Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  “After a while you get a sort of tolerance of the magic potion when you take it orally. Takes a while to kick in. When you need the effect to be immediate, it’s best you take it like snuff.”

  There was a knock at the door. It was Arthur Kannenberg. His eyes were bulging a bit more than was usual for him; in that respect they reminded me of his stomach. Hitler might have been a vegetarian and a teetotaler but it was plain Kannenberg liked his sausage and his beer.

  “How’s it going?” he said affably.

  “Good,” I said.

  “Anything you need, Bernie?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “I spoke on the telephone with Peter Hayer, the ornithologist. Like you asked. He’s there now, at the apiary. If you want to speak with him.”

  “Peter Hayer? Sure. Thanks, Arthur.”

  “I suppose you heard everything. That argument between myself and Brückner.”

  “I don’t think we were the only ones, Arthur. But then I suppose you were both aware of that. What’s the big idea? That some of what you said might get back to the Leader without you having to tell him, I suppose. Only you’d better remember, that works two ways.”

  Kannenberg looked sheepish for a moment. “I suppose you know he’s a murderer. Brückner. He served under Colonel Epp, during the Bavarian communist insurrection in 1919. They killed hundreds of people. In Munich and in Berlin. I’ve even heard it said that it was Brückner who commanded the Freikorps men who murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Which is one reason that he’s especially close to Hitler, of course. I mean to say—what’s one more murder for a man like that? I happen to know he has a rifle with a sniper scope at his house in Buchenhohe. You might care to see if it’s still there.”

  “Arthur,” I said patiently. “You really can’t have it both ways. You already told me that Flex was standing next to Brückner when he was shot on the terrace. Remember? Besides, what happened to Luxemburg and Liebknecht? In Berlin they might still think that was murder. But certainly not in any other part of Germany. Least of all this one.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Kannenberg smiled sadly. “But you know, Brückner and Karl Flex, they weren’t exactly what you’d call friends. Brückner threatened to kill him once.”

  “Oh? What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember the exact words. You should ask him about it. But I will say this: his best friend on the mountain used to be Karl Brandt. It was Dr. Brandt who treated Brückner after his car accident. Which is also why Brückner recommended him to Hitler. Brandt owes everything to Brückner. Everything. Not only that, but Brandt is a pretty good shot, by all accounts. His father was a copper with the Mühlhausen Police and showed him how to handle a gun when he was a kid.”

  “They used to be friends, you said? Implying that they aren’t any longer.”

  “Brückner fell out with Dr. Brandt, too. I’m not sure exactly why. But I think because Brandt was into something with Flex.”

  I nodded patiently.

  “Thanks, Arthur, I’ll bear all that in mind.”

  “Just thought I’d mention it.”

  “Duly noted.”

  Kannenberg smiled back at me and then left.

  “What do you make of that, boss?” said Kaspel.

  “Frankly, I’m not surprised, Hermann. In a place like this, where truth is always at a premium, we’re going to hear plenty of good stories. I suppose Neville Chamberlain heard one about the Czechos and I suppose you have to believe what you want to believe. Therein lies the problem, you see; I worry that I’m going to think one of these people actually did it. Not because they did do it, but because I start thinking that someone must be telling the truth.”

  I grabbed my coat and the binoculars and headed toward the door with Kaspel following. Halfway downstairs I stopped for a second to show him the list of names compiled by Bruno Schenk; the last name on the list belonged to the man we were going to see, the Landlerwald’s ornithologist, Peter Hayer.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  April 1939

  It was snowing lightly and there was a party of workers shoveling the stuff off the road along the western perimeter of the Leader’s Territory. They looked pretty sullen about it, too, although I don’t know that there’s any other way to look when you’re shoveling while it’s still snowing.

  “Slow down,” I said, realizing, too late, that I should have been driving: Kaspel had so much meth inside him I was afraid he might have some kind of seizure. I felt a bit high myself. The voices were gone for the moment but I was still buzzing, which seemed only appropriate given where we were going. “I make a bad passenger at the best of times. But I don’t want to get killed while I’m here. Heydrich would never forgive you.”

