Prussian Blue

EIGHT

It was 750 kilometers from Berlin to Berchtesgaden, but in the rear seat of Heydrich’s own car—a shiny black Mercedes 770K—with an SS-monogrammed cashmere rug across my knees, I hardly noticed either the distance or the cold. The car was as big as a U-boat and almost as powerful. The eight-cylinder supercharged engine throbbed like rush hour at Potsdamer Platz and even with snow on the autobahn the Mercedes just rolled up the road; it felt as if I were riding into the afterlife Hall of the Slain with a chorus line of Valkyries, only in rather finer style. I’m not sure that Mercedes has ever made a better automobile. Certainly never one as big or as comfortable. A couple of hours in that limousine and I was ready to take charge of Germany myself. In the front seat, behind the enormous steering wheel, sat Heydrich’s Easter Island statue of a driver, and next to him Friedrich Korsch, my criminal assistant from the Alex. Alongside me in the back of the car was Hans-Hendrik Neumann, Heydrich’s pointy-faced adjutant. The rear seats were more like a pair of leather armchairs in the Herrenklub and during some of the journey, I dozed off. We made Schkeuditz, just west of Leipzig, in under two hours—which seemed remarkable to me—and Bayreuth in less than four, but with darkness falling and more than four hundred kilometers still to go, we were obliged to stop and refuel in Pegnitz, north of Nuremberg. Filling the tanks of KMS Bismarck would have been quicker and cheaper . . .

I could have used a big, powerful car like the Mercedes 770K on my escape through France. Certainly I could have used a nap. The Citroën was an 11 CV Traction Avant—which is French for an underpowered front-wheel-drive rust bucket; the eleven probably referred to the amount of horsepower the thing had. It was uncomfortable and slow and, driving it, I needed all my wits about me. After six hours behind the wheel I was exhausted; my neck and eyes hurt and I had a head that ached worse than Ptolemy’s botched craniotomy. I wasn’t any farther north than Mâcon but I knew I was going to have to stop and take a rest, and thinking it might be better if I stayed under the radar, avoiding all hotels and even pensions, I pulled into a jolly-looking camping site. There are two million campers in France, a large proportion of whom are motorists. I had neither a tent nor a caravan but this hardly seemed to matter since I was planning to sleep in the car and, in the morning, to use the showers and cafeteria in that order. What I wouldn’t have given for a hot bath and a dinner at the Hotel Ruhl. But when I offered the individual in the site office—a man with hooded eyes and a perfumer’s fastidious nose—the fifty-francs charge for the space he asked to see my camping license and I was reluctantly obliged to confess that I was unaware that such a thing even existed.

“I’m afraid it is a legal requirement, monsieur.”

“I can’t camp here without one?”

“You can’t camp anywhere without such a license, monsieur. Not in France, anyway. It was created to give people insurance against damage caused to any third party by camping. Up to twenty-five million francs for damages arising from fire, and five million for damages arising from accident.”

“So wait, I don’t need insurance to drive a car in France but do need it to pitch a tent?”

“That’s correct. But you can easily get a camping license from any automobile club.”

I glanced at my watch. “I think it’s a little late for that, don’t you?”

He shrugged, indifferent to my fate. I daresay he was less than keen to have a suspicious character like me staying on his campsite; a man with a foreign accent wearing a scarf in October and sunglasses after dark isn’t the type of carefree camper who encourages trust in the heart of Vichy. Even Cary Grant couldn’t have pulled that off.

So I left the campsite and drove on for a few kilometers and found myself a nice quiet country lane under some tall poplars and then a field where I could shut my sore eyes for a while. But it was hard to sleep knowing that Friedrich Korsch and the Stasi were already on my trail. Almost certainly they would have hired some self-drive cars at the Europcar rental office next to the railway station in Marseilles and very likely they were only a couple of hours behind me on the N7. Eventually I managed to sleep a little on the backseat of the Citroën but not without Friedrich Korsch appearing in a dream that took place somewhere at the back of the double pain I now called my eyes.

It was strange the way he’d entered my world again after all these years, and yet not strange at all, perhaps. If you live long enough you realize that everything that happens to us is all the same illusion, the same shit, the same celestial joke. Things don’t really end, they just stop for a while and then they start up again, like a bad record. There are no new chapters in your book, there’s just the one long fairy story—the same stupid story we tell ourselves and which, mistakenly, we call life. Nothing is ever really over until we’re dead. And what else could a man do who’d worked for the Reich Security Office except carry on working for the same lousy department under the communists? Friedrich Korsch was a natural policeman. Such continuity made perfect sense to the communists; the Nazis had been good at law enforcement. And with a different book—Marx instead of Hitler—a slightly different uniform, and a new national anthem, “Risen from the Ruins,” everything could carry on as before. Hitler, Stalin, Ulbricht, Khrushchev—they were all the same, the same monsters from the neurological abyss we call our own subconscious. Me and Schopenhauer. Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.

I could almost hear the voice of Friedrich Korsch now, seated in the front of the Mercedes 770K as we’d reached the outskirts of Nuremberg—effectively, the capital of Nazism in Germany—and he’d mentioned a good hotel, which was where I most wanted to be right now, with a comfortable bed, a hot bath, some eyedrops, and a good dinner . . .

