Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  He unbuttoned his holster and handed over the Walther P38, standard issue for most SS officers unless, like me, they were anything to do with the criminal police, in which case they were given the PPK. He checked the safety, ejected the magazine quickly, and placed both in my hands. It was an impressively competent display for a man who was a doctor and an SS bureaucrat.

  I inspected the breech, which was empty, sniffed the barrel, and then glanced at the single-stack magazine in the palm of my hand.

  ‘Only three rounds,’ I said. ‘And it’s been fired. Recently.’

  ‘Yes. I did some shooting practice with my gun yesterday afternoon. In the woods near the Upper Castle. It was just to keep my hand in. It’s my belief that one cannot be too careful, what with all these Czech terrorists from UVOD running around.’

  ‘And are you a good shot, sir?’

  ‘No. Not good. Competent, perhaps.’

  I nodded at Kuttner’s body. ‘Obviously we won’t know the kind of gun that was used to kill the Captain until a postmortem has been performed. However, I’m afraid I will have to keep your weapon for now, sir.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘Yes. I may need to try to match the bullet that killed Captain Kuttner with a bullet fired from your gun. What were you using for target practice yesterday?’

  ‘Songbirds. Pigeons.’

  ‘Hit anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did anyone see you? Baron Neurath perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask him, I suppose.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Captain Kuttner,’ he repeated.

  I said nothing.

  ‘But I think that perhaps I could explain my opinion of him to you and the General in private.’

  ‘I think that’s an excellent idea, Hugo,’ said Heydrich. He glanced at Kritzinger and Pomme. ‘Gentlemen. If you would excuse us for a moment, please.’

  The butler and the Captain left the bedroom. I closed the door as best I could given the fact that it had been broken in. I stayed there for a moment, running my fingers over the splintered wood and broken brass-work while Jury blustered his way through an explanation of why he had disliked the dead man.

  ‘The matter is a delicate one, involving a lady I know. She is a woman of probity and reputation, you understand. However, the other day I overheard Captain Kuttner talking about her in a way I considered extremely distasteful. I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t mention her name or the specific details of the scurrilous gossip that was being relayed.’ Jury cleared his throat nervously, removed his glasses and started to polish the lenses with a handkerchief. ‘But I can assure you it was not the sort of thing one would expect to hear from an officer and gentleman.’

  ‘It’s true,’ admitted Heydrich. ‘Kuttner had an unfortunate tendency to be indiscreet. Even outspoken. I had occasion to speak to him about this.’

  I nodded. ‘Exactly who did Kuttner tell about your affair with this little opera singer?’ I asked him bluntly.

  ‘Well, I really must protest.’ Jury proceeded to give me a look as if he wished it was me lying on the bed with a bullet hole in my torso.

  ‘What was her name again? Elizabeth something. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Suppose we just leave her name out of this,’ said Jury.

  ‘All right. Suppose we do. Only that’s going to make it a little difficult to try to clear your name, General. You see I’ll need to speak to this other officer that Kuttner was speaking to. About your girl friend. Who was he?’

  Jury bit his lip. This took some doing given how thin it was. ‘Major Thummel,’ he said.

  ‘And by the way, you were right,’ I said. ‘Captain Kuttner was a gossip. He told me the same thing. About you and Fräulein Schwarzkopf and Doctor Goebbels. Kuttner seemed to think that there might be some other reason behind the Minister’s patronage than just her singing.’

  ‘You are impertinent, Captain Gunther.’

  ‘There’s no question about that, sir. The question is what else was said. And whether any of that is enough of a motive for murder.’

  ‘Need I remind you that you are speaking to a general?’

  ‘You can sit on the highest branch if you want, sir. But it certainly won’t stop me from shaking the tree. And I can shake it quite hard if I have to. Hard enough to dump you on your backside.’

  ‘I’m afraid Gunther is right, Hugo,’ said Heydrich. ‘This is really no time to be sensitive. I must have this situation cleared up as soon as possible if I am to avoid any embarrassment. That’s embarrassment to me and my office, you understand, not to you, Hugo. I can’t allow anything to get in the way of an early conclusion to this unfortunate matter. Even if that does mean us riding roughshod over your feelings and quite possibly your whole future, too, if you refuse to cooperate with the Commissar’s inquiry.’

  Heydrich looked at me now.

  ‘The fact is, Gunther, that Captain Kuttner heard this story from me. It was I who told him about General Jury’s affair with Fräulein Schwarzkopf. I’m sorry, Hugo, but everyone in Berlin knows what’s been going on. Except perhaps the Leader, and your wife, Karoline. Let us hope that she above all people can remain in ignorance of all this.

