Prague Fatale (13 page)

Ten minutes went by. Most of the cars drove away with their passengers. It was two-fifteen. A kilometre to the west of where I was standing, the Führer, purported to be a bit of a night owl, was probably putting on his pyjamas, combing his moustache, and cleaning his teeth before sitting down to write his diary. At around two-twenty, the door of the Jockey Bar opened and, for a brief moment, an obtuse triangle of dim light fell on the patent-shiny sidewalk – long enough for me to see a woman wearing a raincoat and a hat and carrying a man’s umbrella. She looked one way and then the other before glancing at her watch. It was Arianne Tauber.

Abandoning my inadequate refuge I walked quickly forward and presented myself in front of her.

‘You look like a widow’s handkerchief,’ she said.

‘It’s only what happens when air turns back into water. You’re a chemist. You should know that.’

‘And you should know I changed my mind about letting you walk me home.’

‘Looks like I got wet for nothing then.’

‘That’s precisely why I’ve decided to walk you home, copper. All that water dripping off your hat. If we move your head the right way we can probably fill a couple of glasses. So it’s probably lucky that I managed to steal a half-bottle of Johnnie Walker to go with it. That’s the only reason I’m late. I had to wait for the right moment to lead the raiding party on Otto’s bar.’

‘With a pitch like that I might just allow you to walk me home and then up the stairs.’

‘Well, we can hardly drink it in the street.’

It’s quite a walk from Luther Strasse to Fasanenstrasse and it was fortunate that the rain eased soon after we began;
even so, we were obliged to stop a couple of times and take a nibble off her bottle. Amundsen wouldn’t have approved of breaking into our supplies so soon after setting off from base camp, but then he had sled dogs and all we had were soaking wet shoes. By the time we reached my apartment, the half-bottle of Johnnie Walker was only a third, which is probably why we took off our clothes and, it being wartime when these things seemed to happen a little more quickly than of old, we went straight to bed and, after a few minutes of animal magic to remind us both of happier times before God got angry with the people who stole the fruit of his favourite tree, we resumed our earlier conversation with small glasses in our hands and, perhaps, a little less front. It’s pointless trying to maintain a persona concealing one’s true nature from the world when your damp clothes are lying in a hurried heap on the floor.

‘I never slept with a cop before.’

‘How was it?’

‘Now I know why cops have big feet.’

‘I hate to sound like a cop so soon after—’

‘You
are
going to arrest me.’

‘No, no.’

‘I won’t come quietly.’

‘So I noticed. No, Arianne, I’ve been thinking about your job at the Jockey Bar and wondering if you should give it up or not. In case Gustav does go back there looking for you.’

‘And what did you conclude, Commissar?’

‘That if the Gestapo had arrested him and brought him back to the bar to look for you, then you’d be in trouble.’

‘True. But even if I did leave the club, they wouldn’t have a problem finding me. Otto has all my details. My work book number, my address, everything. No, if I left there, I’d also
have to leave my room and go underground. Which is impossible. That sort of thing takes money and connections.’

‘That’s the very same conclusion I came to myself. As I see it, there are two other possibilities. One is that he assumes you handed over the envelope, as agreed, and never comes back at all. He gave you that envelope to give to Paul because he was scared to give it to Paul himself; and that could mean he’s too scared ever to return to the club and ask you anything more about it. The other possibility is that he does come back, and if he does, then you find an excuse to telephone me at the Alex and then I come along and arrest him.’

‘Conveniently leaving me out of it, right?’

I nodded and drank some more of the Scotch. It was the first proper liquor I’d tasted since coming back from the Ukraine. Normally I don’t drink Scotch. But this tasted just fine. Like some fiery drink of the gods that might have been gathered from a hive of immortal bees. My own sting was gone, at least for the moment. But after the defilement of my flesh, I was beginning to feel divine again.

‘Conveniently leaving you out of it.’

‘You said Paul was found dead in Kleist Park. But you didn’t say any more.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘How do you know it was him? I was as close to him as I am to you now and I’m not sure I would have recognized him again.’

‘It was him all right. His injuries were those of a man who’d been hit by a car. And it’s not like there were any other unreported traffic accidents in that area that night.’

‘So who was he?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you should decide, Gunther.’

I asked myself how much she ought to know, and when I told her it was mainly because I wanted to see how she would react. Despite our being in bed together – maybe because of it – I wasn’t yet satisfied that she was as innocent as she had led me to believe. But even if she did turn out to be rather more culpable than I had previously supposed I couldn’t imagine myself serving her up cold to the Gestapo.

‘The man you were paid to meet at Nolli, he was really a Czech called Franz Koci who was working for the Three Kings.’

‘You mean those terrorists who were in the newspapers earlier this year?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now I am scared.’ She closed her eyes and lay back against the pillow, then sat up abruptly and stared at me with wide eyes. ‘You know what that means, don’t you? It means that Gustav must be some sort of spy. For the Czechs.’

‘I’d say that was a pretty good guess.’

‘What am I going to do?’

‘You might try to remember some more about Gustav. And if that doesn’t happen, I might tie you over a table and beat it out of you myself. Like the Gestapo.’

‘Do they really do that? I’ve heard stories.’

‘All of them are true, I’m afraid.’

‘Maybe I should go underground, after all.’ She shook her head and shivered. ‘It must be bad enough to have someone hurt you to make you tell them something you know; but to have someone hurt you when you’ve got nothing you can tell them. That doesn’t bear thinking of.’

‘And that’s precisely why I want you to tell me all about Gustav. Once again. From the very beginning. Everything you
remember and everything you might have forgotten. Your best chance of disappearing from this picture is to paint another. Of him.’

