Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘And Nebe takes his orders from me. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You remind me of someone, Gunther. A rather stubborn Belgian by the name of Paul Anspach. He used to be President of the International Fencing Association. After Belgium was defeated, in June 1940, Anspach, who had acted as a military judge advocate, was arrested for alleged war crimes and put in prison. After he was released I had him summoned to Berlin, where I ordered him to surrender the Presidency to me. He refused. I can’t tell you how irritating that was; however, I admired his courage and sent him home.’

  ‘Not even you can always get what you want, General.’

  ‘I can actually. With the help of the Italian President of Fencing, I managed to have him stripped of the International Presidency anyway. It’s pointless being stubborn with me, Gunther. I always get what I want in the end. You should know that by now. That it’s not wise to oppose me. In case you didn’t understand, that’s the point of the fucking story.’

  ‘I’ve never believed it was wise to oppose you,’ I said, ‘even when I was doing it. No more than I think it’s wise for you to drive without an escort in an open-top car. You are an invitation to any would-be Gavrilo Princip to have a go. In case you had forgotten, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria also travelled in an open car.’

  Heydrich laughed, and although such a thing seemed almost impossible, I found I disliked him even more than before.

  ‘If I should ever gain the impression that my conduct in this respect was wise or ill-considered – if ever someone were to attack this car – I would not hesitate to respond with unheard-of violence. I suspect that the population of Prague is well aware of this fact. And while your concern is touching, Gunther, I think it unlikely that I will ever need to take your advice about this.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean to sound like I care what happens to you, sir. Any more than I mean to sound touching. What I mean to say is what your detective ought to say. Your bodyguard. Whatever it is you choose to call me. I don’t know a hell of a lot about fencing, but if it’s anything like boxing, then a fighter is told to protect himself at all times. That’s not weakness, General. Any more than it’s weakness to look out for a fellow officer from Halle-an-der-Saale who went to the same school with you.’

  ‘It’s clear to me by now that not everyone agreed with that.’

  ‘Tell me, sir, was Kuttner any good at his job?’

  ‘In so far as it went.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I have three other adjutants, all of whom are quite competent. I had thought that one more wouldn’t make any difference. One is enough for most people, of course. Of course I am not most people. However, the only reason I have four adjutants – correction, three adjutants – is to remind me to delegate more. I have a great problem trusting people to carry out my orders.

  ‘Ordinarily there’s nothing any of them do that I couldn’t do better myself. But seeing them at my every beck and call reminds me that there are other more important tasks that require my attention. Having three adjutants makes me more productive, more efficient. Frankly, however, I can’t stand the sight of any of them. Kuttner was at least someone I thought I liked. But adjutants are a necessary evil for a man in my position. Much like yourself.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  ‘That certainly was not my intention.’

  ‘Your father knew Kuttner’s father. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. But, since you ask, what is more relevant, perhaps, is that my mother gave Albert Kuttner music lessons.’

  ‘Is that how you met?’

  ‘I think it must have been. I seem to recall seeing him when I was back on leave from the Reichsmarine. I couldn’t have been more than twenty at the time. Kuttner was much younger, of course. I may even have tried to talk Albert into joining the naval academy, just like me. After all, he went to the same school that I did. But his father was less of a nationalist than my own, which might be why he chose to pursue a legal career instead. Not that any of this is relevant.’

  ‘I disagree. Finding out everything there is to know about a man who has been murdered and a lot more besides is, in my opinion, always the best way to discover why he was murdered. And once I find out why, it’s often a very simple matter to discover who.’

  Heydrich shrugged. ‘Well, it’s your business. You know best in these matters. You must do what you think fit, Gunther.’

  About halfway between Jungfern-Breschan and Prague the road ran between recently ploughed fields. It was a desolate scene with little in the way of other traffic until, nearing Bulovka Hospital, we encountered an ambulance and, further on, a tram grinding up the hill that led to the city suburbs. Crossing Troja Bridge the car slowed and rounded a corner, and a man snatched off his cap and bowed as he caught sight of a German staff car.

  It was easier to hear Heydrich now that we weren’t going quite so fast, and once again I tried to question him about Albert Kuttner.

  ‘Did you like Albert Kuttner?’

  ‘Is that your way of asking if I killed him?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. And to answer your other question, no, I didn’t like him. Not any more. Once I did. A while ago. But not lately. He was a disappointment to me. And to some extent he was becoming something of a liability. Since you mentioned Colonel Jacobi, I assume you know the details of what happened there. The quarrel they had. To be frank, Gunther, I am not at all sorry that Kuttner is dead. But my conscience is clear. I gave the man every opportunity to atone for his inadequacies. At the same time I can’t have people murdering my staff just because they don’t like them. Christ, if you and I were to murder all of the people back at the Lower Castle I didn’t like, then we should have hardly anyone left in the local SD: Jacobi, Fleischer, Geschke, von Neurath. I wouldn’t shed a tear if any of them caught a bullet.’

