Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  I smiled at this copper’s trick. He was making sure my story was consistent.

  “Dora. Dora Brandt.”

  It was odd how I’d fetched up in Homburg, and this begged all sorts of important and very German questions about fate. I’m not sure Nietzsche would have recognized in my being in Homburg again his concept of eternal recurrence, but sometimes it did seem as if the details of my life were destined to be repeated, over and over, for all eternity. Goethe might have said that I had an elective affinity for trouble, that I was chemically marked out for it. Either that or I was just doomed to wander the face of the earth, like Odin, seeking some kind of knowledge that might aid my own futile, twilight bid for immortality. Then again, maybe it was just the ancestral gods punishing my hubris for imagining that I had got away with murder, much as they usually did themselves. I might have stopped believing in God but I still needed the gods, if only to explain things to myself. You see, I’d been in Homburg before.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  April 1939

  Friedrich Korsch dropped me back at the Villa Bechstein, because he was still forbidden to be in the Leader’s Territory, and I walked up the hill, past the Berghof, and the Türken Inn where Johann Brandner now sat freezing in a prison cell, to Martin Bormann’s hilltop house. Halfway there, I removed the tie from under my jaw; I needed to be taken seriously if I was going to save Brandner’s life. It was well past midnight and I was relieved but not very surprised to see that a few lights were still burning behind the government leader’s neat window boxes; Bormann had long ago adopted the habits of his near-nocturnal master and rarely went to bed before three in the morning, or so Hermann Kaspel had told me. But as I arrived at the house, I found a car waiting there with the straight-eight engine running and Bormann, plus several of his aides, coming out the front door. The top had been folded down and the back of the car was almost as tall as I was. Bormann was dressed in a fine black leather coat, a white shirt, a blue tie with white polka dots, and a misshapen brown felt hat. Seeing me, he waved me forward and then almost immediately held up his hand to stay my progress.

  “Whoa, that’s far enough. You look like you have the mumps.” Clearly he’d forgotten about my suspect broken jaw and before I could explain, he added, “There are six children in this house, Gunther, so if you do have the mumps, you can fuck off now.”

  “It’s not the mumps, sir. I slipped on the ice and fell flat on my face.”

  “Not the first time that’s happened, I’ll be bound. You know what’s good for a swelling like that? Wrap a string of pork sausages around your neck, like a scarf. Takes the heat out. And also makes quite a conversation piece. Although you’d best not wear that around the Leader. He’s a vegetarian and is liable to have anyone wearing a scarf made from a string of sausages shot. Or committed to a mental asylum. Which amounts to the same thing these days.” He laughed cruelly, as if this might actually be true.

  “Are you going somewhere?” I asked, changing the subject. “Back to Berlin perhaps?” Just saying that was enough to make me feel homesick.

  “I’m going up the Kehlstein, to the tea house. Ride with me and, on the way there, you can tell me what else you’ve discovered about Karl Flex’s murder. I assume you wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t have something important to tell me. I certainly hope so.” But then he shivered inside his coat, rubbed his hands furiously, and waved imperiously at the car. “I’ve changed my mind about the top, boys. I think we’ll have it up after all.” He looked at me and, a little to my surprise, explained himself. “I’ve been stuck inside all day in meetings and I thought I wanted some fresh air, but now I realize it’s much colder than I thought.”

  I climbed into the back of the big 770K while Wilhelm Zander and Gotthard Farber—yet another of Bormann’s aides I hadn’t met before—set about lifting the hood. Meanwhile, I sat alongside Bormann and waited for him to tell me to speak. Instead, he lit a cigarette with a large gold ingot that doubled as a gaslighter and started to talk like a man who talked all the time and assumed that someone was always listening; but it was to me that most of this talk was directed now, and for that reason listening closely seemed only judicious.

  “The Leader is a man of sudden fancies,” he said. “He often likes to do things on the spur of the moment. And since it’s very possible that he will decide to visit his new tea house at any time of the day and night, especially in the beginning, it’s imperative that I gauge the complete readiness of the Kehlstein staff and the building itself. A test flight, so to speak. Hence this visit. To satisfy myself that everything will meet his exacting standard.”

