Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  “Well, at least I’ve got a brain,” I said pointedly. “Unlike Udo Ambros.”

  “And I still don’t believe that Captain Kaspel’s death was anything but an accident.”

  “Then there’s the small matter of an alibi,” I continued, ignoring Högl’s objections. “From what I hear, Johann Brandner was in hospital when he was arrested. In which case I expect that there are lots of people—some of them doctors, German doctors—who might be prepared to say that Brandner was never out of bed. So unless he was hospitalized for persistent sleepwalking, I can’t say that I think much of your confession, gentlemen.”

  “Nevertheless he did sign a full confession,” said Högl. “And in spite of what you might believe, it was all done with an absolute minimum of force. It’s true. The sergeant was going to hit him at one stage. But the fact is he fell down the stairs.”

  “I’ve certainly not heard that one before. Can I read this confession?”

  Rattenhuber handed me a typed sheet of paper on which was an almost illegible scrawl of a signature.

  “What the major says is absolutely true,” he said, while I glanced over Brandner’s confession. “He fell. But when we did question him, frankly, the threat of returning him to a concentration camp was more than enough to persuade him to volunteer the truth. He claims he’s been suffering from malnutrition ever since Dachau.”

  “That ought to be an easy claim to substantiate,” I said handing back the confession, which made no mention of Kaspel or Ambros, not that I had really expected it would. “I’d like to see him, if I may. Speak to the man myself. Look, Colonel, maybe he did kill Karl Flex. I don’t know. Nothing would give me more pleasure than going straight back to Berlin right now, knowing that the Leader was safe. But I do have a number of questions I need to satisfy myself about before I can rubber-stamp this confession and turn it over to General Heydrich at Gestapo headquarters.”

  I could see that this mention of Heydrich troubled them both, which was of course why I’d invoked his name; nobody in Germany wanted to incur his displeasure, least of all Rattenhuber.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “We wouldn’t want the general to think we’ve swept anything under the carpet here. Would we, Peter?”

  But it was immediately clear that Högl felt his association with Hitler as old comrades from the Sixteenth Bavarian could trump my association with Heydrich; it was a reasonable assumption. I could almost see the Leader with his hand on his former NCO’s shoulder. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased; listen to him; he’s a real fucking Nazi.

  “There’s no question of that, sir,” he said. “But to me it’s beginning to seem very much as if the famous Commissar Gunther from the Berlin Murder Commission is much more interested in satisfying himself and rescuing his professional reputation than in apprehending the culprit. We have a confession from a local man with a proven grudge who knows the area and is a trained marksman. Frankly it seems like an open-and-shut case to me.”

  “Then the Leader should be counted as fortunate that Reichs Leader Bormann and Heydrich put me in charge of this investigation, Major, not you.”

  “It was Gunther who identified Brandner as the number one suspect,” said Rattenhuber. “You have to hand it to him, Peter. Until he got here we were all half-inclined to believe that the shooting might have been an accident. A poacher’s stray shot, perhaps. I think we owe the commissar a great deal.”

  “If the commissar insists on interviewing this man again, I have no objection of course,” said Högl. “That’s his prerogative. I just don’t want us to find ourselves in a position where Johann Brandner retracts what he has said so that the commissar here can indulge himself in some stupid fantasy about a whole series of murders here in Obersalzberg and Berchtesgaden.”

  “You’re not going to ask him to retract his confession, are you?” said Rattenhuber.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Not in this place.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Högl.

  “It means that in the Türken Inn it’s you and the colonel who are in charge, not me. And he’s your prisoner. Not mine.”

  “There you are, Peter,” said Rattenhuber. “There’s no question of the commissar persuading Johann Brandner to withdraw his confession. He just wants to check the umlauts are in place over the right letters. Isn’t that so, Gunther?”

  “That’s right, sir. I’m just doing my job.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  April 1939

  A few minutes later, SS-Untersturmführer Dietrich ushered Friedrich Korsch and me to the top of a precipitous circular stone staircase that looked like the back door into the lowest part of hell.