  Kaspel slowed a little and drove us farther up the mountain toward the Kehlstein, past the Türken Inn on our right, and then Bormann’s house. He pointed out the sights as we went along, which did nothing to make me feel any safer. Meanwhile, I opened the second envelope that had been on my desk, which was from Major Högl, if only to avoid looking at the twisting road ahead.

  “That’s the kindergarten, the greenhouse—Hitler likes his fresh fruit and vegetables—the SS barracks. You can’t see it, but Göring’s house is down there to the left. Naturally it’s the biggest. Then again, so is he.” He pulled up at a small crossroads. “That’s the post office. And next to it the chauffeurs’ quarters, garages for all the official cars, and behind those the Platterhof Hotel, which is still being constructed, of course.”

  “It’s like a small town up here.”

  “Christ only knows what they’re doing underground. Sometimes you can feel the vibration of all the tunneling that’s going on in Obersalzberg and it’s like the Nazis are inside your skull. Of course there are lots of government buildings down in Berchtesgaden as well. Only that tends to be the brother’s territory. Albert Bormann. He’s in charge of the Chancellery and a small group of adjutants who don’t take their orders from brother Martin. There’s even a theater up here, but outside the Leader’s Territory. They put on all sorts of things for the locals, to try and improve community relations. I heard our friend Schenk give a talk there once. Or was it Wilhelm Zander? Yes, Zander.” Kaspel laughed. “He talked about Tom Sawyer and the American novel. You can imagine how that went down.”

  “It’s a great book.”

  “Zander certainly thought so.”

  “I suppose he’s another Bavarian.”

  “No. He’s from Saarbrücken.”

  The car slithered a bit as it accelerated again. In some parts the road was high up and narrow, and I didn’t give much for our chances if we came off it. “What’s the story between Martin and Albert?”

  “They hate each other. But I don’t know why. Heydrich is always pushing me to find out, but I still have no idea what the reason is. Once I heard Martin Bormann refer to Albert as the man who holds the Leader’s coat. Which says all you need to know.”

  “Unless you’re Heydrich.”

  “Maybe you can find out something. In case you didn’t know it, I think you’re doing all right.”

  “I wish I shared that opinion.”

  He jerked his thumb behind him. “Anyway, that’s the Leader’s Territory and strictly off-limits to everyone who’s not anyone. But surrounding this three-kilometer area is another enormous fence measuring eleven kilometers long; it encloses almost the whole area around the Kehlstein, which is the game and bird sanctuary. That’s where we’re headed now. A couple of years ago, when Bormann was planning to have the whole area enclosed, Geiger, the gamekeeper, pointed out the disastrous consequences for the local wildlife. Much of that was already gone because of all the noise from construction work. Driven off like many of the people, I suppose. Mindful of Hitler’s love of nature, Bormann created the Landlerwald Forest, just south of the Riemertiefe, and they’ve reintrod
uced chamois, fox, red deer, rabbits, you name it. Everything except a unicorn.”

  “No wonder the poachers like it here.”

  “They drive Bormann mad. And of course he’s scared Hitler will find out and want to do something radical about it. I think Hitler cares more about little furry animals than he does about people.”

  “Evidently,” I said.

  “What are you reading?”

  “It’s from Major Högl. A list of all the fatalities sustained by the local workforce during the last couple of years. Ten workers killed in an avalanche on the Hochkalter. Eight killed when a tunnel collapsed under the Kehlstein. One worker who fell into the elevator shaft. Five workers killed by a landslide below the Südwest tunnel. Three truck drivers killed when their vehicles went off the road. One worker stabbed to death by a co-worker at the Ofneralm camp, because he didn’t want to pay off a bet. And this is odd: there’s a P&Z worker listed as dead, cause unknown.”

  “Nothing odd about that. People die for all kinds of reasons, don’t they? If the work doesn’t kill them, the magic potion will. I’m sure of it. I’ve got to lay off that stuff myself. My heart feels like a hungry hummingbird.”

