Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  “I think I know you pretty well. And only because there’s a part of me that’s just like you. I’m a Prussian, too, remember? And I can usually figure out what your next move is going to be. It’s usually the one I wouldn’t have the nerve to make myself.”

  Kuchl was a picturesque Austrian village on the other side of the Kehlstein and the Göll massif, which formed the border with Germany and, according to a large sign on the road, had been JEW-FREE SINCE 1938. The village was one of those very neat Catholic places that resembles a scene from a book of fairy tales with lots of pastel-colored houses, a largish church, and a smaller one that was a useful spare, grotesque wood carvings that demonstrated the village’s facility for carving wood grotesquely, and a Gasthof with painted window frames and an ornate wrought-iron sign that looked like a medieval gibbet. On almost every building was a Nazi banner or mural, which must have baffled the life-sized Jesus nailed onto the crucifix in the main square; in the cold, bright moonlight that painted figure seemed less like the Christ and more like the poor Jew, Süss Oppenheimer, who gets hanged in a near blizzard by the good citizens of Württemberg at the end of Veit Harlan’s notorious film. In the main square we asked a young man leaving the Gasthof on a bicycle for the way to Oberweissenbachstrasse and Diesbach’s Boardinghouse and were misdirected, politely, to another Jew-free village, called Luegwinkl. It was only after we’d asked for directions again, almost an hour later, that we finally made our way across a bridge over the Salzach River, to the edge of a tree-covered hillside, where we found Diesbach’s Boardinghouse—a three-story wooden chalet with a wraparound wooden balcony and a working waterwheel. Under the eaves of the house was a wooden stag’s head and, by the front door, a park-style wooden bench, underneath which were enough dirty boots to keep a shoe-shine in business for a day or two. The upper-floor lights were on and there was a strong smell of wood smoke from the chimney.

  “We’re only a few kilometers from Germany,” said Korsch as we stood outside the front door. “And yet I feel we just went several centuries back in time. I wonder why that is. Something in the air perhaps? A slight taste of aspic jelly.”

  “I wonder why that young bastard sent us in the wrong direction,” I said. “We were only five minutes away from this place when we asked him for directions.”

  “Your accent? Perhaps he didn’t like you.”

  “Maybe. But more likely it was this car. It looks official. At this time of night we look like we’re police. Who else would be arriving here at ten p.m.?”

  “These people are too respectable to try and fuck with the law.”

  “They may be old-fashioned, but they’re not stupid. That boy had more than enough time to cycle over here and warn Johann Diesbach we were coming. Perhaps Diesbach has been expecting us.”

  I got out of the car and walked across the snow-covered path to a dry rectangle on the driveway where a car or perhaps a small truck had been parked until a short while ago. On the ground a few meters away, next to an old light blue Wanderer on bricks, was a used Mahle oil filter of the kind that had functioned as a makeshift sound suppressor on the barrel of the Mannlicher carbine used to shoot Karl Flex. But it was the pink footsteps in the snow that interested me the most; they were the same pink footprints I’d seen outside the house of Udo Ambros. I picked up one of the boots from under the bench and inspected the lugged sole; it was the same pattern as the one I’d seen before. The sole was encrusted with tiny crystals of pink salt.

  “There was a car parked here until it stopped snowing about an hour ago. I’ll bet my pension Diesbach isn’t here.”

  “Someone’s in,” said Korsch, looking up. “I just saw someone at the window.”

  “Look, when we’re inside, keep whoever’s there talking while I take a leak and have a snoop around.”

  I knocked on the door and a window upstairs opened.

  “We’re closed for the winter,” she said.

  “We’re not looking for rooms.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Open the door and we’ll tell you.”

  “I should think not. Look, what do you mean by knocking on someone’s door at this time of night? I’ve a good mind to report you both to the police.”