  “Did the prisoner really fall down these stairs?” I asked.

  Dietrich hesitated.

  “I won’t tell you told me. But I really need to know if this confession is on the level. For the sake of the Leader. You see, if Johann Brandner didn’t kill Dr. Flex, then the real murderer is still running around Berchtesgaden. Just imagine if he decided to shoot someone else. That could really blow out Hitler’s candles.”

  “He was pushed. By Major Högl.”

  “Good lad. I thought as much.”

  “Sir. Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything you like. But you’ll probably have to listen hard to understand the answer with this jaw. I’d make a lousy ventriloquist.”

  “Major Högl says the other two prisoners we have down here are to be shot. On Captain Neumann’s orders. And that I’m to command the firing squad. I don’t know what to say to them. I’d rather not do it, really. I’ve never commanded a firing squad and I’m not quite sure what to do.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Lieutenant. I imagine the orders will have to be checked with Berlin. Which could take some time.”

  “They already were. Colonel Rattenhuber sent a telex asking Prinz Albrechtstrasse for confirmation and General Heydrich said we’re to shoot them first thing tomorrow morning and then send the bodies back to Austria.”

  “Then I shall want to send a telex myself,” I said. “To ask the general if he’ll change his mind. Can you help me do that?”

  “Willingly. It’s not that I’m questioning my orders, you understand. It’s just that it doesn’t seem right somehow, to shoot our own men.”

  “Just for the record, Lieutenant, we’ve been shooting our own men and worse, since 1933.”

  Thirty or forty meters down into the bowels of the earth was a low square corridor that led to a couple of damp, wooden-floored cells, and an empty kennel for a guard dog, which was where we found Johann Brandner, naked and in a bad way; he was thinner than a pipe cleaner and just as white, with a couple of large bruises on his face, one under each eye, and a broken nose that was still encrusted with blood. But I didn’t need to speak to him. It was immediately plain that Brandner was weak from lack of food and clearly belonged in hospital. He could hardly stand, which wasn’t made any easier by the height of the kennel. We fetched him out and helped him to drink some water.

  “Please,” he whispered. “I’ve told you everything.”

  “Look, I’m going to get you out of here. Just be patient.”

  Brandner looked at me fearfully, as if he suspected this was a trick and I would hit him if he now confirmed that his previous confession had been false. I fed a cigarette into his mouth and one into my own. Smoking is easy with a suspected broken jaw; it’s all in the lips.

  “No, no,” he said. “I really did kill Flex. I shot him on the terrace of the Berghof, with a rifle.”

  I nodded. “Remind me how many shots you fired. One or two?”

  “I only needed to fire once. I used to be a marksman in the army, you see. And it wasn’t a difficult shot, from a window in the Villa Bechstein. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “What kind of a rifle did you use?
”

  “A bolt-action Mauser.”

  “The Karabiner 98? With a three-power Voigtländer sight?”

  “That’s right. Good rifle, that.”

  “All right,” I said. “I believe you. By the way, why were you in hospital?”

  “I went there after I was released from Dachau. I was suffering from malnutrition.” He took a drag of the cigarette and smiled weakly. “Please don’t send me back there.”

  “I won’t.” It was an evasive, cowardly answer, I knew, but I had no desire to add to Brandner’s woes.

  “What is going to happen to me, sir?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, even though I had a good idea. It wasn’t so long since the Gestapo in Stuttgart had arrested Helmut Hirsch for his part in a plot intended to destabilize the Reich that, perhaps, had included shooting some low-level Nazi bureaucrat—someone like Karl Flex. There had been very little evidence against Hirsch other than his own confession, but that certainly didn’t stop the Nazis from proceeding with his prosecution. Soon after his arrest he’d been transferred to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. And I could easily see how Brandner’s confession might become the basis of a larger conspiracy that could justify a few more arrests and, eventually, executions, too. The Nazis had a morbid taste for the guillotine that was the equal of the revolutionary tribunal during the French Reign of Terror.

