were in the wrong job?”
“Sure. It’s an occupational hazard for any cop. Things always look better for crooks who are making serious money.”
“Especially when the crooks are in government.”
“Well, who knew? When they were elected. That they were crooks, I mean.”
“Pretty much everyone who didn’t vote for them, Friedrich. And I suspect quite a few of the stupid fools who did. Which only makes it worse.”
“Who’s this second signatory on the Bormann account? Max Amann?”
“I think he’s chairman of the Reich Media Chamber. Whatever that is.”
“Must be close to Bormann.”
“I guess so.”
“Just seeing these two passbooks scares the shit out of me,” said Korsch. “I don’t mind admitting it. You know, it’s like I was saying before, boss. What happens when Bormann wants his passbook? To have access to his money.”
“According to Bormann’s passbook, there are three passbooks for that account. This one, and two others. Presumably the others are in Bormann’s possession. Which explains why he’s not asked about this one yet. Who knows? Perhaps he never will.”
“That’s a comforting thought. But either way, Bormann’s got to worry that if you do find his bankbook you’re going to give it to General Heydrich. And that Heydrich will use it against him. It’s exactly the sort of thing Heydrich would do. He collects dirt like a schoolboy’s fingernails.”
“Even Heydrich isn’t mad enough to believe he could blackmail Martin Bormann. Especially now, with another war looming.”
Actually, I wasn’t so sure about this; Heydrich had just enough nerve to blackmail the devil himself, and collect on his menaces, too. I told myself it was the only reason I was working for the general, and sometimes I even believed my own story—that I really was tired of being a cop in Nazi Germany and craved a quiet life in rural obscurity, as a village policeman, perhaps. Of course, the truth was very different. Mostly you just do what you’re good at, even if the people you’re doing it for are no good themselves. Sometimes you want to kill them but most of the time you know you’re never going to do it. In Germany that’s what we call a successful career. I opened the big leather ledger and began to turn the stiff pages. But beyond recognizing a few names and addresses, I had no real clue what it all amounted to, apart from a great deal of money.
“It would seem that the details of what Flex and his masters were up to are in this book. Although for the life of me I’m not sure what I’m looking at. I never was very good with figures that don’t wear pretty lingerie and ask me to buy them a beer with some red syrup in it. It seems clear to me that a lot of people around here were handing over sums of money quite regularly to Karl Flex. But it’s hard to say exactly why they did that. Not yet, anyway. A lot of these names are marked with the letters P, Ag, or B, which must have meant something to Flex but it means nothing to me. Flex was at the money end of some sort of local racket that wasn’t anything to do with compulsory purchase orders. These are people paying smaller, regular sums to Flex, not the Obersalzberg Administration paying them for their cuckoo-clock houses.” I shrugged. “You know, this sort of thing reminds me of the good old days when there were criminal rings who charged people protection. The trouble is, the only people you need protection from these days is the government. They’re the biggest criminal ring in history.”
Korsch turned the ledger to look at it and nodded.
“So here’s a thought,” he said after a while. “Why don’t we just pick someone out from all these names and go and ask them? That fat lawyer, for example. Dr. Waechter. The one who bought Rothman’s premises? I see his name is down here in the ledger with a B and an Ag in his column. Let’s go back there and just ask the bastard, straight out. And if he doesn’t tell us, we should drive him straight to Dachau and threaten to leave him there. I know the road now. And I bet that Captain Piorkowski would go along with it, too. He’d just assume that Heydrich wanted things that way. Believe me, that bastard lawyer will start talking the minute he smells the not-so-fresh air and sees the friendly motto on the gate.”
“You really didn’t like him, did you, Friedrich? Waechter.”
“Did you?”
“No. But I’m prejudiced. I never met a German lawyer yet who I didn’t want to defenestrate from the sixth floor of the Alex.”
“You scared him once. You could scare him again. We both could. With any luck he’ll shit himself
on Piorkowski’s office floor.”
“Much as I would like to put the fear of Heydrich up Waechter’s fat arse I’d prefer to have half an idea of what this ledger means first. One thing I’ve learned since coming back to work for Kripo is that it’s never a good idea to ask questions in Nazi Germany until you know what some of the answers are. Especially after that case last November. Karl Maria Wiesthor. All that work to catch a murderer who turned out to be Himmler’s best friend. What a waste of time. Himmler hated me for solving that case. I told you he kicked me on the shin, didn’t I?”