There’s a little red warning card with a hole in the middle that the Ministry of Propaganda likes you to slip over the tuning dial of your radio. ‘Racial comrades!’ it says. ‘You are Germans! It is your duty not to listen to foreign radio stations. Those who do so will be mercilessly punished!’ Now me, I’m a good listener. A lot of being a good detective is knowing when to shut up and let someone else do the talking. Arianne liked to talk – that much was obvious – and while she told me nothing new about Gustav she told me quite a lot about herself, which was of course the main point of the exercise.

She was from Dresden, where she’d gone to university. Her husband, Karl, also a student from Dresden, had joined the German Navy in the summer of 1938 and had been killed on a U-boat in February 1940. Three months later, her father, a commercial traveller, had been killed during a bombing raid while on a business trip to Hamburg.

Naturally I checked up on all of this later. Exactly as Arianne had described, her fiancé’s boat, U-33, had been sunk by depth-charges from a British minesweeper in the River Clyde, in Scotland. Twenty-five men, including Karl and the boat’s commander, were lost. Her younger brother, Albrecht, had joined the Army in 1939 but now he was with the military police. Her father had worked for the pharmaceutical works in Dresden and often did business with E.H. Worlée, another chemical company, in Hamburg. Soon after Herr Tauber’s death Arianne had come to Berlin to work for BVG – the Berlin Transport Company – as a secretary to the director of Anhalter Railway Station. But she had quit this
job – a good job – because, she said, he couldn’t keep his hands off her.

His was a predicament with which I strongly sympathized. I couldn’t keep my hands off her either.

Planting evidence was hardly uncommon at the Alex. For a lot of detectives lacking the skills or the patience to do the job properly, it was the only way they could ever secure a conviction. I’d never done it myself but there’s a first time for everything and, in the absence of the evidence that was legally held by the Gestapo in the death of Franz Koci, I decided to ‘find’ some new evidence that hitherto was held only by me. But first I had to make Lehnhoff’s earlier on-the-scene inquiry seem like what it was: incompetent, only more so, and when I reviewed his case notes I discovered that no fingertip search of the area in Kleist Park where Koci’s body was discovered had ever been conducted. So I telephoned Sachse at Gestapo headquarters to prick his ears with this new ‘information’.

‘I thought you told me that all of the evidence at the scene of the crime had been collected.’

‘I did. It was.’

‘Like hell. With a homicide, especially an important homicide like this one, it’s standard practice to have ten or fifteen police officers on their hands and knees in a line to comb the general area. Or at least it was while this department had real police working here. Real police who did real police work. But there’s no record of a fingertip search of the ground where Koci’s body was found.’

‘But looking for what?’

‘Evidence. What evidence, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what it might be. But I think I’d recognize it when I saw it.’

‘You really think that park’s worth another look?’

‘Under the circumstances, yes I do. Between you and me, Inspector Lehnhoff – the first investigating detective – is lazy and dishonest, so it wouldn’t have been your fault if the ground wasn’t properly searched. I suppose you just took his word for it that things had been done properly.’

I was saying half of this in case Lehnhoff decided to say anything about my assaulting him.

‘Well, yes, I did.’

‘I thought so. All right. You weren’t to know. But under the circumstances you’d better organize a search yourself. Commissioner Lüdtke has told us all that budgets at the Alex are tight. I don’t want him coming down on my neck about the cost of this.’

‘I’ll organize it immediately.’

‘Good. Please let me know if they find anything.’

Of course I knew exactly what they were going to find in Kleist Park. I knew because I’d already put it there myself. And when later on that same day Sachse appeared in my office with a plastic bag containing a switchblade, I made a big show out of looking surprised.

‘This is made by Mikov,’ I said, examining the switchblade carefully. ‘That’s in Czechoslovakia, isn’t it? I mean Bohemia and Moravia.’

‘Yes.’

‘That would fit with our friend Franz Koci, wouldn’t it?’ I leaned back in my chair and frowned a frown that could have made it big in silent movies. ‘I wonder.’

‘What?’

I made another big show of thinking hard. I walked around my office, which contained several filing cabinets, a lot of empty ashtrays, and on the wall a nice picture of Adolf Hitler. The picture had been put there by the previous occupant and while I hated it, for me to have taken it down would, in the eyes of the Gestapo, have made me look like Gavrilo Princip.

I opened one of the filing cabinets. This was as full as the Prussian State Library and contained unsolved cases and reports going back years. Very little of what was in there had anything to do with me, and for all I know, Philipp Melancthon’s report to the Diet of Worms was one of the older files at the back of the drawer. But I knew what I was looking for. I forced a gap and tugged out a grey folder with Geert Vranken’s name on the corner.

‘Geert Vranken. Aged thirty-nine, a foreign railway worker from Dordrecht, in the Netherlands. Educated at the University of The Hague. Murdered earlier this month. His body, what remained of it, was found on the railway line just south of Jannowitz Bridge after being struck by a train to Friedrichshagen.’

‘What about it?’

Sachse sat down on the corner of my desk, folded his arms and then checked his hair. This was still as neat as a field of wheat and approximately the same colour, and I briefly wondered if it ever looked any different in a high wind or underwater. Probably not. His head could have been found on the roof of the Pintsch factory, like Vranken’s, after a train had gone over his neck and there wouldn’t have been a hair out of place.

‘I was the investigating officer, that’s what. And while it’s not uncommon for people to get hit by trains in the dark it is uncommon to find that they had already sustained multiple
stab wounds. I examined the torso myself and I seem to remember that the contour of the wounds was not unlike the shape of this Bohemian switchblade.’