The Widow Killer (34 page)

“You think.”

“Everyone thinks.”

“And what do the others want to do?”

“Go, of course! Who wants to wait till it breaks? Come on, love, we talked this through two days ago. From there it’ll be clear what to do next.”

He could see in the distance that bridge blown off its foundations, hanging deceptively in the air.

“Yes. It’s coming soon. The only question is who’ll start it.”

“Exactly.”

She fell silent and looked inquisitively and inquiringly at him. He gathered his strength.

“I hope you’ll go,” he said.

“You want me to?”

“Yes.”

“Ah… that’s interesting.”

“Why so?”

“You mentioned something a while back about loving me.”

“Yes!”

“So that’s no longer the case?”

He could not let her get away with that.

“If I love you, how can I want you to stay? I want you to live, I want to have a reason to survive this. Once the battle starts, I could probably find you a hiding place, but I could hardly stay with you.”

“I know,” she said.

“Well, then.”

He felt the emptiness begin to open inside him, but kept his face and voice expressionless, so as not to evoke her sympathy. But why? Why not admit that without her he would be alone with the war, and his life would lose all meaning? Or should he give up this messianic complex of personal guilt and go with her? She was right: he was alone at work; he could issue his own marching orders.

“So you love me,” she said before he could speak again.

“Yes.”

“And you’ll let me leave.”

He steeled himself.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“What?”

“That you love me so much.”

He did not know what to say to this. He felt like he was slowly losing her; every word he said sounded weak or false. This was to be his punishment; could there be a worse one? His nation had visited immeasurable sorrows on the world, and he was sacrificing his personal happiness to redeem them. He wanted to know everything, quickly.

“When will it be?”

“This evening at six, suitcases packed, at the theater. Departure is precisely at seven.”

He looked perplexedly at his watch.

“But it’s eight…”

“I know,” she said. “You see, I love you too. So why should you die here alone?”

Jitka’s funeral took place the morning of Saturday, May fifth. Jan Morava had barely left the dormitory on Konviktska Street when he sensed a new mood in the air. Once again the city’s temper had completely changed. An almost awkward enthusiasm replaced the fear that had gripped it since the February air raids. Most of the German signs had disappeared. The stragglers removing the remaining few did not worry about appearances; they simply crossed out the German words with two strokes of a brush dipped in lime or paint.

This time it was the Czech police closing off the entrance to Bartolomejska Street. They looked quite exotic. For the first time in years, they wore their black helmets and officers’ belts with pistols and carried rifles. These men were clearly from another district, but they amiably waved him through without checking his documents; they must have known him from occasional contact with his office. Morava had only come in to announce that he intended to continue his search after the funeral, and was surprised when Beran told him that they would go to the cemetery together.

“I’ve made the arrangements,” he said. “I’ll just change quickly, and you should put on a uniform too; it’s important we all be seen today. And Morava,” he called after him, “pick up a pistol as well.”

For the first time in two years, since his promotion to assistant detective, he pulled his uniform down from the top shelf of the office wardrobe. The years of disuse showed. When he met the superintendent again they couldn’t help smiling. With training, Morava’s shoulders had grown, and his sleeves barely fit. Beran had lost weight in the bustle of the last few months and his shirt swam on him. Their holsters weighed them down; they kept wanting to cinch them up. The high cap with its badge crimped Morava’s head and settled on Beran’s ears. On top of this they smelled of naphthalene.

“Well, how-dee-doo!” a similarly dressed Litera summed them up. “One look at us and the Germans will pee in their pants and lay down their arms!”

That was his first and last joke for the day. They rode silently through Prague, watching the city painstakingly transform itself from a German metropolis into a Czech one, and trying not to dwell on the reason for their trip. This hysterical rush, Morava mused, was like trying to erase the traces of your own deeds, as if overnight the city could expunge— or at least will itself to forget—six years of meek acceptance too often verging on active collaboration.

The Czech activity had caught the Germans’ attention. Heavily reinforced military patrols were everywhere. Today they walked in threes or fours instead of in twos, and hand grenades with long hafts now jutted from their belts.

