Prussian Blue

FIVE

The train would not stop again until it reached Marseilles in a little over an hour’s time. I breathed a sigh of relief, almost. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it promised to be a perfect late October day. A few French families with children on half-term holidays were walking down to the beaches of Saint-Raphaël, careless, relaxed, laughing, in search of some autumn sun before the long winter, and I looked at them with envy, wishing for a life more ordinary and less interesting than mine. Nobody paid me any attention but just in time I remembered the gun under my waistband and pulled my already sweat-stained shirttail out of my trousers to hide it. Then I climbed a low wooden picket fence and crossed a piece of dry waste ground onto the Avenue Beauséjour. My heart was beating like a small animal’s and if the bar on the corner had been open I might have gone in and swallowed a large one just to keep a lid on my fear, which was growing by the minute. When I was standing right next to my car I uttered a deep, desperate sigh and stared into the bright, prickling atoms of existence and asked myself if there was any real point to what I was doing. When you go on the run you have to believe it’s worth it, but I really wasn’t sure about that. Not anymore. I was already tired. I had no real energy left for life, let alone escape. My neck still ached and my eyes were two acid burns on my face. I just wanted to go to sleep for a hundred years, like Friedrich Barbarossa deep inside his mountain lair at Obersalzberg. Nobody cared if I lived or died—not Elisabeth, and certainly not Anne French—so why was I even doing this? I had never felt more alone in my life.

I lit a cigarette and tried to smoke some sense into those suddenly feeble organs that were shrinking inside my chest.

“Come on, Gunther,” I said. “You’ve been in some tight spots before. All you have to do is get in that crappy French car and drive. Do you really want to give those Bolshevik swine the satisfaction of catching you now? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Where’s that Prussian backbone people are always on about? Only, you’d better hurry up. Because any minute now someone is going to go looking for you on that train and who knows what will happen when they find Gene Kelly reading the insides of his eyelids. So finish that cigarette, climb in that damn car, and get going before it’s too late. Because if they find you, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Hanging is going to sound like a picnic next to thallium poisoning.”

A few minutes later I was driving west along the Route Nationale, toward Avignon. I give a good pep talk even though I say so myself. It was now decided: I was going to survive if only to spite those communist bastards. I had a full tank of fuel and a Citroën that had recently been in the workshop—a four-hundred-franc grease-and-oil change—so I was confident it wouldn’t let me down, or as confident as you can be when it’s not a German car. In the trunk was some money, some warm clothes, another gun, and a few meager possessions from my flat in Villefranche. For a while I kept glancing seaward, where I now had the moving Blue Train in sight on my left, hoping that none of the Stasi were looking out of the compartment window. The road I was on ran parallel to the track. This gave me an anxious half an hour’s driving, but I had no choice about the route if I wanted to pick up the main highway north, along the Rhône. I didn’t really relax until I reached Le Cannet-des-Maures, where the rail track and the DN7 went in different directions, and it was there I finally lost sight of the train altogether. But despite the head start I’d made on my countrymen I didn’t fool myself that it would be beyond their abilities to find me again. Friedrich Korsch was smart, especially with a man like Erich Mielke driving him hard with the threat of what might happen to his wife and five-year-old daughter if he didn’t catch me. Like the Gestapo before them, the Stasi had been finding Germans who didn’t want to be found for almost a decade. That was what they were good at, perhaps the best in the world. The Mounties might have had a reputation for always getting their man but the Stasi always got the men and the women and the children, too, and when they got them they made them all suffer. There were thousands locked up in Berlin’s notorious Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen, not to mention several concentration camps once run by the SS. Almost certainly they would now proceed to fabricate some reason to force me out of France, whether I wanted to leave the country or not. I had a shrewd idea I might have seriously disabled Gene Kelly with the blackjack, in which case Korsch might finish the job, leaving me wanted for murder by the French police. So I knew I had to get out of France, and soon. Switzerland was more or less impossible to get into, of course, England and Holland were too far away, and Italy probably wasn’t quite far enough. I might have tried Spain but for the fact that it was a Fascist country and I’d had enough of fascism to last me a lifetime. Besides, I’d already more or less made up my mind where I was going even before I’d jumped off the train. Where else could I go but Germany? Where better for a German to hide than among millions of other Germans? Nazi war criminals had been doing it for years. Only a few thousand had ever bothered to escape to South America, or ever needed to. Every year they seemed to find some wanted man who’d reinvented himself in some shithole no-account town like Rostock or Kassel. Once I was across the French border I could find a small town in Germany and disappear for good. Not being anyone particularly important, that had to be a reasonable possibility. Once I was in West Germany, I might get by without either one of my passports. I’d stand a better chance there than almost anywhere. But I bitterly regretted telling Korsch how much I wanted to return home, even if it had been done to convince him we were friends again; he wasn’t stupid and almost certainly he would put himself in my shoes and arrive at the same conclusions I had.

