Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“Pick me up outside the Berghof in ten minutes. We’ll go and take a look at it. See if we can’t find something there.”

“You’re forgetting that I’m not cleared to enter the Leader’s Territory.”

“Then go back to the Villa Bechstein. I’ll meet you there. Did you call Hermann?”

“On his way down to Berchtesgaden now.”

I went out of my room and downstairs to the hallway. The house was even colder than before but one or two servants wearing overcoats were still around; Kannenberg had told me that they were practicing being up at this late hour for when Hitler was there. All I wanted to do was find a bed and sleep. I resisted the temptation to pop a couple of Pervitin and hoped for the best.

It was a short walk from the Berghof to the Villa. The sloping road was made treacherous by snow and ice and I was glad of the Hanwag boots that I was wearing on my feet. In the guardhouse at the bottom of the road the SS man was so surprised to see someone on foot and coming down the hill from the Berghof that he fell off his stool. He must have thought I was Barbarossa awoken from his thousand-year sleep inside the mountain; either that or he’d been asleep himself.

I found Friedrich Korsch waiting in a car at the Villa and together we drove down the mountain into Berchtesgaden. Maximilianstrasse ran from the hill behind the outsized main railway station to a point just below the local castle, which was a nice shade of icing pink. The garage address on the receipt Korsch had found was opposite the Franciscan monastery and immediately next to Rothman’s Silver, which appeared to have gone out of business. The monastery looked like it was doing fine. On the shop window was the faint outline of a yellow star that had been cleaned off but only — I imagined — after the departure of Herr Rothman and his family from Berchtesgaden. Small towns like Berchtesgaden were harder on Jews than big cities; in small towns everyone knew who and where the Jews were, but in a big city, Jews could disappear. I wondered if, like Gerdy Troost’s friend Dr. Wasserstein, Rothman had gone to live in Berlin or, perhaps, left Germany altogether. I knew what I would have done.

I still had Flex’s door keys and after trying them out found one that fit the lock in the garage door. We opened it and switched on a bare lightbulb to reveal a bright red Maserati — the one with the side exhaust — and polished to absolute perfection. With a bonnet as long as a coffin, the car was a tight fit in the garage. The starter handle had been removed and the front of the Italian car was resting against a mattress laid out against the back wall, so that the car could be pressed right up against it without damaging the front, in order that the garage doors might be closed and locked.

“It certainly doesn’t look as though anyone was here before us,” I observed. There was a whole set of mechanic’s tools on the wall but nothing was missing from that. “Then again, there’s not much to search. Only the car.”

“But what a car,” said Korsch. “This would explain the pictures at the house in Buchenhohe.”

I shook my head. “I can’t say I paid much attention to them.” I peered through a connecting door into the empty shop.

“They were all about motor racing.” He pointed to a picture of Rudolf Caracciola on the wall. “Grand Prix posters. Drivers. It seems our friend Flex was an enthusiast. I bet this car was Flex’s pride and joy.”

“If that was the case then why not keep it up at the house in Buchenhohe?”

“Are you kidding? There’s no garage up there, that’s why. The man wanted to keep the snow off this pristine beauty. And I don’t blame him. Besides, this thing doesn’t have a hood. Perfect for summer but perhaps not so good in winter.” Korsch walked around the car smoothing the bodywork with his hand. “It’s a 26M sport. Built in 1930. Two-point-five liter, straight eight, two hundred horsepower. Must have cost a few marks.”

“You know about cars?”

“I was a mechanic before I joined the force, boss. At the Mercedes garage in Berlin west.”

The Maserati was parked over an inspection pit, which Korsch quickly inspected and reported was empty of anything but sump oil. Meanwhile I opened the car’s trunk and then the glove box. As well as two pairs of goggles, a couple of leather helmets, and some driving gauntlets, there were maps of Germany and Switzerland and a receipt for the Hotel Bad Horn on Lake Constance. I even unbuckled the straps on the bonnet and searched beside the engine and found nothing much there, either. The keys were still in the car and Korsch couldn’t resist sitting in the driver’s seat and gripping the steering wheel.

“I’d love to own a car like this,” he said.

“Well, if you stay here on Hitler’s mountain and manage to figure out a nice lucrative racket for a man like Martin Bormann, then maybe you’ll be able to afford one. But I don’t know that this tells us very much. Except that he liked to drive to Switzerland.”

“It tells us that Flex had good taste in cars. It tells us that he was making serious money. It tells us what he spent his money on. It tells us that no one we’ve talked to so far has mentioned this car, so maybe he didn’t drive it that often. Maybe not many people knew about it. Or even about this garage.” He turned the wooden wheel wistfully. “Can I start it?”

“Be my guest,” I said. “Drive it around the town for all I care.”

We pushed the car back from the mattress and retrieved the starter handle from the tiny trunk. We were just about to turn over the engine when the mattress toppled onto the Maserati’s sloping bonnet. I went to lift it up again.

“Wait a minute,” I told Korsch. “I think there’s something on the wall behind this mattress.”

We pushed the car farther back along the stone floor until it was halfway out the door and onto the street, and tugged the mattress away to reveal an old York wall safe with a combination lock. It was a big one, too — at least as big as a car door. I tried the small round handle but the door remained firmly closed.

“Must have belonged to the shop,” said Korsch. “A nice way of hiding it, too. With this car.”

“I wouldn’t mind betting that this is what the person who searched Flex’s house was looking for,” I said.

“I’ll buy that,” said Korsch. “I mean, who’s looking for a safe after you see something as eye-catching as this?”

“Looks like we’re going to need the previous owner, Jacob Rothman,” I said. “Or perhaps the man whom Flex was renting this place from. Dr. Waechter. For the combination.”

“Waechter is at 29 Locksteinstrasse, Berchtesgaden. That’s a couple of kilometers from here.”

“So let’s go and wake him up.” I smiled, imagining some greedy fat Nazi lawyer who’d taken advantage of the Rothmans’ situation. I was already imagining the pleasure I was going to take in that interview.

“We could take the Maserati.”

“Why not? That’s bound to wake everyone up.” I smiled at that idea, too; there was something about the quiet complacency of Berchtesgaden that needed a disturbance of the kind that only an eight-cylinder Grand Prix Maserati could achieve.

We left a note for Hermann Kaspel on the garage door, telling him to wait there for our return. And a few seconds later we’d managed to start the car and Korsch was driving us through the streets of Berchestgaden and up the hill north, toward the Katzmann and the Austrian border. In spite of the cold wind in our faces — the windscreens were the fold-down, hardly-worth-having type — Korsch was grinning from ear to ear.

“I love this car,” he shouted. “Just listen to that engine. One plug per cylinder, twin overhead camshaft.”