Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘You told me it was a traffic accident, didn’t you? Happens every day. And spies are apparently no exception.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m pretty sure that he murdered that Dutch foreign worker, Geert Vranken. You remember. The fellow who got himself hit by a train after receiving multiple stab wounds.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be waiting for you when you get back from your weekend with the General.’

  Lüdtke looked like he was enjoying my discomfort. He knew the truth about my dislike for the Nazis but it didn’t stop him from savouring my dilemma: for me not to be a Party member and yet still in such apparent high favour with Heydrich was amusing to him. It amused me, too, which is to say it stopped me from thinking about much else.

  ‘Doctor Ploetz, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lüdtke leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head as if he was about to surrender. ‘I hear Prague’s very nice at this time of year. I’ve often fancied going there with the wife. She collects glass, you know. And there’s a lot of glass in Prague.’

  ‘That should keep the Nazis happy. They like smashing glass. Here, maybe you should go instead of me.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Lüdtke smiled. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say to a man as important as the Reichsprotector of Bohemia. My God, I should be surprised if he even knew I existed.’

  ‘Any man who can persuade Berlin detectives to wear women’s clothes in order to catch a murderer is certain to have been noticed upstairs.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to say so, Bernie. But of course I had lots of help. Remember Georg Heuser?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Georg Heuser was one of my best detectives on the S-Bahn murder case. Good man, is Georg. Of course, he lacks your subtlety and experience, but he’s a promising young policeman. And of more use here than where he is now.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘In a Special Action Group somewhere in the Ukraine.’

  I didn’t reply. Suddenly going to Prague didn’t seem so bad after all. Not when they were still sending ‘good’ men to Special Action Groups in the Ukraine. Just thinking about Georg Heuser and what he was probably going through in Minsk, or Pinsk, or Dnipropetrovsk, or any one of a hundred Jew towns where innocent people were being murdered in their thousands, made me feel that I was much better off than I realized. And all talk of an S-Bahn murderer seemed laughable when one of our own investigating detectives now seemed likely to chalk up more victims in twenty-four hours than Paul Ogorzow had managed in one murderous year.

  Lüdtke played with the rocker blotter on his desk for a moment as if trying to measure something.

  ‘You hear stories,’ he said, finally. ‘About what is happening out east. In Ukraine and Latvia, for example. The Police Battalions. Special Action Groups and what have you. You were there, Bernie. What is the truth about what’s happening? Is it true what they’re saying? That people are being murdered? Men, women and children. Because they’re Jews?’

  I nodded.

  ‘My God,’ he said.

  ‘I think you once said that whenever I came in here it was like rain coming in at the eaves. Now you know why. Since I came home there hasn’t been a day when I didn’t feel ashamed. And the nights are worse.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘That’s the third time you’ve mentioned God, Friedrich-Wilhelm. And I’ve been thinking that there must be a God because after all, the Leader is always mentioning Him and it’s inconceivable he could be wrong about that. But what we’ve done to the Jews, and what we’re still doing to the Jews, and, I think, what we seem intent on doing to the Jews for a good while longer, well, He’s not going to forgive that in a hurry. Perhaps not ever. In fact, I’ve a very terrible feeling that whatever we do to them He’s going to do to us. Only it’ll be worse. Much worse. It’ll be much worse because He’s going to get the fucking Russians to do it.’

  ‘I hear Prague is very nice at this time of year. I’ve often wanted to go there.’ Arianne shook her head. ‘I really can’t imagine why I haven’t been already. After all, Prague is only a couple of hours on the train from Dresden. And my Mama’s a German-speaking Czech from Teplitz. Did I tell you that? She moved to Dresden when she met my Papa. Not that she ever really thought of herself as a Czech. Nobody does in Teplitz. At least that’s what my Mama says.’ She paused. ‘Maybe I could go and see my brother. His unit is stationed near Prague.’

  We were at Kempinski’s Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz, a department store of cafés and restaurants that described itself as ‘the jolliest place in Berlin’ and which was as ersatz as the coffee we were drinking in the Grinzing Café, which with its diorama of Old Vienna and the Danube River was itself pretty ersatz. Of the several bars and cafés in Vaterland, Arianne much preferred the Wild West Bar’s log-cabin walls, American flags, and the picture of Custer’s Last Stand, but, immediately outside its door was an amusement machine with a light-gun on which you could shoot at pictures of aircraft, and the city’s young anti-aircraft gunners were fond of using it for their boisterous practice. This particular form of entertainment was too like the real thing for my money and so we sat in the Grinzing and hugged each other fondly in sight of a trompe-l’oeil of the Austrian capital city with miniature bridges, mechanical boats, and an electric train-set while a little orchestra played Strauss waltzes. It was like being a giant or a god, which, in Germany, usually amounts to the same thing. Arianne was smaller than me by a head, and while that didn’t make her Freia to my Fasolt, she was very much a goddess of feminine love. I’d seldom had a lover as expert as Arianne and, after the depressing horrors of the Ukraine, which, whenever possible, I was keen to put out of my mind, perhaps I was falling for her. Hell, I had fallen for her. Since meeting her I hadn’t thought about killing myself. Not once. I knew she was riding for herself but I could hardly blame her for that. The whole damned country was addicted to its own selfish pursuits. So I heard her out as she made her play and probably smiled a fond, indulgent sort of smile as she went about it. Because while there was a part of me that still didn’t trust her, there was an even larger part that simply didn’t care. Not any more. I was in Gaza, bound with new ropes and fresh bowstrings, with my hair in knots and my head in her lap. Sometimes it just happens that way.

