The Widow Killer (5 page)

“So, let’s give it to them.”

The trio entered. At first sight these representatives of the Czech Protectorate’s executive forces were less than impressive: the police commissioner, small and round, reminiscent of Pickwick; Superintendent Beran, tall and thin, a Don Quixote; and the kid from yesterday, broad-shouldered with small, pink cheeks. Just like Silly Honza, the hero of Czech fairy tales, whom Buback had loved as a child and therefore now especially disliked. He knew, though, that a Czech’s appearance is a sadly deceptive thing. Those innocent and harmless-looking Honzas were the worst sort of traitors, and their cunning multiplied their strength.

The colonel had his own opinion about the Czechs. He did not acknowledge them or their lackadaisically raised right hands, and bellowed at them as if they were new conscripts.

Once he had repeated what they had heard individually from him and State Secretary Frank, he concluded: “The Third Reich believes the brutal murder of Baroness Elisabeth von Pommeren is a signal from agents of the traitorous London government-in-exile. With this act, they are unleashing a wave of terror against all Germans in the Protectorate. The guilty party must be detained, and an appropriate punishment meted out. Otherwise the Reich’s retaliation will be even more severe and extensive than after the Heydrich assassination. The empire of Greater Germany stands on the brink of a decisive reversal in its all-out war against the plutocrats and Jewish Bolsheviks; we will annihilate them on their own territory! The empire will destroy anyone who even contemplates knifing it in the back!”

Or perhaps slicing its stomach open, Buback thought.

“We will drench the soil of Prague in rivers of Czech blood if doing so will save a single drop from German veins. It is in your hands, gentlemen.” (It was evident how little he meant by that word, Buback thought.) “Will you protect your countrymen from a calamity planned by a handful of cynical expatriate mercenaries? I authorize you to form your own investigative team; you will bear full responsibility for the results. The liaison officer of the local Reich Security Office, Chief Inspector Buback, will be my representative. He will be providing me with detailed information about the state of the investigation and can secure the cooperation of our offices for you, should you need it. That is all. Now, which of you will answer personally for the team’s activity?”

Police Commissioner Rajner bowed as respectfully as his paunch would allow, and his gaze—till now fixed upon the colonel—slid over to his scrawny neighbor.

“Superintendent Beran…”

Buback had expected it. It would be interesting to work with a man whose name had been a household word for years. He recalled the way the papers had praised Beran during one particular case. A jealous man had killed his wife and her lover, and Beran had stepped forward from the barricade of officers around the house, shouting, If you don’t shoot me, I promise you I’ll take you for a beer once you get out of prison! And he had undoubtedly done so. Even years later, Beran seemed like a man who kept his word and got things done no matter what. It dismayed Buback that he would have to spy on such an opponent and neutralize him.

Beran nodded agreeably and replied, in accented but passable German, as casually as if he were talking about the weather.

“Given the current personnel situation, I’ll still be supervising all of Prague’s criminal police operations. As time goes on, we’ll be more and more hard pressed by the influx of refugees from the East. Therefore, my deputized representative, detailed exclusively to this case, will be Assistant Detective Morava.”

Buback was stunned when Meckerle just nodded; how can he let them foist that kid on us? Careful: the colonel’s a dangerous fox. Silly Honza straightened up woodenly, blushing all over. Buback remembered the schoolboy’s notebook. You, at any rate, will be mine, kiddo! He tried to answer Beran in the same casual vein.

“That’s your business. My job is to see that you get your job done as quickly as possible.”

“That’s what we ordinarily do,” the superintendent replied politely and looked him straight in the eye.

Figures we’d be enemies, Buback thought ruefully; we’d make a great team. At the same time he noticed that Meckerle’s attention was slowly but surely beginning to drift. To avoid a general dismissal that would have included him as well, he snapped to attention. At least it would remind the Czechs that this wasn’t a social call.

“Standartenfuhrer, permit me to escort the gentlemen to my office to receive their status report.”

