I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. What could I do against a man of Heydrich’s standing and authority?
‘What I mean is: are you intending to try to arrest me, perhaps? To make a scene.’
‘You murdered someone, General.’
‘You’re right, of course. And I did regret having rescued Kuttner’s career. I could have lived with his behaviour in and after Latvia. What happened to him there is by no means unusual — which is of course why Reichsmarshal Goring has charged me with finding a better solution to this problem. I could even have lived with his behaviour to Colonel Jacobi. The two of them have some history, it seems; however, Jacobi is a prick and frankly anyone who gets the better of that man is to be admired rather than condemned.
‘But I was shocked when Berlin’s Gestapo informed me that my own adjutant was probably homosexual. Not that he was very obvious about it; indeed I was so sceptical that I sent him along to Pension Matzky, where I’m afraid to say he disgraced himself with a girl called Grete. When he failed to perform with her, unfortunately she mocked his inadequacy and earned herself a beating. He was very apologetic about it afterwards; he even sent her some flowers by way of compensation; most bizarrely he then seems to have adopted an entirely opposite opinion of the poor girl and decided that he felt some romantic attachment for her. I’m sure there are medical explanations for his mental state. But if there are, I have no time for them. That was when I decided to get rid of him. I dislike men who are violent to women almost as much as I dislike men who are unreliable.
‘Anyway, if I had sent him back to Berlin in disgrace it wouldn’t have been long before he disgraced himself again and, more importantly, disgraced his family in Halle. I couldn’t have that. I am very fond of those people. Fond enough to want to spare them any further pain. So I thought it was better for him to be quietly murdered by me in a way that can be easily hushed up rather than allow his family to endure the public disgrace that would follow his being sentenced to some SS punishment battalion. Indeed, it already seems to me much more probable that at some stage in the hopefully not too distant future Captain Kuttner will become an unfortunate victim of Vaclav Moravek, and heroically shot by him while trying to assist in the Czech terrorist’s arrest. We may even have to award him a posthumous decoration. That’s a story that should play well at home, don’t you think?’
‘Why not? He is as good a Nazi hero as any others I can think of.’
Heydrich smirked. ‘Yes, I thought you might approve. You were wrong about one thing, however. I couldn’t ever have risked wasting so much time searching for my spent brass on the floor of Kuttner’s room. So, I had the gun inside a sock, so that it could be fired without any of the spent brass being ejected onto the floor or the bed. It all stayed safely inside the sock. Until as you say, I threw it into the corridor. Anyway, having decided to kill him — it was as you say The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that gave me the idea of how to do it — I then wondered if I might put his death to some useful purpose. If I could rely on you to be your usual awkward self and pose a lot of awkward questions to people like Henlein, Frank, von Eberstein, Hildebrandt, Thummel and von Neurath, whom we’ve had our doubts about for some time. And you came up trumps. Nothing you’ve said can spoil what I’m feeling now. And you’ll no doubt be pleased to discover that you will have advanced my reputation even further. The apprehension of the traitor X will put me in very good odour with the Leader. Ever since the invasion of Poland, the traitor has been a thorn in our side. No more. And my triumph will be complete just as soon as the third of the Three Kings is in my hands. You see, now that I have Thummel, it can’t be very long before everything is neatly wrapped up.’
‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘I’m not about to let you get away with murder, General.’
‘We’re getting away with it every minute,’ murmured Heydrich. ‘I thought you knew that.’
‘Kuttner had it coming for all I know, but even in the SS there are standards that have to be adhered to. Military discipline. Due process. Probably it will cost me my job. Even my life, but I can at least try to bring you down.’
‘You’re a fool if you think you can bring me down. But then I think you know that already, don’t you? It’s certainly true, you can cause a bit of trouble for me, Gunther. Himmler won’t thank me for exposing Paul Thummel; and naturally the investigation will have to be entirely above reproach. Very possibly that will involve you. In which case I can hardly have you shot or sent to a concentration camp. No, I can see I’m going to have to provide you with a better, more urgent reason than your loyalty to me, one that will make sure you keep your mouth shut about all of this.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, sir. Not this time.’
