Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

In the Schlossberg Caves, darkness enveloped me as if I’d been swallowed by a whale. For several black minutes I felt my breathless way along the rough quartz walls like a blind man on a cliff edge, as if my fingers were my eyes. Now and again I pressed the small of my back hard against the rock to punctuate my progress and tiny fragments of sand adhered to my palms and worked their way under my fingernails. Once or twice I even dropped to my knees, and with the toe of one shoe pressed against the wall, I reached out to check if I was still within a tunnel. It seemed that the one I was in was less than two meters in width because it could easily be touched without abandoning the thread of the labyrinthine wall I was using as my route. I didn’t care about my coat now. I was more afraid of falling than being covered in sand, or being shot. Mostly it was my nose that led me forward, because as I returned to my wall and stepped through the gently curving sable tunnels, the perfume of Johann Diesbach’s distinctively sweet pipe tobacco grew ever stronger. I could also smell Zander’s cigarette — my colleague’s favorite French cigarettes were very pungent — I could even smell the acrid sulfur of the match that had lit it — and I cursed myself roundly for not prohibiting him from smoking. If I could smell his tobacco inside the caves, then so might Johann Diesbach. For ten or fifteen minutes I moved through the void in this flat-footed, halting way, but when I reached the end of my wall I guessed the tunnel I was in had ended. Warning myself against impatience, I dropped onto my front once again and crawled forward, but this time I realized that I must now be in one of the so-called caves and, with no sense of its size, I knew I would have to risk taking a quick glimpse of approximately where I was in order to cross it, or else risk serious injury.

My police flashlight was the Siemens kind we’d used during the war, with a little adjustable metal cowl to conceal the electric bulb from an enemy sniper while you were reading a map at night; more often than not we’d only ever used these cowled flashlights to read a map with a thick greatcoat pulled over our heads. With all this in mind — I kept telling myself that Johann Diesbach was a former Jäger and a formidable adversary, and I certainly hadn’t forgotten the trench mace I’d found in his valise; a man who could pack a weapon like that next to his toothbrush was certainly to be feared — I got down on my knees and, with the flashlight half-buried in the sand, I switched it on for just a second in the hope I might get a better idea of my immediate surroundings. It was as well that I did: in the middle of a substantial cavern a steep stair led down to a lower level; another few steps in the dark and I’d have broken my neck. I left the light on just long enough to calculate the number of steps I’d need to reach the next tunnel and then switched it off again. A minute or two later, I’d negotiated my way across the sandy floor to the opposite wall. Gradually, I reached a second inner chamber and, on the other side of silence, a few stray sounds — a cough, a throat cleared, the scrape of a match, a sigh, lips drawing fiercely on a pipe stem — crept into my empty ears like crepuscular clues. Then, at the very edge of the darkness, black became a violet gray, and with eyes straining for something to see, the way my lungs would have needed oxygen, I saw the pale beginning of what might have been light. I took a few more tentative steps, and gradually the unfocused blur grew stronger, shifting like something that was almost alive until I perceived that it was the guttering, quiet flame of a very small candle. I lifted my gun to my face, thumbed back the hammer, slipped off the safety, and poked my head around the corner of the wall.

I saw his shoes first of all and my first thought was how big they were. The man had enormous feet. He’d taken the shoes off to allow them to dry. A green hat with a cock feather in the band lay alongside them and his loden coat was hanging on a nail in a roof prop. Diesbach himself was seated on the floor with his back to the wall, about ten or fifteen meters from where I was standing. The candle was only a few centimeters away from his stockinged foot. He was wearing a good wool suit, with plus fours I hadn’t noticed before; his arms were crossed, a briar pipe was in his mouth, and his eyes were closed. From time to time his mouth twitched to let out a puff of smoke, like a sleeping dragon. He seemed like a tougher-looking version of Adolf Hitler. The mustache wasn’t exactly uncommon in Germany; there were lots of men who wanted to look like the Leader. Some grew a Hitler mustache to make themselves more authoritative, and I’d even read in the newspaper about a man who’d claimed he was due a greater amount of respect just because he had a toothbrush mustache. Apart from the long-barreled Luger resting in his hand Diesbach appeared to be as relaxed as if he’d been on a day trip to Rügen Island and seemed very much at home in the cave, as if he’d just sat down after a good day mining salt.

I ought to have shot the bastard just for the mustache — and without warning, the way Diesbach had shot Udo Ambros and Karl Flex. Most other cops who still worked for the Murder Commission in 1939 would certainly have put a hole in him without a moment’s hesitation. And a hole would certainly have slowed him down long enough to get the cuffs on him. In those days, however, I still entertained the foolish notion that I was better than them, and that it was my duty to give the man a chance to give himself up. But in truth, while it was a shot I could easily have made in broad daylight, in the flickering light of a solitary candle, missing him looked only too possible; and if I missed him with one shot, I knew I might not get another. From my training at the Alex I knew that most criminals were shot by police at distances of less than three meters, and at that kind of range, you couldn’t get a better pistol than a Walther PPK. But at more than ten meters, it was hard to beat a long-barreled Parabellum Luger. In the hands of a Jäger, a long-barreled Luger had the edge on my PPK, with the stopping power of a castle door. Which made it more or less imperative that I should cross as much of the cave’s floor as possible before trying to arrest him. Even then I knew I’d be taking a considerable chance. No man with an Iron Cross First Class prefers an ignominious death on the guillotine at Plötzensee to dying with a gun in his hand and a good curse on his lips. While Diesbach’s eyes were closed, the one thing I had in my favor was the element of surprise; with a thick layer of sand under my feet I might easily halve the distance between us before letting him know I was aiming a gun at his beer hole. At which point he might be of a mind to give himself up. But even as I made my plan I was aware that he was too tough to quit without a fight; the muscles of his forearms bulged like ham hocks and he had a jaw that looked as if it had been cut in a quarry. Mining was probably less of a problem to a man like that than charming customers smoothly in expensive Munich restaurants. Maybe he just scared the chefs into buying his pink gourmet salt. Him and that damned toothbrush mustache.

Pointing my gun at the center of his chest I started across the cave. At fifteen meters my mouth was as dry as the sand on the ground; at fourteen meters, my heart was beating so loudly I thought he might hear it; at thirteen meters I was starting to grow in confidence; at twelve I was close enough to see the white scar on his chin; at ten I was getting ready to tell him to drop the gun and put up his hands; but at eight meters, he opened his eyes, met mine, and smiled as if he’d been expecting me.