Prussian Blue

SIXTY

Not for one moment did I think Johann Diesbach had walked out of the bookshop and then simply ducked into his estranged sister’s doorway—that would have been a hell of a gamble—but I couldn’t risk the possibility he hadn’t done exactly that. What seemed more probable was that my earlier suspicion had been correct, and that Diesbach’s sister had been warned we were coming, and that Johann had been on his way out the door when he’d seen Zander and me walking across Markt Platz and had decided to hide in the bookshop; he couldn’t ever have thought we’d step in there before going up to Paula Berge’s apartment. For him to return to the very same address we had been heading for would have been foolhardy. Still I had high hopes of finding him abroad on Homburg’s empty streets and I ran one way and then the other, like a windup Schuco toy—a short way down Klosterstrasse, then along Karlsbergstrasse, and finally north, up Eisenbahnstrasse, toward the railway station. I’d already seen the blonde climb into a green Opel Admiral driven by a man wearing the smart uniform of a naval captain lieutenant, but of Johann Diesbach there was no trace. He’d disappeared.

Nor did I find any sign of a local policeman on patrol. Of course Homburg would never be the kind of place where there were cops hanging around the street corners. It wasn’t just life that happened somewhere else than Homburg; crime did as well. It had started to rain again, hard Saarland rain that was full of coal dust and the exhausting truth of ordinary German life. Any sensible Orpo man would have been wrapped up in his waterproof police cape and standing in a quiet doorway with his hands cupped around a quiet smoke, or holed up in the nearest café waiting for the rain to stop. It’s certainly what I would have done. A cigarette in a doorway is usually as near to luxury as any half-frozen, uniformed cop on duty is ever likely to come.

Two-thirds of the way up Eisenbahnstrasse I found the local police station and, flashing my beer token, explained that I was on the trail of a dangerous police killer by the name of Johann Diesbach, and added a reasonable description of the man I’d seen in the bookshop at Markt Platz.

“This is a matter of the highest priority,” I added self-importantly. “I’m acting on the direct orders of the government leader’s office. The man is armed and dangerous.”

“Right you are, sir.” The sergeant had muttonchop whiskers down to his shoulders and a mustache that was as big as the wingspan of the Prussian imperial eagle. “What do you want me to do?”

“Send a couple of your best men to the railway station to keep an eye out for him. And the local bus station, if you have one. I’ll be back here in half an hour to take charge of the search.”

Then, ignoring the rain, or at least trying to, I walked back to where I’d left Wilhelm Zander. My shoes were already soaked and my feet were cold; my hat looked more like a lump of clay on a potter’s wheel. Very sensibly, Zander was standing deep in the doorway of the building with one hand inside his greatcoat pocket and I guessed he was holding a gun. The valise was safely between his heels. He threw away the cigarette he’d been smoking and almost came to attention.

“No one has been in or out of this building since I’ve been standing here,” he said.

“I’ve sent a couple of coppers to keep an eye on the local railway station. So, hopefully, he won’t get far. And anyone lurking in a doorway like you are is bound to stand out in this place.”

I squeezed into the doorway beside him, opened the case, and searched quickly through Diesbach’s belongings: I found some clean clothes, a bit of French money, a French Baedeker, a pair of shoes, a Saarland newspaper with a number and an initial penciled on the front page, a picture of a naked woman I didn’t recognize, a traveling chess set, a tin of Wybert throat lozenges, a razor, a leather strop and some soap, a toothbrush and a tube of Nivea toothpaste, a box of Camelia, some pistol ammunition, and a spiked object that looked as if it had come from a medieval armory.

“What the hell is that?” asked Zander.

“It’s a trench mace. We used that sort of thing when we were raiding enemy trenches at night. It was a very effective way of killing Tommies quietly. And the old ways are the best.”

Zander blinked uncomfortably. “Who’s the woman in the photograph? His wife, I suppose.”

I smiled. “No. I think that’s probably his girlfriend, Pony. Lives in Munich.”

“And the Camelia—the sanitary towels? Is she with him?”

“No.”

“His sister’s?”

“I expect he borrowed them from her.”

“Why on earth—?”

“When you’re on the run, your shoes get wet. I know mine are.” I showed him the spare pair of shoes in the valise and how Diesbach had tucked a towel inside each like an insole, to help dry it. “It’s an old soldier’s trick. Helps keep your feet dry. Which is especially useful on a day like this. A Camelia is much more absorbent than newspaper.” I closed the valise, turned in the doorway, and rang the doorbell but if Paula Berge was at home she was sensibly not answering.

“Kick it down,” said Zander.

“I don’t think so. Besides, what would be the point? We already know he was here. The street and apartment number are penciled on the front of this newspaper. But she’s going to deny he was ever with her, of course. And in the time we waste persuading Paula Berge to talk I think we could usefully return to the local police station and detail some more police to start searching the rest of this town. That’s what I’ve told the duty sergeant.”

We climbed into the car—Zander joined me in the front seat this time—and I drove to the police station on Eisenbahnstrasse, where I now ordered the desk sergeant to deploy his entire force; but this turned out to be just three more men because—including the two at the railway station—there were only five men on duty in the whole of Homburg, and they moved at an unhurried sort of pace that only the police in small towns can achieve. What was almost as bad, they seemed to regard the very idea of a police search as some kind of jolly game and were full of chatter and jokes and eager to arrest a cop killer. I told them to pay particular attention to buses traveling west, toward Saarbrücken and the border with French Lorraine, but it was like setting a donkey to catch a hare and a poor start to a Homburg manhunt.

