Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘I’ll always love you,’ I said, for effect.

  ‘And I love you, too.’

  I nodded. ‘All right. Let’s go and find some dinner.’

  CHAPTER 14

  I couldn’t sleep that night, but Arianne had very little to do with that, although she didn’t sleep well either. Sometime before dawn I must have slept a little because I dreamed I had returned to an almost preternatural time and place that was before the Nazis. But this was a recurring dream for me.

  We made a desultory attempt at intimacy but our spirits were not in it, hers even less than mine. We washed and dressed and ate some breakfast in the mosaic café downstairs. She seemed depressed and spoke very little, almost as if she was already on the train back to Berlin; but then again, I wasn’t exactly gabby myself.

  ‘You seem very quiet this morning,’ she said.

  ‘I was thinking the same of you.’

  ‘Me? I’m fine.’ She sounded defensive. ‘I didn’t sleep very well.’

  ‘You can sleep on the train.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps I will.’

  Pushing aside the salt and pepper cellars, I tried to take her hand but she pulled it away.

  ‘Don’t pretend, Bernie. You look like you can’t wait to get rid of me.’

  ‘Let’s not go over this again, Arianne.’

  ‘As you like.’

  We walked toward the elevator. The boy opened the double doors to admit us to his little vertical world, but just as I was about to follow Arianne inside the hotel clerk appeared in front of us and handed me a sealed envelope. As the car groaned its way up the shaft I read the note that it contained.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Arianne.

  ‘I just lost my ride to the Jungfern-Breschan.’

  She frowned.

  ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘Heydrich reminding me who’s boss, probably.’

  ‘You mean you’ve got no car?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, how will you get there? It’s fourteen kilometres.’

  ‘Apparently I will have to walk over to Hradschin Castle and beg a lift there.’

  The elevator car arrived on the top floor, where we got out.

  ‘That’s quite a walk from here,’ she said. ‘To the castle. I did it yesterday. At least forty minutes. Maybe more. You should telephone them and make them send a car.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘Then you could spend some more time with me.’

  I shook my head. ‘Believe me, I’m in no hurry to get there. Besides, it’s a nice day. And the walk will do me good. It will give me some time to think. Now I can see you off at the station.’

  ‘Yes. That would be lovely.’

  On our way along the floor she went into the bathroom; and I went back to the room. I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed and waited for her.

  Arianne was quite a while, although this wasn’t unusual. She was always well dressed and well groomed, which was one of the reasons I liked her. There’s something very sexy about disassembling something that has taken so long to put together: belt, dress, shoes, suspenders, corselette, brassiere, stockings, panties. But when she returned after at least fifteen minutes, she seemed even stiffer than before, as if the paint she had applied to her lovely face was meant not just to enhance her beauty but also to cover her true feelings.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, a little breathlessly, as she came through the door, ‘I’d rather you didn’t come to the station if you don’t mind. I’ve just done my make-up and I know I’ll cry if you’re standing on the platform waving goodbye. So, if you don’t mind, darling, let me go on my own. It’s only five minutes’ walk. My bag isn’t heavy. And I can manage perfectly well on my own.’

  I didn’t protest. Clearly her mind was made up.

  And that was it. When I walked out of the hotel and turned right and west to walk to the Charles Bridge and the Castle that lay beyond it, I never expected to see Arianne Tauber again, and it was as if a great load had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt if not carefree then certainly a profound sense of liberation. Strange how wrong we can be about so much. Being a detective, even a bad one, I should have been used to that: being wrong is an important part of being right, and only time can tell which it turns out to be.

  In the Old Town Square, I took a moment to remind myself of that. A few tourists, mostly off-duty German soldiers, had assembled in front of the town hall’s astronomical clock to witness the hourly medieval morality lesson involving Vanity, Delight, Greed and Death which took place in two little windows above the elaborate astrolabe. The off-duty soldiers took lots of photographs of the clockwork figures and checked their wristwatches, but none of them looked like they were learning much. That’s the thing about morality lessons. Nobody ever learns anything. We were face to face with the past, but none of us seemed to understand that we were also face to face with an allegory of our future.

  I got back to the Lower Castle at around ten o’clock and found Kurt Kahlo waiting patiently for me in the Morning Room.

  ‘Captain Kluckholn was just here,’ he said.

  ‘What did he want?’

  He handed me a sheet of paper.

  ‘It’s a list of Kuttner’s personal effects,’ he said. ‘Apparently these are available for our inspection in Major Ploetz’s office.’

  I glanced over the list.

  Kahlo handed me a brown envelope and, smiling, shook his head.

  ‘He’s also given us two tickets each for the circus next Wednesday evening.’

  ‘The circus? What the hell for?’

