Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

Gradually the police search receded and after several minutes’ silence I risked peering through the bush. The cop with the pungent aftershave had gone. I waited another couple of minutes with my heart in my mouth and then crept out of my hiding place so I could go to the edge of the copse and look up the road to Sarreguemines. I could just see some lights flashing helpfully in the distance but in the dark it would be easy for me to make my getaway before the police fetched some tracker dogs and returned in force to search the trees. I reckoned my best direction was west, along the road to Freyming-Merlebach, which was the opposite way from Sarreguemines. So, hugging the bushes for cover, I walked back into Puttelange-aux-Lacs and then picked up the D656 out of town. After walking a few hundred meters I saw a hotel restaurant called La Chaumiere, where a number of people were having dinner in the floodlit garden. I watched them a little enviously for a minute or two, wishing I might have been doing something as ordinary as eating a meal in a nice restaurant. I watched the cars they’d left in the car park. One of these, a green Renault Frégate with beige upholstery, still had the keys in the ignition and I calculated that I might enjoy the safe use of it for at least an hour, and perhaps even longer, until dinner was ended — an hour before the police were informed and more roadblocks could be set up.

It was a nice little car, very modern, with a radio. I didn’t listen to it; instead I drove slowly through Hoste and Cappel, before deviating north at Barst, and motoring through Marienthal and Petit Ebersviller. It took me less than thirty minutes to reach Freyming-Merlebach, where I steered off the main road and down a long neglected farm track before dumping the car carefully under the branches of a very large weeping willow. I was now just a few kilometers from the old German border and a sort of freedom. Freyming-Merlebach was mostly shops and little white bungalows with very few public buildings of any note; more important, however, the town of Karlsbrunn was indicated on a signpost and it couldn’t have looked more welcome. I walked north, up Rue Saint-Nicolas with a smile on my face as if I’d just completed an Olympic marathon in the gold-medal position.

The Saar might have been a département of France but the people there were Germans. Just to be among my own countrymen again would feel like a kind of victory in itself. I’d been away from Germany for too long. There’s nothing like living in France to make a German feel like he’s a very long way from home. But about halfway up the street, I saw a group of four or five men in front of the big bay window of a brightly lit bar and there was something about them that made me pause in a doorway opposite and watch them for a couple of minutes before I could even think of walking on. They were military-sized, with military haircuts, and wearing cheap, mass-produced gray suits of the kind no self-respecting Frenchman would ever have worn. Their shoes were weapons-grade with thick soles made to stamp on East German faces. The ties they were wearing looked as if they were made of cardboard and the fists they squeezed experimentally on the end of their circus-strongman arms were as big as beer mugs. As I watched them, a man who was speaking on the telephone by the door finished his call and came out of the bar smoking a cigarette. He shouted something in German. So close to the old German border, this wasn’t at all remarkable. There were probably many other Germans in Freyming-Merlebach. But it did seem remarkable that the man with the cigarette and the eye patch who was doing all the shouting was Friedrich Korsch.

Udo Ambros lived on Aschauerstrasse in Berchtesgaden, about half a kilometer farther on from the home of Dr. Waechter, the lawyer who owned the exiled Jew’s garage containing the red Maserati. Ambros’s isolated house enjoyed a spectacular view of the Watzmann and backed onto a thick forest but it wasn’t much of a place — certainly nothing to compare with Dr. Waechter’s; just a largish, two-story Alpine building that was little better than a poorly built barn, with a corrugated iron roof, a rusting wire fence, an abandoned water trailer, and a pile of near-fossilized wood stacked under a row of long icicles hanging from the black eaves like the teeth of some extinct mountain carnivore. A red DKW motorcycle stood on the snow-covered path along which were a series of footprints that contrasted strongly with my own; these others were reddish, even blood-colored, which raised a question in my head as to exactly how they got that way. A piebald horse was watching me carefully from the top of a long sloping field and a crudely carved bear stood guard by the front door; from the angle of his head and the snarling, aggrieved expression on his face he looked as if he had taken a bullet to the neck. There were only two windows, both of them on the ground floor. I glanced in one but I might just as easily have been looking through a fog, the glass was so grimy. Not that the dirty net curtains helped much, either. I knocked at the door and waited but no one answered. The relentless silence of the valley felt as if it had been ordained by the local gods and it was unnerving, as if the whole of nature was desperately afraid of waking Wotan while he was taking a well-deserved nap with Fricka on a nearby mountaintop. Living somewhere like this would, I knew, have driven me as mad as King Ludwig. Berliners like me were not meant for empty places like this. We like the sound of noise more than we care for the noise of silence, which is always a little too long and loud for our cynical metropolitan ears. The true hallmarks of civilization are clamor, hubbub, and commotion. Give me pandemonium every time. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of dung and wood smoke. The smell of coal suits me a lot better; my smoker’s cough works better when there’s some sulfur dioxide and heavy metals in the damp atmosphere.

I might have concluded that the assistant huntsman was not at home if it hadn’t been for the motorcycle. The cylinder of the 500-cc engine was cold to the touch but rocking the bike revealed the fuel tank was almost full. I kick-started it in the hope that the sound might summon its owner and the engine roared into life at only the second time of asking, all of which implied that the machine was regularly ridden and most probably the preferred method of transport for Udo Ambros; but only the piebald came to the edge of the fence to see what was happening, fixing me with the kind of wary, black-eyed, who-the-hell-are-you kind of look I normally only get from single women in bars. After a minute or more I allowed the bike to stall, walked back to the front door, knocked a second time, and peered through the window again. I don’t know what I expected to see in there. A man hiding from me? Some firelight, perhaps? A witch with a cauldron full of stolen children? I turned around and went to question the mare in the hope that she might give me a clue where Ambros was to be found; and without hesitating, she did. As soon as I reached the fence she turned away and following her with my eyes for a few seconds I saw a man’s legs sticking out of a door at the side of the house.

“Herr Ambros,” I said. He didn’t answer, so I picked up a length of wood and threw it near him just in case he was underneath a car or a tractor; but of course I knew he wasn’t. If the man had been alive he would have been summoned by the noise of the DKW starting up. Reluctant to risk tearing my suit by climbing over the fence I went back to the door. It wasn’t locked. With so little real theft in this part of Germany — except, of course, the kind that Bormann and his people were guilty of — few bothered locking their front doors.