  “So lay off it. I won’t mind if you want to get some shut-eye.”

  “I’ll be okay. Just tell me what’s so odd about this dead worker.”

  “Only the name, so far. R. Prodi.”

  “And?”

  “There was a snapper who went home from the P-Barracks because she had a dose of jelly. Her name was Prodi. Renata Prodi. She was the one favored by Karl Flex.” I paused, and when Kaspel didn’t say anything, I let a couple of thoughts loose in the car. “But maybe she didn’t go home after all. Maybe her being on this list is some kind of bureaucratic oversight. At the very least we ought to find out if she ever made it to Milan. And how she comes to end up on a list of dead workers put together by your boss.”

  A few minutes later we drew up in front of a wooden chalet that was about twenty meters long and perhaps half as wide; there was a chimney on the sloping roof and about two hundred and fifty small square windows in the four walls. There was no glass in the windows because they weren’t the kind of windows anyone was going to be looking through or even going near, not without a veil and a smoker. What I was looking at was the Adlon Hotel of beehives.

  Inside the apiary door the first thing you saw was a little glass bee house where, if you were interested, you could see a hive of bees doing what bees do. They call it work but I’m not so sure that the bees would; I doubt they had a union. But it was only the one bee I was interested in—the one in my pocket, from the dead man’s trouser turnup. I wasn’t especially curious about the rest of the bees, but the three men in the small apiary office were of great interest to me, not least because two of them had scoped rifles and one of them stood up and smiled as soon as he saw me and what I was holding.

  “You found my field glasses,” he said simply.

  “You must be Herr Geiger, the gamekeeper.”

  “That’s right.”

  I let him have the binoculars and then shook his hand. “They are yours, then?”

  He unfastened the lid and pointed to what was written there. “My initials: JG. Where did you find them?”

  I wasn’t ready to supply an explanation to that so I showed them my brass warrant disc. That usually deflects questions I don’t want to answer. “I’m here from the Police Praesidium in Berlin at the request of Government Deputy Chief of Staff Bormann to investigate the murder of Karl Flex.”

  “Bad business,” said one of the other two.

  “And you are?”

  “Hayer. I’m the Landlerwald ornithologist.”

  “Udo Ambros,” said the other, who was smoking a pipe. “One of the assistant hunters. And I ain’t ever been to Berlin. Nor likely to go, neither.”

  “Did any of you know Dr. Flex?”

  “I’ve seen him around,” said Geiger.

  “Me too,” said Ambros. “But I didn’t know he was a doctor.”

  “He was a doctor of engineering,” I said. “With P&Z.”

  “That explains it, then,” said Ambros. “They’re not what you’d call popular around here, the folk from P&Z.”

  “Still,” added Hayer, “no one deserves that. To be murdered, I mean.”

  I left that one alone. So far I’d not seen much to persuade me that Flex hadn’t had it coming.

  “It’s quite the place you have here,” I said. “I had no idea that bees could live so well in Germany.”

  “These bees have better lives than a lot of Jews, I think,” said Geiger.

  “Yes, but they’re just as cliquey,” said Ambros.

  “It’s not only the bees who are well looked after in the Landlerwald,” said Geiger. “There’s another hut like this one just a few hundred meters away where the deer come and go for hay and grain. Especially in winter, when the grazing’s harder.”

  “Not to mention a sanctuary for predatory birds,” added Hayer. “Eagles, owls. To protect our many breeding species.”

  “Bigger windows, I suppose,” I said.

  Nobody smiled. Things were a bit like that in Obersalzberg. Their own jokes were just fine; but there was nothing funny about a Kripo commissar from Berlin.

  “We have about two thousand numbered breeding boxes for every variety of bird, some of which are quite rare,” said Hayer proudly. “They’re all over the Landlerwald.”

  “But it’s not a zoo,” insisted Geiger. “There are no tame animals here. Our work here is governed by the rules of the Bavarian State Forest Administration.”

