Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“The Deutscher Hof,” said Korsch. “Remember that, sir?”

“Of course.”

“That’s a nice hotel. Best I’ve stayed in, anyway. Always reminds me a bit of the Adlon.”

Korsch and I had stayed at the Deutscher Hof — rumored to be Hitler’s favorite hotel — on a trip to Nuremberg the previous September, when we’d been investigating a possible lead in a serial murder case. For a while we had suspected that Julius Streicher, the political leader of Franconia, might be the culprit and we had gone to Nuremberg to speak to the local police chief, Benno Martin. Streicher was Germany’s leading Jew-baiter and the publisher of Der Stürmer, a magazine so crudely anti-Semitic that even a majority of Nazis shunned it.

I caught Korsch’s eye in the side mirror mounted on the huge spare tire beside his door and nodded.

“How could I forget?” I said. “That was the night we first clapped eyes on Streicher. Totally blue with drink he was, but still boozing it up with a couple of stroke maidens like he was the Holy Roman Emperor himself. For a while I quite fancied him for it. The murders, I mean.”

“Hard to believe a man like that is still a gauleiter.”

“There’s a lot that’s hard to believe right now,” I murmured, thinking about the war that was probably just down the road; surely it wouldn’t be long before the French and the British called Hitler’s bluff and mobilized their armies. Rumor had it that Poland was next on Hitler’s list for annexation, or whatever the diplomatic word is after Munich for invading someone else’s country.

“Not for much longer,” said Neumann. “Confidentially, Streicher’s been under investigation since November, accused of stealing Jewish property seized after Kristallnacht, which was rightly the property of the state. Not to mention the fact that he’s been libeling Göring’s daughter, Edda.”

“Libeling?” said Korsch.

“He alleged in his newspaper that she was conceived by artificial insemination.”

I laughed. “Yes, I can see how that would piss Göring off. How it would piss any man off.”

“General Heydrich expects him be stripped of all his Party offices by the end of the year.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said. “Where are you from, Neumann?”

“Barmen.” He shook his head. “It’s all right. Franconia is a mystery to me, too.”

“It’s wizard country,” I said. “Stay on the path, that’s what they always say there. Don’t go into the woods. And don’t ever talk to strangers.”

“Damn right,” said Korsch.

After a moment I said, “Confidentially, you say. I suppose that means it’s all going to be done in secret and then swept under the carpet, just like the Weisthor affair.”

“I believe Streicher is still protected by Hitler,” said Neumann. “So yes, I imagine you’re probably right, Commissar Gunther. But nothing’s perfect, is it?”

“You noticed that, too, eh?”

“Speaking of secrets,” said Neumann. “I suppose we’d better discuss how you’re going to keep the general informed of what you’re up to when you’re in Obersalzberg, without alerting Martin Bormann.”

“I’ve been wondering about that.”

“While you’re down there, I’ll be based a few kilometers across the German border, in Salzburg. As a matter of fact, I do quite a lot of confidential work for the general in Austria. Close to Berchtesgaden is a little place called St. Leonhard. It’s virtually on the border. And in St. Leonhard there’s a discreet guest house called the Schorn Ziegler, which has a very good restaurant. Real home cooking. I’ll be staying there. If you have anything to report or if you need anything from Heydrich’s office in Berlin, that will be where you can find me. Failing that you can always find me at Gestapo headquarters in Salzburg. That’s easy to find, too. Just look for the old Franciscan monastery on Mozartplatz.”

“I take it the monks are no longer there. Or did they all join the SS?”

“What’s the difference?” said Korsch.

“Regrettably, they were thrown out of there last year.” Neumann looked sheepish for a moment. “After the annexation, there were a lot of things that happened that could have been handled differently, better.” He shrugged. “Me, I’m just an electrical engineer. I leave politics in the hands of the politicians.”

“That’s the trouble,” I said. “I have an awful feeling that the politicians are even worse at handling politics than the rest of us.”

“Drink?” Neumann lifted the armrest to reveal a small cocktail cabinet.

“No,” I said, taking hold of the red leather rope on the back of the seat in front of me, as if it might help me to hold on to that resolve. “I do believe I’m going to need a clear head when I get to Obersalzberg.”

“You don’t mind if I do,” he said, lifting a small crystal decanter clear of its purple-velvet-lined cocoon. “The general keeps an excellent brandy in his car. I think it’s almost as old as I am.”

“Go ahead. I look forward to reading the taster’s notes.”

I lowered the window a centimeter and lit a cigarette, if only to chase off the faintly intoxicating smell of hot oil and warm rubber and expensive alcohol and male body odor that filled the elegant interior of the big Mercedes. Icy fog shrouded the road ahead, dissolving other headlamps and rear lamps like something soluble at the bottom of your glass. Small forgotten towns came and went in a blur as the fallen angel’s car tunneled its rumbling way south through the uncertain dark. Yawning and blinking and registering what was always twenty meters behind us, I sank deeper into my seat and listened to the sharp-toothed wind as it whistled a melancholy banshee tune beside the freezing-cold glass of the window. There’s nothing like an extended road trip at night to steal thoughts from your past and your future both, to make you think that coming is no different from going, and to persuade you that a hoped-for long journey’s end is merely another bloody beginning.

It was almost midnight when we reached Berchtesgaden in the southeast corner of Bavaria. In the dark, it looked like a typical Alpine valley town with several tall church spires, a high castle, and many colorful wall murals, although most of these were of recent origin and illustrated a childish devotion to one man that bordered on idolatry. Living in the capital of Germany, I suppose I ought to have been used to a bit of apple polishing and arse groveling, but for Berliners a hero always comes with a dirty mark on his white vest, and it’s unlikely that any of my fellow citizens would ever have decorated the outside wall of his home with anything more than a kitsch name board or a street number. I wasn’t sure why Adolf Hitler had chosen a cozy little tourist town as his unofficial capital — which is what it was — but he’d been visiting Berchtesgaden since 1923, and in the summer it was impossible to open a German newspaper without seeing several pictures of our avuncular Leader with local children. He was always seen hand in hand with children — the more German-looking, the better — almost as if someone (Goebbels, probably) had decided being seen with them might make him seem like less of a belligerent monster. For me, the opposite impression always prevailed. Anyone who’d read the Brothers Grimm could have told you that big bad wolves and wizards, wicked witches and greedy giants had always enjoyed the taste of a hot pie stuffed with the succulent meat of small boys and girls who were dumb enough to go off with them. I wondered about some of those little girls in pigtails and dirndls who were taken to meet Hitler as a birthday treat, I really did.