Prussian Blue

FORTY-SIX

I walked into Berchtesgaden and back up the road to Obersalzberg. Halfway up the mountain I stopped and looked back at the little Alpine town in the dying light of the late afternoon and reflected that it was hard to believe such an idyllic-looking place could have been the scene of two brutal murders in less than twenty-four hours. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t that hard to believe, given the Nazi flags that were flying over the railway station and the local Reichs Chancellery. I carried on walking. It was a long climb made even longer by the feeling that my efforts were not just pointless but also a kind of subtle punishment; that nothing I did was ever going to make a difference to the way things were, and it was sheer hubris on my part to think they would.

By the time I reached the Villa Bechstein, I had calmed down a little. But that didn’t last long. As soon as I arrived, Friedrich Korsch told me that the Gestapo had arrested someone for the murder of Karl Flex.

“Who is it?” I asked as I warmed myself by the fire and lit a cigarette to catch my breath.

“Johann Brandner. The photographer.”

“Where did they find him?”

“At a hospital in Nuremberg. Apparently he’d been a patient there for several days.”

“Pretty good alibi.”

“The local boys picked him up yesterday morning and brought him straight here.”

“Where is Brandner now?”

“Rattenhuber and Högl are interrogating him in the cells underneath the Türken.”

“Jesus. That’s all I need. How did you find out about it?”

“The RSD duty officer. SS-Untersturmführer Dietrich told me when I asked him to organize that firing squad. Boss? Is Neumann serious about that? They’re really going to shoot those two thugs from Linz?”

“The SS are always serious about shooting people. That’s why they have a little death’s head on their hats. To remind people that they’re not playing games. Look, we’d better get along to the Türken before they shoot Brandner as well.”

“Sure, boss, sure. By the way. What happened to your face?”

I shifted my jaw painfully. It felt like a couple of spare panels from the Pergamon Altar. “Someone hit me.”

“Captain Neumann?”

“I wish. Then I could have killed him. But no, it was someone else.”

“Here,” he said. “Take a bite of this.”

Korsch handed me his own hip flask and I took a sip of the Gold Water he was so fond of drinking. The stuff contained tiny flakes of gold that went straight through your body unchanged and, according to Korsch, turned your piss to gold. Which, given the sheer weight of lead, is the best kind of alchemy there is.

“You should get that jaw seen to. Who’s that SS doctor I’ve seen around Obersalzberg? The one with the hop pole up his arse.”

“Brandt? Knowing him, he’d probably poison me. Get away with it, too, knowing him.”

“All the same, boss, it looks to me as if your jaw might be broken.”

“That can only help,” I said through my teeth.

“How?”

“To keep my big mouth shut.”

I walked along to the Türken Inn where, in the officers’ mess, I found Rattenhuber and Högl drinking champagne and looking very pleased with themselves. SS-Untersturmführer Dietrich—the young duty officer I’d met before—was there, as was a muscular RSD sergeant.

“Congratulations, Gunther,” said Rattenhuber, pouring me a glass. “Have some champagne. We’re celebrating. He’s been arrested. Your very own number one suspect. Johann Brandner. We’ve got him in a cell downstairs.”

He handed me the glass but I didn’t drink it.

“So I hear. Only he’s no longer my number one suspect. I hate to spoil your party, Colonel, but I’m more or less sure it was someone else who killed Karl Flex.”

“Nonsense,” said Högl. “He’s already admitted it. We have his signed confession to everything.”

“Everything? Then it’s a pity he’s not Polish, too, and we’d have a good reason to invade Poland.”

Rattenhuber thought that was funny. “Very good,” he said.

But Högl’s face remained as straight as the seams on his black tunic pockets.

“All right,” I said, “tell me everything he’s admitted to and then I’ll tell you if he’s just talking to save his skin.”

“He did it all right,” insisted Högl. “He even told us why.”

“Surprise me.” I sipped the champagne through gritted teeth and then put the glass down again. I wasn’t in the mood to drink for any reason other than the anesthetic effect it might have on my jaw.

“The same reason he was sent to Dachau. He blamed Dr. Flex for the compulsory purchase order. For the loss of his photographic business here in Obersalzberg.”

“Maybe he did. But that’s not exactly front-page news. Not up here. And to be quite frank with you, I doubt he killed anyone.”

“Look, Gunther,” said Rattenhuber. “I can see why you might be sore with us. This was your case after all. And perhaps we should have waited for you before we interrogated him. But, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, time is of the essence here. As of now, the Leader can come to the Berghof and enjoy his fiftieth birthday in total safety. Bormann will be delighted when he hears a man has signed a confession. That the status quo has been returned. And surely that’s all that matters.”

“You can call me old-fashioned, sir, but I prefer to believe that what matters most is finding the real culprit. Especially in this case where the Leader’s security is concerned. And it’s not me who’s sore. I don’t imagine Brandner told you any of this voluntarily. My guess is that you had this orangutan smack him around a bit. Which is a poor way to solve any crime, in my experience.”

The sergeant bristled a bit at hearing this description but that was all right. I was sort of hoping he might take a swing at me so I could hit someone. After what had happened to Aneta Husák, I was desperate to hit someone, even an orangutan.

