The Widow Killer (19 page)

Today, Jitka had fallen asleep as soon as they arrived home. Morava opened his briefcase and removed the materials he had prudently smuggled with him. Making his way quietly down to the kitchen, he spread the new leads across the table like playing cards. In about fifty cases, his intuition had coincided with Buback’s: half a hundred fates marked by a predilection for perversion. Almost none of the fellows (all were men) had cropped up on the criminal register, and the few who had were down for minor offenses: three petty thefts, one drunken vandalism, and one slight injury.

The public servants they had contacted were deeply shaken by the detailed description of the murders. They had taken pains to observe their patients, clients, guests, neighbors, and other people who they sensed might harbor traces of exceptional if hidden brutality. A good half of the reports concerned repeated mistreatment of women, children, and animals. The majority took place behind closed doors at home, and therefore had been classified, albeit with some sense of discomfort, as private affairs.

A slew of the men were barroom brawlers, prone to brutalize other pub customers over a difference of opinion, a game, or just because they were too drunk to care. A couple of cases mentioned torture, and the witnesses belatedly reproached themselves for not having the courage to step in. In the end all were concluded by settling the score somehow, with the participants agreeing to hush up the affair.

For obvious reasons the rape cases interested Morava most. In some, women were tied up and subjected to sadistic assaults. It amazed him how many serious offenses like these went unpunished, because the victims either let themselves be bought off or did not dare to press charges for fear of retribution. He marked as “urgent” the case of one barber who, according to the examining surgeon’s report, had sliced into his unwilling lover’s breasts, but later prevailed on his victim to change her statement, apparently compensating her financially as well.

The remaining reports did not fit any one profile: there were exhibitionists, sodomites, voyeurs, and other deviants indulging their aggressive whims. Under the Nazis, unlawful firearms possession by a Czech usually meant death by firing squad, so knives were now the weapon of choice.

A few unclear reports were left over. Instead of containing direct leads, they were requests for consultations. None of them sounded urgent enough to require immediate action; Morava saw them as fallbacks in case the other trails led nowhere. For example, there was one note requesting the police to kindly visit the rectory in the north Bohemian town of Klasterec u Teplic. It concerned the disappearance of a picture of Saint Reparata, which was later returned by the thief.

Morava shook his head and resolved to give the newcomers on his team a little lecture about concentration at work. On the sheet he noted that it should be remanded to the appropriate department. Then he pored over the sorted piles and tried to put himself in the killer’s place the way Beran had taught him to.

Why is he doing it? So consistently and painstakingly? Why the fixed order, even with a double murder? Where did he find this secret rite, one never before seen or heard in this country? Could it be from somewhere else? Only the excised heart reminded him of Inca rituals.

The one thing that continually nagged at him, and he repressed it with revulsion, was the method and the vessels the killer used—all startlingly similar to those of the Moravian zabijacka…

It was past midnight when, his skin burning from an icy shower, he crawled under their eiderdown slowly and quietly, so as not to wake Jitka.

“I’m not sleeping,” she said.

“Did I wake you?”

“No, I couldn’t fall asleep.”

Morava was immediately worried. “Is something wrong?”

“No…”

“So why, then?”

“I’m angry at myself for wanting it… our child…”

She was turned away from him as she said it, and he sat sharply up, turned on the light, and leaned over her to see into her eyes.

“Jitka, please! Look at me.”

Her eyelids were scrunched up in pain, and she shook her head.

“But we both wanted… we both want it, Jitka.”

“It’s always the woman, though. I really only wanted it because I was worried about you.”

“Well, so?”

“I should have been thinking of the child. It’s so defenseless.”

He managed at least to turn her toward him. Even in their mutual solitude he whispered to her.

“It’s in the safest possible place: inside you. And I’m right here.”

“But what if one day you’re not? Look how useless I am.”

“It’ll be over soon. You read our mothers’ letters: they were sick up till the third month, then it vanished. Remember?”

