Prague Fatale

by Philip Kerr

  ‘When these cans are gone come and get some more, if you’re still at liberty. And if you’re not then please forget you ever met me.’

  ‘Thanks, Willy.’

  ‘Now I have a small favour to ask you, Bernie. Which might even be to your advantage. There’s an American journalist staying here in the hotel. One of several, as it happens. His name is Paul Dickson and he works for the Mutual Broadcasting System. He would dearly like to visit the war front but apparently such things are forbidden. Everything is forbidden now. The only way we know what’s permitted is if we do something and manage to stay out of prison.

  ‘Now I know you are recently returned from the front. And you notice I don’t ask what it’s like out there. In the East. Just seeing a compass these days makes me feel sick. I don’t ask because I don’t want to know. You might even say this is why I went into the hotel business: because the outside world is of no concern to me. The guests in this hotel are my world and that’s all the world I need to know. Their happiness and satisfaction is all that I care about.

  ‘So, for Mr Dickson’s happiness and satisfaction I ask that you meet with him. But not here in the hotel. No, not here. It’s hardly safe to talk in the Adlon. There are several suites of rooms on the top floor that have been taken over by people from the Foreign Office. And these people are guarded by German soldiers wearing steel helmets. Can you imagine it. Soldiers, here in the Adlon. Intolerable. It’s just like 1919 all over again but without the barricades.’

  ‘What are workers from the Foreign Office doing here that they can’t do in the Ministry?’

  ‘Some of them are destined for the new Foreign Travel Office, when it’s finished. But the rest are typing. Morning, noon and night, they’re typing. Like it’s for a speech by the Mahatma.’

  ‘What are they typing?’

  ‘They’re typing up releases for the American press, most of whom are also staying here. Which means that there are Gestapo in the bar. Possibly there are even secret microphones. I don’t know for sure, but this is what I heard. Which is another source of grief for us.’

  ‘This Dickson fellow. Is he in the hotel right now?’

  Willy thought for a moment. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Don’t mention my name. Just tell him that if he’s interested in a bit of “Life Poetry and Truth”, I’ll be beside the Goethe statue in the Tiergarten.’

  ‘I know it. Just off Herman Göring Strasse.’

  ‘I’ll wait fifteen minutes for him. And if he comes he should come alone. No friends. Just him and me and Goethe. I don’t want any witnesses when I speak to him. These days there are plenty of Amis who work for the Gestapo. And I’m not sure about Goethe.’

  I hoisted the bread bag onto my back and walked out of the Adlon onto Pariser Platz, where it was already getting dark. One of the only good things about the blackout was that you couldn’t see the Nazi flags, but the brutal outlines of Speer’s partly constructed Foreign Travel Office were still visible in the distance against the purpling night sky, dominating the landscape west of the Brandenburg Gate. Rumour had it that Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, was using Russian POWs to help complete a building that no one other than Hitler seemed to want. Rumour also had it that there was a new network of tunnels under construction connecting government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse with secret bunkers that extended under Herman Göring Strasse as far as the Tiergarten. It was never good to pay too much attention to rumours in Berlin for the simple reason that these were usually true.

  I stood by the statue of Goethe and waited. After a while I heard a 109 quite low in the sky as it headed south-east toward the airfield at Tempelhof; and then another. For anyone who’d been in Russia, it was an instantly recognizable and reassuring sound, like an enormous but friendly lion yawning in an empty cave and quite different from the noise of the much slower RAF Whitleys that occasionally ploughed through Berlin skies like tractors of death and destruction.

  ‘Good evening,’ said the man walking toward me. ‘I’m Paul Dickson. The American from the Adlon.’

  He hardly needed the introduction. His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware. The hand that pumped mine was part of a body that still consumed nutritious food. His sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement. And while it was dark I could almost feel his tan. As we exchanged cigarettes and conversational bromides, I wondered if the real reason Berliners disliked Americans was less to do with Roosevelt and his anti-German rhetoric and more to do with their better health, their better hair, their better clothes and their altogether better lives.

  ‘Willy said you’ve just come back from the front,’ he said, speaking German that was also better than I had expected.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Care to talk about it?’

  ‘Talking about it is about the only means of committing suicide for which I seem to have the nerve,’ I confessed.

  ‘I can assure you, sir, I am nothing to do with the Gestapo. If that’s what you’re implying. I dare say that’s exactly what someone who was a Gestapo informer would tell you. But to be quite frank with you there’s nothing they have that I want. Except perhaps a good story. I’d kill for a good story.’

  ‘Have you killed many?’

  ‘Frankly, I don’t see how I could have done. As soon as they know I’m an American most Berliners seem to want to hit me. They seem to hold me personally responsible for all the ships we’ve been giving to the British.’