  ‘But, Herr Commissar, I think that the part of the story at which poor General Jury will have taken most offence relates not to her talents in the bedroom, which I assume are considerable, but to her talent as a singer. I’m afraid it’s true, Hugo. If the Fräulein was really any good as a soprano she’d be singing with the Berlin State Opera and not the German Opera. And you may not know it for sure but the Commissar is quite right that she has been sharing her sexual favours with the Minister of Propaganda. I have the incontrovertible proof of that, which at some future stage I would be happy to show you. So there’s no need to get on your high horse about all of this. You’ve both been fucking her and that’s all there is to it. I mean, how else do you think she was made a principal soprano so soon after joining the chorus? It was Goebbels who fixed that for her. In return for services that she rendered to him horizontally.’

  Jury’s cheeks were now quite red and his hands were fists. I wondered if that showed a man who was angry enough to kill a brother officer in cold blood.

  ‘I don’t care for your manners, General Heydrich,’ said Jury.

  ‘That is of small account to me, Hugo.’ Heydrich paused. ‘Well, how about it? Did you kill Captain Kuttner?’ He paused. ‘If you did then I promise that we can arrange things so as to avoid too much of a scandal. You can resign, quietly, and go back to your loyal wife, Karoline. Perhaps you can even pick up your medical career again. But I can promise that if you deny it and it turns out to be you after all who murdered the Captain, then it will go very hard for you. We have plenty of filthy prison cells in Terezin Castle where even a distinguished man such as you can be forgotten for years, right up until the moment when I sign his death-warrant and have him hanged the old Austro-Hungarian way. By strangulation from a pole.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ insisted Jury and then, with a short click of his heels and a bow of the head, he left the room abruptly.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed that capricious demonstration of your new powers,’ said Heydrich. ‘I know I did.’

  A few seconds later there was a knock on the open door. It was Kurt Kahlo.

  ‘I searched underneath the window, sir,’ he told me. ‘Nothing. But I found this lying on the floor further down the corridor. I marked the spot, so don’t worry.’

  He placed a small brass object in my hand.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Heydrich.

  I held the object up in my fingers. It looked like a metallic cigarette end.

  ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, sir, it’s a shell case from a Walther P38.’

  Heydrich tossed the shell case back to me.

  ‘Well, Gunther. Much as I should like to stay and observe you destroy the character of another of my g
uests, I do have urgent business to attend to. The rather more urgent matter of finding Vaclav Moravek.’

  ‘Yes, of course, sir.’

  ‘I’ve told Major Ploetz that no one is to leave until you’ve had a chance to question him. No one, apart from him and me and Klein, my driver.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I shall see you this evening when you can tell me of the progress you’ve made.’

  ‘All right, sir.’

  When he was gone I opened Captain Kuttner’s tunic and pulled up his bloody shirt to inspect the bullet wound and was surprised to find not one but two holes, both in the centre of his chest and each about the size of the nail on a man’s little finger. Kahlo was searching the floor again. I didn’t say anything about there being two gunshot wounds. After a minute or so I turned the dead man onto his side so that I could inspect his back.

  ‘There’s no exit wound,’ I said, carefully using the singular. I rubbed my hand up and down the dead man’s back. ‘But sometimes you can find the bullet just underneath the skin. I’ve seen bullets just fall out of people who’d been shot, after which they can end up just about anywhere. But I think this poor sonofabitch is still carrying metal.’

  I pushed Kuttner onto his back again and stood up.

  ‘Show me where you found that shell case.’

  Kahlo led the way out of Kuttner’s bedroom and in the corridor outside he pointed to a box of matches on the floor that he’d used to mark the spot where he’d discovered the shell casing.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You cut along to the Morning Room and make it look as much like an interview room as possible. On second thought, no. Leave it as it is. But we’ll need pencils and paper, a jug of water, some liquor, some glasses, a fresh pot of coffee every hour, a telephone, some cigarettes, and a typewriter.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘And tell Doctor Honek that the ambulance men can remove the body to the hospital. And have him arrange an autopsy, will you? Today, if possible.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  I glanced back to Kuttner’s door, about twenty metres away, and once Kahlo had gone, dropped onto my hands and knees and made my way slowly along the corridor. After a few minutes a door opened and out of a bedroom stepped the only officer in the Lower Castle who wasn’t a member of the SS or the SD. He was wearing the uniform of a major in the German Army.

  ‘You look how I feel,’ he observed.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Last night. I drank far too much. But on top of all that there was the champagne, which never agrees with me at the best of times. Still, under the circumstances I didn’t want to turn it down. We were celebrating after all, weren’t we? All the same I do regret it now. Woke up with a bit of a head this morning. I felt like I wanted to curl up and die.’

  ‘You have to be alive to feel like that, I suppose.’

  ‘What’s that? Oh, yes. I heard one of the adjutants got Stalin’s greatcoat. A terrible business.’

  Stalin’s greatcoat was a coffin.

  ‘Which one was he? All of these adjutant fellows sort of look the same to me.’

  I found what I was looking for: the second shell casing. I stood up and found myself facing a man of about the same age as me.

