The guard on the gate saluted smartly and, having checked his list, admitted me into the finely manicured grounds. I walked around to the front of the house and down to the lakeside, where I smoked a cigarette and pictured myself back in 1935, smartly dressed, with a car of my own, making a decent living and no one to tell me what to do. No one but the Nazis, that is. Back then I’d told myself I could ignore them. I’d been wrong, of course, but then so were a lot of other people smarter than me, Chamberlain and Daladier included. The Nazis were like syphilis; ignoring them and hoping everything would get better by itself had never been a realistic option.
When I finished my cigarette I went into the one-and-a-half-story hallway at the center of the house. There everything was the same but different. At one end of the house was a library with a bay window and a table with plenty of copies of Das Schwarze Korps, but these days even the most fanatical Nazis avoided the SS newspaper as it was full of the death notices of dearest sons — SS men and officers who had fallen “in the east” or “in the struggle against Bolshevism.” At the other end of the house was a conservatory with an indoor fountain made of greenish marble. The fountain had been switched off; possibly the sound of something as clear and pure as Berlin water was distracting to the types who stayed there. In between the library and the fountain were several salons and drawing rooms, two of them with magnificent fireplaces. The best of the furniture and a rare Gobelin tapestry were gone but there were still a few pieces I recognized, including a large silver cigarette box from which I grabbed a fistful of nails to fill my empty case.
They had three senior SS officers from Budapest, Bratislava, and Krakow staying at the villa and it seemed I was just in time to get some veal and potatoes and some coffee before they finished serving lunch. Very soon I regretted giving in to my hunger when these three engaged me in conversation. I told them I was not long back from Prague, and they announced that Berlin’s former chief of police, Kurt Daluege, was now the acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and that a whole month after Heydrich’s death the effort to find all of his assassins was still continuing. I already knew that Lidice, a village suspected of having harbored the killers, had been destroyed and its population executed. But these three officers now told me that, not content with this stupid act of reprisal, a second village called Ležáky had also been leveled — just a couple of weeks before — and the thirty-three men and women who lived there had been massacred, too.
“They say Hitler ordered the deaths of ten thousand randomly chosen Czechos,” explained the colonel from Krakow, who was an Austrian, “but that General Frank talked him out of it, thank God. I mean, what’s the point of reprisal if you end up shooting yourself in the foot? Bohemian industry is much too important to Germany now to piss the Czechos off. Which is all you’d succeed in doing if you slaughtered that many. So they had to content themselves with Lidice and Ležáky. As far as I know, there’s nothing important in Lidice and Ležáky.”
“Not anymore,” laughed one of the others.
I excused myself and went to find a lavatory.
Arthur Nebe had told me that the speeches to the IKPK delegates would all be given in the central hall and it was there I now went to see where my ordeal was to occur. I felt a little sick with nerves just thinking about it, although that might as easily have been something to do with what I’d just been told about Ležáky; besides, I knew that what I was facing wasn’t much compared to the ordeal that Friedrich Minoux now found himself subjected to. Five years in Brandenburg is certainly no weekend at the Adlon when you’re a career pen-and-desk man.
One of the officers offered me a lift back into Berlin in his Mercedes, which I declined for all the reasons that I hoped weren’t obvious. I told him that there was a concert in the Botanic Garden in Zehlendorf I wanted to attend. I wasn’t in a hurry to enjoy the joke about Ležáky again. I walked back down to Königstrasse and headed back to the station, where, under the octagonal ceiling of the entrance hall, I met a man wearing olive-green lederhosen that I hadn’t seen for seven years.
“Herr Gunther, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
The man was in his fifties with fair hair; the sleeves of his collarless blue shirt were rolled up to reveal forearms that were as big as fire hydrants. He looked tough enough so I was glad to see he was smiling.
“Gantner,” said the man. “I used to drive the Daimler for Herr Minoux.”
“Yes, I remember. What a coincidence. I’ve just been up at the villa.”
“I figured as much, you being SD n’all. There’s plenty of your lot round that way now.”
I felt myself smart at the idea that the SD was “my lot.”
“Really, I’m still just a policeman,” I said, keen to distance myself from the kind of SS who had destroyed Lidice and Ležáky. “I got called back onto the force in ’thirty-eight. And they put us all in uniform when we invaded Russia. There wasn’t much I could do about it.”
The number of times I’d heard myself utter this excuse. Did anyone believe it? And did it really matter to anyone but me? The sooner I was part of something worthwhile like the War Crimes Bureau the better.
“Anyway, they’ve got me on nights at the Alex, so I don’t offend anyone with my choice of cologne. What are you doing here anyway?”
“I live around here, sir. Königstrasse. Matter of fact, there’s several of us who used to work for Herr Minoux who are there now. Number 58, if you’re ever in the area again. Nice place. Owned by the local coal merchant. Fellow called Schulze, who used to know the boss.”
“I was very sorry to read about what happened to Herr Minoux. He was a good client. How is he dealing with bed and breakfast at German Michael’s?”
“He’s just started a stretch at Brandenburg at the age of sixty-five, so, not well. The bed’s a little hard, as you might expect. But the food? I mean, we’re all on short rations because of the war, right? But what they call food in there, I wouldn’t give it to a dog. So I drive out to Brandenburg every morning to take him breakfast. Not the Daimler, of course. I’m afraid that went south a long time ago. I’ve got a Horch now.”
“It’s allowed? You bringing in breakfast?”
“It’s not just allowed, it’s actively encouraged. Excuses the government from having to feed the prisoners. About the only food he’ll eat is what I take him in the car. Just some boiled eggs, and some bread and jam. Matter of fact, I was just in town to fetch some of his favorite jam from someone who makes it especially for him. I take the S-Bahn to save petrol. Frau Minoux, she’s still in Garmisch, although she also rents a house in Dahlem. And Monika, Herr Minoux’s daughter, she lives on Hagenstrasse, in Grunewald. I’ll tell the boss you said hello if you like.”