Hunting the Hangman

by Howard Linskey

  ‘But you could be killed.’

  ‘And so could anyone. All over the world there are people dying every day in this war.’

  She fell silent then, her head drooping forward and he took it she was unconvinced.

  ‘What have I said about all of this?’

  ‘No, Josef, not now.’

  ‘Yes, Liběna, now. I mean it, it’s important. I need you to say it back to me, now more than ever. I have to be convinced you will be alright.’

  ‘I don’t like to think of it. I don’t want to consider going on without you.’

  ‘But you must promise me you will. You must promise me, for my sake. I need to know I can concentrate on my mission. I can’t have my mind distracted from it by worrying about you. I need to hear you say that you will do everything necessary.’

  ‘I will,’ she answered reluctantly, and fresh tears fell.

  ‘Then say it.’ He was gentle but insistent.

  ‘I will do everything necessary to survive.’

  ‘And what will you do first?’

  ‘I will take the package you gave me,’ she answered him by rote.

  ‘And who will you go and see?’

  ‘Hlinka, the forger.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Your Uncle Jaroslav in Žilina.’

  ‘Good, very good, Liběna. And what then? How will you go about your life?’

  And she looked up at him half pleadingly, as if to say don’t make me go on with this cruel game, but he met her eyes with his and frowned a response until she relented.

  ‘I will take each day in turn.’ Liběna said it defiantly. ‘Each day in turn,’ she repeated firmly, looking directly into his eyes as she spoke, and he let the matter end there.

  Now all Gabčík sought was the opportunity to bring Liběna back from her melancholy, so they could enjoy the precious, irregular moments they had together.

  ‘You know my view, it’s all in the fates. Maybe we will live to be a hundred and maybe we will not.’ He had tried to sound jovial but she answered him with a silence, so Josef continued by teasing her. ‘And maybe you will love me forever or maybe you will run off with the baker’s son.’

  ‘Would he bully me the way you do?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Then he is in with a chance.’

  He pulled Liběna closer to him, so the back of her head rested against Josef’s chest and his arms enveloped her entirely.

  ‘Of course maybe, just maybe, we will grow very old together and have children, and so many grandchildren that I forget all of their names and you will have to constantly correct me.’

  He kissed her hair.

  ‘Then I would have grown fat and be the size of a house and you would not want to look at me anymore.’

  She said it sullenly but he knew she was starting to relent, playing along with the game now. Her pretended sulking showed him the little crisis had passed and he leaned over her, kissing Liběna full on the lips.

  ‘I will never tire of looking at you.’

  By the time Sergeant Karel Čurda reached Prague, via the safe houses of the Jindra network, his nerves were in shreds. Zelenka christened him the worrier, for he had noted Čurda’s doleful eyes and permanently furrowed brow and the way he held his hands clamped nervously together when he sat, as if praying, and perhaps he was.

  Any sudden noise, a bang on the door perhaps, would make Čurda flinch visibly and he was clearly ill at ease in the company of more than one or two resistance men at a time. Zelenka could understand it, of course. Čurda had endured a torrid time since his return. The mission that brought him here had ended almost before it began and he had barely escaped with his life. Čurda had seen the man who sheltered him betrayed by an anonymous hand then shot dead in the street. If that were not enough ill fortune, he had then learned the fate of his good friend Ivan Kolařík. The man had killed himself with cyanide rather than be tortured to death by the Gestapo.

  If Čurda had really lost his nerve, Zelenka would not push him back into danger. Still the man should surely try to be a little more active than he was currently. If Čurda had his way he would sit in the safe house all day and simply stare out through the window, watching the street outside, monitoring its comings and goings. Surely he would go mad with frustration if he stayed there any longer?

  As soon as Zelenka returned from Kutná Hora he delivered a bag of provisions as an excuse to check on him. He was about to leave Čurda once more in his solitary state when, on an impulse, he stopped.

