The Widow Killer (12 page)

“Did you serve in the army?”

“Yes, the Czechoslovak one.”

“So you took an oath?”

“Yes. But under the Germans I also…”

“Willingly?”

“No…”

“So what’s your question?”

They both buttoned their flies.

“Thank you,” the uniformed man said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed until it blows over.”

Before he climbed into the car, Morava spotted the administrator’s wife on the second floor of the castle. Her corpulent husband in his vest, plus fours, and rubber galoshes did not seem like a passionate soul prone to murderous rages. Despite this, the woman in the window above him briefly clasped her hands and put a finger to her lips. A woman beloved by her husband loved her lover, who made love to her beloved and apparently loving daughter. Jan Morava could not understand their behavior; he felt a deep repugnance toward them.

Why not give this shady vintner a draft of the truth? he wondered. Idiot, he rebuked himself instantly; you work in a cemetery, where every day new graves fill with victims of the chain of abandoned passion and instinctual reaction. Maybe the only reason those feelings don’t affect you is that heaven sent you an angel in the form of Jitka. So don’t play the righteous man, to yourself or to her!

The face of the land they had crossed not long ago had changed beyond recognition. In the twilight, only teams with ploughs, harrows, and seed drills passed by; the earth appeared to have simply swallowed up the gigantic army, if it had not in fact been a mere hallucination. Buback, who was used to the appearances and disappearances of military forces, could easily spot the traces of their presence everywhere and was impressed by their unbroken discipline.

From the snatches of conversation he had overheard in the office and Prague’s German House bar, he pieced the picture together with what he dimly remembered from school geography lessons. This hilly landscape stretching north across the Moravian-Slovak borderland to Silesia and linking up with the Czech-Moravian highlands farther west took the shape of a mighty natural bulwark. The battle that would decide the fate of the war and the future shape of the world would definitely be fought here.

How must the boy feel, with his mother here, he thought, and immediately asked him. He learned that his companion had convinced her to move to Prague until the wedding. In return, he got an equally intimate question: did the chief inspector also have a family?

“No!” he nearly snapped, and bristled again, but right away he realized that there was no reason to; after all, it was he who had started the personal questions, and he did not want to behave like a member of a master race. So he added, “My wife and daughter were killed last year in an air raid.”

Darkness had long since enveloped the car, but when he heard nothing and turned his head to his companion, he saw sympathy in the boy’s eyes. The reaction surprised and nonplussed him, and they sat staring at each other this way for a few long seconds before the Czech spoke again.

“I’m truly sorry, Mr. Buback.”

He did not remember when anyone last confused him as much as this young man, and the only thing he could think to say was “Thank you.”

In Brno they stopped at the vintner’s hotel, and the horrified clerk, stammering, corroborated the facts. The onetime sadistic murderer, now tender paramour to two generations of women, was in the clear, and they were back where they had started.

The two of them spent the remainder of the trip in the back seat, half asleep, half awake. Litera could only drive as fast as the narrow beams of the car’s blue-painted headlamps permitted. Buback was silent. From time to time he fell into phantasmagoric, contentless dreams, only to wake staring over the unmoving shoulders of the driver into an inky darkness, unbroken by the blacked-out towns that seemed more like stage sets.

Long past midnight he heard the driver’s voice informing the rear of the car that they were in Prague; where should he drop them off? Buback nearly answered in Czech and froze: to his surprise, he was less frightened of losing his secret advantage than he was of looking foolish in front of his traveling companion. The Czech deferred to him, and in his fatigue Buback made a further slip when, quite irregularly, he gave his home address. He tried to make up for it by getting out at the very foot of the road. With a brisk good-bye, he headed up the steep slope on foot.

The Czechs now called this neighborhood Little Berlin. What had mostly been Jewish homes were now apartments for functionaries sent here from the Reich. Buback had arrived late, and the only place left for him was an attic studio in a turn-of-the-century house occupied by the chairman of the Prague Volksgericht—“People’s Court”—and his large family. They had been overjoyed when he asked for the key to the servants’ staircase in the back; it meant he barely ever saw them. Several times, however, the judge had given him a lift to work in his official car, which passed the Gestapo building on its way to the Pankrac prison.

