Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘But I was shocked when Berlin’s Gestapo informed me that my own adjutant was probably homosexual. Not that he was very obvious about it; indeed I was so sceptical that I sent him along to Pension Matzky, where I’m afraid to say he disgraced himself with a girl called Grete. When he failed to perform with her, unfortunately she mocked his inadequacy and earned herself a beating. He was very apologetic about it afterwards; he even sent her some flowers by way of compensation; most bizarrely he then seems to have adopted an entirely opposite opinion of the poor girl and decided that he felt some romantic attachment for her. I’m sure there are medical explanations for his mental state. But if there are, I have no time for them. That was when I decided to get rid of him. I dislike men who are violent to women almost as much as I dislike men who are unreliable.

  ‘Anyway, if I had sent him back to Berlin in disgrace it wouldn’t have been long before he disgraced himself again and, more importantly, disgraced his family in Halle. I couldn’t have that. I am very fond of those people. Fond enough to want to spare them any further pain. So I thought it was better for him to be quietly murdered by me in a way that can be easily hushed up rather than allow his family to endure the public disgrace that would follow his being sentenced to some SS punishment battalion. Indeed, it already seems to me much more probable that at some stage in the hopefully not too distant future Captain Kuttner will become an unfortunate victim of Vaclav Moravek, and heroically shot by him while trying to assist in the Czech terrorist’s arrest. We may even have to award him a posthumous decoration. That’s a story that should play well at home, don’t you think?’

  ‘Why not? He is as good a Nazi hero as any others I can think of.’

  Heydrich smirked. ‘Yes, I thought you might approve. You were wrong about one thing, however. I couldn’t ever have risked wasting so much time searching for my spent brass on the floor of Kuttner’s room. So, I had the gun inside a sock, so that it could be fired without any of the spent brass being ejected onto the floor or the bed. It all stayed safely inside the sock. Until as you say, I threw it into the corridor. Anyway, having decided to kill him – it was as you say The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that gave me the idea of how to do it – I then wondered if I might put his death to some useful purpose. If I could rely on you to be your usual awkward self and pose a lot of awkward questions to people like Henlein, Frank, von Eberstein, Hildebrandt, Thummel and von Neurath, whom we’ve had our doubts about for some time. And you came up trumps. Nothing you’ve said can spoil what I’m feeling now. And you’ll no doubt be pleased to discover that you will have advanced my reputation even further. The apprehension of the traitor X will put me in very good odour with the Leader. Ever since the invasion of Poland, the traitor has been a thorn in our side. No more. And my triumph will be complete just as soon as the third of the Three Kings is in my hands. You see, now that I have Thummel, it can’t be very long before everything is neatly wrapped up.’

  ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘I’m not about to let you get away with murder, General.’

  ‘We’re getting away with it every minute,’ murmured Heydrich. ‘I thought you knew that.’

  ‘Kuttner had it coming for all I know, but even in the SS there are standards that have to be adhered to. Military discipline. Due process. Probably it will cost me my job. Even my life, but I can at least try to bring you down.’

  ‘You’re a fool if you think you can bring me down. But then I think you know that already, don’t you? It’s certainly true, you can cause a bit of trouble for me, Gunther. Himmler won’t thank me for exposing Paul Thummel; and naturally the investigation will have to be entirely above reproach. Very possibly that will involve you. In which case I can hardly have you shot or sent to a concentration camp. No, I can see I’m going to have to provide you with a better, more urgent reason than your loyalty to me, one that will make sure you keep your mouth shut about all of this.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, sir. Not this time.’

  ‘Do try to be sporting about this, Gunther. At least let me try.’

  ‘If you like.’

  Heydrich threw away his cigarette and glanced at his wristwatch.

  ‘We’ll go straight to Gestapo headquarters. There, if you wish, you can make out your own report, in as much detail as you like. Pecek Palace is the proper place to bring charges against me. That is, if I can’t provide you with a better reason than simple self-preservation.’

  ‘I dare say you have people there who can persuade anyone to do anything.’

  ‘Oh, you misunderstand me, Gunther. You weren’t listening, perhaps. I said I was going to give you a much better reason to keep your mouth shut than self-preservation, and I meant it. You’re quite safe from that sort of thing, I can assure you. I’m going to give you something much more compelling than violence against your person, Gunther. Shall we?’

  I nodded, but something told me that I had already lost. That this was one murderer who was almost certain to get away quite unscathed.

  It was three-thirty in the afternoon when Heydrich and I got into the Mercedes with Klein and started out for the centre of Prague. No one said very much but it was obvious that Heydrich was in a good humour, humming a pleasant-sounding melody that was the very opposite to the threnody playing inside my own thick skull.

  Nearing the railway line that led west to Masaryk Station, we overtook a horse-drawn hearse headed south, for the Olsany Cemetery. The mourners walking behind looked at Heydrich with baleful eyes as if somehow they held him responsible for the death of the person they were escorting to church. For all I knew that was true, and the sight of his distinctive SS car must have been like catching a glimpse of the grim reaper himself. You could feel the hate following us like X-rays and despite Heydrich’s overbearing confidence that he was invincible, it was clear to me that the hatred directed at him could just as easily have been a hail of machine-gun bullets. An ambush was the best way to kill Heydrich, and once you were in that car, anything might happen. If it had happened right then and there, I wouldn’t have minded that much.

