The Widow Killer (10 page)

He listened at the door. The staircase was silent. The short street was empty as well when he peered cautiously out. He walked down it without meeting a soul. Still he was burdened by the nagging thought that he had forgotten something. At the main train station, he remembered: the caretaker! He had wanted to finish him off before leaving today. But it was still light and night trains were infrequent these days. Anyway, the man couldn’t recognize him unless they were brought face-to-face. The main thing, then, was the alibi; he could not afford even a shadow of suspicion to fall on him.

The station loudspeaker in the waiting room boomed a warning over and over about how to behave during the low-flying “tinker” machine-gun attacks from Allied pilots, which strafed locomotives on the tracks of the Protectorate. He knew the announcement by heart; although he firmly believed that she would protect him, he always sat in the last car anyway.

In the darkened compartment he read newspaper articles about sunken registered tons of British goods, American planes shot down, and destroyed Soviet tanks, but he barely noticed the figures. He was imagining what they would write in two days’ time about him.

The sometime room painter Josef Jurajda, now a night watchman, was dragged from under his quilt early the next morning by Vaca; he had had a night off. Yes, sir, his wife had gone to Olomouc, he muttered, to bring their daughter and grandchildren back; it looked like there would be fighting in the city, and they had a one-story house there with a shallow cellar. No, sir, he hadn’t gone; got to catch up on sleep when you can, never enough of it with this job. Yes, sir, February fourteenth was just an ordinary day for him: he got home at six in the morning, slept through till evening, and at eight was back at work. No, sir, he couldn’t swear to it; the years went round like a spinning wheel, one night was pretty much like the rest and he knew even less about the days, but his wife remembered they’d bombed Prague that afternoon, and he’d heard about it from her in the evening. Yes, sir, he remembered her saying it as she woke him up to go to work; he was always the last to know, once the train had left the station, so to speak. No, sir, who would he have run into at work? He gets there long after everyone’s gone, and the cleaning girls don’t come till morning.

Morava ran out of questions and glanced at Buback. The German shook his head. He too seemed surprised that ten years ago this chubby guy—with the eyes of a rabbit and the cheeks of a hamster—had been jabbing tied-up prostitutes with pins and masturbating at them.

In any event, he made a note that this half-educated retired sadist spoke a quite literary Czech. Like most Moravians, he thought proudly—and immediately remembered what the caretaker from Vltava Embankment had said about the man who carved up the Pomeranian baroness. Of course! A fellow Moravian. That didn’t excuse him, but it did narrow the field of possible perpetrators from seven million to three…

He realized that Buback would be missing the telltale linguistic signs, but kept it to himself until he could consult with Beran. He snapped face-on and profile shots of the watchman for the Prague caretaker and recommended to Vaca that he let the man go back to bed for the meanwhile. Then they set off southward.

He got in next to the German and asked if he had a particular route in mind. No, he learned, and risked a suggestion: would Herr Oberkriminalrat like to stop for lunch along the way? When Buback nodded, Morava even felt brave enough to propose a location: there was a decent pub on the main road; they would reach it around noon and—if this was acceptable—Morava could meanwhile stop briefly to visit his mother.

For the first time the German showed something like human interest. Morava briefly explained to him that he came, as his surname suggested, from Moravia—more precisely from what was once the Moravian-Austrian border region where they were headed. That was why he’d spoken passable German since childhood. His father, he continued, died a long time ago, and his mother lived alone next to the old family smithy, now rented out, since he, her only son, had fled to Prague to study law and his sister had married a vicar. Later, the Germans closed the Czech colleges and universities, halting Morava’s studies, and he’d landed, degreeless, in the police force.

Was an hour enough, Buback asked in telegraphic style, and the assistant detective made a mental note of the debt, one to pay back even if the creditor was a Nazi.

They fell silent (their driver, Litera, Beran’s favorite, was more taciturn today than usual) as the car wound along narrow country roads not built for the double load of spring farming and war traffic. When possible they passed the trucks carrying fertilizer and the army kitchen, and were themselves passed by official cars and couriers on powerful motorcycles.

