by Philip Kerr
I opened a closet and on a shelf behind some blankets I found several boxes of the same red Brenneke slugs that had been used to kill Udo Ambros. Leaning against a thickly papered wall in a corner of the chilly master bedroom was a Walloon sword as long as a ski pole, which almost made me glad we’d not got there earlier. A white cat was lying on the brass bed and he stared at me with bright blue eyes that were as sharp as the sword and full of a cat’s questions, which meant the answers were no more important than the time of day, the taste of fresh snow, or the shape of a cloud formation above the Kehlstein. There are times when I think it would be good to be a cat, even in that part of the world, at least as long as you stayed away from Hitler and the Landlerwald. Some of the drawers in the bedroom chest were empty and still open and, lying on the carpet, were a cuff link, a collar stud, and a 7.62 mm Parabellum cartridge; clearly someone with a Luger pistol had left in quite a hurry.
On the bedside table was a piece of paper and on this was a long list of customer names and train times for Munich and Frankfurt, which was unremarkable except for the fact that whoever had written it preferred using the same neat, semi-literate capital letters that had appeared on Udo Ambros’s “suicide” note. I folded the paper and pocketed it. More pictures among the ivory-handled hairbrushes and combs on the Biedermeier dressing table showed several of Benno, the much-loved young man who’d misdirected us earlier, clearly to allow him enough time to cycle home and warn his father, Johann—who appeared in another photograph with Udo Ambros when he’d still been in possession of a head, and before someone blew it off with a shotgun—that the police were now hot on his trail. Ambros was a tough-looking man, but Diesbach looked tougher and altogether more dislikable, not least because the mustache had been trimmed and now looked exactly like Adolf Hitler’s. I removed the pictures from their frames, put them in my coat pocket, and went into the next room. I stared at the man in the bathroom mirror, retied the Raxon keeping my jaw tight, and growled back at him:
“No wonder the cat was looking strangely at you, Gunther. You look like someone’s idea of toothache.”
The bath was full of cold water, as if Frau Diesbach had been on the point of having a bath when her heroic son had arrived home and announced my imminent arrival; her stockings and underwear lay on a white basket chair behind the door. In another place I might have picked them up and sniffed them; it had been a while since I’d enjoyed the intimate smell of an attractive woman and I was beginning to experience withdrawal symptoms. Instead I picked up her brassiere and for a moment or two admired its sheer size. It looked like a slingshot that had once belonged to Goliath and one that might have substantially improved his slim chances against the shepherd boy David. That and a decent boulder or two. I’d always felt sorry for Goliath. But Bavarian mountain air does strange things to a Berlin Fritz like me.
There was a chromium-plated electric radiator on the tiled wall, a set of false teeth in a glass on the windowsill, and a large bathroom cabinet above the basin. I opened it and immediately saw the answers to questions the white cat might have cared more about if he’d known exactly how they were going to affect him. The plain fact of the matter is that you can’t get a plate of fish and a saucer of milk if your owners are locked up in a concentration camp, or worse. But of professional satisfaction at my having suddenly grasped the full extent of what was going on here in the Diesbach home, there was none. Besides, I doubted that it was the kind of elegant drawing-room solution to a crime you’d have found in the work of any respectable detective storyteller like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers; it wasn’t the kind of police evidence that made you feel anything but ashamed to have discovered it. And I felt sick to my stomach at what I was now obliged to go downstairs and say to Frau Diesbach’s face, because in the circumstances I didn’t know that I’d have done anything different from what Johann Diesbach had done—except perhaps not shoot Udo Ambros. Nobody deserved to have their face become the startled facsimile of a painting by Picasso. In the bathroom cabinet was a bottle of Protargol. And it was about then I remembered that Protargol was silver nitrate and that the symbol for silver on the periodic table was Ag. Which probably explained the Ag list in Flex’s loathsome ledger. There was some Pervitin, too—P for Pervitin?—but that hardly seemed important beside the standard medical treatment for a venereal disease. The question was, which of them was afflicted with the dose of jelly? Johann Diesbach, his wife, or both? Benno Diesbach didn’t even come into my thinking here; from the look of him he was a long way off that first moment of joy when a boy becomes a very startled man. I’d seen more obvious-looking virgins on a Berlin street corner. I pocketed both types of pill and ran downstairs with more evidence for my present theories than Archimedes wearing just a bath towel.
