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.
‘Tell Colonel Bohme to come and fetch us,’ Heydrich told the NCO. And then to me: ‘I’m lost in here.’
‘A common experience, I imagine.’
‘Bohme is the one who thought he could solve Kuttner’s murder,’ said Heydrich.
‘Are you going to tell him or shall I?’
‘Oh, I know you find it hard to credit, but I take a lot of vicarious pleasure in your solving Kuttner’s murder. I mean I can admire it as a piece of reasoning. And I’m very much looking forward to seeing the expression on his stupid Saxon face.’
‘I’d been kind of looking forward to that myself. Bohme was the other officer who straightened Kuttner’s tie after your speech the other night. When he rescued the maid, Rosa, from Henlein’s clumsy drunken pass. I shall miss the opportunity of making him feel like he had something to hide.’
‘You’re a natural contrarian, Gunther,’ observed Heydrich. ‘I think your problem is not with the Nazis, it’s with all authority. You just don’t like being told what to do.’
‘Maybe.’
I glanced around.
‘Major Thummel’s here?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Is Bohme questioning him?’
‘Abendschoen is leading the interrogation. He’s much more agile than Bohme. If anyone can trip Thummel up without breaking skin, it’s Willy Abendschoen.’
A minute or two passed before we heard footsteps coming up the broad stairs.
Bohme arrived at the top of the stairs and marched smartly across the hall and into the reception area. He saluted in the usual Nazi way, and under the circumstances I didn’t bother returning the compliment; but Heydrich did.
‘Let’s go and see the prisoner, shall we?’ said Heydrich.
Bohme led the way back across the hall and downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs we walked on through a warren of unpleasant smelling and dimly lit corridors and cells.
‘I hear it’s down to you, Captain Gunther, that we found Thummel was the traitor,’ Bohme told me. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you.’
Bohme paused outside a cell door. ‘Here we are.’
‘Not only that but he has also solved the murder of Captain Kuttner,’ said Heydrich.
‘Then you’ve really covered yourself in glory, haven’t you?’ said Bohme. ‘So who did it?’
I glanced at Heydrich.
‘What’s the game, General?’ I said. ‘If you’ve got a card to play here, then you’d better play it, only don’t treat me like an idiot.’
‘In spite of all that, an idiot is what you are,’ said Heydrich. ‘A very clever idiot. Only a clever man could have deduced who murdered Captain Kuttner, how and why. But only an idiot could have behaved as you did.’
Heydrich pushed open the door to a large interrogation room that was complete with stenographer, several wooden chairs, some chains hanging from the ceiling, and an en suite bath. Besides the stenographer there were two largish men in the room and a naked woman.
‘Only an idiot could have been so easily duped by the Czechs,’ said Heydrich. ‘By her.’
He pointed at the girl.
It was almost as well he identified her because she was nearly unrecognizable.
The naked girl was Arianne Tauber.
As soon as I saw Arianne I moved to help her and found myself solidly restrained by Bohme and another largish man who’d been standing, unseen by me, behind the heavy wooden door of the interrogation room; restrained and then, on Heydrich’s order, searched for a non-existent weapon and quickly manacled on a length of chain to a cast-iron radiator as big as a mattress, safely out of harm’s way.
I hauled at the chain attached to my wrists and swore loudly, but no one was paying much attention to me. I was like a dog that had been safely kennelled, or worse.
Heydrich laughed, and that was the cue for the others to do the same. Even the stenographer, a young hatchet-faced woman in SS uniform, shook her head and smiled as if she was genuinely amused by my threats and bad language. Then she straightened the little forage cap she was wearing and adjusted the grip that kept it on her head. She must have sensed me wishing I could have smacked it onto the floor.