Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

Friedrich Korsch dropped me back at the Villa Bechstein, because he was still forbidden to be in the Leader’s Territory, and I walked up the hill, past the Berghof, and the Türken Inn where Johann Brandner now sat freezing in a prison cell, to Martin Bormann’s hilltop house. Halfway there, I removed the tie from under my jaw; I needed to be taken seriously if I was going to save Brandner’s life. It was well past midnight and I was relieved but not very surprised to see that a few lights were still burning behind the government leader’s neat window boxes; Bormann had long ago adopted the habits of his near-nocturnal master and rarely went to bed before three in the morning, or so Hermann Kaspel had told me. But as I arrived at the house, I found a car waiting there with the straight-eight engine running and Bormann, plus several of his aides, coming out the front door. The top had been folded down and the back of the car was almost as tall as I was. Bormann was dressed in a fine black leather coat, a white shirt, a blue tie with white polka dots, and a misshapen brown felt hat. Seeing me, he waved me forward and then almost immediately held up his hand to stay my progress.

“Whoa, that’s far enough. You look like you have the mumps.” Clearly he’d forgotten about my suspect broken jaw and before I could explain, he added, “There are six children in this house, Gunther, so if you do have the mumps, you can fuck off now.”

“It’s not the mumps, sir. I slipped on the ice and fell flat on my face.”

“Not the first time that’s happened, I’ll be bound. You know what’s good for a swelling like that? Wrap a string of pork sausages around your neck, like a scarf. Takes the heat out. And also makes quite a conversation piece. Although you’d best not wear that around the Leader. He’s a vegetarian and is liable to have anyone wearing a scarf made from a string of sausages shot. Or committed to a mental asylum. Which amounts to the same thing these days.” He laughed cruelly, as if this might actually be true.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked, changing the subject. “Back to Berlin perhaps?” Just saying that was enough to make me feel homesick.

“I’m going up the Kehlstein, to the tea house. Ride with me and, on the way there, you can tell me what else you’ve discovered about Karl Flex’s murder. I assume you wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t have something important to tell me. I certainly hope so.” But then he shivered inside his coat, rubbed his hands furiously, and waved imperiously at the car. “I’ve changed my mind about the top, boys. I think we’ll have it up after all.” He looked at me and, a little to my surprise, explained himself. “I’ve been stuck inside all day in meetings and I thought I wanted some fresh air, but now I realize it’s much colder than I thought.”

I climbed into the back of the big 770K while Wilhelm Zander and Gotthard Farber — yet another of Bormann’s aides I hadn’t met before — set about lifting the hood. Meanwhile, I sat alongside Bormann and waited for him to tell me to speak. Instead, he lit a cigarette with a large gold ingot that doubled as a gaslighter and started to talk like a man who talked all the time and assumed that someone was always listening; but it was to me that most of this talk was directed now, and for that reason listening closely seemed only judicious.

“The Leader is a man of sudden fancies,” he said. “He often likes to do things on the spur of the moment. And since it’s very possible that he will decide to visit his new tea house at any time of the day and night, especially in the beginning, it’s imperative that I gauge the complete readiness of the Kehlstein staff and the building itself. A test flight, so to speak. Hence this visit. To satisfy myself that everything will meet his exacting standard.”

He glanced around impatiently as Zander and Farber struggled with the hood, which was obviously very heavy. It didn’t help that Farber was only three cheeses high, which wasn’t quite high enough to lift the hood all the way up on its steel frame.

“Hurry up, we haven’t got all night. What’s taking so long? Anyone would think I’d asked you to put up the big top in a fucking circus. This is a Mercedes limousine, not some Jew’s jalopy.”

It took both his aides several minutes to secure the hood and by the time they climbed into the seat in front and we were ready to leave, they were severely out of breath, which would have made me smile if I hadn’t been seated alongside the ersatz tyrant. My own breathing wasn’t exactly easy. But at last the driver shifted the bus-sized gear lever, turned the huge steering wheel, and the giant enterprise of gleaming chrome and polished black enamel set off up the mountain road.

“The last time I went up there, Gunther, the cakes and the strudel were not quite to his taste. It’s true he hasn’t yet been to the tea house, but I know him well enough to say that there was too much fruit in the strudels and not enough cream in the cakes. And the tea they were serving was English tea, which Hitler despises. It certainly wasn’t Hälssen & Lyon’s decaffeinated tea. Hamburg tea. That’s what he calls it. And that’s the only one he’ll drink. Of course, no one else but me would have noticed this. In many ways Hitler is a very austere, unworldly person with no real interest in his own comfort. Which is why I have to take care of these matters for him. I don’t mind telling you, that’s quite a responsibility. I have to think of everything. And he’s grateful for it, too. You might find this hard to believe but Hitler really doesn’t like telling people what to do. He much prefers people to work toward what he thinks.”

Bormann’s lungs took a long tug on his cigarette and exhaled a generous mixture of smoke and alcohol, self-importance and hubris. Doubtless he was taking advantage of the Leader’s absence to indulge his own vices. But as he talked I began to realize that he was drunk, and not just with power. From the smell of his breath, which now filled the backseat of the car like a smoke grenade, I guessed he’d consumed several brandies. I thought about lighting one myself and immediately rejected the idea. Bormann wasn’t the kind of man with whom one could behave normally: him smoking a cigarette in an enclosed space was one thing; someone else doing it was probably a crime in the workplace and punishable with an improbably large fine.

“When I was last there I also noticed a slight problem with the Kehlstein’s heating system,” he said. “So now I have to make sure that the temperature up there is just right for a man who prefers the dark and doesn’t like the sun very much. Not too hot and not too cold. You may have noticed that things are a little cool down at the Berghof. Did you? Yes, I thought so. That’s because Hitler doesn’t feel temperatures like ordinary men such as you or I, Gunther. Perhaps it’s because he never takes his jacket off. Perhaps it’s a legacy of his time in Landsberg Prison. I’m not sure, but that’s my litmus test. The comfort of a man wearing a woolen jacket at all times.”

I decided not to distract Bormann by asking him about anything really trivial, such as the possibility of a German invasion of Poland that might spark off a second European war, and continued to await his pleasure. But after several minutes of talk about tea and cake and the correct room temperatures at the Kehlstein, I was becoming impatient of being seat meat and was on the point of broaching the subject of Johann Brandner’s innocence, when suddenly Bormann yelled at the driver to stop. For a moment I thought we’d run someone over except that Bormann would hardly have stopped for that. We’d just passed a group of construction workers standing under a forest of floodlights by the side of the road and Bormann seemed infuriated by something they’d done, or, as it happened, not done.