“The Deutscher Hof,” said Korsch. “Remember that, sir?”

“Of course.”

“That’s a nice hotel. Best I’ve stayed in, anyway. Always reminds me a bit of the Adlon.”

Korsch and I had stayed at the Deutscher Hof—rumored to be Hitler’s favorite hotel—on a trip to Nuremberg the previous September, when we’d been investigating a possible lead in a serial murder case. For a while we had suspected that Julius Streicher, the political leader of Franconia, might be the culprit and we had gone to Nuremberg to speak to the local police chief, Benno Martin. Streicher was Germany’s leading Jew-baiter and the publisher of Der Stürmer, a magazine so crudely anti-Semitic that even a majority of Nazis shunned it.

I caught Korsch’s eye in the side mirror mounted on the huge spare tire beside his door and nodded.

“How could I forget?” I said. “That was the night we first clapped eyes on Streicher. Totally blue with drink he was, but still boozing it up with a couple of stroke maidens like he was the Holy Roman Emperor himself. For a while I quite fancied him for it. The murders, I mean.”

“Hard to believe a man like that is still a gauleiter.”

“There’s a lot that’s hard to believe right now,” I murmured, thinking about the war that was probably just down the road; surely it wouldn’t be long before the French and the British called Hitler’s bluff and mobilized their armies. Rumor had it that Poland was next on Hitler’s list for annexation, or whatever the diplomatic word is after Munich for invading someone else’s country.

“Not for much longer,” said Neumann. “Confidentially, Streicher’s been under investigation since November, accused of stealing Jewish property seized after Kristallnacht, which was rightly the property of the state. Not to mention the fact that he’s been libeling Göring’s daughter, Edda.”

“Libeling?” said Korsch.

“He alleged in his newspaper that she was conceived by artificial insemination.”

I laughed. “Yes, I can see how that would piss Göring off. How it would piss any man off.”

“General Heydrich expects him be stripped of all his Party offices by the end of the year.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “Where are you from, Neumann?”

“Barmen.” He shook his head. “It’s all right. Franconia is a mystery to me, too.”

“It’s wizard country,” I said. “Stay on the path, that’s what they always say there. Don’t go into the woods. And don’t ever talk to strangers.”

“Damn right,” said Korsch.

After a moment I said, “Confidentially, you say. I suppose that means it’s all going to be done in secret and then swept under the carpet, just like the Weisthor affair.”

“I believe Streicher is still protected by Hitler,” said Neumann. “So yes, I imagine you’re probably right, Commissar Gunther. But nothing’s perfect, is it?”

“You noticed that, too, eh?”

“Speaking of secrets,” said Neumann. “I suppose we’d better discuss how you’re going to keep the general informed of what you’re up to when you’re in Obersalzberg, without alerting Martin Bormann.”

“I’ve been wondering about that.”

“While you’re down there, I’ll be based a few kilometers across the German border, in Salzburg. As a matter of fact, I do quite a lot of confidential work for the general in Austria. Close to Berchtesgaden is a little place called St. Leonhard. It’s virtually on the border. And in St. Leonhard there’s a discreet guest house called the Schorn Ziegler, which has a very good restaurant. Real home cooking. I’ll be staying there. If you have anything to report or if you need anything from Heydrich’s office in Berlin, that will be where you can find me. Failing that you can always find me at Gestapo headquarters in Salzburg. That’s easy to find, too. Just look for the old Franciscan monastery on Mozartplatz.”

“I take it the monks are no longer there. Or did they all join the SS?”

“What’s the difference?” said Korsch.

“Regrettably, they were thrown out of there last year.” Neumann looked sheepish for a moment. “After the annexation, there were a lot of things that happened that could have been handled differently, better.” He shrugged. “Me, I’m just an electrical engineer. I leave politics in the hands of the politicians.”

“That’s the trouble,” I said. “I have an awful feeling that the politicians are even worse at handling politics than the rest of us.”

“Drink?” Neumann lifted the armrest to reveal a small cocktail cabinet.

“No,” I said, taking hold of the red leather rope on the back of the seat in front of me, as if it might help me to hold on to that resolve. “I do believe I’m going to need a clear head when I get to Obersalzberg.”

“You don’t mind if I do,” he said, lifting a small crystal decanter clear of its purple-velvet-lined cocoon. “The general keeps an excellent brandy in his car. I think it’s almost as old as I am.”

“Go ahead. I look forward to reading the taster’s notes.”

I lowered the window a centimeter and lit a cigarette, if only to chase off the faintly intoxicating smell of hot oil and warm rubber and expensive alcohol and male body odor that filled the elegant interior of the big Mercedes. Icy fog shrouded the road ahead, dissolving other headlamps and rear lamps like something soluble at the bottom of your glass. Small forgotten towns came and went in a blur as the fallen angel’s car tunneled its rumbling way south through the uncertain dark. Yawning and blinking and registering what was always twenty meters behind us, I sank deeper into my seat and listened to the sharp-toothed wind as it whistled a melancholy banshee tune beside the freezing-cold glass of the window. There’s nothing like an extended road trip at night to steal thoughts from your past and your future both, to make you think that coming is no different from going, and to persuade you that a hoped-for long journey’s end is merely another bloody beginning.