‘Very well, sir. And thank you.’
I may even have clicked my heels and bowed my head. Working for Heydrich was like being friendly with a vicious tom cat while you were looking around for the nearest mouse hole.
CHAPTER 13
Arianne was pleased to see me, of course, although not as pleased as I was to see her, in our bed, alone, naked and willing to use her body to help divert my thoughts from Heydrich, Jungfern-Breschan, the Three Kings and Pecek Palace. I told her nothing of my worries. Where Heydrich was concerned, it was best to know very little, as I was beginning to discover myself. What did I tell her as, exhausted by our love-making, we lay intertwined like two primitive figures carved from the same piece of antler-horn? Only that my duties kept me out of Prague, in Jungfern-Breschan, otherwise I should certainly have visited her at the Imperial Hotel before now.
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Really, I’m quite happy here on my own. You’ve no idea how nice it is just to sit and read a book, or to walk around the city by myself.’
‘I do,’ I muttered. ‘I can imagine, anyway.’
‘I left a message for my brother. And there are plenty of other Germans in Prague I can talk to. As a matter of fact, this hotel is full of Germans. There’s a very beautiful girl in a suite on the same floor as us who’s having an affair with some SS general. And she’s a Jew. Doesn’t that sound romantic?’
‘Romantic? It sounds dangerous.’
Arianne shrugged that off. ‘Her name is Betty Kipsdorf and she’s utterly sweet.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘The general? Konrad something. He’s more than twice her age but she says you really wouldn’t know it.’ She laughed. ‘On account of the fact that he used to be a gymnastics teacher.’
I said I didn’t know who that could be. And I didn’t. I wasn’t exactly on first-name terms with any SS generals, even the ones I knew.
‘He’s very vigorous, apparently. For a general. Me, I always say that if you want a job done and done properly it’s a captain you want. Not some effete flamingo with clockwork heels.’
Flamingos were what the ranks called officers of the General Staff, a reference to the red stripes on their trouser legs.
‘What do you know about flamingos?’
‘You’d be surprised who we get through the doors of the Jockey Bar.’
‘No. But I’m still surprised that you’d prefer a captain to one of them.’
‘And perhaps a little suspicious.’
‘That’s probably no fault of yours.’
‘We’d get on like a house on fire if you weren’t a cop, don’t you think so, Parsifal?’
‘These are the times we live in, I’m afraid. All sorts of things make me suspicious, angel. Two aces in a row. Double-sixes. A sure thing for the state lottery. A kind word or a compliment. Venus rising from the sea. I’m the kind of Fritz who’s apt to look for a maker’s mark on the scallop shell.’
‘I might get insulted if I knew what any of that was about. After all, there’s a little part of you that’s still in me.’
‘Now it’s my turn to get insulted.’
‘Don’t be, Gunther. I enjoyed it, a lot. I think that maybe you underestimate yourself.’
‘Perhaps. I might even call it an occupational hazard except that, so far, it’s helped to keep me alive.’
‘Is staying alive so very important to you?’
‘No. Then again I’ve seen the alternatives, and at close quarters. In Russia. Or twenty years ago, back in the trenches.’
She gave me a little squeeze, the kind that feels like a wonderful sort of conjuring trick and that doesn’t need any limbs. Whenever a woman holds me tight like that it’s the best argument there is against the solipsistic idea that one can be truly certain only of the existence of one’s own mind.
‘How much more suspicious would you get if I said I’d fallen for you, Gunther?’
‘You’d have to say it a lot for me to believe it might be true.’
‘Maybe I will.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. When you’ve said it the first time we can review the situation. But right now it’s just a hypothetical.’
‘All right, I—’
She paused for a moment, uttering a sigh that was as unsteady as a whippet’s hind leg as I nudged up deep against the edge of her latest thought.
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘It’s true, Parsifal. I’m falling for you.’
‘You’re a long time in the air, angel. By now anyone else would have hit the ground.’ I nudged into her again. ‘Hard.’
‘Damn you, Gunther.’
Her breath was hot in my ear except it sounded cold and erratic, like someone laughing silently.
I prompted her a little more and said, ‘Go on. Let’s hear what it sounds like.’
‘All right. I love you. Satisfied?’
‘Not by a long way. But I will be, if this keeps up.’
She hit me on the shoulder but there was pleasure on her face. ‘You sadistic bastard.’
‘I’m a Nazi. You said so yourself. Remember?’
‘No, but you’re also rather wonderful, Gunther. All the more so because you don’t realize it. Since Karl, my husband, there have been other men. But you’re the first man I’ve cared anything about since he died.’
‘Stop talking.’
‘Go ahead and make me.’
I didn’t say anything. Conversation between us had become unnecessary. We didn’t need speech to act out a story that many others had told before. It wasn’t original but it felt like it was – an almost silent film that seemed both familiar and new. We were still performing our own highly stylized homage to German expressionism when the telephone rang on the bedside table.
‘Leave it,’ I said.
‘Is that wise?’
‘It sounds like trouble.’
It stopped ringing.
When our own motion picture finished, she got up to fetch one of my cigarettes.
I rolled onto my back and stared out of the window at the little pepper-pot dome on top of the building opposite.
The telephone started to ring again.
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘It always rings again when it’s trouble. Especially first thing in the morning, before breakfast.’
I picked up the receiver. It was Major Ploetz, Heydrich’s first adjutant. He sounded shaken and angry.
‘A car is coming to pick you up and bring you back here, immediately.’
‘All right. What’s up?’
‘There’s been a homicide,’ said Ploetz. ‘Here, at the Lower Castle.’
‘A homicide? What kind of homicide?’
‘I don’t know. But you should be outside your hotel in fifteen minutes.’
And then he hung up.
For one glorious moment I allowed myself to hope it was Heydrich who was dead. That one of those officers and gentlemen of the SS and the SD, jealous of Heydrich’s success, had shot him. Or perhaps there had been a machine-gun attack by Czech terrorists while Heydrich was out for his early morning ride in the countryside around Jungfern-Breschan. Perhaps even now there was a horse lying on top of his lifeless body.
And yet surely if it had been Heydrich who was dead, Ploetz would have said so. Ploetz wouldn’t ever have used the phrase ‘a homicide’ for someone as important as his very own general. The victim had to be someone of lesser importance or else Ploetz would have said ‘Heydrich has been murdered’ or ‘The General has been murdered’ or ‘There’s been a catastrophe, General Heydrich has been assassinated.’ A homicide didn’t begin to cover the lexicon of words that would probably be used by the Nazis if ever Heydrich was unfortunate enough to meet with a well-deserved but premature death.