Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

The offices of Obersalzberg Administration were ten minutes from the center, on Gebirgsjägerstrasse in Berchtesgaden-Strub, a short distance past the Adolf Hitler Youth Hostel and the local army barracks, which was home, Gerdy told me, to a whole regiment of mountain infantry, just in case the RSD up in Obersalzberg proved insufficient for Hitler’s defense. The office, part of a complex of impressive new buildings, was dominated by an enormous floodlit stone lion, which made a change from an eagle, I suppose; even so, the lion looked like it was doing something unspeakable to a ball finial, which was the same unspeakable thing the Nazis were doing to Germany. Gerdy Troost drew up in front of the OA building in a squeal of tires and stepped out of the Wanderer. There were no lights in the office.

“Good,” she said. “There’s no one here.”

She unlocked the front door with a large black key, switched on a light, threw aside her fur stole, and ushered me inside, where everything was white walls, shiny brass locks, blond oak, and gray stone floors. Everything smelled of recently planed wood and new carpets; even the telephones were the very latest combination-rotary-dial models from Siemens. On the walls were lots of framed plans and drawings, photographs of Hitler, portraits of long-forgotten Germans, and, on the largest wall, a big print of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man , which is beloved of fascists everywhere, as it shows the blend of art and science and proportion, although to me it always looked like a naked policeman trying to direct traffic around Potsdamer Platz. Under a coffered ceiling, double-sized windows ensured there was plenty of light during the day, and copies of The Architectural Digest lay on almost every table in the public areas. The dog ran ahead and disappeared upstairs to practice its salute. Gerdy showed me her office and what was on the drawing board, but by now I was less interested in her work than in the gray filing cabinets that were grouped in a large room on the ground floor and, in particular, those cabinets that housed the personnel files. I tugged at the drawer of one; it was locked, but that wasn’t going to deter me now.

“I don’t have the keys to those, I’m afraid,” said Gerdy. “So we’ll have to wait until we can speak to Hans Haupner in the morning.”

I grunted, but the Boker knife I carried was already in my hand. That and the slim piece of smooth, curved spatula-like metal I’d found on the ground where Hermann Kaspel’s car had been parked in Buchenhohe; it made a very useful jimmy. With these simple tools I set about breaking into the drawer.

“You can’t do that,” said Gerdy fearfully, even as I was able to prise open the cabinet with my makeshift jimmy and slide the lock catch to the side with the knife. My breaking and entering wasn’t quite up to the standard of the Krauss brothers but it was good enough.

“It looks like I already did,” I said, hauling open the drawer.

“So that’s why you wanted to come here. To get into these filing cabinets.”

I laid my tools on top of the cabinet. She picked these up and looked at them as I started to riffle through the files.

“Do you always go equipped for burglary?”

“Listen, when Roger Ackroyd gets murdered, someone’s supposed to do something about it. Even if Roger Ackroyd was scum, someone is supposed to do something about it. That’s one of the more important ways you know that you’re living in a civilized society. At least it used to be. Hercule Poirot is supposed to make sure that Roger Ackroyd’s killer doesn’t get away with it. Well, right now, that Hercule Poirot’s me until someone else says different. People lie to me, people try to kill me, people punch me in the face, people tell me I shouldn’t ask questions about things that are none of my business, and me and my broken jaw just have to find a way around all that in the best way I can. Sometimes that includes a gun and a hat, and sometimes a knife and a piece of scrap metal. I never much was one for a magnifying glass and a briar pipe. But any day now I expect the Murder Commission to close up shop and for me to be made redundant and for General Heydrich — he’s my boss — to say, ‘Hey Gunther, don’t bother doing that shit anymore. It’s not important who killed Roger Ackroyd because we killed him, see? And we’d rather our fellow Germans didn’t know about this, if you don’t mind.’ And that will be all right, too, because at least then I’ll know I’m no longer living in a civilized society, so it won’t matter. Because we will be living in a state of barbarism, and nothing much will matter anymore. I’ll be able to go home and tend my window box and lead the kind of quiet, respectable life I always wanted to enjoy. If I sound cynical and bitter it’s because I am. Trying to be an honest cop in Germany is like playing croquet in no-man’s-land.”

“That’s a nice speech. Sounds like you’ve given it before.”

“Only in front of my bathroom mirror. That’s the only audience I trust these days.”

Gerdy Troost put the knife down but kept hold of the spatula, weighing it in her hand as if she enjoyed the feel of it and smiling a wry sort of smile. “But this tells me that you’re selling yourself short, Gunther. I doubt you could ever be as respectable as you like to make out. No one truly respectable would keep something like this in his top pocket.”

“You mean you know what that is?”

“Yes. Most women would. Most women and probably most doctors, too. But even for them it’s hardly done to keep this next to your favorite fountain pen and Grandpa’s old cigarette case.”

“It’s a medical instrument?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I keep away from doctors if I can.” I smiled. “And I don’t know anything about women.”

“Well, it’s hardly scrap metal. It’s a dilator. It’s used to widen and lengthen a woman’s private parts during an examination.”

“And here was me thinking that was done with forefinger and thumb. I don’t mean to sound excited. Only the contents of my pockets don’t usually come with such a fascinating history.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“Used by who? What kind of doctor?” I knew the answer to this, but I just wanted to have it confirmed by someone else. I was already thinking about Dr. Karl Brandt’s previous existence, sterilizing women considered racially or intellectually inferior — to say nothing of his more recent work terminating pregnancies for the unfortunate women of P-Barracks, when he wasn’t devoting himself to the Leader’s health.

“A gynecologist. An obstetrician.”

“Where would that kind of doctor normally keep such an instrument?”

“It’s been a while since I, er — but in a little wallet or cloth wrap of medical instruments, probably. Somewhere cleaner than your inside pocket, I hope.”

“And might that wallet include something sharp? Like a curette?”

“Almost certainly.”

I had a vague memory of seeing just such a cloth wallet on the desk in Brandt’s makeshift surgery at the theater in Antenberg. And now that she’d explained what it was, the scene was easily pictured: Karl Brandt had got underneath Hermann Kaspel’s car, taken out his medical instruments, used a curette to cut the car’s brakes — probably the same curette he’d used to cut open Karl Flex’s corpse — and the dilator had slipped out of the wallet in the dark. He probably didn’t even know it was gone until long after I’d found it lying in a pool of hydraulic fluid outside Kaspel’s house in Buchenhohe. Of course, it was one thing knowing this; it was quite another accusing an SS doctor of murder when Adolf Hitler had been the guest of honor at his wedding. That wasn’t ever going to happen, and my nice speech about the murder of Roger Ackroyd sounded even more hollow now than it had before. They’d certainly shoot me long before they ever allowed Karl Brandt to go to the guillotine. It was for this reason I kept my new discovery to myself; the last thing I wanted was for Gerdy Troost to air an accusation like that over the tea table at the Kehlstein.*