Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  “Frankly I’d prefer it if you didn’t. Not until I have half an idea of what I’m really looking for.”

  “It doesn’t seem right, somehow. I don’t know.”

  I let her waver like this for a while and then took out the last of the categorical imperative I was still carrying in my pockets. It was a long time since I’d read Kant but I still knew how to play a few of his angles. Any cop does. “Sure you do. But if you’ve forgotten, then you’ll probably find the reason on page two of Dr. Wasserstein’s prescription on how to be a decent German.”

  “Is that what it was? I thought it was a suicide note.”

  “It amounts to the same thing. And you know that helping me is the right thing to do, so why even argue about it?”

  “What are you expecting to find?”

  “Would you believe me if I said I don’t think I will know for sure until I find it? Gathering evidence is like finding truffles. The pig has to stick its nose to the ground and sniff around for quite a while before it ever digs up anything interesting. And even then it’s sometimes hard to distinguish a piece of fungus that’s worth anything from a bit of shit.”

  “You’ve made your point. But you don’t act like a pig. And believe me, I should know. Martin Bormann is the biggest pig on the pork farm. You’re more of a hound, I think. A Weimaraner. A gray ghost from Weimar. Yes, that’s you.”

  “The ghost sounds about right. My feet are sore, and ever since I got here my heart feels like a clenched fist and I think I will be gray by the time I finish investigating this case. So you’ll take me there? To Obersalzberg Administration’s offices?”

  “All right. Only, do you mind if we go there in my car? I like to drive but I prefer not to when Hitler’s here at the Berghof. He doesn’t approve of women drivers. I’m not sure he approves of women doing anything very much except having babies and frying some Fridolin’s schnitzel. He often says that a woman who drives is a woman who dies.”

  “I guess that counts double if you’re smoking at the wheel.”

  “Probably.”

  Professor Troost telephoned the Berghof duty officer and asked him to have her car brought around to the front. A few minutes later we were seated in a nice blue Auto Union Wanderer and heading down the mountain at the sort of speed that made me think Hitler was probably right about women drivers. By the time we reached Berchtesgaden I had him down as a pretty sensible sort of fellow who put a high value on his life. The dog, Harras, seemed to enjoy the ride, however; he sat behind us with a big stupid grin on his muzzle, pawing the air uselessly.

  The offices of Obersalzberg Administration were ten minutes from the center, on Gebirgsjägerstrasse in Berchtesgaden-Strub, a short distance past the Adolf Hitler Youth Hostel and the local army barracks, which was home, Gerdy told me, to a whole regiment of mountain infantry, just in case the RSD up in Obersalzberg proved insufficient for Hitler’s defense. The office, part of a complex of impressive new buildings, was dominated by an enormous floodlit stone lion, which made a change from an eagle, I suppose; even so, the lion looked like it was doing something unspeakable to a ball finial, which was the same unspeakable thing the Nazis were doing to Germany. Gerdy Troost drew up in front of the OA building in a squeal of tires and stepped out of the Wanderer. There were no lights in the office.

  “Good,” she said. “There’s no one here.”

  She unlocked the front door with a large black key, switched on a light, threw aside her fur stole, and ushered me inside, where everything was white walls, shiny brass locks, blond oak, and gray stone floors. Everything smelled of recently planed wood and new carpets; even the telephones were the very latest combination-rotary-dial models from Siemens. On the walls were lots of framed plans and drawings, photographs of Hitler, portraits of long-forgotten Germans, and, on the largest wall, a big print of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which is beloved of fascists everywhere, as it shows the blend of art and science and proportion, although to me it always looked like a naked policeman trying to direct traffic around Potsdamer Platz. Under a coffered ceiling, double-sized windows ensured there was plenty of light during the day, and copies of The Architectural Digest lay on almost every table in the public areas. The dog ran ahead and disappeared upstairs to practice its salute. Gerdy showed me her office and what was on the drawing board, but by now I was less interested in her work than in the gray filing cabinets that were grouped in a large room on the ground floor and, in particular, those cabinets that housed the personnel files. I tugged at the drawer of one; it was locked, but that wasn’t going to deter me now.

