Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

The room — one of the largest in the house — was quiet and cool; it felt more like a sepulchre than a study. I walked around for a good minute before I was retracing my footsteps, which, like a ghost’s, were completely silent in that room, as if I hardly existed at all. Heydrich could have arranged that, of course, and only too easily. As easily as emptying out the crystal ashtray on the desk which looked very clean and brightly polished. One of Kritzinger’s duties, perhaps?

I don’t know that I expected to find anything. I was just being nosy, but like any detective I felt I had the licence to indulge this tendency, which only feels like a vice when it is accompanied by something more venial like envy or greed. There was nothing in there I really coveted, although I had always wanted a nice desk with a comfortable office chair, but maybe this furniture was a little too grandiose for my purpose. All the same I sat down, spread my hands along the Reichsprotector’s desk, leaned back in his chair, glanced around the room for a moment, handled some of the books on his shelves — mostly popular fiction — looked over his many photographs, inspected the blotter for some recent correspondence — there wasn’t any — and then decided I was very glad I wasn’t Reinhard Heydrich. Not for all the world would I have changed places with that man.

The leather desk diary was full of appointments and not much else. There were many previous meetings at the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg, at the Berghof, at the Reich Chancellery; and future evenings at the circus — strangely, that was underlined — a day at Rastenburg, a weekend at Karinhall, a night at the Deutsches Opernhaus, Christmas at the Lower Castle, and then a January conference at an SS villa in Grosser Wannsee. As Heydrich’s detective would I be required to go to all of these places? Rastenburg? The Reich Chancellery? The thought of actually meeting Hitler filled me with horror.

I searched the wastepaper bin underneath the desk and found only a sock, with a hole in it. There were no office drawers for me to search. If Heydrich had secret files they were certainly kept somewhere secret. I looked around the room.

The safe I decided at last was behind the portrait of Hitler; and so it proved; but I wasn’t about to try and open it; even my impertinence had its limits. Besides, there were things I really didn’t want to know. Especially the secret things that Heydrich knew.

The heavily lined curtains looked like they belonged in a theatre and might easily have afforded me a hiding place if someone came into the study. The big windows were as thick as my little finger and quite possibly bullet-proof, too. At the back of the curtains were a couple of machine pistols and a box of grenades; Heydrich wasn’t leaving much to chance. If anyone attacked him in his house he clearly intended to defend himself to the last.

But did I want him or one of his adjutants to catch me in there? Perhaps. Being thrown out of his office might also have resulted in my being thrown off the case and sent back to Berlin in disgrace, which seemed like an outcome devoutly to be wished. But it didn’t happen and finally, after I’d been in there for almost fifteen minutes, I got up and went out onto the landing, still unobserved.

The next door along from Heydrich’s study was a suite of rather more feminine rooms — doubtless these had been set aside for Lina Heydrich — where, among the rose-patterned sofas, elegant chairs, and long mirrors, was a dressing table as big as a Messerschmitt.

I went downstairs and managed to creep unnoticed past the open door of the Dining Room, which was full of cauliflower; nearer the back garden I put my head around the door of a Play Room, and then a Nursery.

As yet I had no knowledge of the extensive servants’ quarters in the basement, so I descended a narrow flight of stairs and walked along a dimly lit corridor that seemed to serve as the spine and nervous system of the house. Even on a sunny day like this one, the stone-flagged basement corridor felt more like the lock-up at the Alex, although it smelled a lot better. Kahlo was right about that.

In the big kitchen several cooks were hard at work preparing the next course of lunch, which was being served by waiters whose faces were more familiar. They regarded me with suspicion and alarm. Fendler, the footman I’d spoken to earlier, who happened to be smoking a cigarette near the back door, came over and asked me if was lost. I said I wasn’t of course, but a little deterred by the horrified looks I was getting, I was about to return upstairs and get some lunch after all when, at the furthest, dimmest end of the corridor, a door opened and an SS sergeant whom I was certain I’d never seen before came out, closed the door carefully behind him, and then went into the room opposite.

In the moment before the door closed I saw a brightly lit, busy room containing what looked like a telephone switchboard, and thinking that this was as good a time as any to introduce myself in person — there was another call to the Alex I wanted to place — I went along the corridor and opened the door.

Immediately, a burly-looking SS corporal jumped up from a wooden bench, threw down his newspaper, and blocked my way. At the same time he kicked another door shut behind him, but not before I caught a glimpse of several large taperecorders and, seated in front of them, some more SS men wearing headphones.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the corporal, ‘but I’m afraid you can’t come in here.’

‘I’m a police officer.’ I showed him my warrant disc. ‘Commissar Gunther, from the Alex. General Heydrich has given me the run of the house to investigate a murder.’

‘I don’t care who you are, sir, you can’t come in here. This is a restricted area.’

‘What’s your name, Corporal?’

‘You don’t need to know that, sir. You don’t need to know anything about what happens in here. It doesn’t concern you or your particular investigation.’

‘My particular investigation? That’s my call, Corporal. Not yours. What is this place anyway? And what happens behind that door? It looks like Deutsches Grammophon in there.’

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you leave, sir. Right now.’

‘Corporal, did you know that you’re obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty? I have no intention of leaving until I have a full explanation of what’s going on in here.’

By now voices were raised, my own included, and there had been a certain amount of chest-on-chest pushing and shoving. I was angrier at myself than at the corporal — frustrated at having missed finding the loose floorboards before and now irritated to discover what looked to me like a listening post for eavesdropping on the house guests — only the corporal didn’t know that, and when someone appeared behind me in the door I had just come through and I turned around to see who this was, the corporal hit me. Hard.

I didn’t blame him. I didn’t blame anyone. Like raising your voice and arguing and pointing, blaming people is not something you can do when you’re heading down through the black hole that suddenly appears underneath your shoes. Doctor Freud didn’t give it a name and, strictly speaking, you only know what being unconscious really means if a thug with a hardwood fist like a Zulu’s knobkerrie has used this same lethal object to hit you expertly on the back of the neck, as if trying to kill a large and argumentative and rather gullible rabbit. No, wait, I did blame someone. I blamed myself. I blamed myself for not listening to the eavesdropping SS corporal in the first place. I blamed myself for missing the trick with the floorboards in Kuttner’s bedroom. I blamed myself for taking Heydrich at his word and thinking I really did have the run of the house to pursue my investigation. But mostly I just blamed myself for thinking it was even possible to behave like a real detective in a world that was owned and run by criminals.