The Widow Killer (23 page)

The team already looked like runners crouched at the starting line. Beran, however, spoke up for the first time in that half hour.

“Be sure to tell your lady colleagues the whole truth: We’ll give them the best protection we can, but at certain points the murderer will be closer to them than any assistance we can give, and his behavior might unexpectedly change. Any women who volunteer in spite of this will immediately be elevated to a higher service grade, but they must be aware that they are voluntarily exposing themselves to a degree of risk. I’ll want to speak with all of them personally at four as well.”

These three sentences instantly deflated their hunters’ euphoria. They dispersed in a pensive mood. Beran asked Buback to remain behind with Morava. He dismissed the interpreter and led the discussion in German.

“Herr Oberkriminalrat,” he said to Buback, “I’d like to personally convey to you some information I’m sending to the police commissioner. The case of the widow killer will continue to fall under the jurisdiction of Assistant Detective Morava, but all his activities—including this most recent one—have been cleared with me, and I am therefore responsible for them.”

“I will pass it on,” the German said, and added unexpectedly, “along with the fact that I approve of the plan. In this phase I will continue to be at your disposal in my office here.”

As he and Morava proceeded through the anteroom, where Jitka was alone at her desk again, he stopped and asked her, “How is your father doing?”

It was the first time Buback had spoken to her since their dinner together, and Jitka, surprised, stood up as if reciting in school.

“Danke…”

“Please, sit down. Is everything all right?”

“Nothing happened to him… Almost nothing,” she added in her forthright way, “just a couple of bruises…”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh,” she replied quickly, as if approving the deed, “they weren’t the first ones he’s gotten. And at least he survived. We’re all very grateful to you.”

“Good,” said Buback a bit absentmindedly, “very good. Well then, good luck. To you, your family, and your fiance. Who is it, by the way?

Morava could sense Jitka’s unease at having deceived the German. Hesitantly she answered, “The assistant detective…”

When Buback still seemed puzzled, she pointed at Morava.

The German stared, flabbergasted, first at him, then at her and back at him. For the first time they could remember, he laughed out loud.

“Oh, no! Oh, no!”

He took her by the left hand and him by the right, and shook both their hands simultaneously. The warmth of his response seemed completely sincere.

“My heartiest congratulations! My heartiest congratulations!”

With that he let go and left them, still laughing. Morava and Jitka were equally dumbfounded.

What has happened to him? Morava wondered.

He knew there was no way to find out, so he gave Jitka a kiss and set off on his way. The rest of the day did not go nearly as well; later that afternoon in Beran’s office a dejected Morava had little good news to report.

“At your suggestion, Mr. Beran, we gave briefings in all our departments, but not a single female employee volunteered.”

“That’s not surprising,” said his superior, “but they’re not the only women in Prague, after all, are they?”

“No,” Morava sighed, “but where can we look? We need some sort of assurance…”

“Relatives of the victims,” Beran suggested. “The last one had a sister, maybe the other ones did as well. Or jailers; there’s a few sharp girls among them.”

“Actresses…” The German surprised them again.

“But of course,” Beran concurred. “Morava, put your men on it.”

“I sent them home,” Morava confessed, deflated. “They haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a week.”

Before Beran could rebuke him, Jitka walked in through the open door.

“Tomorrow I’ll go, Mr. Beran,” she announced simply. “It’s my house and Jan will certainly protect me best, don’t you think?”

She sat, wrapped again in a large white bath sheet, legs crossed beneath her in his only armchair, laughing her head off as he told her about his conversation with Meckerle.

“Don’t you know
Hamlet
?”

“I remember it vaguely from school…”

“They send him to France with a letter requesting his execution.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“Come on, love! Big Mecky explained it himself, didn’t he?”

“What?”

“He had to learn about you from me, and in your presence, no less. He’s proud—as I’d expected—but he does have some sense. He’d been wondering what to do with me anyway.”

“He tried to tell me something of the sort.”

“You mean he confided in you?”