  Kahlo nodded. ‘Prague’s Crown Circus. I hear it’s very good. Everyone’s invited. Even me. It’s an outing for the SD and the SS and the Gestapo. Isn’t that nice? Mr and Mrs Heydrich are going. And so are Mr and Mrs Frank. Apparently your lady friend, Fräulein Tauber, is also invited. Whoever she is. I didn’t even know you had a lady friend here in Prague.’

  ‘I don’t. Not any more. Right now she’s on a train back to Berlin.’

  ‘God, I wish I was.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Now I understand why you wanted to get away last night. At the time I thought you were headed for the Pension Matzky.’

  ‘You know about that, do you?’

  ‘More than you might think. A mate of mine in the local vice squad had to interview the girls. Heydrich set the place up even before he became Reichsprotector.’

  ‘He never struck me as the type to pimp for his fellow officers.’

  ‘Oh, he’s not. The place is a honey trap. It’s equipped with listening devices so that he can eavesdrop on important Czechos or the top brass when they come down from Berlin. My mate reckons he’s blackmailing half of the General Staff. Apparently he’s got a similar place planned in Berlin. In Geisebrechtstrasse. If I were you, sir, I’d keep away from both.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip. I think I will.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  There was a second envelope in Kahlo’s hand. He handed it over. In the envelope was a letter from Geert Vranken’s father in the Netherlands, thanking me for contacting his daughter-in-law – she was too upset to write herself – and for informing them of his son’s ‘accident’; he also asked me to keep him informed of exactly when and where his son’s remains were eventually interred.

  ‘News from home?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ I put the letter and the circus tickets in my pocket. ‘Who’s our next witness?’

  ‘Brigadier Bernard Voss.’

  ‘Remind me who he is.’

  ‘In charge of the SS Officer School at Beneschau. And everything you’d expect from the commandant of an officer training school: a real stiff prick. Very probably you could use some uglier words than that. Especially if you’re a Czech. In November 1939 some students from the local university organized a demonstration during which Frank’s driver was injured. He shouldn’t have been there at all, but that’s another story. Anyway, twelve hundred students we
re arrested and Voss commanded the firing squads that shot several of them. As an example to the rest.’

  I pulled a face. It was easy to despise a man who’d done something like that. I knew because I’d done something like that myself.

  ‘And Voss once met Hitler,’ added Kahlo, ‘which is not so unusual in this house. However, when you talk to him it seems to have been the most important day in his life.’

  It was easy to believe this after just ten minutes in Voss’s company. Hitler he regarded as the modern equivalent of Martin Luther; and maybe he wasn’t so far wrong: Luther was another hugely deluded German I regarded with more than a little distaste.

  Fortunately for my inquiry it seemed Voss was just as happy to talk about the incident at Beneschau involving Kuttner and Jacobi as he was about the day he met Hitler.

  ‘Captain Kuttner was a highly intelligent young officer and I was surprised that he should have said what he did. However, I was not at all surprised that Colonel Jacobi should have answered him in that way. But then, that’s Jacobi for you.’

  ‘Where was General Heydrich when this happened?’

  ‘In the dining hall at Beneschau we have a long refectory-style table. I was right next to Jacobi. But Heydrich was at the opposite end of the table.’

  ‘Why didn’t he sit next to you, sir? Surely that would have been customary.’

  Voss shrugged. ‘The General was late. Delayed by some official business.’

  His voice was about as thick as a recently tarred road.

  ‘Why weren’t you surprised that Jacobi should have said what he said?’

  Voss shrugged again. He wasn’t as tall as he should have been; these days you don’t have to look commanding to be in command. But he did look tough for a man of almost fifty, which is about the number of stitches it must have taken to sew up the Schmisse on his left cheek, and you couldn’t argue with an Iron Cross first class or the courageous even foolhardy way he smoked, like every cigarette was his last.

  ‘It’s no secret that he and I don’t agree on a number of issues. Still there was no excuse for young Kuttner to be insubordinate like that. That was a surprise. I always thought him a very polite, courteous young man. Always. Ever since I first met him several years ago.’

  ‘So you knew him before he came to Prague?’

  ‘Oh yes. He was a cadet-officer at the SS Junker School in Bad Tolz when I was the commander there.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘When I was the commander at Bad Tolz? Let’s see now. July 1935 until November 1938. Kuttner was one of the best young officers that was ever produced there. He graduated at the top of his class. As you might have expected. After all, he was a law graduate of some brilliance. And great things were expected of Kuttner. He was certainly being groomed for one of the top jobs in the SS. Yes, it’s true he had important connections. But he had considerable ability of his own. If only things hadn’t gone wrong for him in Latvia he’d have been a major by now. With an important desk job in Berlin.’

