Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'I sat down hardly knowing what to expect, and for a while neither of us said a word as his thin, bony, dead Christ hands rippled over the shiny keyboard. I listened and kept my eyes on the photograph on the piano lid. It was a picture of Heydrich in profile wearing a fencer's white jerkin and looking like the sort of dentist you might have nightmares about – the kind who would have pulled all of your teeth to improve your dental hygiene.

'"Ghuan Zhong was a seventh-century Chinese philosopher," Heydrich said, quietly. "He wrote a very great book of Chinese sayings, one of which is that 'Even the walls have ears'. Do you understand what I'm saying, Gunther?"

'"Yes, General," I said and looking around tried to guess where a microphone might have been hidden.

'"Good. Then I'll keep playing. This piece is by Mozart, who was taught by Antonio Salieri. Salieri was not a great composer. He's better known to us today as the man who murdered Mozart."

'"I didn't even know he'd been murdered, sir."

'"Oh yes. Salieri was jealous of Mozart, as is often the way with lesser men. Would it surprise you to know that someone is trying to murder me?"

'"Who?"

'"Himmler, of course. The Salieri de nos jours. Himmler is not a great mind. His most important thoughts are the ones I'm yet to give him. He is a man who goes to the lavatory and probably wonders what Hitler would like him to do while he's in there. But one of us will certainly destroy the other, and with any luck it will be him who loses the game to me. He is not to be underestimated, however. And this is the reason that I keep you in Sipo, Gunther. Because if by any chance Himmler wins our little game I want someone to find the evidence that will help to destroy him. Someone with a proven track record in Kripo as an investigating detective. Someone intelligent and resourceful. That man is you, Gunther. You are the Voltaire to my Frederick the Great. I keep you close for your honesty and your independence of mind."

'"I'm flattered, Herr General. And rather horrified. What makes you think I could ever destroy a man like Himmler?"

'"Don't be a fool, Gunther. And listen, I said help to destroy. If Himmler succeeds and I am murdered it will of course look like an accident. Or that someone else was responsible for my death. In those circumstances there will have to be an inquiry. As head of Kripo Arthur Nebe has the power to appoint someone to direct that inquiry. That someone will be you, Gunther. You will have the assistance of my wife, Lina, and of my most trusted confidant – a man named Walter Schellenberg of the SS Foreign Intelligence Service. You can trust Schellenberg to know the most politic way to bring the evidence of my murder to the Fuhrer's attention. I have enemies it's true. But so does that bastard Himmler. And some of his enemies are my friends.'"

I shrugged. 'So you see he made it almost impossible for me to leave Kripo.'

'And that's the real reason that Nebe ordered you back from Minsk to Berlin,' said the Ami with the pipe. 'What you told Silverman and Earp – about Nebe being worried you might land him in the shit – that was only half the story, wasn't it? He was protecting you, on Heydrich's personal instructions. Wasn't he?'

'I assume so, yes. It was only when I got back to Berlin and met Schellenberg that I was reminded of what Heydrich had said. And also of course when he was assassinated in 1942.'

'Let's get back to Mielke,' said the Ami with the ill-fitting glasses. 'Was it Heydrich who made him your pigeon?'

'Yes.'

'When did that happen?'

'Following the conversation at the piano,' I said. 'A couple of days after the fall of France.'

'So, June 1940.'

'That's right.'

I was summoned back to Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where the scene was frenetic to say the least. People were scurrying around with files, phones ringing almost continually, couriers running along corridors carrying important dispatches. There was even a gramophone playing the song 'Erika', as if we were actually with the motorised SS as they drove on towards the Normandy coast. And, most unusually, everyone was smiling. No one ever smiled in that place, but that day they did. Even I had a smile on my face. To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us had sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn't have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I'm honest the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly we were all proud to be German again.

Of course people were also feeling good because they thought – we thought – that the war was over, before it had even begun. Hardly anyone was dead, in comparison with the millions who'd died in the Great War. England would have to make peace. The Russian back door was secure. And America wasn't interested in getting involved, as usual. All in all it seemed like some sort of miraculous reprieve. I expect the French felt very differently, but in Germany there was national jubilation.

And frankly the last person on my mind when I walked into Heydrich's office that morning was a stupid little prick like Erich Mielke.

Seated at a table beside Heydrich was another uniformed SS man whom I didn't recognise. He was about thirty, slightly built, with a full head of light brown hair, a fastidious almost feminine mouth and the sharpest pair of eyes I'd seen outside of the leopard's enclosure at the Berlin Zoo. The left eye was particularly cat-like. At first I assumed it was narrowed against the smoke from his silver cigarette holder, but after a while I saw that the eye was permanently like that, as if he had lost his monocle. He smiled when Heydrich introduced us, and I saw that there was more than a passing resemblance to the young Bela Lugosi, always supposing that Bela Lugosi had ever been young. The SS officer's name was Walter Schellenberg, and I think he was a major then – much later on he became a general – but I wasn't really paying attention to the pips on his collar patch. I was more interested in Heydrich's uniform, which was that of a reserve major in the Luftwaffe. More interesting still was the fact that his arm was in a sling, and for several nervous minutes I supposed that my presence there had something to do with an attempt on his life he wanted me to investigate.

'Oberkommissar Gunther is one of Kripo's best detectives,' Heydrich told Schellenberg. 'In the new Germany that's a profession not without some hazard. Most philosophers argue that the world is ultimately mind or matter. Schopenhauer states that the final reality is human will. But whenever I see Gunther I am reminded of the overriding importance to the world of human curiosity, too. Like a scientist or an inventor, a good detective must be curious. He must have his hypotheses. And he must always seek to test them against the observable facts. Is it not so, Gunther?'

'Yes, Herr General.'

'Doubtless he is even now wondering why I am wearing this Luftwaffe uniform and hoping secretly that it heralds my departure from Sipo so that he might enjoy an easier, quieter life.' Heydrich smiled at his little joke. 'Come now, Gunther, isn't that exactly what you were thinking?'

'Are you leaving Sipo, Herr General?'

'No, I'm not.' He grinned like a very clever schoolboy.

I said nothing.

'Try to contain your obvious relief, Gunther.'

'Very well, General. I'll certainly do my best.'

'You see what I mean, Walter? He remains his own man at all times.'

Schellenberg just smiled and smoked and watched me with his cat's eyes and said nothing. We had one thing in common at least. With Heydrich nothing was always the safest thing to say.