Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“If the commissar insists on interviewing this man again, I have no objection of course,” said Högl. “That’s his prerogative. I just don’t want us to find ourselves in a position where Johann Brandner retracts what he has said so that the commissar here can indulge himself in some stupid fantasy about a whole series of murders here in Obersalzberg and Berchtesgaden.”

“You’re not going to ask him to retract his confession, are you?” said Rattenhuber.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Not in this place.”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Högl.

“It means that in the Türken Inn it’s you and the colonel who are in charge, not me. And he’s your prisoner. Not mine.”

“There you are, Peter,” said Rattenhuber. “There’s no question of the commissar persuading Johann Brandner to withdraw his confession. He just wants to check the umlauts are in place over the right letters. Isn’t that so, Gunther?”

“That’s right, sir. I’m just doing my job.”

A few minutes later, SS-Untersturmführer Dietrich ushered Friedrich Korsch and me to the top of a precipitous circular stone staircase that looked like the back door into the lowest part of hell.

“Did the prisoner really fall down these stairs?” I asked.

Dietrich hesitated.

“I won’t tell you told me. But I really need to know if this confession is on the level. For the sake of the Leader. You see, if Johann Brandner didn’t kill Dr. Flex, then the real murderer is still running around Berchtesgaden. Just imagine if he decided to shoot someone else. That could really blow out Hitler’s candles.”

“He was pushed. By Major Högl.”

“Good lad. I thought as much.”

“Sir. Can I ask you something?”

“Anything you like. But you’ll probably have to listen hard to understand the answer with this jaw. I’d make a lousy ventriloquist.”

“Major Högl says the other two prisoners we have down here are to be shot. On Captain Neumann’s orders. And that I’m to command the firing squad. I don’t know what to say to them. I’d rather not do it, really. I’ve never commanded a firing squad and I’m not quite sure what to do.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Lieutenant. I imagine the orders will have to be checked with Berlin. Which could take some time.”

“They already were. Colonel Rattenhuber sent a telex asking Prinz Albrechtstrasse for confirmation and General Heydrich said we’re to shoot them first thing tomorrow morning and then send the bodies back to Austria.”

“Then I shall want to send a telex myself,” I said. “To ask the general if he’ll change his mind. Can you help me do that?”

“Willingly. It’s not that I’m questioning my orders, you understand. It’s just that it doesn’t seem right somehow, to shoot our own men.”

“Just for the record, Lieutenant, we’ve been shooting our own men and worse, since 1933.”

Thirty or forty meters down into the bowels of the earth was a low square corridor that led to a couple of damp, wooden-floored cells, and an empty kennel for a guard dog, which was where we found Johann Brandner, naked and in a bad way; he was thinner than a pipe cleaner and just as white, with a couple of large bruises on his face, one under each eye, and a broken nose that was still encrusted with blood. But I didn’t need to speak to him. It was immediately plain that Brandner was weak from lack of food and clearly belonged in hospital. He could hardly stand, which wasn’t made any easier by the height of the kennel. We fetched him out and helped him to drink some water.

“Please,” he whispered. “I’ve told you everything.”

“Look, I’m going to get you out of here. Just be patient.”

Brandner looked at me fearfully, as if he suspected this was a trick and I would hit him if he now confirmed that his previous confession had been false. I fed a cigarette into his mouth and one into my own. Smoking is easy with a suspected broken jaw; it’s all in the lips.

“No, no,” he said. “I really did kill Flex. I shot him on the terrace of the Berghof, with a rifle.”

I nodded. “Remind me how many shots you fired. One or two?”

“I only needed to fire once. I used to be a marksman in the army, you see. And it wasn’t a difficult shot, from a window in the Villa Bechstein. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“What kind of a rifle did you use?”

“A bolt-action Mauser.”

“The Karabiner 98? With a three-power Voigtländer sight?”

“That’s right. Good rifle, that.”

“All right,” I said. “I believe you. By the way, why were you in hospital?”

“I went there after I was released from Dachau. I was suffering from malnutrition.” He took a drag of the cigarette and smiled weakly. “Please don’t send me back there.”

“I won’t.” It was an evasive, cowardly answer, I knew, but I had no desire to add to Brandner’s woes.

“What is going to happen to me, sir?”

“I have no idea,” I said, even though I had a good idea. It wasn’t so long since the Gestapo in Stuttgart had arrested Helmut Hirsch for his part in a plot intended to destabilize the Reich that, perhaps, had included shooting some low-level Nazi bureaucrat — someone like Karl Flex. There had been very little evidence against Hirsch other than his own confession, but that certainly didn’t stop the Nazis from proceeding with his prosecution. Soon after his arrest he’d been transferred to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. And I could easily see how Brandner’s confession might become the basis of a larger conspiracy that could justify a few more arrests and, eventually, executions, too. The Nazis had a morbid taste for the guillotine that was the equal of the revolutionary tribunal during the French Reign of Terror.

I sneezed, which was agony as far as my face was concerned, and for a minute I closed my eyes until I had processed the pain. My own head felt like someone had tried to cut it off with a butter knife.

“It wasn’t us that did that, was it?” asked a voice. “Smacked you on the head?” The two cells underneath the Türken were occupied by the Gestapo men from Linz who’d both come to the barred windows to listen to my conversation with Brandner. But given what I now knew about the fate that was planned for them, I hardly wanted to speak to either man.

“Someone else,” I said. “It’s been that kind of day.”

“Looks like your jaw might be broken,” said one. “Best thing you can do? Take off that cheap Raxon around your neck and use it like a bandage, under your trap and over the top of your head. You’ll look like a prick, of course, but you should be used to that, and it won’t hurt quite as much. If you see a pill Jesus, he won’t do much more than bandage it up anyway and give you some painkillers. I know what I’m talking about. This won’t surprise you but I’ve broken a few jaws in my time. Fixed a few, too. Before I joined the Gestapo I was a corner man for Max Schmeling. And the quicker you do it, and the tighter you do it, the better.”

It sounded like he was having me on but I took off my tie and tied a nice bow on top of my head and a few minutes later my head looked like the last Christmas present in the orphanage. I put my hat back on, which made me look a little less ridiculous, perhaps, but only just. And he was right; it did feel a little better.

“Thanks,” I said through my teeth.

“Hey, Commissar Gunther,” said the other man — the one I’d stabbed with the piece of glass. “What’s going to happen to us ? You can’t keep us here. Kaltenbrunner isn’t going to appreciate that if he finds out. But if you let us go now we won’t tell him. We’ll drive quietly back to Linz and it’ll be like this never happened. We’ll tell him we had a car accident or something.”