The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online

of clients any detective can have, the ones with money enough to spend finding out something that just isn’t true, and it was the easiest two hundred marks a week I ever earned in my life. Previously Minoux had been a keen supporter of Adolf Hitler; but that hadn’t been enough to keep him out of jail when it was discovered he’d defrauded the Berlin Gas Company of at least 7.4 million reichsmarks. Friedrich Minoux was now doing five years in the cement. From what I’d read in the newspapers, his house in Wannsee had been sold to pay for his defense but until then I hadn’t realized that the buyer was the SS.
    The guard on the gate saluted smartly and, having checked his list, admitted me into the finely manicured grounds. I walked around to the front of the house and down to the lakeside, where I smoked a cigarette and pictured myself back in 1935, smartly dressed, with a car of my own, making a decent living and no one to tell me what to do. No one but the Nazis, that is. Back then I’d told myself I could ignore them. I’d been wrong, of course, but then so were a lot of other people smarter than me, Chamberlain and Daladier included. The Nazis were like syphilis; ignoring them and hoping everything would get better by itself had never been a realistic option.
    When I finished my cigarette I went into the one-and-a-half-story hallway at the center of the house. There everything was the same but different. At one end of the house was a library with a bay window and a table with plenty of copies of
Das Schwarze Korps
, but these days even the most fanatical Nazis avoided the SS newspaper as it was full of the death notices of dearest sons—SS men and officers who had fallen “in the east” or “in the struggle against Bolshevism.” At the other end of the house was a conservatory with an indoor fountain made of greenish marble. The fountain had been switched off; possibly the sound of something as clear and pure as Berlin water was distracting to the types who stayed there. In between the library and the fountain were several salons and drawing rooms, two of them with magnificent fireplaces. The best of the furniture and a rare Gobelin tapestry were gone but there were still a few pieces I recognized, including a large silver cigarette box from which I grabbed a fistful of nails to fill my empty case.
    They had three senior SS officers from Budapest, Bratislava, and Krakow staying at the villa and it seemed I was just in time to get some veal and potatoes and some coffee before they finished serving lunch. Very soon I regretted giving in to my hunger when these three engaged me in conversation. I told them I was not long back from Prague, and they announced that Berlin’s former chief of police, Kurt Daluege, was now the acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and that a whole month after Heydrich’s death the effort to find all of his assassins was still continuing. I already knew that Lidice, a village suspected of having harbored the killers, had been destroyed and its population executed. But these three officers now told me that, not content with this stupid act of reprisal, a second village called Ležáky had also been leveled—just a couple of weeks before—and the thirty-three men and women who lived there had been massacred, too.
    “They say Hitler ordered the deaths of ten thousand randomly chosen Czechos,” explained the colonel from Krakow, who was an Austrian, “but that General Frank talked him out of it, thank God. I mean, what’s the point of reprisal if you end up shooting yourself in the foot? Bohemian industry is much too important to Germany now to piss the Czechos off. Which is all you’d succeed in doing if you slaughtered that many. So they had to content themselves with Lidice and Ležáky. As far as I know, there’s nothing important in Lidice and Ležáky.”
    “Not anymore,” laughed one of the others.
    I excused myself and went to find a lavatory.
    Arthur Nebe had told me