Second Violin (7 page)

Hitler was celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the failed putsch of 9 November 1923 in the Rathaussaal in Munich when the news that vom Rath had died reached him. It is unclear whether he
said anything at all – but the most telling report is of him saying ‘Let the SA have their fling.’

Several hours later, closer to one in the morning, it fell, as so many things did, to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Reich security service, to cross the Ts and dot the
Is. The spontaneous nature of what was about to happen needed to be choreographed.

Heydrich was not to be found in any bierkeller, he was propping up the bar in the Four Seasons Hotel, a few streets away in Munich, sampling the bartender’s skills with the cocktail
shaker, in the company of his deputy, Wolfgang Stahl. They had the place to themselves. It would be a brave bartender who told an SS General he was closing up. Neither Heydrich nor Stahl had been
party members in 1923 – indeed, Stahl had been nothing more than a schoolboy in Vienna. Neither of them could quite share the street fighting, beer-swilling pleasures that seemed to have
given such simple gratification to the pioneer brownshirts. Stahl had done this a thousand times. Heydrich sampled drinks in the same way he sampled women. Given the choice – and saying no
was hardly possible – Stahl preferred the nights when they hit the bars and boozed to the nights when the Obergruppenführer wanted to lurch from one high-class brothel to the next. If
they couldn’t share a taste in women, occasionally they shared a taste in music. Heydrich wasn’t a bad violinist, Stahl was even better on the piano. Together they played Mozart, which
was to Stahl’s taste; and Haydn, which was very much to Heydrich’s. As Nazis went they might be considered sophisticates – each respected the other’s intelligence, talent
and taste, and privately despised his foibles, fads and paranoias. They kept files on everyone – they had files on each other and, unknown to the man himself, they even had secret files on
Hitler, although of what use they might be within the Reich Stahl could not imagine – their uses outside the Reich he considered limitless.

Stahl pushed his whisky sour to Heydrich. Heydrich pushed back a Manhattan in exchange.

‘As the English say not my cup of tea.’

Stahl opened his briefcase and slid a few sheets of paper across to Heydrich.

‘One of our men brought me this earlier today. He thinks it might be important.’

Heydrich fanned the papers out and looked at the first page.

After a minute or so he turned it over and looked less carefully at the second. His reading of the third and fourth was no more than cursory.

‘Do you think it’s important?’ he said at last.

‘If it’s real, if it’s authentic . . . yes. Just about.’

‘Where was it found?’

‘In the home of a retired Professor of Music. A man in his seventies. A critic of the Reich whose criticism finally came back to him today. We packed him off to review Dachau for us, from
the inside. It appears that this was among his father’s papers when he died about thirty years ago. The good professor has had it ever since.’

‘I suppose things like this turn up from time to time.’

‘They do.’

‘Is it any good?’

‘That’s a different matter.’

Stahl pointed to the arcane symbols on the paper. Meaningless if you didn’t know the code, perhaps meaningless if you did.

‘Look at the left hand . . . all those turgid minims and semi-breves. It’s as though someone had doped Debussy with a horse tranquilliser and slowed him down to a crawl. It’s
leaden stuff, plod, thump, plod.’

‘It’s better when the violin chips in.’

‘Perhaps. I think the only thing to be said for it is “historical importance” – you no more have to play it or listen to it than you’d pay attention to a war
memorial in a suburban cemetery. It’s hand-written, untitled, but at least he signed it . . . F. Nietzsche, 9 May 1888. About a year before he went bonkers, I should think.’

‘Can I take it you don’t
want
to play it, then?’

Stahl burst out laughing, Heydrich joined in – an unpleasant, high-pitched nasal whine. Only the bartender setting a house phone in front of Heydrich stopped them degenerating into
schoolboy giggles.

‘For you, Obergruppenführer.’

Heydrich spoke his name, listened for ten seconds, said ‘Ja.’

Then, to Stahl, ‘Find that useless sod Bruhns and get us a staff car. We’re wanted at Äussere Prinzregentenstrasse.’

Stahl had never been to Hitler’s Munich flat. It seemed odd that he should have one at all – as though he were some sort of national deputy maintaining a home of
political convenience in a remote provincial constituency rather than the absolute ruler of millions of Germans. Berchtesgaden he could understand – the Eagle’s Nest spoke of the
self-aggrandisement, the colossal ego that was Hitler . . . from flophouse to Bauhaus – a flat in Munich didn’t.