“I don’t give much for their chances of finding so much as a broken umbrella,” I said as I returned to the car with Zander. “Those are the doziest cops I’ve seen outside a Mack Sennett movie.”

“They didn’t impress me, either,” admitted Zander. “I think we’d better keep looking for him, don’t you?”

We drove northeast to the railway station to check that our man was not yet arrested—he wasn’t—and then motored around Homburg in the driving rain for a while, searching the deserted streets for Johann Diesbach. Homburg made Saarbrücken look like Paris. We saw only one other pedestrian who looked like it might be him; it turned out to be a woman.

“How can a man disappear like that?” complained Zander. “The bars aren’t even open yet.”

“Happens all the time in Germany,” I said. “You might even say it’s common. Only police like me don’t normally go looking for them. The ones who disappear. Not least because everyone knows where they really are.”

“And where’s that?”

“A KZ. Or worse.”

“Oh. I see. Then perhaps he knows someone else here in Homburg. A friend of his sister, perhaps. That man you saw at the Karlsberg Brewery. Perhaps he’s hiding him. And there are plenty of places you can hide in a brewery.”

“Yes, that’s possible, I suppose.”

I pulled up in front of a coffeehouse.

“Stay here,” I said.

I ran in, checked the lavatories, and came out again.

“Not in there, either.”

I turned the car around and once again started to drive in the direction of the brewery.

“Where are we going now?”

“The brewery.”

Zander nodded. “I was thinking. When we were in Bormann’s car, you said this man was a Jäger, trained in Hutier tactics. What are Hutier tactics?”

“Hutier tactics? You might almost call it common sense. Instead of ordering the kind of attack in which thousands of soldiers would walk across no-man’s-land, Hutier trained up special storm battalions of light infantrymen, small groups of men who were specialists in carrying out surprise infiltration attacks. It might have worked, too, if someone had thought to do this a bit earlier than March 1918.”

“So he knows what he’s doing.”

“When it comes to looking after himself? I should say so. Or maybe you’ve forgotten that trench mace in his valise.”

“Yes. I do see what you mean.”

“Look, what else can you remember about this awful place?” I asked. “Besides what happened here in 1793.”

“Most of the furniture that was saved from the old château went to Berchtesgaden Castle.”

“Something that might help,” I said acidly.

“It’s so long ago.”

“What brought you here, anyway? From Saarbrücken.”

“My brother, Hartmut, and I had a very religious childhood. He’s now in Berlin, working for the Gestapo. Most people around these parts are Roman Catholics but my parents were strict Lutherans and on Sunday Hartmut and I went to Sunday school. Most of the time that was as bad as it sounds. But once a year the church used to organize a summer picnic and it was nearly always here in Homburg, in the old gardens of Karlsberg Castle. Which for a small boy was quite exciting, as you can imagine. There were lots of games and sports. But—” He shrugged. “I was never very good at those. Mostly Hartmut and I used to go off with a couple of friends and explore the castle ruins.”

Zander lit us a couple of the French cigarettes he favored, and I waited patiently while he took us on a short walk down memory lane.

“Now I come to think of it,” he said finally, “there is somewhere, perhaps. Somewhere I’d hide if it was me on the run in Homburg. Of course, you’d have to be pretty desperate.”

“You mean like Johann Diesbach.”

“Er, yes. Well, underneath the castle ruins are the Schlossberg Caves. When I was a boy we used to go in there a lot. I think everyone in Homburg knows about the Schlossberg Caves. Strictly speaking, they’re not caves at all, but man-made quartz mines; the sand, you see—it was highly prized and especially useful for cleaning and grinding glass. And with at least five kilometers of passageways on at least nine levels a man could evade capture indefinitely. That’s one of the reasons I’m fond of Tom Sawyer. Because McDougal’s cave in Twain’s book always reminds me of the Schlossberg Caves, here in Homburg.” He shrugged. “Of course, it was not everyone’s cup of tea. And in truth I never liked actually going into the caves much myself. Not as much as Hartmut. Although I had to, of course, for reasons of youthful bravado. I suffer from claustrophobia, you see. I hate being in an enclosed space. Especially one that’s underground. I used to read Mark Twain’s book as a way of confronting my phobia. After being lost in McDougal’s cave for several days Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher find their way out again, you see?”

“That’s not likely to be a problem for a man like Diesbach who owns a salt mine and who’s spent half of his life underground.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“And quite a bit before that, when he was in the army, of course. I’m probably half troll myself after four years in the trenches.”

“He’d probably be quite at home in there. It’s warm and dry, and I think you’d be reasonably comfortable on the sandy floor.”

“Where are these Schlossberg Caves?”

“Farther up the same hill as the brewery.”

“Then that’s where we’re going first. And if we don’t find him in the caves, we’ll take a look in the brewery, as you suggested. Maybe they’ve got a beer barrel as big as the Heidelberg Tun and we’ll find him hiding inside it.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to go in the caves with you,” Zander said nervously. “I told you before. I suffer from claustrophobia. Besides, it’s like a rabbit warren in there, with multiple ways in and out.”

I said nothing.

“Shouldn’t we go and fetch some of those uniformed policemen to help us?”

“I want to catch the rabbit. Not scare him away.”

“With one important difference surely,” said Zander. “This particular rabbit is by your own admission armed and extremely dangerous.”