Prussian Blue Read online

  “I know the feeling,” said Kaspel.

  “If it is a clue, it’s not much of one. You’ll find dead or dying drones almost everywhere around these parts in the autumn months. Behind the curtains. Usually somewhere warm.”

  “I found two just the other day in my towel cupboard,” confessed Ambros. “I reckon they’d been asleep in there for months.”

  “Perfectly harmless, of course,” said Hayer. “They can’t actually sting you. Drones don’t have a sting, just sexual organs. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.”

  “Actually, sir, you’ve been an enormous help.” I had the strong feeling that this was not what he wanted to hear, and I ladled it on a bit. “Hasn’t he, Hermann?”

  “Yes, sir. An enormous help.”

  Hayer smiled thinly. “I don’t see how.”

  “Perhaps. But that’s my job, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Did you know Dr. Flex, Herr Hayer? You didn’t say.”

  “I had some dealings with him, yes,” he answered stiffly.

  “Might I ask what those dealings were?”

  “They were in relation to the sale of my house to the deputy chief of staff.”

  “Am I right in assuming that you didn’t want to sell?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And what happened? Exactly.”

  “They made me an offer and eventually I agreed to sell my house. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t mind, that’s all I want to say about it, Commissar.”

  “Come on, Herr Hayer, it’s common knowledge that you weren’t very happy about it. Did Karl Flex threaten you?”

  Peter Hayer leaned back in his chair and silently regarded a shelf full of books on beekeeping. Next to them was an old print of some medieval beekeepers, their faces covered with what looked like basket-woven masks.

  “At least that’s what I’ve been told,” I said. “From what I’ve heard he liked to throw his weight around. Pissed a lot of people off. Seems as if he had that bullet coming, by popular demand.” The ornithologist was looking at his fingernails, his face about as inscrutable as the three medieval beekeepers in the print on his wall. “Look, Herr Hayer, I’m a city boy. I don’t much like the mountains. And I don’t much like Bavaria. All I care about is that I catch the man who pulled the trigger on Flex so that I can go home to Berlin. I’m not in the Gestapo and I’m not about to report people who talk out of turn. I say quite a lot that’s out of turn myself. Isn’t that so, Hermann?”

  “He’s not even in the Nazi Party,” Kaspel said.

  “So let’s just be straight here. Karl Flex was a bastard. One of several bastards employed to do Bormann’s dirty work in Obersalzberg. Isn’t that right?”

  “He didn’t just threaten me,” said Hayer. “He ordered some men to remove my front and back doors. In the middle of winter. My wife was expecting at the time. So I had no choice but to sell. The house was worth twice what I was paid for it. Anyone will tell you that.”

  Geiger and Ambros were murmuring their agreement.

  “The house was demolished, immediately after I’d vacated it. My grandfather built that house. It was one of several that used to be where the local Theater Hall is now. In Antenberg. The one they built to show films and other entertainment for the local workers. I sometimes go there just to be reminded of the view from my old house.” He glanced at his watch. “As a matter of fact, we’re all going there tonight.”

  “Tell me what happened after you were obliged to sell,” I said.

  “There’s nothing much to tell. After that, Dr. Flex put an advertisement in the Berchtesgadener Anzeiger informing readers about what had happened to me and announcing that anyone else who resisted appropriation would be treated as an enemy of the state and sent to Dachau.”

  “When was this?”

  “February 1936. So. As you can see, I’ve had three years to get used to the idea that I don’t live up here anymore. No, now I live down in the town. In Berchtesgaden. If I had been going to shoot Flex, I think I would have done it back then, when my blood was hot about it.”

  “It takes a cool head to make an accurate shot.”

  “Then that lets me out. I never was much of a shot.”

  “I can vouch for that, Commissar,” said Ambros. “Peter’s a terrible shot. He can barely hit a mountainside with the shotgun, let alone the rifle.”

  “What about Johann Brandner? The local photographer who fell foul of Bormann. He’s a good shot.”