  I sneezed, which was agony as far as my face was concerned, and for a minute I closed my eyes until I had processed the pain. My own head felt like someone had tried to cut it off with a butter knife.

  “It wasn’t us that did that, was it?” asked a voice. “Smacked you on the head?” The two cells underneath the Türken were occupied by the Gestapo men from Linz who’d both come to the barred windows to listen to my conversation with Brandner. But given what I now knew about the fate that was planned for them, I hardly wanted to speak to either man.

  “Someone else,” I said. “It’s been that kind of day.”

  “Looks like your jaw might be broken,” said one. “Best thing you can do? Take off that cheap Raxon around your neck and use it like a bandage, under your trap and over the top of your head. You’ll look like a prick, of course, but you should be used to that, and it won’t hurt quite as much. If you see a pill Jesus, he won’t do much more than bandage it up anyway and give you some painkillers. I know what I’m talking about. This won’t surprise you but I’ve broken a few jaws in my time. Fixed a few, too. Before I joined the Gestapo I was a corner man for Max Schmeling. And the quicker you do it, and the tighter you do it, the better.”

  It sounded like he was having me on but I took off my tie and tied a nice bow on top of my head and a few minutes later my head looked like the last Christmas present in the orphanage. I put my hat back on, which made me look a little less ridiculous, perhaps, but only just. And he was right; it did feel a little better.

  “Thanks,” I said through my teeth.

  “Hey, Commissar Gunther,” said the other man—the one I’d stabbed with the piece of glass. “What’s going to happen to us? You can’t keep us here. Kaltenbrunner isn’t going to appreciate that if he finds out. But if you let us go now we won’t tell him. We’ll drive quietly back to Linz and it’ll be like this never happened. We’ll tell him we had a car accident or something.”

  “It’s not up to me,” I said. “It’s General Heydrich’s decision. And they’re none too fond of each other.” I gave each of them a cigarette and lit them both.

  “No one told us you were working for him.”

  “I think I did, but that hardly matters now, does it?”

  “Look, it was nothing personal. We were only obeying orders. You know that. You’re a cop, just like us. You do what you’re told, right? That’s the job. Kaltenbrunner says jump, you say, how high? Sounds to me like the three of us got caught in the middle of a feud between your boss and ours. To hell with them both, that’s what I say.”

  “We can agree about their destination anyway,” I said. “If not much else.”

  “What is going to happen to us?” said the other. “Seems to me like you’re sidestepping the question.”

  I was. So I told them what Neumann had in mind. And not because I wanted to give them grief but because I’d ducked the truth one too many times that day already. It was easily done in Germany and a bad habit I was quickly developing. But how else was I going to stay alive?

  “I think they mean to put you in front of a firing squad.”

  “They can’t do that. Not without a court-martial.”

  “I’m afraid they can. They can do anything they like. Especially here on Hitler’s mountain. But I don’t think it will come to that. I’m going to ask General Heydrich to change his mind. Not because I like you, either. But because—well, let’s just say that I don’t want anyone to be shot on my account. One way or the other, I’ve seen a bit too much killing of late. And I’d rather not see any more.”

  “Thanks, Gunther. You’re all right. For a Berliner.”

  I went back to the stairs and started to go up, but I could just as easily have gone the other way. The stairs continued down as well as up. Far below my feet I could hear and feel the sound of men working with drills and the cold, damp air was thick with masonry dust.

  “What’s down there?” I asked Dietrich. “More cells? Torture chambers? Secret weapons? The seven dwarves?”

  “Bunkers. Tunnels. Power generators. Storage rooms. This whole mountain would look like a rabbit warren if you were to see it in cross-section. From Göring’s house you can walk all the way to the Platterhof Hotel without seeing the light of day.”

  “I guess that’s the way these people like it. The Nazis always were a bit too nocturnal for my taste.”

  “Sir, please. I’ve been a Party member myself since 1933.”

