by Philip Kerr
“I think it was probably quite deliberate that he shot him where he did,” said Frau Diesbach. “On the terrace at the Berghof, I mean. I hope I won’t get into any more trouble for saying this, Commissar, but Martin Bormann is hated on this mountain. With him gone, a lot of people think a lot of things would be better around here. Johann blamed Martin Bormann for employing people like Karl Flex, Brandt, Zander, the whole rotten bunch of them. He wanted to embarrass Bormann. Leave him looking like a fool in Hitler’s eyes. Enough maybe for Hitler to get rid of him. Lots of people who know Johann would be inclined to help him escape, for that reason alone.”
“Where’s he gone, missus?” said Korsch. “I’m running out of patience here.”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, can I?”
“I suppose you think we’re stupid, missus.”
“I don’t suppose that,” she said in a way that made me think she was about to make another smart remark.
“Don’t get clever with us, missus,” said Korsch. “We don’t like people who get clever with us. It reminds us that we’re due a lot of overtime and expenses we won’t ever get. And what kind of man doesn’t tell his wife where he’s headed when he’s going on the run from the police?”
“The clever kind, obviously.”
“I’d tell my wife if it was me.”
“Yes, but would she care?”
That was when Friedrich Korsch slapped her face, twice. Hard. Hard enough to knock her off the chair she was sitting on. A good forehand and then a backhand, like his name was Gottfried von Cramm. Each slap sounded like a firecracker going off and he couldn’t have slapped her better if he’d been auditioning for a job with the Gestapo.
“You need to tell us where he’s gone,” shouted Korsch.
I’m not one for hitting people, normally. Most suspects who agree to tell the police everything figure that we won’t notice when they try to hold just one thing back. And it always shocks them when they realize that isn’t going to work. Me, I’d probably have questioned her for a while longer, but we were short of time, Korsch was right about that. Brandner’s only chance of avoiding a short haircut was us catching Karl Flex’s killer and soon. I picked her up off the floor and sat her down, which was a good way of making sure I was in the way of Korsch hitting her again. She looked shocked, as well she might. And while I disapproved of what Korsch had done I thought it was too late to complain about it.
“Sorry about that.” I took out my handkerchief, knelt down at the woman’s feet, and wiped her mouth. “Only, my friend here is the crusading type. You see, there’s an innocent man in a prison cell in Obersalzberg who could go to his death for Flex’s murder and that makes Korsch a bit physical. I don’t think he’ll do it again, but if you have any idea of where your husband’s gone, you’d best tell us now. Before he starts to feel a sense of real injustice.”
“French Lorraine,” she said dully, holding her cheeks like she was a young grisette who’d been abandoned with a small child and an unfortunate complexion. “He was stationed there during the war. With the Second Bavarian Corps. He always liked it there, in Lorraine. Was always talking about it. He speaks good French, you see. Loves the French. Loves the food. And the women, knowing Johann. That’s where he said he’d go. I’m not sure precisely where. I’ve never been there myself. But once he’s across the French border, he’ll be somewhere in Lorraine.”
What she was saying seemed to fit with the framed maps I’d already seen on the walls, and the pictures of Diesbach in army uniform. It’s odd how one feels about a place that saw so much death; I myself had always wanted to go back to northeastern France and the towns near the Meuse where, in 1916, the Battle of Verdun had been fought. But Korsch wasn’t having any of that.
“You might as well have said Bermuda, missus,” he complained. “It’s seven hundred kilometers from here to the French border. And he won’t have long enough to get that far. When we ask where’s he gone, we mean where is he now, and not where would he like to go on vacation if he won the state lottery.”
He was going to slap her again but this time I stayed his hand because I knew exactly how Frau Diesbach was feeling. Both of us had been slapped enough for one day.
FIFTY-SIX
October 1956
From the top of the skull-like hill all that could be seen was a black-and-white engraving of the inferno that was industrial capitalism.
In many ways the Saarland was just as horrifying as I remembered it from before the war: slag heaps as big as the Egyptian pyramids, a petrified forest of tall industrial chimneys belching so much gray smoke it looked as if the earth itself had caught fire, endless freight trains crawling along a venous system of rail tracks and sidings and double switches and signal boxes, pit wheels turning like the lazy cogs in a very dirty clock, gasometers and warehouses and factory buildings and rusting sheds, canals so black they looked as if they were filled with oil, not water, and all of this under a sky thick with coal dust and bruised by the incessant noise of metalworks and smelters and pile drivers and locomotive engines and end-of-shift whistles. With eyes that were prickling because of the sulfurous air, you could even taste the iron and steel on the back of your tongue and feel a low Morlock hum in the poisoned earth beneath your feet. As a testament to human industry it was not a very pleasing one from an aesthetic point of view. But it was more than merely ugly; it was as if a kind of original sin had been perpetrated against the very landscape, and I thought I might almost have been looking at Niflheim, the dark, misty home of dwarves, where treasure wasn’t only hoarded, it was mined from the ground or forged in secret for the Burgundian kings. The French certainly thought so, which was why they had tried so hard to keep the Saar as a part of France and, like Siegfried, to steal its heavy industrial treasure. The dwarves of the Saarland, however, were as stubbornly German as their Wagnerian counterparts and, in a recent referendum that might have made the territory independent under the auspices of a European commissioner to be appointed by the Western European Union, they had voted no to Europe and the idea of remaining in economic union with France; any month now it was supposed that the so-called Saar Protectorate would finally become part of the Federal Republic of Germany. Every patriotic German certainly hoped so, and throughout the FRG the return of the Saar was generally viewed with enthusiasm, albeit of a more quiet sort than that which had greeted the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. The major difference was that now there were no German troops involved and no treaties repudiated. It was perhaps the most peaceful change of flag in that region in almost a century, and the idea that Germany and France might go to war again about the Saarland already seemed as unthinkable as interplanetary space travel.
