Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

Müller’s eyes moved to the side like a guilty hound; he stared at the ground for a moment and shook his head silently. It was the silence that surprised me, not him denying that he knew anything.

“You know the sort of thing I’m talking about,” I said. “I’d like to shoot that Fritz, or I wish someone would put a bullet in this fellow’s head. The sort of thing that sounds like an idle threat over a few beers and that no one takes seriously until someone actually stops being idle and goes and does it.”

Müller shrugged and shook his head again. For a man who liked to talk, especially to himself — when you’re a self-employed roofer, who else is going to answer? — and who’d already talked a great deal, his silence was the most eloquent thing he’d said all morning. This was the kind of detail that von Sonnenberg should have put in his book, the sort of thing detectives get a nose for. If he didn’t know exactly who had taken a shot at Flex, then almost certainly he knew lots of people who’d like to have done so.

“All right,” I said. “That’s all. Thanks for your help, Herr Müller.”

“By the way,” said Kaspel, “did the doctor sort you out? Your knees, or your back, or whatever it was that took you there?”

“Yes, sir. He’s a good doctor, that Dr. Brandt.”

I looked at Kaspel. Brandt wasn’t exactly an uncommon name in Germany. Nevertheless I felt obliged to ask the obvious question. Sometimes they’re the best ones.

“That wouldn’t be Dr. Karl Brandt, would it?”

“I don’t know his first name, sir. Young fellow. Handsome, with it. Married to a champion swimmer, he is. Not that there’s much swimming round here in the winter, mind. But there is in summer. The Königssee is a lovely place to swim. Cold though. Even in August, it’s cold. That’s glacier water, you see. Like swimming in the ice age.”

“You mean the Dr. Karl Brandt who’s in the SS, don’t you?” said Kaspel.

“That’s right, sir. The Leader’s doctor. When the Leader’s not here Dr. Brandt runs a clinic out of the local theater in Antenberg. Keep his hand in, he says. Likes to give something back to the community for its hospitality. Very popular with local people, he is. They both are, him and the wife. Although they’re not from round here. He’s from Mulhouse, I believe, which is as good as being French, in my book. Not that I hold that against the doctor, since he is, quite obviously, thoroughly and completely German, through and through.”

Kaspel and I walked back to the front door of the Villa Bechstein.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “About Brandt, I mean.”

“I thought so, too. But I don’t see him crawling around that rooftop in the snow. Do you?”

Leaving the rifle in the hallway, we returned to the car just as a gardener turned up and started to take some tools out of his van. I closed my eyes and put my ear into the cold air. All I could hear was nature’s lingering mountain silence, a persistent and very audible hush, which felt more like the subaural gasp of thousands of tiny Alpine tumults and commotions.

“It’s so very still in this place,” I said. “So very quiet after Berlin, don’t you think?” I shrugged. “I guess I’m just a city boy through and through. Every so often I like to hear a tram bell and a taxi engine. Reminds me I’m actually alive. Up here on Hitler’s mountain — well, you might easily forget something important like that.”

“You get used to it. But I guess that’s why the Leader likes it so much.”

“Strange that it should be so quiet and yet no one heard five shots fired from a G98. I can’t figure that at all.”

Meanwhile, the gardener had laid a big log onto a sawhorse near the bottom of the ladder and was now filling a chain saw with gasoline.

“You the gardener here?” I asked the man before he started the chain saw.

“One of them. Head gardener is Herr Bühler.”

“Do you cut logs with that every morning?”

“Have to. They burn a lot of wood in that house. Maybe fifteen or twenty baskets a day.”

“That much?”

“At this time of year, I’m cutting logs almost every day.”

“And always with that?”

“The Festo? Absolutely. From my point of view this is the best thing a German ever invented. I’d be lost without this machine.”

“And here? On this same spot?”

He pointed at the pile of logs. “This is where the wood is.”

“Rolf Müller, the roofer,” I said. “How well do you know him?”

The gardener grinned sheepishly. “Well enough to start this chain saw when I see him coming. I’m not much for talking myself. But Rolf — he does like to talk. Only, it’s a little hard to know about what, sometimes.”

“True. Have you ever seen anyone other than Rolf Müller up on that roof?”

“No, sir. Never.”

We watched the gardener start the chain saw. It sounded exactly like the Alba 200 motorcycle I’d owned just after I got married. And was probably every bit as dangerous.

“Maybe there’s the reason nobody heard anything, right there,” shouted Kaspel.

“Maybe,” I said, and took a deep breath. I felt as if I had a chain saw revving impatiently in my chest. That was the methamphetamine. The dry mountain cold was easier to ignore.

After a poor night’s sleep I awoke beside a silent guard of swaying poplars, unnourished, light-headed, and ravenously hungry. I was as cold and stiff as an English princess who believes she might be head-over-heels in love with someone other than herself. I tried a few shoulder stretches and succeeded only in making my half-strangled neck sore. I ought to have felt a little more hope for the day on seeing the sun rise above the misty fields of open countryside, I suppose, but I didn’t. Instead, at that early waking hour I was one of the undead, the outlawed, the damned; but I had only myself to blame for that. I would surely have been in England by now if I’d gone along with Mielke’s plan. So I started up the Citroën and drove on for about an hour until, in a little town called Tournus, I saw a café and a tabac that were opening up. I stopped the car beside a malodorous public lavatory, where I washed and shaved, and bought a couple of French newspapers and a packet of Camels before heading next door for a coffee and a croissant and a smoke. I was becoming more French than I might ever have believed possible. It was a sunny morning so nobody was paying much attention to me or my sunglasses, or my grimy shirt; this was provincial France after all, where grimy shirts are the prevailing style. But I’d already made page three of France Dimanche . I suppose there wasn’t yet another breathless story they could print that week about Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim getting a divorce. God might have created woman. Monsieur Vadim had merely tried his best to make her happy. I could have told him not to bother. Gentlemen prefer blondes but blondes don’t know what they prefer until they get a strong sense that they’re not going to get it. The next best thing to Bardot and Vadim’s matrimonial convulsions was a double murder on the Blue Train between Nice and Marseilles, and that was me. I had to hand it to Friedrich Korsch. It had been inspired of my former criminal assistant to kill the train guard as well as Gene Kelly. I hadn’t seen that coming. Now the French police had an even better reason to look for me other than one dead German tourist called Holm Runge, which seemed to be the dead Stasi man’s real name — the man I’d battered on the head. The French police prefer to investigate murder when it involves their own citizens; they like to take things personally. According to the paper, the police were anxious to speak to a man called Walter Wolf in connection with the murders. Formerly a hotel concierge on the Riviera, he was also known as Bertolt Gründgens, which was of course the name in my shiny new passport. The man was believed to be armed and dangerous, and German. The police would probably like that, too.