  ‘Čurda, I am off to talk to someone who may have some interesting intelligence for us. I thought you might like to come with me. It will get you out of this house for a while and I could use another set of ears on this one. It may help your friends Gabčík and Kubiš with their mission. It’s not far, we could walk it together.’

  ‘Well, I would like to help you Zelenka, of course. You have all been so kind to me since I arrived in Prague, sheltering and feeding me like this…’

  ‘That is our duty, Čurda. You do not have to thank us for this.’

  ‘It’s just we were expressly forbidden to know anything about each other’s mission; ordered in fact. Back in England they would make us swear not to talk about what we were going to do over here. In case we were ever captured. I would hate that anybody could later say I disobeyed a direct order by getting involved in Gabčík and Kubiš’ mission. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  Zelenka reached for his coat and slipped it on.

  ‘Don’t worry, Čurda, yes, I think I understand,’ and he left without another word.

  Čurda watched Zelenka through the window as he walked away. It had been an uncomfortable moment but he would gladly endure many more of them if he could stay away from this resistance work. Once in Prague, Čurda had given up all thoughts of armed struggle against the Nazis. The Germans were organised, well equipped and patrolling the streets in numbers. It was clear they could never be driven out, only a fool would try. Instead he would settle for the quiet life. He had false papers and a safe room with a good Czech family. There was enough food and the house was warm. Hell, with his subsistence money there was not even a pressing need to get a job. It was almost the good life.

  Each time Čurda thought of the last moments of Ivan Kolařík it made him sick to his stomach. He promised himself whatever happened he would never endure the same fate as his friend.

  Kubiš looked petulant, hurt, like a woman, thought Gabčík, as he watched his friend walk into the bar at U Fleků, the four-hundred-year-old beer hall they had chosen for a meeting place, but he was not going to point that out for fear of another almighty row.

  Jan reluctantly sat down and his friend challenged him immediately. ‘So, have you decided? Are you going to kill Heydrich or me?’

  ‘Both I think,’ answered Kubiš. ‘Then I will shoot Anna’s father as well, so all my troubles will vanish in a day.’

  Gabčík nodded sagely. ‘Sounds like a good plan.’ And he slid a freshly poured glass of beer over the table to Kubiš.

  They were treading warily, each trying not to inflame the other but both too proud for conventional apologies. Their nervous verbal sparring was as close as either would come to it.

  ‘I am glad I didn’t hit you, though. I mean, I would hate to have ruined your good looks,’ added Gabčík.

  ‘That was very thoughtful and bruises are so conspicuous in Prague.’

  ‘They are becoming less so. You could always say you had an afternoon at the Petscheck Palace.’

  ‘Not many get to say that. Can you honestly say you have met anyone who actually came out of there again?’

  ‘No,’ and Gabčík exhaled deeply. ‘Look Jan, what do you say we kill Heydrich together first, and leave killing each other till after the war, eh?’

  ‘On balance that sounds lik
e a sensible idea. Hell, the Germans will probably save us both the trouble.’

  ‘I realise you are as committed to this operation as I am. I just wish you had said something to Bartoš so he got the message from us both.’

  ‘And I told you it was impossible to interrupt you, as it always is when you lose your temper, and besides that I did not feel comfortable.’

  ‘What do you mean, because he is a captain?’

  ‘No, fuck Bartoš, not that no, it was the location.’ Kubiš seemed embarrassed to continue. ‘Frankly, I felt uncomfortable speaking in that church, with all of those bones around me.’

  Gabčík laughed but this time it was the amusement of a friend.

  ‘If you chose the sight to confound Bartoš and Vaněk,’ Kubiš continued, ‘then I think you did a good job. You certainly unsettled me.’

  Gabčík was serious for a moment. ‘No, that was not the reason I chose Kutná Hora.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘I chose it to remind everybody that all men are mortal. You are mortal, I am mortal, but so is the bastard Heydrich.’ Gabčík said it with conviction and instantly Kubiš began to comprehend. ‘We have started to treat him as if he is impossible to kill but he is not a devil, though he acts like one. He is only a man. He is flesh, he is bone and he is blood, and we have forgotten that. And I tell you this, Jan, he is a lot closer to God today than he thinks.’