Meckerle now stiffened up as well and gave them a parting shot for good measure.

“I want that man, here and soon,” he bellowed, pointing imperiously at the floor between them. “I want to be the first to ask him personally why he did it. I might even save us the expense of an execution.”

Then, finally, he stuck out his arm in the German salute.

As usual, Morava shook off his jitters quickly; the knowledge that he was doing his best calmed him. Feeling Beran’s confidence buoyed him as well.

The tumultuous events of the evening before had further sharpened his wits. He had woken, as he’d planned, at five o’clock, even after his first night of love. For a while he had gazed in adoring disbelief at the girl beside him. Once he had made sure that he wasn’t dreaming, he went downstairs quietly in the dark, found the chicory in the unfamiliar kitchen, and made himself a quite drinkable coffee. As he sipped it, he wrote down neatly what had already happened, what was happening now, and what must happen in the near future.

He could cross off the site investigation and the autopsy. He had dictated a detailed report (including, among other things, the fact that the murderer had worn gloves and left no traces) to Jitka yesterday in the office—a century ago, he smiled to himself, before that magnificent radiance had descended on them… The superintendent had managed to have the report translated into German overnight, and left it for Meckerle.

In Buback’s office, a bulletin was being sent by telegraph or courier to all the police stations in the Protectorate. It ended with a directive to review all the old police blotters; any cases with even a distant resemblance should be brought to Prague’s attention. At this point Morava fell silent and looked inquiringly at his boss.

The superintendent turned to the German. “I request your permission to examine the blotters from the former Czechoslovak Republic; we will be looking for any leads in this case.”

The German answered without hesitation.

“I will permit it—as long as an agent from the appropriate German security detachment is present at all times; afterward the logs will be resealed immediately.”

He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and the authority to back it up, Morava evaluated. He finished by asking if the chief inspector had any additional suggestions.

“For now, the press is not to report on this item.”

“The censor’s office has already been alerted, but it only reviews the Czech press,” Morava said, pleased that he had anticipated this demand.

“I’ll deal with the German office myself,” the man behind the desk snapped.

The upholstered doors opened noiselessly. A young man with a shaven skull handed Buback a sheaf of paper and disappeared. The German looked over the report and turned to Beran again; my first goal, Morava thought, will be to get this man to stop ignoring me.

“Why are your people at the house on the embankment?”

“I ordered them to watch the caretaker,” Beran said, taking responsibility. “He’s a potential witness for the prosecution; the perpetrator might try to eliminate him.”

“Call them off. There are German organizations housed in the building; we’ll take care of it ourselves.”

Beran nodded again genially. Morava could sense what he was thinking: We’ll save on overtime, and now we have a good idea where their counterespionage is.

Buback abruptly stood up. Social graces were clearly not his strong point.

“I expect your reports daily at eight hundred, fourteen hundred, and twenty hundred hours. At an appropriate point I’ll join the investigation. Prepare an office for me in your building with two telephone lines.”

He did not wish them well, but neither did he say Heil Hitler. From his position at the side of the desk, Morava spotted the faces of two women in a picture frame. Unbelievable, he thought. Despite the events of the last twenty-four hours, Jitka was still on his mind. But could Germans still feel love, after everything they had done?

As they walked down past three checkpoints to the ground floor of the Gestapo fortress, a wave of antagonism rolled over him. These run-of-the-mill sergeants with the skull and crossbones on their caps behaved with incredible arrogance toward the highest officer and best detective of the Protectorate police. They were infinitely worse, he thought, than any Czech guard in Bartolomejska would dare be even to a prisoner. It filled him with a chilling sense of his own insignificance. Only a couple of steps separated them from the infamous basement that had swallowed several of his colleagues, among them Beran’s right-hand man. The only way out of there was via the concentration camps or the military firing range in Kobylisy.

Morava believed that Meckerle, who was in charge of all this, was dead serious. If they did not bring him the murderer’s head, he’d take one of theirs, and Morava had no doubt which of the three of them would be least missed and would thus suit them best as a general warning.

