Philip Kerr - Prague Fatale

It grew cold. Wind tore the leaves off the trees and hurried them east in their thousands. The water on the Spree looked like corrugated iron. The cold felt like barbed wire. There was one thing to be done before the snows arrived, a sentimental gesture that meant nothing to anyone I had ever met; but I suppose I wanted to feel better about myself. I organized the release of Geert Vranken’s remains from Berlin’s Charite Hospital and paid for them to be buried in a zinclined wooden crate — just in case, after the war, his family wanted to dig it up and take his remains home to the Netherlands.

There was one other person at the funeral: Werner Sachse from the Gestapo. With his black leather coat, his black hat and black tie, he looked like a proper mourner. The short service was conducted by the pastor of St John’s Church, in Plotzensee, and when it was over Sachse told me he admired the thought if not the practice.

‘Where would we be if policemen paid for every foreign worker who gets killed in an accident?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I reminded him.

Sachse shrugged as if the correction I’d offered hardly mattered. The fact remained that the dead man wasn’t German and therefore his death was of little or no account.

For a moment I wondered if telling him why I was doing it was a mistake; and then I told him anyway.

‘I’m doing it so that somewhere, someone who isn’t German will have a better opinion of us than we deserve.’

Sachse pretended to be surprised about that, but before we parted we shook hands, so I knew he wasn’t.

Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Ludtke was known as Stop-Gap Ludtke on account of his name and because no one had expected him to survive in the job because he wasn’t a Party member. But he did what he was told, and when someone told him to put me on night duty that’s what he did. Not that I minded very much. Being on nights kept me out of sight and out of mind. At least it did until early on the morning of Monday 17 November. I mention the murder I investigated that night only because it was Heydrich himself who had me taken off the case. I expect he was worried that I might actually solve it.

It was about five o’clock in the morning when I got the telephone call from Kriminal Inspector Heimenz at the police station in Grunewald. There had been a murder at one of those fancy modern villas in Heerstrasse. He wouldn’t say who it was on the telephone; all I knew was that it was someone famous.

One of the good things about being on nights was that I had access to a car, so I was at the address in less than half an hour. And it was easy to find. There were several police cars parked outside, not to mention a huge silver Rolls-Royce. As soon as I stepped through the elegantly modern front door I guessed whose house it was. But I hardly expected that he was also the victim.

General Ernst Udet was one of the most famous men in Germany. At the age of just twenty-two he had survived the Great War as Germany’s highest-scoring air-ace. Only Manfred von Richthofen had more victories than he did. After the war he’d made several movies with Leni Riefenstahl and was a stunt-flier in Hollywood. The house was full of film posters, flying cups and photographs of aeroplanes. A polished wooden aircraft propeller hung on one wall and it was several minutes before I could tear myself from all of Udet’s memorabilia to look at his dead body. He wasn’t very tall, but then you don’t need to be tall to fly aeroplanes, especially when these are experimental: Udet was the Director-General of the Luftwaffe’s developmental wing. He was also a close friend of Hermann Goring. Or at least, he had been a close friend until someone shot him.

The body was naked. It lay in the middle of an enormous double bed, and surrounded by empty brandy bottles, most of them good-quality French brands. There was a neat hole in his forehead and a hammerless Sauer. 38 in his right hand. For a small man — he couldn’t have been more than one sixty — he had an enormous penis. But it wasn’t any of these details that drew the eyes. Not even the telephone line that was coiled around one of his muscular arms like a Jew’s tefillin. It was what was written on the headboard in red lipstick that tugged at my eyeballs and made me think I had walked in on a major scandal.

REICHSMARSHAL, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

I suppose the choice of words was meant to make you think of Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross, and abandoned by God the Father. But that wasn’t what I thought of; and it wasn’t what Inspector Heimenz thought of, either.

‘This is one homicide I’m happy to leave to you boys at the Alex,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Let me tell you, he looks how I feel.’

‘Cut and dried, isn’t it?’

‘So you take the case.’

‘Not me. I want to sleep at night.’

‘You’re in the wrong job for that.’

‘The Grunewald is not like the rest of Berlin. This is a quiet district.’

‘So I see. Who found the body?’

‘The girlfriend. Name of Inge Bleyle. She claims they were on the telephone when she heard the shot. So she drove straight over here in that modest little car you saw parked outside and found him dead.’

‘That Rolls is hers?’

‘So it would seem. Apparently Herr Udet had been drinking heavily all week.’

‘From the look of things, Martell and Remy Martin are going to be inconsolable.’

‘It seems that he and the Air Ministry had had their differences concerning the success of the air war against the British.’

‘You mean the lack of it, don’t you?’

‘I know what I meant to say. Perhaps you’d better speak to Fraulein Bleyle yourself, sir.’

‘Perhaps I had. Where is she now?’

‘In the drawing room.’

I followed him downstairs.

‘Hell of a place isn’t it, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hard to imagine anyone who owned a place like this shooting himself.’

‘Is that what you think happened?’

‘Well, yes. The gun was in his hand.’

I stopped on the stairs and pointed to one of the many photographs covering the wall: Ernst Udet and the actor Bela Lugosi, posing on a California tennis court.

‘Looks to me as if Ernst Udet was a lefty,’ I said.

‘So?’

‘The gun was in his right hand. I don’t know about you, but if I was going to shoot myself — and believe me I’ve considered it, seriously, these past few months — I’d probably hold the gun in my stronger hand.’

‘But the words written on the headboard, sir. Surely that was meant to be some sort of suicide message.’

‘I’m only sure that’s what it’s meant to look like. Whether it is or not we’ll only know when a doctor gets him on the slab. You’d expect a powder burn on the skin if he really did press the gun to his forehead, and I didn’t see one, that’s all.’

The inspector nodded. He was a small man with small hands and a small way about him.

‘Like I said, this is one homicide I’m glad to leave to the Alex.’

Inge Bleyle had stopped crying. She was about thirty years old, tall — much taller than Ernst Udet — and good-looking in an understated way. She was wearing her fur coat and there was a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, neither of which looked like she’d paid much attention to them since they came her way.

I found an ashtray, held it under her cigarette and tapped the back of her hand. She looked up, smiled ruefully and then put out the cigarette in the ashtray while I continued holding it.

‘I’m Commissar Gunther. From the Alex. Feel like talking?’

She shrugged. ‘I guess so. I guess I have to, right? I mean, I found him, and I made the call, so someone has to start the ball rolling.’