Prussian Blue

THIRTY-FIVE

We left the scene of the accident and drove up the winding mountain road to Hermann Kaspel’s address in Buchenhohe, parking our own car a short distance away so that we wouldn’t wake his widow. There were no lights burning in the house, for which I was grateful, otherwise I might have felt obliged to go in and give the poor woman the bad news then and there. She was obviously asleep and unaware of the terrible tragedy that had overtaken her, which was just as well. The bringer of bad news certainly doesn’t look any better at four o’clock in the morning, especially when he looks like me. Besides, all I wanted to do now was take a look at the spot in front of the house where Kaspel’s car had been parked, while the crime scene was still relatively fresh. And keeping our voices down, we inspected the space with our flashlights.

“You can still smell the glycol,” said Korsch, squatting down and touching the wet ground with his fingertips. “Most brake fluid is just glycol-ether based. Especially in a cold climate like this one. You see where it’s melted the snow when it poured onto the ground?”

“It’s just like you said, Friedrich.”

“No question about it. Hermann Kaspel was murdered. Just as surely as if someone put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.” Korsch stood up and lit a cigarette. “You’re lucky to be alive, boss. If you’d been in that car, you’d probably be dead, too.”

I glanced up at the cold sky. The veil of earlier clouds had lifted to reveal heaven’s great black canopy and, as I frequently did, I remembered the trenches, Verdun, and the freezing nights on sentry duty when I must have looked at every star in the sky, steadily reflecting upon my own imminent mortality. I was never afraid of dying when I looked up at the heavens; from cosmic dust we had come and to cosmic dust we would all return. I don’t know that I thought much about the moral law within me; perhaps it was, after all, an extravagance beyond the horizon of my vision. That and the fact that it was a pain in the neck to keep looking up that way, not to mention dangerous.

Korsch walked a few meters away from the house and collected a length of old green-gingham curtain material he’d seen lying on the side of the road. It was only lightly dusted with snow but the edge was stained with brake fluid. On a backstreet in Berlin it would hardly have been unusual but in such a scrupulously tidy place as Obersalzberg, where even the flowers in the window boxes were standing neatly to attention, it seemed worthy of note.

“My guess is that he used this to lie on,” said Korsch. “While he was underneath Kaspel’s car. Careless to leave it here like this.”

“Perhaps he had to,” I said. “Perhaps he was disturbed.” There was a maker’s mark on the curtain lining, which told us only that it had been made a long way away, at a branch of Horten’s department store—the DeFaKa, in Dortmund. “If we could find the pair to this, then we might be in business as far as identifying Hermann’s murderer is concerned. But somehow I don’t see anyone allowing us to search every house on Hitler’s mountain to look for a length of old curtain. As I’m often reminded, some of these people are Hitler’s friends.”

As we walked away from the house my boots kicked a piece of metal lying on the road, which caught my flashlight, and I bent down to pick it up. For a moment I thought I’d found the knife used to cut the brake lines, but I soon realized that the object in my fingers wouldn’t have cut anything. Made of rounded metal, it was thin and smooth and curved, about twenty centimeters long and less than ten millimeters in diameter, and resembled a misshapen table utensil—a spatula or a longish spoon without a bowl, perhaps.

“Is it something that fell off the bottom of the car?” I asked, handing it to Friedrich Korsch and letting him examine the object for a moment.

“No. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. This is stainless steel. And much too clean to have come off any car.”

As we returned to the car, I slipped the object into my jacket pocket and told myself that I’d ask someone about it later, although quite who I might ask I had no idea; it didn’t look like the kind of object that could easily be identified.

Friedrich Korsch dropped me back at the Villa Bechstein and, almost immediately, left for Munich to spring the Krauss brothers from Stadelheim Prison. I helped myself to a large brandy in the drawing room, toasted Kaspel’s memory, and then walked back up the hill toward the Berghof. The sentry was awake this time but just as surprised as before to see someone on foot at that time of night. According to all the newspapers and magazines, Hitler loved to walk all over Obersalzberg, but I saw little evidence that he or anyone else for that matter walked anywhere other than to the next armchair in the Great Hall or the Berghof terrace. I walked on, past the Berghof to the Türken Inn, where the local RSD was headquartered. Everything was quiet and it was hard to believe that on a frozen hillside only a few kilometers away was the body of a man who had been murdered. The Türken was another Alpine-chalet-style building made of white stone and black wood, except that it had its own parade ground with an absurdly tall flagpole flying an SS flag, and an excellent view of Bormann’s house nearby. There was a little stone sentry box out front that resembled a granite sarcophagus and I had the guard escort me to the duty officer. Almost mummified with cold, he was glad to move some blood around his polished black helmet. By contrast the RSD duty officer in the Türken was tucked up in an office heated by a nice fire, a small cooking stove, and a heartwarming picture in Berliner Illustrated News of Göring proudly holding his baby daughter, Edda. I envied him that much, anyway. On the office table was a dinner plate with a loaf of bread, some butter, and a chunk of Velveeta, which reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was fortunate that I’d recently lost my appetite. There’s nothing like seeing a man you know cut in half to stop you feeling hungry; but seeing a coffeepot steaming on the stove, I helped myself before coming to the point of my being in that office. The coffee tasted good. It tasted even better with sugar. There was always plenty of sugar on Hitler’s mountain. If there had been a bottle I might have helped myself to that, too. The officer was an SS-Untersturmführer, which is to say a lieutenant with just three pips on his collar and a pimple on his neck; he was about twelve years old and as green as his shoulder straps and, with his glasses and his pink cheeks, his membership in a master race looked all too provisional. His name was Dietrich.