“Be careful, Gunther,” said Högl, grinning unpleasantly. “It looks as though someone already hit you today.”

“I slipped. On the ice. There’s a lot of it about up here. But if I do want someone to hit me, then I figure I’m in the right place for it. Which makes me think his confession is about as reliable as an Italian army. Nuremberg is three hundred kilometers away. It’s just about possible Johann Brandner murdered Karl Flex but I don’t think there’s any way he could have murdered Captain Kaspel and got back there in time to be arrested yesterday. Or, for that matter, that he could have killed Udo Ambros, either.”

“Ambros—he’s the assistant hunter, isn’t he?” said Rattenhuber. “At the Landlerwald.”

“He was,” I said, “until someone removed his head with a shotgun. I discovered his body earlier today when I went to speak to him at his house in Berchtesgaden. I suspect Ambros had a shrewd idea of who really murdered Karl Flex. Not least because he owned the Mannlicher rifle that was used to shoot him. So someone else tried to make it look like a suicide. But it was murder. Suicides don’t normally write neat legible letters that answer all of your questions except perhaps the meaning of life.”

“Maybe it was suicide,” said Högl. “Maybe you’re wrong. Like any Murder Commission detective, it seems to me that you’ve got murder on the brain.”

“Well, at least I’ve got a brain,” I said pointedly. “Unlike Udo Ambros.”

“And I still don’t believe that Captain Kaspel’s death was anything but an accident.”

“Then there’s the small matter of an alibi,” I continued, ignoring Högl’s objections. “From what I hear, Johann Brandner was in hospital when he was arrested. In which case I expect that there are lots of people—some of them doctors, German doctors—who might be prepared to say that Brandner was never out of bed. So unless he was hospitalized for persistent sleepwalking, I can’t say that I think much of your confession, gentlemen.”

“Nevertheless he did sign a full confession,” said Högl. “And in spite of what you might believe, it was all done with an absolute minimum of force. It’s true. The sergeant was going to hit him at one stage. But the fact is he fell down the stairs.”

“I’ve certainly not heard that one before. Can I read this confession?”

Rattenhuber handed me a typed sheet of paper on which was an almost illegible scrawl of a signature.

“What the major says is absolutely true,” he said, while I glanced over Brandner’s confession. “He fell. But when we did question him, frankly, the threat of returning him to a concentration camp was more than enough to persuade him to volunteer the truth. He claims he’s been suffering from malnutrition ever since Dachau.”

“That ought to be an easy claim to substantiate,” I said handing back the confession, which made no mention of Kaspel or Ambros, not that I had really expected it would. “I’d like to see him, if I may. Speak to the man myself. Look, Colonel, maybe he did kill Karl Flex. I don’t know. Nothing would give me more pleasure than going straight back to Berlin right now, knowing that the Leader was safe. But I do have a number of questions I need to satisfy myself about before I can rubber-stamp this confession and turn it over to General Heydrich at Gestapo headquarters.”

I could see that this mention of Heydrich troubled them both, which was of course why I’d invoked his name; nobody in Germany wanted to incur his displeasure, least of all Rattenhuber.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “We wouldn’t want the general to think we’ve swept anything under the carpet here. Would we, Peter?”

But it was immediately clear that Högl felt his association with Hitler as old comrades from the Sixteenth Bavarian could trump my association with Heydrich; it was a reasonable assumption. I could almost see the Leader with his hand on his former NCO’s shoulder. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased; listen to him; he’s a real fucking Nazi.

“There’s no question of that, sir,” he said. “But to me it’s beginning to seem very much as if the famous Commissar Gunther from the Berlin Murder Commission is much more interested in satisfying himself and rescuing his professional reputation than in apprehending the culprit. We have a confession from a local man with a proven grudge who knows the area and is a trained marksman. Frankly it seems like an open-and-shut case to me.”

“Then the Leader should be counted as fortunate that Reichs Leader Bormann and Heydrich put me in charge of this investigation, Major, not you.”

“It was Gunther who identified Brandner as the number one suspect,” said Rattenhuber. “You have to hand it to him, Peter. Until he got here we were all half-inclined to believe that the shooting might have been an accident. A poacher’s stray shot, perhaps. I think we owe the commissar a great deal.”

“If the commissar insists on interviewing this man again, I have no objection of course,” said Högl. “That’s his prerogative. I just don’t want us to find ourselves in a position where Johann Brandner retracts what he has said so that the commissar here can indulge himself in some stupid fantasy about a whole series of murders here in Obersalzberg and Berchtesgaden.”

“You’re not going to ask him to retract his confession, are you?” said Rattenhuber.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Not in this place.”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Högl.

“It means that in the Türken Inn it’s you and the colonel who are in charge, not me. And he’s your prisoner. Not mine.”

“There you are, Peter,” said Rattenhuber. “There’s no question of the commissar persuading Johann Brandner to withdraw his confession. He just wants to check the umlauts are in place over the right letters. Isn’t that so, Gunther?”

“That’s right, sir. I’m just doing my job.”