‘Do try to be sporting about this, Gunther. At least let me try.’
‘If you like.’
Heydrich threw away his cigarette and glanced at his wristwatch.
‘We’ll go straight to Gestapo headquarters. There, if you wish, you can make out your own report, in as much detail as you like. Pecek Palace is the proper place to bring charges against me. That is, if I can’t provide you with a better reason than simple self-preservation.’
‘I dare say you have people there who can persuade anyone to do anything.’
‘Oh, you misunderstand me, Gunther. You weren’t listening, perhaps. I said I was going to give you a much better reason to keep your mouth shut than self-preservation, and I meant it. You’re quite safe from that sort of thing, I can assure you. I’m going to give you something much more compelling than violence against your person, Gunther. Shall we?’
I nodded, but something told me that I had already lost. That this was one murderer who was almost certain to get away quite unscathed.
It was three-thirty in the afternoon when Heydrich and I got into the Mercedes with Klein and started out for the centre of Prague. No one said very much but it was obvious that Heydrich was in a good humour, humming a pleasant-sounding melody that was the very opposite to the threnody playing inside my own thick skull.
Nearing the railway line that led west to Masaryk Station, we overtook a horse-drawn hearse headed south, for the Olsany Cemetery. The mourners walking behind looked at Heydrich with baleful eyes as if somehow they held him responsible for the death of the person they were escorting to church. For all I knew that was true, and the sight of his distinctive SS car must have been like catching a glimpse of the grim reaper himself. You could feel the hate following us like X-rays and despite Heydrich’s overbearing confidence that he was invincible, it was clear to me that the hatred directed at him could just as easily have been a hail of machine-gun bullets. An ambush was the best way to kill Heydrich, and once you were in that car, anything might happen. If it had happened right then and there, I wouldn’t have minded that much.
By the time we reached the outskirts of the city what little confidence I had of making something stick to Heydrich had faded. Optimism has its limits. I was an idealist and ahead of me lay an unpleasant, possibly painful, even fatal demonstration of just where idealism could get you. A jail cell. A beating. A train ride to the concentration camp being built around the fortress of Terezin. A bullet in the back of the head. Heydrich might have assured me I was safe but I had little confidence in his assurances; and thoughts of my own peril overpowered any other ideas of just what the man sitting in front of the car — whose own mind seemed more preoccupied with Schubert and his trout — had in store to deflect me from any attempt to bring charges against him.
So we drove on to what promised to be some sort of final reckoning between us.
Pecek Palace, formerly a Czech bank, was part of a government area that was home to several tall and rusticated grey buildings any one of which could have been Gestapo headquarters. But the real HQ was easy to spot at the end of the street, surrounded as it was with checkpoints and bedecked with two long Nazi banners. It was a grim, granite edifice that was a near-copy of the Gestapo’s central HQ in Berlin’s Prinz Albrechtstrasse, with huge cast-iron lamps that belonged on an ogre’s castle, and a Doric-columned portico that might have seemed elegant but for several SS men who were grouped out front, easily recognizable with their leather coats, pork-knuckle faces and pugilist’s manners. None of them looked as though they would have turned a short hair to see a defenestrated Czech crash onto the black cobbles in front of their cold eyes. Five storeys above the street the balustrade featured stone vases that resembled giant funeral urns. Certainly it wouldn’t have surprised the Czechs to have been told that this was what these were used for. After three years of occupation the Gestapo at Pecek Palace had the most fearsome reputation in all of Europe.
Klein stopped the car at the entrance and the guards came to attention. I followed Heydrich through the wrought-iron doors and up a short, shiny limestone staircase that was lit by a large brass chandelier. At the top of the stairs were some glass double-doors lined with green curtains and in front of these were two SS guards, a pair of Nazi flags, and between them a portrait of the Leader — the one by Heinrich Knirr that made him look like a queer hairdresser. To the left was a reception area where I presented my identification and endured the awl-like scrutiny of the uniformed NCO on duty.
