Prussian Blue

FORTY

At Rothman’s garage in Berchtesgaden, the Maserati was parked on the street again and Friedrich Korsch was seated in the passenger seat surrounded by several small boys who had gathered around to admire the car. But the biggest small boy was probably Korsch himself. Puffing a cigarette happily, he looked like he’d just won the German Grand Prix. Next to the Maserati was a Paulaner beer truck that hadn’t been there before. Paulaner was the biggest brand of beer in Bavaria. When he saw me, Korsch climbed out of the Maserati, threw away the cigarette—which was promptly acquired by one of his young admirers—and came to the window of my car.

“You fetched the Krauss brothers?” I said.

“In the back of the truck. I was lucky. They were about to be transferred to do hard labor in Flossenbürg.”

“Good work.”

“Not entirely. They say they’ll only open the safe if we let them go at the Italian border.”

“What does Heydrich have to say about that?”

“He’s fine with it. If they open the safe, they can walk. There’s just one problem, boss.”

“What?”

“These two yids don’t trust us to keep our word.”

“How about if we sign a letter, something on paper, a guarantee—?”

“They don’t like that idea either.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Can you blame them? This is Berchtesgaden. Remember? If the Chancellor’s own word isn’t worth shit—”

“Strictly speaking, that was Munich, but I know what you mean. It sets a bad example for the rest of us.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We have to get into that safe. I’ve a good idea it’s the key to everything, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Look, I’d better speak to the brothers myself. Maybe we can come to an arrangement. What sort of condition are they in?”

“A bit dirty. I fed them both on the road from Dachau. And they had some beers in the truck, which ought to have put them in a better mood by now. But considering where they were, not too bad, really.”

“Bring them into the garage, Friedrich. We’ll talk there.”

The two brothers were Jews from the Scheunenviertel, a slum district in the center of Berlin with a substantial Jewish population from Eastern Europe and, before the Nazis, one of the most feared neighborhoods in the city, a place where few policemen ever dared to tread. To make an arrest, the cops from the Alex used to have to go in there in substantial numbers, and sometimes with an armored car. That was how the brothers had been arrested the first time, after a series of burglaries carried out in Berlin’s biggest and best hotels, including the Adlon. It was said that they’d even burgled Hitler’s suite at the Kaiserhof just before he became chancellor of Germany, and stolen his gold pocket watch and some love letters, but it was probably just one of the many stories about the Krauss brothers that had helped to make them notorious. Where Adolf Hitler was concerned, truth was a concept that only a Cretan would have recognized, and I suspect even he’d long forgotten where he’d hidden it. After Franz and Erich Sass—two Berlin bank robbers from the ’20s whose careers had reportedly inspired them—the Krauss brothers had been the most famous career criminals in Germany, and their burglary of the police museum at the Alex to recover their own tools made them almost legendary. They were small and dark and immensely strong but after several months in Dachau the clothes they were wearing were at least two sizes too big. They’d changed in the back of the truck and their prison clothes, with green triangles signifying they were career criminals, were still in their hands as if they didn’t know what to do with them or didn’t dare to throw them away.

I had an idea they were originally from Poland, where their father had been a famous rabbi, but if they were still religious it wasn’t obvious; they were tough-looking men whose skill was not unlocking the secrets of the Zohar and the Kabbalah, but other people’s safes. It was said that they could open a gnat’s arse with a paper clip and that the gnat wouldn’t even notice.

“That’s a York,” said Joseph Krauss, inspecting the safe. “From Pennsylvania, America. You don’t see many American nuts like that in Germany. Last one of these I saw was in a jeweler’s shop on Unter den Linden. A better shop than this one, too. Of course, that was when we still stole from Jewish businesses, but we gave that up when you Nazi momzers started doing it, too. Now, it could be a three-number combination, or a four. But you have to hope it’s a three, which will take less effort to puzzle. I could drill it, of course, but that will take a lot more time and besides you have to drill it in the right place, and to do that you need to have seen the other side of the door and studied the mechanics of the lock. Maybe you’ll find some other shmegegge to drill it for you. But he might not know where to drill and leave it ongepotchket and then you might never get it open.” Joseph Krauss shook his head and looked sad. “Not that you do have to drill it, like I say. But I tell you honestly, the talent needed to open this safe by feel is rare. There are maybe three people in the whole of Europe who could puzzle it to order and my brother Karl is one of them. All he needs is that rubber mallet on the wall, in case it needs a good zetz. But that’s not your main problem, Commissar.”

