Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“Somehow I didn’t think you were a hunter, too,” I said.

“I’m not. The people pay me any way they can. Rabbits, mostly. Pheasant. Some deer. I’ve even been given the carcass of a wild boar.”

“You must invite me to dinner sometime, Doctor. Although it had better be when the Leader’s not around. I doubt he’d approve of all this meat. In fact, he wouldn’t.”

Brandt smiled weakly, as if the idea of inviting me to his house was unimaginable. “I can assure you that all of the game I am given by these people was sourced outside the Leader’s Territory and the Landlerwald.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” On the desk, beside a little cloth wallet of surgical instruments, was a packet of Pervitin. I picked it up, only to have him take it out of my hand, and while he was doing that I picked up an amber medicine bottle and glanced at the label. Brandt sighed as if he’d been dealing with an unruly child and snatched that away, too.

“What’s this about?” he asked. “I have real patients to see, so get to the point, will you?”

“That’s the point.” I nodded at the tablets in his hand and then at a well-stocked medicine cabinet containing more of the same. “Among other things. The Protargol. We both know it’s for treating venereal disease. And seeing it here on your desk, as if you were expecting to prescribe it this evening, well, it makes me wonder if any of the locals have got a dose, too. I mean, like Karl Flex.”

“You wouldn’t really expect a doctor to comment on any of his patients,” Brandt said stiffly. “Especially something as sensitive as that.”

“Oh, I respect patient confidentiality, Doc. But I don’t think it usually applies to someone who’s dead. Especially when that someone has been murdered. And when he’s the subject of a police autopsy. It’s common practice for a doctor to tell the police about every little thing he can see that’s wrong with a human body. And that means everything from a gaping hole in the head to a dose of jelly. Flex had the jelly, too, didn’t he? But for some reason you chose not to mention it.”

“I suppose I just didn’t think it was relevant to the cause of death,” said Brandt. “Which was obvious. He had been shot in the head. Look, Commissar, Karl Flex was a friend of mine. He was a guest at my wedding. And in all honor I felt obliged to allow the man some privacy. It’s what any decent German would have done.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you, Doc. What is your SS motto? ‘Blood and honor,’ isn’t it? That would seem to cover almost everything here, wouldn’t it? But you can take my word for it, nothing private is ever permitted to a man after someone has blown his skull apart with a rifle bullet. The pieces of skull and brain tend to land all over the place. And when that place is the Berghof terrace, it tends to make his privacy entirely irrelevant . It might surprise you to learn that I’m no stranger to things like honor myself. But I don’t rate Flex’s blood and honor that highly. Not when he was little better than a common pimp for the girls at P-Barracks. Not when he gave the jelly to one of them.”

“Who told you that?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I should have thought it much more likely that it was one of those damned whores who gave it to Karl.”

“Maybe. Either way, you’re the one with the cure on his desk. And you’re the one who’s been looking out for the health of those damned whores. Isn’t that right?”

Brandt said nothing, which I suspect was his normal response to anything in Obersalzberg. When your masters are Hitler and Bormann, saying yes or very little is always the hallmark of true loyalty.

“How about I ask you a straight question and you try to give me a straight answer, Doc? Are there many other people in this community infected with gonorrhea?”

“Why do you ask?”

“That’s not a straight answer. At which point I might normally brush some dandruff off your shoulders. How about you have another shot at answering before I ask the question again, only this time maybe I’ll ask it so that everyone out there can hear me.”

“Look, Commissar, this is an extremely sensitive matter. I don’t think you can have any idea how sensitive.”

“I get that. Nobody wants the Leader to find out about the P-Barracks. He’d be furious, of course. Venereal disease is spread by Jews, not by decent Aryan folk. How many?”

“Maybe fifteen or twenty,” said Brandt.

Reminding myself that this was a man at whose wedding Hitler and Göring had been the guests of honor, I asked my next questions with my heart in my mouth.

“Renata Prodi. She had it, too, right?”

