Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“I think I get the picture. You want some dirt on him, too. If there is any.”

“There is,” said Heydrich. “There most certainly is.”

“Kaltenbrunner has a wife,” explained Nebe. “Elisabeth.”

“That doesn’t sound so dirty.”

“He also enjoys the favors of two aristocratic Upper Austrian women.”

“Ah.”

“One of them is the Countess Gisela von Westarp,” said Heydrich. “It’s uncertain if any of their liaisons take place at the house in Berchtesgaden but if they do it’s certain the Leader would take a very dim view of this. Which is why I want to know about it. Hitler places great store on family values and on the personal morality of senior Party men. Find out if this Gisela von Westarp is ever at the house in Berchtesgaden. Also if any other women go there. Their names. It shouldn’t be beyond your powers of investigation. That’s how you used to make a living, isn’t it? As a private detective, one of those shabby little men who snoop around hotel corridors and peer through keyholes looking for evidence of adultery.”

“In retrospect it doesn’t seem so shabby,” I said. “As a matter of fact I used to quite enjoy snooping around hotel corridors. Especially the good hotels, like the Adlon, where there are thick carpets. It’s easier on the feet than goose-stepping across a parade ground. And there’s always a bar close at hand.”

“Then this should be easy for you. And now you may go.”

I grinned and got to my feet.

“Something amusing you?” asked Heydrich.

“It was only something Goethe once said. That everything is hard before it’s easy.” I got up and walked to the door but not before nodding Paul Werner’s way. “I might not have a doctorate. A real one. But I do read, Paul. I do read.”

It was 750 kilometers from Berlin to Berchtesgaden, but in the rear seat of Heydrich’s own car — a shiny black Mercedes 770K — with an SS-monogrammed cashmere rug across my knees, I hardly noticed either the distance or the cold. The car was as big as a U-boat and almost as powerful. The eight-cylinder supercharged engine throbbed like rush hour at Potsdamer Platz and even with snow on the autobahn the Mercedes just rolled up the road; it felt as if I were riding into the afterlife Hall of the Slain with a chorus line of Valkyries, only in rather finer style. I’m not sure that Mercedes has ever made a better automobile. Certainly never one as big or as comfortable. A couple of hours in that limousine and I was ready to take charge of Germany myself. In the front seat, behind the enormous steering wheel, sat Heydrich’s Easter Island statue of a driver, and next to him Friedrich Korsch, my criminal assistant from the Alex. Alongside me in the back of the car was Hans-Hendrik Neumann, Heydrich’s pointy-faced adjutant. The rear seats were more like a pair of leather armchairs in the Herrenklub and during some of the journey, I dozed off. We made Schkeuditz, just west of Leipzig, in under two hours — which seemed remarkable to me — and Bayreuth in less than four, but with darkness falling and more than four hundred kilometers still to go, we were obliged to stop and refuel in Pegnitz, north of Nuremberg. Filling the tanks of KMS Bismarck would have been quicker and cheaper...

I could have used a big, powerful car like the Mercedes 770K on my escape through France. Certainly I could have used a nap. The Citroën was an 11 CV Traction Avant — which is French for an underpowered front-wheel-drive rust bucket; the eleven probably referred to the amount of horsepower the thing had. It was uncomfortable and slow and, driving it, I needed all my wits about me. After six hours behind the wheel I was exhausted; my neck and eyes hurt and I had a head that ached worse than Ptolemy’s botched craniotomy. I wasn’t any farther north than Mâcon but I knew I was going to have to stop and take a rest, and thinking it might be better if I stayed under the radar, avoiding all hotels and even pensions, I pulled into a jolly-looking camping site. There are two million campers in France, a large proportion of whom are motorists. I had neither a tent nor a caravan but this hardly seemed to matter since I was planning to sleep in the car and, in the morning, to use the showers and cafeteria in that order. What I wouldn’t have given for a hot bath and a dinner at the Hotel Ruhl. But when I offered the individual in the site office — a man with hooded eyes and a perfumer’s fastidious nose — the fifty-francs charge for the space he asked to see my camping license and I was reluctantly obliged to confess that I was unaware that such a thing even existed.

“I’m afraid it is a legal requirement, monsieur.”

“I can’t camp here without one?”

“You can’t camp anywhere without such a license, monsieur. Not in France, anyway. It was created to give people insurance against damage caused to any third party by camping. Up to twenty-five million francs for damages arising from fire, and five million for damages arising from accident.”

“So wait, I don’t need insurance to drive a car in France but do need it to pitch a tent?”

“That’s correct. But you can easily get a camping license from any automobile club.”

I glanced at my watch. “I think it’s a little late for that, don’t you?”

He shrugged, indifferent to my fate. I daresay he was less than keen to have a suspicious character like me staying on his campsite; a man with a foreign accent wearing a scarf in October and sunglasses after dark isn’t the type of carefree camper who encourages trust in the heart of Vichy. Even Cary Grant couldn’t have pulled that off.

So I left the campsite and drove on for a few kilometers and found myself a nice quiet country lane under some tall poplars and then a field where I could shut my sore eyes for a while. But it was hard to sleep knowing that Friedrich Korsch and the Stasi were already on my trail. Almost certainly they would have hired some self-drive cars at the Europcar rental office next to the railway station in Marseilles and very likely they were only a couple of hours behind me on the N7. Eventually I managed to sleep a little on the backseat of the Citroën but not without Friedrich Korsch appearing in a dream that took place somewhere at the back of the double pain I now called my eyes.

It was strange the way he’d entered my world again after all these years, and yet not strange at all, perhaps. If you live long enough you realize that everything that happens to us is all the same illusion, the same shit, the same celestial joke. Things don’t really end, they just stop for a while and then they start up again, like a bad record. There are no new chapters in your book, there’s just the one long fairy story — the same stupid story we tell ourselves and which, mistakenly, we call life. Nothing is ever really over until we’re dead. And what else could a man do who’d worked for the Reich Security Office except carry on working for the same lousy department under the communists? Friedrich Korsch was a natural policeman. Such continuity made perfect sense to the communists; the Nazis had been good at law enforcement. And with a different book — Marx instead of Hitler — a slightly different uniform, and a new national anthem, “Risen from the Ruins,” everything could carry on as before. Hitler, Stalin, Ulbricht, Khrushchev — they were all the same, the same monsters from the neurological abyss we call our own subconscious. Me and Schopenhauer. Sometimes being German seems to come with some serious disadvantages.

I could almost hear the voice of Friedrich Korsch now, seated in the front of the Mercedes 770K as we’d reached the outskirts of Nuremberg — effectively, the capital of Nazism in Germany — and he’d mentioned a good hotel, which was where I most wanted to be right now, with a comfortable bed, a hot bath, some eyedrops, and a good dinner...