Prussian Blue

TEN

He wasn’t tall and at first I didn’t see him. I was too busy staring in wonder at the Kehlstein reception hall, where everyone was waiting for me. It was a large round room, perfectly proportioned, made of gray granite blocks, with a coffered ceiling and a marble fireplace that was the size and color of an S-Bahn train. Above the fireplace was a Gobelin tapestry featuring a couple of bucolic lovers and on the floor was an expensive crimson Persian rug. In front of the red fireplace a circular table was surrounded by comfortable armchairs that made me feel tired just looking at them. There were no curtains on the big square windows that provided an unimpeded mountaintop view of a dark and stormy night. Light snow was dusting the glass and outside the window I could hear the lanyard shifting in the wind on a tin flagpole like the clapper in a tiny bell. It was a good night to be inside, especially on top of a mountain. A log the size of the Sudetenland was smoking in the grate and on the walls were several electric candelabra that looked as if they’d been placed there by a mad scientist’s faithful retainer. There was a mahogany grand piano and a small rectangular table and some more chairs, and in another doorway a man wearing a white SS mess jacket with a silver tray under his arm. It was a room with the kind of rarefied atmosphere in which some men might have thought they could decide the future of the world, but it made my ears feel as if someone had pulled a cork out of my skull, although that could as easily have been the sight of an open flask of Grassl on the table, prompting the sudden realization that I needed a drink that wasn’t tea. Only one of the five men around the table was in uniform but I knew he couldn’t be Bormann, as the man had only a colonel’s helping of cauliflower on his SS collar badge; he was also the one man who got to his feet and returned my Hitler salute, politely. The others, including the pugilistic-looking type who now took charge of things in the tea house, and whom I guessed was probably Martin Bormann, remained firmly seated. I didn’t blame any of them much for not wanting to get up to greet me—sudden movements like that at such high altitude can give you a nosebleed. Besides, the chairs really did look very comfortable and, after all, I was just a copper from Berlin.

“Commissar Gunther, I presume?” asked Bormann.

“How do you do, sir?”

“You’re here, at long last. We would have had you flown here, but there wasn’t a plane available. Anyway, sit down, sit down. You’ve come a long way. I expect you’re tired. I’m sorry about that, but it really can’t be helped. Are you hungry? Of course you are.” He was already snapping his fingers in the air—strong, fat fingers that were wholly unsuitable for something as delicate as a tea house to summon the man in the SS mess jacket. “Fetch our guest something to eat. What would you like, Commissar? A sandwich? Some coffee?”

I couldn’t place the man’s accent. Perhaps it was Saxon. It certainly wasn’t an educated sort of voice. He was right about one thing, however: I was as hungry as a threshing machine. Högl and Kaspel had sat down at the table as well, but Bormann didn’t offer them anything. I soon realized that he was wont to treat the men who worked for him with open contempt and brutality.

“Perhaps a slice of bread with mustard and some sausage, sir. And maybe a cup of coffee.”

Bormann nodded at the waiter, who went to fetch my dinner.

“First of all, do you know who I am?”

“You’re Martin Bormann.”

“And what do you know about me?”

“From what I’ve been told you’re the Leader’s right-hand man here in the Alps.”

“Is that it?” Bormann uttered a scornful laugh. “I thought you were a detective.”

“Isn’t that enough? Hitler’s no ordinary leader.”

“But it’s not just here, you know. No, I’m his right-hand man in the rest of Germany, too. Anyone else you’ve ever heard of as being a person who’s close to the Leader—Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess—believe me, they don’t amount to shit when I’m around. The fact is that if any of them wants to see Hitler, they have to come through me. So when I talk, it’s as if the Leader were here now, telling you what the fuck to do. Is that clear?”

“Very clear.”

“Good.” Bormann nodded at the bottle of schnapps on the table. “Would you like a drink?”

“No, sir. Not when I’m on duty.”

“I’ll decide if you’re on duty, Commissar. I haven’t yet made up my mind if you’re the real deal or not. Until then, have a drink. Relax. That’s what this place is all about. It’s brand-new. Even the Leader hasn’t seen it yet, so you’re very privileged. We’re here tonight because we’re field-testing the place. Seeing that everything works before he gets here. That’s why you can’t smoke, I’m afraid. The Leader always knows when someone’s been smoking, even in secret—I’ve never known a man with such heightened senses.” He shrugged. “Not that I should be surprised, of course. He’s the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir, why a tea house?”