  I took another look at the three men in the apiary office. They had durable outdoor faces and durable outdoor clothes. Thick tweed suits, with plus-four trousers, stout boots, cream woolen shirts, green woolen ties, and Bavarian-style felt hats with gray feathers. Even their thick eyebrows and mustaches looked like the warmest ones in the shop. Their German rifles were mounted with sniper scopes and well maintained; you could smell the gun oil. There were also a couple of shotguns on a rack behind the desk. It looked like a lot of firepower for killing a few cats.

  “So why the rifles?” I asked.

  “You’re not much of a hunter without a rifle,” said Ambros. In his buttonhole was an enamel badge featuring a pickax and a mallet, and the words Berchtesgaden Salt Mines and Good Luck. It made a pleasant change from a Party badge with a swastika.

  “Yes, but what do you shoot?”

  “Squirrels and feral cats, rooks and pigeons. Meat for the Leader’s table, when we’re asked to supply it.”

  “So it’s not a reserve in the sense that the animals are protected.”

  “The animals are protected. From everyone except us.” He crossed his legs and grinned; he was wearing the same Hanwag boots as me.

  “We’re not in the business of shooting men, if that’s what you’re driving at,” said Geiger.

  “Someone was,” I said. “And they used an Austrian-made Mannlicher carbine fitted with a telescopic sight to do it. Not to mention your field glasses, Herr Geiger. To answer your earlier question, I found them thrown down the chimney of the Villa Bechstein, as well as some spent brass on the rooftop—the spot the assassin fired his shots from.”

  “And you think I might have had something to do with that? I lost these binoculars a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been looking for them ever since. They were my father’s.”

  “That’s true, Herr Commissar,” said Hayer. “He’s been a real pain in the arse about them. Even looked for them myself.”

  “And I would hardly have said I owned them if I’d had anything to do with shooting that man, now would I?”

  “The Mannlicher carbine was down the same chimney. And it wasn’t Santa Claus who left it there. A carbine fitted with a sound suppressor. A Mahle oil filter on the barrel.”

 
; “Poacher’s trick,” said Geiger. “The locals come and go around here using the old salt mine tunnels. We found a couple last summer and blocked them up. But this whole mountain is riddled with gravel pits and salt mines. People have been mining salt here for hundreds of years.”

  “What about poachers? Ever catch any?”

  Geiger and Ambros shook their heads. “About a year ago I found a rifle,” said Geiger. “With a silencer on it. Same as what you described. But sadly not the man who used it.”

  “What happened to the rifle?”

  “I gave it to that Major Högl fellow. From the RSD. Poaching’s a crime, you see. And all crime in Obersalzberg has to be reported to the RSD.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who owns a Mannlicher carbine, would you?”

  “Common enough gun in this part of the world,” said Ambros, puffing his pipe. “I have a Mannlicher at home.”

  “That’s not missing, I hope.”

  “I keep all my weapons in a gun cabinet, Herr Commissar. With a lock on it.”

  “I myself only own a shotgun,” said Hayer. “To shoot a few rooks now and then. So I do find myself wondering why Herr Kannenberg should have telephoned to say that it was me you wanted to speak to. That’s right, isn’t it, Herr Commissar? You did want to speak to me?”

  “If you’re the beekeeper, I do, yes.”

  “I am.”

  I showed him the bee I’d found in Flex’s trouser cuff.

  “It’s a dead bee,” said Hayer.

  This sounded like dumb insolence, but perhaps only because it was the kind of dumb insolence to which I was much given myself.

  “A clue, is it?” asked Ambros. More dumb insolence.

  “It was in the dead man’s clothes. So perhaps it is, I don’t know. What kind of bee is this, Herr Hayer?”

  “A drone. A male honeybee that’s the product of an unfertilized egg. Its primary function is to mate with a fertile queen. But very few drones are successful in this respect. Most of the drones live for about ninety days and all drones are driven out of the hive in the autumn. Of course, there’s no telling how long this one has been dead. But even without honey to eat, some of them can survive long after they’ve been ejected from the hive.”