“Several times. I’d love to have seen that.”
“It wasn’t so funny at the time. Although I think Heydrich and Arthur Nebe enjoyed it. Besides, Waechter might tell Bormann and we’d lose possession of our Bible. Which is what we have here, I suspect. That’s our edge. Even if we don’t know what these people were paying for. No, right now we need someone to help us to decode what’s here in Flex’s holy book. God’s high priest, perhaps.”
“There’s only one true God in Obersalzberg. And Bormann is his prophet.”
“Then if not a priest perhaps a high priestess to help us understand the holy writ. A local Cassandra.”
“Gerdy Troost.”
I nodded. “Exactly. She’s not going to be pleased when I tell her what’s become of her medical friend. When she finds out he drowned himself in the Isar she might just be ready to tell me everything she knows—which, I suspect, is quite a lot.”
“What’s this woman like, boss? Pretty?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Not particularly.”
“Well, that never stopped you before, did it?”
“Listen, I’m glad about that. I’d hate to be tempted to do something indiscreet in Hitler’s house. If he dislikes smoking and drinking it’s hard to imagine what he’d make of two people at it like rabbits in the guest room. For all I know she’s the Leader’s girlfriend. Although it’s hard to imagine what they might get up to that wouldn’t include a two-hour speech at the Sportpalast instead of dinner at Horcher’s.”
“You’d think he’d pick someone pretty,” said Korsch. “I mean, he could have almost any woman in Germany.”
“Maybe he likes good conversation over his tea and cake.”
“I can put up with a clever girl as long as she’s pretty.”
“I’ll let them know. Me, I’m a man of simple tastes, Friedrich. I don’t mind what they look like just as long as they look like Hedy Lamarr. This one. Frau Troost. She’s a designer, she says. As if that’s unusual in a woman. In my experience they’ve all got their designs. Most of them never tell you what those are until it’s too late.” I was thinking of my last girlfriend as I spoke. I still wasn’t sure what Hilde had wanted, only that it hadn’t included me.
“What happened to her old man, then?”
“Paul Troost? All I know is that he’s dead. And that he was much older. Which makes me wonder about their marriage. Gerdy—she’s not like most women. I don’t think she likes men very much. Just Hitler. And I’m not sure he even counts in the man department. He probably doesn’t think so. Not on the evidence of the tea house on the Kehlstein. It’s the kind of place where gods go to plan the conquest of this world and the next.”
Korsch nodded. “Well, if your friend Gerdy is disposed to foretell the future, see if she can predict if there’s going to be another war.”
“You don’t need Cassandra for that, Friedrich. Even I can tell there’s going to be another war. It’s the only possible explanation for Adolf Hitler. He just wants it that way. He always did.”
FORTY-THREE
October 1956
Hugging the shadows of the shop doorway like a nervous cat, I watched Friedrich Korsch as he barked orders at his men in front of the brightly lit corner bar in Freyming-Merlebach. So close to the historic border nobody would have paid much attention to a group of men speaking German—including one particular man wearing leather shorts. The Saarland might have become an administrative part of France but, from what I had read in the papers, few people bothered to parler Français there. Even in Freyming-Merlebach there were signs for German beer and cigarettes on the steamy window of the bar and just to see these made me feel a little closer to home and safety; it was ages since I’d necked a Schloss Bräu or puffed on a Sultan or a Lasso. A long time had passed since Germany, and its old familiar habits, had felt so near to my heart.