Buback attempted to reproduce in his own words Meckerle’s description of her as a femme fatale and his regret that he couldn’t destroy either of them.

“I’m inclined to believe it,” she remarked. “He’d never had it like that before, so he should be grateful.”

She said it quite matter-of-factly, as if they were talking about the weather, and Buback once again felt how deeply it pained him.

“Like what?” he managed nonetheless to ask.

“Come on, you saw his wife. If you want to know a man, look at his spouse. He tried to impress me by bragging about his mistresses, but I saw one of them and that confirmed it: yet another peasant. I taught him what royal lovemaking is.”

Buback felt worse and worse but still could not stop this new confession. He wanted finally to understand completely whom she chose and how, so he could find the strength to end their relationship.

“I don’t understand. He told me you were uncommunicative and chilly. Like a fish.”

“You’re joking. Were you that open with each other? That should have pleased you, shouldn’t it? That you know a different me?”

“I was more surprised than anything. And now you tell me that he—”

“What don’t you understand? After all, I admitted, he did impress me a bit. So I gave him the opportunity to find himself through me. Don’t let his appearance fool you; he’s not much of a lover. I taught him that in bed, rank, weight, age, and responsibility don’t matter. With me—and only with me—he learned that there’s more to love-making than a bit of grunting and thrusting. I stimulated his imagination, because I didn’t fuss over him. Instead, I made him win my favor on his own.”

Buback was so visibly upset that she suddenly turned petulant.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you pleased I’ve decided to sleep only with you?”

“You know I am!”

She let the bath sheet drop past her chest and hips.

“So then, love, what are you waiting for?”

Two hours later, she was resting again in utter self-surrender, her head on his “wing,” as she called his shoulder, her right leg beneath his knees and her left on his belly. In this tangle of limbs, she began to describe how she and Meckerle had met. She’d recuperated a bit in Berlin after that horrible retreat through Prussia… but she didn’t want to and wasn’t going to talk about that. Through connections she’d gotten herself assigned to peaceful Prague. After her first appearance in the German Theater’s troupe, two Viennese petty officers were waiting for her afterward by the back door, offering her an evening out. She had already learned from her colleagues who the master of Prague was. They would have to ask Colonel Meckerle, she told the two of them with a frosty smile and they disappeared into the darkness.

She used the same answer on subsequent days to more and more new suitors. Theater fans followed the troupe’s membership closely, and apparently she was unmissable. As interest rose so did ranks; soon she was rebuffing generals’ aides-de-camp with the same line. As she had anticipated, she said cheerfully to Buback, a month later Meckerle personally appeared in the auditorium. During the intermission, she— and not the soloists of the
Magic Flute
—was invited secretly to his box so he could ask her if it was true she had linked herself to him.

She asked for his pardon; having lived through war and personal hell in the East, she wanted to stay clear of these heartless meddlers, she said. The imperial protector and the state secretary did not look like the type to have mistresses, so she had decided unilaterally to put herself under the protection of the third most powerful man in the Protectorate. That swelled his head a bit, of course, and not only his head, she laughed gruffly. When she guiltily promised him that she’d stop immediately, he relented and gave her permission to continue.

Then she cut off the confidences until, as she said, he was in rut. On principle, she refused to meet with him in his apartment or a hotel, because she knew full well that he absolutely could not visit her in the German artists’ dormitory. Anyway, she hated the place, because living there marked her as just another a dime-a-dozen troupe member. It was true, though, she admitted to Buback; she was a dancer, had never studied singing, and still did not know how to read music. She had been accepted into the first troupe for Martin’s sake, so she could accompany him. Only later did it become clear that she had more talent than many of the trained singers.

She had correctly calculated, she continued during her next cigarette—which she managed to find, settle in its holder, light, and tap on the rim of an empty glass without changing position—that here in Prague, only Meckerle could raise her from the abyss to the heights she’d scaled five years earlier with Martin in Berlin. Once again she would be admired and envied for catching the biggest fish in the pond (then, a star of the stage; now, a warlord).

