The Widow Killer (6 page)

So be it: I will strike again, and sooner than I planned to! And then again and again! We’ll see whose nerves are stronger. Three will be enough to start it going; censorship is powerless in this country against rumors.

Still, he lacked the strength he had last felt in the house on the embankment. It had melted away as he wearily half sat, half lay on the park bench. Lunch at Angel’s had seemed to set him right, but later on the train he had fallen into a torpor he could not shake off.

The next day he managed to leave work while it was still light. He chose a longer route through the city park to air the unheated building’s mildewy stench out of his clothes and noticed the celebrations. A couple of pathetic booths were bravely pretending, in this sixth wartime winter, to be a Lenten fair. He passed a shooting range, where a youth in a long coat hit five paper roses and the owner grudgingly gave him a prize. He stopped and stared. It was the thing he’d longed for since childhood: a Habesan. Of course, the large puppet was only a shadow of the prewar ones in their shiny colored satins, but here it shone brightly among the other trophies, the highest attainable goal.

He found himself enviously eyeing the happy winner as a handful of the youth’s peers applauded. The boy gave the black turbaned doll to a girl, making another nearby plead for one as well. The sharpshooter looked embarrassed and balked. He dismissed his friends’ insistence and the overlooked girl’s reproaches. “I’d never be able to do it twice,” he said.

The stand owner must have thought so too and sensed a chance to recoup part of his losses. Finally the young man could not resist the pressure and bought five more shots.

He looked on, paralyzed, recognizing his own dilemma: he too was holding back, out of fear that his single success could not be repeated, that next time he would make a laughingstock of himself again. He knew from his stint in the army that even with a well-maintained weapon, there was almost no likelihood of a second round as good as the first. He faced his own failure as the youth carefully lined up his five lead shots, breaking open and reloading the gun. His fate is my fate, he told himself despondently.

His head cleared when he heard the clamor. The angry stall owner was giving the second girl a Habesan as well.

The image of the puppet lulled him to sleep that night. And when he woke up, he knew he was ready again. Time to find himself an alibi, the instruments, and some new clothes.

Quiet wonder was the only description that fit Jan and Jitka’s state “afterward.” Throughout their lovemaking she remained silent, although her rushed breath would slowly grow calmer and her eyes, even now, would look at him with the same surprised expression as on the night of February fourteenth, when a new furrow of bombs had threatened to rip across Prague. At that moment he firmly believed that not only would he survive the death throes of the war, but he would live eternally in a suspended moment of grace named Jitka.

Even in that first darkness, which stripped them of their inborn shame with unexpected ease, he felt that this was a moment of truth for both of them. Both came from honorable Moravian stock, where, from time immemorial, couples had first known each other on their wedding night. They confessed the next day how shocked they were at their own boldness, but soon their consciences were appeased by the tacit understanding that they would marry as soon as possible.

Without even asking, he accompanied her home the next day as well, and she did not seem at all surprised. She made him her grandmother’s potato soup with dried mushrooms, and then they talked about their families—as it turned out, from villages quite near each other. The conversation was so ordinary that he felt ashamed again. Everything he had ignored the day before, when immediate, irrepressible desire had made it so simple and natural, suddenly became a puzzle. What would happen from here? Where to start? What to say? How to touch her? He bitterly regretted the awkward ignorance and powerlessness that made him feel so uncertain, and finally he decided to slink home to his den. But Jitka just smiled at him and stretched out her hand to the lamp. How simple, he thought gratefully amid the rustling of sheets and clothes; his cheeks were still burning, but after that there was nothing but bliss.

This ritual repeated itself every evening, and Morava soon realized that the same steps led a different way each time. It seemed he was constantly charting a new path across an unknown landscape, but at the same time Jitka was uncovering more layers in him as well.

Morning celebrations soon joined their evening ones. They grew accustomed to falling asleep and waking up in each other’s arms: his chin in her hair, her mouth clinging to his breast. They would greet each other with sleepy smiles and a kiss scented with childhood, and close their eyes again until the shrill ring of the alarm clock drove them out of bed.

