The Widow Killer (9 page)

What plans did the central office have once the front got here, Brno’s defender of the law asked when he’d briskly gobbled down the Moravian roast (obtained without ration coupons, which was in and of itself a punishable crime). Everyone in Brno was sure—he assured Morava emphatically, so the message would make it to Prague—that the great German Reich would be victorious, but how should they carry on in the short term if for strategic reasons the Furhrer found it expedient to withdraw the front temporarily past Brno? Were they perhaps counting on the Brno team’s experience to reinforce the Prague police? After all, criminal elements in Prague would be sure to exploit the political confusion.

Morava lost patience with them. They were officers just like their colleagues in Prague, he told them sternly, and he didn’t know anyone there who was as obsessed with what would happen after the war. As long as they maintained public order—which was, after all, their only obligation—and had not engaged in extracurricular political activities of their own accord, they’d have nothing to fear. After all, every regime needs criminal police. Now, if they’d kindly excuse him, he’d had a tough day and tomorrow wouldn’t be any easier; he had to finish up the investigations their subordinates hadn’t completed, so he wanted to get some sleep.

He left them there with their half-empty glasses and looming fears and walked swiftly back to the hotel down dark, deserted streets that he had almost forgotten in his years in Prague. Before he rang for the doorman, he stopped and listened. No, he was not imagining it; a weak but perceptible rumbling rippled through the cold, still air, first weakening, now strengthening and overflowing like the April thunderstorms he remembered over south Moravia.

The front, he realized. They’re that close!

Then his thoughts turned to Jitka, because it was the first time in their three weeks together that he would sleep alone.

The man from the Brno Gestapo assured Buback that he could forget about two of the suspects immediately. If Bruno Thaler’s alibi for 1938 was problematic, he had one for this February fourteenth that was unimpeachable: he was working as a prison guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp and had not taken any days off this year. Alfons Hunyady had left for another unidentified camp three years ago in a transport of Moravian Gypsies, wearing the label
Parasite.

Buback had refused Matulka’s dinner invitation primarily because the Czech and his deputy were useless to him. Every word they spoke dripped with proof that they were Nazier than the most fanatical Nazis. In a police uprising, worthless toadies like them would be the first to lose their heads.

He had two surprisingly good whiskeys with his colleague and compatriot in the local German casino and managed an hour of small talk. How funny, he thought, that since… when was it, Stalingrad, or maybe the Allied landing at Normandy, conversations like this had lost all substance. Under certain conditions even a sarcastic remark about the weather could prove dangerous; after all, it could be a gibe at the constant excuses emanating from the armed forces high command. The situation on the fronts was completely taboo.

They exhausted the murder of Baroness von Pommeren, chatted a bit about Moravian wine, which Buback had not drunk since his youth, and called it a night when they caught each other simultaneously yawning. The chief inspector politely refused an escort home, and when he reached the hotel decided to prolong his walk. Against the dark sky the even darker silhouette of a steep knoll rose close by. He decided he could do with a bit of exercise and set off at a brisk clip up the slope.

Soon the metropolis lay at his feet, darkened, unfriendly, and unknown, the second largest city in the land where he was born. Where does a bilingual German from nonexistent Czechoslovakia belong anyway? Especially one from Prague?

The product of a mixed marriage in which his mother prevailed, Erwin Buback had therefore gone to a Czech grammar school in his native Prague. When his mother died, his father, an insurance agent, married a wealthy German woman from Karlsbad. Erwin attended the German gymnasium there and was sent to Dresden to study law. His parents, who had no further children, wanted to strengthen Erwin’s identification with the nationality they shared.

Buback had met Hilde in that wonderful city on the Elbe and stayed until the war broke out. He soon earned his stripes in a field which had never interested him, but which proved reasonably secure in a time of economic and political upheaval. The criminal police, of course, came under Nazi supervision in time, but at least the Nazis understood that to have a dependable judicial and corrective system they had to let some professionals remain at their posts.

