Prague Fatale (21 page)

‘Take it from me, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I do know what I’m talking about. I know this damnable country better than anyone in the fucking room.’

Frank spoke with some vigour and he was looking at Heydrich as he did, which made me wonder if there was not some grudge he nursed for his new master.

I was glad when Frank walked away to fetch himself another drink, leaving me with the impression that spending an eternity with men like Heydrich, Jacobi and Frank was the nearest thing to being in hell that I could think of.

But the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Berries – for that matter the whole damned tree – for the curling turd of the evening went to Colonel Doctor Hans Geschke, a 34-year-old lawyer from Frankfurt on the Oder who was chief of the Gestapo in Prague. While studying in Berlin, he’d seen my name in the newspapers, and in spite of our differences in rank, this was a good enough reason for him to try to make common cause with me. Which is another way of saying he needed someone to patronize.

‘After all,’ he explained, ‘we’re both policemen you and I, doing a difficult job, in very difficult circumstances.’

‘So it would seem, sir.’

‘And I like to keep abreast of ordinary crime,’ he said. ‘Here in Prague we have to deal with more serious stuff than some Fritz slicing his wife up with a broken beer bottle.’

‘There’s not so much of that around, sir. Beer bottles are in rather short supply in Berlin.’

He wasn’t listening.

‘You should come in and see us very soon, at the Pecek Palace. That’s in the Bredovska district of the city.’

‘A palace, eh? It sounds a lot grander than the Alex, sir.’

‘Oh no. To be quite honest with you it’s hard to see how it was ever a palace except in some dark corner of Hades. Even the executive rooms have very little charm.’

Geschke’s was a waxwork’s expressionless face. Captain Kuttner had said that at the Pecek Palace Geschke was known as ‘Babyface’, but this could only have been among people who knew some very frightening babies with duelling scars
on their left cheeks. Geschke was one of those factory-manufactured Nazis they turned out like unpainted Meissen porcelain: pale, cold, hard, and best handled with extreme care.

‘I haven’t seen much of the city yet,’ I said. ‘But it does seem rather infernal.’

Geschke grinned. ‘Well, we do our best in that respect. So long as they fear us, they do what they’re told. We mustn’t let these Czechos make fools of us, you see. We have to be the master in our own house, so we can’t afford to overlook any wrong. We really can’t. You let them get away with one thing, there will be no end to it. But tell me, Gunther. In the Weimar Republic, when you had a suspect at the Alex and he refused to cooperate, what did you do? How on earth did you manage?’

‘We never hit anyone, if that’s what you’re driving at, sir. We weren’t allowed to. The Prussian Police Regulations forbade it. Oh, some cops smacked a suspect around now and then, but the bosses didn’t like that. We got results because we got the evidence. Once you have the evidence it’s hard for a man not to sign a confession. Find the evidence and everything else follows. We were good at that: finding evidence. The Berlin Detective Service was, for a while, the envy of the world and its backbone was the police commissars.’

‘But weren’t you at all frustrated by the stupidities of Prussian justice? Sometimes it seemed to be absurd that penal servitude for life rarely ever lasted longer than twelve years. And that so many criminals deserving of their death sentences were reprieved by the Prussian government. For example, those two Jews, Saffran and Kipnik. Remember them?’

I shrugged. ‘Honestly? I can think of many others I’d like to see under the falling axe before those two. Why, just a few
months ago there was the S-Bahn murderer case. Fellow named Paul Ogorzow who killed six or seven women and tried to kill as many more again. Now,
he
deserved his fate.’

‘Is it true that he was a Party member?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘Lots of other people thought so, too. That’s probably why it took so long to catch him. But what you were saying is absolutely right. We can’t afford to overlook any wrong. Especially when it’s a wrong committed by our own, don’t you think?’

‘Ah, now there speaks a true policeman.’

‘I like to think so, sir.’

‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help you, Gunther, in your new capacity as the General’s personal detective, then please let me know.’ Geschke raised his glass and bowed. ‘Anything to help General Heydrich and keep him safe for the new Germany.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

I glanced around the room and tried to picture which, if any, of the General’s guests might actually try to poison him and found that in the new Germany it wasn’t so hard. In a room full of murderers anything seemed possible.

About halfway through this unforgettable evening Major Dr Ploetz, Heydrich’s First Adjutant and number one myrmidon, turned on the library radio so that we could listen to Hitler’s speech from the Sports Palast, in Berlin.

‘Gentlemen, please,’ he said, while the radio was warming up. ‘If I could ask you to be silent.’

‘Thank you, Hans-Achim,’ said Heydrich, as if he and not the Leader had been at the microphone. And then solemnly,
as the sound of the Sports Palast crept into that room, he intoned: ‘The Leader.’

It was typically thoughtful of Heydrich. I suppose he thought it would be a treat for those of us who were feeling a little homesick. And it was: a bit like hearing my mother reading the old story of how the bad boy Friedrich terrorized a lot of animals and people. It remained to be seen if the Third Reich’s ranting answer to bad Friedrich might yet be bitten by the same dog that had eaten the naughty boy’s sausages but, for me at any rate, there was always the hope that he would be. It was hard to think of a treat half as enjoyable as the idea of the Leader being bitten by a greedy dog. His own, perhaps.

In the corridor outside the library a man was on the telephone, and I poked my head out of the door to see who among Heydrich’s guests had dared to make or take a call in the middle of Hitler’s speech. Whoever he was I certainly didn’t blame him. Even at the best of times the Leader was always too loud for me. Probably he’d honed his oratorical skills in the trenches, during bombardments.

Not that you couldn’t have heard every rasping word of the broadcast in the corridor. The radio was an AEG Super Orchestra as big as a Polish peasant’s barn, and with the speech playing at full volume there was no chance of not hearing it almost anywhere in the house. Probably you could have heard the speech at the centre of the earth.

‘No, you did the right thing in calling me here, Sergeant Soppa.’

The man speaking was Oscar Fleischer, head of the Gestapo’s Resistance Section in Prague – the same man who had been taunted so infamously by one of the Three Kings.

‘All right, I’ll be there in half an hour. Just don’t let the
bastard die until I get there. He did? So it was him after all.’

Fleischer caught my eye and turned his back on me.

‘No, no, I’m perfectly certain he’ll want to know. Yes, of course I’ll tell him. I’ll do it right now. Yes. Goodbye.’

Fleischer replaced the telephone and, grinning excitedly, scribbled something on a piece of paper before handing it to Captain Pomme and then running upstairs, two steps at a time.

I lit a cigarette and drifted out into the corridor next to Captain Pomme.

‘Good news?’ I asked.

‘I should say so,’ said the adjutant and went back into the library without further eludication.

I was about to follow when I glanced out the window above the telephone and had a good view of Heydrich’s other adjutants – Kuttner and Kluckholn – standing under the flagpole on the front lawn. Although the window was open, I couldn’t hear what was said – not with the radio in the library so loud – but it was plain that a heated argument was in progress, indeed that the two men were on the edge of exchanging blows. I was about to go outside and play Saturday night policeman when Kuttner strode angrily up the drive toward the gatehouse. A moment later Fleischer, wearing belts and his cap, galloped downstairs again and went straight out the front door as a car drew up and then took him away in a furious spray of gravel.

A little disappointed that I was not going to break up a fight between two SS officers, I turned my attention back to what was being broadcast in the library.

Hitler’s speech was the traditional opening of the Winter Relief Campaign. This was the Nazi Party’s annual charitable
drive to provide food and shelter for the less fortunate during the coming winter months and was as near as it ever got to real socialism. Failure to donate was not an option. People who forgot to donate were quite likely to find their names in the local newspaper. Or sometimes, worse.

