Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

Geschke grinned. ‘Well, we do our best in that respect. So long as they fear us, they do what they’re told. We mustn’t let these Czechos make fools of us, you see. We have to be the master in our own house, so we can’t afford to overlook any wrong. We really can’t. You let them get away with one thing, there will be no end to it. But tell me, Gunther. In the Weimar Republic, when you had a suspect at the Alex and he refused to cooperate, what did you do? How on earth did you manage?’

‘We never hit anyone, if that’s what you’re driving at, sir. We weren’t allowed to. The Prussian Police Regulations forbade it. Oh, some cops smacked a suspect around now and then, but the bosses didn’t like that. We got results because we got the evidence. Once you have the evidence it’s hard for a man not to sign a confession. Find the evidence and everything else follows. We were good at that: finding evidence. The Berlin Detective Service was, for a while, the envy of the world and its backbone was the police commissars.’

‘But weren’t you at all frustrated by the stupidities of Prussian justice? Sometimes it seemed to be absurd that penal servitude for life rarely ever lasted longer than twelve years. And that so many criminals deserving of their death sentences were reprieved by the Prussian government. For example, those two Jews, Saffran and Kipnik. Remember them?’

I shrugged. ‘Honestly? I can think of many others I’d like to see under the falling axe before those two. Why, just a few months ago there was the S-Bahn murderer case. Fellow named Paul Ogorzow who killed six or seven women and tried to kill as many more again. Now, he deserved his fate.’

‘Is it true that he was a Party member?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘Lots of other people thought so, too. That’s probably why it took so long to catch him. But what you were saying is absolutely right. We can’t afford to overlook any wrong. Especially when it’s a wrong committed by our own, don’t you think?’

‘Ah, now there speaks a true policeman.’

‘I like to think so, sir.’

‘Well, if there’s anything I can do to help you, Gunther, in your new capacity as the General’s personal detective, then please let me know.’ Geschke raised his glass and bowed. ‘Anything to help General Heydrich and keep him safe for the new Germany.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

I glanced around the room and tried to picture which, if any, of the General’s guests might actually try to poison him and found that in the new Germany it wasn’t so hard. In a room full of murderers anything seemed possible.

About halfway through this unforgettable evening Major Dr Ploetz, Heydrich’s First Adjutant and number one myrmidon, turned on the library radio so that we could listen to Hitler’s speech from the Sports Palast, in Berlin.

‘Gentlemen, please,’ he said, while the radio was warming up. ‘If I could ask you to be silent.’

‘Thank you, Hans-Achim,’ said Heydrich, as if he and not the Leader had been at the microphone. And then solemnly, as the sound of the Sports Palast crept into that room, he intoned: ‘The Leader.’

It was typically thoughtful of Heydrich. I suppose he thought it would be a treat for those of us who were feeling a little homesick. And it was: a bit like hearing my mother reading the old story of how the bad boy Friedrich terrorized a lot of animals and people. It remained to be seen if the Third Reich’s ranting answer to bad Friedrich might yet be bitten by the same dog that had eaten the naughty boy’s sausages but, for me at any rate, there was always the hope that he would be. It was hard to think of a treat half as enjoyable as the idea of the Leader being bitten by a greedy dog. His own, perhaps.

In the corridor outside the library a man was on the telephone, and I poked my head out of the door to see who among Heydrich’s guests had dared to make or take a call in the middle of Hitler’s speech. Whoever he was I certainly didn’t blame him. Even at the best of times the Leader was always too loud for me. Probably he’d honed his oratorical skills in the trenches, during bombardments.

Not that you couldn’t have heard every rasping word of the broadcast in the corridor. The radio was an AEG Super Orchestra as big as a Polish peasant’s barn, and with the speech playing at full volume there was no chance of not hearing it almost anywhere in the house. Probably you could have heard the speech at the centre of the earth.

‘No, you did the right thing in calling me here, Sergeant Soppa.’

The man speaking was Oscar Fleischer, head of the Gestapo’s Resistance Section in Prague — the same man who had been taunted so infamously by one of the Three Kings.

‘All right, I’ll be there in half an hour. Just don’t let the bastard die until I get there. He did? So it was him after all.’

Fleischer caught my eye and turned his back on me.

‘No, no, I’m perfectly certain he’ll want to know. Yes, of course I’ll tell him. I’ll do it right now. Yes. Goodbye.’

Fleischer replaced the telephone and, grinning excitedly, scribbled something on a piece of paper before handing it to Captain Pomme and then running upstairs, two steps at a time.

I lit a cigarette and drifted out into the corridor next to Captain Pomme.

‘Good news?’ I asked.

‘I should say so,’ said the adjutant and went back into the library without further eludication.

I was about to follow when I glanced out the window above the telephone and had a good view of Heydrich’s other adjutants — Kuttner and Kluckholn — standing under the flagpole on the front lawn. Although the window was open, I couldn’t hear what was said — not with the radio in the library so loud — but it was plain that a heated argument was in progress, indeed that the two men were on the edge of exchanging blows. I was about to go outside and play Saturday night policeman when Kuttner strode angrily up the drive toward the gatehouse. A moment later Fleischer, wearing belts and his cap, galloped downstairs again and went straight out the front door as a car drew up and then took him away in a furious spray of gravel.

A little disappointed that I was not going to break up a fight between two SS officers, I turned my attention back to what was being broadcast in the library.

Hitler’s speech was the traditional opening of the Winter Relief Campaign. This was the Nazi Party’s annual charitable drive to provide food and shelter for the less fortunate during the coming winter months and was as near as it ever got to real socialism. Failure to donate was not an option. People who forgot to donate were quite likely to find their names in the local newspaper. Or sometimes, worse.

Hitler’s oratorical style for the Winter Relief speech was calculated to impress rather more than the actual content and usually it wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it. But my normal reaction was that it was a little like listening to Emil Jannings recite a bit of cudgel verse, Caruso singing a song from a Silly Symphony or Mark Antony eulogizing a dead cat. This year it was different, however, as it soon became clear that there was more at stake than a few fat Germans going hungry in January. As well as the more predictable bromides about the glory of giving and being generous — something that was second nature to us Germans, of course — the Leader proceeded to make an announcement concerning the beginning of ‘the great decisive battle of the coming year’, which would be devastating to the enemy.

Now many of us in that library and in the country at large were already under the impression that ‘the great decisive battle’ was already as good as won. We had certainly been told as much by Doctor Goebbels on several previous occasions. But here was Hitler more or less admitting that he’d bet the family silver on what was yet to happen, that he’d gambled all of our futures on something that was not a cast-iron certainty; and the upshot was that anyone listening to him now was left inescapably with the distinct idea that things in the East were not going entirely to plan for our hitherto invincible armed forces.