“Captain Kaspel has been killed in an accident,” I said. “On the road to Buchenhohe. It would seem that he lost control of the car he was driving and went off the road.”

“You’re not serious,” said Dietrich.

“Well, actually, what I said, it’s not quite accurate. I’m more or less certain Kaspel was murdered. Someone cut the brake hoses on his car. I think they meant us both to be killed, but as you can see, I escaped.”

“In Obersalzberg? Who would do such a thing?”

“Yes, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? That someone here, on Hitler’s mountain, could even think of committing murder. It’s incredible.”

“Do you have an idea who this person is, Herr Commissar?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. But I will find out. Look, you’ll have to notify the appropriate services to recover the body and the car. An ambulance, I suppose. And a fire truck. It’s a real mess, I’m afraid, and not for the squeamish. The car’s a complete wreck. Maybe a doctor, I don’t know. Not that he can help. And perhaps you’d better tell Major Högl. Although I’m not sure if he’s the kind of officer that you can wake up with important news or if it’s best to wait for the morning. Only you can say, sonny. But around here I get the feeling that bad news always waits until the morning.”

I glanced out the window. There was a light on the ground floor in Bormann’s house and I wondered if he would want to know about Kaspel’s death and if I dared disturb the deputy chief of staff at this time of night. Leave it to Högl, I told myself; you’ve got enough to do, Gunther. You won’t be able to tell Bormann without also having to report on your progress, which has been disappointing, to say the least. The only good news you could tell a man like Martin Bormann was that you’d caught the murderer; everything else was an excuse for your own incompetence. Besides, there was always the danger I might talk out of turn. There’s nothing like seeing a man you like cut in half to make you a little too free with your opinions. Things like that happened a lot in the trenches. It’s how I lost my first set of sergeant’s stripes—telling some fool of a lieutenant that he’d got a couple of good men killed.

“God in heaven, this is terrible news. Captain Kaspel was such a kind man. With such a nice wife.”

“You can leave the widow to me,” I said, and yawned. The warmth of the Türken’s office was making me sleepy again. “Make sure Högl knows that. I’ll tell her first thing in the morning, just as soon as I’ve snatched a few hours’ sleep and had some breakfast.”

I was on the point of leaving when I noticed the rifle rack: they were all the standard German army rifle—the Mauser Karabiner 98—but one with a scope caught my attention. This was a Mannlicher M95, the same kind of carbine that had been used to shoot Karl Flex. I lifted it out of the rack, worked the bolt, and inspected the magazine, which was full. The gun was well maintained, too, and in better condition than the carbine I’d found at the Villa Bechstein; for one, it wasn’t covered in soot. I turned the carbine and inspected the barrel; it was dirtier than it looked on first inspection but whether that meant it had been fired recently was not something I could determine.

“What’s this doing here?” I said.

“That’s Major Högl’s rifle, sir,” said Dietrich. “He uses it to go hunting sometimes.”

“What does he shoot up here?”

“Nothing inside the Leader’s Territory or the Landlerwald, you understand,” he insisted. “Nothing except a few local cats. Everything else is forbidden.” The lieutenant smiled uncomfortably, as if he didn’t approve. “The Leader doesn’t really like cats around the Berghof.”

“So I hear.”

“They kill the local birds.”

I nodded. The fact was, I’d always liked cats and even admired their independence; being shot by the Nazis for doing what comes naturally was the kind of existential dilemma with which I could easily sympathize.

“Is this the same rifle that Captain Kaspel gave to him? The one that belonged to a poacher?” But even as I asked I wondered how Kaspel could have failed to have noticed it there, on the Türken’s rifle rack. Surely he would have mentioned it following our trip to the apiary.

“I don’t know, sir. Would you like me to ask him?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll ask him myself.”

I walked quickly back down to the Berghof and discovered my room was chillier than before on account of the fact that someone had been in there and left the door wide open. I wrote a message for Heydrich, collected my notebook and, thinking I needed to be somewhere warm, returned immediately to the Villa Bechstein, where I told the two RSD duty officers to send the telex, and to awaken me at eight. Then I went upstairs. Someone had thoughtfully left a bottle of schnapps on my dressing table, next to the Leica. I guess it did make a nice picture at that; it’s nice to have a few snaps of a favorite place you’ve been, even if that place is at the bottom of a glass.