Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

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.

We turned off the main highway and Klein steered the Mercedes down a gently sloping road that wound around to the right and then the left. There were trees now and the air was strong with the smell of freshly mown grass and pine-needles, and after the grey misery of Prague this felt like a place where it might be easier for Heydrich to escape from the cares of the world, even the ones he himself had inflicted or was planning to inflict. At Jungfern-Breschan, he might get away from it all, just as long as he didn’t mind the several hundred SS stormtroopers who were there to protect his privacy.

A handsomely baroque pink stucco house came into view on our right. Behind a gated and guarded archway I counted six windows on the upper floor. It looked like a hunting lodge but I couldn’t be sure. I’d rarely been hunting myself, and never for anything more elusive than a missing person, a murderer, or an errant wife, and it was hard to comprehend how anyone wanting to shoot a few pheasants also needed a matching Russian Orthodox chapel and a swimming pool in the grounds to be able to do it. Of course, it’s always possible that if I’d prayed a bit more and learned to swim a bit better I might have bagged the odd snipe or two myself.

‘Is that General Heydrich’s new house?’

‘No. That’s the Upper Castle. Von Neurath continues to live there. For the moment, anyway.’

Konstantin von Neurath had been the Reichsprotector of Bohemia until Hitler decided he was too soft and gave the job to his blond butcher; but before that von Neurath had been the German Foreign Minister — a job now held by the most unpopular man in Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop.