Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

The optician was a smiling, benign sort of man, whose arms were too short for his otherwise neat, buttoned white cotton jacket. The glasses he was wearing on the end of his nose were rimless and almost invisible, quite the opposite effect from the one I was hoping to achieve. There was a light smell of antiseptic in the air, which the hyacinth on the marble mantelpiece was doing its drooping best to dispel.

“I’ve lost my glasses,” I explained. “And I need a replacement pair as soon as possible. All I have are these prescription sunglasses without which I’d be quite short-sighted, I’m afraid. But I can’t keep walking around with these on, and in this weather.” I smiled. “Perhaps you could show me some frames.”

“Yes, of course. What kind of style were you looking for, monsieur?”

“I prefer a heavy frame. Much like these sunglasses of mine. Yes, I think I’d like to have tortoiseshell or black, if you have them.”

The optician — Monsieur Tilden — smiled back and opened several drawers that were full of dark-framed glasses. It was like looking into Groucho’s bedside table.

“These are all heavier frames,” he said, selecting a pair, cleaning them quickly with a green cloth, and then handing them to me. “Try these on.”

They were exactly like my own sunglasses, except that they were filled with plain glass, and hence perfect in every way for my present needs. I turned to the mirror and swapped them for my sunglasses, careful not to let Monsieur Tilden see my bloodshot eyes. The frames were perfect. Now all I had to do was steal them. It was at this point, right on cue, that my accomplice came lurching through the shop door.

“I think I need some spectacles,” he said biliously. “My eyes are not what they were. Can’t see straight. Leastways, not when I’m sober.” For a moment he studied the Snellen eye chart as if it were a language he could speak fluently, and then he belched quietly. A strong smell of cider and perhaps something worse filled the shop and even the hyacinth looked like it was about to admit defeat. “I like to read the newspaper, you see. To keep myself informed about what is happening in this benighted world of ours.”

The tramp was not someone the poor optician considered to be a likely customer but in the time it took Monsieur Tilden to persuade the man to leave, I’d swapped the frames I’d selected for my own sunglasses, closed the drawer from which they came, apologized, and then left — as if driven away by the tramp’s ripe smell. I walked back to the park, where several minutes later the tramp returned to receive the second half of his fee, and my thanks.

At another shop I bought a beret to help cover my head of thinning blond hair and, within just a few minutes, I managed to make myself look like a real Franzi. All I needed now was to neglect my personal hygiene, and to obtain a service medal for a war I hadn’t fought in.

I walked back to the train station and, from a safe distance, kept a watchful eye on the Strasbourg train platform. The cops were checking everyone’s identity and even with a beret and glasses it seemed unlikely I could slip through a cordon like that. I didn’t doubt that the same level of security would be present in Strasbourg itself. But it took only a minute or two to figure out a way around the French police check: to my surprise there was no police check on trains leaving Dijon for Chaumont, which is about an hour farther north. Why not go there? I thought. And then take another train on to Nancy, from where I might hitch a ride to the German border somewhere near Saarbrücken? I daresay that in 1940 it took Hitler not much longer than a minute or two to figure out that it was simply easier to go around the back of the Maginot Line than through the front of it. It seems obvious now. Frankly, it seemed obvious then. But that’s the French for you. Adorable. I went to the ticket office and bought a ticket on the next local train bound for Chaumont.

“If the gardener was cutting wood with that chain saw,” I said, “and that was what covered up the sound of the shots, then would the shooter have risked him seeing the rifle when he came back down from the Villa Bechstein roof?”

Kaspel was driving us to the P-Barracks, at the Gartenauer Insel, in Unterau. He shook his head.

“It’s not the sort of thing you could fail to notice,” admitted Kaspel. “Equally, the gardener would surely have noticed someone other than Rolf Müller coming down from that roof. That’s what he said. Unless they’re in it together.”

“No. I can’t believe that, either.”

“You sound very sure about that. Why?”

“You get a feel for these things, Hermann. Neither man was particularly nervous about answering our questions. Most of the witnesses I ever questioned, I knew within seconds if they were on the level or not. Didn’t you?”

“You’re the commissar, not me.”

“A man can go from being an innocent witness to being your number one suspect in the space of five seconds. Even Doctor Jekyll couldn’t manage a transformation that fast.” I shook my head. “I’d have left the rifle up on the roof. And just made my escape. For all we know he’s across the border by now and hiding somewhere in Austria. Besides, you said the RSD searched almost everyone in the vicinity immediately after the shooting. If they had found someone with a rifle they’d have arrested him and I wouldn’t be enjoying this mountain air.”

“But if he’d left the rifle up on the roof of the Villa Bechstein, we’d have found it. And we didn’t. Just the shooter’s used brass.”

“Then maybe he tossed it off the villa’s roof, into the woods. And picked it up later. Or maybe it’s buried in a snowdrift. Or — or, I don’t know.”

“In which case we should probably organize a search of the Villa Bechstein’s grounds. I’ll sort it out the minute we come back from Unterau.” Kaspel paused. “Why are we going to the P-Barracks anyway? The girls are all French and Italian. Not to mention the fact that they’re whores. They’re not going to tell us a damn thing.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But let me and Heydrich’s money do the talking. Besides, I like talking to whores. Most of them have the kind of degree that you can’t get from the Humboldt University of Berlin.”

At the foot of the mountain we turned right toward the Austrian border and Salzburg, and drove north along a flat road that always stayed close to the course of the River Ache, meandering through a giant landscape designed by God to make a man — most men, anyway — feel small and insignificant. Maybe that’s why men build churches; God must seem a little friendlier and more likely to listen to prayers in a nice warm church than on top of a cold jagged mountain. Besides, a church is a lot easier to get to on a winter’s Sunday morning. Unless you’re Hitler, of course. The air was a curious mixture of wood smoke and hops from the chimney of the Hofbräuhaus, which we soon passed on our left. A collection of large yellow buildings with green shutters and proud red-and-blue banners — none of them Nazi — it looked more like the headquarters of some rival political party than the local brewery, although in Germany beer is more than just politics, it’s a religion. My kind of religion, anyway.

“Another thing. Rolf Müller. My guess is that he’s heard people in that beer house wishing Bormann and some of his men dead on several occasions before. And he just didn’t want to say who they were. Men who might also have overheard him mentioning his doctor’s appointment.”

“Then it was lucky it was you who was questioning him and not Rattenhuber or Högl, otherwise right now they’d be trying to beat some names out of him in the cells underneath the Türken Inn.”