That did not mean that the detectives resisted the Nazis, far from it. Buback felt admiration for the verve with which they quickly returned order to a shattered Germany. He too welcomed the Fuhrer as the re-newer of German honor, which the Versailles dictates had trampled. His loyalty, though, was a far cry from the fanaticism in other branches of the Reich’s government. He was a German, and that was that.

Buback, his young wife, her parents, and their acquaintances applauded enthusiastically when the Fuhrer resolved to return misappropriated territories to a resurrected Germany. They wholeheartedly welcomed the annexation of Austria in 1938. Erwin was greatly pleased when Bohemia returned to Greater Germany’s embrace. He experienced a heady Night of Torches in liberated Karlsbad, and tears sprang to his eyes when the banner of new Germany waved over his native Prague as well. He and his colleagues celebrated the lightning victories in Poland and the west.

While at first the newly formed security detachments repelled him with their ostentatious brutality, he came to see his office’s connection to them as a necessary evil, an unavoidable consolidation of forces in a nation at war. Sent to France, Holland, and Belgium to ensure the peaceful coexistence of his kinsmen in occupied territories, he devoted his energies, as before, to that task and no other. Some things he saw shocked him others he observed with disapproval; but he felt a direct personal responsibility for all of it.

It was a Sunday in June of 1941, the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union, when he first began to feel uneasy. When he asked Hilde why she wasn’t joining the domestic festivities, she brought Heidi’s geography textbook and opened it to the map of Europe and Asia. The speck that was Germany butted up against the gigantic expanse of Russia. He controlled his irritation and chided her mildly: she should have stuck to pastries instead of teaching if she couldn’t recognize cartographic distortions and, more important, if she couldn’t understand that territory was not the only factor involved.

After that the war only permitted him the occasional visit home, when he would drink in as much of Hilde and Heidi’s presence as he could. Understandably they kept to personal topics, but he noticed that his wife avoided everything political to the point of awkwardness. Once, however, she slipped, and it led to the one bitter argument of their life together.

On a walk through the Franconian vineyards just one year ago, he had been trying to explain an idea he had just had to Hilde. In retrospect, he had probably been attempting to convince himself more than her. By retreating on all fronts, he had claimed, the Furhrer was coiling his people into a spring that would then fling the Allies into the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean Sea and across the Urals. Then Hilde unexpectedly asked him if the Furhrer hadn’t lost touch with “his people” long ago.

The low curtains of grapevines stretched out far and wide around them, with not a person in sight, and so he shouted at her. How could she, how dare she lend her voice to such filthy suspicions—now of all times, when only the iron will of a united Germany could overcome their ideologically confused and disorganized enemies?

Endless times since then he had imagined this scene, seen the colors, smelled the scents, heard Hilde and himself, and his regret at spoiling their last day together grew stronger with the suspicion that maybe she had been right after all.

If Germany won, the defeated Allies would rebuild its shattered cities and would cede their poorly managed and sparsely populated eastern territories as reparations—but was there any hope for the basic human values that years of mutual slaughter had ruined? And could anyone anywhere even begin to take the place of his Hilde and Heidi?

Tonight, high above a city that would soon be celebrating its freedom from the Occupation, a devastating analogy occurred to him for the first time: could the German Fuhrer derive the same perverted satisfaction from the worldwide butchery he’d unleashed as the unknown murderer did from his bloody slaughter of women?

He was freezing. Chills crept across his body; he must have goose-bumps! Then he realized why.

The reckless comparison he had just drawn instantly made him the worst sort of criminal, the kind most of his colleagues at Bredovska Street would send to the basement and then (after a short trial) to the camps or the old military shooting range in the northern suburbs. He imagined how Meckerle would react if he said it aloud. If it happened face-to-face, Meckerle would relieve him of duty and lock him in the asylum; if it happened during a staff meeting, he would probably kill Buback on the spot.