  By the time we reached the outskirts of the city what little confidence I had of making something stick to Heydrich had faded. Optimism has its limits. I was an idealist and ahead of me lay an unpleasant, possibly painful, even fatal demonstration of just where idealism could get you. A jail cell. A beating. A train ride to the concentration camp being built around the fortress of Terezin. A bullet in the back of the head. Heydrich might have assured me I was safe but I had little confidence in his assurances; and thoughts of my own peril overpowered any other ideas of just what the man sitting in front of the car – whose own mind seemed more preoccupied with Schubert and his trout – had in store to deflect me from any attempt to bring charges against him.

  So we drove on to what promised to be some sort of final reckoning between us.

  Pecek Palace, formerly a Czech bank, was part of a government area that was home to several tall and rusticated grey buildings any one of which could have been Gestapo headquarters. But the real HQ was easy to spot at the end of the street, surrounded as it was with checkpoints and bedecked with two long Nazi banners. It was a grim, granite edifice that was a near-copy of the Gestapo’s central HQ in Berlin’s Prinz Albrechtstrasse, with huge cast-iron lamps that belonged on an ogre’s castle, and a Doric-columned portico that might have seemed elegant but for several SS men who were grouped out front, easily recognizable with their leather coats, pork-knuckle faces and pugilist’s manners. None of them looked as though they would have turned a short hair to see a defenestrated Czech crash onto the black cobbles in front of their cold eyes. Five storeys above the street the balustrade featured stone vases that resembled giant funeral urns. Certainly it wouldn’t have surprised the Czechs to have been told that this was what these were used for. After three years of occupation the Gestapo at Pecek Palace had the most fearsome reputation in all of Europe.

  Klein stopped the car at the entrance and t
he guards came to attention. I followed Heydrich through the wrought-iron doors and up a short, shiny limestone staircase that was lit by a large brass chandelier. At the top of the stairs were some glass double-doors lined with green curtains and in front of these were two SS guards, a pair of Nazi flags, and between them a portrait of the Leader – the one by Heinrich Knirr that made him look like a queer hairdresser. To the left was a reception area where I presented my identification and endured the awl-like scrutiny of the uniformed NCO on duty.

  ‘Tell Colonel Bohme to come and fetch us,’ Heydrich told the NCO. And then to me: ‘I’m lost in here.’

  ‘A common experience, I imagine.’

  ‘Bohme is the one who thought he could solve Kuttner’s murder,’ said Heydrich.

  ‘Are you going to tell him or shall I?’

  ‘Oh, I know you find it hard to credit, but I take a lot of vicarious pleasure in your solving Kuttner’s murder. I mean I can admire it as a piece of reasoning. And I’m very much looking forward to seeing the expression on his stupid Saxon face.’

  ‘I’d been kind of looking forward to that myself. Bohme was the other officer who straightened Kuttner’s tie after your speech the other night. When he rescued the maid, Rosa, from Henlein’s clumsy drunken pass. I shall miss the opportunity of making him feel like he had something to hide.’

  ‘You’re a natural contrarian, Gunther,’ observed Heydrich. ‘I think your problem is not with the Nazis, it’s with all authority. You just don’t like being told what to do.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I glanced around.

  ‘Major Thummel’s here?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is Bohme questioning him?’

  ‘Abendschoen is leading the interrogation. He’s much more agile than Bohme. If anyone can trip Thummel up without breaking skin, it’s Willy Abendschoen.’

  A minute or two passed before we heard footsteps coming up the broad stairs.

  Bohme arrived at the top of the stairs and marched smartly across the hall and into the reception area. He saluted in the usual Nazi way, and under the circumstances I didn’t bother returning the compliment; but Heydrich did.

  ‘Let’s go and see the prisoner, shall we?’ said Heydrich.

  Bohme led the way back across the hall and downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs we walked on through a warren of unpleasant smelling and dimly lit corridors and cells.

  ‘I hear it’s down to you, Captain Gunther, that we found Thummel was the traitor,’ Bohme told me. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Bohme paused outside a cell door. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Not only that but he has also solved the murder of Captain Kuttner,’ said Heydrich.

  ‘Then you’ve really covered yourself in glory, haven’t you?’ said Bohme. ‘So who did it?’

  I glanced at Heydrich.

  ‘What’s the game, General?’ I said. ‘If you’ve got a card to play here, then you’d better play it, only don’t treat me like an idiot.’

  ‘In spite of all that, an idiot is what you are,’ said Heydrich. ‘A very clever idiot. Only a clever man could have deduced who murdered Captain Kuttner, how and why. But only an idiot could have behaved as you did.’