Hitler’s oratorical style for the Winter Relief speech was calculated to impress rather more than the actual content and usually it wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it. But my normal reaction was that it was a little like listening to Emil Jannings recite a bit of cudgel verse, Caruso singing a song from a Silly Symphony or Mark Antony eulogizing a dead cat. This year it was different, however, as it soon became clear that there was more at stake than a few fat Germans going hungry in January. As well as the more predictable bromides about the glory of giving and being generous – something that was second nature to us Germans, of course – the Leader proceeded to make an announcement concerning the beginning of ‘the great decisive battle of the coming year’, which would be devastating to the enemy.

Now many of us in that library and in the country at large were already under the impression that ‘the great decisive battle’ was already as good as won. We had certainly been told as much by Doctor Goebbels on several previous occasions. But here was Hitler more or less admitting that he’d bet the family silver on what was yet to happen, that he’d gambled all of our futures on something that was not a cast-iron certainty; and the upshot was that anyone listening to him now was left inescapably with the distinct idea that things in the East were not going entirely to plan for our hitherto invincible armed forces.

When the speech and the thunderous applause that greeted it in the Sports Palast had finally concluded and the AEG
radio was, at last, turned off by Major Dr Ploetz, it was immediately apparent that there were several others in that library who had the same thought as me: someone in the government – Hitler himself, perhaps? – had woken up to the painful reality of just what Germany had undertaken to do in Russia. And this being the Third Reich of course, which was based on lies, it meant that things were probably much worse than we had been told.

Our sombre faces told the same grim story. Indeed, General von Eberstein, who was some big noise in the SS general staff, may actually have muttered some desperate imprecation to a God who was certainly some place else, if anywhere at all. General Hildebrandt, who was Heydrich’s equivalent rank in Danzig, merely hurled his cigarette into the fireplace as if he was as disgusted with it as he was with everything else.

This might have been what prompted Heydrich to say a few words, to resurrect our visible lack of enthusiasm. More likely it was Fleischer’s handwritten note that Captain Pomme had handed him a few minutes earlier. Heydrich himself was grinning like he’d just eaten the last slice of honey-cake.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘If I could have your attention for just a few more minutes. I’ve been given a note by Criminal Commissar Fleischer of the Gestapo, which contains some excellent news. As most of you know, since May of this year we’ve had two of the Three Kings – Josef Balaban and Josef Masin – in custody at Pankrac Prison, here in Prague. These are, of course, two of the three leaders of Czech terrorism here in Bohemia. However, the third king, Melchior, as we like to call him, has eluded us. Until now. It seems that one of our two prisoners – I don’t know which, but somehow I feel sure that his name must be Josef – has agreed to cooperate with our inquiries and, finally, has revealed that
Melchior’s real name is Vaclav Moravek, formerly a captain in the Czech Army. We have already begun a search for him here in Prague and at his home town of Kolin, near Losany, and it is now expected that we shall shortly make an arrest.’

I felt oddly sick. It seemed that while we’d been stuffing ourselves with Veal Holstein and Leipziger Everything, a brave man had been tortured into revealing the name of the most wanted man in the Third Reich.

‘Bravo,’ said one of my brother officers, an Abwehr major named Thummel.

Others also present applauded this news, which seemed to please Heydrich no end, and there he might, and perhaps should, have left the matter. But full of his own importance, Heydrich continued to talk for several more minutes. He was not, however, a public speaker. Self-conscious and calculating, he lacked Hitler’s common touch and rhetorical flourish. His voice was pitched too high to inspire men; worst of all, he used a string of big German words where one or two smaller ones would have worked better. Of course, this was typical of the Nazis, for whom language was often used to mask their own ignorance and stupidity – which they possessed in an inexhaustible supply – as well as to give their words the placebo effect of authority; like a doctor who has an impressive Latin name for what is wrong with you, but sadly not a cure.