Free The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr Page A

something interesting about Stiftung Nordhav, I started to eavesdrop on their conversation. My conscience might be getting a bit dull these days, but there’s nothing wrong with my hearing. Their wisecracks were all taken from the SS joke book, which—take my word for it—only the SS think is funny.
    “That’s one stamp I won’t be putting on my fucking Christmas cards,” said the senior officer. I guessed him to be almost two meters in height.
    “Not if you want the card to get there in time for Christmas,” said the aide.
    “Hardly matters, does it? We’ve made Christmas illegal in Bohemia.”
    Both men laughed unpleasantly.
    “They were going to put a picture of Lidice on the ten-pfennig stamp,” said the aide, “until someone told them that there was nothing actually left to photograph. Just a lost shoe and a lot of empty brass cartridges.”
    “I just wish he was here to see it,” said the senior officer. “Just so I could see the look on his goat’s face. Strange-looking bugger, Heydrich. Didn’t you think so? He looks like a Paris perfumer, inhaling some rare scent.”
    “Death, probably. The scent which fills that long nose. His death, thank God.”
    The senior officer laughed. “Very good, Werner,” he said. “Very good.”
    “Do you think he really was a Jew, sir? Like they say?”
    “No, it was Himmler who put that rumor into circulation. To deflect attention from his own very questionable origins.”
    “Really?”
    “Keep it under your hat, Werner, but his real name is Heymann, and he’s half Jew.”
    “Christ.”
    “Heydrich knew that. He had a whole file on the Heymann family. The slippery bastard. Still, anyone could be forgiven for thinking Heydrich was a Jew. I mean, look at that fucking nose. It’s straight out of
Der Stürmer
.”
    I’d never liked Heydrich, but I’d certainly feared him. It was impossible not to fear a man like Heydrich. And I wondered if these two would have made such openly critical remarks about the former Protector of Bohemia if the general had still been alive. I rather doubted it. At least I did until the senior officer looked around and I realized exactly who he was. I’d only ever seen a picture of him but he was a hard man to forget: there were so many scars on the bedrock of his craggy face that they might almost have been left there by a glacier retreating from the moraine of his forbidding personality. It was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the man rumored to be the next head of the RSHA. The Swiss clinic had dried him out sooner than anyone would have supposed possible.
    I went up to the next floor to have a nose-around. There was a long narrow corridor of doors and on one of them were painted the words STIFTUNG NORDHAV and EXPORT DRI VES G . M . B . H . PRIVATE . I was just about to try the handle when an SS major came out the door. He was accompanied by a tall foreign-looking officer who, from the kepi under his arm, I thought might have been French, until I saw the little crosses on his buttons. I guessed he might be Swiss.
    “As before, we’ll do the deal through Export Drives,” the major was saying. “That was the company we used for the purchase of the machine guns.”
    “I remember,” said the Swiss.
    Their conversation stopped abruptly when they saw me.
    “Can I help you?” asked the SS major.
    “No. I was just looking for somewhere quiet to gather my thoughts. I’m the morning’s first speaker, worse luck.”
    “Good luck,” he said, and locked the door behind him.
    The two men went downstairs and out onto the terrace and, at a distance, I followed.
    Half a kilometer away to the east and across the lake, at Strandbad Wannsee, hundreds of Berliners were arriving at the city’s favorite lido for a day on the beach, reserving their wicker beach chairs, or spreading their towels on eighty meters of pristine white sand. There was a light breeze that stirred the blue flags on top of the two-story clinker-brick promenade and which carried