Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“BMW,” I said as coolly as I could, given that I’d not long since strangled a man to death. Would Korsch and his men have found the body of the Stasi man in shorts yet? Perhaps. But I’d hidden him quite carefully. “Best motorcycle in the world.”

“You German?”

“Berlin, born and bred.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

“Tell me about it. Only that isn’t going to change anytime soon. My home’s in the east now. In the GDR. Behind the Iron Curtain. And so’s my old job. At the Alex. I doubt I’ll ever see either one of those again.”

“You were a cop?”

Every cop in Germany had heard of Berlin’s Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz. Saying you were from the Alex was like telling an English cop you were from Scotland Yard. In all the previous descriptions of me I’d read in the newspapers, my past as a policeman was something the Stasi had left out of my résumé. Chasing cops never played well with other cops, even French ones. It gives them an itch.

“Twenty-five years in the uniform, give or take. When the war ended I was a sergeant in the Order Police. By rights I should have had a nice fat pension to go with my nice fat wife. But I had to settle for getting away with my life.”

“Had it rough?”

“No worse than most people. When the Ivans showed up in Berlin, cops like me were less than popular, as you can imagine. Unlike my wife, if you receive my meaning. For a while there she was very much in demand.”

“You mean?”

“I do mean. Twenty or thirty of the red bastards. One after the other. Like they were using her for bayonet practice. I was somewhere else at the time. Cowering in a shell hole, probably. Anyway, she never got over it. Nor did I, if it comes to that. Anyway, since I tossed away my beer token I’ve just drifted from one job to the next.”

“What kind of work?”

“Odd jobs. The kind of not-very-talkative jobs an ex-cop can do in his sleep. Which was just as well, as I usually was.”

“What’s your name?”

“Korsch. Friedrich Korsch.”

“Where are you coming from now, Friedrich?”

“Brussels. My wife, Inge, was Belgian, you see. I was working at the Royal Museum and then as a guard on the trains — the Étoile du Nord — until I hit a bit of rough luck.”

“What kind of rough luck?”

I brandished my bottle of wine. “The liquid kind. Hence, the captain of industry you see before you now.”

“Where are you headed?”

I was looking at the road sign when I answered and I ought to have known better than to trust the inspiration that the gods provided for me at that particular moment. The only reason the gods get away with their own mistakes is by tricking us into committing mistakes of our own.

“Homburg. Thought I might look for a job at the Karlsberg Brewery.” I grinned. “Just joking. My sister, Dora, works at the local brewery, so I thought I’d ask for her there. Figure I can probably get there sometime tomorrow. What is it? Thirty kilometers from here?”

“You fit a lot of descriptions,” he said.

“Not all of them, surely. There must be a couple of missing dogs and cats who don’t look like me.”

The moto rider smiled. Making a traffic cop smile is no mean feat. I know. I used to wave cars around Potsdamer Platz. Breathing all that lead makes you grumpy. Which probably explains Berliners.

“Anyway, at the Alex we used to say that most police descriptions can fit absolutely anyone unless they’re descriptions of the kind of people you could only see at a circus or a freak show.”

“That’s true.”

“I’m not sure which one of those categories I fall into, myself. The latter, more than likely.”

He was still smiling and by now I knew I was more or less safe, at least for the time being; any minute he was going to tell me to be on my way, but I certainly didn’t expect him to offer me a ride.

“Hop on,” he said. “I’ll take you to Homburg. My hometown, as a matter of fact.”

“That’s very kind of you. Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble. Besides, I don’t smell so good right now. It’s been a day or two since I had a good wash. Or a decent manicure.”

“I was in the Panzer Corps,” said the moto rider. “Tenth Panzer Grenadiers. Believe me, nothing could smell worse than five men living inside an F2 for a whole summer. Besides, on a bike you’ll always be downwind of me.”

I climbed onto the passenger seat and found it surprisingly comfortable. Minutes later we were speeding east along the road toward Kaiserlautern, and I was congratulating myself on the dexterity of my abilities as a liar. Lying effectively is a bit like one of those cards for a stereoscope: the card is two separate pictures, side by side, which only works if you end up seeing one clear central image, which perforce is an illusion, and is the picture of depth and clarity that you are meant to see, instead of what is actually there. It’s the result of the left eye not knowing what the right is doing; the brain fills in the gap, which is a good way of understanding all kinds of deception. But the most important thing about lying to a cop is not to hesitate; he who hesitates gets arrested. And if all else fails, you punch the cop in the mouth and run for it.

It was nice to see the world go by from the back of the motorcycle, even if that world was the Saarland. A tractor towing a barge laden with coal along the canal; a cart hauled by a couple of heifers, which was followed by two women who were almost as sturdily bovine as their two beasts; a large family of Sinti camped colorfully in a field; an advertising hoarding from the previous October referendum still covered with posters advocating saying NO FOR GERMANY and others that read ONLY TRAITORS TO EUROPE SAY NO, SO SAY YES; a man on a street corner having his horse reshod by a farrier while a small boy held the animal’s head steady; a huge German army bunker in a field that looked as though it had been broken in two by an earthquake; a white house dwarfed by a pile of black coal as high as a mountain. Life looked simple, basic, dull, commonplace, the way it always was for most people; I, for whom the path to heroism was now impossibly overgrown, who had lost any sense of enchantment with the world, would have given a lot for a life as ordinary as that.

Homburg was made up of nine villages, not that you’d notice; it’s the kind of town that history forgot on its way to somewhere more interesting, which is nearly anywhere. Most people confuse it with the Bad Homburg that’s north of Frankfurt, which is probably just wishful thinking. There’s a ruined castle on top of a hill and an abbey and the tire factory and the Karlsberg Brewery, of course — you can smell that all over the town — but the most interesting thing to do in Homburg is leave.

The moto rider dropped me near the brewery gate. Established in 1878, Karlsberg is one of the largest breweries in Germany and certainly looks like it. I’m not sure what they did about the big star of David on the cream-colored concrete wall and on the bottle label back in the day when the Nazis were in power. This was blue and not yellow so maybe they just left it alone.

“Here we are.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention it. And good luck to you, Friedrich. I hope you find your sister. What was her name again?”

I smiled at this copper’s trick. He was making sure my story was consistent.

“Dora. Dora Brandt.”

It was odd how I’d fetched up in Homburg, and this begged all sorts of important and very German questions about fate. I’m not sure Nietzsche would have recognized in my being in Homburg again his concept of eternal recurrence, but sometimes it did seem as if the details of my life were destined to be repeated, over and over, for all eternity. Goethe might have said that I had an elective affinity for trouble, that I was chemically marked out for it. Either that or I was just doomed to wander the face of the earth, like Odin, seeking some kind of knowledge that might aid my own futile, twilight bid for immortality. Then again, maybe it was just the ancestral gods punishing my hubris for imagining that I had got away with murder, much as they usually did themselves. I might have stopped believing in God but I still needed the gods, if only to explain things to myself. You see, I’d been in Homburg before.