  Voss shook his head.

  ‘Of course, he’s not the first SS officer that this sort of thing has happened to. I know because I keep up with a lot of the young men who passed through my hands at Bad Tolz. Men like Kuttner. The work is too much to expect anyone to carry out without it having some effects on morale and character. They’re only flesh and blood, after all.’

  It was odd how the same did not seem to apply to the victims of ‘the work’ that Voss described.

  ‘A new approach is needed to the work of evacuation and resettlement. A different solution to the Jewish problem. A better solution. And I’ve told Heydrich as much. Something is needed that takes into account the humanity of the men we ask to carry out these special actions.’

  He sounded so reasonable I had to remind myself that he was talking about mass murder.

  ‘After Bad Tolz, when you next saw Kuttner again – which was when?’

  ‘At the luncheon where the incident we were talking about took place.’

  ‘When you saw him again, would you say that he’d changed?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very much. And the change was obvious. To me he looked a nervous wreck. Which is what he was, of course. But still highly articulate. And likeable. Yes, I still liked him. In spite of everything. It’s a great shame this has happened.’

  After I finished with Brigadier Voss, Captain Kluckholn appeared in the Morning Room and explained that Major Thummel had to be back in Dresden that evening and, with their agreement, he had leapfrogged the list of witnesses ahead of Geschke, Bohme and Jacobi.

  ‘Is that all right with you, Gunther?’

  ‘Yes. But now that you’re here, Captain, I have a couple of quick questions I’d like to put to you.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘To you, yes. Of course. And by the way thanks for the circus tickets.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Thank the General.’

  ‘I will.’ I opened my cigarette case and offered him one.

  Kluckholn shook his head. ‘Don’t smoke.’

  ‘Hermann, isn’t it?’ I lit my nail and whistled down the smoke.

  He nodded.

  ‘Which adjutant are you? First, second, or third? I never can remember.’

  ‘Third.’

  Kluckholn folded his hands at his back and waited politely. He was the tallest and most distinguished of Heydrich’s remaining three adjutants. He was also the leanest. His hair was dark and worn slightly longer than most other officers in the SD, which added an almost glamorous, film-starrish aspect to the way he looked. A uniform suited him and he knew it. There was a second-class Iron Cross ribbon worn from the second buttonhole on his tunic and the right angles on the flares of his riding breeches looked like they’d been put there by Pythagoras. The Spanish-cut top-shaft boots were polished like horse brass and had almost certainly been supplied by an expensive dressage company like König. I had half an idea that if Heydrich ever accused him of being improperly dressed, Kluckholn would have hanged himself with his own aiguillette.

  ‘Tell me, Hermann. The night before Captain Kuttner was found dead. What did you two argue about?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken. We never argued.’

  ‘Oh, come on. I saw you in the front garden. While the Leader was on the radio telling us how wonderfully things were going for our armies in Russia, you two were at each other’s throats, like one of those stone sculptures on the front gate.’

  ‘I’m sorry to contradict you, Gunther. You may have seen what you assumed to be an argument but if you had been privy to our conversation you would have heard something quite different from an argument.’

  ‘So what was it?’

  ‘A gentlemanly discussion.’

  ‘Clenched fists. Gritted teeth. Face to face like a couple of boxers at a weigh-in. I think I recognize an argument when I see one.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar, Captain Gunther?’

  I let my lips tug at my cigarette for a long second before I answered him.

  ‘No, not at all. But all the same I’m still wondering if the gentlemanly conversation you had that was very different from an argument makes you a suspect in a murder. You hardly liked the man, after all.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘You did. Yesterday afternoon when General Heydrich was biting everyone’s ears in the library. I couldn’t help but hear your handsome eulogy of Captain Kuttner. I would say I was eavesdropping except that I imagine your boss left the door open and meant me and some others in the house to hear exactly what was said. There’s not much he does that hasn’t got a damned good reason behind it. Incidentally, I’m not the only one who’s wondering if you were up to putting a bullet in adjutant number four. Some of the other officers aren’t exactly slow when it comes to casting aspersions on the characters of their fellow officers. Are they, Kurt?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But it is disappointing, sir. I thought that among brother officers of the SS and the SD there would be a grea
ter sense of honour and camaraderie. To be honest, there have been times in the last couple of days when this room seemed more like the school principal’s office, the number of tales that have been told in here.’

  ‘So how about it, Hermann?’

  Kluckholn shook his head. ‘Whatever you heard, Captain Gunther, I can assure you I did not murder Captain Kuttner. Perhaps my language was a little intemperate yesterday, in the library. But I had a better opinion of him than perhaps you heard me say.’