Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“There’s no way to say this that sounds kind or polite, Frau Diesbach, so I’m just going to say it and then, if you’re sensible and you tell me where he’s gone, I’ll try to help you. Your husband, I can’t help. But there’s no need for you to go the same way. I will catch him and when I do it would look better for you if I could tell my superiors that you cooperated. Even if you didn’t. If you start throwing things at me now and affecting pious outrage, then I tell you frankly I won’t like that at all. Or you. I’m telling you straight that if you don’t cooperate, you’re going to jail. Tonight. The way I see it is that your husband, Johann Diesbach, who was probably full of methamphetamine at the time, shot and killed Karl Flex because Flex gave you a venereal disease.” I placed the Protargol and the Pervitin on the table next to the salt. “Exhibits one and two. Flex had decided he wasn’t satisfied with your husband paying him money to pretend that your son Benno was working for the Obersalzberg Administration in order that he be kept out of the army. He liked you, too, and decided he wanted something other than money. He decided he wanted you in his bed. In return for giving you what you wanted. Unfortunately he also gave you a venereal disease.”

I paused as the tall, handsome woman who’d been about to have a bath sat down heavily and fumbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief. “Good, I’m glad you’re not arguing with this. Because my jaw hurts, as you can probably see, and I really don’t have the energy to argue back. Karl Flex wanted you in his bed and you agreed, because you love your son and getting him into a reserved occupation for a hundred marks a year seemed like the best means of keeping him out of harm’s way. I only met him briefly and he seemed like a good boy. Loyal and, yes, brave, but maybe a little wet behind the ears, and you were right to try to get him deferred from the army because in wartime it’s those young men with the sweetest faces who are usually the first to buy it because they’re always trying to prove that they’re not so wet after all. You agreed to sleep with Flex and he gave you a dose of jelly. And when you complained he referred you to Dr. Brandt, who agreed to help find you a cure, because he’s in on the same mountaintop racket as Flex. But by then you’d given the dose of jelly to your husband, and so he decided to put an end to it all. The whole rotten business. This is why Johann shot him. And good for him. That’s what I say. Karl Flex had it coming with a nice telegram from the Kaiser. If I was married to you, I’d have probably shot him myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have used my friend Udo’s rifle to do it, mind. That was unkind because it left Udo in the frame for Flex’s murder. Although not as unkind as what happened when Udo guessed he’d been measured up for it by his old friend. What did he do? Threaten to tell the police? He must have done, otherwise Johann wouldn’t have gone to poor Udo’s house and shot him, too. You didn’t know about that? It doesn’t matter. Take it from me, suicide it certainly was not. My jaw may be broken, but there’s nothing wrong with my brain. There’s a box of the same ammunition used to blow Udo’s head off in a closet upstairs, as well as a sample of the same hand that wrote the so-called suicide note. As a case of murder it’s a more open-and-shut case than my office door at the Murder Commission in Berlin. You see, I’ve done this kind of thing before, Frau Diesbach. People — not just you, people who should know better because they run the government — they will persist in believing that I don’t know when I’m being lied to. But I do. I’m pretty good at it, too. Lately I’ve had a lot of practice.

“Then, when Criminal Assistant Korsch and I came here tonight, who should we meet on the road but young Benno himself. I recognized him from the photograph on your piano. It was dumb to leave that out for us to see. But you probably didn’t have time to hide it, what with your husband having to say his good-byes in five minutes flat. It was Benno who misdirected us in order to give him enough time to cycle back here and warn his father that the police were on the way, wasn’t it? I figure Johann’s got a good ninety minutes’ start on us now. The question is, which way did he go? Farther into Austria? Or to Germany? Or Italy, perhaps? I want some answers and you’d better make them good ones or it won’t just be you who goes to jail, Frau Diesbach. I figure that when we catch up with him it will be Benno, too. Wasting police time in Germany was always a serious offense, but now we’re obliged to take it personally.”

Frau Diesbach wiped her eyes and then lit another cigarette. I lit one, too, and so did Korsch because we both knew of old that any story sounds better when it’s accompanied with a good smoke. Of course, a lot of the stories that cops hear are all smoke but this one was true; I could tell that straightaway because I could feel a strong twinge in my jaw when she talked. Besides, she was crying in a way that usually accompanies the truth and that you can’t fake unless you’re Zarah Leander and even she prefers not to do the type of crying that involves a lot of heavy nose-blowing; for a woman it’s just not flattering, especially on camera.

“Benno is a good boy but he’s not the army type. Unlike my husband. Who is. Johann’s much tougher than Benno will ever be. And he’s our only son now. You see, Commissar, Benno’s older brother, Dietrich, was in the German navy, and was killed in Spain, during the civil war. Killed in 1937, at the Battle of Malaga, when the Deutschland was attacked by Republican planes. At least, that’s what we were told. I can’t lose another son. Do I have your word that Benno won’t get into trouble?”

“You do. So far it’s only me and my assistant here who know he tried to sell us something from the toy catalog. We can easily forget he even exists.”

She nodded and inhaled fiercely, as if she’d been trying to kill something inside her and when she pulled the cigarette from her lip the dry piece of skin on her lower lip came partly away with it and hung there off her mouth like a tiny cheroot. From time to time she wiped her cheeks clean of tears but after a while there were what looked like two dry riverbeds on her pale face.

“Take a moment,” I said kindly. “Pull yourself together and try to tell us everything.”

Korsch fetched a schooner of something sticky from a bottle on the sideboard and handed it to her. She sucked it down like a hungry cormorant and then handed him the glass, as if soliciting a refill. I nodded at him. Alcohol can be a cop’s best friend in more ways than one; it consoles even when it doesn’t loosen tongues.

“You’re almost right, Commissar Gunther. Karl Flex did sleep with me. Several times. But it wasn’t at all like you said. Karl had taken money from me, not Johann, to keep Benno out of the army. That much is true. Benno is a very sensitive boy and frankly the army would kill him. I make no apology for that. Johann and I disagreed about it, of course. He was furious when he found out about it. He thought the army would make Benno a man. I thought it would make him — dead. After all, everyone suspects a war is coming. With Poland. And if it’s with Poland, it will be with the Russians, too. And then where will we be? But Karl didn’t force me to sleep with him, and it certainly wasn’t conditional on him keeping Benno out of the army. You see, I found a letter from my husband’s mistress, Pony, in his coat pocket. Yes, that’s her name. Don’t ask me how you get a name like Pony. Anyway, Johann was riding her on his business trips to Munich. So I slept with Karl out of revenge, I suppose. One weekend, when Johann was in Munich with Pony, we went to the Hotel Bad Horn on Lake Constance in Karl’s lovely Italian sports car. But what I didn’t know is that it wasn’t just a sweet love letter that Pony had given to Johann, but also a venereal disease. Subsequently he gave it to me. And before I knew it, I’d given it to Karl. We had a big argument about it and in spite of his own indiscretions, Johann got very jealous and swore he would kill Karl. Only I never thought he would actually do it. But you are right about the methamphetamine. Like half of the men on the mountain, Johann is addicted to the stuff. It makes them kind of insane, I think. But the men who work for OA need it just to keep up with Martin Bormann’s insatiable timetable. Only recently the supply of Pervitin ground to a halt. They’re keeping the Pervitin for the army apparently. But then Karl and Brandt started selling it to anyone who had the cash. Which is just the way things work around here these days. I don’t say that Bormann knows about it. But he ought to know about it.”