Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

But something made me think that I’d had something to do with this theft and so I picked up the telephone and asked the Obersalzberg operator to connect me with the Berghof; a few moments later the mystery of the missing ladders had been solved. Arthur Kannenberg had asked the RSD to find him a ladder so that I might have one on the Berghof terrace and they’d borrowed the roofer’s ladders from the Villa Bechstein without telling anyone. If only all feats of criminal detection were so straightforward.

“They’re bringing the ladders back now,” I said to the butler. “Telephone Herr Müller and tell him I’d like to speak with him as soon as he gets here. The sooner, the better, Winkelhof.”

In the drawing room I found Friedrich Korsch warming himself in front of a large fire and reading a newspaper while he listened to the radio. In Berlin there was much outrage at the military pact the British had signed with Poland and I wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad news — if this would deter Hitler from invading Poland, or bring about an immediate declaration of war by the Tommies if he did.

“I was beginning to think something might have happened to you,” said Korsch. “I had a terrible feeling I might be kicking my heels here all day.”

I glanced around the drawing room and nodded appreciatively. Kicking your heels didn’t look so bad in a room like that. Even the tropical fish in the aquarium looked warm and dry. Kicking arses felt altogether more hazardous; for all I knew, Bormann was going to be furious at the way I’d just treated his first administrator.

“As it happens, you’re in luck, Friedrich. You’re right in the center of things after all. This villa is now a crime scene.”

“It is? It certainly doesn’t feel like one. I slept like a top last night.”

“Lucky you.” I told him about Karl Flex, as much as I knew. Then I showed him the brass cartridges. “I found these on the path outside. By the way, this is Captain Kaspel. I think you met, briefly, earlier on.”

The two nodded at each other. Korsch lifted the cartridge up to the firelight.

“Looks like a standard rimless bottleneck eight-millimeter rifle cartridge.”

“My guess is that we’ll find more of these on the roof. Just as soon as the RSD comes back with the ladders.”

I explained about the roofer before handing Korsch the spent bullets we’d dug out of the balcony at the Berghof.

“Get someone to take a look at these. Might have to be the Police Praesidium in Salzburg. And I’m going to need a rifle with a telescopic sight. I also want these films developed and printed. And discreetly. Bormann wants this matter handled very discreetly. And you’d better warn whoever does it that these prints are for adult eyes only.”

“There’s a photographer in Berchtesgaden who can do the job,” said Kaspel. “Johann Brandner. On Maximilianstrasse, just behind the railway station. I’ll organize a car for you. Although now I come to think about it, I’m not altogether sure if he’s still there.”

“I’ll sort it out,” said Korsch, and pocketed the films. “There must be someone local who can do your dirty pictures. You have been busy, sir.”

“Not as busy as Karl Flex,” I said. “By the way, Hermann. Where does a man go if he wants some female company in this town?”

“That’s an unfortunate side effect of the magic potion,” said Kaspel. “It does give a man the point.”

“Not me, Hermann. Karl Flex. He had a dose of jelly. Remember the Protargol? The question is, where did he get it? The jelly, I mean. If it comes to that, where did he get the Protargol?”

“There is a place,” said Kaspel. “The P-Barracks. But it’s supposed to be under the medical supervision of a doctor from Salzburg.”

“It’s a barrack. You mean it’s under the control of the Obersalzberg Administration?”

Kaspel went to the drawing room door and closed it carefully.

“Not exactly. Yes, it’s the P&Z workers who are going to the P-Barracks, yes. But I really don’t see someone like Hans Weber or Professor Fich running a bunch of whores, do you?”

“So who then?”

Kaspel shook his head.

“Keep talking,” I said. “This is starting to get interesting.”

“It’s about six kilometers from here, at the Gartenauer Insel, in Unterau, on the north bank of the River Ache. About twenty girls work there. But it’s strictly workers only, and off limits for anyone in uniform. I’m not sure if that would have included Karl Flex. I haven’t been there myself but I know some SS men in Berchtesgaden who have, if only because there’s always trouble at the P-Barracks.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The workers get drunk while they’re waiting for a particular girl. Then they fight about which girl they want and then the local SS have to restore order. It’s always busy, day and night.”

“If the place is making two hundred marks an hour, sixteen hours a day,” said Korsch, “then that’s three thousand a day. Twenty thousand a week.”

“Assuming that Bormann is keeping at least half—” I said.

“I didn’t say that,” said Kaspel.

“Are you saying he doesn’t know about it?”

“No. From what I’ve heard it was his idea. To set the place up. But—”

“Then perhaps it was Karl Flex who collected the cash from these girls for his master, the Lord of the Obersalzberg. As well as a little taste of what was on offer. Which in itself provides a possible motive for murder. Pimps get murdered all the time. Horst Wessel, for example. He was just an SA pimp murdered by a good friend of his whore’s landlady.”

Kaspel was looking slightly sick.

“True story,” I said. “Happened right on my patch, in Alexanderplatz. I helped my then boss, Chief Inspector Teichmann, crack that case. You can forget all the crap in the Nazi song. It was a simple dispute about an eighteen-year-old snapper. Wessel wasn’t much older. So that’s where we’re going next. To the P-Barracks in Unterau.” I looked around as I heard the RSD men returning the ladders outside the window. “As soon as we’ve had a look at the Villa Bechstein’s roof.”

“I swear, you’re going to get me killed, Gunther.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just watch where you’re putting your feet. It looks slippery up there.”

Rolf Müller, the local roofer, was a primitive, round-shouldered, good-humored sort of fellow with a full head of reddish hair that looked dyed but probably wasn’t, glasses that were almost opaque with dirt and grime, and an abstracted manner that seemed to mark him out as one who was always alone on a rooftop. He seemed to have a propensity for conversations with himself from which he saw no reason to exclude anyone else who happened along, me included, and to this extent, he was like a character from a play by Heinrich von Kleist whose misunderstandings and detachment from reality are the stuff of comedy. Emil Jannings would have played him in a movie. His hands and face were covered in boils. He looked like a careless beekeeper.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he told me when I found him tying one of the returned ladders to the scaffolding tower. “It’s not that they’re bad. Not a bit of it. It’s just that they don’t give a second thought for anyone else. Which if they did, they wouldn’t do it in the first place, see? It comes of being in uniform, I reckon. Not that I was like that myself when I was in uniform. But it’s that particular uniform, I think. And that cap badge. The skull and crossbones. It’s just like them Prussian kings and the old-life cavalry that guarded them. Nothing mattered to those cavalrymen except the person of the emperor. It’s like they think the human part of you doesn’t matter anymore, when it does. It really does, you know.”