  ‘That’s straightforward enough, I suppose.’

  ‘Henlein and Jury are particularly awful, don’t you think? Cunts. The pair of them.’

  ‘When first we talked, sir. In the garden, yesterday. You mentioned an attempt on your own life. Do you think Kuttner’s murder might be related? A case of mistaken identity, perhaps? Kuttner was tall and blond, much like you. His voice and accent were not unlike yours either.’

  ‘You mean, high?’

  ‘Yes sir. In the dark, who knows? The killer might simply have shot the wrong person.’

  ‘The thought had occurred to me, of course.’

  ‘In which case I might very well be wasting my time looking for one of our colleagues with a good reason to murder Captain Kuttner, when my energies might be better spent looking for one of them who badly wants you dead.’

  ‘Interesting idea. And of my dear friends and esteemed colleagues back at my new home, which of them would you say has the best reason to want me dead?’

  ‘You mean, apart from me?’

  ‘You have an alibi, don’t you? You weren’t actually in the house at the time when Kuttner was murdered.’

  ‘Thoughtful of you to have provided me with one,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I should have thought that Frank or von Neurath have the best reasons, from a professional point of view. Von Neurath might like to be revenged on you for the sake of it. Although he doesn’t strike me as a murderer. But Frank does. With you dead, Frank probably gets your job.’

  ‘This is intriguing. Anyone else?’

  ‘Henlein and Jury probably hate you too, don’t you think?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t trust Jacobi as far as I could kick him.’

  ‘He does make the flesh creep, does he not?’

  ‘Geschke and Fleischer are hardly my idea of good friends, either.’

  ‘Not friends, perhaps. But colleagues. And good Nazis. And since we are discussing those among my staff who might hate me, there’s Kritzinger, too. I’m not suggesting that he might kill me, but I shouldn’t be a
t all surprised if he hates me. He’s an Austrian, from Vienna, and before the war he worked for the Jew who used to run the estate.’

  ‘Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Kuttner told me.’

  ‘After the Anschluss he and his master fled here from Vienna hoping to escape the inevitable before Bloch-Bauer finally took off for Switzerland, in 1939.’

  ‘But Kritzinger is in the SS. Most of the staff are in the SS, aren’t they?’

  ‘Of course. But very few of them were in the SS until the Reich acquired the Lower Castle.’

  ‘I thought that’s why they were hired. Because you knew you could trust them.’

  ‘They are all in the SS because it means the Reichsprotector doesn’t have to pay them out of his own pocket, Gunther. Otherwise I should never be able to keep a house as big as that, not on my salary.’

  That made me sit up a little: Heydrich had never struck me as mean with money; mean-spirited, yes, but not an embezzler. And to be so honest about it, too! Of course, I knew he’d never have told me if Himmler didn’t know about it and approve. Which meant that they were all in it. The whole rotten crew. Living high on the hog while the ordinary Fritz went without his beer and his sausage and his cigarettes.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure Kritzinger is a good German,’ continued Heydrich. ‘But it has to be faced, he was devoted to the Bloch-Bauers.’

  ‘Then why on earth do you keep him on?’

  ‘Because he’s an excellent butler, of course. Good butlers like him don’t grow on trees, you know. Especially now that we’re at war. I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand what that means, but Kritzinger puts his professional duties as a butler ahead of his own personal opinions, always. He sincerely believes that it is his duty to provide good service and concentrate only on that which lies within his realm, as a butler. If you were to question him he would probably tell you that he wouldn’t care to say, or something else that was courteously evasive.’

  ‘And yet you said that he might hate you.’

  ‘Of course. I have to recognize that it’s a possibility. It would be stupid not to consider it. Doing what I do, Gunther, it’s wise not to trust anyone. All I ask of people is that they do their duty, and in that respect at least, Kritzinger is beyond reproach.’ He looked impatient for a moment. ‘That may be too subtle a distinction for a man like you, but there it is. Such are the dilemmas that afflict everyone who finds himself in a position of great authority.’

  ‘All right, General. Whatever you say.’

  ‘Yes. It had better be.’

  When we were still several blocks east of the Imperial Hotel, Klein drew up outside an apartment building with massive, fierce-looking atlantes, Jugendstil windows, and a roof like a Bavarian castle. The portal was covered in mosaic and topped with a decorative filigree balcony. The building looked as if it had been designed by someone whose architectural influences were Homer and the Brothers Grimm. But the address was chiefly remarkable for the absence of any SS or even regular Army sentries, and it was immediately clear to me that this was not an official building.

  ‘What’s this place?’ I asked.

  ‘The Pension Matzky. A brothel run by the Gestapo for the entertainment of important Czech citizens. It’s staffed by twenty of the most beautiful amateur courtesans in all of Bohemia and Moravia. You need a password just to get through the door.’

