Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“May I see some identification, please?”

I already had my beer token in my hand, which was right under her substantial breasts. Maybe that’s why she didn’t see it.

“Here.”

“That’s it? This little piece of metal?”

“That’s a warrant disc, lady,” I said, “and I don’t have the time.”

I pushed past the twin Gordian knots that were her bosom and went into the house.

“What’s all this about?” Frau Diesbach closed the front door behind us and wiped her large hands on the white apron she was wearing. She was taller than Friedrich Korsch by more than a head.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. Quite alone.”

We were in a hallway with a flagstone floor, a dark oak sideboard, and, on the whitewashed wall, an old photograph of the even older Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I, who looked a lot like the wiliest animal in the Vienna woods, and another of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. There were several other pictures of a heavily mustached Johann Diesbach in uniform that seemed to indicate he’d been part of the German Sixth Army and a veteran of the Battle of Lorraine, which was one of the very first engagements of the war and generally held to have been so inconclusive that it had helped to create the stalemate of trench warfare that persisted for another four costly years. On his chest was an Iron Cross First Class. Several hunting rifles and shotguns were on a rack beside a woodcut print of a hermit ticking off a group of medieval horsemen for some undisclosed offense: waking him up, probably. Everything smelled strongly of pipe tobacco and since the lady of the house didn’t strike me as an obvious pipe smoker herself, I concluded a man had been there very recently.

“What does your husband do, Frau Diesbach?” I asked.

“We own a small salt mine,” she explained. “In Berchtesgaden. We refine our own high-quality table salt. Which he sells direct to restaurants throughout Germany and Austria.”

“Sounds like a lot of digging,” said Korsch.

“There’s not much digging involved,” she explained. “We use a brine extraction process. Freshwater is fed into the mountain and the nonsoluble components of the rock sink to the bottom. It’s all about pumps and pipelines now, and very scientific.”

“Is he at the mine now?”

“No, he’s away selling gourmet-quality salt to our big customers in Munich, so he could be home very late.”

“Which customers would they be?”

“The head chef at the Kaiserhof.”

I walked into the drawing room and switched on a lamp that appeared to be made of a large rose-colored crystal. On the table next to it were several jars of pink salt. I picked one up. It was full of smaller versions of the table lamp and was the same salt that I’d seen in the lugs of the boot outside.

“I told you, my husband’s not here,” she insisted irritably, and tugged nervously at a piece of dry skin on her lower lip.

“Is this it? Your gourmet-quality salt?”

“That’s what it says on the label.”

“He’s in Munich, you say.”

“Yes. Of course, it’s possible he might stay overnight. If he’s had too much to drink. Having dinner with clients, he often does, I’m afraid. It’s an occupational hazard when you’re offering hospitality.” She lit a cigarette from a silver box with nervous fingers. By now the cleavage between her breasts was shifting like the San Andreas Fault.

“The head chef at the Kaiserhof, Konrad Held,” I lied. “I know him well. I could telephone him if you like and find out if your husband’s still there.”

“It might not be the head chef he’s seeing,” she allowed, tugging at the skin on her lip some more. “But someone else in the hotel kitchen.”

I smiled patiently. You get to know when someone is lying to you. Especially with tits as eloquent as hers. After that it’s just a question of judging the right moment to let them hear that. No one likes being called a liar to his or her face. Least of all in their own home and by the police. I almost felt sorry for the woman; if it hadn’t been for that earlier bit of sarcasm I might have been polite, but as things stood I was more inclined to bully her now, just to hurry things along. An innocent man’s life was at stake, after all. There was a fretted shelf running the length of the drawing room at just above head height and my eyes were already sorting through the books, looking for something to help bring some extra pressure to bear on her, to overcome any more resistance to our questions. Mostly the books were to do with geology, but I’d already seen a couple of titles that might serve my purpose. But for now I ignored them and walked across the drawing room to the wide, redbrick fireplace. Behind a wrought-iron screen, the log fire was still burning quietly; the log was hardly a size you’d have chosen if you’d been on your own. Whoever had built that fire from scratch had done it for a cozy evening made for two. Next to the fire was an armchair and on the chair was a copy of that day’s Völkischer Beobachter . I picked it up, sat down, and laid the paper on the hearth next to an ashtray and a tin of Von Eicken with the lid left off; in the ashtray was a pipe. After a while I picked that up as well and found the cherrywood bowl was still warm — warmer than the fire. It was all too easy to picture the man who had been seated there in front of the fire not half an hour before, puffing his tobacco like a Danube boat captain.

“It’s a nice house you have here,” said Korsch, opening a drawer in the bureau.

Frau Diesbach folded her arms defensively. Probably it helped prevent her from hitting Korsch over the head with the table lamp. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

“Is there much money in table salt then?” he asked, ignoring her remark. Sometimes police work contains the very opposite of a Socratic dialogue: you say one thing, I pretend I didn’t hear it and say another.

“Like anything else, there is if you work hard.”

“I wish that was true,” said Korsch. “There’s certainly not much money in being a policeman. Isn’t that right, boss?”

“Is that what you’re looking for? Money? I assumed you were here to investigate a crime, not commit one.”

Korsch laughed harshly. “She’s a sour one. Must be all that salt, eh, boss?”

“Sounds like it.”

“You should try refining sugar, instead, missus.”

“Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“I told you,” said Korsch, pulling open another drawer provocatively. “We’re looking for your husband.”

“And I told you. He’s not here. And he’s certainly not in that bureau.”

“Lots of people start out trying to be clever with us,” said Korsch. “But it never lasts for very long. The last laugh is usually ours. Isn’t that right, boss?”

I grunted. I didn’t feel much like laughing. Not with my jaw tied up. And certainly not after seeing poor Aneta Husák murdered in cold blood. I wasn’t about to forget that in a hurry. On top of a baby grand piano were some photographs and it wasn’t long before I started to believe that one of these was of the same scholarly-looking young man who had sent us on the wild-goose chase to Luegwinkl. After a while I got up, collected the picture off the polished piano lid, looked at it for a while, and showed it to Korsch who nodded back at me. It was him all right.

“That explains a lot,” he said.

“Who’s this?” I asked Frau Diesbach.

“My son Benno.”

“Good-looking boy, isn’t he?” Korsch was being sarcastic. With his thick glasses, receding chin, and coy expression, Benno Diesbach looked like a real wet paper bag and just the type of sensitive, weedy boy an anxious, doting mother would have wanted kept out of something as rough as the army. My mother had probably felt the same way about me when I was about twelve, assuming she ever felt anything at all.