Prague Fatale

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know. Unlike you, sir, I don’t go to the opera very often. In fact, hardly at all.’

  ‘Hmm. Waste of a life.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You seem to be as ignorant as you are stupid,’ said Jury. Then he smiled at me, bowed slightly, and said: ‘Nice talking to you, Captain Gunther.’

  He walked quickly down toward the sentry box and then, having uttered the password, passed through the gate leaving me alone with Captain Kuttner.

  ‘Bastard,’ said Kuttner. ‘Did you hear what he said? How unbelievably rude.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let it bother you, Captain. I don’t much like opera either. Especially Wagner. There’s something about Wagner that’s just too piss-German, too fucking Bavarian for a Prussian like me. I like my music to be every bit as vulgar as I am myself. I like a bit of innuendo and stocking top when a woman’s singing a song.’

  Kuttner smiled. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But the real reason why Doctor Jury likes opera so much is every bit as vulgar as you describe. Rumour has it that he’s been having an affair with a young singer at the Deutsches Oper in Berlin. Rather an attractive creature by the name of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. And that would be vulgar enough were it not for the fact that she’s also singing a duet with Doctor Goebbels. At least, that’s what General Heydrich says.’

  ‘Then it must be true.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘General Heydrich always knows our dirtiest little secrets.’

  ‘Oh God, I hope not.’

  ‘Well, he certainly knows mine,’ I said. ‘You see, after lunch we went for a short walk in the castle grounds and I made the mistake of reminding him exactly what they are, just in case he’d forgotten.’

  ‘I hardly think that can be true. Not if he’s appointed you as his new bodyguard.’ Kuttner lit a cigarette. ‘Is it true? That you’re going to be his detective?’

  ‘I had thought I might have been arrested by now. So it would seem so.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘You’re right, it won’t be easy. But he’s fair, you know. And a good man to have on your side. I don’t know what would have happened to my SS career if he hadn’t taken me on. By the way, how’s your stomach for flying?’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘What a pity. The General insists on flying himself to Berlin and Rastenburg. Frankly, I’m always terrified. He thinks he’s a much better pilot than he really is. He’s had several crashes.’

  ‘That’s a comforting thought.’ I shrugged. ‘Perhaps we’ll get lucky and end up in Scotland. Like Hess.’

  ‘Yes. Quite.’ Kuttner laughed. ‘Still, I hate to think what would happen if we ever flew into some real trouble.’

  ‘As a matter of fact that’s what I was doing just now. Looking for trouble. I thought I’d get out of the house and scout the area.’

  Kuttner winced, noticeably.

  ‘The lie of the land, so to speak,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Generally, trouble sort of comes looking for me, so I don’t have to venture too far. I’ve always been lucky that way.’

  ‘Quite a few of us in the SS have been lucky that way, don’t you think?’ Kuttner sighed a faint sigh of regret. ‘With trouble. Frankly, I’ve had a bit of a rough summer.’

  ‘You’ve been east, too, huh?’

  Kuttner nodded. ‘How did you know?’

  I shrugged. ‘I look at you and maybe I see something of myself.’

  ‘Yes. That must be it.’

  ‘Where were you posted?’

  ‘Riga.’

  ‘I was in Minsk.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘Loathsome. And Riga?’

  ‘The same. And really quite unnecessary, a lot of it. You go to war, you expect to kill people. I was almost looking forward to it; to being in action. When one is young one has such romantic ideas of what war is like. But it was nothing like that, of course.’

  ‘No. It never is.’

  Kuttner tried to smile, but the part he needed inside himself to make the smile work properly was broken. He knew it. And I knew it.

  ‘It’s an odd state of affairs, don’t you think, when a man feels guilty for doing his duty and obeying orders?’ He took a sharp drag of the cigarette he was smoking as if he hoped it might suddenly kill him. ‘Not that guilt even begins to cover the way I feel.’

  ‘Believe me, Captain, I know exactly how you feel.’

  ‘Do you? Yes. I can see that you do. It’s in your eyes.’

  ‘And that’s the reason you’re not sleeping?’

  ‘Can you?’ Kuttner shook his head. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever sleep, properly, again. Not ever. Not in this life.’

  ‘Talk about it now, if it makes you feel any better.’

  ‘Does it make you feel any better? To talk about it?’

  ‘Not much. I talked about it once, quite recently, to an American journalist. And I felt a little better about it. I felt that it was at least a start.’

  Kuttner nodded and then dredged up something from his memory. I didn’t have to wait long.