  ‘Don’t worry; Berliners have never been interested in having a navy,’ I said. ‘That kind of thing matters more in Hamburg and Bremen. In Berlin, you can count yourself lucky that Roosevelt never gave the Tommies any beer or sausage, or you’d be dead by now.’ I pointed toward Potsdamer Platz. ‘Come on. Let’s walk.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said and followed me south out of the park. ‘Anywhere in particular?’

  ‘No. But I need a few minutes to address the ball, so to speak.’

  ‘Golfing man, huh?’

  ‘I used to play a bit. Before the Nazis. But it’s never really caught on since Hitler. It’s too easy to be bad at it, which is not something Nazis can deal with.’

  ‘I appreciate your talking to me like this.’

  ‘I haven’t told you anything yet. Right now I’m still wondering how much I can tell you without feeling like – what was his name? The traitor. Benedict—?’

  ‘Benedict Arnold?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  We crossed Potsdamer onto Leipziger Platz.

  ‘I hope we’re not headed for the Press Club,’ said Dickson. ‘I’d feel like a bit of a fool if you took me in there to tell me your story.’ He pointed at a door on the other side of the square where several official-looking cars were parked. ‘I hear all kinds of bullshit in that place.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Doctor Froehlich, the Propaganda Ministry’s liaison officer for the American media, he is always summoning us in there for special press conferences to announce yet another decisive victory for German forces against the Red Army. Him or one of those other doctors. Brauweiler or Dietrich. The doctors of deceit, that’s what we call them.’

  ‘Not forgetting the biggest deceiver of them all,’ I said. ‘Doctor Goebbels.’

  Dickson laughed bitterly. ‘It’s got so bad that when my own doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me I just don’t believe him.’

  ‘You can believe him. You’re American. Provided you don’t do anything stupid, like declare war on Russia, most of you should live for ever.’

  Dickson followed me across to Wertheim’s department store. In the moonlight you could see the huge map of the Soviet Union that occupied the main window, so that any patriotic German might look at it and fo
llow the heroic progress of our brave armed forces. It wasn’t like there was anything else in the store to put in the window. When the place had been owned and run by Jews it had been the best store in Germany. Now it was little better than a warehouse, and an empty one at that. The shop assistants spent most of their time gossiping and ignoring the spectators – you could hardly call them customers – who wandered around the store in search of merchandise that simply wasn’t there. Even the elevators weren’t working.

  There was no one on the sidewalk in front of the window and it seemed as good a place as any to tell the American radio journalist the truth about our great patriotic war against the Russians and the Jews.

  ‘Give me another one of your cigarettes. If I’m going to cough up the whole story I want something inside me to help it along.’

  He handed me an almost full pack of American cigarettes and told me to keep it. I lit one quickly and let the nicotine go and play in my brain. For a moment I felt giddy and light-headed like it was the first time I ever smoked. But that was how it should have been. It wouldn’t have been right to have told Dickson about the police battalions and resettlement and special actions and the Minsk ghetto and pits that were full of dead Jews without feeling a little sick inside.

  Which is exactly what I told him.

  ‘And you saw all of this?’ Now it was Dickson who sounded sick inside.

  ‘I’m a captain in the SD,’ I said. ‘I saw it all.’

  ‘Jesus. It’s hard to believe.’

  ‘You wanted to know. I told you. That’s how it is. Worse than you could possibly imagine. When they don’t let you go somewhere it’s because they can’t boast about what they’re doing. You could have worked it out for yourself. I’d be there right now but for the fact that I’m a bit particular about who I pull the trigger on. They sent me home, in disgrace. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to a punishment battalion.’

  ‘You were in the SD?’ Dickson sounded just a bit nervous.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘That’s like the Gestapo, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s the intelligence wing of the SS. The Abwehr’s ugly little sister. Like a lot of men in the SD, I came in through a side door marked No Bloody Choice. I was a policeman at the Alex before I was in the SD. A proper policeman. The kind who started out helping old ladies across the road. Not all of us make Jews clean the street with a toothbrush, you know. I want you to know that. Me, I’m a bit like Frankenstein’s monster with the little girl at the lake. There’s a part of me that really wants to make friends and to be good.’

  Dickson was quiet for a moment. ‘No one back home is going to believe this,’ he said, eventually. ‘Not that I’d ever get it past the local Press Censor. This is the trouble with radio. You have to clear your copy in advance.’

  ‘So leave the country. Go home and buy a typewriter. Write it up in the newspapers and tell the world.’

  ‘I wonder if anyone would believe me.’

  ‘There is that. I can hardly believe it myself and I was there. I saw it. Every night I go to bed in the hope that I’ll wake up and find that I imagined the whole thing.’

  ‘Perhaps if you told another American besides myself. That would make the story more believable.’

  ‘No. That’s your problem, not mine.’

  ‘Look,’ said Dickson, ‘the man you should really meet is Guido Enderis. He’s the chief of the New York Times Berlin office. I think you should tell him what you just told me.’