  “You don’t look old enough. But did you ever ask yourself what all these bunkers are for? Maybe someone knows something we don’t. About our real chances for keeping that peace treaty we signed with the Franzis and the Tommies at Munich.”

  Back in the officers’ mess upstairs, Rattenhuber and Högl were waiting for me. Rattenhuber put down his champagne and stood up, a little unsteadily; Högl carried on reading a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter as if my opinion of the suspect’s guilt or innocence mattered not at all.

  “Well?” asked Rattenhuber. “What do you think?”

  “Johann Brandner couldn’t possibly have murdered Karl Flex.” I was looking at Högl as I continued with my answer. “In case you’re interested.”

  “You see?” Högl was speaking to Rattenhuber from behind the newspaper. “I told you he’d make trouble, sir. In my opinion, the commissar wants all the glory for himself.”

  “Why do you say this, Gunther?” Rattenhuber sounded exasperated. “You said yourself he was suspect number one. Johann Brandner has the right background. A substantial and previously documented motive. The local knowledge. Everything. When the Gestapo arrested him in Nuremberg he even had a rifle at home. And we have a confession. Why would he confess to something he didn’t do?”

  “All sorts of reasons. But mostly there’s only one that counts these days. Fear. Fear of what you people might do to him if he said he didn’t kill Karl Flex. Look, nothing of what he just told me agrees with any of the forensic evidence I found up at the Berghof or the Villa Bechstein and that’s what counts here.”

  “Perhaps he was trying to mislead you,” said Rattenhuber. “By contradicting his previous statement he hopes to muddy the investigative waters, so to speak.”

  “Look, Colonel, if you and the major here care to take the trouble, you’ll easily see that the man is innocent. If you want to inform Bormann that he’s your murderer, then go right ahead. That’s fine by me. I haven’t asked him to retract his confession and I’m not going to. But I don’t believe a word of it and I’m going to keep on hunting for
the real killer until the Reichs Leader or General Heydrich tells me to stop.”

  Högl put down his newspaper and stood up as if I had finally said something important enough to get his attention.

  “Very well,” said Högl. He pointed out the window across the parade ground at the enormous four-story house that sat at the top of the snow-covered field above the Türken Inn; with the Untersberg mountains behind, it looked more like a luxury Alpine hotel than the home of one man. “Let’s go and ask the Boss what he thinks. He’s there now. I can see the light on in his office. I’ll telephone Martin Bormann this very minute and ask if we can walk up there and speak to him. We’ll let him decide on the guilt of this man, shall we?”

  “You must really want to be rid of me, Major,” I said. “But I wonder why you want to be rid of me so badly.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  April 1939

  We were ushered into Bormann’s ground-floor study to await the arrival of the Reichs leader. The house smelled strongly of rosemary, as if someone was roasting lamb, and suddenly I was hungry. The whitewashed room we were in had a vaulted ceiling with a brass chandelier and a large red marble fireplace that was a smaller version of the one I’d seen up at the tea house. The blond oak doors had huge strap hinges that made you think you were back in church and, in truth, the three of us were just as quiet as if we were sitting in a row of pews instead of some richly upholstered armchairs, but the rest of the house was noisy with children, as if the huge building also housed a kindergarten. The Nazis liked big families; they gave mothers with lots of children medals for producing more Nazis. Mrs. Bormann probably had an Iron Cross First Class.

  Under the window was a set of shelves with lots of books that seemed like they’d been bought for how they looked and not how they read, several silver beer tankards, and various pictures of Hitler in his rare unguarded moments. In one of these he was seated in a deck chair on a hillside in a forest; over his left shoulder was a black dog that might have been his familiar. The wooden floor was covered with a thick red Persian rug and on the walls were a couple of broadswords, some choice tapestries, and several oil paintings of a dark-haired woman I assumed was Bormann’s fecund wife, Gerda. None of the paintings did her any favors; she looked tired. Then again, having six children to look after all day would tire the Pied Piper of Hamelin.