  “We are the police,” said Korsch, and then grinned at me. He never tired of saying that kind of thing. “This is Commissar Gunther, and I’m Criminal Assistant Korsch.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “We’re looking for Johann Diesbach.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Can you open the door please, missus? We need to ask you some questions. About your husband.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, ‘Where is he?’”

  “I have no idea. Look, he went out this morning and he’s not come home yet.”

  “Then we’ll come in and wait for him.”

  “Couldn’t you come back here in the morning?”

  “It won’t be my colleague and I who are back here in the morning. It will be the Gestapo.”

  “The Gestapo? What would the Gestapo want from us?”

  “The same thing they want from everyone. Answers. I just hope you have them, Frau Diesbach. They’re not as patient as us.”

  The woman who switched on the hall light and answered the door was wearing a low-cut blouse, a red velvet waistcoat, and a white pinafore, and was carrying more in front than a busy waitress at Oktoberfest. She was very tall with short dark hair, dry thick lips, and a neck like Nefertiti’s Zulu cousin. Attractive, I suppose, in an Amazonian sort of way, as if Diana the huntress had possessed an older and more obviously lethal sister. Her green eyes flicked sharply across our faces but the hand at the side of her red cotton dress was trembling as if she was terrified of something; us, probably, but there was nothing in her voice that betrayed her fear: she spoke clearly and confidently.

  “May I see some identification, please?”

  I already had my beer token in my hand, which was right under her substantial breasts. Maybe that’s why she didn’t see it.

  “Here.”

  “That’s it? This little piece of metal?”

  “That’s a warrant disc, lady,” I said, “and I don’t have the time.”

  I pushed past the twin Gordian knots that were her bosom and went into the house.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  April 1939

  “What’s all this about?” Frau Diesbach closed the front door behind us and wiped her large hands on the white apron she was wearing. She was taller than Friedrich Korsch by more than a head.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. Quite alone.”

  We were in a hallway with a flagstone floor, a dark oak sideboard, and, on the whitewashed wall, an old photograph of the even older Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, who looked a lot like the wiliest animal in the Vienna woods, and another of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. There were several other pictures of a heavily mustached Johann Diesbach in uniform that seemed to indicate he’d been part of the German Sixth Army and a veteran of the Battle of Lorraine, which was one of the very first engagements of the war and generally held to have been so inconclusive that it had helped to create the stalemate of trench warfare that persisted for another four costly years. On his chest was an Iron Cross First Class. Several hunting rifles and shotguns were on a rack beside a woodcut print of a hermit ticking off a group of medieval horsemen for some undisclosed offense: waking him up, probably. Everything smelled strongly of pipe tobacco and since the lady of the house didn’t strike me as an obvious pipe smoker herself, I concluded a man had been there very recently.

  “What does your husband do, Frau Diesbach?” I asked.

  “We own a small salt mine,” she explained. “In Berchtesgaden. We refine our own high-quality table salt. Which he sells direct to restaurants throughout Germany and Austria.”

>   “Sounds like a lot of digging,” said Korsch.

  “There’s not much digging involved,” she explained. “We use a brine extraction process. Freshwater is fed into the mountain and the nonsoluble components of the rock sink to the bottom. It’s all about pumps and pipelines now, and very scientific.”

  “Is he at the mine now?”

  “No, he’s away selling gourmet-quality salt to our big customers in Munich, so he could be home very late.”

  “Which customers would they be?”

  “The head chef at the Kaiserhof.”

  I walked into the drawing room and switched on a lamp that appeared to be made of a large rose-colored crystal. On the table next to it were several jars of pink salt. I picked one up. It was full of smaller versions of the table lamp and was the same salt that I’d seen in the lugs of the boot outside.

  “I told you, my husband’s not here,” she insisted irritably, and tugged nervously at a piece of dry skin on her lower lip.

  “Is this it? Your gourmet-quality salt?”

  “That’s what it says on the label.”

  “He’s in Munich, you say.”