  He glanced around impatiently as Zander and Farber struggled with the hood, which was obviously very heavy. It didn’t help that Farber was only three cheeses high, which wasn’t quite high enough to lift the hood all the way up on its steel frame.

  “Hurry up, we haven’t got all night. What’s taking so long? Anyone would think I’d asked you to put up the big top in a fucking circus. This is a Mercedes limousine, not some Jew’s jalopy.”

  It took both his aides several minutes to secure the hood and by the time they climbed into the seat in front and we were ready to leave, they were severely out of breath, which would have made me smile if I hadn’t been seated alongside the ersatz tyrant. My own breathing wasn’t exactly easy. But at last the driver shifted the bus-sized gear lever, turned the huge steering wheel, and the giant enterprise of gleaming chrome and polished black enamel set off up the mountain road.

  “The last time I went up there, Gunther, the cakes and the strudel were not quite to his taste. It’s true he hasn’t yet been to the tea house, but I know him well enough to say that there was too much fruit in the strudels and not enough cream in the cakes. And the tea they were serving was English tea, which Hitler despises. It certainly wasn’t Hälssen & Lyon’s decaffeinated tea. Hamburg tea. That’s what he calls it. And that’s the only one he’ll drink. Of course, no one else but me would have noticed this. In many ways Hitler is a very austere, unworldly person with no real interest in his own comfort. Which is why I have to take care of these matters for him. I don’t mind telling you, that’s quite a responsibility. I have to think of everything. And he’s grateful for it, too. You might find this hard to believe but Hitler really doesn’t like telling people what to do. He much prefers people to work toward what he thinks.”

  Bormann’s lungs took a long tug on his cigarette and exhaled a generous mixture of smoke and alcohol, self-importance and hubris. Doubtless he was taking advantage of the Leader’s absence to indulge his own vices. But as he talked I began to realize that he was drunk, and not just with power. From the smell of his breath, which now filled the backseat of the car like a smoke grenade, I guessed he’d consumed several brandies. I thought about lighting one myself and immediately rejected the idea. Bormann wasn’t the kind of man with whom one could behave normally: him smoking a cigarette in an enclosed space was one thing; someone else doing it was probably a crime in the workplace and punishable with an improbably large fine.

  “When I was last there I also noticed a slight problem with the Kehlstein’s heating system,” he said. “So now I have to make sure that the temperature up there is just right for a man who prefers the dark and doesn’t like the sun very much. Not too hot and not too cold. You may have noticed that things are a little cool down at the Berghof. Did you? Yes, I thought so. That’s because Hitler doesn’t feel temperatures like ordinary men such as you or I, Gunther. Perhaps it’s because he never takes his jacket off. Perhaps it’s a legacy of his time in Landsberg Prison. I’m not sure, but that’s my litmus test. The comfort of a man wearing a woolen jacket at all times.”

  I decided not to distract Bormann by asking him about anything really trivial, such as the possibility of a German invasion of Poland that might spark off a second European war, and continued to await his pleasure. But after several minutes of talk about tea and ca
ke and the correct room temperatures at the Kehlstein, I was becoming impatient of being seat meat and was on the point of broaching the subject of Johann Brandner’s innocence, when suddenly Bormann yelled at the driver to stop. For a moment I thought we’d run someone over except that Bormann would hardly have stopped for that. We’d just passed a group of construction workers standing under a forest of floodlights by the side of the road and Bormann seemed infuriated by something they’d done, or, as it happened, not done.