  ‘When you mentioned scouting the area, it made me think of something. Something awful. We were on our way through Poland. This was before our assignment in Riga. We had stopped at a town called Chechlo. It’s a broken-down, shit-on-your-shoes, nowhere sort of place with a lot of drooling peasants whose tongues are too big for their mouths. But I don’t suppose I shall ever forget it now; not for as long as I live. We had been burning down Polack villages for no real reason that I could see. Certainly there was no military necessity in it. We were just throwing our weight around like brutes. Some of my men were drunk and nearly all of them were animals. Anyway, we came across a troop of Polish boy scouts. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than sixteen and the youngest perhaps as young as twelve. And my commanding officer ordered me to put all of them up against a wall and shoot them. Shoot them all. They were in uniform, he said and we have orders to shoot anyone in uniform who hasn’t surrendered. I said they were just schoolboys who didn’t know any better because they didn’t speak German, but he didn’t want to know. Orders are orders, he said, get on with it. I remember their mothers screaming at me to stop. Yes, I’ll always remember that. I wake up sometimes still hearing them beg me to stop. But I didn’t. I had my orders. So I carried them out, you see. And that’s all there is to it. Except it isn’t, of course. Not by a long way.’

  After several stiff drinks I can talk to anyone, even to myself. But mostly I was drinking so that I could talk to Heydrich’s other guests. I like to talk. Talking is something you need to do if you’re ever going to encourage a man to talk back at you. And you need a man to talk a little if he’s ever going to say something of interest. Men don’t trust other men who don’t say much, and for the same reason they don’t trust men who don’t drink. You need a drink to say the wrong thing, and sometimes, saying the wrong thing can be exactly the right thing to say. I don’t know if I was expecting to hear anything as romantic as a confession to an attempted murder, or even a desire to see Heydrich dead. After all, I felt that way about him myself. It was just talk, a little bread on the water to bring the fish around. And the alcohol helped. It helped me to talk and to anaesthetize myself against the more revolting chat that came my way. But some of my colleagues were just revolting. As I glanced around the library it was like looking at a menagerie of unpleasant animals – rats, jackals, vultures, hyenas – who had sat for some bizarre group portrait.

  It’s hard to say exactly who was the worst of the bunch, but I didn’t speak to Lieutenant Colonel Walter Jacobi for very long before I was itching all over and counting my fingers. The deputy head of the SD in Prague was a deeply sinister figure with – he told me – an interest in magic and the occult. It was a subject I knew a little about, having investigated a case involving a fake medium a few years back. We talked about that and we talked about Munich, which was
where he was from; we talked about him studying law at the universities of Jena, Tübingen and Halle – which seemed like a lot of law; and we even talked about his father, who was a bookseller. But all the time we were talking I was trying to get over the fact that with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, his wire-framed glasses and his praying-mantis personality, Jacobi reminded me, obscenely, of what might have resulted if Hitler and Himmler had been left alone in the same bedroom: Jacobi was a Hitler–Himmler hybrid.

  Equally unpleasant to talk to was Hermann Frank, the tall thin SS general from the Sudetenland who’d been passed over to succeed von Neurath as the new Reichsprotector. Frank had a glass eye, having lost the real one in a fight at school in Carlsbad, which seemed to indicate an early propensity to violence. It was the right eye that was fake, I think, but with Frank you had the idea he might have changed it around just to keep you guessing. Frank had a low opinion of Czechs, although as things turned out they had an even lower opinion of him: five thousand people filled the courtyard of Pankrac Prison in the centre of Prague to see him hanged the old Austrian Empire way one summer’s day in 1946.

  ‘They’re a greedy barbarous people,’ he told me candidly. ‘I don’t feel in the least bit Czech. The best thing that ever happened to me was to be born in the German-speaking part of the country, otherwise I’d be speaking their filthy Slavic language now, which is nothing more than a bastardized form of Russian. It’s a language for animals, I tell you. Do you know that it’s possible to speak a whole sentence in Czech without using a single vowel?’

  Surprised at this startling display of hatred I blinked and said, ‘Oh? Like what, for example?’

  Frank thought for a moment and then repeated some words in Czech which might or might not have had some vowels only I didn’t feel like looking inside his mouth to see if he was hiding any.

  ‘It means “stick a finger through your throat”,’ he said. ‘And every time I hear a Czech speak, that’s exactly what I want to do to them.’

  ‘All right. You hate them. I get the picture. And losing your eye at school like that must have been pretty tough. It explains a lot, I guess. I went to a pretty tough school myself and there are some boys I might like to get even with one day. Then again, probably not. Life’s too short to care, I think. And now you’re in such an important position, sir – the police leader in Bohemia, effectively the second most powerful man in the country – well, that’s the part I don’t understand at all, sir. Why do you hate the Czechs so much, General?’

  Frank straightened absurdly. It was almost as if he was coming to attention before answering – an effect enhanced by the fact that he was wearing spurs on his boots, which seemed an odd affectation to me, even in Heydrich’s country home, which had stables, with horses in them. Pompously, he said:

  ‘As Germans it’s our duty to hate them. It was the failure of the Czech banks that helped to precipitate the financial crisis that brought about the Great Depression. Yes, it’s the Czech bankers we can thank for that disaster.’

  Resisting my first instinct, which was to shiver with disgust as if Frank had vomited onto my boots, I nodded politely.

