Prague Fatale

CHAPTER 6

I went back to the Alex for a while and sat at my desk and wondered if there might be a way of finding Gustav without involving Arianne Tauber. She and only she could have identified him and, for that reason alone, it seemed unlikely that he would ever go back to the Jockey and risk seeing her again. Especially if he was what it seemed he was – almost certainly a spy. More than likely he’d lost his nerve about meeting his Czech contact on Nolli. Possibly, he thought he was already being shadowed by the Gestapo, but if they had been tailing him, then surely they’d have picked her up when she met Gustav at the Romanisches Café. If he was under surveillance then the Gestapo would never have risked allowing him to pass information to her. It seemed more likely that Gustav had lost his nerve. In which case, who better than a joy-lady to deliver something to his Czech contact? Most of the prostitutes I’d ever known were resourceful, courageous, and, above all, greedy. For a hundred marks there wasn’t a silk in Berlin who wouldn’t have agreed to what Gustav had asked. Handing over an envelope in the dark was a lot easier and quicker and, on the face of it, safer than sucking someone’s pipe.

‘Working late?’

It was Lehnhoff.

‘Victor Keil, aka Franz Koci,’ I said.

‘The Kleist Park case. Yeah. What about it?’

‘The uniformed fairy that found him under the bushes. Sergeant Otto Macher. Do you know him well?’

‘Well enough.’

‘Do you think he’s honest?’

‘Meaning what?’

‘It’s a straightforward question, Gottfried. Is he honest?’

‘As far as it goes these days.’

‘In my book it goes all the way to the altar.’

‘There’s a war on. So maybe not as far as that.’

‘Look, Gottfried. We’re both in the shit-house age-group. And I certainly don’t want to cause any trouble for you and Sergeant Macher. But I need to know if our dead Czecho was carrying more than just the fifty marks we found on him.’

All of the lavatories at the Alex had three numbers on the door, of which two were always ‘00’; and the phrase ‘shit-house age-group’ was used to indicate anyone born before 1900 and therefore over the age of forty.

‘If you say you’re in the shit-house then I believe you,’ said Lehnhoff. ‘But from what I’ve heard around the factory you’re here not because you’re ready for your pension, but because you’ve got vitamin B.’

He meant that I had connections with senior Nazis who would keep me better nourished than other men.

‘With Heydrich,’ he added.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Does it matter? That’s the splash on the men’s porcelain.’

‘The Czecho’s watch was gone. It wasn’t at his apartment when we searched it, and there wasn’t a pawn ticket. But I really don’t care about that. I’m guessing he had at least five Alberts on him when he was first found in the park. There were only fifty on him by the time I made his acquaintance. I need to know if I’m right about that. You don’t have to say anything. Just nod or shake your head and we’ll say no more about it.’

Lehnhoff’s head remained still. Then he grinned. ‘I can’t help you. I just don’t know. But even if I did, what makes you think I’d tell you?’

I stood up and came around the desk. ‘I don’t like threatening other men with my vitamin B. I much prefer it if people pay attention to my natural authority. Me being a Commissar’n all.’

‘That won’t work either. Sir.’

Lehnhoff was still grinning as he left my office.

I picked up my coat and followed him out onto the landing. Cool air was drifting up the enormous stairwell. Down on the ground floor there were raised voices, but that was normal in the Alex. Even at the best of times the place was like a zoo full of all kinds of wild and noisy animals. But up on the third floor things were quieter. The blackout curtains were drawn and most of the lights were off. At the other end of the landing was an abandoned floor polisher. It looked a lot like me. Then the raised voices on the ground floor became a little more urgent and someone cried out with pain. Someone was working overtime and it gave me an idea.

‘Hey Gottfried,’ I said, catching him up. ‘You know what they used to say about this place?’

Lehnhoff stopped at the top of the stairs and looked at me with open contempt. ‘What’s that?’

‘Be careful on the stairs.’

I hit him in the stomach, hard enough to bend him in two and fold him over the balustrade so that he could empty his fat gut into the stairwell. If it was my lucky day some Nazi would slip on Lehnhoff’s soup and break his collarbone. Holding him by the collar, I pushed him down so that his feet tipped off the shiny floor and then slammed my forearm across one of his kidneys. He yelled out with the pain of it but that was fine because nobody ever paid much attention to the sound of pain at the Alex. It was one more background noise, like the sound of a typewriter or a telephone ringing in an empty room. I could have slugged Lehnhoff all night until he was groaning for his pastor and it would have been just another night at police headquarters to anyone’s ears.

‘Now,’ I said, bending close to Lehnhoff’s waxy ear. ‘Do I get an answer to my question or would you like to go downstairs? Three flights at a time?’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Okay. God. Please.’ His subsequent answers sounded exactly like a cry for help. ‘We took a hundred marks off him. Me and Macher. Sixty for me and forty for him. Please.’

‘In twenties?’

‘Yes. Yes. Twenties. Yes. Pull me up, for God’s sake.’

I pulled him back off the balustrade and dumped him on the linoleum, where he lay curled and twitching and whimpering as if his mother had just delivered him onto the Alex floor. He gasped:

‘What the hell—’

‘Hmm? What’s that?’

‘What the hell difference does it make to you, anyway? A hundred fucking marks.’

‘It’s not the money. I don’t care about that. It’s just that I didn’t have the time or even the inclination to wait until you were ready to answer my question. You know something? I think I’ve been affected deeply by working in an environment where, within the context of a police interrogation, violence is now endemic.’

‘I’ll get you for this, Gunther. I’ll make a fucking complaint. Just see if I don’t.’

‘Hmm. I wouldn’t rush into that, if I were you. Remember. I’ve got vitamin B, Gottfried.’ I twisted the hair on his scalp so that I could tap the back of his skull against the balustrade. ‘I can see in the dark. And I can hear everything you say from a hundred miles away.’

The jazz lovers outside the Jockey Bar had called it a night and several smart-looking Mercedes cars were parked out front with drivers who were impatient to take their masters home in comfort and safety – or as safe as could be managed with most of your headlights taped up. There was a rumble in the sky but it wasn’t the RAF. I could feel a breeze in the air and the breeze had an edge of moisture that was the vanguard of something heavier. Minutes later it started to rain. I moved into an inadequate doorway and buttoned my coat tight against my neck, but it wasn’t long before it started to feel more like a shower curtain and I cursed my stupidity for not bringing along the nail-brush and the shard of soap that I kept in my desk drawer. But an umbrella would probably have been better. Suddenly, walking a prostitute home, even a pretty one, looked like a bad idea in a whole novel full of miserable ideas by some miserable French writer. The sort of novel that gets turned into an even more miserable movie starring Charles Laughton and Fredric March. And, reminding myself why I was there – she was the only person who had met Franz Koci, whose homicide I was supposed to be investigating – I pulled my hat down over my ears and pressed myself hard into the doorway.

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.