Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“I think that would be wise, Colonel.”

“By the way, these are for you.”

Rattenhuber handed over several telegrams, which I pocketed for later. But Rattenhuber wasn’t having any of it.

“Well, aren’t you going to read those?” demanded Rattenhuber. “Damn it, man, they’re telegrams, not love letters. There can be no secrets among men for whom the Leader’s safety and welfare is paramount. Especially when his arrival is now so close. There’s no time to lose. He’ll be here in less than five days.”

I wasn’t inclined to argue with that, not with the head of the RSD. So I opened them up and read them, providing a description of each for the sake of good manners.

“This is from the Gestapo in Salzburg. Johann Brandner, my leading suspect, hasn’t been seen at the address where he’s been living since before Flex was murdered. He’s a trained marksman and a local man with a grudge, so you can see why he’s of interest to me. The Gestapo has no idea where he’s gone. At least that’s what they say. They don’t seem inclined to help me look for him, either. Perhaps Kaltenbrunner—”

“Kurt Christmann is in charge of the Salzburg Gestapo,” said Rattenhuber. “He’s an old friend of mine. So to hell with Kaltenbrunner. I’ll telephone him later this morning and explain the urgency of finding this man.”

I opened another telegram. “My assistant, Friedrich Korsch, has traced the Krauss brothers to Dachau concentration camp.”

“The Krauss brothers. Who are they?”

“They are also suspects,” I lied. “At least they were. Before Dachau, it seems they were banged up in Stadelheim Prison and so they couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Flex’s murder.” Quickly I opened another telegram and glanced over the contents. “But this is better news. They’ve traced the serial number of the Mannlicher carbine that was used to shoot Flex. The one I found dropped down the chimney at the Villa Bechstein. It turns out that the rifle was sold to Herr Udo Ambros.”

“I know that name,” said Rattenhuber.

“The assistant hunter,” I said. “At the Landlerwald.”

“Geiger’s man. Yes, of course.”

“I interviewed him yesterday.” I was speaking carefully now. The last thing I wanted was Ambros arrested by the RSD and a confession beaten out of him in the cells below the Türken. People have a habit of saying anything when they’re guests of the Gestapo. If I was going to pinch anyone, I wanted to be sure that the person arrested had actually shot and killed Karl Flex. Besides, I could hardly see how Ambros might have had the access to the Berghof he would have needed to have drawn the obscene cartoon of Hitler in my notebook. At the very least he had to have had an accomplice. Perhaps more than one. “I think it’s time I questioned him again.”

I opened the last of my telegrams and glanced over it quickly. Heydrich had ordered his own adjutant to join me on Hitler’s mountain. To watch my back, he said; after the visit from the Linz Gestapo this ought to have sounded just fine to me.

“We’ll come with you. Perhaps we can help.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t, sir. Not yet anyway. We wouldn’t want to scare him into confessing to something he might not actually have done. When the Leader gets here, I don’t want there to be any doubt that we have the right man in custody.”

“But it’s his rifle, isn’t it?” said Rattenhuber.

“Yes, but all the same, I’d prefer to hear his story as to why the rifle is no longer in his possession before I arrest him. It might actually be that there’s a reasonable explanation for that.”

I didn’t really think this was likely but I wanted to handle Ambros by myself. Rattenhuber said his office at the Türken would provide me with the man’s address. For a Bavarian and a Nazi, he wasn’t a bad fellow. But he still looked a little peeved about staying behind.

“Very well, Herr Commissar.”

“By the way, sir. Since Captain Kaspel is dead and my own assistant is currently in Munich, Captain Neumann is going to join me here in Obersalzberg. General Heydrich feels his adjutant can help me with this investigation. Perhaps you would be good enough to inform Deputy Chief of Staff Bormann.”

“As you wish, Commissar. You’re the detective.”

I nodded gratefully but the truth was I had my doubts about this. After what had happened during the night I felt as if every time I stopped moving a disembodied hand chalked just a bit more of a thick white line around my still twitching body, like a corpse discovered on the floor of the palace during Belshazzar’s feast. Uncovering the secrets of Hitler’s mountain, I wasn’t much more than another murder waiting to happen. Someone had taken a considerable risk in trying to kill me, twice. Possibly they would try again. And it was unfortunate that the man Heydrich had sent to watch my back would, if his master ordered him to, put a hole in it without a moment’s hesitation. The one thing about the Nazis you could always rely on was that they were not to be relied upon. None of them. Not ever.

Two hours later, in the nothing town of Puttelange-aux-Lacs, I perceived the full extent of my folly and the consequences of trusting a Catholic priest. The police were at the crossroads on the other side of a small bridge and it was fortunate for me I saw them first. The blue flashing lights helped; they might as well have erected a red neon sign. I had no choice but to wheel my bicycle off the Rue de Nancy, remove my holdall from the luggage rack, and drop the machine on the other side of a disused, rusted gate set between two redundant brick posts that stood on the edge of an empty field like the last teeth in some vagrant’s carious mouth. Satisfied that the bicycle could not be seen from the road, I walked across an unfenced field in the opposite direction, chucking away my war medal, my glasses, and my beret while I did so, hoping to approach the main road to Sarreguemines and, immediately beyond that, the old German border, from a less observed direction. But I soon realized this would not be possible. The road running through the center of town was full of police cars and it was clear to me that the priest of Saint Hippolyte had given me up when I saw him sitting in one of these cars with a cigarette in his face and enjoying a joke with the gendarmes. So much for his Bible oath, I thought, and concluded he must have been one of those casuistic Catholics for whom reason is a way of explaining the world for their own convenience rather than a simple capacity for making sense of things. Which is to say almost all of them, of course. He didn’t see me turn around and walk southeast, in the opposite direction, toward Strasbourg, although I was almost tempted to go straight back to Bérig-Vintrange and burn down his church like a true SS man. Instead I reached the outskirts of town in a few minutes and concealed myself in the back of an old blue van without wheels that was abandoned in the overgrown drive of a large empty house. I’d wait for dusk, when I figured I had a better chance of traveling unnoticed. There was some strong-smelling straw on the floor and behind the van’s closed doors I was able to relax a little. It would have been a simple matter for the police to have surrounded me, but oddly, I wasn’t that worried by my situation. As long as I remained quiet and didn’t smoke, no one but the mice would ever have known I was hiding there. I thought I could probably circumvent the police once it was dark — hopefully they were still looking for a man on a bicycle wearing a beret — and get on the road to the Saarland again. I estimated that it was about thirty kilometers to the old border. Of course, now that I was on foot it would take me longer to get there but sitting in the back of an old van made me wonder if perhaps I could find a place in another van, or a truck, one going northeast as far as Germany, perhaps. I resolved to try.