Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

‘Do you see a sign that says this carriage is forbidden to Jews?’

The Labour leader glanced around, redundantly. There was a small printed panel that read Attention! The Enemy is Listening! but nowhere was there an anti-Semitic sign of the kind you sometimes saw on park benches or at public baths. Even I was surprised about that.

He shook his head.

I pointed at Arianne. ‘This woman worked for BVG until about a year ago.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I was secretary to the director himself.’

‘Is there anything in the BVG railway rules and regulations that says a Jew must give up his seat to a German?’

‘No. There isn’t.’

‘So there,’ I said. ‘Let that be an end of it. Go away and keep your ignorant mouth shut.’ I might also have mentioned the decoration around the old Jew’s neck, but I didn’t want anyone in that compartment thinking that this was the only reason I was interfering on his behalf.

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 Schona, 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 Goring’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 cafe 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 cafe was full of soldiers and their off-duty laughter, their off-colour jokes, and their better-quality — better than Berlin — cigarette smoke.