‘Do you? Yes. I can see that you do. It’s in your eyes.’
‘And that’s the reason you’re not sleeping?’
‘Can you?’ Kuttner shook his head. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever sleep, properly, again. Not ever. Not in this life.’
‘Talk about it now, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘Does it make you feel any better? To talk about it?’
‘Not much. I talked about it once, quite recently, to an American journalist. And I felt a little better about it. I felt that it was at least a start.’
Kuttner nodded and then dredged up something from his memory. I didn’t have to wait long.
‘When you mentioned scouting the area, it made me think of something. Something awful. We were on our way through Poland. This was before our assignment in Riga. We had stopped at a town called Chechlo. It’s a broken-down, shit-on-your-shoes, nowhere sort of place with a lot of drooling peasants whose tongues are too big for their mouths. But I don’t suppose I shall ever forget it now; not for as long as I live. We had been burning down Polack villages for no real reason that I could see. Certainly there was no military necessity in it. We were just throwing our weight around like brutes. Some of my men were drunk and nearly all of them were animals. Anyway, we came across a troop of Polish boy scouts. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than sixteen and the youngest perhaps as young as twelve. And my commanding officer ordered me to put all of them up against a wall and shoot them. Shoot them all. They were in uniform, he said and we have orders to shoot anyone in uniform who hasn’t surrendered. I said they were just schoolboys who didn’t know any better because they didn’t speak German, but he didn’t want to know. Orders are orders, he said, get on with it. I remember their mothers screaming at me to stop. Yes, I’ll always remember that. I wake up sometimes still hearing them beg me to stop. But I didn’t. I had my orders. So I carried them out, you see. And that’s all there is to it. Except it isn’t, of course. Not by a long way.’
After several stiff drinks I can talk to anyone, even to myself. But mostly I was drinking so that I could talk to Heydrich’s other guests. I like to talk. Talking is something you need to do if you’re ever going to encourage a man to talk back at you. And you need a man to talk a little if he’s ever going to say something of interest. Men don’t trust other men who don’t say much, and for the same reason they don’t trust men who don’t drink. You need a drink to say the wrong thing, and sometimes, saying the wrong thing can be exactly the right thing to say. I don’t know if I was expecting to hear anything as romantic as a confession to an attempted murder, or even a desire to see Heydrich dead. After all, I felt that way about him myself. It was just talk, a little bread on the water to bring the fish around. And the alcohol helped. It helped me to talk and to anaesthetize myself against the more revolting chat that came my way. But some of my colleagues were just revolting. As I glanced around the library it was like looking at a menagerie of unpleasant animals – rats, jackals, vultures, hyenas – who had sat for some bizarre group portrait.
It’s hard to say exactly who was the worst of the bunch, but I didn’t speak to Lieutenant Colonel Walter Jacobi for very long before I was itching all over and counting my fingers. The deputy head of the SD in Prague was a deeply sinister figure with – he told me – an interest in magic and the occult. It was a subject I knew a little about, having investigated a case involving a fake medium a few years back. We talked about that and we talked about Munich, which was where he was from; we talked about him studying law at the universities of Jena, Tübingen and Halle – which seemed like a lot of law; and we even talked about his father, who was a bookseller. But all the time we were talking I was trying to get over the fact that with his Charlie Chaplin moustache, his wire-framed glasses and his praying-mantis personality, Jacobi reminded me, obscenely, of what might have resulted if Hitler and Himmler had been left alone in the same bedroom: Jacobi was a Hitler–Himmler hybrid.
Equally unpleasant to talk to was Hermann Frank, the tall thin SS general from the Sudetenland who’d been passed over to succeed von Neurath as the new Reichsprotector. Frank had a glass eye, having lost the real one in a fight at school in Carlsbad, which seemed to indicate an early propensity to violence. It was the right eye that was fake, I think, but with Frank you had the idea he might have changed it around just to keep you guessing. Frank had a low opinion of Czechs, although as things turned out they had an even lower opinion of him: five thousand people filled the courtyard of Pankrac Prison in the centre of Prague to see him hanged the old Austrian Empire way one summer’s day in 1946.
‘They’re a greedy barbarous people,’ he told me candidly. ‘I don’t feel in the least bit Czech. The best thing that ever happened to me was to be born in the German-speaking part of the country, otherwise I’d be speaking their filthy Slavic language now, which is nothing more than a bastardized form of Russian. It’s a language for animals, I tell you. Do you know that it’s possible to speak a whole sentence in Czech without using a single vowel?’
Surprised at this startling display of hatred I blinked and said, ‘Oh? Like what, for example?’
Frank thought for a moment and then repeated some words in Czech which might or might not have had some vowels only I didn’t feel like looking inside his mouth to see if he was hiding any.
‘It means “stick a finger through your throat”,’ he said. ‘And every time I hear a Czech speak, that’s exactly what I want to do to them.’
‘All right. You hate them. I get the picture. And losing your eye at school like that must have been pretty tough. It explains a lot, I guess. I went to a pretty tough school myself and there are some boys I might like to get even with one day. Then again, probably not. Life’s too short to care, I think. And now you’re in such an important position, sir – the police leader in Bohemia, effectively the second most powerful man in the country – well, that’s the part I don’t understand at all, sir. Why do you hate the Czechs so much, General?’
Frank straightened absurdly. It was almost as if he was coming to attention before answering – an effect enhanced by the fact that he was wearing spurs on his boots, which seemed an odd affectation to me, even in Heydrich’s country home, which had stables, with horses in them. Pompously, he said:
‘As Germans it’s our duty to hate them. It was the failure of the Czech banks that helped to precipitate the financial crisis that brought about the Great Depression. Yes, it’s the Czech bankers we can thank for that disaster.’
Resisting my first instinct, which was to shiver with disgust as if Frank had vomited onto my boots, I nodded politely.
‘I always thought that was because our economy was built on American loans,’ I said. ‘And when they came due our own German banks failed.’
Frank was shaking his head, which was full of grey hair combed straight back so that the top of his head seemed to be in a line with the tip of his longish nose. It wasn’t the biggest nose in the room so long as Heydrich was around, but at the same time you wouldn’t have been surprised to see it pointing out the way at a crossroads.
‘Take it from me, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I do know what I’m talking about. I know this damnable country better than anyone in the fucking room.’
Frank spoke with some vigour and he was looking at Heydrich as he did, which made me wonder if there was not some grudge he nursed for his new master.
I was glad when Frank walked away to fetch himself another drink, leaving me with the impression that spending an eternity with men like Heydrich, Jacobi and Frank was the nearest thing to being in hell that I could think of.