Some soldiers with the insignia of the feared German field troopers (which reminded Morava of a tin spitoon) surfaced unexpectedly just past Rakvice. The policemen’s Protectorate identification papers got a good laugh out of them, but as the troopers were turning the car back, Morava’s companion showed his usefulness.

My God, Morava realized as he watched the three bandits change instantly into sheep, Buback really is a much bigger cheese than Beran.

The war had by this point squeezed spring off the carriageway; every once in a while deep ruts in the fields leading to the nearby woods hinted at huge quantities of hidden military machinery.

They found the pub on the village square closed. A toothless old man who did not recognize Morava whistled that the landlord had left with his family for Brno. Before the assistant detective’s spirits could sink, the German remarked dryly that he was not hungry anyway and would rather have a half-hour walk in the fresh air. Morava was decidedly grateful. They let Buback out, and Litera veered as directed down the muddy lanes toward the smithy. The tenant smith was finishing one horseshoe while Morava’s mother tended to the horse.

“Jan! My baby!” she shouted joyfully, and carefully put the hoof down onto the hard-packed soil. “It can’t be! It can’t! Oh!”

While the driver swallowed slabs of bread and bacon in the kitchen, washing it down with huge gulps of rose-hip tea, Morava’s mother repeated those words over and over again in the neatly kept sitting room. Her son, meanwhile, hastily told her that he had fallen in love with the sweetest girl under the sun and wanted to make her his wife, and that he intended to bring his mother back to Prague as soon as possible, so that he and Jitka could give her grandchildren while they were still working.

The farther they traveled, the more the land resembled a giant army encampment, and Erwin Buback became more and more ashamed of his nighttime funk.

The faces of officers and soldiers on the truck beds and the seats of the official jeeps were not shining with enthusiasm, but that is how members of any army look when they have been practicing the dreary art of war for years on end. On the other hand, there was no faintheartedness in their faces or even fatigue; they looked rested, radiating a calm resolve and certainty that they would succeed and survive.

He had noticed this phenomenon before. Despite the retreats on all European theaters, a single successful strike was enough to change the soldiers’ mood overnight. A step forward, Buback knew, was a cure, even if only for a couple of days; it gave the German soldiers a reserve of moral and physical strength for another month on the defensive.

This broken terrain, its southern slopes covered with vineyards, would be suitable for a new main line of defense. However, treadmarks in the wet soil indicated that a large number of tanks had recently passed by. That suggested this might be the very place where the long-awaited counteroffensive would begin.

Colonel Meckerle, who had excellent connections in the Furhrer’s main council, had recently made it known that the retreat was part of the most magnificent trap in military history. This was no fairy tale, no rumor, gentlemen! Not just one but two Bolshevik army divisions—one and a half million troops—would be flung into a gigantic cauldron and boiled into borscht. Meckerle had the Gestapo officers’ cafeteria serve the dish, and its dark red color had a very vivid and encouraging effect.

During his short walk around the village green, a massive artillery column rolled by that they had not seen on the way there; it had evidently joined the main road from a side track. The heavy cabs with their long trailers were a dead giveaway: they had to be transporting howitzers beneath their camouflaged canvasses. And it was the howitzer’s percussive fire that launched every major offensive. Buback reproached himself again for his weakness the day before.

Maybe it wasn’t wrong for him and Hilde to be so suspicious of Germany’s highest leader, however awful it sounded. What difference did it make, in the end? This bloody war would decide the fate of the German people for generations to come—and perhaps even their right to exist. Even if Buback had been right to think that Hitler had failed his country, shouldn’t Germans keep trying to avert a total defeat and at least achieve an honorable peace?

Only a year ago he and everyone else had condemned the assassination attempt on the Fuhrer as a monstrous act, carried out by traitors in the pay of the enemy. But maybe the conspirators were simply patriots who had given in to their doubts, just as he and Hilde had. If so, they were not alone. And if Buback was right, there would be more brave men to come who would risk the punishment Meckerle had supposedly described to his closest advisers: being hanged from a butcher hook on a thin string, to die a slow, shameful death.

