Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

I love driving, but France is a big country and its endless roads hold no pleasure for me. Driving is fine if you’re alongside Grace Kelly and in possession of a nice blue convertible Jaguar on a picturesque mountain road with a picnic basket in the trunk. But for most people, motoring in France is dull, and the only thing that stops it from being routine are the French, who are among the worst drivers in Europe. Not without some justification, we used to joke that there were more Frenchmen killed by bad motorists during the fall of France in the summer of 1940 — as the French desperately tried to escape the German advance — than there were by the Wehrmacht. For this reason I tried to keep my mind on my driving but, in almost inverse proportion to the relentless monotony of the road ahead, my mind soon began to wander like a lost albatross. It’s said that the prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully and I’m sure that’s true; however, I’m here to report that the actual experience of being hanged, and the lack of oxygen that a noose tightening against the two carotid arteries occasions, affects a man’s thinking in all sorts of adverse ways. It had certainly affected mine. Perhaps that was Mielke’s intention: to make me more dumbly compliant. If so, it hadn’t worked. Dumb compliance was never my strong suit. My head was full of mist and clouded with what had been long forgotten, as if the present was now obfuscated by the past. But that wasn’t quite it, either. No, it was more like everything below my line of sight was shrouded in mist and, beyond the desire to return to Germany, I could not see where I had to go and what I had to do. It was as if I were the man in that picture by Caspar David Friedrich and I was a wanderer above a sea of fog — insignificant, deracinated, uncertain of the future, contemplating the futility of it all, and, perhaps, the possibility of self-destruction.

Old and once familiar faces reappeared in the far distance. Snatches of Wagnerian music echoed between half-glimpsed mountaintops. There were smells and fragments of conversation. Women I’d once known: Inge Lorenz and Hildegard Steininger, Gerdy Troost. My old partner Bruno Stahlecker. My mother. But, gradually, as I left the French Riviera behind and headed determinedly north toward West Germany, I started to recall in detail what I’d been prompted to remember by Korsch. It was all his fault — reminiscing like that, in what was obviously, in retrospect, an attempt to put me off my guard. He’d been a decent cop back then. We both were. I thought about the two cases we’d worked together after I’d been drafted back into Kripo on Heydrich’s orders. The second of these cases had been even stranger than the first and I was obliged to investigate just a few months before Hitler invaded Poland. Clearly, as if it were yesterday, I remembered a dark and wintry night in early April 1939, and being driven halfway across Germany in the general’s own Mercedes; I remembered Berchtesgaden, and Obersalzberg, and the Berghof, and the Kehlstein; I remembered Martin Bormann and Gerdy Troost and Karl Brandt and Hermann Kaspel and Karl Flex; and I remembered the Schlossberg Caves and Prussian blue. But most of all I remembered being almost twenty years younger and possessed of a sense of decency and honor I now found almost quaint. For a while back there, I think I sincerely believed I was the only honest man I knew.

“It’s high time they arrested you, Gunther,” said a sharp voice from on high. “There’s no place for lefties like you in this city’s police force.”

I looked up and caught sight of a familiar uniformed figure descending the wide stone stairs like a late arrival at the Leader’s Ball; but if Heidi Hobbin had ever owned a glass slipper she’d have taken it off and stuck the heel in my eye. There weren’t many women in the Berlin police force: Elfriede Dinger — who subsequently married Ernst Gennat, not long before he died — and Police Commissioner Heidi Hobbin, who was also known as Heidi the Horrible, but not because she was ugly — she was actually quite a looker — it was just that she enjoyed bossing men around, mercilessly. At least one of them must have enjoyed it, too, because I later learned that Heidi was the mistress of Kripo boss Arthur Nebe. Dominant women: that’s one particular perversion I’ve never really understood.

“I hope you’re taking him straight to Dachau,” Heidi told the two Gestapo men who were escorting me down the back stairs toward the Police Praesidium’s Dircksenstrasse exit. She was accompanied by an ambitious young district court councilor, a friend of mine from the Ministry of Justice, called Max Merten. “It’s the very least that he deserves.”

After Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in January 1933, I was never what you’d call popular around the Alex. When Bernhard Weiss was purged from the Kripo because he was a Jew it was inevitable that the men from his Murder Commission were always going to be regarded with suspicion by our new Nazi bosses — especially if they were center-left SPD supporters like me. All the same, hers was an easy mistake to have made; even with the Gestapo on their best behavior and summoning me politely — almost — on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders, to their headquarters, they still managed to give the appearance of two men making an arrest. But Heidi didn’t know this and was still laboring under the misapprehension that I was being taken into custody. Considering she was supposed to be a cop, she never was very observant.

Enjoying the prospect of her imminent disappointment, I stopped and touched the brim of my hat. “Kind of you to say so, ma’am,” I said.

Heidi’s eyes narrowed as she regarded me as if I were an unflushed lavatory. Max Merten tipped his bowler hat politely.

“You’re a troublemaker, Gunther,” said Heidi. “And you always have been, with your smart remarks. Quite frankly I have no idea why Heydrich and Nebe believed they needed you back at the Alex in the first place.”

“Someone has to do the thinking around here now that the police dogs have been sacked.”

Merten grinned. It was a joke I’d heard him make on more than one occasion.

“That’s exactly the kind of remark I’m talking about. And which I for one will certainly not miss.”

“Will you tell the commissioner the good news?” I asked one of the Gestapo men. “Or shall I?”

“Commissar Gunther isn’t actually under arrest,” said one of the Gestapo men.

I smiled. “You hear that?”

“What do you mean, ‘not actually’?”

“General Heydrich has summoned him to an urgent meeting in his office at Prinz Albrechtstrasse.”

Heidi’s face fell. “What about?” she asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” said the Gestapo man. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Commissioner. We don’t have time for this. The general doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“That’s right,” I said, and looking at my watch, I tapped it urgently. “We really don’t have time for this. I’ve got an important meeting to attend. With the general. Perhaps later, if there’s time, I’ll drop by your office and tell you what it was he wanted to consult me about. But only if Heydrich thinks it appropriate. You know what he’s like about security and confidentiality. Then again, perhaps you don’t. It’s not everyone he takes into his confidence. By the way, Commissioner Hobbin, where is your office? I’ve forgotten.”

The Gestapo glanced at each other and tried, without success, to suppress a grin. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they had a sense of humor, albeit a dark one, and this was the sort of status-conscious joke that any power-minded Nazi — which was more or less all of them — could understand and appreciate. The young magistrate — he couldn’t have been much more than thirty — Max Merten, was trying harder at not smiling. I winked at him. I liked Max; he was from Berlin-Lichterfelde and at one stage he’d been considering a career in the police, until I talked him out of it.