Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“I told him to slow down,” I said, “the last time I was driving with him. Frankly, he scared the shit out of me when he was behind the wheel of that car. It was the meth, I think. The magic potion. It made him drive too fast. He joked that it would kill him. And now it has.”

Korsch shook his head. “It wasn’t the meth that killed him, boss,” he said. “I’m pretty sure of that. And it wasn’t his lousy driving. It wasn’t even black ice on the road, although that hardly helped. And those are winter tires, with a thicker tread than summer ones. Almost new, by the look of them. Like I said before, the RSD’s cars are extremely well-looked after.”

“So what are you saying? He crashed his car, didn’t he?”

“He crashed the car because his brakes had failed. And the brakes failed because someone deliberately cut the hydraulic hoses that feed the brakes. Someone who knew what they were doing.”

I hadn’t heard of anyone ever doing such a thing, so I shook my head in slow disbelief. “Are you sure?”

“I told you, I used to work for Mercedes-Benz. I know the leads and the hoses on this car like I know the veins on my own cock. But even I might not have noticed something wrong if the car hadn’t overturned like this. The 170 has a four-wheel hydraulic-drum brake system, which relies on hydraulic fluid, right? Liquids aren’t easily compressible, so when you start to brake you apply pressure on the fluid’s chemical bonds. Without that fluid there’s no braking force at all, which means the brakes fail. You can see from the oblique angle of the cut on this cable supplying fluid to the drums that it didn’t break and it didn’t detach; it’s been neatly cut with a knife or a pair of wire cutters. There’s no fluid left in them. The fact is, the poor bastard didn’t stand a chance. This car weighs the best part of one thousand kilos. From here to Buchenhohe is maybe five kilometers of winding mountain road. I’m amazed he managed to keep the car on the road for as long as he did. Hermann Kaspel was murdered, boss. Someone must have cut the brakes while the car was parked outside his house. One of his neighbors, I expect. And here’s another thing you might want to consider, Commissar. It looks like you’ve been a lot closer to solving who killed Karl Flex than perhaps you’d ever thought. Because whoever murdered poor Kaspel here almost certainly intended to murder you, too. They must have hoped you’d be in the car with him when it went off the road. You see, if they kill you and him, then this investigation is ended. Make no mistake, Bernie. Someone in Obersalzberg or Berchtesgaden wants you dead.”

We left the scene of the accident and drove up the winding mountain road to Hermann Kaspel’s address in Buchenhohe, parking our own car a short distance away so that we wouldn’t wake his widow. There were no lights burning in the house, for which I was grateful, otherwise I might have felt obliged to go in and give the poor woman the bad news then and there. She was obviously asleep and unaware of the terrible tragedy that had overtaken her, which was just as well. The bringer of bad news certainly doesn’t look any better at four o’clock in the morning, especially when he looks like me. Besides, all I wanted to do now was take a look at the spot in front of the house where Kaspel’s car had been parked, while the crime scene was still relatively fresh. And keeping our voices down, we inspected the space with our flashlights.

“You can still smell the glycol,” said Korsch, squatting down and touching the wet ground with his fingertips. “Most brake fluid is just glycol-ether based. Especially in a cold climate like this one. You see where it’s melted the snow when it poured onto the ground?”

“It’s just like you said, Friedrich.”

“No question about it. Hermann Kaspel was murdered. Just as surely as if someone put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.” Korsch stood up and lit a cigarette. “You’re lucky to be alive, boss. If you’d been in that car, you’d probably be dead, too.”

I glanced up at the cold sky. The veil of earlier clouds had lifted to reveal heaven’s great black canopy and, as I frequently did, I remembered the trenches, Verdun, and the freezing nights on sentry duty when I must have looked at every star in the sky, steadily reflecting upon my own imminent mortality. I was never afraid of dying when I looked up at the heavens; from cosmic dust we had come and to cosmic dust we would all return. I don’t know that I thought much about the moral law within me; perhaps it was, after all, an extravagance beyond the horizon of my vision. That and the fact that it was a pain in the neck to keep looking up that way, not to mention dangerous.