Korsch was wearing a short, black belted leather coat that I felt sure he’d owned almost twenty years before, when he’d still been a young Kripo detective in Berlin. But the leather flat cap he was wearing looked to have been more recently acquired and added a proletarian, almost Leninish touch to his appearance, as if he was anxious to conform to the political realities of life in the new Germany, or at least in half of it. But it was his voice I recognized most: among Germans, the Berlin accent is considered one of the strongest and most abrasive in the language, and among Berliners, the Kreuzberg accent is about as strong as Löwensenf mustard. Korsch’s accent had been one of the things that had, perhaps, stopped him from making commissar under the Nazis. Senior Berlin detectives like Arthur Nebe—who was the son of a Berlin schoolteacher—and like Erich Lieberman von Sonnenberg, an aristocrat, and even Otto Trettin had always regarded Friedrich Korsch as a bit of a Mackie Knife, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he always carried an eleven-centimeter switchblade in his pocket, as a backup for the broom-handle Mauser he favored. Kreuzberg was the kind of place where even grandmothers carried a switchblade or at least a long hat pin. In truth, however, Korsch was a well-educated man with his Abitur who enjoyed music and the theater, and collected stamps for a hobby. I wondered if he still owned the twenty-pfennig stamp of Beethoven that lacked a perforation and which he’d told me would one day be valuable. Were communists allowed to do something as bourgeois as make money from selling a rare stamp? Probably not. Profit was always going to be the ideological doorjamb on which communism stubbed its ugly toe.
I pressed myself back against the door as the Stasi man in the leather shorts walked toward me lighting a French cigarette. In the dusk the cigarette lighter also lit up a boyish face with a deep scar that meandered off his forehead and down his cheek like a length of unruly hair; somehow it missed an eye that was as blue as an African lily and probably just as poisonous. Halfway across the street the man stopped and turned as Korsch finished what he was saying with the words “damned idiots,” spoken loudly and with real venom.
Then he said, “That was the comrade-general I was speaking to on the telephone. He told me his contact in the French police reported that a man answering Gunther’s description was spotted a few kilometers west of here, in a place called Puttelange-aux-Lacs, less than two hours ago. The French police lost him, of course. Idiots. They couldn’t catch a fucking apple if it fell off a tree. And he may have stolen a car—a green Renault Frégate—to help make his escape. In which case he could well be here by now. And if he is here it’s my guess he’ll dump the Renault and try and make it into the Saar on foot. Through here or one of these other shitty little towns along what used to be the border.”
“That’s a nice little car,” said another Stasi man, echoing my own opinion.
“But it looks like Mielke was right about this place,” Korsch continued. “We’re to keep an eye out in case he tries to cross over tonight. Which means constant vigilance. If I find one of you bastards sneaking in some shut-eye when you should be looking out for Gunther, I’ll shoot you myself.”
The news that Mielke had a man—possibly more than one—in the French police didn’t surprise me. The country was riddled with communists and it was less than a decade since the French Section of the Workers’ International—the SFIO—had participated in the provisional government of the liberation. Stalin might have been dead but the French Communist Party—the PCF—led by Thorez and Duclos, remained doctrinaire, hard-line Sta
linists and none of the red Franzis, even the ones in the police, would have had a second thought about collaboration with the Stasi. But it did surprise me that the information being provided was up-to-the-minute and accurate. In itself this was alarming. But that the Stasi were devoting more effort to my elimination than even I could have imagined was worse; Erich Mielke wasn’t the kind of man to leave loose ends, and of course I was as loose an end as you could find outside of a string factory.
“And if we do find him, sir?”
Korsch considered this for less than a second. “We kill him, of course. Make it look like a suicide. String him up in the woods and leave the body for the local cops. Then go home. So there’s your incentive, boys. As soon as the bastard’s dead we can all go and get ourselves drunk somewhere and then head back to Germany.”
I heard the hobnailed footsteps of someone walking up the dimly lit street and, a few seconds later, a man wearing a blue boiler jacket and carrying a large shopping bag with a baguette poking out of the top like a submarine’s periscope hove slowly into view on the same side as the dark doorway I was standing in. Of course, even in the dwindling light he saw me immediately, paused for a moment, allowed his face to register some surprise, muttered a quiet “Bonsoir,” and then carried on walking until he came abreast of the Stasi man wearing the shorts and the long woolen stockings. It wasn’t unusual in this rural part of France for men to wear lederhosen. Leather shorts were popular with Alsatian farmers because they are comfortable, hardwearing, and don’t show the dirt. The man with the shopping bag would probably have ignored the Stasi man in the shorts but for the fact that the German stepped into his way with the obvious intent of checking that this was not me attempting to make my escape. I couldn’t blame him for that; the man in the blue jacket looked more like me than I did.
“Yes?” he said. “What do you want, monsieur?”