At times his people’s humiliation and degradation had infuriated Morava so much that he would gladly have given his life for their freedom. Thus far no one had ever offered him the chance. But last night for the first time, love had lit up his world more dazzlingly than the pilots’ magnesium flares, and now he wanted desperately to live.

That morning, when Jitka had opened her eyes, he had felt fear instead of happiness at her presence: how easily he could lose her or be lost to her in this strange time!

He asked himself: Is happiness a cage for souls to cower in, robbed of their courage?

No! He remembered the passages his grandmother used to read to him from the Bible: It is a shield that would protect him, Jitka, and their children from harm.

My love, I swear to you: in the name of our happiness, I will catch that butcher!

MARCH

An insistent thought woke him: today! He kept his eyes closed so as not to frighten off the long-awaited images.

He saw himself there again as she lay down on the dining-room table transformed into a sacrificial altar. A couple of times in the past few days he’d heard her reproach him sternly for losing his nerve. He countered that he had a cold, that he must have caught a draft as the pressure wave (he’d remembered it only later) blew out the window-panes. He knew, though, that it was a feeble excuse. Something in him balked; he had gone soft again, and it took all his strength just to keep his workmates from noticing.

Brno still haunted him, though it hadn’t been a complete catastrophe. Even if he had screwed it up, at least he’d saved his skin for the next attempt. And after all, the newspapers had hashed and rehashed the story; even in the words they used to humiliate him—labeling him mentally ill—he heard a poorly concealed sense of admiration and horror. In the end, though, a depressing sense of his own failure won out. Add to it the memory of how the girl screamed and fouled herself, and the whole affair had tied his hands for years.

Now that he had finally dared to accept the mission again, he was eager to see what the newspapers would say. On the second and third days he was patient when the news brought only pictures of disfigured victims from the first Prague air raid—although it annoyed him that his immaculate work would not be contrasted with the random results of bomb explosions.

On the fourth day he was constantly tempted to break the strict rules he had set for himself and sneak into the director’s office—where the daily papers resided—during the man’s short daytime absences. In the end he held out and was all the more disappointed. The focus of attention was the Prague air-raid victims’ state funeral; there was not a word of his deed.

He was alone in the enormous building; he had locked up and made his rounds, and could therefore head home. There, however, he would have to report. Instead, he sat down on the wide marble staircase, turned out the light, and tried in the dark to make sense of it. The silence began to hum unbearably, and the sound, which had no discernible source, made him wonder if he was crazy. Or in shock? After all, a large bomb had fallen close by. He knew from the army what a concussion was; a Hungarian grenade had practically fallen on his head in 1920, instantly ending a promising military career. What if this new shock had turned his wishful thinking into a hallucination?

Finally, a thought saved him. The narrow beam of his flashlight led him down to the cellar; years of practice let him choose the keys from the large ring by touch. He spat angrily at the stone-cold furnace; they’d shivered all through February in winter coats, since the Krauts had requisitioned all the coal. By the back wall, blocks of ice gleamed.

In December, when they stacked the cellar with thick slices cut from the frozen river, he had prudently scouted out a corner where there were already more than three dozen pieces; it would be safe here through May. Although he could now turn the lights on, he stuck with his flashlight. He leaned against the wall, stretching his free hand behind the ice slabs as far as it would go. His fingers grasped and dislodged a small package.

He put the light on the ground to have both hands free, and unwrapped the wax paper very nervously, because the item inside was unnaturally hard. But it was the one! It was frozen, that’s all; how could he have doubted? He congratulated himself for having anticipated this crisis. It was here, his deed, imprisoning the wretched soul which could not fly away.

He arrived home at peace. His mind, free now of distractions, was calm: those fucking policemen had kept his triumph secret! It seemed even more unfair to him when he remembered the way they had harped on his first failure. Will and ambition made him bold again. Finally he had something to tell her.