Korsch walked a few meters away from the house and collected a length of old green-gingham curtain material he’d seen lying on the side of the road. It was only lightly dusted with snow but the edge was stained with brake fluid. On a backstreet in Berlin it would hardly have been unusual but in such a scrupulously tidy place as Obersalzberg, where even the flowers in the window boxes were standing neatly to attention, it seemed worthy of note.

“My guess is that he used this to lie on,” said Korsch. “While he was underneath Kaspel’s car. Careless to leave it here like this.”

“Perhaps he had to,” I said. “Perhaps he was disturbed.” There was a maker’s mark on the curtain lining, which told us only that it had been made a long way away, at a branch of Horten’s department store — the DeFaKa, in Dortmund. “If we could find the pair to this, then we might be in business as far as identifying Hermann’s murderer is concerned. But somehow I don’t see anyone allowing us to search every house on Hitler’s mountain to look for a length of old curtain. As I’m often reminded, some of these people are Hitler’s friends.”

As we walked away from the house my boots kicked a piece of metal lying on the road, which caught my flashlight, and I bent down to pick it up. For a moment I thought I’d found the knife used to cut the brake lines, but I soon realized that the object in my fingers wouldn’t have cut anything. Made of rounded metal, it was thin and smooth and curved, about twenty centimeters long and less than ten millimeters in diameter, and resembled a misshapen table utensil — a spatula or a longish spoon without a bowl, perhaps.

“Is it something that fell off the bottom of the car?” I asked, handing it to Friedrich Korsch and letting him examine the object for a moment.

“No. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before. This is stainless steel. And much too clean to have come off any car.”

As we returned to the car, I slipped the object into my jacket pocket and told myself that I’d ask someone about it later, although quite who I might ask I had no idea; it didn’t look like the kind of object that could easily be identified.

Friedrich Korsch dropped me back at the Villa Bechstein and, almost immediately, left for Munich to spring the Krauss brothers from Stadelheim Prison. I helped myself to a large brandy in the drawing room, toasted Kaspel’s memory, and then walked back up the hill toward the Berghof. The sentry was awake this time but just as surprised as before to see someone on foot at that time of night. According to all the newspapers and magazines, Hitler loved to walk all over Obersalzberg, but I saw little evidence that he or anyone else for that matter walked anywhere other than to the next armchair in the Great Hall or the Berghof terrace. I walked on, past the Berghof to the Türken Inn, where the local RSD was headquartered. Everything was quiet and it was hard to believe that on a frozen hillside only a few kilometers away was the body of a man who had been murdered. The Türken was another Alpine-chalet-style building made of white stone and black wood, except that it had its own parade ground with an absurdly tall flagpole flying an SS flag, and an excellent view of Bormann’s house nearby. There was a little stone sentry box out front that resembled a granite sarcophagus and I had the guard escort me to the duty officer. Almost mummified with cold, he was glad to move some blood around his polished black helmet. By contrast the RSD duty officer in the Türken was tucked up in an office heated by a nice fire, a small cooking stove, and a heartwarming picture in Berliner Illustrated News of Göring proudly holding his baby daughter, Edda. I envied him that much, anyway. On the office table was a dinner plate with a loaf of bread, some butter, and a chunk of Velveeta, which reminded me I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was fortunate that I’d recently lost my appetite. There’s nothing like seeing a man you know cut in half to stop you feeling hungry; but seeing a coffeepot steaming on the stove, I helped myself before coming to the point of my being in that office. The coffee tasted good. It tasted even better with sugar. There was always plenty of sugar on Hitler’s mountain. If there had been a bottle I might have helped myself to that, too. The officer was an SS-Untersturmführer, which is to say a lieutenant with just three pips on his collar and a pimple on his neck; he was about twelve years old and as green as his shoulder straps and, with his glasses and his pink cheeks, his membership in a master race looked all too provisional. His name was Dietrich.