The Widow Killer (35 page)

His first reward was a dangerous surprise. While central Prague still seemed to be firmly in German hands, he met armed Czechs as soon as he turned off Narodni Avenue. They were policemen, true, but their number and weaponry indicated that the Reich had not sent them here. His German caused a sharp change in their behavior.

“Hands behind your head!” said the sergeant in charge.

He obeyed and calmly looked on as they frisked him and studied his papers, which proved him to be a member of the Reich’s criminal police force with the rank of chief inspector. A moment before the Czech, Buback noticed for the first time a round stamp placed there in Bredovska Street when he took up his post: geheime staatspolizei prag.

“Gestapo!” said the commander of the security line, more in amazement than anger, but instantly Buback was among enemies. He had seen this sudden eruption of hatred in the other occupied cities he had hastily left, and knew where it would probably end. Guardians of public order, who spent years in the Germans’ pay suppressing their countrymen’s resistance, were often the first to take revenge on their old masters, either to avenge their former powerlessness or to secure their jobs under the new regime.

“Can we rough him up a bit?” asked an aggressive, pasty-faced kid.

“I’m a criminal detective and am cooperating with your colleague Morava from Number Four,” Buback said to the man who had called him Gestapo, trying not to betray any reaction to the Czech words.

“Don’t know him,” snapped the sergeant.

“He’s an assistant detective—”

“A spy!” chipped in another policeman. “He’ll tell them we have guns and they’ll send the tanks in!”

“No chance. Teply! Votava!”

“Here!”

The new men surrounded Buback with practiced ease.

“Take him to Number Four. And if he’s lying, put him behind bars!”

“Why not just take him down to the cellar and bump him off?” the pasty face said.

Buback fixed his eyes on the sergeant’s; keep your fingers crossed, Grete, he thought superstitiously.

“I need to see Superintendent Beran,” he requested firmly. “I’m working with him.”

This name made an impact. He could see that they all knew it.

“Take him over there,” the sergeant ordered the two men, who had meanwhile locked elbows with Buback. “Make sure nothing happens to him until they find the superintendent. And if he’s feeding us a line, then do what you want with him.”

There were more surprises in store for Morava. The car did not return to the police complex on Bartolomejska. Instead, Litera swung off Na Perstyne Street into Husova Street and from there into a long, dark alleyway. They alighted in a small courtyard beneath the sign colliery; the German equivalent was, of course, freshly painted out. A couple of grubby men smoking on overturned tubs greeted Beran like an old friend.

“Josef, you wait here,” the superintendent said to Litera. First names? With his driver? Suddenly Morava’s familiar world seemed utterly foreign.

“And you’re with me,” Beran called out to him.

They entered an office where two policemen sat with rifles and cartridge pouches. The men hastily stood, but Beran nodded for them to sit and headed down into the basement. From the firm’s giant wood and coal storerooms they slipped through a newly made hole in the wall into a small cellar for tenants. Wooden crosspieces divided the area into cells; the last one was open and empty, and an opening at the back led into the neighboring building.

In the next cellar, several policemen were unpacking weapons and ammunition from crates, carefully cleaning the rifles and standing them in rows against the walls, and placing the boxed cartridges and hand grenades on boards laid across sawhorses. The men took no notice of the arrivals, and Beran strode past them without looking around. Morava’s surprise grew. Was there another Prague, another police force, another Beran he knew nothing about?

Apparently so, for suddenly they were in an extensive vault with a Gothic ceiling, full of people in police uniforms and civilian garb; there must have been thirty of them in various corners and from various divisions. Morava recognized the faces of his department’s technicians. At the sight of the superintendent their conversations gradually trailed off, and in a few seconds silence had descended.

“How does it work?” Beran asked.

“So far we’ve only tried gramophone music,” volunteered Vesely, who on the surface ran the telephone and telegraph exchanges, pointing at an antique machine with a horn, “but they’ve confirmed that it comes out all over Prague. Now they’re checking the backup stations in Vinohrady and Nusle; once they’re done, we can start whenever we want.”

