This sounded like the best thing he’d ever said to me; but I was through opening my mouth like that for a long while. Perhaps permanently. He hadn’t yet finished telling me my own fate.
‘You will return to your desk in Kripo and leave Germany’s destiny in the hands of men like me who truly understand what that means.’
He smiled his paper-knife smile and toasted me silently.
I toasted him back but only because, perhaps for the last time, I was hoping to point out a long hair in his chicken soup.
‘And the attempt on your life, sir? The poisoning, at Rastenburg? I accept that you no longer wish to have me act as your bodyguard. But am I to take it that you no longer wish me to investigate the recent attempt to kill you?’
He stared at me for a moment and, with a quiet surge of pleasure, I realized he had forgotten all about this incident.
‘There never was such an attempt,’ he said defiantly. ‘I made it up so that I might have a plausible reason to invite you to Prague with the rest of them.’
I nodded meekly, a little surprised that he’d admitted such a thing; and I wondered where the actual truth was to be found: if there really had been an attempt to poison Heydrich at Rastenburg after all.
‘Besides, as the most powerful man in Bohemia and Moravia, I think I’m quite safe here, wouldn’t you agree, Horst?’
So that clinched it, for me; he was lying.
Bohme smiled an obsequious smile. ‘Absolutely, sir. You have Prague’s SS and SD at your immediate disposal; not to mention the Gestapo and the German Army.’
‘You see?’ crowed Heydrich. ‘I have nothing to worry about. Especially not in Prague. The day the Czechs try to kill me – really try to kill me, not that half-baked attempt we had today, although you mark my words that will have its own repercussions – the day they try to kill me will be the very worst day in the history of this country and will make the defenestrations of Prague look like a childish prank. Isn’t that right, Horst?’
‘Yes sir. In a long line of crazy Czech ideas that would be the craziest idea of all.’
I had my doubts about that. I hadn’t been in Bohemia for very long but from what little I knew about the country it seemed only appropriate that the idea of the Bohemian – a type of fellow not easily classified and who never acted in a conventional or predictable way – had got started in Prague. In Prague throwing someone out of a window was just a childish prank. A bit of harmless fun. But I didn’t expect a Roman Catholic German from Halle-an-der-Saale to understand this. And if I really had been as single-minded and independent as Heydrich said I was, I would probably have told him he was wrong: murder – even political assassination – is rarely ever committed by people who are anything else but crazy; and, over the centuries, one way or another, a lot of crazy things had happened in Prague.
So I nodded and told Heydrich he was right, when I knew he wasn’t.
And that is what makes anyone dangerous.
I moved back to the Imperial Hotel and waited for my Berlin rail warrant to arrive. Heydrich liked to keep most people waiting and I waited for several days. So I saw the sights and tried not to think about what might be happening to Arianne. But of course that was impossible. I preferred to believe that she hadn’t actually condoned my murder but that she had felt obliged to go along with it as part of the general plan to kill Heydrich; and after all, when you’re shooting Germans it’s hard to know who is a Nazi and who isn’t. It’s a dilemma I understood very well.
Finally my travel papers came through, and on my last night in Prague I remembered my ticket for the Circus Krone, and decided to go along.
It was a cold autumn evening with a clear sky and a full moon, and people were already wearing their warmest winter coats. I sat well away from the rest of my SS colleagues but I had a good view of all of them in the front row of seats and I confess I paid more attention to Mr and Mrs Heydrich and Mr and Mrs Frank than I did to the clowns and the animals.
I hadn’t seen Lina Heydrich before. She was handsome rather than beautiful. She wore black with a thick fur stole and a little black pillbox hat. Mrs Frank wore a wool overcoat with wide lapels and a brown fedora. The two wives sat beside each other and next to them sat their husbands, who were wearing civilian clothes, like everyone else in the SD and Gestapo who was at the circus that night. Frank wore a plain gaberdine coat with a white shirt and a patterned silk tie. Heydrich wore a thick double-breasted overcoat and held a black trilby on his lap. And he also wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that I’d never seen on him before.
Like anyone else, these four marvelled at the trapeze and laughed at the clowns and they appeared to enjoy themselves. Like anyone else. That was what struck me most of all. Out of uniform, Heydrich and Frank looked just like anyone else, although even as they sat there a security crackdown was already under way in the city. Later on, I learned that the mayor of Prague, Otokar Klapha, had been executed and on the very same day that Arianne was arrested. Hundreds of UVOD collaborators were being rounded up and buildings right across the city were covered with posters listing the names of many others sentenced to death. You wouldn’t have known any of that if you’d watched Heydrich at the circus, shaking with laughter as three clowns behaving like the sort of simpletons the Nazis would probably have murdered for reasons of racial purity fell off chairs and soaked each other with buckets full of water.
Two days later, Heydrich announced that the deportation of all the Jews in the Protectorate – some ninety thousand of them – was to begin at the end of the year. To where, he didn’t say. Nobody did. Me, I had a pretty good idea, but by then I was back in Berlin.
CHAPTER 15
It felt good to be in Berlin again. At least it felt good for an hour or two. Soon after arriving back at my apartment in Fasanenstrasse I discovered to my disappointment that the two Fridmann sisters from downstairs had been deported to some shithole in Poland. Behnke, the block warden, who knew these things, insisted that it was a nice town called Lodz and that they’d be happier there ‘living with their own’, instead of with ‘decent Germans’. I told him I had my doubts about this but Behnke didn’t want to hear them. He was more interested in learning Russian so that he would be able to speak to his peasants when eventually he met them. He really thought he was going to get some of that living space in Russia and the Ukraine that Goebbels was forever ranting about. I had my doubts about that, too.
It grew cold. Wind tore the leaves off the trees and hurried them east in their thousands. The water on the Spree looked like corrugated iron. The cold felt like barbed wire. There was one thing to be done before the snows arrived, a sentimental gesture that meant nothing to anyone I had ever met; but I suppose I wanted to feel better about myself. I organized the release of Geert Vranken’s remains from Berlin’s Charité Hospital and paid for them to be buried in a zinclined wooden crate – just in case, after the war, his family wanted to dig it up and take his remains home to the Netherlands.
There was one other person at the funeraclass="underline" Werner Sachse from the Gestapo. With his black leather coat, his black hat and black tie, he looked like a proper mourner. The short service was conducted by the pastor of St John’s Church, in Plotzensee, and when it was over Sachse told me he admired the thought if not the practice.