In the city of Saarbrücken things were more or less the same as they’d always been, too. Most of the serious damage inflicted by the U.S. Army had been repaired and there was little sign that a world war had ever taken place. But this was never an attractive city and the rebuilding had left the place as hard on the eye as it had always been. Harder, maybe. The French were certainly not about to waste their money on urban planning or public architecture. Any new buildings were functional, not to say brutal; from what little I’d been able to see of the future, it seemed to be fashioned largely from concrete. Landwehrplatz, the main square in Saarbrücken, resembled a German prison yard from which the prisoners had all wisely escaped. Everything was as gray and solidly Germanic as the lead in a Faber-Castell pencil.
Up close, things were a little more ambiguous. All the newspapers and magazines in the kiosks were German, as were most of the street names. Even the names of the shops—Hoffmann, Schulz, Dettweiler, Rata, Schooner, Zum Löwen, Alfred Becker—made me think I might be back in Berlin, but the bunting and the flags and the cars—Peugeots and Citroëns, mostly—were all French, as were the records I heard in bars and restaurants: a lot of Charles Aznavour, Georges Brassens, and Lucienne Delyle. Quite a few
of the Saarland police carried the word Gendarmerie on the shoulders of their dark blue uniforms, which provided a clear indication of who they took their orders from. I wasn’t out of the woods yet; not by a long straw. Then there was the money: the official currency of Saarland was the franc, although thoughtfully the French called it the frank, and the denominations on the coins were stamped in German. And the big brands in the shops were mostly French or sometimes American. There were even a few French restaurants of the sort you could have found on the Left Bank in Paris. It was all very strange. With its German simplicity and French pretensions, the Saar resembled some ghastly transvestite—a very muscular man badly in need of a shave who was wearing lipstick and high heels in a hopeless attempt to pass himself off as a pretty coquette.
I bought twenty Pucks and some matches at the tobacconist, a copy of the Saarbrücker Neueste Nachrichten, and in Alfred Becker, a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, a loaf of bread, a box of Président Camembert portions, and a large bar of Kwatta chocolate. I didn’t linger in the supermarket. I was acutely aware of the down-at-heel, beggarly figure I now presented. There was a hole in the knee of my trousers, my shoes were water-stained and ruined, I was badly in need of a shave, and I looked as if I had spent the night sleeping under a hedge, which I had. The people of the Saar might have been poor but unlike me they had washed recently, and their clothes, while not of the best quality, were clean; everyone looked gainfully employed and respectable. It takes a lot to make a hardworking German forget about his or her appearance.
On the road to Homburg, beside the only green space in Brebach, I sat down and ate a little of my bread and cheese and read the newspaper. I was relieved to see nothing about me in the paper, which was dominated by the Hungarian revolution, but even while I was enjoying a rare moment of peace and quiet, a cop on a motorcycle pulled up and gave me a look that was as hard as the passenger saddle on his R51. With his white shirt and dark tie, his long riding boots, his dark blue uniform, his Sam Browne belt, and his matching leather gauntlets he looked more like a pilot in the Luftwaffe than a moto rider. After a while he lifted the goggles onto his crash hat and summoned me with a jerk of his head. I got up off the ground and walked to the side of the bike. Fortunately I hadn’t yet opened the bottle so there was no question of my being drunk. He was German, which was also in my favor.
“BMW,” I said as coolly as I could, given that I’d not long since strangled a man to death. Would Korsch and his men have found the body of the Stasi man in shorts yet? Perhaps. But I’d hidden him quite carefully. “Best motorcycle in the world.”
“You German?”
“Berlin, born and bred.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
“Tell me about it. Only that isn’t going to change anytime soon. My home’s in the east now. In the GDR. Behind the Iron Curtain. And so’s my old job. At the Alex. I doubt I’ll ever see either one of those again.”
“You were a cop?”
Every cop in Germany had heard of Berlin’s Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz. Saying you were from the Alex was like telling an English cop you were from Scotland Yard. In all the previous descriptions of me I’d read in the newspapers, my past as a policeman was something the Stasi had left out of my résumé. Chasing cops never played well with other cops, even French ones. It gives them an itch.
“Twenty-five years in the uniform, give or take. When the war ended I was a sergeant in the Order Police. By rights I should have had a nice fat pension to go with my nice fat wife. But I had to settle for getting away with my life.”
“Had it rough?”
