The Widow Killer (44 page)

He was even more shocked at the political problem presented by Vlasov’s anticipated attack on his former allies. The outlaw Russian general was expected to turn on the Germans, a move that would greatly help the insurgents. According to Beran, an increasing faction within the council believed that any cooperation with Vlasov was tantamount to approving the Russian rebels’ original motive for fighting against their native country.

The commanders from the city’s southeastern edge were asking urgently for an explanation: Why couldn’t they accept Vlasov’s men as emergency protectors? They were exasperated to see the Germans’ death grip closing around them, and made it clear how little these breaking and re-forming political ice floes interested them.

However, both commanders thought the suggested German retreat from the area around the main train station—a dangerous reinforcement source if Schorner should attack Prague—should be accepted as a local decision not affecting the Allied principle of total and unconditional capitulation.

Beran and Brunat therefore decided to recommend that the Czech National Council accept a political resolution to the situation.

And what about Vlasov? Beran claimed—and Brunat backed him on it—that the Russian would not want to attack unless necessary. Then he reached for the telephone.

“If the Germans attack you,” he ordered someone, “Vlasov’s people can fight alongside you; I’ll take the heat for it.”

In the meanwhile, Buback would wait there, the chiefs decided in conclusion; they would guard him against the ever-growing numbers of patriots who were trying to set a sharper tone at Bartolomejska. Several colleagues, supposedly led by the garage manager, had adorned themselves with armbands marked RG, calling themselves the Revolutionary Guards.

How strange, Morava thought. Tetera—nicknamed “Pretty Boy” for his skirt chasing—never let a word against the Germans pass his lips; they’d always watched their words in his presence. But the young detective had already noticed at the radio station how quickly the cowards became heroes. After all, the woman called Andula (who, at a critical moment, had asked them to heed the Germans’ request to cease broadcasting distress calls) had become the first to compile a list of “radio station lighters.”

Finally he had finished his tasks. As he left, he agreed with Buback on three times and places to meet (just in case) and picked up Litera and the car in the courtyard. After confirming with the operations officer that, excepting the center, Bubenec and Pankrac, there were still contiguous bands of the city in Czech hands, he decided to wear his uniform so they would not be held up with constant identification checks. The others wanted to avoid Germans, but Morava now believed he might be able to reason with many of them. They could always ask to be taken to the Gestapo building; curiously, thanks to Buback, it might offer them the greatest degree of safety.

First they visited the caretaker. The house on the embankment was locked and they had almost given up ringing when unexpectedly something moved in the raised ground-floor window. The Germans had had guards here till Friday, he explained once he’d opened the door; yesterday they’d disappeared with a truckload of papers, so he was on his own. They still hadn’t caught the murderer? No, Morava admitted, and now they couldn’t even help the caretaker. Surely he could see what was afoot, so in future: Keep the door locked and don’t open it! Still, they would like to test his memory once more.

In putting nine other photographs chosen randomly from the archive on the table along with Rypl’s, he was satisfying the conscience Beran’s training had drilled into him, rather than his intellect; he had long since ruled out the caretaker as a reliable witness. Instantly he realized his error.

The shock of the murder, the bombardment and his resulting shameful bowel trouble must have temporarily clouded the man’s memory, but a few months’ distance had refreshed it; the caretaker pointed without hesitation to Rypl.

Finally, a state’s witness!

Could he move somewhere else for the meanwhile, Morava asked. Where, the man replied; the front would cut off his path to safety in eastern Bohemia any day now, and how would he get out of Prague, anyway? It occurred to Morava that he could requisition a guard for the man under the pretext of securing German secret offices; his boss had been right once again.

On the way over Morava had thought it strange he was fighting so hard for one witness while Rypl was conducting public executions. Or does murder stop being murder, legally, when the victim belongs to a stronger nation that forces its law on others through violence? And what does it mean when a new police force starts to form within the old one? Would the garage manager Tetera dare say he served the law better than Beran did? He persisted in his gloomy thoughts as they crossed a dozen or so barricades. Finally they were at the house where earlier he had come looking for Karel Malina, the Beroun depot employee.