She was not comforted; instead she turned away from him and her heaving shoulders told him she was crying. He was at a loss.

“Come on, Jitka! Please?”

“No, Jan… This is no world to bring a child into…”

It was the first time their thoughts and feelings had diverged, and the change was sudden and dramatic. Stubbornly he sought the words that would convince her.

“It never has been a good world. The pages of your family Bible testify to that. But it’s been better, and it will be again. Who would have believed three years ago that truth would win out? And now we can almost touch it. It may be a few more months, but the Reich will collapse, it’s in the air, as inevitable as spring; even Roosevelt’s death can’t change that. Peace will come, freedom will return, and our child will live in both of them.”

She said something; he didn’t immediately understand.

“What?”

“But so will that monster! Catch him, Jan! He frightens me more than Hitler does…”

Grete stepped into the bathroom as Buback began his soak in the tub. He had not heard her arrive over the din of the water and was all the happier to see her. Buback never knew for sure when and if she would come. After his first night with her, the longing to be back with her had never abated, despite his fatigue. He felt sure he had never had and could never have a better lover. However, a nagging feeling of impropriety held him back: Meckerle had entrusted her to him, counting on Buback to behave decently. But did that extend to covering up Meckerle’s infidelities… ?

Just before midnight, his body had resolved his debate with his heart. Resolutely he left the German House bar and set off to see her. When he rang the bell he did not even have the chance to say his name before her voice broke in: “Where are you?”

This time she was wrapped in the white bath towel he had worn the day before; it emphasized the length of her arms and legs.

“What have you come to tell me?” she asked before he could speak. “That you betrayed his confidence? Or even mine?”

“No,” he admitted. “Just that it was pure rapture with you.”

“Aha… So then, Buback,” she said, addressing him as a man would, dispensing, as he would soon find out, once and for all with his Christian name, “if you want to keep me, then grant me three wishes, as the old custom goes. One: no watches. It’s bad enough that I have to be on time once a day. Two: I want to tell you the truth. I’ve been lying my whole life, playing a role, and before I die—which these days might be anytime—I’d like to find out what in me is real and what’s a lie. And the third one you can discover on your own, since you’re something of a detective.”

Then she opened the white material like a curtain.

Encouraged by the way she gave herself to him again, he tried afterward to draw her closer as he used to with Hilde. However, the intensity of her resistance contradicted the passion preceding it. Although he owned her completely when she was in his embrace, he lost her entirely the moment she was dressed. Her estrangement took place with miraculous speed. She hardened like plaster of paris, he thought, and mentioned it to her: did she push him out of her mind before he even left her sight?

She hated good-byes, she explained, and had decided that sorrow and disappointment would never rule her again; she’d seen too much of them already,
finito!
At the best possible moment, she would snap down the shade and hold it there until she was sure the joy would stay with her. How did she know? he asked. The way a bat knows, she laughed; she had learned to sense unhappiness and deception even in the dark, and to veer around them.

“Space, Buback! I hate walls; I have to feel space around me.”

He understood that freedom was fresh air for her. Without it she would choke; she fought for it fiercely, like a drowning woman. Did she want to see him tomorrow? And how could he find out today? Maybe he should stop watching his watch and find out for himself when the time came! Would she take his extra set of keys? Why not, unless he needed them for another woman…

Her “truth telling” was even more disconcerting. Soon she began to lay out her life story for him, loading one cigarette after another into her holder like ammunition clips. Her first lover at fifteen, a dancer only three years older, who held on for over ten years; it was a long, happy young love, Hansel and Gretchen, that would have lived on into friendship in old age, except for Martin Siegel. Like the actor? Buback asked, surprised. Yes, the very one.

Siegel, the darling of Hamburg’s female stars, suddenly fixed his gaze upon her, a novice. Hans shook with rage. On his twenty-fifth birthday she did not have a present for him. “I’ll cut Seigel off,” she promised, as a consolation prize. The oldest trick in the book, she now laughed; the famous thespian behaved just as Meckerle would years later. Instead of consoling himself with the next in line, he would not let go.