“No worse than most people. When the Ivans showed up in Berlin, cops like me were less than popular, as you can imagine. Unlike my wife, if you receive my meaning. For a while there she was very much in demand.”
“You mean?”
“I do mean. Twenty or thirty of the red bastards. One after the other. Like they were using her for bayonet practice. I was somewhere else at the time. Cowering in a shell hole, probably. Anyway, she never got over it. Nor did I, if it comes to that. Anyway, since I tossed away my beer token I’ve just drifted from one job to the next.”
“What kind of work?”
“Odd jobs. The kind of not-very-talkative jobs an ex-cop can do in his sleep. Which was just as well, as I usually was.”
“What’s your name?”
“Korsch. Friedrich Korsch.”
“Where are you coming from now, Friedrich?”
“Brussels. My wife, Inge, was Belgian, you see. I was working at the Royal Museum and then as a guard on the trains—the Étoile du Nord—until I hit a bit of rough luck.”
“What kind of rough luck?”
I brandished my bottle of wine. “The liquid kind. Hence, the captain of industry you see before you now.”
“Where are you headed?”
I was looking at the road sign when I answered and I ought to have known better than to trust the inspiration that the gods provided for me at that particular moment. The only reason the gods get away with their own mistakes is by tricking us into committing mistakes of our own.
“Homburg. Thought I might look for a job at the Karlsberg Brewery.” I grinned. “Just joking. My sister, Dora, works at the local brewery, so I thought I’d ask for her there. Figure I can probably get there sometime tomorrow. What is it? Thirty kilometers from here?”
“You fit a lot of descriptions,” he said.
“Not all of them, surely. There must be a couple of missing dogs and cats who don’t look like me.”
The moto rider smiled. Making a traffic cop smile is no mean feat. I know. I used to wave cars around Potsdamer Platz. Breathing all that lead makes you grumpy. Which probably explains Berliners.
“Anyway, at the Alex we used to say that most police descriptions can fit absolutely anyone unless they’re descriptions of the kind of people you could only see at a circus or a freak show.”
“That’s true.”
“I’m not sure which one of those categories I fall into, myself. The latter, more than likely.”
He was still smiling and by now I knew I was more or less safe, at least for the time being; any minute he was going to tell me to be on my way, but I certainly didn’t expect him to offer me a ride.
“Hop on,” he said. “I’ll take you to Homburg. My hometown, as a matter of fact.”
“That’s very kind of you. Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble. Besides, I don’t smell so good right now. It’s been a day or two since I had a good wash. Or a decent manicure.”
“I was in the Panzer Corps,” said the moto rider. “Tenth Panzer Grenadiers. Believe me, nothing could smell worse than five men living inside an F2 for a whole summer. Besides, on a bike you’ll always be downwind of me.”
I climbed onto the passenger seat and found it surprisingly comfortable. Minutes later we were speeding east along the road toward Kaiserlautern, and I was congratulating myself on the dexterity of my abilities as a liar. Lying effectively is a bit like one of those cards for a stereoscope: the card is two separate pictures, side by side, which only works if you end up seeing one clear central image, which perforce is an illusion, and is the picture of depth and clarity that you are meant to see, instead of what is actually there. It’s the result of the left eye not knowing what the right is doing; the brain fills in the gap, which is a good way of understanding all kinds of deception. But the most important thing about lying to a cop is not to hesitate; he who hesitates gets arrested. And if all else fails, you punch the cop in the mouth and run for it.
It was nice to see the world go by from the back of the motorcycle, even if that world was the Saarland. A tractor towing a barge laden with coal along the canal; a cart hauled by a couple of heifers, which was followed by two women who were almost as sturdily bovine as their two beasts; a large family of Sinti camped colorfully in a
field; an advertising hoarding from the previous October referendum still covered with posters advocating saying NO FOR GERMANY and others that read ONLY TRAITORS TO EUROPE SAY NO, SO SAY YES; a man on a street corner having his horse reshod by a farrier while a small boy held the animal’s head steady; a huge German army bunker in a field that looked as though it had been broken in two by an earthquake; a white house dwarfed by a pile of black coal as high as a mountain. Life looked simple, basic, dull, commonplace, the way it always was for most people; I, for whom the path to heroism was now impossibly overgrown, who had lost any sense of enchantment with the world, would have given a lot for a life as ordinary as that.
Homburg was made up of nine villages, not that you’d notice; it’s the kind of town that history forgot on its way to somewhere more interesting, which is nearly anywhere. Most people confuse it with the Bad Homburg that’s north of Frankfurt, which is probably just wishful thinking. There’s a ruined castle on top of a hill and an abbey and the tire factory and the Karlsberg Brewery, of course—you can smell that all over the town—but the most interesting thing to do in Homburg is leave.
The moto rider dropped me near the brewery gate. Established in 1878, Karlsberg is one of the largest breweries in Germany and certainly looks like it. I’m not sure what they did about the big star of David on the cream-colored concrete wall and on the bottle label back in the day when the Nazis were in power. This was blue and not yellow so maybe they just left it alone.
“Here we are.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it. And good luck to you, Friedrich. I hope you find your sister. What was her name again?”