Prussian Blue

SIXTY-TWO

I stood outside the Karlsberg Brewery frowning and shaking my gray head in wonder as I stared up at the big blue company logo on the dirty stucco wall: a man in a leather apron shifting a beer barrel inside a blue star of David, dated 1878. On the face of it, nothing in Homburg had changed very much; nothing except me, and the surprising thing was I felt surprised by this. It seemed almost impossible that seventeen years had passed since I’d last been there and yet none of those years had had any effect on Homburg itself. It still looked like a small and very boring town in Germany and I hadn’t missed the place more than I’d missed a lost sock. But time lost was something else; that was gone forever. And this brought me up short, as if I’d just driven an express train straight into the buffers of my own past. For everyone, the future arrives at a thousand miles an hour but for a moment I took that personally as if this was some kind of hilarious game the Chancellor of Heaven had chosen to play with me, and only with me. Like I was nothing more than five dice in a game of Yahtzee. I’d always thought there was plenty of time to do a lot of things and yet, now I really thought about it, there had been not a moment to spare. Perhaps that was why people chose to live in a dump like Homburg in the first place: the pace of life just seems slower in a town like that, and maybe that’s the secret of a long life, to live in a place where nothing ever happens. Then something did happen; it started to rain heavily.

Of course I knew where I was going to be spending the night as soon as the police moto rider dropped me in front of the gates of the brewery. I suppose that was written on my heart in fiery letters. There was a hotel nearby and with franks in my pocket I tormented myself for a long moment by staring at it wistfully and thinking fondly about a bath, some hot food, and a bed, but I’d already decided against it. I needed to fly below the radar now, to be someone I’d never considered being before: a man without a future. The Stasi were depending on me acting as if I believed the opposite. Besides, I was hardly dressed for respectable company; any hotel manager or desk clerk seeing me would have put in a call to the local police just to be on the safe side. Playing the part of a tramp, I’d have given Charlie Chaplin a run for his money. There was a hole in my shoe to match the one in my trouser leg, my face looked like a magnet for iron filings, and the shirt on my back felt like a butter wrapper. So I trudged up the hill, to the top of Schlossberg-Höhenstrasse, admired the view for about two seconds, and made my way through thick vegetation along the same narrow hillside path I half-remembered, until I reached the entrance to the Schlossberg Caves. These were closed for the winter, and a heavy iron door that hadn’t been there before blocked the way inside. According to a sign on the wall, the caves were now a tourist attraction, although it was hard to imagine anyone coming all this way to see not very much; it wasn’t like the caves were home to some fascinating paleolithic paintings of ancient man and his favorite pastimes, or a series of spectacular geological formations; these weren’t even proper caves, just old quartz mines, worked out years ago and then abandoned. With the rain becoming heavier and now dripping down the back of my neck, abandonment felt like a familiar story in that part of the world. I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

Inside the caves, the ground was as soft and dry under my feet as if I’d been walking along the sands at Strandbad Wannsee in early summer. With my Ronson extended in front of me like a grave robber’s lamp, I made my way to one of the larger chambers, where I found an electric light switch and flicked it on. The illumination this provided was small, meant only to be atmospheric, and that suited me fine; the last thing I wanted was to advertise my presence there. The concave vaulted ceiling was the shape of the whorl on my very dirty thumb and presented a variety of colors, mostly beige and red, but also a few blues and greens, although this might have had more to do with what the quartz did to the light, which played as many strange tricks as the immortal Chancellor himself. It was like being inside a large ant colony somewhere in the irradiated depths of New Mexico, with tunnels extending in all directions, and I half-expected a mutated giant insect to come and bite my head off. It certainly didn’t feel anything like Germany. Then again, I’d seen some really bad movies since moving to France. For a while I explored the various levels—only one or two of which had electric light—and gradually figured out how the mine workings had been constructed; in some of the tunnels you could still see traces of the old tracks that had been used to transport wagons full of sand out of the caves. Everything was quiet, like a stopped clock wrapped in several layers of cotton wool, as if time itself was finally on hold. Perhaps because I desperately wanted it to be that way.

I took off my sodden jacket and hung it on the light switch in the main cavern, hoping it might dry. I also fetched the money from my coat pocket and laid it on the sand to dry. Then I sat down with my gun by my side, leaned against the rough-hewn wall, and lit a cigarette. I might have lit a fire except that I knew there was nothing outside that looked dry enough to burn. Besides, out of the wind and the rain, it was reasonably warm in the caves—warm enough to relax a little, draw a breath, and reflect on how far I’d come since leaving Cap Ferrat.

I opened the bottle of red, drank a third of it in one gulp, and ate some of the chocolate. For a while after that I wondered if I should smoke another cigarette and decided against it; making my tobacco supplies last a while seemed like a better idea. Perhaps I would smoke one after a nap. I tried to imagine what life had been like for the hundreds of quartz miners who were now my invisible companions. But instead I set myself the easier task of remembering just what had happened in those caves before the war some seventeen years ago, with Johann Diesbach and Wilhelm Zander. To think I’d risked my life to arrest that man. And as if any of it had ever mattered. Germany’s invasion of Poland had been just five months away. Instead of working as a police commissar in a country where the law had ceased to matter very much, I should have been on the first train west, to France and safety. French Lorraine had been so very close to Homburg. As a senior policeman with plenipotentiary powers I could easily have bluffed my way across the border. Instead, I’d been playing the kind of hero that no one really wanted. What a fool I’d been.

I glanced around my new apartment and wondered what I could buy to make the place seem a little more congenial. That was how we made things better in the trenches: a few books from Amelang, some furniture from Gebrüder Bauer, a bit of expensive table linen from F. V. Grünfeld, a couple of silk rugs from Herrmann Gerson, and maybe several carefully selected paintings from Arthur Dahlheim on Potsdamerstrasse. All the comforts of home. Mostly we pinned a few photographs to the rough planks that were our walls: girlfriends, mothers, film stars. Just as often we didn’t know who the photographs were of, since the men who’d put them there were long dead, but it never felt right to take them down. I opened my damp wallet and looked for a picture of Elisabeth I’d kept but somewhere along the way I must have lost it, which grieved me a little. And after a while all I could do was sit back and screen the movie from 1939 on the wall of the cave. I watched myself—in black-and-white, of course—like Orson Welles in The Third Man, gun in hand, flashlight at the ready, moving slowly through the tunnels in search of Johann Diesbach, one rat looking for another. Could rats see in the dark? As a boy I’d visited the Museum of Natural History in Berlin’s Invalidenstrasse on many occasions and I remembered being horrified at some pictures of a naked mole rat; I thought it was probably one of the most unpleasant-looking animals I’d ever seen. Which was what I felt like now. A kind of deracinated, unloved rat who’d lost all his fur. Not to mention the only photograph of my wife.

I thought I might hole up in the Schlossberg Caves for a couple of days before making for the new German border, which was only a short way east of Homburg. Once I was properly in West Germany, I could hitch a ride to Dortmund or Paderborn, and buy myself another identity the way someone else might have bought a new hat. Lots of people had done that after 1945. Including me. It wasn’t difficult to get a new name; besides, those new names were real enough, it was just some of the Germans who used them who were false.

I suppose I must have fallen asleep but I don’t know for how long. When I awoke with a start it was because I was certain I was not alone, and this was mainly because the silencer on a Russian-made PM automatic was pointed squarely at my face.