“Take something we can pry with,” he suggested to Litera.

He headed straight for the neighbor’s bell. A bony man opened the door.

“Come in. Eliska’s been expecting you.”

She greeted the policemen. Her cheeks burned with repentance.

“Why didn’t you tell us the truth?” Morava scolded her, although he was mainly angry at himself.

“You didn’t have uniforms—”

“I showed you my documents!”

“But there was a German with you—”

“From the criminal police. He’s helping us.”

“How was I to know?”

“I told you clearly we were looking for a murderer.”

Her husband had been studying Morava. Now he made a decision.

“Tell them. They don’t look like provocateurs. And it’s out in the open now anyway. What if something happened to Malina?”

“Karel…” She swallowed and corrected herself. “Mr. Malina came on Tuesday to tell me he was hiding a parachutist…”

No! Morava despaired; he’d been here—just one door away.

“… and that he’d be going away to meet the man’s contacts, so he might be detained. He took his keys back; I had to swear not even to tell my husband.”

“But you did tell him,” he reproached them both.

“Only yesterday. I thought it was taking too long, and by now it seemed a bit strange…”

“Have you heard anything from next door?”

“No. But a cop could have a peek, couldn’t he?”

“Not legally,” he said, chafing at the impotence of old-fashioned laws. “We have to have authorization for forced entry. I don’t know where I would get it in this situation, so I’ll take responsibility for it myself. But I need both of you as witnesses for the opening, search, and closure of the apartment.”

The engineer agreed for both of them. When Litera tried to pry the door open with a tire iron, the man brought a whole box of tools from his apartment and wedged a massive chisel in himself. At the second hammer blow the lock gave way. A stench hit them as if they’d opened a sewer.

It never ends, Morava thought, his heart sinking. Dumbly he exchanged a knowing glance with Litera, who no longer hid the pistol in his hand, and suggested to the woman, “Better stay here, ma’am. I’m afraid it won’t be pleasant.”

“Run along home, Eliska,” her husband ordered.

Now the import of it hit her, but she could not obey. Collapsing against the staircase wall, she clutched her throat with her hands.

Piles of trash lay in the kitchen; an unmade bed and an open wardrobe greeted them in the bedroom. Morava pressed down on the last door handle, his hand wrapped—out of habit—in a handkerchief.

In the bathtub, on a checked blanket smeared with feces, lay a small man, dead less than twenty-four hours.

Jan Morava immediately remembered another body lying beneath a cover of soil and once again felt the touch of pure despair.

He was the first to wake up, thanks to his bladder. They had left the German woman overnight to “rest in peace,” as the bald and toothless Lojza jokingly put it. There were plenty of other guest bedrooms in the extensive apartment, but his wariness had led him to choose a maid’s chamber instead, where he could sleep alone and lock the door.

It was raining. Not hard, but persistently; in the misty morning the scrawny courtyard trees evoked the inhospitable mood of a chill winter’s end. Here and there a pop resounded, as if someone nearby had smashed an inflated paper bag; it didn’t sound at all like distant gunfire. The noises were so few and far between that suddenly he felt worried: maybe it was all over. That would be a shame!

Yesterday, he was sure, had been a milestone in his life just like the day he punished that floozy in Brno. With one difference: back then he had failed miserably, thanks to his own incompetence, and withdrawn into his shell for years; it took him from February until the black April day when they nearly caught him to crawl painfully out again. Still, since the uprising began yesterday he’d done better than he’d ever dreamed, and now he was awash in self-confidence, just like that rookie on the Brno shooting range years ago.

Most of all, he felt great. Although he had devotedly followed her orders, he had always been prone to treacherous attacks of lethargy. Now he knew their source: society’s hypocritical morality had forced him to hide. It called righteous purges a crime and had him pursued like a beast, hoping to wreak its sorry retribution on his neck. The same society, however, had now declared open season on its occupiers, and he was its tool of punishment.

I AM THE NATION!