“Hey hey!” Litera pointed at a trio they passed underneath the railroad bridge.

The German army had always flaunted its orderliness and discipline in the occupied territories, but the cigarettes stuck in the corners of the soldiers’ mouths were a far cry from that image. For experienced warriors, apparently, Prague was already on the frontlines.

They reached the crown of the steep street alongside the Vysehrad ramparts and rumbled across the cobblestones to the church by the cemetery. There Beran surprised Morava for the second time that day.

“I got one for you, too,” he said, while Litera opened the trunk and removed two bouquets and a small wreath.

FOR JITKA FROM JAN—FOR JITKA FROM V. B.—FOR JITKA FROM EVERYONE said the ribbons. Red, white, and blue, they were the colors of the Czech flag, which until now had been strictly forbidden.

“Everyone wanted to come,” the superintendent explained, “but I’m sure you’ll understand I couldn’t allow that, so I’m here both in a personal capacity and for them.”

Beran had arranged the simple ceremony after a short conversation with Morava on Wednesday. He had unsentimentally ordered that under no circumstances must it run late or exceed fifteen minutes. The police technician removed the decoy tablet with the name jan morava from the gravesite where the murderer had taken the star-crossed bait, and replaced it with a real one:

JITKA MODRA

The sexton and a vicar from the Evangelical Church of the Savior were waiting at the graveside. Next to them was a simple wooden coffin resting on planks. In a few sentences the vicar said a farewell for her parents and relatives, who were cut off from Prague by the front. Then he read the Lord’s Prayer, and for the first time Morava neither moved his lips nor even said it to himself.

Even now he could only think about the man he was after. How to find him now? Prague was coming to a boil, like a cauldron whose lid dances as the water threatens to spill over. The Czech newspapermen, overcome at the eleventh hour by sympathy for the Resistance, kept sanctimoniously refusing to publish the murderer’s picture. Morava had made a thousand copies of Rypl’s photograph, but only a few policemen in Prague had one, and they were already preoccupied, waiting to see whether the Germans would attack them again, this time more savagely, or whether they themselves would suddenly be forced to attack the Germans. Where could a man hide if he apparently had no relatives or friends here? And who would harbor a strange man at great risk to himself when it could still be a Gestapo trap? Unless… unless… unless he thought he was hiding Rypl from the Germans!

Yes, if people who had called the Germans valued customers yesterday could turn about and publicly erase all the German signs today, wouldn’t someone who desperately wanted an alibi be tempted to hide a supposed… what? Maybe a persecuted patriot? But then it could be a whole family covering for him, or a whole building. Rypl wouldn’t even have to set foot outside.

In that case, the key character was this Malina. The murderer had almost certainly left the train station with him. Why should they accept the neighbor’s statement that he went to visit his mother and that there was no one in the apartment? No, he’d have it opened today on orders… He almost turned to Litera so as to be off without delay, when a movement disrupted his thoughts.

Four men in well-worn dark clothes skillfully tightened and then loosened the straps. The coffin began to descend into the grave he had designed himself and adorned with his own name, only to place his wife and unborn child into it. Just at that moment Jitka seemed to be physically present by him; he could see the shyness of her brown eyes beneath their lids, smell the country milkiness of her skin, feel her fingers, knuckles, elbows, sides, breasts.

For a moment that numb silence in his soul threatened to rip wide open; he nearly sank to his knees and wept bitterly, almost jumped into the pit to huddle on the wooden lid. He felt someone’s palm clasp his arm. It was Beran, guiding him to the lip of the grave. Together they threw a handful of earth on the coffin. And afterward, as he strode off down the grave-lined path toward the car, he heard a quiet voice behind him.

“Good work, Morava!”

Beran continued in the vehicle from the front seat.

“Today you’ll have to interrupt your investigation and be my personal adjutant for a day. I’ve become a commander in my old age. The Germans were right to hang that bogeyman Buback around our necks, you know.”

“Why didn’t you even hint to me that—”

“You’re not made for deception, or so I felt. I wanted you to keep your credibility. Jitka was all I needed.”

