And that was it. When I walked out of the hotel and turned right and west to walk to the Charles Bridge and the Castle that lay beyond it, I never expected to see Arianne Tauber again, and it was as if a great load had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt if not carefree then certainly a profound sense of liberation. Strange how wrong we can be about so much. Being a detective, even a bad one, I should have been used to that: being wrong is an important part of being right, and only time can tell which it turns out to be.
In the Old Town Square, I took a moment to remind myself of that. A few tourists, mostly off-duty German soldiers, had assembled in front of the town hall’s astronomical clock to witness the hourly medieval morality lesson involving Vanity, Delight, Greed and Death which took place in two little windows above the elaborate astrolabe. The off-duty soldiers took lots of photographs of the clockwork figures and checked their wristwatches, but none of them looked like they were learning much. That’s the thing about morality lessons. Nobody ever learns anything. We were face to face with the past, but none of us seemed to understand that we were also face to face with an allegory of our future.
I got back to the Lower Castle at around ten o’clock and found Kurt Kahlo waiting patiently for me in the Morning Room.
‘Captain Kluckholn was just here,’ he said.
‘What did he want?’
He handed me a sheet of paper.
‘It’s a list of Kuttner’s personal effects,’ he said. ‘Apparently these are available for our inspection in Major Ploetz’s office.’
I glanced over the list.
Kahlo handed me a brown envelope and, smiling, shook his head.
‘He’s also given us two tickets each for the circus next Wednesday evening.’
‘The circus? What the hell for?’
Kahlo nodded. ‘Prague’s Crown Circus. I hear it’s very good. Everyone’s invited. Even me. It’s an outing for the SD and the SS and the Gestapo. Isn’t that nice? Mr and Mrs Heydrich are going. And so are Mr and Mrs Frank. Apparently your lady friend, Fräulein Tauber, is also invited. Whoever she is. I didn’t even know you had a lady friend here in Prague.’
‘I don’t. Not any more. Right now she’s on a train back to Berlin.’
‘God, I wish I was.’
‘Me too.’
‘Now I understand why you wanted to get away last night. At the time I thought you were headed for the Pension Matzky.’
‘You know about that, do you?’
‘More than you might think. A mate of mine in the local vice squad had to interview the girls. Heydrich set the place up even before he became Reichsprotector.’
‘He never struck me as the type to pimp for his fellow officers.’
‘Oh, he’s not. The place is a honey trap. It’s equipped with listening devices so that he can eavesdrop on important Czechos or the top brass when they come down from Berlin. My mate reckons he’s blackmailing half of the General Staff. Apparently he’s got a similar place planned in Berlin. In Geisebrechtstrasse. If I were you, sir, I’d keep away from both.’
‘Thanks for the tip. I think I will.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Anything else?’
There was a second envelope in Kahlo’s hand. He handed it over. In the envelope was a letter from Geert Vranken’s father in the Netherlands, thanking me for contacting his daughter-in-law – she was too upset to write herself – and for informing them of his son’s ‘accident’; he also asked me to keep him informed of exactly when and where his son’s remains were eventually interred.
‘News from home?’
‘Not exactly.’ I put the letter and the circus tickets in my pocket. ‘Who’s our next witness?’
‘Brigadier Bernard Voss.’
‘Remind me who he is.’
‘In charge of the SS Officer School at Beneschau. And everything you’d expect from the commandant of an officer training school: a real stiff prick. Very probably you could use some uglier words than that. Especially if you’re a Czech. In November 1939 some students from the local university organized a demonstration during which Frank’s driver was injured. He shouldn’t have been there at all, but that’s another story. Anyway, twelve hundred students were arrested and Voss commanded the firing squads that shot several of them. As an example to the rest.’
I pulled a face. It was easy to despise a man who’d done something like that. I knew because I’d done something like that myself.
‘And Voss once met Hitler,’ added Kahlo, ‘which is not so unusual in this house. However, when you talk to him it seems to have been the most important day in his life.’
It was easy to believe this after just ten minutes in Voss’s company. Hitler he regarded as the modern equivalent of Martin Luther; and maybe he wasn’t so far wrong: Luther was another hugely deluded German I regarded with more than a little distaste.
Fortunately for my inquiry it seemed Voss was just as happy to talk about the incident at Beneschau involving Kuttner and Jacobi as he was about the day he met Hitler.