  “I don’t have the keys to those, I’m afraid,” said Gerdy. “So we’ll have to wait until we can speak to Hans Haupner in the morning.”

  I grunted, but the Boker knife I carried was already in my hand. That and the slim piece of smooth, curved spatula-like metal I’d found on the ground where Hermann Kaspel’s car had been parked in Buchenhohe; it made a very useful jimmy. With these simple tools I set about breaking into the drawer.

  “You can’t do that,” said Gerdy fearfully, even as I was able to prise open the cabinet with my makeshift jimmy and slide the lock catch to the side with the knife. My breaking and entering wasn’t quite up to the standard of the Krauss brothers but it was good enough.

  “It looks like I already did,” I said, hauling open the drawer.

  “So that’s why you wanted to come here. To get into these filing cabinets.”

  I laid my tools on top of the cabinet. She picked these up and looked at them as I started to riffle through the files.

  “Do you always go equipped for burglary?”

  “Listen, when Roger Ackroyd gets murdered, someone’s supposed to do something about it. Even if Roger Ackroyd was scum, someone is supposed to do something about it. That’s one of the more important ways you know that you’re living in a civilized society. At least it used to be. Hercule Poirot is supposed to make sure that Roger Ackroyd’s killer doesn’t get away with it. Well, right now, that Hercule Poirot’s me until someone else says different. People lie to me, people try to kill me, people punch me in the face, people tell me I shouldn’t ask questions about things that are none of my business, and me and my broken jaw just have to find a way around all that in the best way I can. Sometimes that includes a gun and a hat, and sometimes a knife and a piece of scrap metal. I never much was one for a magnifying glass and a briar pipe. But any day now I expect the Murder Commission to close up shop and for me to be made redundant and for General Heydrich—he’s my boss—to say, ‘Hey Gunther, don’t bother doing that shit anymore. It’s not important who killed Roger Ackroyd because we killed him, see? And we’d rather our fellow Germans didn’t know about this, if you don’t mind.’ And that will be all right, too, because at least then I’ll know I’m no longer living in a civilized society, so it won’t matter. Because we will be living in a state of barbarism, and nothing much will matter anymore. I’ll be able to go home and tend my window box and lead the kind of quiet, respectable life I always wanted to enjoy. If I sound cynical and bitter it’s because I am. Trying to be an honest cop in Germany is like playing croquet in no-man’s-land.”

  “That’s a nice speech. Sounds like you’ve given it before.”

  “Only in front of my bathroom mirror. That’s the only audience I trust these days.”

  Gerdy Troost put the knife down but kept hold of the spatula, weighing it in her hand as if she enjoyed the feel of it and smiling a wry sort of smile. “But this tells me that you’re selling yourself short, Gunther. I doubt you could ever be as respectable as you like to make out. No one truly respectable would keep something like this in his top pocket.”

  “You mean you know what that is?”

  “Yes. Most women would. Most women and probably most doctors, too. But even for them it’s hardly done to keep this next to your favorite fountain pen and Grandpa’s old cigarette case.”<
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  “It’s a medical instrument?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “I keep away from doctors if I can.” I smiled. “And I don’t know anything about women.”

  “Well, it’s hardly scrap metal. It’s a dilator. It’s used to widen and lengthen a woman’s private parts during an examination.”

  “And here was me thinking that was done with forefinger and thumb. I don’t mean to sound excited. Only the contents of my pockets don’t usually come with such a fascinating history.”

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  “Used by who? What kind of doctor?” I knew the answer to this, but I just wanted to have it confirmed by someone else. I was already thinking about Dr. Karl Brandt’s previous existence, sterilizing women considered racially or intellectually inferior—to say nothing of his more recent work terminating pregnancies for the unfortunate women of P-Barracks, when he wasn’t devoting himself to the Leader’s health.

