Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“And even if Hitler did ever complain about it, then he could blame everything on Flex and the other men running these schemes at one remove.” The more I thought about Gerdy’s idea, the more I realized it wasn’t just possible, it was probable. “Yes, that might work. In fact, that might work very well.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, this is what I call a proper racket,” I said. “Let’s face it. Only the most fanatical Nazi actually wants to go and fight in Poland. Not with the possibility of the Soviet Union and the French coming in on the Polish side. That would put us right back to 1914. A war on two fronts. Stay out of the army, stay alive — you don’t have to be Leibniz to understand that kind of equation.”

I sipped the coffee and nodded. Now that she’d mentioned it, the racket seemed blindingly obvious. Who wouldn’t want to pay money to keep their eldest son or a beloved nephew out of the army?

“Clever girl.” I grinned at her. “You know, I really think you’ve put your finger on it, Professor. There are hundreds of names on Karl Flex’s list. And not just here in Berchtesgaden, but also in every town between here and Munich. This racket is being operated right across Bavaria.”

“Almost fifteen hundred,” said Gerdy. “I counted them.”

“Given the strong possibility of a war in Europe this year, a racket like this one would be worth a lot of money. According to the ledger, each of them is paying the equivalent of almost a hundred reichsmarks a year, so that’s a hundred and fifty thousand reichsmarks. And all of it going into the accounts of Martin Bormann and his collectors.”

“But what’s the point of it if you can just charge a new Savonnerie carpet to the government?”

“Because at any moment the whole gravy train might just come off the rails. Even the Lord of Obersalzberg has to prepare for a rainy day. To have some cash salted away for his possible exile. And on the basis of these numbers, there’s plenty of cash to be made from this particular cow.”

“If it’s true, then you should certainly take this to Albert Bormann,” said Gerdy.

“If it’s true? It has to be true.”

“I suppose so.”

“There’s no other possible explanation. You don’t think it is true?”

“It certainly looks that way, yes, but — look, you’ve got a persuasive argument. But proof needs more than that. It needs real evidence. Hard evidence.”

“You’re right. It’s been so long since we bothered with that kind of thing in the police that I’d almost forgotten how it works. To prove this to Albert Bormann’s satisfaction I need to lean on someone who will go on the record. A witness. One of the names on Flex’s B list.” I ran my forefinger down the names in the ledger. “This fellow, for example. Hubert Waechter, from Maximilianstrasse, here in Berchtesgaden. There’s a local Nazi lawyer with the same surname at this address. I imagine it means that the father has paid to keep his son out of the army. Very sensible of him. And rather loathsome. I had dealings with him on another matter. But I’d still like to find out what these other lists mean. The P list and the Ag list. What are those rackets about?

“One of these names appears on all three lists in this ledger. The B list, the P list, and the Ag list. What’s more, it’s a name I’ve come across before. On a bogus suicide note. Something in my bones makes me fancy him for the murder of Karl Flex. I don’t think the B list gives me a clear motive for murder. But maybe the P list and the Ag list will provide me with one. Who knows? It’s just possible that I might hit two rabbits with one bullet. That I can nail Flex’s murderer and Martin Bormann at the same time.”

I finished my coffee and rubbed my hands.

“So let’s go and see if we can persuade this particular Fritz to spill his guts.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I told you. I’ll lean on him. Bormann’s not the only man who can throw his weight around the trench.”

“In which case you really don’t need me, Gunther. I’m not so heavy around this time of night. Not in these shoes.”

I took her little hand and explored it for a moment before I fetched it to my lips. Gerdy blushed a little but didn’t snatch her hand away. She just let me kiss it, fondly, as if she knew how much I appreciated her help and knew what it was costing her to help me like this. Maybe she wasn’t the kind of woman I thought she was. Women never are what you think they are. It’s one of the things that makes them interesting. Either way, I liked her. Admired her, even. I wasn’t about to do anything about that, though. With so many Nazis on the scene, courting her would have been courting disaster. Like wooing a nun in the Sistine Chapel. Besides, Gerdy Troost was in love with someone else, that much was clear. I was just mad enough to think I stood a quarter of a chance of bringing down Martin Bormann, but not mad enough to think I could compete with Adolf Hitler in the affections of a woman who still clearly believed he was a demigod.

She smiled. “I’ll drive you back to the Villa Bechstein, where you can pick up your friend Korsch and your car. But when you’re ready to speak to Albert, come and fetch me. Any time. I’ll only be reading, probably.”

For a moment I pictured her reading Hitler’s book again, and winced.

“I don’t sleep much when I’m here in Obersalzberg,” she added. “No one does. Only Barbarossa.”

“Maybe I should speak to him, too.”

“You can try.”

“Take him for a drive in your car. That should wake him up a bit. In fact, I’d be surprised if he ever slept again.”

I was always a keen reader and learned at my mother’s knee. My favorite book was Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz . I had a copy at home in Berlin in a locked drawer because it was a forbidden book, of course. The Nazis had burned a great many of Döblin’s books in 1933 but every so often I’d get out my own signed copy of his most famous work and read bits aloud, to remind myself of the good old Weimar Republic. But the fact is, I’ll read anything. Anything at all. I’ve read everything from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Karl May. Several years ago I even read Adolf Hitler’s book My Struggle . I found it predictably combative but here and there I also thought it was perceptive, although only about the war. A critic I’m not, but in my humble opinion there’s no book that’s so bad that you can’t get something from it, even that one. For example, Hitler said that words build bridges into unexplored regions. As it happens, a detective does much the same thing, only sometimes he can end up wishing he’d left those regions alone. Hitler also said that great liars are great magicians. A good detective is also a kind of magician, one who is sometimes capable of making those suspects he has assembled theatrically in the library utter a collective gasp as he works his revelatory magic. But that wasn’t about to happen here, more’s the pity. Another thing Hitler said was that it’s not truth that matters, but victory. Now, I know there are plenty of cops who feel the same way but usually the truth is the best victory I can think of. I could go on in this vein but it boils down to just this: as Friedrich Korsch drove us to Johann Diesbach’s address in Kuchl, I was thinking a lot about Gerdy Troost reading that damn book in her rooms at the Berghof, and I couldn’t help but reflect that since arriving in Berchtesgaden I’d had quite a struggle myself. Most murder investigations are a struggle but this one had been especially so because it’s rare, even in Germany, that someone tries to kill you during the course of your inquiry. I hadn’t yet worked out what I was going to do about Dr. Brandt but I wasn’t about to let him get away with the murder of Hermann Kaspel. Not if I could help it. There had to be something I could do. Now, that really was going to be a struggle. And I said as much to Korsch as the car labored up the mountain road. He listened carefully and said, “You want my opinion, boss?”