Siegel rewarded her coldness with heightened attention; in a short while it changed to outright wooing. Passionate poems soon accompanied the flowers; he found her slenderness captivating. Bemused, she read them to Hans and was surprised to see how jealous they made him. Why was he so upset? she objected; Siegel was thirty years her senior, an old man. But if it bothered him that much, she realized, then why didn’t Hans marry her? They’d send the artist a wedding announcement and if he still wouldn’t leave her alone, Hans could challenge him to a duel.

Hastily conceived, eagerly accepted by Hans and carried through by both of them with youthful verve. True, an insultingly extravagant bouquet arrived from Martin Siegel, but with a disarming note. He apologized for pestering her; now he knew her true feelings, and he wished the couple a long and happy life together. At once, she admitted, she felt disappointed that the game was over: it was she who had been defeated. When, two years later, the film weekly
Ufy
gave detailed coverage of Siegel’s spectacular marriage to a beautiful young Berlin actress, envy entered the fray as well. Now she knew for sure that her Hans needed precisely those thirty extra years to treat her the way a man should. Her love for him was no longer young or happy; in fact, it wasn’t even love anymore. It was then she began to deceive him.

Over the years, many men had vied for her favor; now their time had come. She found a new game: men, she learned, fell head over heels in love with her. She managed to convince each of them that he was her chosen lover, while his competitors were no more than a pretext. If she had learned anything perfectly, it was how to pretend passion and to lie. Let Buback beware! For none of these men had been able to give her the pleasure she faked so expertly.

Then she met Martin again.

This time he came to Hamburg on tour, and she fretted over how to behave. Avoid him? Confront him? He solved the problem for her. When he spotted her, he came over and greeted her affably, as if they were close friends. He asked if he could invite the two of them to dinner. And she lied to him, saying Hans was not in town, but she would gladly join him. Martin was staying, of course, in the luxurious Hotel Atlantic; they feasted on lobsters with French wine, and then he returned to their old story. He hadn’t been able to accept her refusal at the time; he could laugh at it now, but she had been the first woman to turn him down at fifty. For two years he was devastated, until fortunately he met Ursula. She was Grete’s age, and that helped him get over it.

She laughed along with him, but felt miserable. Suddenly all the time she had wasted with Hans hit her full force—she could have spent it with this enchanting man, whose skin was just like Hans’s, and his eyes even younger! Soon the hotel carriage would come to take her home; she nearly wept at the thought.

Once they had explained everything to each other, he asked if he could invite her to his suite afterward. There was champagne on ice waiting for him there every evening. In the elevator she decided to be his lover.

“And this fellow I had written off three years earlier as an old man was the first to bring me to a climax and keep me there all night—like you, Buback… Why do you look so embarrassed when I praise you? Come make love to me instead.”

He was only too glad to obey, but her past was beginning to affect him. Why? Hard to be sure, but he felt a strong urge to keep his own a secret. Once, he confessed the short but strong burst of feeling he had had for the Czech girl. The restaurant fiasco had done him more good than harm, he declared, because it broke down his defenses and led him from an imaginary lover to a real one. She laughed.

“So I was a consolation prize! I’ll make you pay! You’ll never have me again!”

He took it as a joke, but when he tried to make love to her again, she crossed her thighs and locked them together. He tried to overpower her; after all, he was sixty pounds heavier and had wrestled. But she thrashed about in his grip; he could not grab her hands or open her legs. He could not even roll her onto her back, because she would wriggle deftly from side to side. Gasping for breath, he talked to her, begged her, warned her he would hurt her. Just before he crossed the line into brute violence, he gave up. His week of euphoria over, he lapsed into a deep depression. He remembered the men she had teased and led on, and felt sure she had written him off for good. Had she gone back to Meckerle? After all, she hadn’t shown up the night before… Silently he released his grip so she could get up. Instead he was suddenly in her embrace.