Prague Fatale (22 page)

Fortunately for everyone present, Captain Kuttner and Kritzinger the butler appeared with champagne and a tray of Bohemian glass flutes, and before long there was something of a party atmosphere in that library. I drank a glass without much pleasure and, when I thought I was unobserved, I slipped away onto the terrace and smoked a cigarette in the darkness. It felt like somewhere I belonged – a
crepuscular world of creatures that hooted and howled and where one might hide to avoid larger predators.

After a while I glanced through the leaded library window and seeing no sign of Heydrich, I decided I might sneak off to bed. But I had not reckoned on Heydrich’s study being immediately at the top of the first flight of stairs; the doors were open and he was seated behind his desk signing some papers under the cold bespectacled eye of Colonel Jacobi. Insouciantly I headed toward the north wing corridor and my room; but if I had hoped not to catch the General’s eye I was quickly disappointed.

‘Gunther,’ he said, hardly looking up from his signature file. ‘Come in.’

‘Very well, sir.’

Entering Heydrich’s study in the Lower Castle at Jungfern-Breschan I had the distinct feeling that I was in a smaller, more intimate version of the Leader’s own study at the Reich Chancellery, and this would have been typical of Heydrich. Not that there was very much that was small or intimate about that room. The ceiling was about four metres high and there were marble relief columns on the walls, a fireplace as big as a Mercedes, and enough green carpet on the floor for a decent game of golf. The refectory-style desk had more glass protecting its smooth oak surface than a good-sized shop window. On this were a marble-urn lamp, a couple of telephones, a leather blotter, an ink-stand, and a brass model of a plane – quite possibly the same Siebel Fh 104 he used to fly himself to and from Berlin. In the arched window was a bronze bust of the Leader, and behind a throne-sized desk chair was a green silk wall-hanging with a gold German eagle holding onto a laurel wreath enclosing a swastika, as if it was something worth stealing.

Heydrich put down his fountain pen and leaned back in the chair.

‘That girl back at your hotel,’ he said. ‘Arianne Tauber. Have you called her to tell her you won’t be coming to see her tonight?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Then don’t. Have Klein drive you into Prague. I think I will be safe enough tonight, don’t you?’

‘If you say so sir.’

‘Oh no. In future it’s for you to say so. That was rather the point of your appointment. But I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. Meet me at Pecek Palace tomorrow morning at ten o’ clock. I have a meeting there to coordinate the arrest of this Moravek fellow.’

‘Very well, sir. And thank you.’

I may even have clicked my heels and bowed my head. Working for Heydrich was like being friendly with a vicious tom cat while you were looking around for the nearest mouse hole.

Arianne was pleased to see me, of course, although not as pleased as I was to see her, in our bed, alone, naked and willing to use her body to help divert my thoughts from Heydrich, Jungfern-Breschan, the Three Kings and Pecek Palace. I told her nothing of my worries. Where Heydrich was concerned, it was best to know very little, as I was beginning to discover myself. What did I tell her as, exhausted by our love-making, we lay intertwined like two primitive figures carved from the same piece of antler-horn? Only that my duties kept me out of Prague, in Jungfern-Breschan, otherwise I should certainly have visited her at the Imperial Hotel before now.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Really, I’m quite happy here on my own. You’ve no idea how nice it is just to sit and read a book, or to walk around the city by myself.’

‘I do,’ I muttered. ‘I can imagine, anyway.’

‘I left a message for my brother. And there are plenty of other Germans in Prague I can talk to. As a matter of fact, this hotel is full of Germans. There’s a very beautiful girl in a suite on the same floor as us who’s having an affair with some SS general. And she’s a Jew. Doesn’t that sound romantic?’

‘Romantic? It sounds dangerous.’

Arianne shrugged that off. ‘Her name is Betty Kipsdorf and she’s utterly sweet.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘The general? Konrad something. He’s more than twice her age but she says you really wouldn’t know it.’ She laughed. ‘On account of the fact that he used to be a gymnastics teacher.’

I said I didn’t know who that could be. And I didn’t. I wasn’t exactly on first-name terms with any SS generals, even the ones I knew.

‘He’s very vigorous, apparently. For a general. Me, I always say that if you want a job done and done properly it’s a captain you want. Not some effete flamingo with clockwork heels.’

Flamingos were what the ranks called officers of the General Staff, a reference to the red stripes on their trouser legs.

‘What do you know about flamingos?’

‘You’d be surprised who we get through the doors of the Jockey Bar.’

‘No. But I’m still surprised that you’d prefer a captain to one of them.’

‘And perhaps a little suspicious.’

‘That’s probably no fault of yours.’

‘We’d get on like a house on fire if you weren’t a cop, don’t you think so, Parsifal?’

‘These are the times we live in, I’m afraid. All sorts of things make me suspicious, angel. Two aces in a row. Double-sixes. A sure thing for the state lottery. A kind word or a compliment. Venus rising from the sea. I’m the kind of Fritz who’s apt to look for a maker’s mark on the scallop shell.’

‘I might get insulted if I knew what any of that was about. After all, there’s a little part of you that’s still in me.’

‘Now it’s my turn to get insulted.’

‘Don’t be, Gunther. I enjoyed it, a lot. I think that maybe you underestimate yourself.’

‘Perhaps. I might even call it an occupational hazard except that, so far, it’s helped to keep me alive.’

‘Is staying alive so very important to you?’

‘No. Then again I’ve seen the alternatives, and at close quarters. In Russia. Or twenty years ago, back in the trenches.’

She gave me a little squeeze, the kind that feels like a wonderful sort of conjuring trick and that doesn’t need any limbs. Whenever a woman holds me tight like that it’s the best argument there is against the solipsistic idea that one can be truly certain only of the existence of one’s own mind.