  ‘I always thought that was because our economy was built on American loans,’ I said. ‘And when they came due our own German banks failed.’

  Frank was shaking his head, which was full of grey hair combed straight back so that the top of his head seemed to be in a line with the tip of his longish nose. It wasn’t the biggest nose in the room so long as Heydrich was around, but at the same time you wouldn’t have been surprised to see it pointing out the way at a crossroads.

  ‘Take it from me, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I do know what I’m talking about. I know this damnable country better than anyone in the fucking room.’

  Frank spoke with some vigour and he was looking at Heydrich as he did, which made me wonder if there was not some grudge he nursed for his new master.

  I was glad when Frank walked away to fetch himself another drink, leaving me with the impression that spending an eternity with men like Heydrich, Jacobi and Frank was the nearest thing to being in hell that I could think of.

  But the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Berries – for that matter the whole damned tree – for the curling turd of the evening went to Colonel Doctor Hans Geschke, a 34-year-old lawyer from Frankfurt on the Oder who was chief of the Gestapo in Prague. While studying in Berlin, he’d seen my name in the newspapers, and in spite of our differences in rank, this was a good enough reason for him to try to make common cause with me. Which is another way of saying he needed someone to patronize.

  ‘After all,’ he explained, ‘we’re both policemen you and I, doing a difficult job, in very difficult circumstances.’

  ‘So it would seem, sir.’

  ‘And I like to keep abreast of ordinary crime,’ he said. ‘Here in Prague we have to deal with more serious stuff than some Fritz slicing his wife up with a broken beer bottle.’

  ‘There’s not so much of that around, sir. Beer bottles are in rather short supply in Berlin.’

  He wasn’t listening.

  ‘You should come in and see us very soon, at the Pecek Palace. That’s in the Bredovska district of the city.’

  ‘A palace, eh? It sounds a lot grander than the Alex, sir.’

  ‘Oh no. To be quite honest with you it’s hard to see how it was ever a palace except in some dark corner of Hades. Even the executive rooms have very little charm.’

  Geschke’s was a waxwork’s expressionless face. Captain Kuttner had said that at the Pecek Palace Geschke was known as ‘Babyface’, but this could only have been among people who knew some very frightening babies with duelling scars on their left cheeks. Geschke was one of those factory-manufactured Nazis they turned out like unpainted Meissen porcelain: pale, cold, hard, and best handled with extreme care.

  ‘I haven’t seen much of the city yet,’ I said. ‘But it does seem rather infernal.’

  Geschke grinned. ‘Well, we do our best in that respect. So long as they fear us, they do what they’re told. We mustn’t let these Czechos make fools of us, you see. We have to be the master in our own house, so we can’t afford to overlook any wrong. We really can’t. You let them get away with one thing, there will be no end to it. But tell me, Gunther. In the Weimar Republic, when you had a suspect at the Alex and he refused to cooperate, what did you do? How on earth did you manage?’

  ‘We never hit anyone, if that’s what you’re driving at, sir. We weren’t allowed to. The Prussian Police Regulations forbade it. Oh, some cops smacked a suspect around now and then, but the bosses didn’t like that. We got results because we got the evidence. Once you have the evidence it’s hard for a man not to sign a confession. Find the evidence and everything else follows. We were good at that: finding evidence. The Berlin Detective Service was, for a while, the envy of the world and its backbone was the police commissars.’

  ‘But weren’t you at all frustrated by the stupidities of Prussian justice? Sometimes it seemed to be absurd that penal servitude for life rarely ever lasted longer than twelve years. And that so many criminals deserving of their death sentences were reprieved by the Prussian government. For example, those two Jews, Saffran and Kipnik. Remember them?’

  I shrugged. ‘Honestly? I can think of many others I’d like to see under the falling axe before those two. Why, just a few months ago there was the S-Bahn murderer case. Fellow named Paul Ogorzow who killed six or seven women and tried to kill as many more again. Now, he deserved his fate.’

  ‘Is it true that he was a Party member?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Lots of other people thought so, too. That’s probably why it took so long to catch him. But what you were saying is absolutely right. We can’t afford to overlook any wrong. Especially when it’s a wrong committed by our own, don’t you think?’

  ‘Ah, now there speaks a true policeman.’

  ‘I like to think so, sir.’

&nb
sp; ‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help you, Gunther, in your new capacity as the General’s personal detective, then please let me know.’ Geschke raised his glass and bowed. ‘Anything to help General Heydrich and keep him safe for the new Germany.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  I glanced around the room and tried to picture which, if any, of the General’s guests might actually try to poison him and found that in the new Germany it wasn’t so hard. In a room full of murderers anything seemed possible.

  About halfway through this unforgettable evening Major Dr Ploetz, Heydrich’s First Adjutant and number one myrmidon, turned on the library radio so that we could listen to Hitler’s speech from the Sports Palast, in Berlin.

  ‘Gentlemen, please,’ he said, while the radio was warming up. ‘If I could ask you to be silent.’