He sat in an outer room while Heydrich talked to Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels. There were those at the same level as Stahl – that is, noticeable and acknowledged, without being ‘one
of us’ – who took every opportunity to string along to meetings with the Führer. Stahl waited until he was invited. Something about Hitler, something he thought ought to be obvious
to anyone who met him, made his flesh creep. And the thought of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler all together was like a freak show – the club-footed, demented dwarf, the bespectacled, bourgeois
owl and the Charlie Chaplin doppelgänger.

Heydrich emerged, tense and holding in his anger.

‘We’re here to structure chaos,’ he said softly. ‘The demented dwarf appears to have taken control of the public response to vom Rath’s death. And that amounts to
no control at all. He’s turning the SA loose. Himmler’s nose is severely out of joint.’

‘There’ll be a bloodbath,’ Stahl said.

Heydrich said, ‘Let us then consider that prospect. Do you have pen and paper?’

Stahl took Nietzsche’s sheet music out of his briefcase, flipped the top off his fountain pen, and turned the music over. He could write almost as fast as Heydrich could speak, and to
improvise aloud, fingers pressed to his high forehead, was one of the Obergruppenführer’s preferred ways to work. Twenty minutes later he was reading his notes back to Heydrich. Himmler
emerged from the inner room, threw them a Heil Hitler to which neither responded, and left a strained silence in his wake.

‘What exactly are we saying?’ Heydrich asked.

‘Smash everything. Round up the rich, kill those who resist. But we must not seem to be involved, indeed we must appear to be the hand of restraint.’

‘Restrain the SA? We recruited the buggers to be thugs.’

‘If they go completely berserk, there are consequences . . . once they’ve sacked the synagogues and the department stores . . . we must stop them looting. I don’t care that
they will want furs and jewellery and God knows what for themselves. I don’t give a damn how many Jews they rob. But if they are seen as looters . . . well, the world will judge us on that . .
but we can gain valuable information, files, names, addresses . . . that alone is reason to stop them looting.’

‘The world will be watching.’

Stahl heard the irony in Heydrich’s tone, but responded to the literal truth in what he said.

‘Exactly. We cannot harm any foreigners . . . Jews included. We haven’t kicked out the foreign press yet.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Put the Criminal Police on the streets. Let them be seen to intervene to stop looting. Of course . . . once a synagogue is ablaze . . .’

‘Quite. And the press?’

‘Police escort. Entirely for their own safety . . . of course.’

‘Of course.’

By the time they had finished, the list of instructions and the veil of restraints that couched them covered all but one page of Nietzsche’s manuscript in unsubtle ambiguities. Heydrich
lay back on the sofa, stretched out his arms and cracked the joints in his fingers. Stahl slipped the sheet music back in his briefcase.

‘I’ll get this to a teleprinter.’

As Stahl opened the door, Heydrich turned his head and spoke.

‘Tell me . . . which side of that document do you think will really be of “historical importance”, which will go down in history and which will be your suburban
monument?’

Stahl didn’t care – all he knew was that he might just have saved a few hundred Jewish lives . . . if one cop, one kripo in a hundred, bothered to play by the rules they had set. And
it was as though Heydrich had read his mind.

‘You know, in the end we’ll have to kill them all.’

‘I know,’ Stahl said, stating for the first time what had been obvious to him for ten years.

‘There won’t be enough bullets in the world to do the job.’

Stahl could only guess at what the Obergruppenführer meant by this.

Rod Troy had finally prevailed upon his father to let him go to Vienna. After the September riots the
Post’
s Vienna stringer, one Stan Burkinshaw, citizen of
Sheffield, had boarded a train to Paris and simply refused to go back: ‘They’re worse than the bloody Germans. It’s as though they’d got the copyright on anti-Semitism.
I’d sooner be covering pigeon-racing in Sheffield.’ Alex obliged and assigned him to a local paper in his home town, where he duly reported on amateur dramatics and burgeoning steel
production as well as pigeon-racing, and continued to think Sheffield more interesting than Vienna.

