Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

To my enormous relief he now came to this conclusion.

‘Take the woman back to her cell,’ he told Sergeant Soppa.

‘Yes sir.’

Soppa and the other man laid the bascule down on the wet floor and started to unstrap Arianne. She groaned slightly as the buckles were released, but it was hard to tell if her heavily bruised eyes were open, so I had no way of knowing if she saw me.

Either way, it was certainly the last time I ever saw her.

‘Let’s continue this conversation in your office upstairs, Horst,’ said Heydrich. ‘Gunther?’ Now he was ushering me out of the interrogation cell, ahead of him.

I walked toward the door. My heart was on the floor alongside Arianne’s bedraggled, half-drowned body, twisting over and over like a dying trout.

Heydrich held my arm for a moment and then smiled a sarcastic smile. ‘What? No fond goodbyes for your poor lover? No last words?’

I didn’t turn around to look back at her. If I had he’d have seen the truth in my face. Instead I met Heydrich’s chilly, wolf-blue eyes, turned a deep sigh into a wry laugh and shook my head silently.

‘To hell with her,’ I said.

It was, I thought, the only place Arianne and I were ever again likely to meet up with each other.

In a large office on an upper floor of the Pecek Palace, Heydrich told an orderly to bring us schnapps.

‘I think we all need one after that ordeal, don’t you, gentlemen?’

I couldn’t argue with this. I was desperate for a drink to put a little iron in my soul.

A bottle arrived. A proper one containing real liver glue but none of the deer or elk blood that Germans sometimes said it contained. That was just a story like the one I was getting ready to tell Heydrich and Bohme. I drank a glassful of the stuff. It was ice-cold, the way it’s supposed to be. But I was colder. Nothing’s been invented that’s as cold as how I felt at that moment.

I went and sat on the windowsill and looked out at the old medieval city of Prague. Somewhere, under one of those dark, ancient roofs, was a fatal creature of death and destruction that was exactly like my own twin brother. Indeed, if the Golem had looked in my eye at what was elusively called the soul, he might well have concluded that I was a man to be shunned, just as people in the street below avoided the Pecek Palace front door like it was a Jaffa pesthouse. Given the wicked, monstrous, inhuman events that I’d just witnessed in the basement, they weren’t so far wrong.

Unbidden, I fetched the bottle and poured another glass of the embalming fluid that helps make Germans like me more German than before and I lit a cigarette half-hoping that it might set fire to my insides and turn me to ashes like everything else that was almost certain to be turned into ashes in due course.

‘I expect you’re wondering how we got onto her,’ said Heydrich.

‘No, but I would have got around to it before long.’

‘The list of Czechs working for the Gestapo here in Prague was hardly complete. One of the people Arianne Tauber approached in that other cafe she mentioned — I can’t remember what it was called — he was ours.’

‘The Ca d’Oro,’ said Bohme. ‘It was the Ca d’Oro, sir. The head waiter is a French fascist who’s been working for the Gestapo since the Spanish Civil War. As soon as he saw her sitting there with the flower inside the magazine he contacted us.’

‘After that,’ added Heydrich, ‘it was only a question of having her followed around the clock. She led us to Radek, about whom Bohme already had his suspicions, didn’t you, Horst?’

‘That’s right, sir.’

Bohme grinned and taking the bottle from my windowsill, he refilled my glass again and helped the General and then himself.

‘That’s why your car didn’t turn up this morning, Gunther. We arrested the two assassins around the corner from your hotel. And the girl when she arrived at the railway station a little later on. We had hoped there would be someone there from UVOD to see her off, but there wasn’t, so we picked her up and put her in the bag with the two killers.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that I think there was ever much danger of either one of you being killed. It was a pretty desperate, spur-of-the-moment sort of plan. And the chances are they’d have been shot by the sentries at the Lower Castle before they got very far.’

‘All in all,’ said Heydrich, smugly, ‘it’s been an excellent day’s work. We have the traitor. We have some more terrorists. It can only be a matter of time before we catch up with Vaclav Moravek.’

‘Yes, congratulations, sir,’ said Bohme, toasting him. ‘Tell me, what are your orders regarding Arianne Tauber? Do you want her questioned again?’

Heydrich was still thinking this over when I said, ‘I expect I can fill in the rest of the gaps in her story for you.’

‘Yes, why don’t you tell us again how you met,’ said Heydrich. ‘In detail.’

I gave him the whole story, more or less; from the circumstances in which I had first met her at Nollendorfplatz Station, to my own middle-aged infatuation; there seemed little point in hiding anything other than my true motive for telling him.

‘Paul Thummel was obviously this fellow Gustav she told me about back in Berlin. She might have denied he exists downstairs but there can be no doubt about that now. I expect that’s the one thing she was keeping back from Sergeant Soppa. He was right about that. I also expect that when Thummel sees her again he’ll fold like a picnic table. Especially when he sees the state you’ve left her in.’

I lit a cigarette and swung my leg carelessly.

‘As far as I can gather, it was Paul Thummel who gave her the list of agents to pass on to Franz Koci. As a major in the Abwehr he was well placed to know exactly who they were. But when she met up to hand them over to Franz Koci, they quarrelled about money, just as she said, and he must have thought she was holding out on him. Maybe she was, too. I expect he demanded that she give him the list and when she wouldn’t — at least not until her complaints had been addressed — he got rough with her and decided to search her underwear.

‘That was when I saw her for the first time. I assumed, wrongly, that he was attempting to rape her. Or worse. As you know, there’s been a lot of that in the blackout this summer. Women attacked and murdered in and around railway stations. I guess it was still on my mind a lot. So naturally I went to her assistance.’

‘Very gallant of you, I’m sure,’ said Heydrich.

‘Koci and I fought but he got away and ran into the blackout. The next day I was looking at his dead body under a bush in Kleist Park.’

‘At the request of Walter Schellenberg,’ said Heydrich.

‘That’s right. The Berlin Gestapo guessed he was a Czech agent, but they had no idea how he’d met his death. Who killed him, or why. I agreed to help. And soon enough I was able to connect Franz Koci with Geert Vranken.’

‘But you decided to leave the girl out of it.’

I nodded.

‘So you could take advantage of her, I suppose.’

It hadn’t been like that; but it was no good saying that I had honestly believed her to be more innocent than she turned out to be. I needed to give Heydrich the kind of cold and clinical reason he could understand. The kind of reason he would have acted upon himself, no doubt.

‘Yes. That’s true. I wanted to fuck her. I had the idea she was just a dupe, but that was always me. Of course as soon as I started sleeping with her I stopped seeing what was right under my nose. That she was in it all the way up to her pretty neck. But it was such a pretty neck.’

‘The rest of her is not bad either,’ said Bohme.

‘About that neck, Gunther,’ said Heydrich. ‘I won’t be able to save it. You know that, don’t you? The fact that she was involved in a plan to kill me, well, that’s of no real consequence. But an attempt to kill Himmler is a different story. The Reichsfuhrer takes any assault on his personal safety rather more personally than I do.’