  “A gynecologist. An obstetrician.”

  “Where would that kind of doctor normally keep such an instrument?”

  “It’s been a while since I, er—but in a little wallet or cloth wrap of medical instruments, probably. Somewhere cleaner than your inside pocket, I hope.”

  “And might that wallet include something sharp? Like a curette?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  I had a vague memory of seeing just such a cloth wallet on the desk in Brandt’s makeshift surgery at the theater in Antenberg. And now that she’d explained what it was, the scene was easily pictured: Karl Brandt had got underneath Hermann Kaspel’s car, taken out his medical instruments, used a curette to cut the car’s brakes—probably the same curette he’d used to cut open Karl Flex’s corpse—and the dilator had slipped out of the wallet in the dark. He probably didn’t even know it was gone until long after I’d found it lying in a pool of hydraulic fluid outside Kaspel’s house in Buchenhohe. Of course, it was one thing knowing this; it was quite another accusing an SS doctor of murder when Adolf Hitler had been the guest of honor at his wedding. That wasn’t ever going to happen, and my nice speech about the murder of Roger Ackroyd sounded even more hollow now than it had before. They’d certainly shoot me long before they ever allowed Karl Brandt to go to the guillotine. It was for this reason I kept my new discovery to myself; the last thing I wanted was for Gerdy Troost to air an accusation like that over the tea table at the Kehlstein.*

  “Seriously, though,” she said. “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it. On the floor of the room at the local hospital where we took Karl Flex’s body for the autopsy.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Sure I’m sure.” I glanced around. “Are we allowed to smoke in here? Only, my answers are always much more convincing when I have a nail in my face.”

  Gerdy found her own cigarettes and poked one in my mouth and then one in hers. They were the good, solidly packed cigarettes with the best Turkish tobacco the Nazis kept for themselves, at least when Hitler wasn’t around to sniff the air in the corridors and check for nicotine on their thumbnails. He’d have made a good detective, maybe. He seemed to have a nose for people breaking the rules. Takes one to know one. I let her light me, too. I realized I liked the idea of that. It made me feel as though we were almost fellow conspirators, two of life’s problem children locked inside Hitler’s morbid sanatorium, rebels seeking a cure from the stiflingly pure atmosphere of the magic mountain.

  “You worry me, Gunther. And I just know I’m going to regret helping you.”

  “You’re the one pushing the cigarette in my mouth, lady. The Leader wouldn’t like you corrupting me in this way. I was in the choir when I was at school. I had a lovely voice.”

  “And you’re the one breaking into confidential filing cabinets with vaginal dilators.”

  “I love the way you say ‘filing cabinets.’ Which reminds me.” I handed her the ledger. “Read out some of those names, will you? We’ve got work to do.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  April 1939

  In a civilization ruled by cruelty and blind obedience, ignorance and bigotry, intelligence shines out like the Lindau Lighthouse, casting its beam for miles in all directions. The famous old Lindau Lighthouse, situated on the northeastern shore of Lake Constance, is perhaps unusual in that it also boasts a massive clock that can easily be viewed from the city. Thus it was with Gerdy Troost. Not only was she extremely bright, she was also perceptive and informative and I seriously doubt I would have made any real progress with my investigation without her help. It was easy to see why Adolf Hitler had made this elfin-faced woman a professor and kept her around the Berghof; it wasn’t only for her ideas on architecture. Famously, she had designed and supervised the construction of the Leader’s new buildings on Munich’s Königsplatz. Gerdy Troost was ferociously smart and from what she herself had said to me, I gathered that she was probably able to tell him a few home truths where no one else would have dared. When the most wicked and mendacious are in charge, truth is the one commodity that is the most valuable of all. To that extent, Gerdy Troost reminded me of me. But which of us would remain alive for longer in Nazi Germany remained to be seen. Truth nearly always outstays its welcome.