  “He’s in Dachau,” said Ambros.

  “Actually he was released a couple of weeks ago and is living in Salzburg.”

  “Sensible of him,” said Geiger. “To stay away from here. I expect people in Berchtesgaden would be too afraid to give him work now.”

  “Anyone think he could have shot Flex?”

  “No one’s seen him,” said Hayer.

  “He was a better shot than he was a photographer,” said Ambros. “That’s all I’ll say.”

  “You know, now I come to think of it, Herr Commissar,” said Geiger, “I’m almost certain that the poacher’s rifle I gave to Major Högl was a Mannlicher carbine. With a telescopic sight. Perhaps you should ask him about it. Or for that matter, ask him who shot Dr. Flex.”

  “You might even find that they were both sweet on the same whore from the P-Barracks,” added Ambros. “Then again, be careful how you ask that question. Our Major Högl was in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry.”

  “So? I wouldn’t have thought that’s so unusual around here.”

  “He was a noncommissioned officer. A sergeant. And by all accounts his orderly in the Sixteenth was a man named Adolf Hitler.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  April 1939

  After leaving the Landlerwald we stopped in the village of Buchenhohe, outside the Leader’s Territory, to search Flex’s house. Like everywhere else in Obersalzberg there was no one abroad or on the streets that I could see. Possibly the people were all huddled indoors keeping warm, listening to the BBC and holding their breath while we waited to find out if there would be war. Nobody, including me, could quite believe that the British and the French might be prepared to fight for the Poles, whose Sanation government was no more democratic than the government of Germany. All wars seem to start for all the wrong reasons and I didn’t suppose this one—nobody doubted that Hitler wasn’t prepared to call the British bluff—would be any different.

  The house itself was made of wood and stone, and was sited close to a curious little gray church that was nearly all sloping roof and squat steeple; it looked like a Big Bertha—a forty-two-centimeter heavy howitzer we’d used to destroy the Belgian forts at Liège, Namur, and Antwerp. It was quite out of keeping with the Bavarian quaintness of Buchenhohe. But the idea of firing an eight-hundred-kilogram shell at the Berghof was not an unattractive one, and well within a giant howitzer’s twelve-kilometer range. That really was a prayer to send up more than once a day.

  “Most of the RSD officers employed at the Berghof live here or at Klaushohe,” said Kaspel. “Myself included. And quite a few of the engineers from P&Z. With the major difference that the majority of these houses were purpose-built. No one here had their house bought by compulsory purchase. At least nobody that I know of.”

  “How do you stand it here after Berlin?” I asked. “It’s like being trapped inside an endless Leni Riefenstahl movie.”

  “You get used to it.”

  Kaspel parked the car on a postage stamp of a driveway in front of a stone-arch doorway that was beneath a heavy black wooden balcony. Friedrich Korsch was there to greet us. Using a car borrowed from the Villa Bechstein, he’d driven the long way round to Buchenhohe, via the main road through Berchtesgaden, and was now peering in through the window. Hermann Kaspel had brought the house keys found in the dead man’s pockets, but it quickly becam
e apparent that we wouldn’t need them.

  “Someone’s been here already, boss,” said Korsch. “Unless the cleaner didn’t come today and they had a wild party last night, it looks as if this place has been burgled.”

  Kaspel opened the front door, which was no longer locked. I stopped to take note of a piece of string hanging out of the letterbox and then followed Kaspel inside. Flex’s books and ornaments were strewn everywhere. There was even some house dust still floating in the air as if a gorilla had just finished shaking an outsized snow globe.

  “I don’t think they’ve been gone for very long,” I said, clearing my throat of dust.

  “Maybe we should wait for the fingerprints people,” said Korsch.

  “What’s the point? On Hitler’s mountain it’s bound to be someone that Flex knew, whose fingerprints were already here before they turned the place over.”

  On the floor was a silver salver, and on the table in the kitchen, a ten-mark note. “It certainly wasn’t money and valuables they were after,” I said. “Whatever it was, I’m guessing they didn’t find it.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Kaspel as we wandered from room to room.