Bormann poured me a glass of schnapps and handed it to me with those fat fingers of his. I sipped it carefully. At fifty percent proof, it rated a bit of caution, just like the man who’d poured it. There was a largish scar above his right eye and, with his plus-four trousers and thick tweed jacket, he had the look of a prosperous farmer who didn’t mind kicking his prize pig. Not fat, but a burly middleweight going to seed, with a proper double chin and a nose like a parboiled turnip.

“Because the Leader likes tea, of course. Stupid question, really. He already has a tea house just across the valley from the Berghof—the Mooslahnerkopf. Which he enjoys walking to. But it was thought that perhaps something more spectacular was fitting for a man of such vision. In daylight the views from this room are breathtaking. You might almost say that this tea house is designed to help provide him with some necessary inspiration.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you like the Alps, Herr Gunther?”

“They’re a little too far off the ground for me to feel quite comfortable. I’m more of a city boy. The beanpole—that is, the Berlin radio tower—is quite high enough for me.”

He smiled patiently. “Tell me about yourself.”

I sipped some schnapps and leaned back in my armchair, and then sipped some more. I was dying for a smoke and a couple of times I even reached for my cigarette case before I remembered how health-conscious they were in Obersalzberg. I glanced at the faces of the other knights seated at this particular round table and perceived that perhaps I wasn’t the only one who needed a cigarette.

“I’m a Berliner, through and through, which means I’m just naturally opinionated. Not necessarily in a good way. I got my Abitur and I might have gone to university but for the war. Saw enough in the trenches to persuade me that I like mud even less than snow. I joined the Berlin police right after the armistice. Made detective. Worked in the Murder Commission. Solved a few cases. Was on my own for a while—a private investigator, and I was doing all right for myself, making good money, until General Heydrich persuaded me to come back to Kripo.”

“Heydrich says you’re his best detective. Is that really true? Or are you just some Fritz he’s sent down here to spy on me?”

“I know how to work a case by the book when that’s what’s required.”

“And what book might that be?”

“The Prussian General Code of 1794. The Police Administration Law of 1931.”

“Ah, that kind of book. The old kind.”

“The legal kind.”

“Does Heydrich still pay attention to that sort of thing? To the letter of the pre-Nazi law?”

“More often than you might think.”

“But you don’t like working for Heydrich, do you? At least that’s what he tells me.”

“It has its interesting side. He keeps me around because, for me, work is the best jacket. I don’t like to take it off until I’ve worn it out and then some. Tenacity—and a stolid propensity to obstinacy—are forensic qualities the general seems to appreciate.”

“He tells me you’ve got a lot of snout, too.”

“I certainly don’t mean to be that way, sir. To other Germans, we Berliners seem to be insolent when we’re not. About a hundred years ago we worked out that there’s no point in being friendly and polite if no one else appreciates it. No one in Berlin, that is. So now we please ourselves.”

Bormann shrugged. “That’s honest enough. But I’m still not convinced you’re the right fist for this particular eye, Gunther.”

“With all due respect, sir, neither am I. With most murder cases I’m usually not required to audition for the job. On the whole, the dead don’t mind much who gives them their last manicure. And I’m not about to convince a man as important as yourself of anything, probably. I wouldn’t presume even to try. The kind of Fritz who can talk a hole through someone’s stomach—that isn’t me. These days there’s not much of a market for what’s laughingly called my personality. I certainly didn’t bring any of my favorite music to put on your nice Bechstein.”

“But you did bring your own piano player, didn’t you?”

“Korsch? He’s my criminal assistant. In Berlin. And a good man. We work well together.”

“You won’t need him while you’re here. My men will give you all the assistance you need. The fewer people who know about what’s happened here, the better.”

“With all due respect, sir. He’s a good copper. Sometimes it helps to have another brain I can borrow—to add another tooth just when I need to chew something hard. Even the best men need a good deputy, someone trustworthy they can rely on, who won’t let them down. That would seem to be as true here as anywhere else.”

It was supposed to be a compliment and I hoped he’d see it that way, but he had the most pugnacious jaw I’d seen outside of a boxing ring. I had the sense that at any moment he might grab me by the throat, or have me thrown from the battlements—if a mountaintop tea house has such a thing as battlements. This was the first tea house I’d been in that looked as if it could have kept the Red Army at bay. Perhaps that was the real reason it had been built and I didn’t doubt that inside the rest of Hitler’s mountain were other secrets I might prefer not to know about. It was enough to make me finish the schnapps a little more quickly than I ought to have done.

Bormann rubbed his roughening, midnight chin thoughtfully.

“All right, all right, keep the bastard. But he stays down at the Villa Bechstein. Outside the Leader’s Territory. Is that clear? If you want to pick his brains, you do it there.”