Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

I cycled through the evening and into the night, but not very used to the effort of it, I managed only about fifteen kilometers an hour. Being a schoolboy with a bicycle never felt so strenuous; then again, Berlin is very flat and a perfect place to cycle anywhere, as long as it’s near Berlin. Before the war you could go for kilometer after kilometer without encountering so much as a bump in the road.

At nine o’clock it was too dark to travel any farther and, in a crummy little village called Château-Salins, I finally had to admit my exhaustion and stop to give my eyes and my backside a rest. I regarded the pink Hotel de Ville next to the town hall on Rue de Nancy with longing, imagining the excellent dinner and the soft bed I might have enjoyed there, but I would have been required to show them an identity card or a passport and I was keen to avoid leaving any kind of a paper trail that the French police — and by extension the Stasi — could pick up. I wheeled the heavy Lapierre through the streets until, on the tattered edge of town, I saw a field covered with hay bales in the moonlight, and I learned that they had a soft bed free for the night that did not require me to show any identification at all. And there, in hay still warm from the heat of the day and with only a few insects for company, I ate the bread and cheese I’d bought in Chaumont — I even ate a raw onion, too — drank a bottle of beer, smoked my last Camel, and slept as well as any man ever slept who had no job, no home, no friends, no wife, nor any notion of a future. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

When I returned to the Berghof from the Villa Bechstein I discovered another loud argument in progress — this one between Arthur Kannenberg, the house manager, and a voice that Hermann Kaspel quickly identified as belonging to Hitler’s local adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner. They were in the Great Hall at the time but the main door was open and from where we were standing, on the stairway immediately above, we could hear almost every bitter word. The Great Hall’s double-height ceiling made certain of that. I daresay it was an excellent room for a piano recital or even a small opera by Wagner, assuming there is such a thing, but this was already quite a performance. It seemed that Brückner was a ladies’ man, and Kannenberg, who was unprepossessing to say the least, suspected the handsome officer of making a pass at his wife, Freda, in the winter garden, which seemed unlikely to anyone who’d seen Freda, or for that matter the winter garden: it was freezing in there.

“You stay away from her, do you hear?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If you have a question about the running of this house, you come to me, not her. She’s had enough of your filthy remarks.”

“Like what? What am I supposed to have said?”

“You know damn well, Brückner. How you’re not getting enough in the bedroom department.”

“I don’t have to answer your filthy accusations,” shouted Brückner. “Besides, no one gets more out of this place than you, Kannenberg. Everyone knows that you’re making a very nice kickback on all of the food and beverage that comes into this house.”

“That’s a damn lie,” said Kannenberg.

“You’re a lousy crook. Everyone knows that . Even the Leader. You think he doesn’t notice? He knows all your little scams. How you charge some of his guests for late-night room service. Or a packet of sneaky cigarettes. Hitler just turns a blind eye for now. But it won’t always be like that.”

“This is very rich coming from someone whose girlfriend had to be compensated by the Leader to the tune of forty thousand reichmarks because you refused to marry her. And if that wasn’t bad enough, everyone knows you put pressure on poor Sophie to give you half that money, to help pay your debts.”

“That money was for some hand-painted ceramics she did, which were a gift for Eva.”

“Forty thousand seems like a lot of money for a coffee service and some oven tiles.”

“To an uncultured oaf like you, perhaps. But those ceramics were a private commission from Adolf Hitler himself. Sophie did give me some money afterwards, but it was in repayment of an old debt incurred after the car accident when I paid all of her medical bills.”

“An accident that would never have happened if you hadn’t been drunk. You can be sure the Leader knows that, too, Brückner.”

“I expect it was you who told him.”

“No, actually, I think it was Sophie Stork herself. She’s none too fond of you since she found out you tried to screw the local mayor’s sister. Not to mention the gamekeeper’s wife, Mrs. Geiger. And Mrs. Högl. I bet that every woman on this mountain has an interesting tale about your wandering hands.”

“Every woman except your wife. That ought to tell you something, you fat little swine.”

“You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns out that the person who shot Karl Flex was really aiming at you, Brückner. He was standing right next to you, after all. There must be a lot of men in Berchtesgaden who would pay to see you dead. Me included.”

“But there’s just one wife who’d like to see you dead, I expect, Kannenberg.”

“This is interesting,” observed Kaspel. “And just when we thought we had a good motive, too.”

“The dead are usually better off than the poor bastards they leave behind,” I said. “With any homicide it’s not just the victim who gets killed. Plenty of reputations get murdered, too.”

“Just stay away from Freda,” shouted Kannenberg. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“That sounds like a threat,” said Brückner.

“It’s our job, Hermann,” I added. “To murder reputations. To turn everything upside down. And not to give a damn how much damage we cause so long as we catch the killer. It used to be that catching the killer was all that mattered. These days, most of the time, it really doesn’t matter at all.”

“You go near her again, Brückner, and I’ll tell your current girlfriend just what kind of movies it was you used to make when you were at film school in Munich.”

“You know, Hermann, I wish I had five marks for every time I’ve finished an investigation having come to the conclusion that the dead man had it coming and the murderer was actually a decent sort of fellow. And I expect that’s what’s going to happen here.”

“You’re a swine,” said Brückner. “I pity Freda, having to be married to a prick like you, Kannenberg. It’s just as well you play the accordion because I don’t see you amusing her in any useful husbandly way.”

“Your days as an adjutant are numbered on this mountain. You may have stood beside Hitler in the beginning—”

“That’s right, Kannenberg. Since before the Munich putsch. Can you say the same? You should always remember the saying: ‘He who is close to the Leader cannot be a bad person.’”

“Maybe so. But he now regards you as a liability. I’d be very surprised if you last another summer up here. It’s not like we’re about to run short of SS adjutants.”

“If I do go, you can be sure I’ll take you down with me, Kannenberg. It might almost be worth it, just to see your ugly face when you fall.”

With this remark the argument ended, although it was unclear exactly why. Maybe they remembered the secret microphones. We heard footsteps in the entrance hall and quickly made ourselves scarce, although not before discovering that many others in the Berghof had also been shamelessly eavesdropping. Our excuse was better perhaps; cops are paid to be nosy. For everyone else it was just a bit of entertainment because there is nothing in life quite as entertaining as other peoples’ pain.