Prague Fatale (44 page)

‘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 required 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.

The heavily lined curtains looked like they belonged in a theatre and might easily have afforded me a hiding place if someone came into the study. The big windows were as thick as my little finger and quite possibly bullet-proof, too. At the back of the curtains were a couple of machine pistols and a box of grenades; Heydrich wasn’t leaving much to chance. If anyone attacked him in his house he clearly intended to defend himself to the last.

But did I want him or one of his adjutants to catch me in there? Perhaps. Being thrown out of his office might also have resulted in my being thrown off the case and sent back to Berlin in disgrace, which seemed like an outcome devoutly to be wished. But it didn’t happen and finally, after I’d been in there for almost fifteen minutes, I got up and went out onto the landing, still unobserved.

The next door along from Heydrich’s study was a suite of rather more feminine rooms – doubtless these had been set aside for Lina Heydrich – where, among the rose-patterned sofas, elegant chairs, and long mirrors, was a dressing table as big as a Messerschmitt.

I went downstairs and managed to creep unnoticed past the open door of the Dining Room, which was full of
cauliflower; nearer the back garden I put my head around the door of a Play Room, and then a Nursery.

As yet I had no knowledge of the extensive servants’ quarters in the basement, so I descended a narrow flight of stairs and walked along a dimly lit corridor that seemed to serve as the spine and nervous system of the house. Even on a sunny day like this one, the stone-flagged basement corridor felt more like the lock-up at the Alex, although it smelled a lot better. Kahlo was right about that.

In the big kitchen several cooks were hard at work preparing the next course of lunch, which was being served by waiters whose faces were more familiar. They regarded me with suspicion and alarm. Fendler, the footman I’d spoken to earlier, who happened to be smoking a cigarette near the back door, came over and asked me if was lost. I said I wasn’t of course, but a little deterred by the horrified looks I was getting, I was about to return upstairs and get some lunch after all when, at the furthest, dimmest end of the corridor, a door opened and an SS sergeant whom I was certain I’d never seen before came out, closed the door carefully behind him, and then went into the room opposite.

In the moment before the door closed I saw a brightly lit, busy room containing what looked like a telephone switchboard, and thinking that this was as good a time as any to introduce myself in person – there was another call to the Alex I wanted to place – I went along the corridor and opened the door.

Immediately, a burly-looking SS corporal jumped up from a wooden bench, threw down his newspaper, and blocked my way. At the same time he kicked another door shut behind him, but not before I caught a glimpse of several large taperecorders
and, seated in front of them, some more SS men wearing headphones.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the corporal, ‘but I’m afraid you can’t come in here.’

‘I’m a police officer.’ I showed him my warrant disc. ‘Commissar Gunther, from the Alex. General Heydrich has given me the run of the house to investigate a murder.’

‘I don’t care who you are, sir, you can’t come in here. This is a restricted area.’

‘What’s your name, Corporal?’

‘You don’t need to know that, sir. You don’t need to know anything about what happens in here. It doesn’t concern you or your particular investigation.’

‘My
particular
investigation? That’s my call, Corporal. Not yours. What is this place anyway? And what happens behind that door? It looks like Deutsches Grammophon in there.’

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you leave, sir. Right now.’

‘Corporal, did you know that you’re obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty? I have no intention of leaving until I have a full explanation of what’s going on in here.’

By now voices were raised, my own included, and there had been a certain amount of chest-on-chest pushing and shoving. I was angrier at myself than at the corporal – frustrated at having missed finding the loose floorboards before and now irritated to discover what looked to me like a listening post for eavesdropping on the house guests – only the corporal didn’t know that, and when someone appeared behind me in the door I had just come through and I turned around to see who this was, the corporal hit me. Hard.

I didn’t blame him. I didn’t blame anyone. Like raising
your voice and arguing and pointing, blaming people is not something you can do when you’re heading down through the black hole that suddenly appears underneath your shoes. Doctor Freud didn’t give it a name and, strictly speaking, you only know what being unconscious really means if a thug with a hardwood fist like a Zulu’s knobkerrie has used this same lethal object to hit you expertly on the back of the neck, as if trying to kill a large and argumentative and rather gullible rabbit. No, wait, I did blame someone. I blamed myself. I blamed myself for not listening to the eavesdropping SS corporal in the first place. I blamed myself for missing the trick with the floorboards in Kuttner’s bedroom. I blamed myself for taking Heydrich at his word and thinking I really did have the run of the house to pursue my investigation. But mostly I just blamed myself for thinking it was even possible to behave like a real detective in a world that was owned and run by criminals.

I don’t suppose I was unconscious for longer than a couple of minutes. When I came to I could have wished it had been a lot longer. Another thing you can’t do when you’re unconscious is feel sick or have a splitting headache or wonder if you should dare to move your legs in case your neck really is broken. Ignoring the severe pain of opening my eyelids I opened my eyelids, and found myself staring down the blunderbuss-barrel of a large brandy balloon. It was a big improvement on a real blunderbuss, or the pistol that these circumstances usually produce. I took a deep, heady breath of the stuff and let it toast my adenoids for a moment before taking the glass from the hand that was holding it in front of me and then pouring all of the contents carefully – tipping my head meant moving my neck – down my throat.

I handed the glass back and found it was Kritzinger who took it from me.

I was in a neat little sitting room with a window onto the basement corridor, a small desk, a couple of easy chairs, a safe, and the chaise-longue I was lying on.

‘Where am I?’

‘This is my office, sir,’ said Kritzinger.

Behind him were two SS men, one of whom was the corporal who had argued with me a few minutes before. The other was Major Ploetz.

‘Who hit me?’

‘I did, sir,’ said the corporal.

‘What were you trying to do? Make a bell ring?’

‘Sorry about that, sir.’

‘No, don’t apologize. Kritzinger?’

‘Sir?’

‘Give this boy a piece of sugarloaf. I reckon he won it fair and square. The last time I got hit like that I was wearing a pointy hat and sitting in a trench.’

‘If only you’d listened to me, sir,’ said the corporal.

‘It looked to me as if that’s exactly what you’ve been doing.’ I rubbed the back of my neck and groaned. ‘To me and everyone else in this house.’

‘Orders are orders, sir.’

Ploetz put his hand on my shoulder. ‘How are you feeling, Captain?’ He sounded oddly solicitous, as if he really did care.

‘Really, sir,’ insisted the corporal. ‘If I’d known it was you, sir—’

‘It’s all right, Corporal,’ Ploetz said smoothly. ‘I’ll handle things from here.’

‘Sure, doc, sure,’ I said. ‘You can pretend there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for all that recording equipment and
while you’re at it, I’ll pretend I’m a proper detective. Right now the only thing I am absolutely certain of is the quality of that brandy. Better pour me another, Kritzinger. I pretend better when I’ve had a drink.’

‘Don’t give him any,’ Ploetz told Kritzinger. And then: ‘Your tongue is quite loose enough as it is, Gunther. We wouldn’t want you to say something to your own detriment. Especially not now you’re in the General’s good books.’

I ignored this. It didn’t sound right. Clearly the blow on the back of my neck had affected my hearing.