Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

There were no bloody footprints leading out of the kitchen and through the house, which made me wonder about the reddish bootprints in the snow on the path outside the front door. How had they got there? It didn’t seem at all likely that the killer would have gone out the back door and climbed over the fence. Besides, the only prints on the snow outside the kitchen door belonged to the horse. With every light switched on, I went carefully through the house, but there wasn’t anything even resembling a footprint. I grabbed Ambros’s coat and went outside. I was never a detective much given to getting down on my hands and knees. For one thing, I didn’t have many suits and the ones I had weren’t the kind to take any punishment. For another, it never seemed worth a fingertip search given that most murders these days were committed by the people I was working for. Even so I dropped the coat beside one of the size-forty-five bootprints and took a closer look. The prints looked like they were from a pair of Hanwag boots, just like the ones I was wearing on my own feet. And the prints weren’t really red at all. They were pink. And it wasn’t blood that had stained the snow. It was salt. The highest quality pink salt. The kind that gourmet cooks were fond of using.

At Rothman’s garage in Berchtesgaden, the Maserati was parked on the street again and Friedrich Korsch was seated in the passenger seat surrounded by several small boys who had gathered around to admire the car. But the biggest small boy was probably Korsch himself. Puffing a cigarette happily, he looked like he’d just won the German Grand Prix. Next to the Maserati was a Paulaner beer truck that hadn’t been there before. Paulaner was the biggest brand of beer in Bavaria. When he saw me, Korsch climbed out of the Maserati, threw away the cigarette — which was promptly acquired by one of his young admirers — and came to the window of my car.

“You fetched the Krauss brothers?” I said.

“In the back of the truck. I was lucky. They were about to be transferred to do hard labor in Flossenbürg.”

“Good work.”

“Not entirely. They say they’ll only open the safe if we let them go at the Italian border.”

“What does Heydrich have to say about that?”

“He’s fine with it. If they open the safe, they can walk. There’s just one problem, boss.”

“What?”

“These two yids don’t trust us to keep our word.”

“How about if we sign a letter, something on paper, a guarantee—?”

“They don’t like that idea either.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Can you blame them? This is Berchtesgaden. Remember? If the Chancellor’s own word isn’t worth shit—”

“Strictly speaking, that was Munich, but I know what you mean. It sets a bad example for the rest of us.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We have to get into that safe. I’ve a good idea it’s the key to everything, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Look, I’d better speak to the brothers myself. Maybe we can come to an arrangement. What sort of condition are they in?”

“A bit dirty. I fed them both on the road from Dachau. And they had some beers in the truck, which ought to have put them in a better mood by now. But considering where they were, not too bad, really.”

“Bring them into the garage, Friedrich. We’ll talk there.”

The two brothers were Jews from the Scheunenviertel, a slum district in the center of Berlin with a substantial Jewish population from Eastern Europe and, before the Nazis, one of the most feared neighborhoods in the city, a place where few policemen ever dared to tread. To make an arrest, the cops from the Alex used to have to go in there in substantial numbers, and sometimes with an armored car. That was how the brothers had been arrested the first time, after a series of burglaries carried out in Berlin’s biggest and best hotels, including the Adlon. It was said that they’d even burgled Hitler’s suite at the Kaiserhof just before he became chancellor of Germany, and stolen his gold pocket watch and some love letters, but it was probably just one of the many stories about the Krauss brothers that had helped to make them notorious. Where Adolf Hitler was concerned, truth was a concept that only a Cretan would have recognized, and I suspect even he’d long forgotten where he’d hidden it. After Franz and Erich Sass — two Berlin bank robbers from the ’20s whose careers had reportedly inspired them — the Krauss brothers had been the most famous career criminals in Germany, and their burglary of the police museum at the Alex to recover their own tools made them almost legendary. They were small and dark and immensely strong but after several months in Dachau the clothes they were wearing were at least two sizes too big. They’d changed in the back of the truck and their prison clothes, with green triangles signifying they were career criminals, were still in their hands as if they didn’t know what to do with them or didn’t dare to throw them away.

I had an idea they were originally from Poland, where their father had been a famous rabbi, but if they were still religious it wasn’t obvious; they were tough-looking men whose skill was not unlocking the secrets of the Zohar and the Kabbalah, but other people’s safes. It was said that they could open a gnat’s arse with a paper clip and that the gnat wouldn’t even notice.

“That’s a York,” said Joseph Krauss, inspecting the safe. “From Pennsylvania, America. You don’t see many American nuts like that in Germany. Last one of these I saw was in a jeweler’s shop on Unter den Linden. A better shop than this one, too. Of course, that was when we still stole from Jewish businesses, but we gave that up when you Nazi momzers started doing it, too. Now, it could be a three-number combination, or a four. But you have to hope it’s a three, which will take less effort to puzzle. I could drill it, of course, but that will take a lot more time and besides you have to drill it in the right place, and to do that you need to have seen the other side of the door and studied the mechanics of the lock. Maybe you’ll find some other shmegegge to drill it for you. But he might not know where to drill and leave it ongepotchket and then you might never get it open.” Joseph Krauss shook his head and looked sad. “Not that you do have to drill it, like I say. But I tell you honestly, the talent needed to open this safe by feel is rare. There are maybe three people in the whole of Europe who could puzzle it to order and my brother Karl is one of them. All he needs is that rubber mallet on the wall, in case it needs a good zetz . But that’s not your main problem, Commissar.”

I nodded. “I know. Assistant Korsch told me. You don’t trust us to let you go after you’ve cracked the nut.”

“S’right. No offense, Commissar. You’re both from the same Kiez as us, I can tell. Berliners are not like Bavarians. These people are like mud. But you’re not going to make schlemiels of us. What’s to stop you from sending us straight back to Dachau when we’ve cracked it? I tell you honestly, Commissar, it’s been driving the two of us crazy. What to do? It’s a real tsutcheppenish . You need us enough to say you’ll pay our price, but we don’t trust you enough to pay it when we’ve done the job. How can we do business like this? Without trust? Impossible. Isn’t that right, Karl?”

But Karl Krauss was already giving himself the safecracker’s manicure — brushing the ends of his fingers on the sleeve of his ill-fitting suit. “I’d love to help you gentlemen,” he said. “I tell you honestly, I could use the practice. It’s been a while since I cracked a nut. I’ve missed it, so I have. But my brother is right. There’s no basis here for trust.” He pulled a sad face, as if a deal was still a long way off for us. “What’s in there, anyway? Maybe if you told us. You must figure something important, otherwise you’d never have brought us here. All this way. At such short notice. And with such important people oiling our way out of that horrible place. General Heydrich, no less. Piorkowski looked like he was going to shit when he heard that man’s geshaltn name.”