Buback did not believe there were any altruists of that sort in the Gestapo. There weren’t even any real detectives among his own men. They all came straight from SS schools with a political mission, loosely interpreted as knocking out the teeth of true or imagined Resistance workers. After all, they had stopped investigating their fellow Germans’ minor offenses a long time ago. But one scenario was probable enough to be vexing. There were many who would be interested in Buback’s inner thoughts, because that was their job: to neutralize anyone harboring harmful opinions.

There was only one solution: to support anyone who could promise Germany would not be trampled underfoot, and then wait until they could finally carry out what they’d failed at the year before. And that meant supporting the very army he was now watching and admiring, as it trudged unbroken toward its decisive battle.

His new resolve had an impact on his behavior toward the two Czechs. He knew that for them, Hitler probably embodied all Germans. Suddenly he no longer wanted to contribute to this false impression. And so, to his own surprise, he accepted the gift they brought him: bread with bacon in a fresh white napkin. He continued to keep his distance, so as not to arouse suspicion. However, he felt sure that Beran’s assistant was indebted to him, and so, like it or not, would come out of his shell. The kid even explained that he had wanted to let his mother know he had gotten engaged.

Buback kept up the flow of conversation without asking suspicious questions. A competent young man in a demanding job, like Morava, had to be aware that a police liaison officer to the Gestapo might be interested in other things besides a brutal murderer. And that in itself said a lot about the Czech mentality, which had changed drastically during the Occupation.

Then, later on, Morava began to repeat a certain woman’s name. Belatedly Buback realized it belonged to the very girl he had been thinking about—these days, more often than about Hilde…

The conversation with his mother comforted Morava. For years he had felt guilty for ruining her dream of keeping the smithy in the family. He visited her regularly, but the weight never lifted.

Until today, that is, when a miracle occurred. As he raced to tell her about Jitka, the tears in her eyes frightened him at first. Would she be jealous now, as well? But suddenly she hugged him and said he had made her unbelievably happy.

He suggested to her that she move to Prague, at least for a while. She could stay in his room, since he would be living at Jitka’s anyway. That way, she’d get to know Jitka and they wouldn’t have to fear for her safety here, where the war loomed larger every day. Then, with his head turned, his conscience clear for the first time in a long while, he watched the place where his life began to shrink away, until all that remained was a bright spot soon swallowed by the horizon of grapevines.

To add to Morava’s unusually good mood, the German’s priggish-ness was noticeably on the wane. Of course, Morava turned even the most innocent of questions inside out before answering, swiftly figuring how Beran would read it. But Buback seemed more interested in the area they were passing through, so Morava told stories about his childhood, confident that he was on safe ground. In some places here the road formed an unguarded border between the Protectorate and the Sudeten territories of the former Czechoslovak Republic, which the Munich agreement had effectively given to the Reich, a goodwill gesture that foreshadowed the annexation. How would things look after the war, he suddenly wondered, would he meet his classmates—if they hadn’t fallen in battle, that is—who had saluted Hitler and roared “Heim ins Reich”? Could they still live here, side by side?

To Buback, however, Morava simply described how ten years ago they had thought nothing of switching back and forth between Czech and German; no one would ever have claimed that one was better than the other. Emboldened by a further innocent question, he recalled how they had sung in both languages during wine tastings in the cellars and invited anyone they wanted to the zabijacka, regardless of nationality. What was a zabijacka? the German queried, and Beran’s instructions flashed through Morava’s head.

He described carefully and yet vividly the Moravian custom of the pig slaughter, in which the most basic human need for nourishment merges with a time-honored ritual of civilization and culture. By offering another person food from your own plate, you prevent the elemental greed at the root of all wars. Without using exactly those words, he emphasized that even in times like these, when food became a rare commodity traded on the black market, in south Moravia the old laws still held. If you had given your neighbor a share of the pig slaughter in times past, then you did it now as well. Which these days could be dangerous for someone who gives generously, he said. Suddenly Morava found himself describing—somewhat more boldly than Beran had advised—the story of Jitka’s father, who had slaughtered a pig, not to sell it on the black market, but to divide it among his relatives and friends.