  “Open the fucking door,” he yelled at Farber, who was already fumbling with the handle before the enormous car had even halted. The minute Bormann got out of the car he threw away his cigarette and started kicking picks and shovels, punching workmen on the shoulders, and shouting at them like they were beasts of burden. “What is this? A fucking trade union meeting? You’re being paid treble time to work nonstop through the night. Not to stand around and lean on your fucking picks and shovels gossiping like a bunch of old women. Are you trying to give me an ulcer? This is intolerable. Call yourself German workmen? It’s a joke, I tell you. Where’s your foreman? Where is he? I want to speak to the gang master right now, or by God, I’ll have you all sent to a concentration camp. Tonight!”

  And then, when one cowering man came to the front of the others, cap in freezing hand, Bormann continued his ranting. They could probably have heard Bormann all the way down the mountain in Berchtesgaden. It was perhaps the most practical demonstration of National Socialism I’d ever heard and I realized with sudden clarity that Nazism was nothing more than the will of the Leader, and that Bormann was his bellowing mouthpiece.

  “What’s the meaning of this? Tell me, because I’d like to know. Yes, me, Martin Bormann, the man who pays your inflated wages. Because every time I drive past this bend in the road it’s always the same thing I see out of the car window: you’re standing around like a bowl of soft eggs and doing fuck all. And nothing ever seems to get done. The road is still a mess. So why aren’t you working on it?”

  “Sir,” said the foreman, “there’s been a problem with the steamroller. We can’t finish asphalt surfacing without the roller. You see, there’s a fault in the smoke-box door. It won’t close properly so we can’t get up a good head of steam.”

  “I never heard such rubbish,” said Bormann. “It’s just not good enough. You should have more than one steamroller. The Leader himself will be here in just a couple of days to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and it’s imperative that this stretch of road is finished before then. I cannot have his visit to Obersalzberg disrupted in any way by local construction work. In any way at all. Now get these men back to work and finish this damned road before I have you shot, you communist bastard. Find another steamroller and get these men working again. If this road is not finished by tomorrow you’ll wish none of you had ever been born.”

  Still cursing loudly, Bormann climbed back into the Mercedes, exhaled loudly, wiped his low forehead, lit another cigarette, and then punched the quilted black leather door, not that this had the least effect on the car: the door was obviously reinforced with armor plating; I daresay the windows were bulletproof, too, just in case someone took a pickax handle to one as the limousine drove by. Riding in that 770K was like being driven around in a bank vault.

  “Enemies I can deal with,” he muttered. “But God preserve us from German workers.” He looked at me and his frown deepened, as if he hardly expected that I was about to improve his mood with my news. He leaned back on the seat and hammered on his not-inconsiderable gut with a fist. “Better tell me something good, Gunther. Before I have a fit and start chewing the carpets in this damn hearse.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said brightly. “I believe I know the name of Karl Flex’s murderer. I mean, his real murderer—not the innocent Fritz who’s freezing his eggs off sitting in the prison cell underneath the Türken Inn.”

  “And that name is?”

  “His name is Johann Diesbach, sir. He’s a local salt miner, from Kuchl, on the other side of the Hoher Göll. It seems Flex was involved with the man’s wife. A fairly typical love triangle and, you’ll be relieved to hear, nothing to do with you or the Leader.”

  “Now, why does that particular name ring a bell?” asked Zander. “Diesbach, you say.”

  “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” I handed Zander the photograph of Diesbach I’d taken from his home. Zander switched on the car’s reading light and studied the photograph carefully.

  “You’re sure about this, Gunther?” asked Bormann. “That Diesbach is your man?”

  “Positive. I’ve just been to his house and found all the evidence I need to get him a first-class ticket straight to the guillotine.”

  “Good work, Gunther.”

  “Sir, I remember this man,” said Zander.

  It was hard not to remember a man with a mustache like Hitler’s.

  “He came to one of my lectures on German literature, sir. At the local theater in Antenberg. They were part of the outreach program, to build bridges with the local community. We talked briefly afterwards.”

  “That was the lecture on Tom Sawyer, perhaps,” I said. “Read it myself once. Like almost every German schoolboy, I guess.”

  “My God, no wonder these locals hate us,” said Bormann. “Tom Sawyer? What’s wrong with some decent German writers, Wilhelm?”