FIFTY-FIVE
April 1939
“There’s no way to say this that sounds kind or polite, Frau Diesbach, so I’m just going to say it and then, if you’re sensible and you tell me where he’s gone, I’ll try to help you. Your husband, I can’t help. But there’s no need for you to go the same way. I will catch him and when I do it would look better for you if I could tell my superiors that you cooperated. Even if you didn’t. If you start throwing things at me now and affecting pious outrage, then I tell you frankly I won’t like that at all. Or you. I’m telling you straight that if you don’t cooperate, you’re going to jail. Tonight. The way I see it is that your husband, Johann Diesbach, who was probably full of methamphetamine at the time, shot and killed Karl Flex because Flex gave you a venereal disease.” I placed the Protargol and the Pervitin on the table next to the salt. “Exhibits one and two. Flex had decided he wasn’t satisfied with your husband paying him money to pretend that your son Benno was working for the Obersalzberg Administration in order that he be kept out of the army. He liked you, too, and decided he wanted something other than money. He decided he wanted you in his bed. In return for giving you what you wanted. Unfortunately he also gave you a venereal disease.”
I paused as the tall, handsome woman who’d been about to have a bath sat down heavily and fumbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief. “Good, I’m glad you’re not arguing with this. Because my jaw hurts, as you can probably see, and I really don’t have the energy to argue back. Karl Flex wanted you in his bed and you agreed, because you love your son and getting him into a reserved occupation for a hundred marks a year seemed like the best means of keeping him out of harm’s way. I only met him briefly and he seemed like a good boy. Loyal and, yes, brave, but maybe a little wet behind the ears, and you were right to try to get him deferred from the army because in wartime it’s those young men with the sweetest faces who are usually the first to buy it because they’re always trying to prove that they’re not so wet after all. You agreed to sleep with Flex and he gave you a dose of jelly. And when you complained he referred you to Dr. Brandt, who agreed to help find you a cure, because he’s in on the same mountaintop racket as Flex. But by then you’d given the dose of jelly to your husband, and so he decided to put an end to it all. The whole rotten business. This is why Johann shot him. And good for him. That’s what I say. Karl Flex had it coming with a nice telegram from the Kaiser. If I was married to you, I’d have probably shot him myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have used my friend Udo’s rifle to do it, mind. That was unkind because it left Udo in the frame for Flex’s murder. Although not as unkind as what happened when Udo guessed he’d been measured up for it by his old friend. What did he do? Threaten to tell the police? He must have done, otherwise Johann wouldn’t have gone to poor Udo’s house and shot him, too. You didn’t know about that? It doesn’t matter. Take it from me, suicide it certainly was not. My jaw may be broken, but there’s nothing wrong with my brain. There’s a box of the same ammunition used to blow Udo’s head off in a closet upstairs, as well as a sample of the same hand that wrote the so-called suicide note. As a case of murder it’s a more open-and-shut case than my office door at the Murder Commission in Berlin. You
see, I’ve done this kind of thing before, Frau Diesbach. People—not just you, people who should know better because they run the government—they will persist in believing that I don’t know when I’m being lied to. But I do. I’m pretty good at it, too. Lately I’ve had a lot of practice.
“Then, when Criminal Assistant Korsch and I came here tonight, who should we meet on the road but young Benno himself. I recognized him from the photograph on your piano. It was dumb to leave that out for us to see. But you probably didn’t have time to hide it, what with your husband having to say his good-byes in five minutes flat. It was Benno who misdirected us in order to give him enough time to cycle back here and warn his father that the police were on the way, wasn’t it? I figure Johann’s got a good ninety minutes’ start on us now. The question is, which way did he go? Farther into Austria? Or to Germany? Or Italy, perhaps? I want some answers and you’d better make them good ones or it won’t just be you who goes to jail, Frau Diesbach. I figure that when we catch up with him it will be Benno, too. Wasting police time in Germany was always a serious offense, but now we’re obliged to take it personally.”
