Prussian Blue

THIRTY-NINE

Udo Ambros lived on Aschauerstrasse in Berchtesgaden, about half a kilometer farther on from the home of Dr. Waechter, the lawyer who owned the exiled Jew’s garage containing the red Maserati. Ambros’s isolated house enjoyed a spectacular view of the Watzmann and backed onto a thick forest but it wasn’t much of a place—certainly nothing to compare with Dr. Waechter’s; just a largish, two-story Alpine building that was little better than a poorly built barn, with a corrugated iron roof, a rusting wire fence, an abandoned water trailer, and a pile of near-fossilized wood stacked under a row of long icicles hanging from the black eaves like the teeth of some extinct mountain carnivore. A red DKW motorcycle stood on the snow-covered path along which were a series of footprints that contrasted strongly with my own; these others were reddish, even blood-colored, which raised a question in my head as to exactly how they got that way. A piebald horse was watching me carefully from the top of a long sloping field and a crudely carved bear stood guard by the front door; from the angle of his head and the snarling, aggrieved expression on his face he looked as if he had taken a bullet to the neck. There were only two windows, both of them on the ground floor. I glanced in one but I might just as easily have been looking through a fog, the glass was so grimy. Not that the dirty net curtains helped much, either. I knocked at the door and waited but no one answered. The relentless silence of the valley felt as if it had been ordained by the local gods and it was unnerving, as if the whole of nature was desperately afraid of waking Wotan while he was taking a well-deserved nap with Fricka on a nearby mountaintop. Living somewhere like this would, I knew, have driven me as mad as King Ludwig. Berliners like me were not meant for empty places like this. We like the sound of noise more than we care for the noise of silence, which is always a little too long and loud for our cynical metropolitan ears. The true hallmarks of civilization are clamor, hubbub, and commotion. Give me pandemonium every time. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of dung and wood smoke. The smell of coal suits me a lot better; my smoker’s cough works better when there’s some sulfur dioxide and heavy metals in the damp atmosphere.

I might have concluded that the assistant huntsman was not at home if it hadn’t been for the motorcycle. The cylinder of the 500-cc engine was cold to the touch but rocking the bike revealed the fuel tank was almost full. I kick-started it in the hope that the sound might summon its owner and the engine roared into life at only the second time of asking, all of which implied that the machine was regularly ridden and most probably the preferred method of transport for Udo Ambros; but only the piebald came to the edge of the fence to see what was happening, fixing me with the kind of wary, black-eyed, who-the-hell-are-you kind of look I normally only get from single women in bars. After a minute or more I allowed the bike to stall, walked back to the front door, knocked a second time, and peered through the window again. I don’t know what I expected to see in there. A man hiding from me? Some firelight, perhaps? A witch with a cauldron full of stolen children? I turned around and went to question the mare in the hope that she might give me a clue where Ambros was to be found; and without hesitating, she did. As soon as I reached the fence she turned away and following her with my eyes for a few seconds I saw a man’s legs sticking out of a door at the side of the house.

“Herr Ambros,” I said. He didn’t answer, so I picked up a length of wood and threw it near him just in case he was underneath a car or a tractor; but of course I knew he wasn’t. If the man had been alive he would have been summoned by the noise of the DKW starting up. Reluctant to risk tearing my suit by climbing over the fence I went back to the door. It wasn’t locked. With so little real theft in this part of Germany—except, of course, the kind that Bormann and his people were guilty of—few bothered locking their front doors.

Death doesn’t always have a smell, but it often has a distinctive feel, as if the silent wraith that has just crept away with a man’s soul brushes against the edge of your own, like an invisible man on a crowded U-Bahn train. It can be unnerving at times. It was like that here and I almost didn’t go any farther into the house out of a reluctance to witness what I might see. You would think a Murder Commission detective would be used to looking at terrible things. But the truth is, you never are. Every horrible murder is horrible in its own way and the pictures of these can never be erased from your mind; even at the best of times my own memories often resemble a series of uglier paintings by George Grosz and Otto Dix. I sometimes ask myself if my temperament might have been very different if I hadn’t seen so many crime scenes.

