The Widow Killer (15 page)

“Please accept my condolences, Herr Buback. You have no idea how well I understand. My parents and brothers perished in the first raid on Hamburg. A stroke of bad luck that both my brothers were on leave at the same time. I lost my husband last year in the retreat from East Prussia. But as opposed to you, I’ve lost the strength to mourn. It’s not just that as a woman, I can’t allow myself to; to be honest, I didn’t really feel like it. With him, at least…”

She gestured with her head in the direction where her expansive lover was taking cover with his wife and the cream of party and government society. Then she fell silent, rooting energetically through her handbag until she found a gold ladies’ cigarette case and a matching lighter. She offered him the box.

“It’s not allowed down here,” he said, drawing her attention to a notice on the wall.

“But they”—once again that sharp motion toward the leaders’ sanctuary—“they were smoking.”

“Quod licit Iovi… Fine for the brasses, but not for the masses,” he translated freely.

She swore softly like a man, threw the items back in her bag, and glanced around the cellar. This was his first opportunity to really look at her. What he saw surprised him. Why would a beast so powerful that even his equals trembled before him choose precisely this one—out of all the young German women running around Prague? And was she young? In the darkened entranceway of her building, in the half-lit car, even in the ballroom where she sat next to him, her slenderness helped her pass as a young girl. The bright light of the shelter, however, mercilessly revealed the truth. Thirty? Thirty-five? Even more? The energy of her every movement spoke against it.

In any case, she was the exact opposite of the Germanic ideal of womanhood as portrayed by the Freie Korperkultur. But she was equally unlike his Hilde and the Prague girl he had invited tomorrow… where indeed? And what would he say to the girl once they had covered her father’s case? Would he invite her home? How would she react? And how should he behave? If she agrees? If she refuses?

As he pondered these questions, he must have been staring intently at Marleen Baumann, who brought him back to the present with an unexpected question.

“You take me for a better sort of whore, don’t you? If not for a worse sort?”

Put on the spot, he stammered a confused protest. Surprisingly it satisfied her.

“I’m glad to hear it. You see, I’d been alone for so long. I find most German men repulsive. At least he”—again she nodded her chin in that direction, and Buback sensed that she was avoiding his name and title—“isn’t a gutless ass-kisser.”

She gave a gruff laugh, which matched her dainty appearance as poorly as her vocabulary did. In fact, her whole face, as he could now see up close, was a collection of disturbing details. Her dove-colored eyes sat strikingly far from one another; eyebrows rising from the bridge of a large nose drooped to the outer edges of her face in an arc reminiscent of clown’s makeup. She had a long chin, a forehead that was too high, and very narrow lips set quite deep beneath her nose, which further increased the sharpness of her profile when she stopped speaking. Suddenly he noticed an oblique line falling from her left earlobe almost across her whole throat; how did he miss it earlier? Oh, of course! She had probably covered it with powder. This wrinkle or scar of a hard-to-distinguish shade between light green and pale yellow indicated a secret.

As if reading his last unspoken thought, she said: “Anyone who hasn’t seen me in a year doesn’t recognize me, Herr Buback. In the course of a few days I lost my reason for living and came to know every kind of depravity on earth. When I realized that I could not kill myself—because more than anything I fear my own death—I learned to survive. I can lie so perfectly that even you would believe me if I wanted you to.”

“Why don’t you want me to?” he asked her, purely to keep the conversation going; he was completely captivated by his new discovery. Yes, her whole face was disturbingly mysterious; as soon as she spoke she changed beyond belief. Her lips became her dominant feature, suddenly so full that they surrounded him, and all her apparent defects coalesced at once into an image far from “beautiful” in the ordinary sense but nonetheless provocatively attractive.

Erwin Buback now knew why his boss kept her. That face was omnipresent; you could not overlook it nor, apparently, forget it.

“Why don’t I want you to?” she repeated, and laughed again. “Apparently I trust you.”

“What did I do to deserve that?”

“As long as fate lets them exist, men only half as interesting as you,” she said to his face without a speck of coquetry, “can live in the present moment, here in our twilight of the gods, day by day, night by night. But you’ve stayed faithful to your old loves. I admire it all the more for being incapable of it myself.”