  ‘Have you got a passport?’

  She nodded. ‘When I was working for BVG my boss told me to get one so I could accompany him on a business trip to Italy. I knew what I was in for and if we’d ever actually got there I might have let him sleep with me, only his wife found out that I was going and then I wasn’t going, and then I was out of a job. It’s a very common story.’

  ‘You’d need a visa, of course.’

  ‘Sure. From the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz. Isn’t that convenient, you working there and everything?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s possible you might need to produce some certification concerning the military importance of your journey. In which case – well, there is no military importance, angel. Not unless we count the restoration of my own morale. But somehow I don’t see them buying that one.’

  Arianne shook her head. ‘No, you only need that kind of certification if you’re planning to take the express train.’ Smiling, she added, ‘You forget. I used to work for BVG. I know all the rules and regulations that affect the railways. No certification of a journey’s relevance is required for any other train. If we take the regular service between Anhalter Station and Jan Masaryk Station, there won’t be a problem. I could probably remember the timetable if I put my mind to it.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. But look, angel, I’m not sure where I’ll be staying or what I’ll be doing. You might find yourself on your own for longer than you’d like. For longer than I’d like, if it comes to that. It could even be dangerous.’

  ‘I’ll go and see the sights when you’re not around. That shouldn’t be too difficult to do. German’s now the official language in Prague. And it’s not like I’ll be wearing a uniform. So I can’t see
how I’m likely to get into any trouble. Or how it could possibly be dangerous.’ She frowned. ‘I think you’re just saying that because you don’t want me to come with you.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about the danger you might be in from the Czechos,’ I said. ‘Frankly, they’re the least of our problems. No, there’s something far more dangerous in Prague than the damned Czechos.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘The new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, that’s what. General Reinhard Heydrich.’

  Someone once said there’s no fool like an old fool in love. But middle-aged fools aren’t any less foolish. I walked home and thought some more about taking Arianne with me to Prague. No matter how smart you are, sometimes you just have to sit down and lay out a balance sheet to help you decide on something. On the credit side Arianne was a potential liability; and on the debit side, she gave me a lot of pleasure, and not all of it horizontal. They say that if, in every transaction, you can identify what you received, where it came from, and what it cost, then you have debits and credits mastered. But what they don’t say is that sometimes you just figure the world owes you a little bit extra and to hell with the consequences. In truth, that’s how most people handle life’s book-keeping. If you believe Prince Hamlet, conscience makes cowards of us all; but I can attest that it’s just as likely that conscience, especially a guilty one, can make you just a little bit reckless.

  CHAPTER 10

  I got down to Berlin’s Anhalter Station about an hour before the train was due to depart so that I could meet Arianne and make sure that we both got a seat in a compartment. The newspaper vendors were shouting about the greatest victory in all military history at Kiev, and now and then about some smaller Italian air success against the British at Gibraltar. A squadron of pigeons up in the rafters of the station roof must have been listening because they flew south across the station concourse in formation, as if in honour of our wonderful armed forces and their brave Italian allies.

  The station was busy with people. Nowadays, Anhalter was always busier than Lehrter or Potsdam: Germans were not travelling west toward RAF targets like Hamburg and Cologne if they could help it. South was better and south-east was better still. Even the pigeons knew that much.

  The train filled. Among the other passengers with a seat in our compartment was an old Jew, easily identified by the yellow star recently sewn onto the left breast pocket of his suit. Nothing else about him was Jewish according to the filthy caricature of a Jew you saw in the newsreels or on the front of Der Stürmer, and prior to the nineteenth of September and Heydrich’s new police law I should have assumed the old man was just another Berliner. Except that he was without question a brave one: the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves he wore on a ribbon around his neck was eloquent proof of that, and probably a clever way to offset the stigma of the yellow star.

  By now people were standing in the corridor and a man wearing the uniform of a Labour Corps leader loudly demanded that the old man give up his place to ‘a German’. From his substantial girth, his relationship with real work looked tenuous to say the least.