I forced myself to walk through a house that looked as if it was already accustomed to violent death. A rabbit lay half-skinned on the kitchen table while the walls of the hallway and the sitting room were full of various animal trophies—deer, badgers, foxes; it might have been my imagination, but they were all looking quite pleased with the way things had turned out. The probable author of their collective misfortune was history. I knew that as soon as I walked into the house. Udo Ambros was lying on the stone floor of the kitchen with his feet through the open door, although to be honest I wasn’t absolutely sure it was him. A shotgun blast to the head at close range has a capacity to make nonsense of things like a man’s identity. I’ve seen decapitated men at Plötzensee who had more of a head to speak of than Udo Ambros. There’s no such thing as a cry for help when the suicide involves a shotgun; the victim always means it. Pieces of skull and brain and gouts of blood had made such a mess of the kitchen that it resembled a direct hit on a trench at Verdun and, had I not been standing in the dead man’s own kitchen, the only reason I could have recognized him at all would have been the Good Luck from Berchtesgaden Salt Mines badge he was wearing in the lapel of his bloodstained Tracht jacket. A whole piece of his face, including the eye, was sticking to the tiled wall above the stove like a piece of a mural by Picasso or the relief on a Roman fountain. I swallowed hard, as if to remind myself I had a neck to which a head was attached, but kept on looking all the same.

I lifted up the dead man’s shirt and put my hand on his chest; the body was quite cold and I guessed he must have been dead for at least eight hours. He was still clutching the shotgun, which lay between his outstretched legs like the sword on a Templar’s tomb. I wrested the gun from his dead fingers. It was a Merkel side-by-side with a Kersten bolting mechanism, one of the more desirable German shotguns. I broke it open to reveal two red Brenneke slugs in the barrels, only one of which had been discharged. Not that it would have needed two; an ordinary shotgun cartridge filled with buckshot would certainly have done the job, but a slug that could have brought down a charging wild boar was making absolutely sure of it, like using a three-kilo hammer to crack an egg. I’d seen these slugs before, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember exactly where. I’d seen so much lately that I didn’t know where I’d left my own arsehole. The only question was, why had he done it? The man I’d met the previous day hadn’t looked as if he’d had much on his mind except the enjoyment of my own discomfort; then again, he must have known I’d trace the Mannlicher carbine to him eventually. And when I did, things would have gone very badly for Udo Ambros. Very badly indeed. The Gestapo would have made quite sure of that. I hadn’t cared to think about what might happen to Karl Flex’s murderer when I caught him but I knew the Nazis well enough to be sure it could so easily have been something worse than the falling ax.

After a while I looked around for a suicide note and found one inside an envelope on the mantelpiece above a wood fire that was still warm to the touch. It was about now I started to wonder why a man who was planning to blow his head off would bother to build a large fire and start skinning a rabbit and pour a full cup of coffee that was still on the table, and I hoped that the note would explain all that.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. I HAVE KILLED MYSELF BECAUSE IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THAT BERLIN COPPER TRACES THE NUMBER ON THAT MANNLICHER CARBINE AND GETS ME FOR THE MURDER OF KARL FLEX AND I DON’T WANT TO DIE, STARVED TO DEATH IN DACHAU LIKE JOHANN BRANDNER. FLEX WAS A BASTARD AND EVERYONE KNOWS HE HAD IT COMING. I LEAVE MY GUNS AND MY MOTORCYCLE TO MY OLD FRIENDS AND FELLOW HUNTSMEN, JOHANNES GEIGER AND JOHANN DIESBACH, AND THE REST OF MY STUFF TO ANY OF THEM WHO WANTS IT. SIGNED UDO AMBROS.