Frau Diesbach wiped her eyes and then lit another cigarette. I lit one, too, and so did Korsch because we both knew of old that any story sounds better when it’s accompanied with a good smoke. Of course, a lot of the stories that cops hear are all smoke but this one was true; I could tell that straightaway because I could feel a strong twinge in my jaw when she talked. Besides, she was crying in a way that usually accompanies the truth and that you can’t fake unless you’re Zarah Leander and even she prefers not to do the type of crying that involves a lot of heavy nose-blowing; for a woman it’s just not flattering, especially on camera.
“Benno is a good boy but he’s not the army type. Unlike my husband. Who is. Johann’s much tougher than Benno will ever be. And he’s our only son now. You see, Commissar, Benno’s older brother, Dietrich, was in the German navy, and was killed in Spain, during the civil war. Killed in 1937, at the Battle of Malaga, when the Deutschland was attacked by Republican planes. At least, that’s what we were told. I can’t lose another son. Do I have your word that Benno won’t get into trouble?”
“You do. So far it’s only me and my assistant here who know he tried to sell us something from the toy catalog. We can easily forget he even exists.”
She nodded and inhaled fiercely, as if she’d been trying to kill something inside her and when she pulled the cigarette from her lip the dry piece of skin on her lower lip came partly away with it and hung there off her mouth like a tiny cheroot. From time to time she wiped her cheeks clean of tears but after a while there were what looked like two dry riverbeds on her pale face.
“Take a moment,” I said kindly. “Pull yourself together and try to tell us everything.”
Korsch fetched a schooner of something sticky from a bottle on the sideboard and handed it to her. She sucked it down like a hungry cormorant and then handed him the glass, as if soliciting a refill. I nodded at him. Alcohol can be a cop’s best friend in more ways than one; it consoles even when it doesn’t loosen tongues.
“You’re almost right, Commissar Gunther. Karl Flex did sleep with me. Several times. But it wasn’t at all like you said. Karl had taken money from me, not Johann, to keep Benno out of the army. That much is true. Benno is a very sensitive boy and frankly the army would kill him. I make no apology for that. Johann and I disagreed about it, of course. He was furious when he found out about it. He thought the army would make Benno a man. I thought it would make him—dead. After all, everyone suspects a war is coming. With Poland. And if it’s with Poland, it will be with the Russians, too. And then where will we be? But Karl didn’t force me to sleep with him, and it certainly wasn’t conditional on him keeping Benno out of the army. You see, I found a letter from my husband’s mistress, Pony, in his coat pocket. Yes, that’s her name. Don’t ask me how you get a name like Pony. Anyway, Johann was riding her on his business trips to Munich. So I slept with Karl out of revenge, I suppose. One weekend, when Johann was in Munich with Pony, we went to the Hotel Bad Horn on Lake Constance in Karl’s lovely Italian sports car. But what I didn’t know is that it wasn’t just a sweet love letter that Pony had given to Johann, but also a venereal disease. Subsequently he gave it to me. And before I knew it, I’d given it to Karl. We had a big argument about it and in spite of his own indiscretions, Johann got very jealous and swore he would kill Karl. Only I never thought he would actually do it. But you are right about the methamphetamine. Like half of the men on the mountain, Johann is addicted to the stuff. It makes them kind of insane, I think. But the men who work for OA need it just to keep up with Martin Bormann’s insatiable timetable. Only recently the supply of Pervitin ground to a halt. They’re keeping the Pervitin for the army apparently. But then Karl and Brandt started selling it to anyone who had the cash. Which is just the way things work around here these days. I don’t say that Bormann knows about it. But he ought to know about it.”
