Prague Fatale (52 page)

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 things 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.

The body was naked. It lay in the middle of an enormous double bed, and surrounded by empty brandy bottles, most of them good-quality French brands. There was a neat hole in his forehead and a hammerless Sauer .38 in his right hand. For a small man – he couldn’t have been more than one sixty – he had an enormous penis. But it wasn’t any of these details that drew the eyes. Not even the telephone line that was coiled around one of his muscular arms like a Jew’s tefillin. It was what was written on the headboard in red lipstick that tugged at my eyeballs and made me think I had walked in on a major scandal.

REICHSMARSHAL, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME
?

I suppose the choice of words was meant to make you think of Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross, and abandoned by God the Father. But that wasn’t what I thought of; and it wasn’t what Inspector Heimenz thought of, either.

‘This is one homicide I’m happy to leave to you boys at the Alex,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Let me tell you, he looks how I feel.’

‘Cut and dried, isn’t it?’

‘So
you
take the case.’

‘Not me. I want to sleep at night.’

‘You’re in the wrong job for that.’

‘The Grunewald is not like the rest of Berlin. This is a quiet district.’

‘So I see. Who found the body?’

‘The girlfriend. Name of Inge Bleyle. She claims they were on the telephone when she heard the shot. So she drove straight over here in that modest little car you saw parked outside and found him dead.’

‘That Rolls is hers?’

‘So it would seem. Apparently Herr Udet had been drinking heavily all week.’

‘From the look of things, Martell and Rémy Martin are going to be inconsolable.’

‘It seems that he and the Air Ministry had had their differences concerning the success of the air war against the British.’

‘You mean the lack of it, don’t you?’

‘I know what I meant to say. Perhaps you’d better speak to Fräulein Bleyle yourself, sir.’

‘Perhaps I had. Where is she now?’

‘In the drawing room.’

I followed him downstairs.

‘Hell of a place isn’t it, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hard to imagine anyone who owned a place like this shooting himself.’

‘Is that what you think happened?’

‘Well, yes. The gun was in his hand.’

I stopped on the stairs and pointed to one of the many photographs covering the wall: Ernst Udet and the actor Bela Lugosi, posing on a California tennis court.

‘Looks to me as if Ernst Udet was a lefty,’ I said.

‘So?’

‘The gun was in his right hand. I don’t know about you, but if I was going to shoot myself – and believe me I’ve considered it, seriously, these past few months – I’d probably hold the gun in my stronger hand.’

‘But the words written on the headboard, sir. Surely that was meant to be some sort of suicide message.’

‘I’m only sure that’s what it’s meant to look like. Whether it is or not we’ll only know when a doctor gets him on the slab. You’d expect a powder burn on the skin if he really did press the gun to his forehead, and I didn’t see one, that’s all.’

The inspector nodded. He was a small man with small hands and a small way about him.

‘Like I said, this is one homicide I’m glad to leave to the Alex.’

Inge Bleyle had stopped crying. She was about thirty years old, tall – much taller than Ernst Udet – and good-looking in an understated way. She was wearing her fur coat and there was a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, neither of which looked like she’d paid much attention to them since they came her way.

I found an ashtray, held it under her cigarette and tapped the back of her hand. She looked up, smiled ruefully and then put out the cigarette in the ashtray while I continued holding it.

‘I’m Commissar Gunther. From the Alex. Feel like talking?’

She shrugged. ‘I guess so. I guess I have to, right? I mean, I found him, and I made the call, so someone has to start the ball rolling.’

‘I believe you told the other detective that you were on the telephone with Herr Udet when the shot was fired. Is that correct?’

She nodded.

‘What had you been talking about?’

‘When I first got to know him, well before the war, Ernst Udet was the life and soul of the party. Everyone liked him. He was a real gentleman. Kind, generous, impeccably well-mannered. But you couldn’t imagine he was even related to the Ernst Udet of recent memory. He drank, he was short-tempered, he was rude. He’d always drunk a lot. Half of those Great War pilots drank just to go up in those planes. But he always seemed like he could handle the drink. But lately he started drinking even more than usual. Mostly he drank because he was unhappy. Very unhappy. I’d left him because of his drinking, you see. And he wanted me back. And I didn’t want to come back because it was obvious that he was still drinking. As you have no doubt seen for yourself. It looks like a one-man house party in there.’

‘Why was he drinking? Any particular reason? I mean, before you left him.’

‘Yes, I understand. He was drinking because of what was happening at the Air Ministry. That Jew, Erhard Milch, was trying to undermine Ernst. All of the people in his department had been fired and Ernst took that very personally.’

‘Why were they fired?’

‘Because that bastard Göring didn’t have the guts to fire Ernst. He figured that if he fired all of Ernst’s people then Ernst’s sense of honour would compel him to resign. He
blamed Ernst for the failure of our air attacks on Britain. That’s what he said to Hitler, to save his own skin. Of course it wasn’t true, not a damned word of it, but Hitler believed him anyway. But that was just one reason he was depressed.’