I nodded. “I know. Assistant Korsch told me. You don’t trust us to let you go after you’ve cracked the nut.”

“S’right. No offense, Commissar. You’re both from the same Kiez as us, I can tell. Berliners are not like Bavarians. These people are like mud. But you’re not going to make schlemiels of us. What’s to stop you from sending us straight back to Dachau when we’ve cracked it? I tell you honestly, Commissar, it’s been driving the two of us crazy. What to do? It’s a real tsutcheppenish. You need us enough to say you’ll pay our price, but we don’t trust you enough to pay it when we’ve done the job. How can we do business like this? Without trust? Impossible. Isn’t that right, Karl?”

But Karl Krauss was already giving himself the safecracker’s manicure—brushing the ends of his fingers on the sleeve of his ill-fitting suit. “I’d love to help you gentlemen,” he said. “I tell you honestly, I could use the practice. It’s been a while since I cracked a nut. I’ve missed it, so I have. But my brother is right. There’s no basis here for trust.” He pulled a sad face, as if a deal was still a long way off for us. “What’s in there, anyway? Maybe if you told us. You must figure something important, otherwise you’d never have brought us here. All this way. At such short notice. And with such important people oiling our way out of that horrible place. General Heydrich, no less. Piorkowski looked like he was going to shit when he heard that man’s geshaltn name.”

“Alex Piorkowski is the camp commandant at Dachau,” explained Korsch. “A real bastard, if you ask me.”

“The man’s a golem,” said Joe Krauss. “A monster.”

“Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you honestly, gentlemen, I have absolutely no idea what’s inside the nut. But I’m hoping what’s in there will help prove that a local Nazi official was corrupt. He’s dead but there could be evidence in there that will take a few others down with him. Papers, documents, ledgers, that’s what I’m hoping for. But if there’s any money or jewelry in there, it’s yours. To keep. All of it. That and the Maserati sports car parked in the street. You can drive it anywhere you like. And I give you my word that we won’t come after you. Or prevent your exit. You can hear me make the call to the border police to let you through. If necessary I’ll even drive you there myself.”

“I’m liking this more now.” Karl Krauss shrugged. “That red Italian job? It’s a nice car. But even in Italy it’s just a noodge. Not a car for gonifs like us. We’ve never been the kind to flash the money around when we had it. That’s how you get pinched. We gay avek in a car like that and the whole world sees, and hears, too, probably. A military brass band couldn’t make more noise than that car. So if we do this job for you we’ll take the beer truck. Who notices such a thing in this part of the world?”

“Then that’s agreed. The truck is yours.”

“But suppose there’s nothing in the safe. Which means you’re disappointed. What then, Commissar? You’ll still let us go? It’s difficult, like my brother Joe says. To have all this trouble for nothing.”

“Give him the keys to the truck now,” I told Korsch. “And the car. Take both, for all I care. Drive in opposite directions. But please open that safe. You can be halfway to Italy in the time it takes for me to get over my disappointment. Not that I pay much attention to things like that these days. To be disappointed you’ve got to believe in something in the first place, and I haven’t believed in anything of late. And certainly very little since 1933. The only reason I’m still a cop is not because I believe in the law or a moral order but because the Nazis wanted it that way. They had me back because they need a glove puppet they can use to ask the wrong questions, at the right time. Which makes me as bad as them, probably.”

“Listen to the police commissar, Karl,” said Joe Krauss. “And we’re the ones who were sent to Dachau. Can you believe it?”

“He’s a real contradiction, and no mistake.”

“Have you got guns?” asked Joe.

“We’re coppers, not Boy Scouts.”

“Let’s see them.”

