I shrugged. “So you see, he made it almost impossible for me to leave Kripo.”
“And that’s the real reason that Nebe ordered you back from Minsk to Berlin,” said the Ami with the pipe. “What you told Silverman and Earp—about Nebe being worried you might land him in the shit—that was only half the story, wasn’t it? He was protecting you, on Heydrich’s personal instructions. Wasn’t he?”
“I assume so, yes. It was only when I got back to Berlin and I met Schellenberg that I was reminded of what Heydrich had said. And also, of course, when he was assassinated in 1942.”
“Let’s get back to Mielke,” said the Ami with the ill-fitting glasses. “Was it Heydrich who made him your pigeon?”
“Yes.”
“When did that happen?”
“Following the conversation at the piano,” I said. “A couple of days after the fall of France.”
“So June 1940.”
“That’s right.”
15
I was summoned back to Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where the scene was frenetic to say the least. People were scurrying around with files. Phones were ringing almost continually. Couriers were running along corridors carrying important dispatches. There was even a gramophone playing the song “Erika,” as if we were actually with the motorized SS as they drove on toward the Normandy coast. And, most unusually, everyone was smiling. No one ever smiled in that place. But that day they did. Even I had a smile on my face. To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn’t have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I’m honest, the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly, we were all proud to be German again.
Of course, people were also feeling good because they thought—we thought—that the war was over before it had even begun. Hardly anyone was dead in comparison with the millions who’d died in the Great War. And England would have to make peace. The Russian back door was secure. And America wasn’t interested in getting involved, as usual. All in all, it seemed like some sort of miraculous reprieve. I expect the French felt very differently, but in Germany there was national jubilation. And frankly, the last person on my mind when I walked into Heydrich’s office that morning was a stupid little prick like Erich Mielke.
Seated at a table beside Heydrich was another uniformed SS man whom I didn’t recognize. He was about thirty, slightly built, with a full head of light brown hair, a fastidious, almost feminine mouth, and the sharpest pair of eyes I’d seen outside of the leopard’s enclosure at the Berlin Zoo. The left eye was particularly catlike. At first I assumed it was narrowed against the smoke from his silver cigarette holder, but after a while I saw that the eye was permanently like that, as if he had lost his monocle. He smiled when Heydrich introduced us, and I saw that there was more than a passing resemblance to the young Bela Lugosi, always supposing that Bela Lugosi had ever been young. The SS officer’s name was Walter Schellenberg, and I think he was a major then—much later on he became a general—but I wasn’t really paying attention to the pips on his collar patch. I was more interested in Heydrich’s uniform, which was that of a reserve major in the Luftwaffe. More interesting still was the fact that his arm was in a sling, and for several nervous minutes I supposed that my presence there had something to do with an attempt on his life he wanted me to investigate. “Oberkommissar Gunther is one of Kripo’s best detectives,” Heydrich told Schellenberg. “In the new Germany, that’s a profession not without some hazard. Most philosophers argue that the world is ultimately mind or matter. Schopenhauer states that the final reality is human will. But whenever I see Gunther I am reminded of the overriding importance to the world of human curiosity, too. Like a scientist or an inventor, a good detective must be curious. He must have his hypotheses. And he must always seek to test them against the observable facts. Is it not so, Gunther?”
“Yes, Herr General.”
“Doubtless he is even now wondering why I am wearing this Luftwaffe uniform and hoping secretly that it heralds my departure from Sipo so that he might enjoy an easier, quieter life.” Heydrich smiled at his little joke. “Come now, Gunther. Isn’t that exactly what you were thinking?”
“Are you leaving Sipo, Herr General?”
“No, I’m not.” He grinned like a very clever schoolboy.
I said nothing.
“Try to contain your obvious relief, Gunther.”
“Very well, General. I’ll certainly do my best.”
“You see what I mean, Walter? He remains his own man at all times.”
Schellenberg just smiled and smoked and watched me with his cat’s eyes and said nothing. We had one thing in common, at least. With Heydrich, nothing was always the safest thing to say.
“Since the invasion of Poland,” explained Heydrich, “I’ve been volunteering as aircrew on a bomber. I was a rear gunner in an air attack on Lublin.”
“It sounds rather hazardous, Herr General,” I said.
“It is. But believe me, there’s nothing quite like flying down on an enemy city at two hundred miles an hour with an MG 17 in your hands. I wanted to show some of these bureaucratic soldiers what the SS is made of. That we’re not just a bunch of asphalt soldiers.”
I assumed he was referring to Himmler.
“Very commendable, sir. Is that how you injured your arm?”
“No. No, that was an accident,” he said. “I’ve also been training as a fighter pilot. I crashed during takeoff. My own stupid fault.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Heydrich’s self-satisfied smile stalled midflight, and for a moment I wondered if I’d gone too far.
“Meaning what?” he said. “That it wasn’t an accident?”
I shrugged. “Meaning only that I imagine you would want to find out everything that went wrong before flying again.” I was trying to back up a little from what, unwisely perhaps, I’d already put in his mind. “What kind of plane was it, sir?”
Heydrich hesitated, as if debating the idea in his own mind. “A Messerschmitt,” he said quietly. “The Bf 110. It’s not considered a very agile plane.”
“Well, there are you. I can’t think why I mentioned such a thing. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t a good pilot, General. I’m sure they wouldn’t let you get in the cockpit unless they were quite satisfied the airplane was airworthy. Me, I’ve never even been off the ground, but I should still want to be quite sure it wasn’t anything mechanical before I went up again.”
“Yes, perhaps you’re right.”
Schellenberg was nodding now. “It certainly couldn’t do any harm, Herr General. Gunther’s right.”
He had a curious, high-pitched voice with a slight accent I found hard to place; and there was something very neat and dapper about him that reminded me of a butler, or a menswear salesman.
An attractive-looking SS secretary—what we used to call a gray mouse—came in carrying a tray with three coffee cups and three glasses of water, just like we were in a café on the Ku-damm, and thankfully we were distracted from the subject of Heydrich’s accident—Schellenberg by the woman herself and Heydrich by the sound of the gramophone that was coming through the open door. For a moment he stamped his boots on the floor in time with the song and grinned happily.
“That’s a marvelous sound, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful, Herr General,” said Schellenberg, who was still eyeing Heydrich’s secretary, and the comment might just as easily have been about her as the music.