He remembered the young Czech woman again, but he did not have the strength or at the moment any reason to correct her. Instead, he gladly acceded to her next request, and began to talk about his wife and daughter. She listened to him attentively, her palms planted firmly on the bench, and he soon noticed the burden of his grief lightening and dispersing slowly into his own words, melding painful facts into comforting memories.

The Allied squadrons crisscrossing the Protectorate held them in the cellar until almost midnight. When the all clear sounded, a thoroughly bored Meckerle had to go off to bed with his wife, who had developed a headache in the cellar air. He managed to pay his respects to his mistress and convey to Buback that his personal chauffeur would return for them. Although the party was starting to gain steam again, both of them understood what the message meant. When later he kissed her hand at the car door and she realized that he was not coming with her, she used the curtain of sound from the motors and voices to ask a further unexpected question.

“Would you be interested in meeting again, when I have time?”

“No,” he answered forthrightly. “The colonel made it clear that was out of the question.”

“I’m not his property,” she announced flatly. “I’m no one’s, not anymore. I’m a free spirit. If some day you feel ready to listen to me the way I listened to you today, you know where to find me. And don’t worry, our number one spy won’t find out.”

During the whole trip home on foot—an impulse he’d suddenly succumbed to—Buback found himself unable to concentrate. He felt torn asunder: He belonged to his old love, as he headed towards new hope, but out of the blue he had found a strange affinity with this unknown creature, who had captured the heart of the Protectorate’s third-in-command.

Hedvika Horakova found a friend at the graveyard. For three months she had stood alone, twice a week, at the grave of her spouse, killed by a toppled crane during the Totaleinsatz—the total deployment—in Essen. Then, one February day, a fresh hole greeted her from nearby. The next day it had been filled in, and she found a sister in grief sobbing over it.

They hit it off right away. On the fourteenth of February, Marta Pavlatova had been making lunch for her husband, who was on the afternoon shift at the Pragovka factory. As usual, he was hanging around the kitchen getting on her nerves, so she chased him off to the grocery store on the opposite corner for their potato rations. From the kitchen’s second-floor window she could see him leaving the store with a full string bag, when all of a sudden a giant invisible hand picked her up and carried her across the apartment; the weight of her body smashed open the door into the hallway and landed her with a blow against the door onto the staircase.

When she managed to stand up and scramble back into the kitchen, the view from the dusty window opened onto a completely unfamiliar street. The grocery store building was split in two; its left half had collapsed into the small square. Only afterward did she notice that the rag doll lying in the center of it was wearing her husband’s pants and sweater.

Hedvika’s tragedy was a hundred days older; she could lend Marta courage. Both were twenty-seven; both had waited to start a family until after the war and were now left alone. They thanked fate that they had met. Hedvika sewed at home; the cinema owner had taken Marta on as an usher. For the moment, they had no reason or desire to look for new partners. Every Wednesday and Saturday before noon they would meet at the Vysehrad cemetery, which was roughly the same distance for both of them—Marta from Pankrac and Hedvika from Emauzy—clean up the gravesites, and set off along the ramparts of the old castle. They would stroll around the accessible portions, taking in the panorama of their native city, which was pulling free from winter’s grip just as slowly and unhurriedly as spring approached.

Then they would head back to one house or the other, depending on whose turn it was to prepare lunch. Over the meal they would talk about what had happened to them, and try to guess when and how the war would end—and what they would do then. They soon admitted to each other that their husbands had disappointed them. They honored the memory of the departed, but believed that once freedom came, a new and better chapter of their lives as women would then begin.

Today they had met as usual, Marta still in black, Hedvika—who simply could not stand the color anymore—in long beige slacks and a quilted bodice, with a kerchief tied around the top of her head. This time they set off for Pankrac, where at Marta’s a rare treat awaited them: potato pasta with poppyseeds.