  26

  ‘Untermensch’

  German word meaning less than human, used by Hitler to describe Jews, Poles and all Slavs, including Czechs

  ‘The trouble with you, Walter, is you never want to get your hands dirty.’

  Heydrich spat the words at Schellenberg, with a spite slowly nurtured by alcohol. The Reichsprotektor swirled his brandy in its glass in snatched rhythmic movements, as if keeping time with the argument as he reproached his subordinate.

  ‘It’s all very well just so long as you don’t have to do the dirty work yourself, isn’t it? So long as someone else is prepared to climb down into the gutter and do it for you.’

  Schellenberg’s usual sense of dread was becoming similarly inured by the brandy, which Karl Frank, Heydrich’s deputy in Prague, continued to pour repeatedly, following his insistence the bottle remain at the table. Schellenberg’s fear of Heydrich was ever present but he could not allow such charges to go unanswered.

  ‘That is hardly fair, Reichsprotektor. You yourself congratulated me on the successful completion of numerous hazardous missions on behalf of the Fatherland. Why, following Venlo, the Führer himself…’

  ‘Shut up about Venlo… I’m not talking about Venlo, Walter.’

  Heydrich slurred his subordinate’s name so badly Schellenberg belatedly realised it would be useless to debate the point. The Reichsprotektor was drunk.

  ‘I’m talking about high policy, the actions that matter, the grand vision. Doing what is necessary to secure a Thousand-Year Reich. Not just a few missions.’ He spat the last word as if it were an illness.

  ‘No, it takes more than that. More!’ Heydrich’s head lolled giddily and he set his glass back down on the table with a loud bang, caused by drunken misjudgement of distance. The noise reverberated in the restaurant that was, by now, noticeably absent of other diners. A waiter misconstrued and came scurrying over to serve them, only for Frank to wave him away violently.

  Heydrich almost seemed to have forgotten his point. Then he caught Schellenberg eyeing him nervously and the thread of his argument began to return.

  ‘Take Salon Kitty. A perfect illustration.’

  Schellenberg let out a sigh. ‘Reichsprotektor, we have discussed this matter repeatedly and I simply could not get involved in such a scheme. It had nothing to do with the intelligence service.’

  Heydrich leaned forward in wild-eyed contradiction.

  ‘It had everything to do with intelligence!’ and he fixed Schellenberg with a look of unfettered fury.

  ‘I agree, Walter,’ chuckled Frank, who seemed oblivious to the dangerous current passing between the two men. ‘Salon Kitty was definitely an intelligent move.’ And he laughed uproariously at his own weak joke, impervious to the fact that he was chortling alone.

  Schellenberg began to feel trapped once more. Would Heydrich always hold such events against him, bringing them out with impunity whenever his mood turned sour?

  But of course he would.

  Heydrich had launched Salon Kitty back in the thirties. It was the most extravagantly debauched scheme the SS ever cooked up. Here was a real, fully operational brothel, operating in a semi-legal capacity, with genuine whores who knew more than a trick or two, and all reserved for the finer people in society: ambassadors, politicians, senior army officers and the numerous visiting foreign dignitaries Berlin played host to in any given peacetime year.

  Every room a hedonist’s haven and all of them bugged, with microphones lodged in double walls. Each and every sexual practice noted and filed away for the day it would come in handy against the enemies of the state, domestic and foreign. Any piece of small talk, sex talk, and pillow talk recorded by an army of listeners who manned the place twenty four hours a day – with pictures through spy holes of every act man could imagine and some he probably could not; masochists and sadists, troilists and onanists, voyeurists and fetishists, all captured lovingly on film for the greater good of the Reich. Not a single whore who was not a volunteer, and how shocked was the disapproving Schellenberg, dispatched to find these amoral courtesans, at the ease with which they filled Salon Kitty with good German girls, each one of the finest stock? He had simply refused to get directly involved and Heydrich had been forced to delegate the task to Arthur Nebe, chief of the criminal police, and a far more natural choice to sniff out potential whores. Everyone a patriot, willing to lie for her country then lie down for it; trained to ask the right question at just the right time.

