The Widow Killer (18 page)

Who can figure this guy out? Morava mused, but a weight lifted from him. He informed Buback about the steps they had just taken, and then sprang a request on him. Only German offices could authorize the installation of telephone lines. They needed one in the sexton’s tiny workroom, so they could call for reinforcements in an emergency.

“I’ll see to it,” Buback announced curtly.

“Your translator will be here in fifteen minutes,” Morava promised him again as he left, and it occurred to him that he owed the man more than that. “Miss Modra is probably on the phone right now with her father. I’d like to thank you for that as well.”

“Then you’re in the wrong place,” Buback cut him off. “I told you the Reich is a government of law, and it expects in return that the Protectorate police, above all, will not waver in their respect of that law.”

“Understandably so,” Morava assured him and left.

Get as far from that guy as possible, he thought. Suddenly he believed Jitka when she said Buback could destroy him as effortlessly as he had helped her.

She must have waited so long at the post office that it wasn’t worth coming in to work, but why hadn’t she at least called?

Impatiently he sorted through the new reports, arranged a translator for the German, and stopped by the cemetery to ask his men for their first impressions. He was pleased that it took a long time to find them; even in this cramped space they had already learned how to make themselves nearly invisible.

At home, the smell of Jitka’s maddeningly delicious cabbage cakes and a bouquet of tulips, as dear and rare as meat these days, welcomed him.

“So Papa’s home,” he said joyfully, swinging her around in the air.

“Grandpa, you mean,” she corrected him.

“How’s that?”

“You’ll be the papa now,” she said, slipping into their south Moravian dialect. “Watch out or you’ll shake the baby right out of me, lover boy!”

APRIL

Jana Kavanova walked home from the funeral smiling. Beneath her black stockings and black ankle boots the bright green grass struggled up between the cobblestones; runners of woodbine wound about the fortress ramparts, their leaves slowly unfolding, and the sky over the moat of the street was amethyst blue and free of airplanes, as it had been for weeks. A feeling of complete happiness suffused her, so strong that she felt ashamed.

Her older sister had just buried her beloved husband. Jana had left her up at the graveside and hurried home to the embrace of her young lover. She could—and would—comfort her sister tomorrow, the day after, and all the days to come, but she would only have Robert today. Prague was swarming with Gestapo agents; it was too risky for him to stay. She had made the arrangements; tomorrow he would be taken on borrowed documents to a place where he could wait out the end of the war safely.

Jana, almost thirty, had met Robert two months before in the shelter beneath Prague’s main rail station. A tall fellow in a clearance-troops overcoat, he gallantly offered her the rare gift of a cigarette. His voice was deep, and in the emergency lighting he looked like her contemporary. She had already accepted his invitation to meet that evening when she learned that he was a newly deployed seventh-year gymnasium student. She kept her word, however, and had not regretted it.

He ended up at her place that evening. The majority of pubs and cafes were closed and the rest seemed hollow and empty: either there were no menus for the customers, or no food for the cooks, or no appetite for the food. Back at the statue of Saint Wenceslas, still the meeting place for young Prague—and God knows Jana didn’t feel old!—she boldly invited him to her apartment for tea with real rum. She could always send him home to his mother, she rationalized to herself. However, as it turned out, he was no child; she warmed to him more and more, and when they had finished the rum (without any tea), she was happy for him to stay.

I’m certainly not his first, she thought jealously, when she saw how skillful he was. Still, she had not slept with anyone for a good six months, since her most recent disastrous fling, and this kid was only a temporary distraction, anyway. Eventually she would find the right man, maybe after the war when the better-quality ones came home from the army. So she gave herself to him without a second thought.

Apparently he took to her as well. He confessed that he’d never been with such a… mature woman. He chose the word carefully and it stung her, but at the same time she felt appreciated. After that he came to see her every night and painted a humorous picture for her of his aunt and guardian’s mounting disapproval. Then, in mid-March, he had learned that in two days his whole class was leaving for northern Moravia.

