Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Any suspects yet?’

  ‘It’s still a little early for that, Major.’

  ‘Hmm. Bad business all round. Leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth to think that some fellow sitting next to you at dinner might have murdered some other fellow you knew in cold blood.’

  ‘Have you anyone in mind?’

  ‘Who me? No.’ Thummel crossed his legs, took hold of the shin of his boot and hugged it toward him like an oar in a two-man scull. ‘But fire away with your questions, Commissar, all the same.’

  ‘Are you feeling better today?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The hangover?’

  ‘Oh, that. Yes. Fine thanks. I’ll say one thing for Heydrich, he keeps a spectacular cellar. Himmler will be jealous when I tell him.’

  That was a little heavy-handed, I thought. Just as he was doing so well creating an easygoing impression of himself he had to go and spoil it by mentioning Himmler, with whom he was quite probably familiar. I looked at Kahlo who rolled his eyes eloquently as if to suggest that in comparison to Kluckholn I was wasting my time – that Thummel was one of the people with a kind face and a good alibi he had been talking about.

  ‘Nevertheless, I shan’t be at all unhappy to go back to Dresden. I don’t feel at all comfortable here in Bohemia. Nothing to do with the Reichsprotector’s hospitality, of course. But there’s something about this country that makes you feel as if you might get your head bashed in on your way to church, like poor old King Wenceslas. Or that one might be defenestrated by a bunch of malodorous Hussites. Awkward, stinky mob, the Czechos. Always were. Right the way through history. Always will be. If you ask me the General’s got his work cut out with these bastards. You were in Paris before this, I hear.’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have to tell you how different Prague is from Paris. The Frenchies are nothing if not pragmatic. They know what side their bread is buttered on, for now. But the Czecho is a very different kettle of fish. He’s a real festering sore is your average Czecho. You mark my words, Commissar, there’s going to be a lot of blood spilled here if we’re ever going to hold on to this country.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Sorry. Rattling on like a milkmaid as usual. You want to talk about poor old Captain Kuttner, don’t you? Not my opinion of the Czechos.’

  ‘I found a spent cartridge on the landing in front of your door. From a P38. Which would seem to indicate that a shot must have been fired in that vicinity. On the morning of the murder did you hear a shot fired?’

  ‘You mean in the house. Not outside. Seems to me there’s always someone shooting something out there. No, I didn’t hear a thing. Mind you, that night I slept like a pickled marmot after all the booze I’d consumed. Slept right through until about – let’s see now – well, it must have been about seven o’clock in the morning when I heard a couple of loud bangs. I got up to see what the commotion was about and Captain Pomme, I think, explained to me that he and the butler had been obliged to batter down Kuttner’s door, on account of how they thought he must have taken an overdose of barbitol. At least that’s what I think he said. So I wandered along to see if I could help and heard Dr Jury say that the poor fellow was dead. There was nothing I could do, of course, so I went back to bed. Stayed there until just about nine. Had a wash, dressed, came out my door again, and there you were, crawling around on the floor looking for that bullet casing. Frankly, I’ve been racking by brains ever since for a reason why anyone would have killed him. Not to mention how. The room door was locked and bolted from the inside, wasn’t it? Window bolted? And no murder weapon yet found. A regular mystery.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I even had a look about the dead man’s bedroom last evening, in search of some inspiration. I’m not trying to show the hen how to lay an egg and all that but while I was there I found several floorboards underneath the rug that were loose. Loose enough to pull them up. There was a good space underneath them. Easily big enough for a decent-sized man to have hidden there. And it occurred to me that the murderer, with a sufficiently cool head, might have been lurking in there all the while that you were all in the room, on top of him, so to speak. Of course, he would have to have devised a means of replacing the floorboards on top of his place of concealment and then pulling the rug back. With a couple of lengths of fishing line, perhaps. Yes, that’s what I’d have used if it had been me in there. With a couple of strategically-placed nails on the skirting-board, you could have wound the rug in as easily as a venetian blind.’

  I looked at Kahlo, who shrugged back at me.

  ‘Sorry.’ Thummel smiled ruefully. ‘I just sort of thought you ought to know. Really, I wasn’t trying to make you look a fool or anything, Commissar Gunther.’

  ‘Actually, sir, I seem to be managing that particular task perfectly well on my own.’

  I sighed and stared up at the ceiling where, immediately above, Kuttner’s room was situated.

  ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

  ‘You can’t think of everything. Such an investigation as you are trying to conduct in this house would try the patience and ingenuity of any mortal man. And look here, I am not saying that is where the murderer was hiding. I am merely suggesting it as a possibility, although not a strong one, I think.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘However, I will say this. In the Abwehr we are constantly impressed by the resourcefulness and imagination of the enemy. Especially the Tommies. Desperation is the father of innovation, after all.’ He sighed. ‘I do not say that is how it was done, Commissar. I say only that is how it could have been done.’

