Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

After several stiff drinks I can talk to anyone, even to myself. But mostly I was drinking so that I could talk to Heydrich’s other guests. I like to talk. Talking is something you need to do if you’re ever going to encourage a man to talk back at you. And you need a man to talk a little if he’s ever going to say something of interest. Men don’t trust other men who don’t say much, and for the same reason they don’t trust men who don’t drink. You need a drink to say the wrong thing, and sometimes, saying the wrong thing can be exactly the right thing to say. I don’t know if I was expecting to hear anything as romantic as a confession to an attempted murder, or even a desire to see Heydrich dead. After all, I felt that way about him myself. It was just talk, a little bread on the water to bring the fish around. And the alcohol helped. It helped me to talk and to anaesthetize myself against the more revolting chat that came my way. But some of my colleagues were just revolting. As I glanced around the library it was like looking at a menagerie of unpleasant animals — rats, jackals, vultures, hyenas — who had sat for some bizarre group portrait.

It’s hard to say exactly who was the worst of the bunch, but I didn’t speak to Lieutenant Colonel Walter Jacobi for very long before I was itching all over and counting my fingers. The deputy head of the SD in Prague was a deeply sinister figure with — he told me — an interest in magic and the occult. It was a subject I knew a little about, having investigated a case involving a fake medium a few years back. We talked about that and we talked about Munich, which was where he was from; we talked about him studying law at the universities of Jena, Tubingen and Halle — which seemed like a lot of law; and we even talked about his father, who was a bookseller. But all the time we were talking I was trying to get over the fact that with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, his wire-framed glasses and his praying-mantis personality, Jacobi reminded me, obscenely, of what might have resulted if Hitler and Himmler had been left alone in the same bedroom: Jacobi was a Hitler-Himmler hybrid.

Equally unpleasant to talk to was Hermann Frank, the tall thin SS general from the Sudetenland who’d been passed over to succeed von Neurath as the new Reichsprotector. Frank had a glass eye, having lost the real one in a fight at school in Carlsbad, which seemed to indicate an early propensity to violence. It was the right eye that was fake, I think, but with Frank you had the idea he might have changed it around just to keep you guessing. Frank had a low opinion of Czechs, although as things turned out they had an even lower opinion of him: five thousand people filled the courtyard of Pankrac Prison in the centre of Prague to see him hanged the old Austrian Empire way one summer’s day in 1946.

‘They’re a greedy barbarous people,’ he told me candidly. ‘I don’t feel in the least bit Czech. The best thing that ever happened to me was to be born in the German-speaking part of the country, otherwise I’d be speaking their filthy Slavic language now, which is nothing more than a bastardized form of Russian. It’s a language for animals, I tell you. Do you know that it’s possible to speak a whole sentence in Czech without using a single vowel?’

Surprised at this startling display of hatred I blinked and said, ‘Oh? Like what, for example?’

Frank thought for a moment and then repeated some words in Czech which might or might not have had some vowels only I didn’t feel like looking inside his mouth to see if he was hiding any.

‘It means “stick a finger through your throat”,’ he said. ‘And every time I hear a Czech speak, that’s exactly what I want to do to them.’

‘All right. You hate them. I get the picture. And losing your eye at school like that must have been pretty tough. It explains a lot, I guess. I went to a pretty tough school myself and there are some boys I might like to get even with one day. Then again, probably not. Life’s too short to care, I think. And now you’re in such an important position, sir — the police leader in Bohemia, effectively the second most powerful man in the country — well, that’s the part I don’t understand at all, sir. Why do you hate the Czechs so much, General?’

Frank straightened absurdly. It was almost as if he was coming to attention before answering — an effect enhanced by the fact that he was wearing spurs on his boots, which seemed an odd affectation to me, even in Heydrich’s country home, which had stables, with horses in them. Pompously, he said:

‘As Germans it’s our duty to hate them. It was the failure of the Czech banks that helped to precipitate the financial crisis that brought about the Great Depression. Yes, it’s the Czech bankers we can thank for that disaster.’

Resisting my first instinct, which was to shiver with disgust as if Frank had vomited onto my boots, I nodded politely.

‘I always thought that was because our economy was built on American loans,’ I said. ‘And when they came due our own German banks failed.’

Frank was shaking his head, which was full of grey hair combed straight back so that the top of his head seemed to be in a line with the tip of his longish nose. It wasn’t the biggest nose in the room so long as Heydrich was around, but at the same time you wouldn’t have been surprised to see it pointing out the way at a crossroads.

‘Take it from me, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I do know what I’m talking about. I know this damnable country better than anyone in the fucking room.’

Frank spoke with some vigour and he was looking at Heydrich as he did, which made me wonder if there was not some grudge he nursed for his new master.

I was glad when Frank walked away to fetch himself another drink, leaving me with the impression that spending an eternity with men like Heydrich, Jacobi and Frank was the nearest thing to being in hell that I could think of.

But the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Berries — for that matter the whole damned tree — for the curling turd of the evening went to Colonel Doctor Hans Geschke, a 34-year-old lawyer from Frankfurt on the Oder who was chief of the Gestapo in Prague. While studying in Berlin, he’d seen my name in the newspapers, and in spite of our differences in rank, this was a good enough reason for him to try to make common cause with me. Which is another way of saying he needed someone to patronize.

‘After all,’ he explained, ‘we’re both policemen you and I, doing a difficult job, in very difficult circumstances.’

‘So it would seem, sir.’

‘And I like to keep abreast of ordinary crime,’ he said. ‘Here in Prague we have to deal with more serious stuff than some Fritz slicing his wife up with a broken beer bottle.’

‘There’s not so much of that around, sir. Beer bottles are in rather short supply in Berlin.’

He wasn’t listening.

‘You should come in and see us very soon, at the Pecek Palace. That’s in the Bredovska district of the city.’

‘A palace, eh? It sounds a lot grander than the Alex, sir.’

‘Oh no. To be quite honest with you it’s hard to see how it was ever a palace except in some dark corner of Hades. Even the executive rooms have very little charm.’

Geschke’s was a waxwork’s expressionless face. Captain Kuttner had said that at the Pecek Palace Geschke was known as ‘Babyface’, but this could only have been among people who knew some very frightening babies with duelling scars on their left cheeks. Geschke was one of those factory-manufactured Nazis they turned out like unpainted Meissen porcelain: pale, cold, hard, and best handled with extreme care.

‘I haven’t seen much of the city yet,’ I said. ‘But it does seem rather infernal.’