“Good work,” said Beran, “very good. Is Brunat here?”

“Hej!” affirmed the bearded sixtyish superintendent of the transit police, in the one word of Slovak left him after his prewar service in Slovakia. He had just appeared through a tunnel from the basement opposite. “Here’s the council’s resolution.”

Morava realized that a system of tunnels and escape routes must have been prepared in all the police buildings on Bartolomejska.

Beran read over the paper and then addressed the crowd in a steely voice.

“Colleagues, up till now we have introduced you into Resistance activities gradually and sparingly, so as not to needlessly threaten our conspiracy. All of you here enjoy my confidence and that of my friend Brunat, and we have now pledged our loyalty to a new political organization: the Czech National Council, which is the temporary representative of the Czechoslovak government, located for the moment in liberated Kosice. In accordance with its resolution, I hereby absolve you of all obligations arising from professional oaths taken to the occupiers. The Czech police is the best organized and best armed civilian group—albeit modestly so—and has therefore been entrusted with a crucial task: to ensure the transfer of power with as few casualties as possible, protecting our people and our town. Now that peace is in sight, we cannot let Prague meet the fate of Europe’s other cities, a fate it has so far been spared. We are not to mount a headstrong, all-out attack—we don’t have the resources for it—but to engage in strategic and principled confrontation backed by careful use of force. There are as many possible variations as moves in a chess game; therefore we have decided not to commit ourselves to any in advance, and instead to retain flexibility of planning and reaction. The first announcement inaugurating our regular city radio broadcasts”—here he waved the paper in the air—“contains an appeal for calm, order, and reason that will be welcomed by the Germans. However, word combinations in the text contain hidden instructions to our neighborhood offices and primary Resistance groups, who will begin the immediate, unobtrusive isolation of German units and offices located directly in the capital.

Gentlemen, good luck with your instructions and I’ll see you at thirteen hundred hours, when we begin.“

He gave the exact time, and thirty men synchronized their watches.

“Brunat, Morava,” the superintendent called, and when both had come over he added in a low voice, “time for the three of us to give Rajner what he’s got coming.”

“You have an urgent visitor,” Brunat informed him.

“Who?”

“Your German inspector is here with an escort.”

“Gestapo?” Beran said warily.

“No need to worry. Our men brought him in. They assumed he was Gestapo; only the fact that he asked for you saved him.”

“What does he want?”

“To speak with you or Morava; he supposedly has news that can’t wait.”

“When did he arrive?”

“Not fifteen minutes ago.”

“Him first, then,” the superintendent said, picking up the pace. “Where is he?”

“You assigned him an office, didn’t you?”

A thousand arrests made, but his first time arrested! Buback grinned, but did not feel like laughing. He sat at his old, familiar desk, its surface covered with carefully arranged reports on the widow killer. The one very basic difference was that now the key, turned twice in the lock for extra security, was in the far side of the keyhole.

He had no one to call, but tried the telephone anyway. Of course they had disconnected it; they weren’t amateurs. At least he felt safer here than he had with those policemen, whose patriotism had begun to affect their judgment.

The Rubicon! Caesar’s fateful river came suddenly to mind. Now Buback was about to cross his own, and he knew that nothing would be the same afterward. He’d gone too far to stop or turn back, though, so he simply cleared his mind and waited. Soon thereafter, the key turned in the lock and the superintendent and his assistant entered. With them was an unfamiliar man who reminded him of an old but still powerful lion.

“Good morning,” Beran said in the same tone he had always used. “I heard you wanted to speak with us. This is my colleague Brunat; he and I have been temporarily entrusted with running the Czech police.”

“Nice to meet you,” said the lion, amiably baring his formidable teeth. “I might add that the former commissioner doesn’t yet know of his good fortune.”

Thus inspired and emboldened, Buback stepped out and over the imaginary river.

“Gentlemen, you may think I’m a coward betraying his own people out of fear, but I’d rather you believe that than prolong this war any longer and multiply its victims. Anyway, you, Mr. Morava, said you were betting there were Germans who would try to stop the worst from happening.”

“That’s right,” the young Czech affirmed.

Buback reeled off Meckerle’s information almost word for word. As he did so he felt his tension slacken, and as he finished, a feeling of calm settled on him. It was behind him, and he was past it. For the first time in years—maybe for the first time in his life—he was at peace, as both a German and a human, because he had suppressed his Germanity for humanity’s sake.

Both older men exchanged a long glance.

“I’ll inform the council immediately,” the second said and thereupon vanished.

“We’re very grateful to you, Mr. Buback,” Beran said, “and personally I think it took great courage. Will you stay in contact with us?”

“I’ll try. My assignment to cooperate with Mr. Morava is still in force. Of course, it’s linked with another task: ascertaining the plans of the Czech police.”

“I can’t imagine you discovered much.”

He decided to be forthright.

“No, not much.”

“I simplified your job by not telling Mr. Morava.”

Buback felt glad that at least he’d been right about the kid.

“I did not go to the funeral of Mr. Morava’s wife,” he said, “because today my participation would have seemed inappropriate in the extreme. However, his behavior and hers as well contributed to a change in my views, and led my companion and me to try to redeem at least some small part of Germany’s guilt. I’d like to continue, as long as a higher power doesn’t interfere to prevent it.”

“Herr Oberkriminalrat…” Beran said, weighing every word, “risk for risk. I’ll give you a pass to confirm your cooperation with us in the investigation. We’ll be grateful for any further news. What can we do for you?”

He had understood Grete’s “give-and-take.”

“How about assistance for someone else who helped you at great personal risk?”

“You mean Mrs. Baumann?”

“Yes. Her theater has gone to American territory, but she refused to leave—on my account. At the moment she’s in my apartment in the neighborhood they call Little Berlin. I’m afraid what might happen to her there once emotions start to run high.”

“I’d be worried too.” Beran nodded glumly. “And we’re certainly in her debt. You can take her in our car, if you can manage your own people on the way. But where will you go?”

“That I don’t know,” Buback confessed. “Our homes and families are gone.”

He realized he was asking them for the impossible. Grete and he, like all Germans, were at the mercy of fate.

The superintendent seemed to feel the same way. At a loss for words, he glanced over at his adjutant.

The young man drew a key from his pocket.

“She’ll recognize it,” he told Buback. “It’s the key to the house. I don’t know if she can stand the idea; I moved out rather than go back. If she can, then take her there. And stay there yourself, if you like. The owners won’t come back till the front’s passed through; until then, only the two of us will know you’re there. And we’ll keep looking for a way out.”

Buback was deeply moved. How would he have acted if their roles were reversed, he wondered. The only proper way to thank them, he felt, was to reveal his final lie.

“Gentlemen, I have a secret advantage over you; it’s the reason I was put here. But your generosity compels me to give it up.” Then, finally, he broke into their common native tongue. “Umim cesky—I speak Czech. Please forgive me!”

The commissioner’s office was just around the corner, so Beran, Brunat, and Morava walked over, but at times it was more like elbowing through a crowd. Bartolomejska Street was swarming with officers, all hurrying to and fro and saluting the two police chiefs. Morava kept shaking his head until the superintendent asked him why.

“All those cops running off at the mouth with Buback around…”

“Whatever he heard, he heard. In the end he did what he did. Maybe hearing those rumors helped.”

“The whole time he was deceiving us…”

“A military stratagem. And beautifully executed, I have to admit. I never even suspected.”

“Except you made sure I didn’t know anything.”

“Except for that,” Beran conceded with a smile.

Then they plunged into the corner building. The secretary transmitted their request for an interview. They waited silently for a few minutes; this was Rajner’s way of demonstrating his rank. Once admitted, they greeted him respectfully, took their seats, and were asked the reason for the audience. Only then did Beran request that the police commissioner formally step down.

Everything went so tactfully and the superintendent phrased his request so politely that at first Rajner completely missed its significance. Once he had heard it for the second time, his forehead broke out in sweat.