  I nodded. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, Commissar. I certainly won’t. If you receive my meaning.’

  ‘We had better go up there and take a look for ourselves.’

  We all three stood up and moved, simultaneously, for the Morning Room door.

  ‘By the way, Major Thummel,’ I said, remembering the letter I had received from Berlin that morning. ‘Does the name Geert Vranken mean anything to you?’

  ‘Geert Vranken?’ Thummel paused for a moment and then shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why, should it?’

  ‘There was a murder investigation in Berlin this summer. The S-Bahn murderer? Vranken was a foreign worker on the railways who was interviewed by the police as a potential suspect and he mentioned a German officer who might be prepared to stand as a character witness for him.’

  ‘And you think that was me?’

  ‘I just received a letter from his father in the Netherlands and he said that his son had met a Captain Thummel, in The Hague, before the war, in 1939.’

  ‘Well, there you are, Commissar. It must be another officer called Thummel. Last time I was in The Hague was 1933. Or maybe thirty-four. But certainly not in 1939. In 1939, I was stationed in Paris. You know, Thummel is not an uncommon name. The maître d’ at the Adlon Hotel is called Thummel. Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes sir. I do know that. You’re right, it must be another officer called Thummel.’

  Thummel grinned cheerfully. ‘Besides, I’m hardly in the habit of giving guest workers a character reference.’ He nodded upstairs. ‘But I don’t mind showing you those loose floorboards, Commissar.’

  After Thummel had left Kuttner’s bedroom, Kahlo climbed into the space in the floor and waited patiently while I replaced the boards. Then I took them up again.

  Kahlo climbed out, covered in dust.

  ‘Well, it’s possible, all right,’ I said. ‘But hardly probable.’

  ‘Why do you say that, sir?’

  ‘The amount of dust on you. If someone had been hidden there on Friday morning I’d have expected a little less dust than there is in there now. Or at least, was, until you got in there.’

  I handed Kahlo the clothes brush I’d picked up from the top of the dresser.

  ‘Lucky it’s not a good suit,’ I said.

  Kahlo growled an obscenity and
began to brush off his jacket and trousers.

  ‘Depends on how much dust there was down there before, doesn’t it?’ he muttered.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And with all of the cauliflower still pissed in their rooms, any one of them might have hidden himself in there and no one would have been any the wiser.’

  ‘I’ve looked at the rug, too, and I can see no means whereby someone drew the rug back over the boards while he was hidden down there. No fishing line; no nails on the skirting.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Kahlo, ‘the murderer has been back in here and removed them.’

  ‘Perhaps. Anyway, if the murderer did manage to conceal himself down there, that puts Kluckholn in the clear. Immediately after the murder, he was here in the room, remember? With you and me.’

  ‘Pity. But I still like him for it. And like you said yourself, it’s hardly probable, is it? That the killer would have hidden in here.’ Kahlo shook his head. ‘No, you’re right. Kluckholn must have done it some other way. It might just be that he turned himself into a bat.’

  I grinned and shook my head. ‘He couldn’t have done it that way, either. The window was closed, remember?’

  ‘So the General says. We all assume that because he’s the General his evidence is one hundred per cent. What if he made a mistake about that? What if the window was open after all?’

  ‘Heydrich doesn’t make mistakes about things like that.’

  ‘Why not? He’s only human.’

  ‘Whatever gave you that impression?’

  Kahlo shrugged.

  ‘It’ll be lunchtime soon,’ he said. ‘You could ask him then.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  ‘Yeah sure. I meant what I said about that promotion, you know.’

  He handed me the clothes brush and then turned around.

  ‘Do you mind, sir?’

  I brushed the worst of it off his jacket and thought of Arianne brushing off my own jacket the previous day. I liked that she had been so particular about my appearance, straightening my tie, adjusting my shirt-collar, and always picking my trousers off the floor and tucking them under the mattress so that they might keep the crease. It was a caring touch I was missing already. By now she was probably across the Bohemian border and back in Germany and a lot safer than she was in Prague. I knew what Thummel had been talking about; there was something about Prague that I didn’t care for at all.

  ‘I’m looking forward to lunch,’ said Kahlo. He was sniffing the air like a big hungry dog. ‘Whatever it is smells good.’

  ‘Everything smells good to you.’

  ‘Everything except this case.’

  ‘True. Look, you go ahead, to lunch. I’m going to stay here for a while.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. Stare at the floor. Listen to that crow outside the window. Shoot myself. Or perhaps pray for some inspiration.’

  ‘You’re not going to miss lunch, are you?’

  Kahlo’s tone made this sound as serious as if I really was planning to shoot myself. Which wouldn’t have been so very far from the truth.