  “Nothing at all, sir. It was just that I wanted to talk about a book that had been important in my own life. Besides, it was the Wilhelm Grunow Leipzig edition of Tom Sawyer, in German.”

  “I was joking, you idiot, as if I give a damn about a fucking book or your damned lecture.” Bormann let out a smoky guffaw. “So where is this fellow Diesbach now, Gunther? Safely in custody, I hope. Better still, dead.”

  “I’m afraid not. He guessed that we were on to him, and made his escape just before we could arrest him.”

  “You mean he’s still on the loose. Around here? In Obersalzberg.”

  “Yes, sir. But now that he knows I’m on his trail, I think he’ll want to get out of Bavaria as quickly as possible.”

  “Maybe so, but look, there’s no time to lose. You simply have to find him. Before the twentieth. Without delay. I want him caught, do you hear? Before the twentieth of April.” Bormann was beginning to sound panicky. “This is a matter of top priority. As soon as I get to the tea house I’ll call Heydrich in Berlin. It’s my order that you should mobilize the whole of Germany in the search for this assassin.”

  “If you’ll permit me to say so, I think it might be better if things proceeded on a more modest scale. By all means we should enlist the help of the police and the Gestapo in searching for him. But it’s my understanding that this matter is still highly confidential. It might be hard to keep it that way if too many people are informed he’s a fugitive. So let’s put it out that he shot and killed a policeman. That way we can ensure the vigilance of all law enforcement agencies without revealing too much of why we’re really hunting him.”

  “Yes, of course.” Bormann stifled a belch but it did nothing for the atmosphere in the rear of the car. “Good thinking.”

  “Besides, I have a fair idea of where he might be heading.”

  “Right. So what do you suggest, Gunther? I mean, you’re the expert on this kind of thing. Fugitive criminals and wanted men.”

  “That we close the German borders with French Lorraine. Temporarily. I happen to believe that’s where he’s heading.”

  “Well, you’ve not been wrong before. But aren’t you being just a little pessimistic? France is a long way from here. Surely he won’t get that far. Not with the Gestapo looking for him.”

  “Look, with any luck Diesbach will be arrested and soon. But I have a hunch he’s going to prove a little more elusive than that.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  “In my opinion, the Gestapo are not nearly as omnipotent as they would like people t
o believe. As for the uniformed police, well, Orpo has been losing its best men to the SS for a while now. The pay’s better, you see. Most of the cops we have on the streets now are too old for the SS. They’re too old for anything, probably. They’re waiting for their pensions, most of them.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t say that to Himmler,” said Bormann.

  “No, sir. But Himmler’s not in charge in Obersalzberg. You are. Also, there’s Diesbach himself.”

  Bormann took the photograph from Zander and studied the face critically.

  “He was a Jäger in the war,” I added. “Stationed near the Meuse, with a top infantry detachment. A proper stormtrooper—not one of those beer-hall brownshirts that Ernst Röhm used to command. This man was probably trained in Hutier tactics. That means he’s tough and resourceful. And a ruthless killer.”

  “He does look tough, I must admit.”

  “He’s got plenty of money and a car, not to mention a lot of guts and a loaded Luger. My guess is that he’s already on a train headed west.”

  “All right. I’ll speak to the Foreign Ministry. What else do you want?”

  “I should like to go to the largest German town close to the Lorraine border—wherever that is—and assume temporary command of the local police and Gestapo myself.”

  “That would be Saarbrücken,” said Zander. “Which also happens to be my hometown.”

  “Then you’re to be pitied,” said Bormann bluntly. “Did you know that in the 1935 referendum ten percent of the Saarland electorate voted to remain part of France?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “That means ten percent are not to be relied upon.”

  “But ninety percent voted to become part of Germany,” said Zander.

  “That’s hardly the point. In the heart of Germany’s main coal-producing state, ten percent of the workforce are potential traitors. That’s a serious matter. Anyway, you’d better go with the commissar, hadn’t you, Wilhelm? To Saarbrücken.”