Authors: Philip Kerr
There was a murmur of approval as the Labour leader barrelled his way out of the compartment and down the carriage. I sat down.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the old man, tipping his hat.
‘Don’t mention it,’ I said and tipped my own in return.
Someone else said, quietly, ‘No one likes that yellow star.’
By now the old man was looking thoroughly bewildered, as well he might be, and he could reasonably have asked any of us how it was, if none of us cared for the yellow star, we had allowed Heydrich’s police order to happen. If he had, I might have suggested a better question: how had we allowed Heydrich to happen? There was no easy answer to a question like that.
The old man got off the train in Dresden, which was a relief to everyone. The sight of the word ‘Jew’ emblazoned on a man of such obvious valour made all of us feel thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.
Despite what had been said about the yellow star, no one in our compartment – no one at all – talked about the war. The injunction on the wooden wall that the enemy might be listening was more effective than might have been imagined. And since there was little else but the war on anyone’s mind, this meant that none of the other passengers in our compartment said very much. Even Arianne, who liked to talk, was silent for most of the journey.
The train travelled north of the Elbe until Bad Schandau, where it passed over a bridge onto the south bank, then east and south again until Schöna, where it halted to allow several customs officers to board. Everyone – myself included, until I flashed my beer-token – was obliged to leave the train and have their luggage searched in the customs shed. None of my fellow passengers protested. After eight long years of Nazism, people knew better than to complain to authority. Besides, these officers were backed by twenty or thirty SS who stood thuggishly on the platform ready to see off any trouble.
The customs officers themselves were surprisingly courteous and polite. They did not bother to search Arianne or her bags when I informed them that she was travelling with me. If they had, I wonder what they might have found.
While the rest of the passengers were in the customs shed and we were alone in the compartment, she looked at me strangely. ‘You’re an odd one, Parsifal. I can’t figure you out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The way you stuck up for that old Jew back there. Jesus, I thought you were supposed to be a Nazi.’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s the company you keep. We don’t see much of General Heydrich in my circle.’
‘He’s not an easy man to disappoint.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Can you? I wonder. I wasn’t always his creature. Even before the Nazis took over, I was out of the police, because of my politics. Which is to say that, like most people who supported the old Republic, I didn’t really have any politics except I wasn’t a Nazi and I wasn’t a Red. But that was no good, see? Not in the cops. So I left; but they’d have kicked me out anyway. Then, in 1938, not being a Nazi made me seem like good police again. I wasn’t about to chalk someone up for a crime just because they were Jewish. That was useful to Heydrich and so he ordered me back into Kripo. And I’ve been stuck there ever since. Worse than that, if I’m honest. Suddenly, when war was declared, if you were in Kripo you were also in the SS; and when we attacked Russia—’
I shook my head. ‘Well, from time to time I’m useful to him in the same way a toothpick might be useful to a cannibal.’
‘You’re worried he might eat you, too. Is that it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Perhaps if more people stood up to Heydrich, the way you stood up to that fat Labour leader?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know Heydrich. People don’t ever stand up to Heydrich for very long. Most often, they end up standing in front of a firing squad. If they’re lucky.’
‘You’re a bit like Faust, I suppose. And Heydrich is your Mephistopheles.’
I nodded. ‘Except that I haven’t had any of the pleasures of the world out of the deal. I didn’t even get to seduce a beautiful and innocent girl. Gretchen, isn’t it?’
‘No. Arianne.’
‘You’re hardly innocent.’
‘But I am beautiful.’
‘Yes. You are beautiful, angel. There’s no doubt about that.’
An hour later we were moving again and quickly through Bohemia, although, from the number of Nazi flags and banners and German troops we saw, you would scarcely have been aware of this. And almost every Czech town we passed through had a new German name, so that it felt less like visiting a foreign country, or even an autonomous territory – which, strictly speaking, is what a ‘protectorate’ amounts to – and more like a colony.
We reached Prague in the late afternoon. According to my 1929 Austrian Baedeker – for some reason this edition included a section on Prague, as if it was still a city in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire – the hotel was just around the corner from Masaryk Station, so we decided to walk there and, holding Arianne’s bag and mine, I led the way through a tall archway and short colonnade of Doric pillars into a square entrance hall with a glass roof and a peeling maroon and gold plaster architrave that resembled something out of an abandoned villa in Pompeii. The hall was full of field-grey uniforms, some of which eyed Arianne hungrily, like wolves. I didn’t blame them in the least. She had a figure like a snake charmer’s pipe. Arianne herself was not unconscious of this effect and, smiling happily, she put an extra couple of notes into the swaying and seductive melody of her walk.
It was less than a hundred metres to the end of the street where the Imperial Hotel was situated. The outside of the building was grey and quite unremarkable, but inside the place was a shrine to art nouveau. On the face of it this seemed at odds with the hotel’s obvious popularity with the German Army, which isn’t well known for its interest in art except of course when it’s stealing it from some poor Jew for Göring’s personal collection. On the walls of the small but impressive entrance-lobby was a creamy-coloured ceramic relief featuring six classically dressed ladies exercising their pet lions. I knew they were classically dressed because they were wearing little gold circlets with asps on their heads and because they had bare breasts – a fashion of which generally I approve.
The breasts of women are a little hobby of mine; and while I know why I enjoy looking at them and touching them, it continues to elude me why I seem to like looking at them and touching them so much.