  ‘I think I’ve talked enough for one evening. Odd but it makes me feel guilty in a whole new way. Before I only felt like a murderer. Now I feel like a traitor, too.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You know there’s a limit to how guilty I can feel before I want to throw up or jump in front of a train.’

  ‘Don’t do that, Captain – whatever your name is. The whole world needs to know what’s happening on the eastern front. The only way that’s going to happen is if people like you are willing to talk about it.’

  ‘And then what? Do you think it’s going to make a difference? If America’s not prepared to come in to the war for the sake of the British I can’t believe they’re going to do it for the sake of Russia’s Jews.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. But you know, sometimes one thing leads to another.’

  ‘Yeah? Look what happened back at Munich, in 1938. One thing led to absolutely nothing at all. And your lot weren’t even at the negotiating table. They were back home, pretending it was nothing to do with the USA.’

  Dickson couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘How can I get in contact with you, Captain?’

  ‘You can’t. I’ll speak to Willy and leave a message with him if I decide I’m ready to puke another fur ball.’

  ‘If it’s a question of money—’

  ‘It’s not.’

  Instinctively we both glanced up as another 109 came rifling in from the north-west and I saw the moon illuminate the anxiety on Dickson’s smooth face. When the sound was just a footnote on the horizon I heard him let out a breath.

  ‘I can’t get used to that,’ he confessed. ‘The way these fighters fly so low. I keep expecting to see something blow up on the ground in front of me.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish it would. But take my word for it: a fighter tends to buzz a little louder when it decides to sting.’

  ‘Talking of things blowing up,’ he said. ‘The Three Kings. You hear anything? Only, the doctors of deceit have been giving us the runaround. Back in May they said they had picked up two of the leaders and that it was only a matter of time before they got their hands on the third. Since when we’ve heard nothing. We keep asking, but no one says anything, so we figure that number three must still be at liberty. Any truth in that, you think?’

  ‘I really can’t say.’

  ‘Can’t or just won’t?’ A cloud drifted across the moon like something dark over my soul.

  ‘C’mon, Captain. You must know something.’

  ‘I’m just back from the Ukraine so I’m a little behind with what’s been happening here in Berlin. But if they’d caught Melchior, I think you’d have heard all about that, don’t you? Through a megaphone.’

  ‘Melchior?’

  ‘And I thought it was just the Germans who were a godless race.’

  I walked away.

  ‘Hey,’ said Dickson. ‘I saw that movie, Frankenstein. And I remember that scene, now. Doesn’t the monster throw the little girl in the water?’

  ‘Yes. Sad isn’t it?’

  I strolled south, down to Bülowstrasse, where I turned west. I might have walked all the way home but I noticed there was a hole in my shoe and at Nolli I decided to get on the S-Bahn. Normally I would have taken the tram, but the thirty-three was no longer running; and since it was after nine o’clock the only taxis around were those that were called by the police for the service of the sick, the lame, the old, or travellers from railway stations with heavy bags. And senior Nazi Party members, of course. They never had a problem getting a cab home after nine.

  Nolli was almost deserted, which was not uncommon in the blackout. All you could see were occasional cigarette ends moving through the darkness like fireflies, or sometimes the phosphorescent lapel badge of someone keen to avoid a collision with another pedestrian; all you could hear were the trains as they moved invisibly in and out of the art nouveau glass dome of the station overhead, or disembodied voices, snatches of passing conversations as if Berlin was one big open-air séance – a ghostly effect that was enhanced by infrequent flashes of electric light from the rail track. It was as if some modern-day Moses – and who could have blamed him? – had stretched out his strong hand toward the sky to spread a palpable darkness over the land of Germany. Surely it was time to let the Israelites leave, or at least to release them from their bondage.

  I was almost on the stairs when, from under the arches, I heard the sound of a struggle. I stopped for a moment, looked around and as a cloud shifted lazil
y off the moon I got a son et lumière view of a man attacking a woman. She was lying on the ground trying to fight him off as, with one hand over her mouth, he fumbled under her skirt. I heard a curse, a muffled scream and then my own footsteps as they clattered down the stairs.

  ‘Hey, leave her alone,’ I yelled.

  The man appeared to punch the woman and as he stood up to face me I heard a click and caught a glimpse of the blade that was now in his hand. If I’d been on duty I might have been carrying a firearm but I wasn’t and as the man came toward me I shrugged the bread bag containing the food cans off my shoulder and swung it hard like a medieval ball and chain as he came within range. The bag hit him on his extended arm, knocking the blade out of his hand, and he turned and fled, with me in half-hearted pursuit. The moonlight dimmed momentarily and I lost sight of him altogether. A few moments later I heard a squeal of tyres from the corner of Motz Strasse and, arriving in front of the American Church, I found a taxi with its door open and the driver staring at his front fender.