  ‘I bet that keeps the tone up.’

  ‘Occasionally I visit the place myself. Or when I wish to reward the men who work for me with something special. And everything at the Pension Matzky is special.’

  As we were sitting there a furtive-looking man went through the front door; but he was not so furtive that I didn’t recognize him. It was Professor Hamperl, the man who had carried out the autopsy on Captain Kuttner.

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked. ‘One of these important citizens of Prague?’

  ‘I really have no idea,’ said Heydrich. ‘But I expect so. Incidentally, the password is Rothenburg. Now ask me why I told you that, Gunther.’

  ‘Why did you tell me that?’

  ‘So that you’ll be thinking about what you’re missing when you see that whore you brought from Berlin. I ask you, Klein, with the thousands of very willing girls there are in this town, can you imagine such a thing?’

  Klein grinned. ‘No sir.’

  Heydrich shook his head. ‘That’s like taking an owl to Athens.’

  ‘Maybe I just like German owls.’

  Heydrich smiled his wolf’s smile, stepped out of the car and went inside the Pension without another word.

  ‘Oh, good. You’re back. Now we can go out somewhere.’

  It was seven-forty-five, but a short while later when I looked at my watch it seemed like it was nine o’clock. With her head in shadow, Arianne was just a naked torso lying on the bed like a piece of marble sculpture. Dominated by light and form, she herself was almost secondary and not a person at all, so that I was reminded, a little, of what I’d seen during my time at the Bulovka Hospital.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and laid my hand on the curving white ski-slope that was the summit of her behind, descending the broad field of her thigh to her near-invisible knee.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want you here.’

  ‘I know you want me, all right,’ said a disembodied voice. ‘You’ve made that perfectly clear. All you do is fuck me.’

  ‘It’s no longer safe for you here in Prague. I told you. There’s a special group of SD that’s been set up to look for Gustav. If they had any idea you’d actually met him, no matter how innocently – well, you can’t imagine what would happen. At least, I hope you can’t imagine what would happen. You’re in danger, Arianne. Real danger. That’s why you urgently have to go back to Berlin. First thing tomorrow. For your own protection.’

  ‘And you. What will you be doing?’

  ‘I’ll be going back to Heydrich’s house in Jungfern-Breschan.’

  ‘Is that his car? The Mercedes you went away in yesterday morning?’ She paused. ‘I followed you downstairs to say goodbye and changed my mind when I saw those other men in the car.’

  ‘Yes. That’s his car. One of them anyway.’

  ‘What are you doing there, anyway? At Heydrich’s house. You don’t tell me anything.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. Not yet. I had a couple of rather boring meetings with some very boring generals.’

  ‘Including him.’

  ‘Heydrich is a lot of things but he’s never boring. Most of the time I’m much too afraid of him to be bored.’

  Arianne sat up and put her arms about my neck.

  ‘You? Scared? I don’t believe it, Parsifal. You’re brave. I think you’re very brave.’

  ‘To be brave you first have to be scared. Take my word for it. Anything else is just foolhardy. And it’s not bravery that keeps people alive, angel. It’s fear.’

  She started to cover my head and neck with kisses. ‘Not you,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I’m afraid of him, yes. I’m afraid of all of them. Afraid of what they might do to me. Afraid of what they might do to Germany. But right now I’m afraid of what they might do to you. That’s why I went to the Masaryk Station before I came here and bought you a ticket back to Berlin.’

  Arianne sighed and wiped a tear from her eye.

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon, I hope. But right now everything is confused. You’ve no idea how confused.’

  ‘And sending me back to Berlin makes things simpler?’

  ‘Yes. But I told you, that’s not the reason you have to go back home. All the same I’ll sleep a lot sounder knowing you’re all right.’

  She stroked my head for a moment and then said: ‘On one condition.’

  ‘No conditions.’

  ‘That you tell me you love me, Parsifal.’

  ‘Oh, I love you all right. As a matter of fact I love you very much,
Arianne. That’s why I have to send you away. It was a mistake bringing you here, I can see that now. It was selfish of me. Very selfish. I did it for me and now I have to do this for you, see? I don’t in the least want you to go home. But because I love you I really do have to send you away.’

  Maybe I did love her at that. Only it didn’t matter very much one way or another. Not now that she was leaving Prague. And somewhere inside me I knew that I couldn’t ever see her again. So long as she knew me she would be in danger because of who and what I was. After she had gone home she would be safe because I was the only person who could connect her with Gustav and Franz Koci. I knew I was going to feel bad about losing her, but this was nothing to how I knew I would feel if ever being with me put her into Heydrich’s cold white hands. He’d gut her for information the way Hamperl had gutted poor Albert Kuttner on the slab at Bulovka..