  ‘Now I come to think of it, that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘Eating has a habit of interfering with my thinking. In that respect it’s almost as bad as beer. If I fast for a while maybe I’ll be given a vision as to how this murder was done. Yes, why not? Maybe if I starve myself like Moses for forty days and nights then perhaps the Almighty will just come and tell me who did it. Of course he might have to set the house on fire to get my full attention, but it’ll be worth it. Besides, I’m pretty sure I have a head start on Moses in one respect.’

  ‘Oh? What’s that?’

  I opened my cigarette case. ‘A smoke. A very small burning bush from whence a great deal of wisdom can be imparted. I reckon any one of those saints could have saved themselves a lot of time and discomfort with a simple cigarette.’

  After Kahlo had left me alone with my angst I sat on the edge of Kuttner’s mattress and lit one, and when I’d had enough of looking at my cigarette’s little mystic trail of holy inspiration I decided to take a look around the house. With more or less everyone now gathered in the Dining Room I was able to go where I pleased without having to furnish an explanation of what I was doing. Besides, I wasn’t sure there was an explanation for what I was searching for. All I knew was that I needed to have an idea – any idea – and to have one fast.

  Hearing a loud cheer downstairs in the Dining Room gave me my first idea. It wasn’t much of an idea but it had at least the merit of being practical. An experiment. An empirical test of an assumption I and everyone else had made right from the very beginning of the case.

  I went along to my own bedroom and fetched the Walther PPK from my bag. Back in Kuttner’s room, I closed the door as best I could, racked one bullet into the chamber, fired the weapon twice in quick succession and then sat down to wait for whatever was going to happen. But if I had expected the shots to summon the arrival of a concerned group of officers in Kuttner’s room, I was wrong. A minute passed, then two; and after five minutes I was quite certain that no one was coming because no one had heard the shots. Of course this told me only that Kuttner might easily have been shot without anyone hearing or bothering to investigate the shots, but that still felt like something. It was one assumption I’d made that could easily be proved to have been false. And where there was one, there might easily be another.

  I went back to my room and replaced the gun in my bag before heading out and along the landing with its blackamoor figures, the hunting-style leather chairs, the decorative Meissen and the less decorative framed photographs of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Bormann and von Ribbentrop. It was a home from home if you lived at the Berghof.

  I was familiar with the more attractive parts of the Lower Castle, including the Library, the Dining Room, the Billiard Room, the Winter Garden, the Conference Room and the Morning Room; but there were other parts of which I knew nothing or which felt forbidden. Heydrich’s study certainly felt like it was out of bounds, even to someone who was supposed to be Heydrich’s detective. Outside the door I paused for a moment, knocked, and then, hearing no one and expecting to find the door locked, I turned the thick brass handle. The door opened. I went inside. I closed the heavy door behind me.

  The room – one of the largest in the house – was quiet and cool; it felt more like a sepulchre than a study. I walked around for a good minute before I was retracing my footsteps, which, like a ghost’s, were completely silent in that room, as if I hardly existed at all. Heydrich could have arranged that, of course, and only too easily. As easily as emptying out the crystal ashtray on the desk which looked very clean and brightly polished. One of Kritzinger’s duties, perhaps?

  I don’t know that I expected to find anything. I was just being nosy, but like any detective I felt I had the licence to indulge this tendency, which only feels like a vice when it is accompanied by something more venial like envy or greed. There was nothing in there I really coveted, although I had always wanted a nice desk with a comfortable office chair, but maybe this furniture was a little too grandiose for my purpose. All the same I sat down, spread my hands along the Reichsprotector’s desk, leaned back in his chair, glanced around the room for a moment, handled some of the books on his shelves – mostly popular fiction – looked over his many photographs, inspected the blotter for some recent correspondence – there wasn’t any – and then decided I was very glad I wasn’t Reinhard Heydrich. Not for all the world would I have changed places with that man.

  The leather desk diary was full of appointments and not much else. There were many previous meetings at the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg, at the Berghof, at the Reich Chancellery; and future evenings at the circus – strangely, that was underlined – a day at Rastenburg, a weekend at Karinhall, a night at the Deutsches Opernhaus, Christmas at the Lower Castle, and then a January conference at an SS villa in Grosser Wannsee. As Heydrich’s detective would I be requir
ed to go to all of these places? Rastenburg? The Reich Chancellery? The thought of actually meeting Hitler filled me with horror.

  I searched the wastepaper bin underneath the desk and found only a sock, with a hole in it. There were no office drawers for me to search. If Heydrich had secret files they were certainly kept somewhere secret. I looked around the room.

  The safe I decided at last was behind the portrait of Hitler; and so it proved; but I wasn’t about to try and open it; even my impertinence had its limits. Besides, there were things I really didn’t want to know. Especially the secret things that Heydrich knew.