  “Yes. Of course, it’s possible he might stay overnight. If he’s had too much to drink. Having dinner with clients, he often does, I’m afraid. It’s an occupational hazard when you’re offering hospitality.” She lit a cigarette from a silver box with nervous fingers. By now the cleavage between her breasts was shifting like the San Andreas Fault.

  “The head chef at the Kaiserhof, Konrad Held,” I lied. “I know him well. I could telephone him if you like and find out if your husband’s still there.”

  “It might not be the head chef he’s seeing,” she allowed, tugging at the skin on her lip some more. “But someone else in the hotel kitchen.”

  I smiled patiently. You get to know when someone is lying to you. Especially with tits as eloquent as hers. After that it’s just a question of judging the right moment to let them hear that. No one likes being called a liar to his or her face. Least of all in their own home and by the police. I almost felt sorry for the woman; if it hadn’t been for that earlier bit of sarcasm I might have been polite, but as things stood I was more inclined to bully her now, just to hurry things along. An innocent man’s life was at stake, after all. There was a fretted shelf running the length of the drawing room at just above head height and my eyes were already sorting through the books, looking for something to help bring some extra pressure to bear on her, to overcome any more resistance to our questions. Mostly the books were to do with geology, but I’d already seen a couple of titles that might serve my purpose. But for now I ignored them and walked across the drawing room to the wide, redbrick fireplace. Behind a wrought-iron screen, the log fire was still burning quietly; the log was hardly a size you’d have chosen if you’d been on your own. Whoever had built that fire from scratch had done it for a cozy evening made for two. Next to the fire was an armchair and on the chair was a copy of that day’s Völkischer Beobachter. I picked it up, sat down, and laid the paper on the hearth next to an ashtray and a tin of Von Eicken with the lid left off; in the ashtray was a pipe. After a while I picked that up as well and found the cherrywood bowl was still warm—warmer than the fire. It was all too easy to picture the man who had been seated there in front of the fire not half an hour before, puffing his tobacco like a Danube boat captain.

  “It’s a nice house you have here,” said Korsch, opening a drawer in the bureau.

  Frau Diesbach folded her arms defensively. Probably it helped prevent her from hitting Korsch over the head with the table lamp. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

  “Is there much money in table salt then?” he asked, ignoring her remark. Sometimes police work contains the very opposite of a Socratic dialogue: you say one thing, I pretend I didn’t hear it and say another.

  “Like anything else, there is if you work hard.”

  “I wish that was true,” said Korsch. “There’s certainly not much money in being a policeman. Isn’t that right, boss?”

  “Is that what you’re looking for? Money? I assumed you were here to investigate a crime, not commit one.”

  Korsch laughed harshly. “She’s a sour one. Must be all that salt, eh, boss?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “You should try refining sugar, instead, missus.”

  “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “I told you,” said Korsch, pulling open another drawer provocatively. “We’re looking for your husband.”

  “And I told you. He’s not here. And he’s certainly not in that bureau.”

  “Lots of people start out trying to be clever with us,” said Korsch. “But it never lasts for very long. The last laugh is usually ours. Isn’t that right, boss?”

  I grunted. I didn’t feel much like laughing. Not with my jaw tied up. And certainly not after seeing poor Aneta Husák murdered in cold blood. I wasn’t about to forget that in a hurry. On top of a baby grand piano were some photographs and it wasn’t long before I started to believe that one of these was of the same scholarly-looking young man who had sent us on the wild-goose chase to Luegwinkl. After a while I got up, collected the picture off the polished piano lid, looked at it for a while, and showed it to Korsch who nodded back at me. It was him all right.

  “That explains a lot,” he said.

  “Who’s this?” I asked Frau Diesbach.

  “My son Benno.”

  “Good-looking boy, isn’t he?” Korsch was being sarcastic. With his thick glasses, receding chin, and coy expression, Benno Diesbach looked like a real wet paper bag and just the type of sensitive, weedy boy an anxious, doting mother would have wanted kept out of something as rough as the army. My mother had probably felt the same way about me when I was about twelve, assuming she ever felt anything at all.