During these rides the corpulent judge, sweating despite the winter cold, would haltingly ask Buback’s opinion on the state of the war. As a matter of principle, Buback hewed to the editorial line of the
Volkischer Beobachter
in his answers: the situation on the battlefield was not a reliable indicator, since the brilliant and therefore unpredictable hand of the Furhrer would make the decisive move, as it had many times before. The judge would enthusiastically echo him, and later, on the evening radio program, Buback would hear news of his neighbor’s fresh successes at work, as reflected in the number of new executions.

Now, as he reached the top of the street, he noticed hushed sounds and movements in front of his darkened house. He halted; for the first time the thought occurred to him that these days, with the advancing front so close, he should be carrying a pistol. The voices were German, however, so he decided to approach them. A large, bulky shadow resolved into a moving van; four strapping fellows were hoisting a long piano into it. Before Christmas Eve dinner last year, his neighbor’s wife had played carols on it and boasted that it was a famed Steinway, left behind by the original owners. Even the men’s blacked-out flashlights showed Buback that the capacious interior of the van was almost full.

Another hulk loomed out of the darkness and barked at him, “What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?” he coldly retorted. “This is where I live.”

The man, doubtless an officer in civilian clothes, took him for an ordinary Aryan he could push around a bit.

“Your documents!”

“It’s all right, officer,” a muffled voice called breathlessly; the judge was rushing over to them. “That’s Herr Buback, the chief criminal detective; he’s our neighbor. Good evening, Herr Buback.”

“Evening…” Buback said, and continued to observe the scene until the import of it hit him.

“My mother-in-law”—the words tumbled out of the judge—“has taken seriously ill, and my father-in-law is alone in the Black Forest, so my wife is going to look after her parents…”

Buback could understand why this man, who had ample reason to fear for his own skin, would send his family to safety while there was still time. However, the sight of the Reich’s local judiciary chief looting the house with the aid of his wardens took Buback’s breath away. For the second time that night he was at a loss for words, and silently watched the grand piano vanish into the van.

“The children are just learning to play,” the judge hastened to explain, desperate for an excuse. “We don’t want them to be out of practice by the time they come back here…”

You rat, you dirty rat, Buback thought angrily; bloodthirsty rats like you provoked all of Europe until it united against us and now you’re the first to leave the ship with your plunder. He lunged toward the back entrance so suddenly that the cowed overseer barely managed to step out of his way. The judge who had sent hundreds to the firing squad and under the knife called after him almost beseechingly.

“Herr Buback! I have permission from the office of the Reich’s protector, and of course I personally will remain at my post—”

Buback put all his venom into slamming the door; the blow shook the house, but he knew that no one was asleep there anyway. The judge’s spouse and children were doubtless safe in a government car, racing westward through the darkness.

The army advanced toward its historic engagement while this cowardly capitulator snuck away. The thought upset him so greatly that he could not even think about sleep. He ferreted out an unfinished bottle of brandy from the cramped kitchenette and poured it straight down his throat. The pressure in his skull immediately lessened; agitation gave way to a woolly exhaustion. Then he noticed an envelope lying on the parquet flooring near the door.

He ripped it open and read Kroloff’s news.

Morava was shocked to find Jitka up so late. “What’s wrong?”

“With me? Nothing. Just waiting for you.”

“But I had no idea when we’d be back. We could have been stuck there for days.”

“Didn’t you get Beran’s message?”

“No, was there one?”

“I telexed it to the police station there after lunch.”

“Aha,” he realized. “The local cop was with us the whole time. And what did it say?”

“He did it again. The butcher.”

“No! When?”

“Yesterday. Actually the day before, but they only found her yesterday.”

“Who? Where?”