  Heydrich pushed open the door to a large interrogation room that was complete with stenographer, several wooden chairs, some chains hanging from the ceiling, and an en suite bath. Besides the stenographer there were two largish men in the room and a naked woman.

  ‘Only an idiot could have been so easily duped by the Czechs,’ said Heydrich. ‘By her.’

  He pointed at the girl.

  It was almost as well he identified her because she was nearly unrecognizable.

  The naked girl was Arianne Tauber.

  As soon as I saw Arianne I moved to help her and found myself solidly restrained by Bohme and another largish man who’d been standing, unseen by me, behind the heavy wooden door of the interrogation room; restrained and then, on Heydrich’s order, searched for a non-existent weapon and quickly manacled on a length of chain to a cast-iron radiator as big as a mattress, safely out of harm’s way.

  I hauled at the chain attached to my wrists and swore loudly, but no one was paying much attention to me. I was like a dog that had been safely kennelled, or worse.

  Heydrich laughed, and that was the cue for the others to do the same. Even the stenographer, a young hatchet-faced woman in SS uniform, shook her head and smiled as if she was genuinely amused by my threats and bad language. Then she straightened the little forage cap she was wearing and adjusted the grip that kept it on her head. She must have sensed me wishing I could have smacked it onto the floor.

  I glanced around the windowless room. It was as big as a chapel in a disused church. The walls were tiled in pea-green. Dusty bare light bulbs hung from the heavily cobwebbed ceiling. The floor was covered with pools of water. There was a slight smell of excrement in the cold air. I hauled some more upon my chain, to no effect. It seemed my situation was as helpless as Arianne’s seemed hopeless.

  She did not move. Her battered purple eyes remained closed like sea anemones. Her wet hair was coiled around her face like dark yellow snakes on the head of a dead Medusa. There was blood in her nostrils and she appeared to have lost some fingernails, but she was not dead. The edges of her bare breasts shifted a little as breath entered and left her body; she could not move because she was strapped onto a wooden bascule. She was not, however, about to be guillotined, although that was the point of the bascule: to restrain the body and transport the head of a condemned person smoothly through a lunette so that he or she might be quickly decapitated by the falling axe.

  Arianne was strapped onto the bascule for an altogether different but almost as unpleasant reason.

  The bascule was positioned precipitously over the end of a bath full of pinkish-brown water so that it worked very like a lever. One of Arianne’s torturers had his foot on the end of the bascule just under her bare feet and all he had to do to allow the wooden board carrying her body to tip forward on the fulcrum that was the lip of the bath was to move his black boot a few centimetres; then she would fall head first into the water and remain there until either she drowned or her torturers decided to lift the bascule up again. It was ingeniously simple, and although the bath was smeared with blood, as if the bascule sometimes fell awkwardly – and perhaps that explained the several contusions on her eyes, cheeks and forehead – it was obviously effective.

  At the end of my chain I was at least a metre away from everyone and this seemed to suggest that others before me had stood where I was, chained to the same radiator and obliged to watch friends being tortured. I couldn’t even kick the edge of the stenographer’s neat little corner-table with its typewriter, pencil, notebook, magazine, coffee-cup and nail-file; but I promised myself that if the bitch started filing her nails while Arianne was being tortured, I would take off my shoe and throw it at her.

  Looking at Arianne, it was impossible to believe she was the same woman I had left behind at the Imperial Hotel that morning. Somehow Heydrich, or the SD or the Gestapo had discovered something about Arianne that had persuaded them to arrest her. But what? Only she and I knew about Gustav and the envelope he had asked her to give to Franz Koci. Nobody else knew anything. Nobody but Gustav. And even if Paul Thummel was indeed Gustav, it seemed impossible that her arrest could be connected with his. Not yet. They had to have picked her up at the station before I had identified Paul Thummel as traitor X.

  ‘Has she talked?’ Heydrich asked Bohme.

  The other man pulled a face. ‘Well, of course, sir. What a question.’

  ‘You think so? What about Masin and Balaban? You couldn’t get them to talk, could you? You had those two Czechos for five months before you managed to get anything out of them.’

  ‘They were exceptionally strong and determined men, sir.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised, now that I’ve been in here. To me this hardly look
s like torture. Somehow I imagined something much worse. Back at my gymnasium in Halle we used to do this sort of thing to other boys just for sport.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, there’s not much that’s worse than the water bascule. Short of death itself, which would hardly be to the purpose, no other torture quite persuades as much that you are surely about to die.’

  ‘I see. So, what has she told us?’

  Bohme approached the stenographer, who handed him a few sheets of typed paper; these he passed to Heydrich and, while the Reichsprotector glanced over what was written there, one of Arianne’s tormentors slapped her bruised cheeks to bring her out of a faint.

  With the sleeves of their striped civilian shirts rolled up above their substantial biceps and their collars removed, Arianne’s tormentors looked ready for work. The man with his foot on the bascule was examining his knuckles, probably inspecting them for damage. His blond hair was almost white and he seemed indifferent to Arianne’s suffering. The other man was smoking a cigarette that stayed in his mouth while he was slapping her.