This silent morning motionlessness opened a new dimension of love in him, and when he would meet Jitka at work later or even just think about her, this was what he remembered. Those Moravian traditions were so ingrained in his character that he never imagined his loved one as she gave herself to him; instead he pictured her in that miraculous state of repose, where instead of touching her body he seemed to approach her soul.

The horrors of their work were implicitly left behind on Bartolomejska Street when the day ended, and they did not waste words on them at home. However, they consciously let the atrocities of war intrude on them more and more each evening. Jan Morava would plug a well-hidden spool (commonly called a churchill) into the radio and cast through the signal jammers’ waves for Czech voices bringing hope and fear. Day by day it grew clearer that the world’s struggle against the Third Reich would be decided in the battle for the Protectorate of Bohmen und Mahren.

Morava had never frightened easily, despite his peaceful nature. He was from a line of blacksmiths and was never afraid of the older kids; they quickly learned that little Jan would do his level best to return every blow he received. Although at work he saw on a daily basis the horrors people inflict on one another, it had never occurred to him that he himself might become a victim. Strange, but true: love awakened this instinctual, animal fear in him overnight.

He remembered how as a small child he would wake up in the middle of the night, sure that something awful had happened to his mother. In a flannel nightshirt soaked with warm sweat, he would pad to the door of the sitting room where his parents’ solid bed stood, noiselessly open it, and strain his ears to catch his mother’s soft breathing beneath his father’s loud snores. If he was unsure, he would glide up to the frame, confirming with a careful touch that her hand and cheek were still warm. Although his father was a tall, sturdy man, Jan could not imagine him surviving without her.

More than twenty years later, a similar fear consumed him that an evil force would rip Jitka from his life. While they were making love, death was absurd; together they formed a magnetic field that repelled all harm. However, once he released her from his embrace, she seemed all the more vulnerable, and so he continued to hold her long after the alarm clock rang.

That March morning the heady scent of live soil wafted into their attic from Vysehrad, Cisafska Louka, and the fields of Pankrac and Branik. Ever since he had come to Prague he had lived near the center, and despite the spartan police dormitory room he inhabited, he never tired of the city. My grass is now asphalt and my trees chimneys, he had once written home, scandalizing his mother. From the first he had fit into the city like a native, and he realized belatedly what a wise move it had been not to take over the family smithy. The only thing he occasionally missed were the smells of the land, which at home had told him as he woke what nature and the weather had in store.

That pungent reek, he knew, marked the point when winter suddenly relaxes its grip and sprouting begins. Years earlier, his grandfather had led him onto the dike of the pond and pointed his callused finger at the frozen surface, just minutes before a great expanse of it suddenly cracked in half with a dark thunder, the liberated water gushing forth from the rift.

Morava was sure that scene would repeat itself this morning, but he did not feel the country boy’s customary joy at winter’s end; instead, fear coursed through him, sharpening as his feelings for Jitka grew stronger.

Tears sprang to his eyes; never had he felt anything like this, not even when his father died. He did not realize that she could see his face.

“Are you crying?” He heard the surprise in her voice.

Unable to speak, he nodded.

“But why?”

“I’m afraid for you.”

“But why… ?” she repeated, puzzled.

It was the first time he had voiced his fear that they were both trapped in the lions’ den. If the war reached Prague, neither Germans nor patriots would be gentle with the Protectorate’s functionaries; the dirtier their own hands were, the fiercer they would be.

“When it looks like the end is near, Jitka, you have to get out of Bartolomejska at any cost.”

“Where should I go?”

“Definitely not home, the front will come that way and they might tar you with the mess your father’s in. You can stay here a couple of days, at worst in the cellar. I’ll tell Beran not to look for you, he’ll certainly understand. Just promise me, if by some chance I’m not here, that at the first sign of danger you’ll do what I said.”