“Unlike Karl Flex, she’s alive, so I don’t have to answer that.”

“Are you sure she’s still alive? Only, someone told me she wasn’t.”

“To the best of my knowledge.”

“That’s not saying much on this mountain.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I understand you also carried out a termination for her. An abortion. And that this was Karl Flex’s child.”

“And this is based on what? The word of another whore? Against that of a German officer.”

“So you’re denying it, then. Fair enough. I didn’t expect you to admit it.”

“I fail to see what any of this has to do with the murder of Karl Flex, Commissar.”

“Frankly, so do I. But it won’t always be that way, I can assure you. I will know everything soon. As a detective I am tenacious.”

“I can believe that.”

“I make no apology for this. It’s my job to make myself a nuisance. Do you know that it’s even been known for some people to wish me dead before I can solve a case.”

“I can believe that, too.”

“I’ve taken enough of your time, Doc. And theirs, too. We’ll talk again, when I have more information at my fingertips. In fact, you can bet on it. Assuming betting’s allowed on Hitler’s mountain. I mean, it’s bad enough that you can’t smoke.”

“I don’t think the Leader has any objections to gambling.”

“Good. So put a blue on me solving this case before the end of the week. That’s money in the bank.”

I spoke to several of the locals on my way out. Most worked for the Obersalzberg Administration or the local brewery but, despite the Nazis having closed down access to the mountain, a few still managed to work their own private salt mines, which struck me as a better trade than digging gold since there was so much of the stuff to be found and, when it was, it fetched a high price among discerning cooks all over Europe.

As I passed by they asked who I was and where I was from and when I told them they looked as surprised as if I’d been Anita Berber pissing on their shoes, and I realized that in spite of all the Nazis had done to change it, they still regarded Berlin as a sink of iniquity and a place where corruption reigned. I certainly missed the iniquity but maybe they were right about the corruption. Quite what they thought of Zander’s talk on Tom Sawyer I have no idea. I listened for a while, and then lit out ahead of the rest.

They’d cooled things down a bit at the Berghof when I arrived back there. Someone had thoughtfully left the big window in the Great Hall open and the place was chillier than the cold cabinet in Flex’s kitchen. You couldn’t sit in my room without keeping your coat on. I wondered if that was just the way Hitler liked it, if they were trying to save money on fuel, or if they figured that keeping the place freezing cold would have the useful effect of making people tremble in the Leader’s presence. Maybe that was part of his diplomatic secret. Hermann Kaspel had told me Hitler didn’t much like snow, or the sun, which was why he’d chosen a house on a north-facing slope. I guess the cold and damp air of the Berghof reminded him of the Viennese slum he’d lived in as a young man. Alone in my office opposite Hitler’s study, I closed the door and filled the stove with as much wood as it could take, and placed a chair right up next to it. I was planning to read some more witness statements, which, I hoped, would send me to sleep. I thought about asking Arthur Kannenberg for some sausages and a bottle but reflected that I could do without the criminal allegations concerning Wilhelm Brückner that were certain to be added onto my supper tray. I lit a Turkish 8 absently, and then cursed when I remembered whose house it was and immediately threw the cigarette in the stove. Being there, at the Berghof, was like being in some mad Swiss sanatorium where everyone was dying of tuberculosis and only the purest mountain air could be tolerated. I looked at the packet of Turkish 8, considered stepping onto the terrace to smoke one, and then grimaced; the thought of going outside in the freezing-cold night air of Obersalzberg to do something as harmless as smoking a cigarette seemed so absurd that I laughed out loud. What kind of crazy damn world was it when such ordinary human pleasures like cigarettes were so strictly controlled? And it struck me that perhaps, in Hitler’s disapproval of tobacco, I’d discovered the true essence of Nazism. I might have gone down to the Villa Bechstein, but for the certainty that Rudolf Hess would find and question me in detail about what had happened at the Berghof. I’d no wish to interpose myself in some Alpine clash of Nazi Titans.