Prussian Blue

FIFTY-THREE

I was always a keen reader and learned at my mother’s knee. My favorite book was Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. I had a copy at home in Berlin in a locked drawer because it was a forbidden book, of course. The Nazis had burned a great many of Döblin’s books in 1933 but every so often I’d get out my own signed copy of his most famous work and read bits aloud, to remind myself of the good old Weimar Republic. But the fact is, I’ll read anything. Anything at all. I’ve read everything from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Karl May. Several years ago I even read Adolf Hitler’s book My Struggle. I found it predictably combative but here and there I also thought it was perceptive, although only about the war. A critic I’m not, but in my humble opinion there’s no book that’s so bad that you can’t get something from it, even that one. For example, Hitler said that words build bridges into unexplored regions. As it happens, a detective does much the same thing, only sometimes he can end up wishing he’d left those regions alone. Hitler also said that great liars are great magicians. A good detective is also a kind of magician, one who is sometimes capable of making those suspects he has assembled theatrically in the library utter a collective gasp as he works his revelatory magic. But that wasn’t about to happen here, more’s the pity. Another thing Hitler said was that it’s not truth that matters, but victory. Now, I know there are plenty of cops who feel the same way but usually the truth is the best victory I can think of. I could go on in this vein but it boils down to just this: as Friedrich Korsch drove us to Johann Diesbach’s address in Kuchl, I was thinking a lot about Gerdy Troost reading that damn book in her rooms at the Berghof, and I couldn’t help but reflect that since arriving in Berchtesgaden I’d had quite a struggle myself. Most murder investigations are a struggle but this one had been especially so because it’s rare, even in Germany, that someone tries to kill you during the course of your inquiry. I hadn’t yet worked out what I was going to do about Dr. Brandt but I wasn’t about to let him get away with the murder of Hermann Kaspel. Not if I could help it. There had to be something I could do. Now, that really was going to be a struggle. And I said as much to Korsch as the car labored up the mountain road. He listened carefully and said, “You want my opinion, boss?”

“Probably not. But we’re friends, so you might as well give it to me.”

“You should take your own advice a bit more often.”

“Remind me.”

“How can you possibly nail Hitler’s doctor for a murder? What the hell does it matter if they execute Brandner for Flex’s murder? Who cares if Martin Bormann is a crook? The Nazis are just like every king we ever had in Holy Germany. From Charles V to Kaiser Wilhelm II. They all think that their best arguments come from the barrel of a gun. So. While we can still walk away from here, before one of those guns shoots you, or even worse, shoots me, we should quit now.”

“I can’t do that, Friedrich.”

“I know. But look, I had to say it. Your trouble is that you’re the worst kind of detective there is. A German detective. No, it’s worse than that; you’re a Prussian detective. You don’t just believe in your own competence and efficiency, you make a damn fetish out of it. You think your devotion to the job is a virtue, but it’s not. With you it’s a vice. You can’t help yourself. It’s something that runs through your character like the black stripe on the old Prussian flag. That’s your problem, boss. If you investigate a case you have to do it scrupulously and to the very best of your ability. Realism and common sense are powerless against your pigheaded devotion to doing the job as efficiently as it’s possible to do it. And this takes away all your better judgment about the wisdom of what you’re doing. You just don’t know when it’s in your own interest to stop. That’s why Heydrich uses you. Because you always stay the course. You’re like Schmeling; you keep getting up even though the fight is lost. To that extent you’re the most Prussian man I’ve ever met. I admire you, Bernie. I also can’t help but think that there’s a real danger you’re always destined to be your own life’s saboteur.”

“I’m glad I asked. It’s kind of refreshing to have the truth, even if it does feel like a slap in the face.”

“It’s fortunate for you I’m driving, boss. Otherwise that’s what you’d get right now. Commissar or not.”

“I had no idea you had such a keen understanding of me. Or indeed were such a keen philosopher.”

“I think I know you pretty well. And only because there’s a part of me that’s just like you. I’m a Prussian, too, remember? And I can usually figure out what your next move is going to be. It’s usually the one I wouldn’t have the nerve to make myself.”