The Protectorate’s eighth-year gymnasium students had long since been deployed at hard labor around the Reich; the seventh-years were now assigned to build the defensive line against the anticipated Russian offensive. Gangs of eighteen-year-olds were to do the excavating under the supervision of German guards. Families of deserters would be threatened with punitive measures. Robert therefore went.

As they agreed, she tagged along that morning, twenty yards behind him—too young to hug him like the other mothers, too old to join the girls accompanying their boyfriends. The truck with its benches trundled off and dissolved in her tears. She knew then that this was not just a passing fling; Robert had truly become her lover.

For a month she heard nothing from him. Her initial despair gradually abated as she stubbornly pieced together information from every possible source. Finally she could not bear the burden of her love alone, and confided in her sister. It surprised and comforted her when her sister emphatically told Jana not to worry about the age difference; she was happy just to see Jana happy.

Leaving early today had been her sister’s idea. Her older sibling had fallen in love with and married a man twice her age, knowing she would soon be more of a nurse than a wife. But she loved him even then and cared for him for many years. Four days ago he simply did not wake up. Only then did Jana hear her sister wail that her life had lost all meaning.

Despite this, her sister ordered her to go straight home from the funeral. She was the only one who knew that Robert was momentarily hiding at Jana’s. As the Soviet cannonade swept across the northeast past Ostrava, the Nazis’ deviousness grew worse and worse; there were fearful rumors that in their desperation the Germans were planning to send the Czech students out in front of the tanks as human shields. His classmates were afraid to flee, so Robert risked it alone.

Two days’ hard march brought him to Olomouc. Even hitchhiking, he’d seen his luck hold; a truck driver put him in a sick deliveryman’s seat, and took him all the way to Prague. Their first night together he and Jana made love until morning. The following day she visited Robert’s aunt. The woman was overjoyed to hear the news, and promised to arrange safe transfer and shelter for her nephew until the end of the war.

So this would be their last night together for who knew how long, and Jana was grateful that her sister had not asked her to give up a minute of their limited time. At the graveside, she thought fondly of her dear brother-in-law, cast a handful of dirt on the coffin, gave her sister a heartfelt kiss, and set off toward the tram. Death was instantly forgotten, and Jana was filled with that joyful longing that had been with her for three days, ever since she let Robert in and he knelt, exhausted, on the threshold and pressed his head into her lap.

The tram conductor asked if she had a ticket, and Jana returned abruptly from her thoughts of Robert to the outside world. As she paid she noticed a postman with a bulging bag. Why did he seem so familiar? The fog began to clear from her brain. Hadn’t he passed her on the way from the cemetery? But if he’d been going uphill, how did he end up here?

She put him out of her mind and spent the rest of the trip to Smichov laying her plans. Of course, Robert couldn’t come to Prague from the country, but why shouldn’t she visit him on Sundays? The trains still ran, albeit with delays, despite the air raids. She wasn’t afraid of them anyway; love was her armor.

As she quietly unlocked the door, her heart was in her throat. She crossed the entrance hall on tiptoes and silently opened the bedroom door. Robert lay naked on the bed, breathing deeply. Yes, he was a man, but in sleep his boyishness showed through. She gazed at him, lost in adoration, and in that moment believed that despite the difference in their ages, nothing could separate them.

The doorbell made her jump. Who could it be? The police? Or maybe the Gestapo? Impossible, she snapped at herself; no one had any idea he was here, aside from his aunt and her sister, and they would never betray him. Feeling more confident, she returned to the apartment door and boldly asked, “Who’s there?”

“Special delivery,” the answer came back.

She remembered the man in the blue cape, swollen by the fat bag underneath it, and had to laugh: she and her postman had taken the same tram here. Or would it be a different carrier? Probably! She opened the door.

It was him.

They still kept to their unspoken agreement: the terrors and horrors of their work would not cross the door of their tiny and uncertain refuge. The need for peace and quiet ran deep in their blood.