I groaned, inside. After Prague I needed this case like I needed a pair of silk stockings of the kind Inge Bleyle was wearing on her lovely legs.

‘And another reason?’

She shrugged. Suddenly she was looking evasive, as if it had dawned on her that she was talking to a cop.

‘What with the war in Russia, well that was getting him down too. Yes, he was depressed and drinking too much. Only – well, he wasn’t long back from a clinic in Bühlerhöhe. They’d dried him out. He did that for me, you know. Because he wanted me back and I’d made that a condition of our getting back together. But I wanted to wait a little, see? Just to see if it took – the cure.’ She sipped her whisky and grimaced. ‘I don’t like whisky.’

‘In this house? That’s not unusual.’ I took the glass and put it on the table between us.

‘Then, a couple of days ago, something happened to him. I don’t know what, exactly. Ploch, his chief of staff at the Ministry until Milch had him fired, had just returned from Kiev. He went to see Ernst and told him something. Something awful. Ernst wouldn’t say what it was, just that it was something happening in the East, in Russia, and that no one would ever believe it.’

I nodded. You didn’t have to be a detective to know what Ploch had probably told him. And it wasn’t anything to do with aeroplanes.

‘Because of that, Ernst had telephoned Göring to ask him about it and they’d argued. Badly. And Ernst threatened to
tell someone at the American Embassy what Ploch had told him.’

‘He said that?’

‘Yes. He had a lot of American friends, you see? Ernst was very popular. Especially with the ladies. The late ambassador’s daughter – I mean the American ambassador’s daughter, Martha Dodds, she was a very close friend. Perhaps more than just a friend. I don’t know.’

She paused.

‘And he told you all of this on the telephone?’

‘Yes. We were talking. Ernst was crying some of the time. Begging me to come and see him. One thing I do remember him saying. It was that he could no longer believe in Germany; that Germany was a wicked country and deserved to lose the war.’

The more I heard about Ernst Udet, the more I started to like him. But Inge Bleyle felt obliged to disagree; anyone would have felt the same.

‘I didn’t like it that he was saying such things. I mean, that kind of talk is not good, Commissar; even if you are a decorated hero like Ernst. I mean, you hear stories about the Gestapo. People being arrested for unpatriotic talk. I told Ernst to be quiet and to keep his mouth shut in case he got us both into trouble. Him for saying such things and me for listening to them without ringing off. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you hear those things. You understand, the only reason I stayed on the line was that I was concerned for his state of mind.’

I nodded. ‘I understand.’

‘Then I heard the shot.’

‘Had he talked about killing himself?’

‘Well, no. Not in so many words.’

‘Did you hear anything else? Voices, perhaps? Footsteps? A door closing?’

‘No. I put the telephone down and drove straight over here. I live only a short distance away in the West End. When I got here all the lights were on. And I still had my key so I let myself in. I shouted his name a couple of times and then went upstairs and found him dead, as you saw. I came back downstairs and used the telephone in the study – it’s a different line – to call the police. I didn’t want to touch the one in his hand. That was an hour ago. I’ve been here ever since.’

‘Do you think he killed himself?’

She opened her mouth to say something; checked herself – the way you do – and said: ‘It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?’

Sensible girl. No wonder she was driving a Rolls-Royce. They don’t hand those cars out to just anyone.

After that two fellows from the Air Ministry showed up: Colonel Max Pendele, who was Udet’s adjutant, and another officer. That was at eight a.m. Then someone from the Ministry of the Interior turned up as well. That was at nine.

At about eleven o’clock I drove back to the Alex to type out my report.

After I’d done this Lüdtke asked me to come up to his office, and when I got there, he told me I was off the case.

I didn’t ask why. By then I hardly needed to. It was plain that someone important didn’t want me asking any awkward questions, and there were plenty that could have been asked about the death of Ernst Udet; and it was only after Heydrich’s death that I learned it had been he who told Lüdtke to take me off the case.

Five days later they buried Udet. It was a state funeral.
They carried him out of the Air Ministry in a casket covered with a Nazi flag, placed him on a gun carriage and then processed up to Invaliden Cemetery, where they buried him close to his old pal the Baron von Richthofen. Of course, state funerals were for heroes, not suicides or enemies of the state, but that was okay because the story released by the authorities – and this was the reason behind my removal, since of course I knew different – was that Udet had been killed testing an experimental fighter plane.

Hermann Göring delivered a eulogy; the nine-centimetre flak gun in the Tiergarten fired a salute that had many Berliners running for an air-raid shelter thinking that the RAF was back in our skies. A few days later they were back, although not to drop any bombs.

It was as well I was off the case. Being a detective has made me unreasonably suspicious. I see connections and conspiracies where other people see only the need to look the other way and keep their suspicions to themselves. Another air ace, Werner Mölders, was killed flying back to Germany for Udet’s funeral, from the Crimea; and around the Alex there were whispers that there was a lot more to his death – the Heinkel on which he was a passenger crashed as it tried to land in Breslau – than had been allowed to meet the eye.