Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  I went and sat on the windowsill and looked out at the old medieval city of Prague. Somewhere, under one of those dark, ancient roofs, was a fatal creature of death and destruction that was exactly like my own twin brother. Indeed, if the Golem had looked in my eye at what was elusively called the soul, he might well have concluded that I was a man to be shunned, just as people in the street below avoided the Pecek Palace front door like it was a Jaffa pesthouse. Given the wicked, monstrous, inhuman events that I’d just witnessed in the basement, they weren’t so far wrong.

  Unbidden, I fetched the bottle and poured another glass of the embalming fluid that helps make Germans like me more German than before and I lit a cigarette half-hoping that it might set fire to my insides and turn me to ashes like everything else that was almost certain to be turned into ashes in due course.

  ‘I expect you’re wondering how we got onto her,’ said Heydrich.

  ‘No, but I would have got around to it before long.’

  ‘The list of Czechs working for the Gestapo here in Prague was hardly complete. One of the people Arianne Tauber approached in that other café she mentioned – I can’t remember what it was called – he was ours.’

  ‘The Ca d’Oro,’ said Bohme. ‘It was the Ca d’Oro, sir. The head waiter is a French fascist who’s been working for the Gestapo since the Spanish Civil War. As soon as he saw her sitting there with the flower inside the magazine he contacted us.’

  ‘After that,’ added Heydrich, ‘it was only a question of having her followed around the clock. She led us to Radek, about whom Bohme already had his suspicions, didn’t you, Horst?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  Bohme grinned and taking the bottle from my windowsill, he refilled my glass again and helped the General and then himself.

  ‘That’s why your car didn’t turn up this morning, Gunther. We arrested the two assassins around the corner from your hotel. And the girl when she arrived at the railway station a little later on. We had hoped there would be someone there from UVOD to see her off, but there wasn’t, so we picked her up and put her in the bag with the two killers.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that I think there was ever much danger of either one of you being killed. It was a pretty desperate, spur-of-the-moment sort of plan. And the chances are they’d have been shot by the sentries at the Lower Castle before they got very far.’

  ‘All in all,’ said Heydrich, smugly, ‘it’s been an excellent day’s work. We have the traitor. We have some more terrorists. It can only be a matter of time before we catch up with Vaclav Moravek.’

  ‘Yes, congratulations, sir,’ said Bohme, toasting him. ‘Tell me, what are your orders regarding Arianne Tauber? Do you want her questioned again?’

  Heydrich was still thinking this over when I said, ‘I expect I can fill in the rest of the gaps in her story for you.’

  ‘Yes, why don’t you tell us again how you met,’ said Heydrich. ‘In detail.’

  I gave him the whole story, more or less; from the circumstances in which I had first met her at Nollendorfplatz Station, to my own middle-aged infatuation; there seemed little point in hiding anything other than my true motive for telling him.

  ‘Paul Thummel was obviously this fellow Gustav she told me about back in Berlin. She might have denied he exists downstairs but there can be no doubt about that now. I expect that’s the one thing she was keeping back from Sergeant Soppa. He was right about that. I also expect that when Thummel sees her again he’ll fold like a picnic table. Especially when he sees the state you’ve left her in.’

  I lit a cigarette and swung my leg carelessly.

  ‘As far as I can gather, it was Paul Thummel who gave her the list of agents to pass on to Franz Koci. As a major in the Abwehr he was well placed to know exactly who they were. But when she met up to hand them over to Franz Koci, they quarrelled about money, just as she said, and he must have thought she was holding out on him. Maybe she was, too. I expect he demanded that she give him the list and when she wouldn’t – at least not until her complaints had been addressed – he got rough with her and decided to search her underwear.

  ‘That was when I saw her for the first time. I assumed, wrongly, that he was attempting to rape her. Or worse. As you know, there’s been a lot of that in the blackout this summer. Women attacked and murdered in and around railway stations. I guess it was still on my mind a lot. So naturally I went to her assistance.’

  ‘Very gallant of you, I’m sure,’ said Heydrich.

  ‘Koci and I fought but he got away and ran into the blackout. The next day I was looking at his dead body under a bush in Kleist Park.’

  ‘At the request of Walter Schellenberg,’ said Heydrich.

  ‘That’s right. The Berlin Gestapo guessed he was a Czech agent, but they had no idea how he’d met his death. Who killed him, or why. I agreed to help. And soon enough I was able to connect Franz Koci with Geert Vranken.’

  ‘But you decided to leave the girl out of it.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So you could take advantage of her, I suppose.’

  It hadn’t been like that; but it was no good saying that I had honestly believed her to be more innocent than she turned out to be. I needed to give Heydrich the kind of cold and clinical reason he could understand. The kind of reason he would have acted upon himself, no doubt.

  ‘Yes. That’s true. I wanted to fuck her. I had the idea she was just a dupe, but that was always me. Of course as soon as I started sleeping with her I stopped seeing what was right under my nose. That she was in it all the way up to her pretty neck. But it was such a pretty neck.’

  ‘The rest of her is not bad either,’ said Bohme.

