Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

I had the room light low and was trying to make less noise than the wood in the stove, so my spirits fell a little when there was a knock at the door. It opened to reveal a tall woman in her thirties, elegant, but not pretty, not even good-looking, but somehow still attractive, in a horsey sort of way. She was dressed in a black suit and a black coat, with a matching black beret, and she was as slim as a used match.

“I thought there was someone in here.”

I stood up and pointed sheepishly at my boots.

“I was trying to creep around but I’ve got these new boots, you see? I’m still getting used to how big they are. Look, I’m sorry if I disturbed you. Next time I’ll wear tennis shoes, hold my breath, and drape a towel across the bottom of the door.”

“Oh, I didn’t say I heard anything. No, I caught the scent of your tobacco. You are aware of the fact that the Leader hates smoking, aren’t you?”

“You know, it’s a funny thing, but I think I did hear something about that, yes. And for about two seconds I forgot where I was and lit one. I suppose I’m going to have to face a firing squad for that cigarette in the morning.”

“Probably. I can fix it for you to be shot somewhere so that you can have a cigarette in your mouth when they do it, if you want.”

“I’d like that. But no blindfold, okay? Especially if you can also fix it for me to be wearing a bulletproof vest when they do it.”

“I’ll see what I can do. My name is Gerdy Troost, by the way. Who are you?”

“Bernhard Gunther, a police commissar from Berlin Kripo.”

“You’re the man who’s here to investigate the murder of Karl Flex, I suppose.”

“Bad news travels fast, doesn’t it?”

“That’s almost right. Look, I was going somewhere for a cigarette myself. Perhaps you’d care to join me.”

“I guess it can’t be any colder out there than it is in here.”

I stood up and followed her along the hush-carpeted corridor and down a staircase in the easternmost corner of the ogre’s castle. I almost felt like we were creeping out of there with a bag of stolen gold coins.

“The panoramic window in the Great Hall is stuck,” she explained. “The motor has stopped working. There are a couple of starter handles that they use to operate it manually, but no one can find them. It’s the biggest piece of glass ever made. Eight and a half meters long by three and a half meters wide. Now, that really is bulletproof and it weighs a ton. I told him it was too much for one motor. Three windows would be better, I said. But sometimes he’s too ambitious and lets his heart rule his head. When it works, it’s something to see. But when it doesn’t, well, you can certainly feel the disappointment in the air tonight.”

I shivered inside my coat collar and decided that perhaps this was a better reflection of the true essence of Nazism than a disapproval of smoking. At the foot of the back stairs we were in a hallway attached to the kitchens. Gerdy Troost led the way through the door and onto a narrow terrace behind the house and, sheltered from the wind by an almost vertical bank on top of which was a whole copse of trees, she opened the black leather purse she’d been carrying under her arm and produced a packet of Turkish 8. The terrace was already littered with cigarette ends.

“I don’t much like these,” she said, lighting me and then herself with a thin gold Dunhill. “But I’ve learned to smoke them because they’re the only cigarettes you can buy up here, and when everyone smokes the same brand that makes things a little easier for addicts like me. I started smoking after I had a bad car crash in 1926. I’m not sure what’s been worse for my health. The accident or the smoking.”

When we were both alight she moved us in front of a metal grille in the embankment through which a current of warm air was moving like a heavenly zephyr. And seeing my surprise, she smiled.

“I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this but you’re a detective, and one is supposed to help the police, right? For everyone in the Berghof this is known as the smoking room. Because it’s always the warmest spot at the Berghof. That’s a local secret. But I figure you’ll need a few cigarettes to help solve this case.”

“More than a few. It’s what we detectives like to call a twenty-packet problem.”

“That many?”

“At least. It’s not easy tiptoeing around the egos of so many important people.”

“Not people, men ,” she insisted. “Important men. Or at least men who think they’re important. To my mind there’s really only one man who’s important around here. With very few exceptions everyone else is out for themselves.”

This seemed hardly worth disputing. “I’m not immune to a bit of that myself. Only I call it survival.”

“A social Darwinist, eh?”

“Only I’m not particularly social. By the way, where’s the warm air coming from? It’s certainly not the house.”

“Underneath the Berghof is a whole network of tunnels and secret bunkers.”

“Bunkers? You make it sound like someone’s expecting a war.”

“There’s no harm in being prepared.”

“None at all, provided the preparations don’t include the invasion of Poland.”

“You’re a Prussian, aren’t you? Don’t you think we have a legitimate case?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Frau Troost, the whole situation involving the Polish Corridor strikes me as nonsensical. There’s nothing I’d like to see more than Danzig properly part of Germany again. I just think there’s maybe a better time to do it. And a cheaper way of bringing it about than another European war.”

“And if negotiations fail?”

“Negotiations always fail. Then you negotiate some more. And if that fails you try again the next year. But people stay dead for even longer. This was my own experience during the last war. We should have talked a bit more at the beginning. And then the end might have been very different.”

“Maybe they should let you handle the negotiations.”

“Maybe.”

“And this case. Think you can handle it?”

“Someone thought so, otherwise they wouldn’t have given me my bus fare from Berlin.”

“And who was that?”

“My superiors.”

“Himmler, I suppose.”

“He’s one of them, last time I looked.”

“You don’t have to play skat with me, Commissar. You want to find this killer, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“So if you’re going to play Hans Castorp it might pay you to cultivate a few local allies up here on the magic mountain. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I liked the fact that she thought I was bright enough to have heard of Hans Castorp.

“We can help each other, perhaps,” she added.

“All right. A cop can always use some new friends. Especially this cop. On the whole I rate pretty highly for a lack of people skills.”

“So do I. Most of the men in the Leader’s intimate circle have learned to be very wary of me. I usually say exactly what I think.”

“That’s not always healthy.”

“I’m not out for myself.”

“Makes you pretty unusual these days.”

Gerdy Troost shrugged impatiently.

“Anyway, please forgive me if I seemed a little guarded. Actually it was Generals Heydrich and Nebe who told me to come down here. You see, if I fail, it won’t reflect badly on them. I’m expendable.”

“And how is that, do you think?”

“Well, it’s like when you get invited to a wedding and the bride and groom really don’t give a damn if you turn up or not.”

“I know what it means, Commissar Gunther. I was just wondering how anyone should think such an unkind thing about a man like you.”

“What it means is that Karl Flex’s murder is Martin Bormann’s problem. If I can solve it, then he’ll be grateful to Heydrich and Nebe. And if I can’t, then it’s still Martin Bormann’s problem, not theirs.”