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “I thought you said it was my husband you were looking for.”

  “Just answer the question, missus,” said Korsch.

  “He went out. For a beer with some friends.”

  “He doesn’t look old enough.”

  “He’s twenty. And he’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “To do with what?” asked Korsch.

  “To do with anything. Look, why are you looking for him at all?”

  “Who?”

  “My husband. He hasn’t broken the law.”

  “No?” From among several books on geology on the shelves I fetched a copy of Alfred Döblin’s famous novel and another one by Erich Maria Remarque for good measure. They were the same cheap editions I had at home. “Someone has. Are these his books or yours?”

  “They must belong to—look, does it matter? My God, they’re just some old books.”

  I felt sure she’d been about to confess that the books belonged to her son, Benno. He certainly looked like anyone’s idea of a keen reader.

  “These are not just books,” I said, “they’re forbidden books.” There were times when it was necessary for me to sound like a real Nazi. Times when I hated myself more than was usual, even by my debased standards. I already had the strong sense not only that Johann Diesbach had just escaped us but also that his escape was prima facie evidence of his guilt. There was that and the pink salt in the soles of the boots outside. I was pretty sure that the man who had worn those had murdered Udo Ambros.

  But with each minute that his wife managed to delay us, the better were the man’s chances of evading capture and the worse were Johann Brandner’s chances of escaping a firing squad or the falling ax at Plötzensee. “Since 1933 these authors have been banned because of their Jewish descent or because of their communist or pacifist sympathies.”

  “I had no idea. Says who?”

  “The Ministry of Truth and Propaganda, that’s who. Don’t you see the newsreels in the cin
ema theaters? For the last six years we’ve been burning books we don’t like.”

  “We don’t go to the cinema very much.”

  “Me, I could care less what you read but ignorance of the law is no excuse, Frau Diesbach. Ownership of these books can result in deportation, imprisonment, or even death. Yes, seriously. So I advise you to cooperate with us and tell us exactly where your husband is, Frau Diesbach, otherwise it won’t just be him that’s in trouble, it will be you, too.” I wondered exactly how much she knew of what her husband had done.

  “Your husband is suspected of being involved in the commission of two murders.”

  “Two?” She looked surprised at the number so I guessed that maybe she’d known about Flex, but not about Udo Ambros.

  “Didn’t I say we’d have the last laugh?” said Korsch.

  “I’ve already told you both,” she said dully. “Johann’s in Munich.”

  “With clients, yes,” said Korsch. “Yes. You said that. We didn’t believe it the first time you said it.”

  The woman sat down heavily in a cloud of Guerlain and despair, and lit another cigarette. I helped myself to the one she was still smoking and which was lying in a large salt-crystal ashtray, puffed it thoughtfully, and smiled a painful smile.

  “May I use your lavatory, Frau Diesbach?” I asked. “While you think things over, perhaps. And I strongly recommend that you do.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It’s at the top of the stairs.”

  “What time will your son be back?” Korsch asked her.

  “I really don’t know. Why?”

  “When are you going to understand that we ask the questions, Frau Diesbach?”

  While Korsch kept her talking I went up the narrow stairs and took a look around. The house was like a smaller version of the Berghof, only without the resident dwarf Alberich. The hallway was lined with several historic maps of the old Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate, an area of southwestern Germany that bordered the Saarland, and framed photographs of cave formations and what looked like salt mines and interesting geological formations. Opening a couple of the plain wooden doors I found small, comfortable rooms with the mattresses rolled up like pastry, and several prints of Alpine hikers. It was probably a nice, clean place to stay in the summer; any happy wanderer would have slept well and after a good German breakfast prepared by Frau Diesbach they’d think they’d done well choosing it—especially if they managed to catch a glimpse or two of her ample bosom.