Where else could Gunther go but the Federal Republic? If he stays in France the French police will find him for us and then, when he’s in custody in some small provincial town, we’ll poison him with thallium just like we’ll poison Anne French. There is only West Germany for Bernhard Gunther. He’s been chased out of almost everywhere else.

I put my foot down hard on the gas pedal in an attempt to gain some time because every minute was precious now. As soon as he was at the station in Marseilles, Friedrich Korsch would telephone Erich Mielke at the Hotel Ruhl in Nice and the comrade-general would mobilize every one of those Stasi agents working undercover in France and Germany to start looking for me all along the border. They had my picture, they had the registration number of my car, and they had the almost limitless resources of the Ministry of State Security, not to mention a capacity for ruthless efficiency that would have been the envy of Himmler or Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

Not that I was without resources myself; as a detective with the Berlin Kripo I’d learned a thing or two about evading the law. Any cop will tell you that being one is excellent training for how to be a fugitive. Which is exactly what I was. Until a few days ago I’d been nothing more than a steady source of simple information wearing a tail coat behind the concierge’s desk at the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat. I wondered what some of the guests would have thought if they’d seen me slugging a Stasi agent with a blackjack. The thought of what Gene’s friends might do if ever they caught up with me made me step harder on the accelerator and I sped north at a hundred kilometers an hour, until the memory of the sound of his thick skull receiving the hard blow began to fade a little. Perhaps he would live after all. Perhaps we both would.

I love driving, but France is a big country and its endless roads hold no pleasure for me. Driving is fine if you’re alongside Grace Kelly and in possession of a nice blue convertible Jaguar on a picturesque mountain road with a picnic basket in the trunk. But for most people, motoring in France is dull, and the only thing that stops it from being routine are the French, who are among the worst drivers in Europe. Not without some justification, we used to joke that there were more Frenchmen killed by bad motorists during the fall of France in the summer of 1940—as the French desperately tried to escape the German advance—than there were by the Wehrmacht. For this reason I tried to keep my mind on my driving but, in almost inverse proportion to the relentless monotony of the road ahead, my mind soon began to wander like a lost albatross. It’s said that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully and I’m sure that’s true; however, I’m here to report that the actual experience of being hanged, and the lack of oxygen that a noose tightening against the two carotid arteries occasions, affects a man’s thinking in all sorts of adverse ways. It had certainly affected mine. Perhaps that was Mielke’s intention: to make me more dumbly compliant. If so, it hadn’t worked. Dumb compliance was never my strong suit. My head was full of mist and clouded with what had been long forgotten, as if the present was now obfuscated by the past. But that wasn’t quite it, either. No, it was more like everything below my line of sight was shrouded in mist and, beyond the desire to return to Germany, I could not see where I had to go and what I had to do. It was as if I were the man in that picture by Caspar David Friedrich and I was a wanderer above a sea of fog—insignificant, deracinated, uncertain of the future, contemplating the futility of it all, and, perhaps, the possibility of self-destruction.

Old and once familiar faces reappeared in the far distance. Snatches of Wagnerian music echoed between half-glimpsed mountaintops. There were smells and fragments of conversation. Women I’d once known: Inge Lorenz and Hildegard Steininger, Gerdy Troost. My old partner Bruno Stahlecker. My mother. But, gradually, as I left the French Riviera behind and headed determinedly north toward West Germany, I started to recall in detail what I’d been prompted to remember by Korsch. It was all his fault—reminiscing like that, in what was obviously, in retrospect, an attempt to put me off my guard. He’d been a decent cop back then. We both were. I thought about the two cases we’d worked together after I’d been drafted back into Kripo on Heydrich’s orders. The second of these cases had been even stranger than the first and I was obliged to investigate just a few months before Hitler invaded Poland. Clearly, as if it were yesterday, I remembered a dark and wintry night in early April 1939, and being driven halfway across Germany in the general’s own Mercedes; I remembered Berchtesgaden, and Obersalzberg, and the Berghof, and the Kehlstein; I remembered Martin Bormann and Gerdy Troost and Karl Brandt and Hermann Kaspel and Karl Flex; and I remembered the Schlossberg Caves and Prussian blue. But most of all I remembered being almost twenty years younger and possessed of a sense of decency and honor I now found almost quaint. For a while back there, I think I sincerely believed I was the only honest man I knew.