  ‘About that neck, Gunther,’ said Heydrich. ‘I won’t be able to save it. You know that, don’t you? The fact that she was involved in a plan to kill me, well, that’s of no real consequence. But an attempt to kill Himmler is a different story. The Reichsführer takes any assault on his personal safety rather more personally than I do.’

  I shrugged as if I cared nothing now for what happened to her. And I shrugged because I knew Heydrich was right. Nothing could save Arianne now. Not even Heydrich.

  ‘The real question here is what happens to you, Gunther. In many ways you’re a useful fellow to have around. Like a bent coat hanger in a toolbox, you’re not something that was ever designed for a specific job, but you do manage to come in useful sometimes. Yes, you’re an excellent detective. Tenacious. Single-minded. And in some ways you’d have done a good job as a bodyguard. But you’re also independent, and that’s what makes you dangerous. You have standards you try to live up to but they’re your standards, which means that ultimately you’re unreliable. Now that I’m where I am in the scheme of things, I can’t tolerate that. I had hoped I might be able to bend you to my will and use you when I could. Like that coat hanger. But I can see now I was wrong. Yes, it’s difficult to turn a woman over to the Gestapo, especially a good-looking woman like Arianne Tauber. Some can do it and some can’t and you’re just the type who can’t. So, I have no further use for you. You’ve become an unfortunate liability, Gunther.’

  This sounded like the best thing he’d ever said to me; but I was through opening my mouth like that for a long while. Perhaps permanently. He hadn’t yet finished telling me my own fate.

  ‘You will return to your desk in Kripo and leave Germany’s destiny in the hands of men like me who truly understand what that means.’

  He smiled his paper-knife smile and toasted me silently.

  I toasted him back but only because, perhaps for the last time, I was hoping to point out a long hair in his chicken soup.

  ‘And the attempt on your life, sir? The poisoning, at Rastenburg? I accept that you no longer wish to have me act as your bodyguard. But am I to take it that you no longer wish me to investigate the recent attempt to kill you?’

  He stared at me for a moment and, with a quiet surge of pleasure, I realized he had forgotten all about this incident.

&n
bsp; ‘There never was such an attempt,’ he said defiantly. ‘I made it up so that I might have a plausible reason to invite you to Prague with the rest of them.’

  I nodded meekly, a little surprised that he’d admitted such a thing; and I wondered where the actual truth was to be found: if there really had been an attempt to poison Heydrich at Rastenburg after all.

  ‘Besides, as the most powerful man in Bohemia and Moravia, I think I’m quite safe here, wouldn’t you agree, Horst?’

  So that clinched it, for me; he was lying.

  Bohme smiled an obsequious smile. ‘Absolutely, sir. You have Prague’s SS and SD at your immediate disposal; not to mention the Gestapo and the German Army.’

  ‘You see?’ crowed Heydrich. ‘I have nothing to worry about. Especially not in Prague. The day the Czechs try to kill me – really try to kill me, not that half-baked attempt we had today, although you mark my words that will have its own repercussions – the day they try to kill me will be the very worst day in the history of this country and will make the defenestrations of Prague look like a childish prank. Isn’t that right, Horst?’

  ‘Yes sir. In a long line of crazy Czech ideas that would be the craziest idea of all.’

  I had my doubts about that. I hadn’t been in Bohemia for very long but from what little I knew about the country it seemed only appropriate that the idea of the Bohemian – a type of fellow not easily classified and who never acted in a conventional or predictable way – had got started in Prague. In Prague throwing someone out of a window was just a childish prank. A bit of harmless fun. But I didn’t expect a Roman Catholic German from Halle-an-der-Saale to understand this. And if I really had been as single-minded and independent as Heydrich said I was, I would probably have told him he was wrong: murder – even political assassination – is rarely ever committed by people who are anything else but crazy; and, over the centuries, one way or another, a lot of crazy things had happened in Prague.

  So I nodded and told Heydrich he was right, when I knew he wasn’t.

  And that is what makes anyone dangerous.

  I moved back to the Imperial Hotel and waited for my Berlin rail warrant to arrive. Heydrich liked to keep most people waiting and I waited for several days. So I saw the sights and tried not to think about what might be happening to Arianne. But of course that was impossible. I preferred to believe that she hadn’t actually condoned my murder but that she had felt obliged to go along with it as part of the general plan to kill Heydrich; and after all, when you’re shooting Germans it’s hard to know who is a Nazi and who isn’t. It’s a dilemma I understood very well.

  Finally my travel papers came through, and on my last night in Prague I remembered my ticket for the Circus Krone, and decided to go along.

  It was a cold autumn evening with a clear sky and a full moon, and people were already wearing their warmest winter coats. I sat well away from the rest of my SS colleagues but I had a good view of all of them in the front row of seats and I confess I paid more attention to Mr and Mrs Heydrich and Mr and Mrs Frank than I did to the clowns and the animals.