  “Because there’s so much mess,” said Korsch. “Usually when people find what they’re looking for, they stop throwing things around.”

  “Maybe it just took them a while to find it. Whatever it might be.”

  “When you create this much havoc, it actually makes it more difficult to find something,” said Korsch. “And there’s always one room that’s left untouched if they do find what they want. But here it looks like they were desperate. And short of time. And they probably went away empty-handed. Which is good for us. Because that means we might be more successful than they were.”

  “How do you work that out?” asked Kaspel.

  “Because we’re the law and we don’t mind if anyone sees us in here. And because we’re not in a hurry.”

  “There’s something else,” I said. “None of the drawers have been opened but the furniture has been moved around quite a bit. Things were knocked over and broken when the furniture was moved. And when the pictures were removed from the walls. It’s as if they were looking for something larger. Something you might hide behind a sideboard or a picture.”

  “A safe, perhaps?” Korsch picked up a polished rosewood humidor that was still full of Havana cigars.

  “A safe, probably,” I said. “The list of Flex’s possessions included a set of house keys that we now have. And a key on a gold chain that was around his neck, and which we think Dr. Brandt might have stolen. Might that have been the key to a safe? A safe someone knew of? Someone who knew not to bother with the house keys, perhaps because they already had another set. Or knew where one was. Which would explain the piece of string hanging out of the letterbox. There was probably a door key on the end of that. I don’t suppose you noted a manufacturer’s name on the missing key, did you, Hermann?”

  “I didn’t write one down,” said Kaspel. “But I’m pretty sure it was an Abus.”

  “Abus make padlocks,” I said. “Not safes.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Kaspel.

  “I imagine our burglar didn’t know it, either. But I’ll still bet my pension it’s a safe he was looking for. There isn’t one wall in here that hasn’t been exposed and examined. By the way, where does Dr. Brandt live?”

  “Here. In Buchenhohe. A couple of hundred meters away. Close to the Larosbach river.”

  “So he’d have had plenty of opportunity, then.”

  “He could easily have come straight here after the autopsy,” said Kaspel.

  I went into the kitchen again. In the corner was a white metal cabinet—an Electrolux cold cabinet—and because I didn’t know anyone who owned one, I opened it up to find several bottles of good Mosel, champagne, some butter, eggs, a liter of milk, and a large tin of beluga caviar.

  “Flex liked expensive things, didn’t he? All those gold trinkets in his pockets. Cigars. Caviar. Champagne.”

  Meanwhile, Kaspel collected a bottle of bright yellow liquid off the dresser. “Nothing expensive about this,” he said. “It’s neo-Ballistol.”

  “Foot care and gun care,” I said. “Because no one else will.”

  “What’s neo-Ballistol?” asked Korsch.

  “It’s an oil,” I said. “In the trenches, we used Ballistol on our feet and on our guns. I’m not sure which of them it was better for.”

  “Not just our feet,” said Kaspel. “Lip balm, disinfectant, digestive problems, and a universal home remedy. Some people swear by this stuff. But it’s been banned up here on the mountain since 1934 when Hitler was poisoned with Ballistol. No one knows if he took too much of his own volition, or someone else gave him too much in his tea. Which is what he likes to drink.”

  “I’ll remember that when I invite him round with the intention of poisoning him.”

  “Either way, Brandt sent the Leader to hospital, and everyone in Obersalzberg was ordered by Bormann to get rid of their personal supply or risk imprisonment.”

  “Everyone except Karl Flex,” said Korsch.

  “How is it for heart palpitations?”

