Prussian Blue

THIRTY-FOUR

Back at Rothman’s Silver in Maximilianstrasse there was no sign of Hermann Kaspel, and the note I’d left for him, threaded through the door handle like a scroll, remained untouched. If the cat in the doorway of the Franciscan monastery opposite knew what had happened to him, it didn’t say; you can’t trust cats, especially when they’re with the Franciscans. Korsch returned the Maserati to the garage and, reluctantly, locked it up again. But his mind was still in the car.

I looked at my watch. “Are you sure Kaspel had the right address?”

“Absolutely,” said Korsch. “I heard him repeat it. Besides, it’s not like you can get lost in a place like this.”

“Jacob Rothman did.” I stamped my feet against the cold. “He should have been here by now. Something must have delayed him. If we go back to the Villa Bechstein via the road to Buchenhohe then maybe we’ll see him. There won’t be many cars on the road at this time of night. Perhaps he broke down.”

“Not in that car he was driving,” said Korsch.

“Why do you say so?”

“I was listening to that engine when you pulled up outside Flex’s house yesterday evening. It’s a 170 and it sounds as sweet as a nut. Anyway, all these cars from the Obersalzberg car pool—they’re much too well-looked after to break down. You know what I think? I think he fell asleep again. One of the RSD sergeants was telling me that once that magic potion wears off, you could sleep for a thousand years.”

“I guess maybe that’s what happened to Barbarossa. He just stopped taking the pills.” I yawned; all our talk of sleep and pills was making me sleepy again.

We drove along the river in the direction of Unterau and the P-Barracks before turning east onto Bergwerkstrasse and driving up the mountain again. A group of workers from Polensky & Zöllner were widening the road where it ran alongside the River Ache in case anyone wanted to drive a tank up there; to me the road already looked quite wide enough. I caught some of their toothless peasant faces in the big headlights of the 170. They looked like they were only a couple of pitchforks and firebrands short of being a mob bent on lynching the monster in the Berghof. Bormann must have figured a tank might stop them. I hoped he was wrong about that.

“We have to get into that safe,” I said. “We also need to keep quiet about it. So maybe it wasn’t very smart to drive around in that car.”

“Fun though. For me, anyway.”

“It won’t be fun if I don’t find this shooter, and soon.”

“I suppose it’s beyond a local locksmith.”

“It is unless his name is Houdini. No, I think we’re going to need a professional nutcracker.” I thought for a moment. “Whatever happened to the Krauss brothers? Those boys could open anything with a lock. Including the Police Museum.”

The Krauss brothers’ burglary of the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz—to recover their professional tools confiscated by the police—was still the stuff of near legend and, at least until the Nazis took control of the place, about the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to the Berlin police.

“The last I heard they were in the cement. Doing five years in Stadelheim Prison.”

“Not like them to get caught.”

“I don’t think they were caught, boss. From what I heard they moved from Berlin to Munich to escape their reputation as the best safecrackers in Germany, and were promptly arrested by the Bavarian Gestapo and thrown in prison on some trumped-up charge.” Korsch lit a cigarette and laughed. “That’s how the Nazis keep the crime rate down. They don’t actually wait for anyone to commit a crime before they throw them in jail.”

“Then we need to have Heydrich get the brothers out so we can bring them down here to crack that safe.”

“Perhaps we only need one brother.”

“Forget it. Joseph doesn’t unlock his own back door without the nod from Karl. And vice versa. Make that your next job, Friedrich. Go to Munich and get them out. I’ll send Heydrich a telex to organize it. And then bring them both here. In secret. And by the way, while you’re there I want you to ask the police if they have any address for a Jew called Wasserstein. Dr. Karl Wasserstein. I’ll give you the address before you go.”

“Who is he?”

“A friend of someone called Gerdy Troost. She’s staying at the Berghof and she’s anxious to find out what happened to him.”

I shifted down into a lower gear and steered the big Mercedes around the next corner. A few meters farther up the road I saw two football-sized headlights and braked hard.

“Christ,” I said. “Well, now we know.”

On a slope about ten meters above us was a black Mercedes 170. It looked as if it swerved in front of a narrow stone bridge and careered down a steep hillside, flattening several small trees before finally it had overturned and then hit a large wedge-shaped rock, which appeared to have cut the front of the car in half, almost. It looked like a dead beetle. The headlights were still on but the wheels had long stopped turning and the dry air was thick with the smell of spilled gasoline. Wisely, Friedrich Korsch retrieved the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it out on his sole before dropping it safely into his coat pocket. I switched off the engine and we jumped out to look for Hermann Kaspel.

“Hermann,” I yelled. “Where are you, Hermann? Hermann, are you okay?” But instinctively I knew he wasn’t.