  Normally I didn’t interfere in these matters; maybe it was the sight of the Knight’s Cross around the old man’s neck – maybe it was just that like a lot of other Berliners I didn’t like the yellow star – but I was feeling more querulous in the face of Nazi bullying.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ I told the Jew and stood up to face down the Labour leader.

  His face reddened like a Muscovy duck as he tried and failed to lift his chest above the polished brown belt around his waist.

  ‘And who the hell are you to interfere?’

  It was a fair question. I wasn’t in uniform. That was in my suitcase and, for once, I was almost regretting not wearing it. But I had the next best thing in my pocket: my warrant disc. I showed it to him in the palm of my hand and it had the usual effect of cowing the man and the rest of the carriage into respectful silence.

  ‘Do you see a sign that says this carriage is forbidden to Jews?’

  The Labour leader glanced around, redundantly. There was a small printed panel that read Attention! The Enemy is Listening! but nowhere was there an anti-Semitic sign of the kind you sometimes saw on park benches or at public baths. Even I was surprised about that.

  He shook his head.

  I pointed at Arianne. ‘This woman worked for BVG until about a year ago.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I was secretary to the director himself.’

  ‘Is there anything in the BVG railway rules and regulations that says a Jew must give up his seat to a German?’

  ‘No. There isn’t.’

  ‘So there,’ I said. ‘Let that be an end of it. Go away and keep your ignorant mouth shut.’ I might also have mentioned the decoration around the old Jew’s neck, but I didn’t want anyone in that compartment thinking that this was the only reason I was interfering on his behalf.

  There was a murmur of approval as the Labour leader barrelled his way out of the compartment and down the carriage. I sat down.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the old man, tipping his hat.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said and tipped my own in return.

  Someone else said, quietly, ‘No one likes that yellow star.’

  By now the old man was looking thoroughly bewildered, as well he might be, and he could reasonably have asked any of us how it was, if none of us cared for the yellow star, we had allowed Heydrich’s police order to happen. If he had, I might have suggested a better question: how had we allowed Heydrich to happen? There was no easy answer to a question like that.

  The old man got off the train in Dresden, which was a relief to everyone. The sight of the word ‘Jew’ emblazoned on a man of such obvious valour made all of us feel thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.

  Despite what had been said about the yellow star, no one in our compartment – no one at all – talked about the war. The injunction on the wooden wall that the enemy might be listening was more effective than might have been imagined. And since there was little else but the war on anyone’s mind, this meant that none of the other passengers in our compartment said very much. Even Arianne, who liked to talk, was silent for most of the journey.

  The train travelled north of the Elbe until Bad Schandau, where it passed over a bridge onto the south bank, then east and south again until Schöna, where it halted to allow several customs officers to board. Everyone – myself included, until I flashed my beer-token – was obliged to leave the train and have their luggage searched in the customs shed. None of my fellow passengers protested. After eight long years of Nazism, people knew better than to complain to authority. Besides, these officers were backed by twenty or thirty SS who stood thuggishly on the platform ready to see off any trouble.

  The customs officers themselves were surprisingly courteous and polite. They did not bother to search Arianne or her bags when I informed them that she was travelling with me. If they had, I wonder what they might have found.

  While the rest of the passengers were in the customs shed and we were alone in the compartment, she looked at me strangely. ‘You’re an odd one, Parsifal. I can’t figure you out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The way you stuck up for that old Jew back there. Jesus, I thought you were supposed to be a Nazi.’

  ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s the company you keep. We don’t see much of General Heydrich in my circle.’

  ‘He’s not an easy man to disappoint.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Can you? I wonder. I wasn’t always his creature. Even before the Nazis took over, I was out of the police, because of my politics. Which is to say that, like most people who supported the old Republic, I didn’t really have any politics except I wasn’t a Nazi and I wasn’t a Red. But that was no good, see? Not in the cops. So I left; but they’d have kicked me out anyway. Then, in 1938, not being a Nazi made me
seem like good police again. I wasn’t about to chalk someone up for a crime just because they were Jewish. That was useful to Heydrich and so he ordered me back into Kripo. And I’ve been stuck there ever since. Worse than that, if I’m honest. Suddenly, when war was declared, if you were in Kripo you were also in the SS; and when we attacked Russia—’

  I shook my head. ‘Well, from time to time I’m useful to him in the same way a toothpick might be useful to a cannibal.’

  ‘You’re worried he might eat you, too. Is that it?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Perhaps if more people stood up to Heydrich, the way you stood up to that fat Labour leader?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know Heydrich. People don’t ever stand up to Heydrich for very long. Most often, they end up standing in front of a firing squad. If they’re lucky.’

  ‘You’re a bit like Faust, I suppose. And Heydrich is your Mephistopheles.’