She summarized the latest gruesome tale for him as if they were still at the office. The fire in the ground-floor apartment on Podskalska Street (building 131 in the district register) went unnoticed until relatively late, because the remodeled kitchen had no window. Although the blaze remained localized, the affected apartment was almost completely burned out. The partially charred body was apparently that of the tenant, Barbora Pospichalova. But yesterday at noon, at the court medical department, a finding turned the investigation on its head: before the fire broke out, the woman—identified by her jewelry and teeth—had been brutally murdered and mutilated in exactly the same manner as the German baroness. The firemen had unfortunately destroyed all the evidence with a stream of water, and then, when they carted the smoking remains off to the dump with the rest of the wreckage, the sliced-off breasts disappeared as well. The missing heart confirmed the link between this brutal murder and the preceding one; the killer had evidently taken the organ with him.

Interviews with the building’s inhabitants revealed nothing of any use. The victim’s only regular visitor was her brother-in-law, who at the first incomplete account fainted and had to be hospitalized. She had never been seen with any other men. The single, barely credible lead was the testimony of a small girl, who had been watching for her mother from the mezzanine before the fire and insisted that a water sprite had left the building with a big suitcase. From this they deduced that a green coat was involved.

“Want some tea?” Jitka asked when she had finished.

“With plum brandy,” he said automatically, trying to digest the realization that the trail he had been following for almost a month had been a dead end from the start. The man who had probably tortured the Brno seamstress before killing Elisabeth von Pommeren and Barbora Pospichalova was not one of the original suspects. In all likelihood he had a clean criminal record. Because he had taken six and a half years to commit his second murder and less than a month for his third, it was reasonable to surmise he had finally settled on a form of murder that was to his taste.

Morava felt the sharp scent of wartime tea concentrate, softened with home-brewed brandy, rising into his nostrils as Jitka lightly but securely wound her arms around his neck.

“You’ll catch him, I’m sure of it!” she said, and he was sure he would not disappoint her.

“My mother,” he answered, “is well and is looking forward to meeting you. She sent you her favorite kerchief. And Buback promised he would help your father.”

“So what else do we need, Jan?” she asked him. “Just the baby, then, I guess. Are you too tired?”

“Jitka…” he whispered and looked into her eyes, hoping that all those awful images would dissolve in her warm brownness. “My love, where have you been all these years? I waited for you my whole life past, and our whole next life you’ll never be rid of me.”

Curiosity was stronger than caution. Just to be sure, he pretended to be fixing the lock on the canteen door until the director and his secretary had sat down to lunch (some sort of gray porridge with red beets, ugh!). Then, for the sake of prying eyes, he casually sauntered up to their office with his equipment in hand. He knocked and waited before entering. In the back room he put down his hammer and pliers on the desk and swiftly yet carefully paged through the daily press. Nothing!

As he stared unbelieving at the back page of the last paper, he noticed that the police blotter reported a fire in Podskalska Street. The sign on the corner the day before yesterday had engraved itself on his memory, because first he had read the German name,
Podskalaergasse,
which made no sense to him. He had to read the article out loud before he realized what it meant. Fortunately, he managed to fold the newspapers up, remember- his equipment, and leave before he lost control completely.

Locking himself in the toilet, he sat down fully dressed on the bowl, his hands and legs shaking uncontrollably. Who was foiling his plans! How could sheer coincidence have ruined the next of his masterpieces! He had thought that this time they would have to take notice of him, to start piecing together his motive. Instead, once again there was nothing, NOTHING, NOTHING!!

In the meanwhile he had become convinced that his actions should have a regular rhythm, so they could count on them. Discounting the poor start in Brno that had paralyzed him for several years, he had been sure that things would go more or less like last time: he needed two weeks to experience it, and two weeks to prepare for it. Like the moon in the heavens, he realized; he would wane, then wax again.

Twelve a year; the number seemed appropriate and at the same time significant. It too had a symbol in it. But to warn them properly, first he had to let them know he existed; everyone had to understand the rhythm and anticipate the coming punishment. That was the only way it could possibly work, the only way the ones who deserved it would fear and repent, become better people, follow the example that would gradually cease to be exceptional, until the world was CLEANSED.