In the hospital, they are emptying the cupboards of all the morphine they can find for the relief of their most important patient.
That evening, an insane raid is organized. The city is invaded by 4,500 men from the SS, the SD, the NSKK, the Gestapo, the Kripo, and other Schupos, plus three Wehrmacht battalions. Add to this the Czech police, who must help them, and there are more than 20,000 men taking part in the operation. All access routes are cut off, all main roads blocked, streets closed, buildings searched, people checked. Everywhere I look, I see armed men jumping from uncovered trucks, running in columns from one building to the next, filling stairwells with the pounding of boots and the clanking of steel, hammering on doors, shouting orders in German, dragging people from their beds, turning their apartments upside down, pushing them about and barking at them. The SS in particular seem to have completely lost controclass="underline" they pace up and down the streets like angry madmen, shooting at lighted windows or open windows, expecting at any moment to be the victims of snipers waiting in ambush. This is not a state of emergency—it’s a state of war. The police operation plunges the entire city into indescribable chaos. That night 36,000 apartments are visited—for a meager yield, compared with the means deployed. They arrest 541 people—of whom three or four are tramps, one a prostitute, one a juvenile delinquent, and one a Resistance leader with no link whatsoever to Anthropoid—and immediately release 430 of them. And they do not find a single trace of the parachutists. What’s worse, this is only the beginning. Gabčík, Kubiš, Valčík, and their friends must have had a strange night. I wonder if any of them managed to sleep? I would be very surprised. As for me … I’m sleeping very badly these days.
223
On the hospital’s second floor, emptied of all but one of its patients, Heydrich is lying in bed. He is weak, his senses are numbed, his body aching, but he’s conscious. The door opens, and the guard lets his wife, Lina, into the room. He tries to smile at her—he’s happy she’s here. She, too, is relieved to see her husband alive, albeit very pale and bedridden. Yesterday, when she saw him just after his operation, all white and unconscious, she thought he was dead. Even after waking up, he looked barely any better. She didn’t believe the doctors’ reassuring words. And if the parachutists had trouble sleeping, Lina’s night wasn’t very pleasant either.
This morning she brings him hot soup in a thermos flask. Yesterday: victim of an assassination attempt. Today: already convalescent. The Blond Beast has thick skin. He’ll be fine, as always.
224
Mrs. Moravec goes to fetch Valčík. Her husband, the kindhearted railway worker, does not want to let Valčík leave in his current state. He gives him a book to read on the tram, so he can hide his face: Thirty Years of Journalism by H. W. Steed. Valčík thanks him. After he’s gone, the railwayman’s wife tidies his room and, stripping his bed, finds blood on the sheets. I don’t know how serious his injury was, but I do know that all doctors in the Protectorate were legally obliged to tell the police about any bullet wounds, under pain of death.
225
A crisis meeting is taking place behind the black walls of Peček Palace, Commissioner Pannwitz summing up: after studying the clues gathered at the crime scene, his initial conclusion is that the attack was planned in London and executed by two parachutists. Frank agrees. But Dalüge, named as interim Protector the day before, believes the attack points to an organized national uprising. As a preventive measure, he orders that lots of people be shot and every policeman in the region rounded up to reinforce the city’s police presence. Frank looks like he’s going to throw up. All the evidence suggests that this attack was organized by Beneš, and even if that were not true … politically, he couldn’t care less if the internal Resistance is implicated or not. “We must not let people believe that there is a national revolt! We have to say that this was an individual action.” On top of that, if they pursue a campaign of mass arrests and executions, they risk disturbing the country’s industrial production. “Need I remind you of the vital importance of Czech industry for the German war effort, Herr Oberstgruppenführer?” (Why have I made up this phrase? Probably because he actually said it.) Frank, the second-in-command, thought his hour had come. Instead of which, they promoted this Dalüge, who has no experience as a statesman, knows nothing of the Protectorate’s business, and can barely even locate Prague on a map. Frank doesn’t object to a show of force: it costs nothing to unleash terror in the streets, and he knows it. But he remembers the political lessons learned from his master: no stick without a carrot. The previous night’s hysterical raid exemplified the uselessness of such actions. What they need is a well-organized and well-funded campaign of denouncements. That would produce better results.
Frank leaves the meeting. He’s wasted enough time with Dalüge. A plane is waiting to take him to Berlin, where he has a meeting with Hitler. He hopes that the Führer’s political genius will not be overpowered by one of his famous rages. In the plane, Frank carefully plans his presentation of the measures he will recommend. Given yesterday’s phone conversation, it’s in his interests to be convincing. In order not to look like a wimp, he suggests invading the city with tanks and regiments, and cutting off a few heads. But, once again, there must be no mass reprisals. Rather, he would advise that Hácha and his government be leaned on: threatened with the loss of the Protectorate’s autonomy, and with German control of all Czech organizations. Plus all the usual methods of intimidation: blackmail, harassment, et cetera. But all of this, for now, in the form of an ultimatum. The ideal solution would be for the Czechs themselves to deliver the parachutists into their hands.
Pannwitz’s concerns are different. His area of expertise is not politics but investigation. He is collaborating with two brilliant detectives sent by Berlin, both of whom are still stunned by the chaos of “catastrophic proportions” that they found here on arrival. They say nothing about this to Dalüge, but to Pannwitz they complain that they needed an escort just to reach their hotel safely. As for the behavior of those rabid SS dogs, their judgment is damning: “They’re completely mad. They won’t even be able to find their way out of the insane maze they’re creating, never mind find the assassins.” They must proceed more methodically. In less than twenty-four hours, the three detectives have already obtained some important results. Thanks to the witness accounts they’ve collected, they are now in a position to reconstruct exactly how the attack unfolded, and they have a description—albeit rather vague (those bloody witnesses can never agree on what they saw!)—of the two terrorists. But there are no leads on the men’s whereabouts. So they’re searching. Not in the streets, though, like the SS imbeciles: they are going through the Gestapo files with a fine-tooth comb.
And they find that old photo taken from the corpse of brave Captain Morávek—the last of the Three Kings, killed in a tramway shoot-out two months earlier. In this photo, the handsome Valčík looks inexplicably bloated. But it’s him, all the same. The policemen have no clues at all linking this man to the attack. They could easily pass on to the next file, but they decide to investigate this photograph just on the off chance. If this were a detective novel, we’d call it a hunch.