But it was not fear that made Buback shiver; fear was one thing he had never been prone to, and he knew he was too experienced—or too cunning?—to be hoisted by his own petard. However, he was alarmed at what was happening to him. What was anything worth if out of the blue, after years of faith, he gave in to suspicions that went far beyond Hilde’s small question on that final afternoon? Was he a common traitor? A coward, afraid of defeat? A victim of enemy propaganda? Or… or had he simply been slow to discover a historic blunder that he helped perpetrate, and now stood horrified at the chilling fate awaiting him and his country?

This last explanation was the most morally justifiable one—but then what difference was there between him and countless other Germans, who, he had heard, paid for far milder speculations in penal gangs, colonies, camps, and at the gallows?

A strange rhythmic sound drowned out the distant gunfire and distracted him from his thoughts. Just ahead, the path ended at a locked gate in a massive wall. The local Gestapo man had mentioned earlier a Brno castle that had been a notorious political prison in Austro-Hungarian days. The good life, compared to today’s prisons, his local colleague had said, grinning; Vienna treated them with kid gloves and look what happened!

Now Buback could make out the rustling of last year’s leaves, the sound of panting, and two Czech voices whispering.

“Love me! Yes! Love me! Yes yes yes!”

Incredible! A chill night, a steep slope, the gloomy cells a stone’s throw away, mass slaughter within earshot, and with all this, two fragile human beings fall in love. And that means hope: an eternal new beginning that repairs the worst brutalities of history.

Suddenly he wanted to live to see it. And the face he pictured belonged to the Czech girl with the brown eyes.

He found a dozen small jars of lard in the pantry—apparently she’d made individual monthly portions—and a pot of lentil soup with a surprisingly large chunk of sausage, which he heated up on the cylinder stove; all he had to do was shove some wood in. He even discovered a bottle of elderberry wine and tucked into a feast prepared for another man. There was a store of logs by the stove; soon it was almost hot in the apartment kitchen. He packed his booty in wax paper next to the rolled-up straps in the suitcase and placed it out in the chilly entrance hall.

The pale body on the dining table grew warm. He touched the skin on the shoulder. It was rough and dry. He realized with a shock: dead people don’t sweat! His own shirt was quite damp after the meal, and the wine had flushed his cheeks. But he did not go into the bedroom, although it might have been more pleasant. This was his first opportunity to get a good, uninterrupted look at what he’d done.

My deed!

He was pleased he had finally worked out his opening lines. He’d behaved like an idiot and taken a terrible risk by almost frightening the first two to death. The one in Brno had become an animal fighting for her life; he barely overpowered her. In the second case she had fortunately recognized him and given herself up; anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would have put up a fight. He had finally hit on it after puzzling the matter over and over at home, and he had decided to start next time by gaining their trust.

Today’s events had proved him right. He had stunned her so perfectly that he was able to make all the necessary preparations without hurrying. She had come to on the table, naked, bound, and trussed, in time to see what was happening to her. He retained the same procedures and was satisfied at how effortless it was compared to the woman on the embankment. This time, all he heard was some weak moaning. The body’s jerking did not prevent him from making all the cuts just as he was supposed to. She held out surprisingly long; almost, it seemed, until he cut it out.

He took his gloves off again and touched first her, then himself, to see if a dead body felt different from a live one. It did not seem to. Her hair was thus all the more surprising. He had held her by it—it was long—when she fell into the wardrobe; the strands had flowed through his palms as he tied her to the tabletop, and were still hairs. As he examined them now, they did not separate; they reminded him of the hemp fiber he had used to clean his freshly oiled implements. So this was a new discovery:

The hair dies first.

He studied her fingers close up to confirm what he knew from the Hungarian campaign: nails and mustaches live the longest.

He remembered helping to bury a lad who had barely grown his first whiskers before they closed the tulle-covered lid on his coffin. Now he raised the severed head and nodded, satisfied: a small mustache was clearly growing on the black-haired woman’s upper lip.

Enough for today; it was time to head back. He pulled the gloves back on, changed his clothes, checked carefully that he had left no telltale traces, put on his hunting coat, and on sudden impulse stuffed the brightly glowing stove with wood until it would not close. Let the rottenness here truly rot for when her paramour arrives!