  After reading aloud almost fifty names from Karl Flex’s ledger, she and I had discovered only that none of them related to a specific personnel file that was in the OA filing cabinets for Polensky & Zöllner, or for Sager & Woerner. The names appearing in the ledger were in a single file on one master list of all OA employees—this amounted to more than four thousand men—but that was all. For none of Flex’s B-list names did we find any individual personnel files with the kind of cross referencing of numbers for employment identification books, identity cards, labor service passbooks, craftsman’s guild certificate numbers, NSDAP personal identity documents, racial declarations, family books, Aryan family tree records, and paybooks that appeared on the files of those employees who were not on the ledger’s B list and which were entirely typical of the bureaucratically minded Nazis.

  And as I closed one drawer and opened another, Gerdy said: “I have a question. A fundamental question.”

  “Go ahead and ask it.”

  “You seem to have a great deal of faith that this ledger provides solid evidence of criminality. But why would someone record and keep evidence that could put him in prison? Or worse. You’d think he would want to keep this kind of thing a secret.”

  “It’s a good question. For one thing, Bormann doesn’t trust anyone. Certainly not these people he uses for his dirty work—Flex and Schenk and Zander. They’re criminals. I’m quite convinced of that. But they’re also bureaucrats. Record-keeping is second nature to men like this. It’s almost as if the keeping of detailed records makes what they’re doing less criminal. They can even convince themselves that they were only doing what they were told. Besides, the ledger was a secret. I had to break into a hidden safe in order to find it.”

  “Maybe so. But I’m looking at it now, and there’s nothing in these OA files that corroborates any actual evidence of criminality. Either Karl Flex wasn’t doing anything wrong in the first place, or the people running Obersalzberg Administration are just plain incompetent.”

  “Did they previously strike you as incompetent? Careless?”

  “Not in the least. If anything they’re meticulous in OA. I happened to catch sight of the interior decorating expenses for the tea house the other day. Everything was noted. And I mean everything. The tablecloths from Deisz, the deck chairs from Julius Mosler, and the Savonnerie rug from Kurt Goebel.”

  “As a matter of interest, how much does one of those rugs cost anyway?” I shrugged. “I’ve been thinking of redecorating my apartment in Berlin.”

  “Forty-eight thousand reichsmarks.”

  “For a rug? That’s more than my whole building cost.”

  Ge
rdy looked sheepish. “Everything used by the Leader is of the very best quality.”

  “You don’t say. By the way, and not that it’s any of my business—I’m just a taxpayer—but how much in total has been spent on this vitally important project?”

  “I can’t tell you that. This is a very sensitive subject.”

  “Tea houses usually are.”

  “This one certainly is.”

  “Come on. Who am I going to tell? The newspapers? The International Tea Association? The Emperor of Japan? Humor me.”

  I opened another drawer to look for a file in the name of someone on Flex’s list; but there was nothing. Gerdy let out a sigh and folded her arms, defensively.

  “All right. And the numbers are, I admit, inherently unbelievable. But all this had to be done in time for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. So I think Polensky & Zöllner’s costs are something in the region of fifteen million. Sager’s, maybe half that. The fact of the matter is that the tea house on the Kehlstein has cost at least thirty million reichsmarks.”

  I whistled. “That’s a lot of money for a cup of tea and a nice view. It might have been cheaper to buy Ceylon. It makes you wonder what the Berghof cost. And the rest of the houses here in Asgard. Not to mention all the roads and tunnels, the railway station, the Platterhof, the local Reichs Chancellery, the theater, the youth hostel, and the Landlerwald.” I whistled some more. A figure like thirty million reichsmarks is worth a good deal of whistling. “How much do you think Bormann makes in kickbacks on a figure like that?”

  “It’s only a guess, mind—but at least ten percent. Not that you could ever prove it.”

  “And Hitler? What about his end? Or is Bormann taking care of the Leader out of his share?”

  “Hitler’s not interested in money. That’s one of the things that makes him different.”