Both Jitka and Jan had grown up in families that were a world unto themselves, and had spent their childhoods in an atmosphere of gruff tenderness. Just north of Moravia’s vineyards, nature seemed to have run out of the gifts she had been so profligate with farther south. Here she coddled no one. Economy was everything, starting with food. Children handed down shoes and clothing until the oft-mended uppers and fabrics gave out.

Caresses, not sweets or presents, were the only signs of affection for the youngest offspring—and those often hurt, since hardened calluses covered their parents’ palms. And when that same hand punished them—as it occasionally and reluctantly did—its traces were visible on the skin for days afterward. However, one thing neither Jan nor Jitka could ever remember was a conscious injustice. Once, when Jan was beaten instead of the true culprit (a stable boy who had blamed a broken jug on him and was later found out), his mother knelt before him and kissed the hand she had just thrashed.

Jan and Jitka first spotted each other in Beran’s anteroom. It was just before his promotion to assistant detective; she had arrived under the work exchange, a Nazi order that uprooted young people from their native villages, breaking the ties that might lead them into the Resistance. The very first words they exchanged brought them closer together: their south Moravian accents marked them as clearly as a scent identifies a flower. Their deeply ingrained modesty did not, of course, permit them to show their interest. It took them a year to get farther than “good morning” and until recently they had addressed each other formally, but their warm smiles—his as gentle as hers— confirmed they shared a common temperament.

Their meeting as lovers on the day the bombs reached Prague was therefore natural—and practically foreordained.

He never doubted they would stay together afterward, nor did he need to ask; it was further proof of the link their shared roots had forged. Young couples can have trouble adapting to sudden communality and often falter on it, unable to overcome the selfishness of differing habits, but from the first time Jitka and Jan woke up together, their common language smoothed over the minor differences in their characters. Their opinions and needs merged; they became in truth “one soul—one body.”

When they boarded the tram at the long-closed National Theater, the working day with all its filth was simply forgotten, as if they were never going to return. At home they cleaned and cooked together, discovering new stories that mapped out the part of their lives when, incredibly enough, they had not known each other, and in love they learned more about one another. This time of innocence would end each morning as Jan awoke. Holding Jitka close in his embrace, he would let his brain get to work.

Today, exceptionally, his mind was already racing before bedtime. In her second month of pregnancy Jitka felt worse than ever before. Her frequent indisposition made her tired during the day; lethargy dulled her appetite and her ensuing weakness made her stomach more irritable. It was a vicious circle that accelerated as time went on. Beran spared her as much as he could; he even suggested that she take sick leave, but she refused.

“Then I would really fall apart. It’s work that’s holding me together right now.”

Morava knew she did not want to leave him alone with his string of failures, and in return he arranged something to look forward to: Saturday, April twenty-eighth, would be their wedding in Jitka’s hometown church, and he had already filed the applications. Both families had agreed by letter that if the front moved dramatically before then, they would marry in Prague, in a civil ceremony; it was unthinkable that Jitka should remain single as their child grew inside her.

That day became a magic date for him. He had learned from Beran that a good detective always sets a deadline for cracking the case, even if the deadline was only a personal one. Now the repeated newspaper announcement and the confidential information they had sent had brought in a stream of warnings and reports, and it was up to him to solve it in time. He had no doubt that the butcher was planning to strike again, and this time he wanted to be quicker.

The killer, he felt, was already in his closely woven web, and Morava’s greatest fear was that some accident of fate would let the man slip through a slack loop. Although his most experienced people were reviewing the reports as they came in (so long as none of them were busy directing the graveyard operation), he tried at least to have a look at all of them. In doing so he realized he had come to rely on Buback as well.

At a certain point—actually, since his mysterious dinner with Jitka— the German had begun to cooperate enthusiastically and with impressive results. During their daily consultations, Morava noticed that the chief inspector was fingering the same sort of suspects he was. One time he mentioned it and had the impression his overseer was even pleased.