“She knew?”

“Of course. She was my right-hand man. I had to order her not to breathe a word to you until I gave permission.”

Grief wrung Jan Morava’s heart again; he’d barely begun to know the girl now buried deep in the stony soil.

“Live in the future, my good friend,” Beran said knowingly. “Your life is only beginning, even though you may think it’s already ended. May she have a long life inside you. Do you know how to use it?”

With no transition he nodded at Morava’s holster and pistol.

“No,” the younger man answered, complying with the change of subject. “I started right when Rajner lowered the number of employees approved to carry weapons.”

“Aha. Well, now we’re raising it again. Take it out of the holster and look straight ahead.”

He obeyed and examined the piece of steel as if it were an unfamiliar animal. Beran leaned over from the front seat, took the weapon and demonstrated.

“This is how you remove and replace the magazine. This is how you take the safety off and put it on. We won’t take it apart now. And then you just squeeze this. Try it.”

Morava obediently slid the magazine out and back in, flipped the safety off and then squeezed the trigger.

A deafening shot rang out and the interior of the vehicle filled with acrid dust.

Litera, shaken, careened onto the fortunately deserted sidewalk.

They stopped.

Morava blushed and stared at the upholstery of the front seat. A small black hole had appeared in it.

Beran bent over and picked up the cartridge, which had flown off to one side and rebounded to land on the floor.

“That was my stupid mistake,” he finally said. “At least you won’t forget that there’s one in the barrel. And never to point it at people. Ugh, what a fright!”

“Love,” Grete said, “you’re going I don’t know where, and all I can do is cross my fingers for you. But when you’re doing I don’t know what, don’t forget there’s someone waiting for you who needs you. Just so you’ll remember to stay alive and not go belly-up.”

First Buback needed to stop at the central office. There he checked that his full powers were still in force; apparently Schorner’s star was still at its zenith. However, the commanders’ assembly, which had seemed so promising, was unlike anything he had ever seen before in that building. All the former masters of the world (as Grete had nicknamed them) and their flunkies were nervously chain-smoking and acting slightly demented. The colonel was still in a meeting at the Castle with K. H. Frank. The two of them were trying to contact Fleet Admiral Donitz; as the Fuhrer’s replacement, Donitz would give them clear instructions on the course of the war and would resolve the jurisdictional dispute in the Protectorate, where overnight Mitte’s army seemed to have seized control. Buback heard the wildest rumors around him, and his head spun: which should he take seriously and pass on to the Czechs, if he truly wanted to make a difference? Finally Meckerle’s aide-de-camp entered.

“Achtung! Der Gruppenfuhrer!”

Everyone flew to their feet; there were a few seconds of tension— which lieutenant general had Berlin dispatched here from the remainders of the Reich?—and then surprise. In marched the old familiar colonel.

For the first time there was no Heil Hitler. Meckerle motioned them to sit with a sharp flap of his hand and curtly advised them that Donitz himself had just promoted him. Then he laid out in just five minutes what Buback needed to know. Measures for a military occupation of Prague were to be implemented immediately. At noon, units stationed around the city would begin to secure strategic points, and that night the army vanguard would arrive. The latter would crush any resistance and secure the city, so that elite divisions and troops could use it as a transit point before the Russian pincers closed in on them from the north and south. They had chosen a time when employees of large firms would be headed homeward for Sunday, and most Czechs would be busy in their gardens. General Vlasov’s corps of former Russian war prisoners was pressing toward the capital of the Protectorate, and this complicated the situation even further. The Russians all faced charges of high treason at home, and they were wreaking havoc with the Germans’ plans by trying to break through to the advancing American army ahead of the Soviets.

“This will all be clarified in a new political doctrine which has just been decoded,” Meckerle finished. “It will be announced in a secret order at fourteen hundred hours. Dismissed!”

He disappeared without a good-bye. Buback, who sensed that they would be served up more fantasies and hot air that afternoon, already knew enough. Old dog or no, he could still learn a few new tricks; he would betray a regime he had sworn allegiance to, in order to uphold values that every normal, feeling person held dear.