Authors: Philip Kerr
‘That’s right, doc. We’ve got to be careful what we say. What is it that the sign says? Attention! The enemy is listening. Well, they are. And they’re pretty good at it, too. Aren’t you, boys? What were you listening to anyway? And don’t tell me it was the Leader talking about the Winter Relief. Something in the Meeting Room? Something in the bedrooms? Maybe you’ve got a recording of Kuttner getting shot. That might come in useful. For me, anyway. Something in the Morning Room? Me, perhaps. Only what would be the point in that? I don’t mind calling you all crooks and liars to your ugly faces. Just see if I don’t.’
Ploetz moved his head in the direction of the door and the two SS men started to leave.
‘Look, Gunther,’ Ploetz said, ‘I think it might be better if you returned to your room and had a lie-down. I’ll inform the General of what’s happened. Under the circumstances, he’ll want to know you’re all right.’
At this moment a lie-down looked very appealing.
Ploetz went outside while Kritzinger helped me to my feet.
‘Are you all right, sir? Would you like me to help you back to your room?’
‘Thanks no, I’ll manage. I’m used to it. It’s an occupational
hazard for a policeman, being hit. It comes of sticking my nose in where it’s not wanted. I should know better by now. It used to be that a detective could turn up at a country house, question everyone, find some recognizable clues, and then arrest the butler over chilled cocktails in the library. But it hasn’t worked out like that, I’m afraid, Kritzinger. I’m afraid you won’t be getting your big moment when everyone realizes what a clever fellow you’ve been.’
‘That is disappointing, sir. Perhaps you would care for another brandy after all.’
I shook my head. ‘No. I expect Doctor Ploetz is right. I do talk too much. It comes of not having any answers. I don’t suppose you know who shot Captain Kuttner.’
‘No, sir.’
He smiled a fleeting smile and then scratched the back of his head, awkwardly.
‘Pity.’
‘You understand, sir, that there are lots of things in this house I prefer not to hear, but if these things had included a shot, or perhaps a snippet of conversation that might shed some light on his unfortunate death, then I should certainly tell you, Commissar. Really I would. However, I am certain there’s nothing I can tell you.’
I nodded. ‘Well, that’s very good of you to say so, Kritzinger. I really think you mean that. And I appreciate you saying it.’
‘Really?’ The smile flickered on again for just a second. ‘I wonder.’
‘No, I do.’
‘I flatter myself that perhaps I know your own independent cast of mind. One can’t help but hear things in a house like this.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘Consequently, I know you believe that I think in a certain way only, for what it’s worth, I don’t. I never have. I am a good German. Like you, perhaps, I don’t know what else to be. But unlike you, I am not a courageous man, if you follow me.’
‘That Iron Cross ribbon in your buttonhole says otherwise, Mister Kritzinger.’
‘Thank you, sir. But that was then. I think things were simpler in that war, were they not? Courage was perhaps easier to recognize not only in oneself but in others as well. Well, I was younger then. I have a wife now. And a child. And long ago I concluded that the only practical course of action available to me was simply to do as I’m told.’
‘Me, too.’
I headed for the stairs a little unsteadily. It had been a very German conversation.
As I passed the dining room I noticed that lunch was finishing. Seeing me, Heydrich made his excuses to the other cauliflower and, smiling, nodded toward the Drawing Room.
It wasn’t every day that Heydrich smiled at me. I followed him, and he led me to the French windows and out onto the terrace where he offered me one of his cigarettes and even condescended to light it for me. He did not smoke one himself. And he seemed oddly cheerful considering that Vaclav Moravek continued to elude the Gestapo. I had only ever seen him like this once before, and that had been in June 1940, after the French capitulation.
‘Major Ploetz told me what happened to you below stairs,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘I should have informed you about the SD listening station but really, I’ve had so much on my plate. As if I didn’t have enough to do here in Bohemia with the Three Kings and UVOD and the traitor X. Reichsmarshal Göring has tasked me to submit to him a comprehensive draft
as to how we can sort out the way the Jews are being handled in all new territories under German influence. Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what things are like in the East. It’s nothing short of chaos. But that’s hardly your concern.
‘But to come back to the traitor X: as you know, all of the guests in this house were under suspicion in that respect. However, by a simple process of elimination our intelligence analysts had narrowed down the search for the traitor’s identity to one of six or seven officers. Consequently everything these men said on the least of subjects was of interest to us. Which is why some of the rooms in the Lower Castle have concealed microphones, just in case one of them should let something important slip.’
‘You mean, like the Pension Matzky.’
Heydrich nodded. ‘You know about the microphones, do you?’ He grinned. ‘Yes, like the Pension Matzky.’
‘And do these rooms here include the Morning Room?’
‘Yes, they do.’
My stomach turned over for a moment; not for my own sake – as far as Heydrich was concerned, I was a hopeless case – but for Kurt Kahlo’s, and I started to rack my brains for anything he had said that might have been interpreted as evidence of his disloyalty.
‘So you’ve heard everything that was said in there?’
‘No, not me personally. But I’ve read some of the transcripts.’
‘Kuttner’s room?’
‘No. My fourth adjutant was hardly important enough to have rated that level of surveillance.’ Heydrich made a face. ‘Which is a pity, because if he had been, then of course we would now know who it was who pumped two bullets into his chest.’
I let out a weary sigh and tried to put some sort of tolerant, understanding face on what had just been revealed to me.
‘In my book, a traitor is a traitor. I can easily see why you should wish to employ every method at your disposal in order to catch him. Including secret microphones. But I just hope you’ll excuse some of my Criminal Assistant Kahlo’s looser talk in the Morning Room. You can blame me for a lot of that. He’s a good man. I’m afraid I’ve been a bad influence on him.’