On the way to the bathroom he gave the others a military wake-up call; before he could shower, he found them blinking sleepily in the kitchen. Real coffee (which they’d found here, of course) revived them, and Lojza remembered the German in the bedroom.

“Anyone like seconds?” he asked.

The boy turned red as he shook his head; clearly he was afraid of any further humiliation.

“ ‘Snot really my thing,” the stoker admitted. “I have to feel a woman all around me.”

“Well, I’ll just jump on ‘er for a second and then we’re off,” the bald man said. “Sure you don’t want any, Ludva?”

This time he was ready.

“Actually I do,” he said, “but once you’re done, and my own way. Let me know.”

When Lojza reported a short while later that he’d had his fun and was looking forward to the show, even the others could not hide their curiosity. The night had not been kind to the German; she certainly hadn’t slept and the uncomfortable position had exhausted her perhaps even more than the men’s lust. When all of them entered the room again, she did not even open her eyes.

“I know,” Ladislav guessed. “You’ll do her dressed, so you won’t get dirty.”

He grimaced ironically at the stoker.

“Look at me!” he ordered her in German, the way he had done to the baroness in February, and to the rest in Czech thereafter.

So she listened, and he once again saw in her eyes animal fear splintering into humble resignation, as if he were her only hope.

Suddenly he was hungry to show them all of it. In the theater where he’d worked, he had never understood how a grown man could take satisfaction in performing, but now it was exactly what he longed for. Of course it was primarily the boy he wanted to see it, Pepik might be his first apprentice.

Watch out!

A red light flashed in his brain. Was he really out of danger? Someone might recognize him and try to make him into a run-of-the-mill murderer. With one witness still at large (whom he couldn’t forget), could he afford to hang three more around his neck, including an adolescent?

I’m no fool!

After all, he could show them another way, similar, but a bit more ambiguous. He’d just neutralize that perfidious dove, where her depraved soul would try to hide!

He checked that her mouth was still well gagged, and placed the point of the knife beneath the nipple of her breast.

“This is how I do it,” he said.

He began to press, gently but insistently. The sharp blade broke the skin, leaving only a red line. Her body tensed as far as the straps permitted; the sound that emerged from under the gag was more like a long brass tone with a mute.

Yes, now he was really aroused, truly aroused like a man who determines life and death, but his hand remained firm, pressing evenly on the haft even while the woman struggled ever more fiercely. Her eyes seemed to flow over, but so did those of the men, he noticed with satisfaction. No one breathed a word; motionless, they followed the slow plunge of steel into her breast.

Then, finally, his sense of touch told him the tip of the knife had reached her heart. Normally he stopped here to come back to it after he had finished the rest. He paused now as well, but only to release his fist for a moment and show them the blade stuck firmly in her flesh. The German had meanwhile closed her eyes; she was trying to escape, to flee from him in spirit.

The other three men were pale. He could not risk it; their wonder might turn into disgust. He grasped the handle again with his fingers and guided it in as deep as it would go. The body immediately slackened. He ripped out the knife, and to his surprise, there was not a drop of blood on the blade.

“What the…” Lojza whispered.

That was all anyone said.

As he undid the straps to wrap them back around his waist, all of them solicitously helped him, one at each corner of the bed. Then it was he who used the stoker’s joke:

“Well, the morning’s still young!”

To dispel the shock, he had them count up their money. When he’d left the runt’s yesterday for the radio station, he’d completely forgotten he was broke. Events had taken the other three unawares as well; the older two had a couple of crowns, the boy not a coin to his name. They searched the apartment, but the Germans had cleverly removed their marks and jewels to a safer place in the Reich. In the woman’s purse they found a handful of crumpled Protectorate crowns; it would have to do for the time being.

“So what,” he reassured them. “The harvest’s just starting; we’ll do our reaping somewhere else.”

As they were putting on their guns in the entrance hall, the bell rang. His throat caught, but immediately he realized the advantage was on their side. He nodded to Ladislav and Lojza to stand with him opposite the front door, and to the youngest to go open it. The boy showed his cleverness; as soon as he had done so he dropped lightning-fast to the ground to give them clear aim.