‘How much more suspicious would you get if I said I’d fallen for you, Gunther?’

‘You’d have to say it a lot for me to believe it might be true.’

‘Maybe I will.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. When you’ve said it the first time we can review the situation. But right now it’s just a hypothetical.’

‘All right, I—’

She paused for a moment, uttering a sigh that was as unsteady as a whippet’s hind leg as I nudged up deep against the edge of her latest thought.

‘Go on. I’m listening.’

‘It’s true, Parsifal. I’m falling for you.’

‘You’re a long time in the air, angel. By now anyone else would have hit the ground.’ I nudged into her again. ‘Hard.’

‘Damn you, Gunther.’

Her breath was hot in my ear except it sounded cold and erratic, like someone laughing silently.

I prompted her a little more and said, ‘Go on. Let’s hear what it sounds like.’

‘All right. I love you. Satisfied?’

‘Not by a long way. But I will be, if this keeps up.’

She hit me on the shoulder but there was pleasure on her face. ‘You sadistic bastard.’

‘I’m a Nazi. You said so yourself. Remember?’

‘No, but you’re also rather wonderful, Gunther. All the more so because you don’t realize it. Since Karl, my husband, there have been other men. But you’re the first man I’ve cared anything about since he died.’

‘Stop talking.’

‘Go ahead and make me.’

I didn’t say anything. Conversation between us had become unnecessary. We didn’t need speech to act out a story that many others had told before. It wasn’t original but it felt like it was – an almost silent film that seemed both familiar and new. We were still performing our own highly stylized homage to German expressionism when the telephone rang on the bedside table.

‘Leave it,’ I said.

‘Is that wise?’

‘It sounds like trouble.’

It stopped ringing.

When our own motion picture finished, she got up to fetch one of my cigarettes.

I rolled onto my back and stared out of the window at the little pepper-pot dome on top of the building opposite.

The telephone started to ring again.

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘It always rings again when it’s trouble. Especially first thing in the morning, before breakfast.’

I picked up the receiver. It was Major Ploetz, Heydrich’s first adjutant. He sounded shaken and angry.

‘A car is coming to pick you up and bring you back here, immediately.’

‘All right. What’s up?’

‘There’s been a homicide,’ said Ploetz. ‘Here, at the Lower Castle.’

‘A homicide? What kind of homicide?’

‘I don’t know. But you should be outside your hotel in fifteen minutes.’

And then he hung up.

For one glorious moment I allowed myself to hope it was Heydrich who was dead. That one of those officers and gentlemen of the SS and the SD, jealous of Heydrich’s success, had shot him. Or perhaps there had been a machine-gun attack by Czech terrorists while Heydrich was out for his early morning ride in the countryside around Jungfern-Breschan. Perhaps even now there was a horse lying on top of his lifeless body.

And yet surely if it had been Heydrich who was dead, Ploetz would have said so. Ploetz wouldn’t ever have used the phrase ‘a homicide’ for someone as important as his very own general. The victim had to be someone of lesser importance or else Ploetz would have said ‘Heydrich has been murdered’ or ‘The General has been murdered’ or ‘There’s been a catastrophe, General Heydrich has been assassinated.’ A homicide didn’t begin to cover the lexicon of words that would probably be used by the Nazis if ever Heydrich was unfortunate enough to meet with a well-deserved but premature death.

‘Is it?’

‘Is it what?’ I answered her absently.

‘Trouble,’ said Arianne.

‘I have to go back to Jungfern-Breschan, immediately. There’s been a death.’

‘Oh? Who?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s not Heydrich.’

‘Some detective you are.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, it certainly
won’t be the gardener who’s dead if they want you to go back immediately. It must be someone important.’

‘I can dream, I suppose.’

Fifteen minutes later I was washed and dressed and standing outside the Imperial Hotel as a black sedan drew up. The driver wearing an SS uniform – it wasn’t Klein – stepped smartly out of the car, saluted, opened the door, and pulled down the middle row of seats because there were two men wearing plain clothes who were already seated in the back.

They were well-fed, hefty types, probably the kind who couldn’t run very fast but who could hand out a beating without breaking the skin on their knuckles.

‘Commissar Gunther?’

The man who spoke had a head as big as a stonemason’s bucket but the face carved on the front of it was small, like a child’s. The eyes were cold and hard, even a little sad, but the mouth was a vicious tear.

‘That’s right.’

A grappling iron of a hand came across the back of the seat.

‘Kurt Kahlo,’ said the man. ‘Criminal Assistant to Inspector Willy Abendschoen, from Prague Kripo.’

He looked at the other man and grinned, unkindly.

‘And this is Inspector Zennaty, of the Czech Police. He’s only along for the sake of appearances, aren’t you, sir? After all, technically speaking this is a Czech matter, isn’t it?’

Zennaty shook my hand but he didn’t say anything. He was thin and hawklike, with shadowy eyes and a hair style that looked like an extension of a short stubbly beard.

‘I’m afraid our Czecho friend doesn’t speak much German, do you, Ivan?’

‘Not very much,’ said Zennaty. ‘Sorry.’

‘But he’s all right, is our Ivan.’ Kahlo patted Zennaty on the back of the hand. ‘Aren’t you, Ivan?’

‘Very much.’

‘Mister Abendschoen would have attended himself,’ said Kahlo, ‘but almost everyone in Prague is now looking for this Moravek fellow. General Heydrich has made his apprehension the number one police priority in the whole of the Protectorate.’

I nodded. ‘So who’s dead? They didn’t say.’

‘One of General Heydrich’s adjutants. A captain named Kuttner, Albert Kuttner. Did you know him at all, sir?’