‘On the contrary, Gunther. It’s thanks to you and your unconventional, not to say insubordinate methods, that the traitor has now been revealed. In fact, everything has worked out exactly as I had hoped it would. You, Gunther, have been the catalyst that changed everything. I don’t know who to congratulate more: me for having the inspiration of bringing you here in the first place, or you for your own stubbornly independent cast of mind.’
I felt my face take on an expression of disbelief.
‘Yes, it’s quite true. It seems that we owe you everything in this matter, Gunther. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that your immediate reward should have been to be knocked unconscious by one of our more robust colleagues in the SD. For which, once again, I offer my sincere apologies. You were after all merely doing your job. A job well done. For even as we speak the traitor is under close arrest and on his way to Gestapo headquarters in Prague.’
‘But who was it? The traitor.’
‘It was Major Thummel. Paul Thummel, of the Abwehr.’
‘Thummel. He’s a man with a gold Party badge, isn’t he?’
‘I did say it would turn out to be someone who was apparently above reasonable suspicion.’
‘But he’s also a friend of Himmler.’
Heydrich smiled. ‘Yes. And that is something of a bonus. The acute embarrassment that this particular association will cause the Reichsführer will be a great pleasure to behold. I can’t wait to see Himmler’s face when I tell the Leader. For that same reason, however, it’s by no means certain that we’ll make any of this stick against Thummel. We shall, of course, do our best.’
I nodded. ‘I’m beginning to understand. It has something to do with that letter I received this morning from the Netherlands, doesn’t it?’
‘It does indeed. You asked Major Thummel if he was the same Captain Thummel who was in The Hague in 1939. He denied it, of course. Now why? Why would that be of any interest to you? But this was a lie. It was a matter of only a few minutes to check through a record of his military service. When Thummel was a captain in 1939, he passed through The Hague on his way to Paris. We know he was in The Hague because he visited our military attaché at the German Embassy. But while he was in The Hague we also think he met secretly with his Czech controller, a man named Major Franck. Franck and Thummel shared a Dutch girlfriend named Inge Vranken. I shall want to see your letter of course, but it rather looks as if Inge Vranken was your friend Geert’s little sister.
‘We suspect Thummel has been spying for the Czechos since as early as February 1936. For a long time he was using a radio transmitter to send messages here, to Prague. As you are aware we were intercepting some of that radio traffic; what we called the OTA intercepts. The Czechos called him A54. Don’t ask me why. Call sign probably. The radio messages were forwarded by courier to the Czech government in exile in London. That went on for quite a while. But then Thummel
began to get scared. He stopped using the radio transmitter altogether. And to all intents and purposes it looked as if he had closed up shop, thus narrowing our chances of getting him.
‘We suspect that UVOD despaired of having lost their best agent. Not least because his material had put the exiled Benes government in London in very good odour with Winston Churchill. No more intelligence meant no more operational scraps from the top table. So the UVOD people set out to re-establish contact with him in Berlin, in person; and for a while that did the trick. But with the net closing in, he lost his nerve for that, too. Frankly I think he’s been expecting this for a while.’
‘But why? Why would an old Party comrade – a man with the confidence of Hitler – why would such a man spy for the Czechos? Why spy at all?’
‘That’s a good question. And I’m afraid I don’t yet know the answer. He’s still denying everything, of course. It’s likely to be several days before we have any idea of the reason behind his treason, or even the full extent of his treachery.’
Was it possible that Thummel had been Gustav? For a moment I pictured Thummel in the hands of the local Gestapo and wondered how long it might take them to beat ‘the full extent of his treachery’ out of the man.
‘Surely it won’t take your people that long.’
Heydrich shook his head. ‘Actually it will. As I said, Thummel has vitamin B. We shall have to question him quite carefully. Himmler would never forgive me if I had him tortured. In the short term at least we can but hope that close interrogation will find holes in his story.’
‘I understand.’
Heydrich nodded, silently.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good work, Gunther. As my personal detective you are off to a flying start, I think.’
He was heading back through the French windows when I spoke again.
‘What I don’t entirely understand, General, is why you murdered Captain Kuttner.’
Heydrich stopped and turned slowly on the heel of his shoe.
‘Hmm?’
‘It was you who killed your own adjutant. That I am certain of. I know how you did it. I just don’t know why you did it. I mean why bother to murder him when you had ample opportunity to have him court-martialled? No, I don’t understand that. Not entirely. And I certainly don’t understand exactly why you had me go to all the trouble of investigating a murder that you yourself had committed.’
Heydrich didn’t say anything. It seemed he was waiting for me to do some more talking before he said anything. So I did. It felt like I was talking my own neck into a noose, but it was hard to imagine it being any more painful than it was now.
‘Of course, I have a few ideas on that score. But first, if you’ll permit me, sir, let me deal with how you killed him.’
Heydrich nodded. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I see you haven’t denied it.’
‘To you?’ Heydrich laughed. ‘Gunther, there are about three people in the world to whom I ever need to justify myself, and you’re not one of them. Nevertheless, I should like to hear your explanation of the solution to the crime, as you see it.’
‘On the night before he was murdered, you gave Kuttner a dose of Veronal, which unwittingly he drank in a glass of
beer. It was the only thing Kuttner drank that night, as he knew to avoid mixing the drug with alcohol. But I bet you persuaded him to have just the one. Everyone else was celebrating, after all. And what an honour to be served by you. I should have thought beer was perfect for your purposes. It wasn’t so alcoholic that he might refuse. And of course beer is bitter, so Kuttner wouldn’t ever have tasted the significant dose of the drug with which you’d doctored it.