But the suicide note asked as many questions as it answered. It was the first one I’d seen that was entirely written in neat capital letters, almost as if Ambros had been keen to make sure that everything was quite clear and understood by the proper authorities; but it also managed to obscure something very important: the true handwriting of the man who’d written the note, which might have enabled me to determine absolutely—with the opinion of the huntsman Johannes Geiger, perhaps—that Ambros had indeed penned it. As it was, I had my doubts. Not least because there was a spot of blood on the corner of the paper about the size of a pinhead. Laboratory analysis might have proved that this was the rabbit’s blood and not a man’s, but the rabbit itself looked to have been properly drained and bled before the skinning had begun. I would have bet a small fortune that the blood had arrived on the notepaper from the head of Udo Ambros. Nothing unusual about that perhaps, except that the note had been inside an envelope. I wandered around the house opening creaky cupboards and smelly drawers and being generally nosy. Meanwhile I asked myself if Johann Brandner, my leading suspect, was dead after all—as the suicide note had alleged. It wouldn’t have been the first time that the Gestapo and the SS had lied about a death in Dachau, even to the criminal police. Death in Dachau might have been a normal occurrence but it was often treated by the authorities as something secret, to be hidden not just from concerned families but from everyone else as well. The few people who knew exactly what went on in Dachau were, I knew, the subject of a so-called Leader Order; and the only reason I knew about this was because Heydrich had once told me about it before sending me to Dachau himself. He was thoughtful like that. On the other hand, it was quite possible that Johann Brandner had returned to Berchtesgaden in secret, killed Udo Ambros, and hoped to put me off the scent by mentioning that he was dead in the suicide note. Being dead is a pretty good alibi for anyone who’s in trouble with the law, but in Nazi Germany it was an existential hazard.

Having seen a gun cupboard in the hallway behind the front door, I searched for keys and eventually found a set on a chain in the dead man’s trouser pocket. Which was when I started to become convinced that Udo Ambros had been murdered. Inside the gun cupboard were a couple of rifles, another shotgun, a Luger pistol, some rifle ammunition, and several boxes of Rottweil shotgun cartridges. Rottweil was owned by a company called RWS and after searching the entire house and the outbuildings I discovered that these were the only cartridges I could find anywhere; the two Brenneke slugs used to kill Ambros were made by Sellier & Bellot and the only two I ever found were the two in the gun, which strongly suggested to me that the murderer had probably brought his own ammunition. Perhaps he’d looked for some cartridges belonging to Ambros, realized they were safely locked away in the gun cupboard, and then been obliged to use the ones in his own pocket or ammunition belt. Which strongly suggested that the murder had not been one carefully planned beforehand; quite possibly the two men had met quite amicably and argued about something before the killer had slipped the two slugs into the victim’s gun and then shot him. Which also suggested that they were friends, or at least acquaintances. And given the contents of the suicide note, what else but my investigation and the provenance of the Mannlicher carbine would they have been arguing about?

There were no bloody footprints leading out of the kitchen and through the house, which made me wonder about the reddish bootprints in the snow on the path outside the front door. How had they got there? It didn’t seem at all likely that the killer would have gone out the back door and climbed over the fence. Besides, the only prints on the snow outside the kitchen door belonged to the horse. With every light switched on, I went carefully through the house, but there wasn’t anything even resembling a footprint. I grabbed Ambros’s coat and went outside. I was never a detective much given to getting down on my hands and knees. For one thing, I didn’t have many suits and the ones I had weren’t the kind to take any punishment. For another, it never seemed worth a fingertip search given that most murders these days were committed by the people I was working for. Even so I dropped the coat beside one of the size-forty-five bootprints and took a closer look. The prints looked like they were from a pair of Hanwag boots, just like the ones I was wearing on my own feet. And the prints weren’t really red at all. They were pink. And it wasn’t blood that had stained the snow. It was salt. The highest quality pink salt. The kind that gourmet cooks were fond of using.