Kuchl was a picturesque Austrian village on the other side of the Kehlstein and the Göll massif, which formed the border with Germany and, according to a large sign on the road, had been JEW-FREE SINCE 1938. The village was one of those very neat Catholic places that resembles a scene from a book of fairy tales with lots of pastel-colored houses, a largish church, and a smaller one that was a useful spare, grotesque wood carvings that demonstrated the village’s facility for carving wood grotesquely, and a Gasthof with painted window frames and an ornate wrought-iron sign that looked like a medieval gibbet. On almost every building was a Nazi banner or mural, which must have baffled the life-sized Jesus nailed onto the crucifix in the main square; in the cold, bright moonlight that painted figure seemed less like the Christ and more like the poor Jew, Süss Oppenheimer, who gets hanged in a near blizzard by the good citizens of Württemberg at the end of Veit Harlan’s notorious film. In the main square we asked a young man leaving the Gasthof on a bicycle for the way to Oberweissenbachstrasse and Diesbach’s Boardinghouse and were misdirected, politely, to another Jew-free village, called Luegwinkl. It was only after we’d asked for directions again, almost an hour later, that we finally made our way across a bridge over the Salzach River, to the edge of a tree-covered hillside, where we found Diesbach’s Boardinghouse—a three-story wooden chalet with a wraparound wooden balcony and a working waterwheel. Under the eaves of the house was a wooden stag’s head and, by the front door, a park-style wooden bench, underneath which were enough dirty boots to keep a shoe-shine in business for a day or two. The upper-floor lights were on and there was a strong smell of wood smoke from the chimney.

“We’re only a few kilometers from Germany,” said Korsch as we stood outside the front door. “And yet I feel we just went several centuries back in time. I wonder why that is. Something in the air perhaps? A slight taste of aspic jelly.”

“I wonder why that young bastard sent us in the wrong direction,” I said. “We were only five minutes away from this place when we asked him for directions.”

“Your accent? Perhaps he didn’t like you.”

“Maybe. But more likely it was this car. It looks official. At this time of night we look like we’re police. Who else would be arriving here at ten p.m.?”

“These people are too respectable to try and fuck with the law.”

“They may be old-fashioned, but they’re not stupid. That boy had more than enough time to cycle over here and warn Johann Diesbach we were coming. Perhaps Diesbach has been expecting us.”

I got out of the car and walked across the snow-covered path to a dry rectangle on the driveway where a car or perhaps a small truck had been parked until a short while ago. On the ground a few meters away, next to an old light blue Wanderer on bricks, was a used Mahle oil filter of the kind that had functioned as a makeshift sound suppressor on the barrel of the Mannlicher carbine used to shoot Karl Flex. But it was the pink footsteps in the snow that interested me the most; they were the same pink footprints I’d seen outside the house of Udo Ambros. I picked up one of the boots from under the bench and inspected the lugged sole; it was the same pattern as the one I’d seen before. The sole was encrusted with tiny crystals of pink salt.

“There was a car parked here until it stopped snowing about an hour ago. I’ll bet my pension Diesbach isn’t here.”

“Someone’s in,” said Korsch, looking up. “I just saw someone at the window.”

“Look, when we’re inside, keep whoever’s there talking while I take a leak and have a snoop around.”

I knocked on the door and a window upstairs opened.

“We’re closed for the winter,” she said.

“We’re not looking for rooms.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Open the door and we’ll tell you.”

“I should think not. Look, what do you mean by knocking on someone’s door at this time of night? I’ve a good mind to report you both to the police.”

“We are the police,” said Korsch, and then grinned at me. He never tired of saying that kind of thing. “This is Commissar Gunther, and I’m Criminal Assistant Korsch.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“We’re looking for Johann Diesbach.”

“He’s not here.”

“Can you open the door please, missus? We need to ask you some questions. About your husband.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, ‘Where is he?’”

“I have no idea. Look, he went out this morning and he’s not come home yet.”

“Then we’ll come in and wait for him.”

“Couldn’t you come back here in the morning?”

“It won’t be my colleague and I who are back here in the morning. It will be the Gestapo.”

“The Gestapo? What would the Gestapo want from us?”

“The same thing they want from everyone. Answers. I just hope you have them, Frau Diesbach. They’re not as patient as us.”

The woman who switched on the hall light and answered the door was wearing a low-cut blouse, a red velvet waistcoat, and a white pinafore, and was carrying more in front than a busy waitress at Oktoberfest. She was very tall with short dark hair, dry thick lips, and a neck like Nefertiti’s Zulu cousin. Attractive, I suppose, in an Amazonian sort of way, as if Diana the huntress had possessed an older and more obviously lethal sister. Her green eyes flicked sharply across our faces but the hand at the side of her red cotton dress was trembling as if she was terrified of something; us, probably, but there was nothing in her voice that betrayed her fear: she spoke clearly and confidently.

“May I see some identification, please?”

I already had my beer token in my hand, which was right under her substantial breasts. Maybe that’s why she didn’t see it.

“Here.”

“That’s it? This little piece of metal?”

“That’s a warrant disc, lady,” I said, “and I don’t have the time.”

I pushed past the twin Gordian knots that were her bosom and went into the house.