  I swept some books off the sofa, sat down, and lit up a Turkish 8, which was my own universal panacea; tobacco and a spoonful of schnapps are two household substances that are almost impossible to abuse, at least in my own self-medicating experience. I glanced at my watch and calculated that it was now thirty-six hours since I’d slept in a bed. My hands were trembling like I had a palsy and my knee was bouncing up and down as if I were the subject of an amusing medical experiment by Luigi Galvani. I rubbed my hand across my face, waited in vain for the nicotine to calm my nerves, and then decided that what I really needed was a shave. I wandered into Flex’s bathroom and looked in the cabinet mirror. The stubble on my chin was beginning to look like an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. I found a brush, some soap, and a good sharp Solingen razor made by Dovo, which I honed for a minute on a thick leather strop. Then I took off my coat and my jacket and started to lather up.

  “You’re going to shave?” asked Korsch. “In here?”

  “It’s a bathroom, isn’t it?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure. Carving my own face with a razor helps me to think. It’s a chance to see things differently. Who knows? Maybe it will help me to stop my hand shaking.”

  But while I shaved, I talked: “So far what we’ve got is a tall man with half his brains blown out who nobody liked except Martin Bormann. Which isn’t saying very much, since most of Bormann’s affection is clearly reserved for Adolf Hitler and Frau Bormann. That lady probably thinks her husband shits ice cream but I’m not so sure she isn’t being sold short. One way or another he’s made a lot of enemies. Him and the minions he employed to do his dirty work. One of those minions was called Karl Flex and probably there were lots of people who wanted him dead. Because it was a lot safer to kill Flex than it was to kill Martin Bormann, someone who found out about yesterday’s meeting at the Berghof decided to take advantage of Rolf Müller’s trip to the doctor to take a shot at Flex from the roof of the Villa Bechstein. Maybe it was even Rolf Müller, although I doubt it. What’s even clearer is that almost anyone else on the Berghof terrace might just as easily have satisfied the assassin as a target. Even if he’d missed Karl Flex—and we know he missed four times—he’d have hit someone hateful to folk around these parts.

  “You know, I never much liked Bavarians until I came to Berchtesgaden and realized how many Bavarians there are who don’t much like the Nazis, and for even better reasons than the familiar ones I have. What makes it so funny to an old social democrat like me is that security up here is supposed to be tighter than my hatband. But in fact it would seem the locals can come and go as they please in the Leader’s Territory on account of how they know all the old salt mine tunnels better than they know t
heir wives’ gynecology. And if some of them weren’t mad enough already about Bormann taking their houses from them, they’re even more ill-tempered since the supply of the magic potion dried up. Maybe they need that stuff to pull those twelve-hour shifts. Maybe that’s why they shot someone from P&Z. Maybe it’s a message from the construction workers’ union.

  “We also know that Flex was taking a cut from the girls in the P-Barracks in return for which he gave one of them, Renata Prodi, a dose of jelly, which required everyone there to take Protargol. Maybe that’s how he afforded his lifestyle. Anyway, that girl is now missing, possibly dead. Also involved with the girls from P-Barracks was Dr. Brandt, who seems to have made himself responsible for protecting Flex’s posthumous reputation in that he’s the chief suspect in the theft of a number of Flex’s personal effects. Some Protargol. Some Pervitin. A key on a chain. A notebook with some names in it. Which would also make him the chief suspect in this burglary. You steal one thing, you’ll steal another. Very possibly Dr. Brandt also carried out an abortion on Renata Prodi, who may have been carrying Flex’s child. This leaves me with an interesting investigative dilemma. Because it’s going to be damn difficult to question Dr. Brandt about any of this on account of the fact that Hitler and Göring were the principal guests at his wedding. If I so much as accuse him of not telling me the right time of day I’ll be on the next bus to Dachau.

  “We have one chief suspect: Johann Brandner. The local photographer who was sent to Dachau when he objected to having to sell his business premises to Martin Bormann. The evidence is only circumstantial, but the circumstances are these: Salzburg is just forty minutes away by car; he’s a former sharpshooter with a Jäger battalion; he could have come down to Berchtesgaden, fired the shots, and gone home again without anyone even registering he was ever here. How about it, Friedrich? Any word from the Salzburg Gestapo?”