What struck me immediately was the deafening silence. There was just the sound of our anxious breath and our thick boots as we scrambled up the wintry slope toward the wrecked car, and the snow freezing hard on the hillside and a light breeze in the frigid trees. Everything in nature was holding its breath. Clouds shifted ominously in the moonlit sky as if something terrible was about to be revealed. There was a dull thud and I looked around to see a heap of snow slipping off a branch. My heart was in my mouth. I’d seen a few car accidents in my time with the Berlin police. Bad accidents. Nothing ever quite prepares you for the sight of what can happen to the human body when a car suddenly encounters a solid immovable object at high speed. But this was as bad as anything I’d seen since the trenches. The car looked as if the imaginary Big Bertha shell fired from the angular church in Buchenhohe had landed right in front of it. Metal never looked so mangled. The driver’s door was hanging open like a farm gate. Kaspel wasn’t in the car but it was easy enough to follow where he’d gone. For one thing there was a perfectly severed leg still wearing a riding boot and a piece of his trousers beside the door; from there Kaspel had crawled away on his stomach, leaving a wide trail of dark blood in the snow.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Korsch turned quickly away, knowing the brutal truth of what we saw, and walked back to the overturned car.

Hermann Kaspel must have known he was going to die. He’d managed to sit up and lean against the trunk of a tree and light a last cigarette with shaking hands—the ground was strewn with spent matches—before he’d bled to death. The butt was still in his mouth and cold to the touch, and his bluish hands were gripped around the neat stump of his left thigh—so neat it looked like a skilled surgeon had used a saw to amputate his leg—as if he’d tried in vain to stop the flow of blood. His skin was as cold as the snow he was seated on and I guessed he’d been dead for at least half an hour. The heart pumps several liters of blood a minute and when the femoral artery is cut like that you bleed out in less time than it takes to finish one cigarette. Unlike his leg, his pale semi-frozen face was completely unmarked. He stared straight ahead of him and over my shoulder, and if I’d spoken to him I thought he might almost have answered, so clear were his eyes. The glint in the irises was just a reflection of the headlights of course but all the same it was strange how alive he still looked. I don’t know why, but I wiped some of the frost off his eyebrows and hair and then I sat with him and lit a cigarette myself. I’d often done something like that during the war, when you stayed with a man and waited patiently for him to die, sometimes holding his hand, or with an arm around his shoulders. We always figured the spirit hangs around the body for a while before it finally disappears. Mostly you put the cigarette in his mouth and let him mix a few puffs with his last breaths. A nail could cure everything, from a mild case of shell shock to a severed leg. Anyone who’d been in the war knew that. And even though you knew tobacco might be bad for you, you also knew that bullets and shrapnel were worse and that if you’d escaped them, then a few cigarettes really didn’t count as any kind of risk worth taking seriously. There was much I wanted to tell Hermann Kaspel but mostly it was that I’d misjudged him and that he’d been a good comrade and that’s the best you can say to a man when he’s dead or going to die. Even if it’s not true. The truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Never was. But I had learned to like and admire Hermann Kaspel. I was also thinking of his poor wife, whom I’d never met, and wondering who was going to tell her, and I decided I couldn’t trust Högl or Rattenhuber to make a decent job of it. Each of them was about as sensitive as Kaspel’s severed leg and every bit as detached. I would have to tell her myself even though I could ill afford the time that would take. After a while I got up and walked back down to the upturned car and Friedrich Korsch.

“I told him to slow down,” I said, “the last time I was driving with him. Frankly, he scared the shit out of me when he was behind the wheel of that car. It was the meth, I think. The magic potion. It made him drive too fast. He joked that it would kill him. And now it has.”

Korsch shook his head. “It wasn’t the meth that killed him, boss,” he said. “I’m pretty sure of that. And it wasn’t his lousy driving. It wasn’t even black ice on the road, although that hardly helped. And those are winter tires, with a thicker tread than summer ones. Almost new, by the look of them. Like I said before, the RSD’s cars are extremely well-looked after.”

“So what are you saying? He crashed his car, didn’t he?”

“He crashed the car because his brakes had failed. And the brakes failed because someone deliberately cut the hydraulic hoses that feed the brakes. Someone who knew what they were doing.”

I hadn’t heard of anyone ever doing such a thing, so I shook my head in slow disbelief. “Are you sure?”

“I told you, I used to work for Mercedes-Benz. I know the leads and the hoses on this car like I know the veins on my own cock. But even I might not have noticed something wrong if the car hadn’t overturned like this. The 170 has a four-wheel hydraulic-drum brake system, which relies on hydraulic fluid, right? Liquids aren’t easily compressible, so when you start to brake you apply pressure on the fluid’s chemical bonds. Without that fluid there’s no braking force at all, which means the brakes fail. You can see from the oblique angle of the cut on this cable supplying fluid to the drums that it didn’t break and it didn’t detach; it’s been neatly cut with a knife or a pair of wire cutters. There’s no fluid left in them. The fact is, the poor bastard didn’t stand a chance. This car weighs the best part of one thousand kilos. From here to Buchenhohe is maybe five kilometers of winding mountain road. I’m amazed he managed to keep the car on the road for as long as he did. Hermann Kaspel was murdered, boss. Someone must have cut the brakes while the car was parked outside his house. One of his neighbors, I expect. And here’s another thing you might want to consider, Commissar. It looks like you’ve been a lot closer to solving who killed Karl Flex than perhaps you’d ever thought. Because whoever murdered poor Kaspel here almost certainly intended to murder you, too. They must have hoped you’d be in the car with him when it went off the road. You see, if they kill you and him, then this investigation is ended. Make no mistake, Bernie. Someone in Obersalzberg or Berchtesgaden wants you dead.”