She had barely begun to cook it, adding the rabbit lard sparingly, when the doorbell rang. Marta’s husband had worked the night shift every third week; at his wife’s request he had equipped the door with a solid chain lock. Now it allowed her to open the door without fear. She spotted an unknown man in a smallish winter coat, unbuttoned to reveal a mouse-colored suit. In one hand he held the stuffed briefcase of an office worker; with the other he raised a flattened hat.

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” he said politely, “but I was told that I might find Mrs. Horakova here.”

“Yes, of course…”

Although only a month had passed since they met, it did not surprise Marta to find someone asking after her friend here. Out of habitual caution she left the chain hitched and called into the kitchen.

“Hedvika, there’s a man here looking for you…”

Even the other woman was not too surprised; she too, in the short time they had known each other, had started thinking of her friend’s house as home. She came into the entrance hall, and the man through the slit in the door raise his hat again.

“Mrs. Horakova?”

“Yes…”

“I’m sorry to drop in on you like this, but it’s in your interest. Your husband perished in the February air raid, didn’t he?”

“No! There’s been a mistake.”

His hand, which was just replacing the hat, suddenly shook severely. It seemed to both women that he was about to faint.

“That was my husband,” Marta exclaimed, “Radomir Pavlat.”

“My husband, Ludvik Horak,” Hedvika added, “lost his life last year during the Totaleinsatz in the Reich.”

The visitor immediately calmed down.

“I must just have mixed up the names, then; I do apologize. As it happens, it concerns both of you. The offices of the Protectorate will be paying the families of air-raid and Totaleinsatz casualties a lumpsum compensation. I’m distributing questionnaires that must be filled out and signed. When they sent me here, I never thought I’d be able to take care of both you ladies.”

“Why don’t you come in?” Marta offered, and pushed the door to, so she could unhook the chain.

“But who sent you here?” Hedvika suddenly wondered. “I don’t think anyone in my building knew—”

The man was already in the apartment and slammed the door behind him. His free hand suddenly held a long, thin knife.

“One word out of you,” he hissed, “and I’ll cut your throats.”

At first glance Lieutenant Colonel Hinterpichler was a lover of good drink, better suited to lederhosen than a buttoned-up uniform. As head of the anti-black market and economic sabotage division, he had apparently been appropriately instructed by Meckerle. Hinterpichler passed his assistant the sheet of paper where Buback had written the name and address of Jitka’s father (obtained from Beran that morning by telephone), and ordered the man to connect him immediately with the head of the appropriate office.

He offered Buback a cognac, which he claimed was an old French variety just seized from a black marketeer, and for a few minutes made small talk with him as if they were old chums in a pub. Finally one of the phones on his desk rang. Like an actor finishing his coffee and stepping onstage to play a sovereign, he instantly modified his voice and demeanor. Suddenly he was every inch a high functionary of the forces everyone feared so greatly, including their own employees.

Having demonstrated his authority, he listened silently to his subordinate in Moravia. The gold pen in his hand hung poised over the paper. Finally he asked a question.

“How is he physically? Can he stand a few knocks?”

Shortly thereafter he nodded contentedly and made his pronouncement.

“Slap him around a bit, but don’t overdo it. Then stick him with a heavy fine and let him go. Heil Hitler.”

He replaced the handset and, back behind the curtains, was jovial again, giving Buback a conspiratorial wink.

“A bit of a drubbing will squelch any suspicions that we’ve recruited him as an informer; that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

He grudgingly admitted that it was; he just did not know how he would explain it to the man’s daughter. He stood up, so as not to put his discomfort on display.

“Thank you, Obersturmbannfuhrer; it will make my work considerably easier.”

“It’s nothing, really,” Hinterpichler grinned smugly. “Pig slaughtering is probably part of the local culture; we’d have to hang all of them. Better to punish a few randomly and keep it under control that way.

Back in his old office Buback breathed deeply in and out a few times, but could not calm down. Getting angry at himself helped; it was an old habit that had pulled him through many a life crisis. Have I lost my mind? Why am I behaving like an adolescent? He had the switchboard put him through to the Czech criminal police and instantly heard her voice (what was so special about it? Yes! Now he knew: She always sounded like she was just waking up).