‘As a matter of fact that’s what I was doing just now. Looking for trouble. I thought I’d get out of the house and scout the area.’
Kuttner winced, noticeably.
‘The lie of the land, so to speak,’ he said.
‘Yes. Generally, trouble sort of comes looking for me, so I don’t have to venture too far. I’ve always been lucky that way.’
‘Quite a few of us in the SS have been lucky that way, don’t you think?’ Kuttner sighed a faint sigh of regret. ‘With trouble. Frankly, I’ve had a bit of a rough summer.’
‘You’ve been east, too, huh?’
Kuttner nodded. ‘How did you know?’
I shrugged. ‘I look at you and maybe I see something of myself.’
‘Yes. That must be it.’
‘Where were you posted?’
‘Riga.’
‘I was in Minsk.’
‘How was that?’
‘Loathsome. And Riga?’
‘The same. And really quite unnecessary, a lot of it. You go to war, you expect to kill people. I was almost looking forward to it; to being in action. When one is young one has such romantic ideas of what war is like. But it was nothing like that, of course.’
‘No. It never is.’
Kuttner tried to smile, but the part he needed inside himself to make the smile work properly was broken. He knew it. And I knew it.
‘It’s an odd state of affairs, don’t you think, when a man feels guilty for doing his duty and obeying orders?’ He took a sharp drag of the cigarette he was smoking as if he hoped it might suddenly kill him. ‘Not that guilt even begins to cover the way I feel.’
‘Believe me, Captain, I know exactly how you feel.’
‘Do you? Yes. I can see that you do. It’s in your eyes.’
‘And that’s the reason you’re not sleeping?’
‘Can you?’ Kuttner shook his head. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever sleep, properly, again. Not ever. Not in this life.’
‘Talk about it now, if it makes you feel any better.’
‘Does it make you feel any better? To talk about it?’
‘Not much. I talked about it once, quite recently, to an American journalist. And I felt a little better about it. I felt that it was at least a start.’
Kuttner nodded and then dredged up something from his memory. I didn’t have to wait long.
‘When you mentioned scouting the area, it made me think of something. Something awful. We were on our way through Poland. This was before our assignment in Riga. We had stopped at a town called Chechlo. It’s a broken-down, shit-on-your-shoes, nowhere sort of place with a lot of drooling peasants whose tongues are too big for their mouths. But I don’t suppose I shall ever forget it now; not for as long as I live. We had been burning down Polack villages for no real reason that I could see. Certainly there was no military necessity in it. We were just throwing our weight around like brutes. Some of my men were drunk and nearly all of them were animals. Anyway, we came across a troop of Polish boy scouts. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than sixteen and the youngest perhaps as young as twelve. And my commanding officer ordered me to put all of them up against a wall and shoot them. Shoot them all. They were in uniform, he said and we have orders to shoot anyone in uniform who hasn’t surrendered. I said they were just schoolboys who didn’t know any better because they didn’t speak German, but he didn’t want to know. Orders are orders, he said, get on with it. I remember their mothers screaming at me to stop. Yes, I’ll always remember that. I wake up sometimes still hearing them beg me to stop. But I didn’t. I had my orders. So I carried them out, you see. And that’s all there is to it. Except it isn’t, of course. Not by a long way.’
After several stiff drinks I can talk to anyone, even to myself. But mostly I was drinking so that I could talk to Heydrich’s other guests. I like to talk. Talking is something you need to do if you’re ever going to encourage a man to talk back at you. And you need a man to talk a little if he’s ever going to say something of interest. Men don’t trust other men who don’t say much, and for the same reason they don’t trust men who don’t drink. You need a drink to say the wrong thing, and sometimes, saying the wrong thing can be exactly the right thing to say. I don’t know if I was expecting to hear anything as romantic as a confession to an attempted murder, or even a desire to see Heydrich dead. After all, I felt that way about him myself. It was just talk, a little bread on the water to bring the fish around. And the alcohol helped. It helped me to talk and to anaesthetize myself against the more revolting chat that came my way. But some of my colleagues were just revolting. As I glanced around the library it was like looking at a menagerie of unpleasant animals – rats, jackals, vultures, hyenas – who had sat for some bizarre group portrait.
