Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

The police gave a pretty good description, including the dark glasses I was wearing. Of Bernie Gunther there was no mention; then again, Bernie Gunther didn’t have any papers, so I was hardly likely to be using that name. The newspaper story didn’t have my picture but it did print the license plate of my motorcar, which meant that I would certainly have to ditch the Citroën, and soon. I thought that if I could drive as far as Dijon, which was another hundred kilometers to the north, then, in a proper city like that, I might get a bus or a train somewhere else heading northeast, perhaps even to Germany. At that hour I had good reason to hope that the police in that sleepy part of France might still be having a coffee and cigarette themselves. Even so, I thought it probably wiser to stay off the quicker N7 and so chose the more scenic D974 through Chagny and Beaune to take me into Dijon. This was the heart of France’s Burgundy region, where some of the finest wines in the world are made, not to mention some of the most expensive ones. Erich Mielke had certainly appreciated them back at the Hotel Ruhl in Nice. I didn’t intend to stop before Djion but in Nuits-Saint-Georges, I saw a pharmacy and, because my eyes were hurting so much, I stopped to buy some collyrium. A bottle of red Burgundy might have done me a bit more good; at least it would have matched my eyes.

In the car, I used the eyewash and was about to drive away when I noticed the gendarme in my rearview mirror; he was walking slowly toward my car and it was obvious he was going to speak to me. I paused. The worst thing to do would be to start the engine and drive away quickly. Cops don’t like squealing tires — it makes them think you’ve got something to hide — and the gun in the glove box was not an option. So I sat there as coolly as I could manage, given that I was now a wanted man, and waited for him to reach my window. I wound it down and looked up as best as I was able as the cop bent down.

“You see that sign?”

“Er no, I had something in my eye and stopped so that I could get some eyewash in that pharmacy.” I showed him the bottle of collyrium to substantiate my story.

“If you’d read that sign, sir, you’d know that this street is less than ten meters wide. Which means that since your car has an odd-numbered license plate you can only park here on an odd-numbered date. Today’s the eighteenth of October. That’s an even date.”

As a policeman I’d been obliged to enforce some stupid, arbitrary laws in my time — in Germany it was strictly forbidden to deny a chimney sweep access to your house, and you could be arrested for tuning your piano at night — but this seemed like such an absurd system of parking that I almost laughed in the flic’s face. Instead I apologized in my best French accent and explained that I was just about to move the car anyway. And with that I was on my way once more, although now very much aware that my French accent was not nearly as good as I supposed, and that it would probably not be long before the gendarme connected me and the sight of my sore eyes with the fugitive German murderer from the famous Blue Train. When it wants to be, the organization of the French police is superb; after all, there are so many of them. Sometimes it seems that there are more policemen in the French Republic than there are nobles and hereditary titles. And I didn’t underestimate their capacity to catch a wanted German fugitive, only their capacity to catch any wanted Vichy war criminals. Always supposing that such men, and women, ever existed, of course. So I turned the car around and, in full sight of the gendarme, drove south out of Nuits-Saint-Georges, before finding another way to head north again.

About ten kilometers farther on, in Gevrey-Chambertin, I saw a sign for the local railway station and finally abandoned the car in a gentle grove of beech trees on the strangely named Rue Aquatique. The road extended for at least a kilometer through a very dry-looking vineyard and couldn’t have looked less aquatic if it had led through the Ténéré desert. I might have parked in front of the station, but I didn’t want to make it too easy for the police to follow my trail. So, carrying my holdall and following the sign, I walked west, beyond another large vineyard. It was an oddly depressing landscape. It was hard to believe that such a place could give birth to so much liquid luxury. Gevrey-Chambertin was just endless vineyards and an even more endless expanse of clouds and blue sky punctuated by the occasional black squiggle that was a bird; it didn’t make me want to set up an easel to paint a picture of my place in the world, just shoot myself. No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there’s nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.

The sun went behind some clouds and it began to rain gently. I bought a ticket for Dijon and sat on the empty platform. The station looked like it hadn’t changed since the First Republic. Even the washing hanging limply on the line outside the kitchen door looked as if it had been there awhile. At least the trains were moving. Several of them roared through the tiny station before finally one stopped and I boarded it. And only now did I perceive the enormous handicap that was my own appearance, whose reflection I’d started to examine critically in the carriage window. If there is one thing that nature abhors more than a vacuum it’s a man wearing sunglasses indoors or when it’s raining. If I kept the glasses on I looked like the invisible man, only a little less inconspicuous. If I took them off I looked like the creature from the black lagoon but only after he’d pulled a long night on the shorts. The other people on the train were already giving me those sideways glances reserved for the recently bereaved or men who belong in a Nuremberg courtroom dock alongside Hermann Göring. After a while I decided to take them off — maybe a little extra light would be good for the whites of my eyes; it couldn’t do them any harm. I lit a cigarette and let the smoke gently soothe my fraying nerves. I think I even tried to smile at a stout woman with a snot-nosed child who was seated on the opposite side of the aisle. She didn’t smile back, but then if I’d had a child who looked like hers I wouldn’t have smiled much myself. They say your children are your real future; if that was so I didn’t give much for her chances.

Trying to look on the bright side of things, I told myself that not driving the car anymore would give my neck and shoulders a much-needed break — that I might start to feel normal again and I’d be able to rest my eyes. I closed them, and for once they didn’t hurt. I even managed to doze off in the thirty minutes it took for that little train to crawl into Dijon and I awoke feeling almost refreshed. At the very least it was the best I’d felt since jumping off the train in Saint-Raphaël. This feeling did not last, however. As soon as I got off the train and entered the main entrance hall I saw several policemen, more than seemed normal even in France, and I was very glad I’d removed my sunglasses which, under the shade of the dirty glass roof, would certainly have marked me out as someone suspicious. But they weren’t interested in people arriving off the local trains; they seemed to be grouped near the platforms for trains arriving from Lyon and trains departing for Strasbourg. It was a good call and one I’d probably have made myself if I’d been with the French police: Strasbourg was just a couple of hours away, and only a few kilometers from the German border — given the impending Treaty of Rome, perhaps even closer than that — and probably where any sensible German fugitive now in Dijon would have headed.

It had stopped raining, so I went outside and sat in the park opposite the station while I tried to calculate my next step. A tramp was seated on a nearby bench and he served to remind me once more that if I was to move freely among law-abiding men I would have to look like one first, which meant I needed something to make my eyes appear to be the eyes of someone respectable. So I changed into my only clean shirt and walked south for a while on Rue Nodot until I came to an optician’s shop. I thought for a moment and then went and found the tramp again, and offered him two hundred francs to help me out. Then I put my sunglasses on and returned to the shop on the Rue Nodot.