His last report, and Rod had read all his reports, had been to state the risk that Vienna posed. Vienna had long since been home to most Austrian Jews – ninety per cent of them. Since
1933, numbers had swelled as German Jews had left the Reich in search of safety. It was a city ticking like a time bomb. They had, Burkinshaw wrote, leapt from frying pan to fire.

The vacancy created as Burkinshaw leapt from frying pan to pigeon loft remained unfilled. Rod had put it to his father that he could and would fill the gap until a new man was hired. Alex had
argued for three weeks but the day before Herschel Grynszpan shot vom Rath he had relented. Rod had arrived in Vienna, checked into the Meissl und Schadn hotel on Kärtnerstrasse –
because Hugh Greene had told him it would be stuffed with the Nazi hierarchy – rather than his father’s recommended Imperial, to find the place buzzing with the assassination of a
complete nonentity who wasn’t even dead yet.

On the evening of the ninth – or, to continue to be precise, the small hours of the tenth – he sat in the bar, alone, quiet, eavesdropping, and heard the news that the nonentity had
finally expired. He had a street map of Vienna and spread it out on the table in front of him. So far he’d reported nothing back to London. While his father might think it appropriate to talk
to the new rulers of Vienna, Rod didn’t. He had walked the city centre for a couple of days, taken a tram ride out to the Prater and viewed Vienna from the wheel, got, as he told himself, a
bit of a feel for the place, found it evoked no memory, dunked no cake, and was now feeling a bit stumped. Whatever was going to happen could happen anywhere. All he wanted was a bit of a clue.
Where to go and who to follow. Something was going to happen. The sheer glee with which the Germans spoke of the death of Ernst vom Rath told him that. It was a godsend, the very excuse the buggers
had been waiting for for just one more rampage.

He was just thinking that perhaps he should not wait for news of any disturbance, and that he should actively go out and seek it, when he saw a waiter pointing in his direction, and a small man
in a grubby macintosh and a grubby trilby, looking very different from the customary clientele of the Meissl bar, came over to him.

‘Herr Troy?’

‘Yes . . . I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure . . . ?’

The little man opened a small leather wallet he had been clutching in the palm of his hand, held it up just long enough for Rod to read, and said, ‘Oskar Siebert, Detective-Sergeant,
Vienna HQ.’

So, the little scruff was a copper. Certainly looked like a copper.

‘Am I under arrest?’

Siebert smiled, pulled out a chair uninvited and sat down.

‘Far from it, Herr Troy. I’m here to protect you.’

‘Protect me?’

Rod could not help feeling that if the Vienna police wanted him protected they would have sent someone bigger.

‘Surely you have heard?’

‘Of course I’ve heard. I’d be a pretty poor excuse for a journalist if I hadn’t.’

‘We – that is the Kripo – fear there may be consequences beyond our control. Naturally you, as a reporter, will wish to see whatever happens tonight. And, as I said, I am here
to . . .’

‘See, that I don’t see.’

‘As I said . . . to protect you.’

‘I think I get the message.’

Siebert gave Rod a nervous little smile, picked up a book of hotel matches from the ashtray, fished around in his pockets and pulled out a crushed packet of Astas. He held it out to Rod, Rod
declined and he lit up a bent cigarette and inhaled deeply. For the first time Rod noticed the deep nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand – the hand waved the match out, wafting
across his words as he did so.

‘Herr Troy, I am just a simple police sergeant.’ Siebert paused, lowered his voice to the not-quite-confidential-but-the-certainly-discreet, ‘We’re not all Nazis you
know.’

Was this deliberately disingenuous? Greene had told him for a fact that most of the Vienna police
were
Nazis.

‘My brother’s a police detective.’

‘Then perhaps we have something in common?’

‘I doubt that, and the purpose of me telling you is that while there might be such a thing as a simple copper – and trust me, I come from a village in the English Home Counties and
they’re full of simple coppers – I don’t think there’s such a thing as a simple detective.’

Siebert shrugged a little – the nervousness of his smile broadened into a grin.

‘I suppose I should be flattered. But tell me . . . it’s almost two in the morning. You have waited up in anticipation. Knowing it or not you were waiting for me and we are neither
of us destined for an early night or even an early morn, so tell me . . . what are you are plans?’