  ‘Tell Frank why you would not get involved in Salon Kitty. Go on tell him. He wants to know, don’t you, Frank?’

  Heydrich took yet another swig of brandy. Frank had stopped laughing now.

  ‘Yeah, sure, why not, Walter?’

  ‘Reichsprotektor, I really don’t see…’

  ‘Tell him!!!’

  Heydrich slammed his hand down onto the table with a crash. The glass he still held in his hand shattered on impact, pitching the last of the brandy onto the white linen tablecloth, staining it the colour of long dried blood. Heydrich appeared shocked for an instant and Schellenberg realised his superior was so drunk he had forgotten he was holding a glass at all. The Reichsprotektor surveyed his hand but miraculously there was no cut. Seemingly satisfied, he turned his attention back to Schellenberg.

  ‘Just tell him,’ he commanded, quietly.

  Though Walter dreaded these outbursts and always felt sick at the wild uncertainty of the outcome, he had little choice but to play his superior’s game and hope he would somehow survive the examination.

  He swallowed slowly, turned to face Frank, who now looked almost as nervous as Schellenberg, and said. ‘It was a matter of honour.’

  Heydrich began to laugh. It was a low, nasty, snickering laugh, rich in contempt.

  ‘Did you hear that, Karl?’ he slurred. ‘A matter of honour.’

  Frank, not knowing how to react, simply grinned and mumbled something inaudibly noncommittal. It did not matter, for Heydrich was challenging Schellenberg to his face again.

  ‘So, you will not choose whores for a brothel dedicated to obtaining secrets for the Reich, yet you will happily take those secrets and make use of them in your role as an intelligence officer?’ He did not permit Schellenberg the luxury of an answer. ‘That is what I am talking about, Walter. You don’t mind that these places exist, you prosper from their presence, and do nothing in practice to prevent a brothel filled with nice German girls sucking and fucking their way through half th
e foreign diplomatic corps, just so long as you don’t have to choose these women yourself. Heaven forfend that you might actually have to meet one of them, touch her hand in greeting, issue her with orders, because that would be beyond the conduct of a gentleman. Am I right? So, I have to find someone who is less of a gentleman than you to handle things. Then everything is acceptable and there is nothing to offend your delicate sensibilities.’

  He let out a humourless chuckle. Frank, desperate to back the right horse, began to laugh weakly along with his superior. Heydrich continued to stare at Schellenberg, who could find no fault in the brutish words of his drunken boss, because they were entirely true. Heydrich was far from finished.

  ‘But if we all held your views there would be no Salon Kitty and none of your precious, invaluable secrets would ever come to light. What would you do now, Walter? If we went back in time and the decision to start the brothel was solely yours, knowing what you know now, aware of the secrets we have gained from the place, would you open her up or not? Answer me – no, don’t answer me, I know the answer already – you would wash your hands of it, like you always do – because you’re weak, Walter, weak.’

  Schellenberg no longer fears for his life. His leader’s voice has calmed and somehow Heydrich is managing to speak clearly for the moment, despite the truly gargantuan amounts of brandy he has consumed. Something tells Schellenberg it is not his life or liberty that are under threat this night, but the carefully ordered and mannered justification of his position within the Reich that is being slowly eroded in front of him. It greatly troubles Schellenberg that there is some truth in Heydrich’s assertion – that he may actually be the watered down, half Nazi hypocrite the general describes.

  Then, the inevitable conclusion of his leader’s argument. ‘Take the Jews, for example. Now that is just what I am talking about, Walter. You do not share the responsibility we all shoulder for the destruction of this plague, this bacillus. You refuse to become directly involved. Or rather it is not that you refuse, it is more that you do not put yourself forward to play a part in this most vital work.’