Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“Politics?” I grinned.

“The use of power by one person to affect the behavior of another? I don’t know what else to call it. Anyway, none of this is your concern. Wait here a moment and then I’ll give you a lift back to the Villa Bechstein.”

I sipped my brandy — it was indeed excellent — and waited patiently while Neumann went upstairs. I had seldom met a more contradictory human being; in some ways he seemed courteous and kind while in others he was wholly without principle. Undoubtedly clever, he had hitched his wagon to Heydrich and was determined to serve him in every way he could, even if it meant running someone over and of course thereby gaining his own advancement. Sometimes that was all it took to be a real Nazi; the absolute and unscrupulous desire for preferment and promotion. Which was why I was never going to thrive in the new Germany. I just didn’t care enough about success to do it by standing on someone else’s face. I didn’t care about anything very much anymore. Except maybe the quaint idea that somehow doing my job and being a good cop — solving the occasional murder — might inspire others to have respect for the rule of law.

I was jolted from this naïve reverie by the sound of two gunshots on the floor above. I put down my glass and ran into the hall just as the captain was coming down the stairs. In his hand was a smoking Walther P38. His long face was tight with nerves, and there was blood on his cheek but otherwise he looked almost nonchalant, which, given the stopping power of the Walther was hardly a surprise; it’s a brave man who will argue with a still-cocked P38. A 9 mm bullet will put a good-size hole in your beer barrel. I barged past him as I ran upstairs and into the lavishly appointed bathroom. But I already knew what I was going to find. Aneta Husák lay naked in a pool of her own blood on the marble floor. She’d been shot in the head; her blood was still rolling down the white shower curtain as her leg twitched spasmodically, and suddenly everything was clear to me in a way it hadn’t been before. Blackmail was so much more serious when a dead girl was involved, especially one who was naked. This way — just as soon as those SS photographers had done their job, and perhaps the local police were called in — Heydrich could keep Kaltenbrunner under his cold, thin thumb forever. And I had helped him to do it. But for me informing Hans-Hendrik Neumann of the existence of the P-Barracks, poor Aneta Husák might still have been alive. But what shocked me almost as much was how kind and solicitous Neumann had seemed when he’d been talking to the girl. Putting the poor creature at her ease, no doubt. It was the Nazi way to catch people unawares — to lie to them and gain their trust and then to betray them, ruthlessly. And after all, she was just a Czech, a Slav, which counted for nothing in Hitler’s Germany. Certainly not since Munich.

I went back downstairs and found Neumann with the two SS men. He was pointing his pistol at me. I took out Aneta’s visitor’s pass and held it up like an exhibit in a courtroom. Not that there was any chance that this murder would ever get near a courtroom.

“She was just a kid,” I said. “Twenty-three years old. And you murdered her.”

“She was a whore,” said Neumann. “A common grasshopper for whom violent death is always an occupational hazard. You of all people should know that. Men have been murdering prostitutes in Berlin since time immemorial.”

“Blood and honor,” I said. “Now I know what that SS belt buckle means. I guess it’s supposed to be ironic, after all.” I threw the girl’s visitor’s pass at him. “Here. You’ll need this for the local police when they pretend to investigate her murder.”

“Please,” said Neumann. “No recriminations, Gunther. I’m not in the mood for your breathtaking hypocrisy. As you said a few minutes ago, we’re both like tools. Only I’m more of a hammer than a spanner.”

I went for him but before I got halfway to his throat someone hit me from behind, a third SS man I hadn’t seen before who must have been standing behind the drawing room door. The blow connected with the side of my head and knocked me across the room. I ended up near the sideboard where I’d left my brandy. And when at last I’d picked myself off the floor, my ear was singing like a kettle and my jaw felt like a bag of builder’s rubble; I collected the brandy and knocked it back in one, which helped to take my mind off the pain in my cheek.

“I think you’d best leave, Commissar,” said Neumann. “Before you get seriously hurt. There’s four of us.”

“But that’s still not enough guts to make one real man.”

I walked out the door before I was tempted to draw my own gun and shoot someone.

I walked into Berchtesgaden and back up the road to Obersalzberg. Halfway up the mountain I stopped and looked back at the little Alpine town in the dying light of the late afternoon and reflected that it was hard to believe such an idyllic-looking place could have been the scene of two brutal murders in less than twenty-four hours. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t that hard to believe, given the Nazi flags that were flying over the railway station and the local Reichs Chancellery. I carried on walking. It was a long climb made even longer by the feeling that my efforts were not just pointless but also a kind of subtle punishment; that nothing I did was ever going to make a difference to the way things were, and it was sheer hubris on my part to think they would.

By the time I reached the Villa Bechstein, I had calmed down a little. But that didn’t last long. As soon as I arrived, Friedrich Korsch told me that the Gestapo had arrested someone for the murder of Karl Flex.

“Who is it?” I asked as I warmed myself by the fire and lit a cigarette to catch my breath.

“Johann Brandner. The photographer.”

“Where did they find him?”

“At a hospital in Nuremberg. Apparently he’d been a patient there for several days.”

“Pretty good alibi.”

“The local boys picked him up yesterday morning and brought him straight here.”

“Where is Brandner now?”

“Rattenhuber and Högl are interrogating him in the cells underneath the Türken.”

“Jesus. That’s all I need. How did you find out about it?”

“The RSD duty officer. SS-Untersturmführer Dietrich told me when I asked him to organize that firing squad. Boss? Is Neumann serious about that? They’re really going to shoot those two thugs from Linz?”

“The SS are always serious about shooting people. That’s why they have a little death’s head on their hats. To remind people that they’re not playing games. Look, we’d better get along to the Türken before they shoot Brandner as well.”

“Sure, boss, sure. By the way. What happened to your face?”

I shifted my jaw painfully. It felt like a couple of spare panels from the Pergamon Altar. “Someone hit me.”

“Captain Neumann?”

“I wish. Then I could have killed him. But no, it was someone else.”

“Here,” he said. “Take a bite of this.”

Korsch handed me his own hip flask and I took a sip of the Gold Water he was so fond of drinking. The stuff contained tiny flakes of gold that went straight through your body unchanged and, according to Korsch, turned your piss to gold. Which, given the sheer weight of lead, is the best kind of alchemy there is.

“You should get that jaw seen to. Who’s that SS doctor I’ve seen around Obersalzberg? The one with the hop pole up his arse.”

“Brandt? Knowing him, he’d probably poison me. Get away with it, too, knowing him.”

“All the same, boss, it looks to me as if your jaw might be broken.”