As soon as I saw the hotel entrance-lobby and the huge café with its temple-tall mosaic pillars I thought of the Ishtar Gate at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, and I suppose this might have been one reason the Imperial was a local favourite with the German Army. Then again, it might just have been because the hotel was also expensive. The Wehrmacht likes expensive hotels and, if it comes to that, so do I. Since I first worked as the hotel detective at the Adlon, I have come to realize that I am very easily pleased: usually the best is good enough. Either way, the Imperial’s café was full of soldiers and their off-duty laughter, their off-colour jokes, and their better-quality – better than Berlin – cigarette smoke.
Our fifth-floor corner-room had two windows. From one
side there was a fine view of the south-east of Prague, which was mostly spires and smoking chimneys; from the other, to the west, you could see the rooftop immediately opposite, which had one of those pepper-pot domes made of oxidizing copper. It looked like a large green samovar.
Almost immediately we went to bed, which seemed like the sensible thing to do, as I had no idea of how soon Heydrich would summon me to his country house or for how long, and strenuous sex was something that had been on our minds ever since the train had left Berlin – although, to be more precise, it had probably been on my mind more than hers. Either way she didn’t have to be persuaded, very much. It was love, or at least a good imitation of it, on my part at least.
And then there was life, which of course is love’s nemesis, sliding under the door in the shape of a brown envelope.
I rolled off Arianne’s naked body and walked across the room to collect it.
Arianne rolled onto her belly, lit only her second cigarette of the day and watched me read the note.
‘Mephistopheles?’
‘I’m afraid so. His driver will collect me first thing tomorrow morning, in front of the hotel.’
‘That certainly gives us plenty of time to do all kinds of things. Who knows, we might even find time to see the sights. I hear the Charles Bridge is worth a look.’
‘Is that what you’d like to do?’
‘Not right now.’ She blew smoke at the ceiling and then gave me a narrow-eyed look. ‘Right now I just want some more of what I came for.’ She put down her cigarette and, lying back on the bed, opened her arms and then her thighs.
‘Everything else, you know, is just tourism and I can do that on my own.’
I threw Heydrich’s note aside, climbed back onto the bed and crawled between her thighs.
‘But for this,’ she said. ‘I need help.’
The General’s driver was an SS sergeant who told me his name was Klein. He was a large, heavy man with fair hair, a high forehead and an expressionless face. I soon learned he was also tight-lipped. Working for the Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, there was a lot to be tight-lipped about.
The car was a dark green Mercedes 320 convertible, and with its less than discreet number plate – SS-4 – it was what Klein drove when Heydrich was not on official or state duties. For those, I soon learned, there was a larger model, a Mercedes 770. The 320 had an extra spotlight mounted on the front fender in case the General had to stop and interrogate someone at the side of the road. There was no flag on the wing but that hardly made me feel any less obvious or insecure. Both of us were in uniform. The top was down. There was no armed escort. We were in enemy territory. To me it felt like visiting an Indian Thuggee village wearing a red coat and whistling ‘The British Grenadiers’. And noting with some amusement my obvious discomfort, Klein explained that the General scorned any escort as a sign of weakness, which was why he preferred him to be driven around Prague with the top down.
‘And how often do you drive him around Prague?’
‘Between Prague Castle and the General’s country house? Twice a day. Regular as sunrise.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Nope.’
‘With one of the Three Kings at liberty, that seems unwise to me.’
We set off and I shrank back into the front passenger seat as a tall man standing beside the road snatched off his battered felt hat out of respect for who – but more probably what – we were. There was a lot of that in Prague. Because the Nazis liked this kind of thing. But I didn’t like it at all, any more than I liked driving around with a three-colour target painted on my chest; and taking out my pistol, I worked the slide and dropped it into the leather pocket on the inside of the car door, from where it might be easily and quickly retrieved in an emergency.
Klein laughed. ‘What’s that for?’
‘Just ignore me, Sergeant. I was in the Ukraine until the end of August. In the Ukraine there are lots of Ivans who want to kill Germans. I assume the same holds true for almost any conquered country. Except perhaps France. I never felt unsafe in France.’
‘So why feel unsafe here?’
‘To my ignorant ears at least, the Czech language sounds a lot like Russian. That’s why.’
‘Then let me reassure you, sir. To attack this, or the General’s other car, SS-3, would be to risk the most severe retribution. That’s what the General says. And I believe him.’
‘But what do you think?’
Klein shrugged. ‘I think this is a fast car and the General likes me to drive fast.’
‘Yes, I noticed.’
‘I think you’d have to be damned lucky to ambush this car. And that, in the long run, would be very unlucky for the Czechos.’
‘And for the General, I’d have thought. Possibly you, too, Sergeant. Really yours is not much of a threat, because it seems to me as if their bad luck is predicated on yours. It’s like saying that if you drown you’ll make sure you take them with you. When they’re dead, so are you.’
We drove about fifteen kilometres north-east of the city centre to a small village called Jungfern-Breschan. The Czechos called it Panenske-Brezany, which is probably Czech for a very quiet village that’s surrounded by a depressingly featureless landscape – just a lot of flat, recently ploughed and very smelly fields. The village itself was rather more quaint and picturesque as long as your idea of what was quaint and picturesque included a few checkpoints and the odd detachment of motorized SS. Anyone foolish enough to have attacked Heydrich’s car would have discovered that the countryside afforded them little cover from these soldiers. A team of assassins at Jungfern-Breschan would have been caught or killed within minutes. Even so, I had to wonder why Heydrich had chosen to live out here, in the middle of nowhere, when he had at his disposal in the centre of Prague a castle the size of the Kremlin, not to mention a handful of elegant Bohemian palaces. Maybe he was worried about defenestration. There was a lot of that kind of thing in Prague. I wouldn’t have minded pushing Heydrich or any number of Nazis out of a high window myself.