Korsch and I each pulled out a Walther PPK and tried to hold them in a way that wouldn’t intimidate the brothers.

“So if you hand over the magazines, then maybe we’ll feel a bit more comfortable,” said Joe. “For safekeeping, you might say. We’ll feel safer that way. My brother doesn’t like working when there are guns around. Especially when he doesn’t have one himself.”

“All right.” I turned the Walther upside down, thumbed the release catch, and then worked the slide to drop the last round from the barrel. I pressed the spare round into the mag and then handed it to Joe Krauss. Korsch did the same.

“That’s more haymish,” he said, and pocketed the magazines. “All right. We’ll do it. Not because we trust you, Commissar. But because you’re an honest fool and it’s lucky for you that you have an honest fool’s face. Isn’t that right, Karl?”

“You’re right, Joe. Honestly, only a fool would work for the Nazis and think there’s not a high price to be paid for mere survival. But I suspect you know this already.” He nodded firmly. “So let’s get on with it, shall we? All I need is a pencil and paper and that rubber mallet. But it’s not to hit the safe. It’s to hit my brother on the head and knock some sense into him when you betray us after all.”

Karl Krauss knelt down beside the York and took hold of the dial and pressed his face to the door. “So,” he whispered, “we start with the mark at the top of the dial in the twelve o’clock position. Now we keep turning to the right and going very slowly we feel for the drop. It doesn’t matter what order we get them in yet, all we’re doing now is just feeling for the drop, see? And there’s one right away on zero. There usually is. Most people like zeroes. It reflects their own life expectations. Of course, if we have got more than one zero, then this complicates matters.”

Joe wrote the number on Korsch’s notepad and waited as his brother explored the feeling in the dial for the next number. I smiled. He looked like any German listening, illegally, to the BBC on the radio.

While the brothers worked on the safe I took Friedrich Korsch outside and explained how the Linz Gestapo had tried to arrest me, and what I’d recently discovered at the house of Udo Ambros.

“Udo Ambros couldn’t be more dead if he was Hindenburg’s great-grandfather. Most of his head is sticking to the wall like the kitchen clock. Someone tried hard to make it look like suicide by shotgun. Left a nice confession for us on the mantelpiece, which was so neatly written it looked like a telegram. Hardly the work of someone who was getting ready to blow his own head off. I’ve seen enough real suicides to know a murder when I smell one. And this one is Limburger cheese.”

“Hey, talking of suicide, that yid eye specialist you were asking about, Dr. Karl Wasserstein? Threw himself into the Isar last Saturday morning wearing his Military Merit Cross and drowned. The Munich cops found a note on his surgery door, which they let me have. I think they had orders from on high not to tell your friend Frau Troost. But if you ask me, that’s another suspicious suicide. Who the fuck ends his life on a Saturday morning? Monday morning I could understand. But not a Saturday.”

Korsch laughed bitterly and handed the note to me, and I put it in my pocket to give to Gerdy later on; maybe. In Germany, disappointment was contagious and often came with consequences. I certainly wasn’t about to squander her willingness to help me in my inquiry with some premature candor regarding the fate of her friend.

“Anyway,” he continued, “it seems that he may have got his doctor’s license back, but only for general practice. Not for ophthalmology.”

“So maybe it was a suicide note after all.”

“Maybe. Anyway, the poor bastard said he thought his life had lost its meaning. Because he couldn’t look at people’s eyes.”

“Nobody looks anyone in the eye these days. Not if they can help it.”

“It would be like you prevented from being a cop anymore, I guess.”

“Try me, Friedrich. The day I can walk away from this bloody life, you won’t find me heading for the nearest river to drown my sorrows. I’ll be at the lakes with a bottle of spiritual ointment, drinking it up in a park in Pankow like a good Bolle boy.”

“Maybe I’ll join you, boss. I was born near that park. Schönholzer Heide. Tschaikowskistrasse, 60.”

“Then that makes us practically related. I know that building. Gray building near the bus stop? I had a cousin who lived there.”

“Every apartment building in Berlin is gray and near a bus stop.”

“Small world, isn’t it?”

“It is until you have to catch the bus.”