“And you… ?” she said, without understanding.

“I have to stay with Beran, but don’t worry about me; I can take care of myself.”

He could see her eyes begin to draw back, and didn’t understand at first what was happening. She pulled away from him, rolled onto her back, and threw off the thin quilt. Light had begun to filter into the room, and for the first time he both felt and saw her naked. Her white body, with its full breasts and the shadow of her sex, seemed even more defenseless than before.

“Jan, I’ll do as you say, but I also have a request.”

“Yes?”

She spoke self-assuredly, in a voice that rang with a mother’s severity.

“On the off chance that you can’t take care of yourself, I at least want to have your child.”

At eight hundred hours Chief Inspector Buback was meeting with Colonel Meckerle. So far, he informed him, he had no reason to criticize the Prague criminal police in their investigation. The Czechs had swiftly collected data on all the sadistic murders from the beginning of the century onward; their records stretched back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It was three weeks since Buback had settled into the office they hastily cleared for him on Bartolomejska Street. After appearing there at random on an almost daily basis, he was reporting on what he had observed.

“I haven’t found the slightest sign of activity outside the purview of the criminal police. Superintendent Beran has apparently stayed true to his prewar principle that police work should remain apolitical. As far as the Gestapo is aware, only one of Beran’s subordinates violated that commandment—the one who was subsequently executed in July 1942 for sympathizing with Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination. His guilt, however, is questionable, since his accuser was an informer he had jailed several times for fraud.”

Meckerle, tightly wedged into a chair that would have comfortably fit two normal men, smirked knowingly.

“Now comes the ‘but.” “

Buback nodded. His supervisor did not have many likable traits, but at least he was direct; long speeches bored Meckerle and brought out his aggressive side.

“Despite this I do not believe Commissioner Rajner’s assertion that the professional departments of the police will remain loyal to us; Rajner is completely in the dark. Although none of the Czech detectives sense or even imagine that I understand them, there is a heightened vigilance in my presence. My frequent visits have blunted this somewhat, and not all of the Czechs manage to hide all their feelings. What’s especially interesting is the mood early in the morning, when people trade fresh news and rumors. Even if they aren’t listening to enemy radio themselves, the Protectorate’s newspapers unfortunately give them more than enough information; the names of eastern cities in the old Czechoslovak Republic appear more and more frequently in announcements from the Reich armed forces high command. During their morning break for rye coffee or herb tea—which they brew up by the hundred-liter—there is a palpable air of excitement throughout the building. Now and then one of them will even drop the pretense of decorum in my presence.”

“Do we have an agent in the building?”

“Two, in fact: one is a technician, the primary one is the garage manager. Their reports are muddled, and all I can read from them is that they no longer believe Germany will eventually prevail, and that they are afraid for their own skins. To judge by what happened in the Netherlands, they will be the first to stab us in the back, if it gives them an alibi. Things will certainly be even worse in the operations units of the Czech police, since they are part of the repressive apparatus of a collaborationist government. As the front moves closer to Prague, the danger will grow that they’ll turn against us at the eleventh hour to rehabilitate themselves.”

“How can we avoid it? Should we lock a couple of them up? Or shoot them?”

What a waste of time, Buback thought; if he can’t even come up with a more intelligent idea…

“I’m afraid it would radicalize the Czech police; in Prague alone there are up to two thousand of them—badly armed, it’s true, but well trained.”

“So then what?”

Meckerle was evidently starting to feel bored.

“Give me a bit of time, Standartenfuhrer. I’ll try to gain the confidence of one of the office workers, Beran’s secretary.”

The giant’s eyes once again showed interest.

“Aha. A little ‘give-and-take’? At last. You’re too young and handsome to play the lifelong widower. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“That’s exactly what I have in mind…”

My God, he stopped short; what am I thinking?

He recalled his first sight of the young woman: in the Czech police superintendent’s anteroom, the eyes of his Hilde had looked shyly and touchingly out at him, just like when he had seen her for the first time…