  ‘Captain Kuttner.’

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t remember him. ‘And you’re the detective fellow, from Berlin, aren’t you? Gunther, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘I suppose that accounts for why you’re crawling around the place on your hands and knees.’

  ‘I do quite a lot of that anyway, sir. Even when I’m not hunting for evidence. I like to drink, you see, sir. That is, when I can get it.’

  ‘There’s no shortage of it here, Gunther. If this keeps up I shall need a new liver. Major Paul Thummel, at your service. If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know. Major Ploetz says that you want to interview everyone who was staying here last night. Fine by me. Just say when. Always glad to help the police.’

  I pocketed the little shell casing. ‘Thank you, sir. Perhaps we could speak later on. I’ll have Captain Pomme contact you to arrange a time.’

  ‘Sooner the better, old man. Ploetz says that none of us can leave the house until we’ve given a statement. Frankly it all sounds a bit excessive. After all, it’s not like any of us is going to run away, is it?’

  ‘I think it has rather more to do with remembering details that might seem unimportant anywhere else. In my experience, it’s always better if you can interview witnesses as close to the crime scene as possible.’

  ‘Well, you know your job, I suppose. Just don’t interview people in alphabetical order that’s all. You’ll find that puts me last, I think.’

  ‘I’ll certainly bear that in mind, sir.’

  Investigating the murder of one young SD officer who had almost certainly participated in the murders of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Latvian Jews, Gypsies and ‘other undesirables’ struck me as absurd, of course. A mass murderer who’d been murdered. What was wrong with that? But how many had I killed myself? There were the forty or fifty Russian POWs I knew about for sure – nearly all of them members of an NKVD death squad. I’d commanded the firing squad and delivered the coup de grâce to at least ten of them as they lay groaning on the ground. Their blood and brains had been spattered all over my boots. During the Great War there had been a Canadian boy I’d put the bayonet into when it was him or me, only he’d died hard, with his head on my shoulder. God knows how many others I’d killed when, another time, I’d taken over a Maxim gun and squeezed the trigger as I pointed it at some brown figures advancing slowly over No Man’s Land.

  But it seemed that Albert Kuttner’s death mattered because he’d been a German officer and a close colleague of General Heydrich’s. That was supposed to make a difference, only it didn’t. At least not to me. Investigating a murder in the autumn of 1941 was like arresting a man for vagrancy during the Great Depression. But I did what I was told and started to go through the motions the way a proper policeman would have done. What choice did I have? Besides, it kept my mind off what I knew was happening out there, in the East. Most of all it kept my mind off the growing sense that I’d been to the worst place on the planet only to realize that the worst place of all was inside me.

  ‘I’ve prepared a list of everyone who stayed at the Lower Castle last night and therefore who you will want to interview,’ said Major Ploetz.

  He handed me a sheet of neatly typed, headed notepaper.

  ‘Thank you, Major.’

  We were in the Morning Room. With its greenish silk Chinoise wallpaper, the room felt like an extension of the garden and a little more natural than the rest of the house. There were a couple of big sofas facing each other like very fat chess-players across a polished wooden coffee-table. In the window was a grand piano and in the fireplace there was a fire that cheered the room. Either side of the marble fireplace was a mosaic of picture frames featuring Heydrich and his family. Kahlo was inspecting these, one at a time, as if looking to judge a winner. Now wearing my civilian clothes, I was seated on one of the sofas, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Here is your mail, Commissar, forwarded from the Alex in Berlin. And here is a copy of Albert Kuttner’s SD personnel file. The General thought it might help you to get a better sense of the man and what he was like and – you never know – perhaps why he was killed. The personnel files of everyone staying here this weekend are being sent over from Hradschin Castle this morning.’

  ‘That’s very efficient of you, Major.’

  It was easy to see why Ploetz was Heydrich’s Chief Adjutant. There was no doubting his efficiency. With his lists and memoranda and facts and figures Achim Ploetz was a real electric Nazi. Before the war I’d been to a town called Achim. It was near Bremen in a nice part of the country that, in its natural state, is mostly moorland. But there was nothing natural about Achim Ploetz, and in that respect at least, Doctor Jury was rig
ht: all of Heydrich’s adjutants were a bit like the golem of Prague.

  Outside the Morning Room window a Mercedes drew up and Heydrich’s driver got out and opened the passenger door expectantly.

  Ploetz saw him out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Well, I’d better go and tell the General that our car is here,’ he said. ‘If there is anything you want, just ask Pomme.’

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  Then he was gone and Kahlo and I were standing at the window peering around the heavy drapes like two comedians getting ready to take a curtain call. The convertible’s top was down and the engine was purring smoothly like some green metal dragon. Ploetz climbed aboard first and sat in the rear. Heydrich sat up front with the driver as if that might help him to control the car despite the fact someone else was at the wheel. He was just like that, I guess. As we watched them drive away there was no sign of an armed escort.