  I hadn’t seen Lina Heydrich before. She was handsome rather than beautiful. She wore black with a thick fur stole and a little black pillbox hat. Mrs Frank wore a wool overcoat with wide lapels and a brown fedora. The two wives sat beside each other and next to them sat their husbands, who were wearing civilian clothes, like everyone else in the SD and Gestapo who was at the circus that night. Frank wore a plain gaberdine coat with a white shirt and a patterned silk tie. Heydrich wore a thick double-breasted overcoat and held a black trilby on his lap. And he also wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that I’d never seen on him before.

  Like anyone else, these four marvelled at the trapeze and laughed at the clowns and they appeared to enjoy themselves. Like anyone else. That was what struck me most of all. Out of uniform, Heydrich and Frank looked just like anyone else, although even as they sat there a security crackdown was already under way in the city. Later on, I learned that the mayor of Prague, Otokar Klapha, had been executed and on the very same day that Arianne was arrested. Hundreds of UVOD collaborators were being rounded up and buildings right across the city were covered with posters listing the names of many others sentenced to death. You wouldn’t have known any of that if you’d watched Heydrich at the circus, shaking with laughter as three clowns behaving like the sort of simpletons the Nazis would probably have murdered for reasons of racial purity fell off chairs and soaked each other with buckets full of water.

  Two days later, Heydrich announced that the deportation of all the Jews in the Protectorate – some ninety thousand of them – was to begin at the end of the year. To where, he didn’t say. Nobody did. Me, I had a pretty good idea, but by then I was back in Berlin.

  CHAPTER 15

  It felt good to be in Berlin again. At least it felt good for an hour or two. Soon after arriving back at my apartment in Fasanenstrasse I discovered to my disappointment that the two Fridmann sisters from downstairs had been deported to some shithole in Poland. Behnke, the block warden, who knew these things, insisted that it was a nice town called Lodz and that they’d be happier there ‘living with their own’, instead of with ‘decent Germans’. I told him I had my doubts about this but Behnke didn’t want to hear them. He was more interested in learning Russian so that he would be able to speak to his peasants when eventually he met them. He really thought he was going to get some of that living space in Russia and the Ukraine that Goebbels was forever ranting about. I had my doubts about that, too.

  It grew cold. Wind tore the leaves off the trees and hurried them east in their thousands. The water on the Spree looked like corrugated iron. The cold felt like barbed wire. There was one thing to be done before the snows arrived, a sentimental gesture that meant nothing to anyone I had ever met; but I suppose I wanted to feel better about myself. I organized the release of Geert Vranken’s remains from Berlin’s Charité Hospital and paid for them to be buried in a zinclined wooden crate – just in case, after the war, his family wanted to dig it up and take his remains home to the Netherlands.

  There was one other person at the funeral: Werner Sachse from the Gestapo. With his black leather coat, his black hat and black tie, he looked like a proper mourner. The short service was conducted by the pastor of St John’s Church, in Plotzensee, and when it was over Sachse told me he admired the thought if not the practice.

  ‘Where would we be if policemen paid for every foreign worker who gets killed in an accident?’ he asked.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I reminded him.

  Sachse shrugged as if the correction I’d offered hardly mattered. The fact remained that the dead man wasn’t German and therefore his death was of little or no account.

  For a moment I wondered if telling him why I was doing it was a mistake; and then I told him anyway.

  ‘I’m doing it so that somewhere, someone who isn’t German will have a better opinion of us than we deserve.’

  Sachse pretended to be surprised about that, but before we parted we shook hands, so I knew he wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 16

  Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Lüdtke was known as Stop-Gap Lüdtke on account of his name and because no one had expected him to survive in the job because he wasn’t a Party member. But he did what he was told, and when someone told him to put me on night duty that’s what he did. Not that I minded very much. Being on nights kept me out of sight and out of mind. At least it did until early on the morning of Monday 17 November. I mention the murder I investigated that night only because it was Heydrich himself who had me taken off the case. I expect he was worried that I might actually solve it.

  It was about five o’clock in the morning when I got the telephone call from Kriminal Inspector Heimenz at the police station in Grunewald. There had been a murder at one of those fancy modern villas in Heerstrasse. He wouldn’t say who it was on the telephone; all I knew was that it was someone famous.

  One of the good thin
gs about being on nights was that I had access to a car, so I was at the address in less than half an hour. And it was easy to find. There were several police cars parked outside, not to mention a huge silver Rolls-Royce. As soon as I stepped through the elegantly modern front door I guessed whose house it was. But I hardly expected that he was also the victim.

  General Ernst Udet was one of the most famous men in Germany. At the age of just twenty-two he had survived the Great War as Germany’s highest-scoring air-ace. Only Manfred von Richthofen had more victories than he did. After the war he’d made several movies with Leni Riefenstahl and was a stunt-flier in Hollywood. The house was full of film posters, flying cups and photographs of aeroplanes. A polished wooden aircraft propeller hung on one wall and it was several minutes before I could tear myself from all of Udet’s memorabilia to look at his dead body. He wasn’t very tall, but then you don’t need to be tall to fly aeroplanes, especially when these are experimental: Udet was the Director-General of the Luftwaffe’s developmental wing. He was also a close friend of Hermann Göring. Or at least, he had been a close friend until someone shot him.