Korsch handed her another glass. His eyes asked me if I wanted one myself but I shook my head. I needed to keep a clear head if I was going to speak to Albert Bormann and then, perhaps, his brother, Martin. Johann Brandner’s life probably depended on a careful use of German grammar and some thoughtful advocacy on my part.
“Of course as soon as I heard that Karl had been murdered I knew it was Johann who’d done it. Our salt mine is in Rennweg. The entrance is between the River Ache and Obersalzberg. That part is well known to me. But where it goes inside the mountain is anyone’s guess. Well, anyone except my husband. There are old tunnels that go hundreds of meters straight under Obersalzberg. I confronted him about it, and he admitted it, more or less. Apparently there’s an old salt mine tunnel that comes out of the mountain in the forest very close to the Villa Bechstein. You could walk straight past it and not even know it was there. Udo must have guessed that, too. Anyway, he and my husband were always borrowing rifles and things from each other. They were in the army together. The Second Bavarian Corps. Johann was a Jäger marksman and, like lots of local men, the best shot in his battalion. Udo was the same. Some of these men grow up with a rifle in their hands. The day before Karl was shot, I saw Johann putting a rifle with a scope in the trunk of his car and while I’m not an expert, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a gun I’d seen before. And there was something stuck on the end of it. Like a can of something. Odd really. I even asked Udo about it the last time I saw him, and he didn’t say anything. Which worried me as well.”
“Does your husband have a workshop?” I asked. “With a working lathe?”
“Yes. He often has to bring pipes back from the mine for repair. How did you know?”
“It’s not important. You were saying. About Udo Ambros?”
“I didn’t know Johann had shot Udo, too. It’s unthinkable, really. Udo would never have turned Johann in. Not without giving him plenty of good warning first.” She shrugged. “So maybe that’s what happened. Johann must have shot him when Udo said he was going to have to tell the police that Johann had borrowed his rifle. And used it to shoot Karl.”
Frau Diesbach sipped the second glass of spirits, winced as if she really didn’t like the stuff, and let out a deep sigh.
“It’s all my fault, really. If I hadn’t paid Karl to get Benno on that list of OA workers none of this would have happened.”
“All right,” I said. “No point in tiptoeing around that saucer of milk. Where’s he gone?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t say. I asked him, of course. And he said it was probably better I didn’t know. That way I couldn’t tell anyone.”
“Have a guess,” said Korsch. “You knew him better than anyone. Pony included.”
She shrugged. “In many ways Johann was a secretive man. A lot of the time I didn’t know where he was. And he was on the road a great deal. Selling our salt. He has friends in Salzburg, Munich, and as far a
field as Frankfurt and Berlin. He could have gone almost anywhere. He has lots of friends in the local area, of course.”
“What about his car?” I asked.
“The car is a new one. A 1939 black four-door Auto Union Wanderer. I don’t know the license plate off the top of my head. But I could find out, I suppose.”
“Does he have much money on him? Passport?”
“There was plenty of money in his wallet when I saw it earlier today. He gave me twenty reichsmarks for housekeeping. But there must have been two hundred more in there. And he has a German passport. That more or less lived in the car, for obvious reasons.”
“Come on, missus,” said Korsch. ‘We’re going to need more than that if we’re going to help you and your son. Where is Benno, by the way?”
“He went to stay with some friends. Until the coast was clear, so to speak. I’m not sure who they are. But he was on his bicycle so he can’t have gone very far. You won’t arrest him, will you? You promised me my son.”
“It’s your husband we’re interested in, not your son,” said Korsch. “But whatever Johann’s excuses for doing it were, he’s a murderer. So don’t even think of protecting him. It’s not just his neck, see? It’s ours, too, if we don’t catch him soon.”
“He’s right,” I said. “It’s the Leader’s birthday on the twentieth. And Martin Bormann wants the murderer of Karl Flex safely in custody before Hitler turns up at the Berghof to unwrap his presents. If only your husband had thought to shoot him somewhere else, Frau Diesbach, this whole thing might have been brushed under the rug. But as it is we’re under a great deal of pressure to close this case before the candles on the cake can be lit. The party’s canceled unless we find the culprit.”