Meckerle, she said, returning immediately to the story, procured a suitable apartment for her as she had expected. To thank him, she presented him there with a feast for the senses. Not a real one, of course, but a perfect replica, she assured Buback, as if this would comfort him. She’d done it so that, for once in his life, he’d have some inkling of what it could be like. After that he would have to get there on his own. Did Buback understand?

She finished her cigarette, wound her slender hands about his head, and kissed him passionately again. He was happy to hold her, but her merciless tale had been depressingly similar to Meckerle’s. For the first time since he had known her—for the first time in his life, really—he felt he was about to explode. She really was a better sort of whore! But then for God’s sake, why had she chosen him?

He knew that if he asked, she would be packed and gone in five minutes, never to return, and the emptiness that would remain after her flooded over him almost physically.

Only a bullet could fill that gap.

He swallowed his shout so forcibly that his Adam’s apple must have moved. Instead, he asked a question.

“So why risk his anger now?”

“First of all, there won’t be any,” she announced convincingly. “You should have realized that today. He knows he got what he deserved. Most likely he’s hoping that he’ll win me back. And second? Figure it out for yourself, Buback; you have a splendid imagination in bed, but in other areas it’s sadly lacking. Use the opportunity while it lasts.”

An hour later she was again lying blessedly in his arms. She still could not sleep and would not let him drift off either.

“Now it’s your turn to talk,” she ordered him, “but not about women. I don’t want to hear that you’ve ever had anyone else.”

“But you—” he finally objected.

“I want you to know me as I am,” she interrupted.

“So then why do you refuse to know me?”

“Why, why, why! Why don’t you tell me what you do? As a child I thought policemen protected the world. So what do you protect now that the world’s coming to an end?”

His work was the one thing that had always upset Hilde. She was constantly afraid for him, and they had tacitly agreed he would not speak about it to her. Now he tried, and surprised himself: His description of the case of the widow killer was brief and dramatic. Grete even sat up in excitement, hugged her knees with her elbows, and propped her childlike breasts on them (for a week now she had insisted that with his help they were finally starting to grow). She was listening so intently that she even forgot to light another cigarette.

When he finished the most recent episode, in which Beran’s secretary insisted on serving as the decoy, Grete asked, “Is she your lotus flower?”

“Please don’t get angry again,” he pleaded panicking.

“I’m not angry. It’s an act of womanly solidarity. And I’m surprised you didn’t offer me the chance.”

“Where did that come from?”

“She’s helping her fiance; why can’t I help you, love? I’ll never make a good wife, let alone a good widow, but surely I can play one as well as your little goddess, don’t you think? But you’ll have to let me go to sleep earlier. Not tonight, though; not tonight… Remember how that first morning you asked me what had happened? Well, here’s what it was: Your sex touched my soul.”

Morava was getting to know a new Jitka. Where had that touching shyness gone that made him long to protect her unto death? Now he could only see it in her as she slept. It was as if incipient motherhood had brought out features rooted deep in her bloodline, which had survived centuries of catastrophes wreaked by mankind and nature in that wide-open land.

He often felt that despite his enthusiastic embrace of city life, he was still a part of that natural landscape, even though he had only spent his childhood there. At certain points, especially crises, he found an inner strength that was not his own. Then he would always remember the strange exhilaration he had felt at his grandfather’s and father’s deathbeds. Even today he did not dare to express it—it seemed too odd—but he believed that at the time some immortal part of their being had passed over to him.

The family smithy, as renovations revealed, had burned down at least twice during the Swedish or Turkish wars. Even the anvil was no more than fifty years old. No one knew where the previous ones had gone, along with the bones of all the local blacksmiths, since only the last three Moravas rested in the town cemetery. Once, while digging, they found a horseshoe, which might have hung over the entrance at some point. It appeared to bear the date 1621 (a tragic year for the Bohemian and Moravian nations), thus proving the existence of at least thirteen generations of blacksmiths on that spot.