Widow Killer

by Pavel Kohout

  On a walk through the Franconian vineyards just one year ago, he had been trying to explain an idea he had just had to Hilde. In retrospect, he had probably been attempting to convince himself more than her. By retreating on all fronts, he had claimed, the Furhrer was coiling his people into a spring that would then fling the Allies into the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean Sea and across the Urals. Then Hilde unexpectedly asked him if the Furhrer hadn't lost touch with "his people" long ago.

  The low curtains of grapevines stretched out far and wide around them, with not a person in sight, and so he shouted at her. How could she, how dare she lend her voice to such filthy suspicions—now of all times, when only the iron will of a united Germany could overcome their ideologically confused and disorganized enemies?

  Endless times since then he had imagined this scene, seen the colors, smelled the scents, heard Hilde and himself, and his regret at spoiling their last day together grew stronger with the suspicion that maybe she had been right after all.

  If Germany won, the defeated Allies would rebuild its shattered cities and would cede their poorly managed and sparsely populated eastern territories as reparations—but was there any hope for the basic human values that years of mutual slaughter had ruined? And could anyone anywhere even begin to take the place of his Hilde and Heidi?

  Tonight, high above a city that would soon be celebrating its freedom from the Occupation, a devastating analogy occurred to him for the first time: could the German Fuhrer derive the same perverted satisfaction from the worldwide butchery he'd unleashed as the unknown murderer did from his bloody slaughter of women?

  He was freezing. Chills crept across his body; he must have goose-bumps! Then he realized why.

  The reckless comparison he had just drawn instantly made him the worst sort of criminal, the kind most of his colleagues at Bredovska Street would send to the basement and then (after a short trial) to the camps or the old military shooting range in the northern suburbs. He imagined how Meckerle would react if he said it aloud. If it happened face-to-face, Meckerle would relieve him of duty and lock him in the asylum; if it happened during a staff meeting, he would probably kill Buback on the spot.

  But it was not fear that made Buback shiver; fear was one thing he had never been prone to, and he knew he was too experienced—or too cunning?—to be hoisted by his own petard. However, he was alarmed at what was happening to him. What was anything worth if out of the blue, after years of faith, he gave in to suspicions that went far beyond Hilde's small question on that final afternoon? Was he a common traitor? A coward, afraid of defeat? A victim of enemy propaganda? Or ... or had he simply been slow to discover a historic blunder that he helped perpetrate, and now stood horrified at the chilling fate awaiting him and his country?

  This last explanation was the most morally justifiable one—but then what difference was there between him and countless other Germans, who, he had heard, paid for far milder speculations in penal gangs, colonies, camps, and at the gallows?

  A strange rhythmic sound drowned out the distant gunfire and distracted him from his thoughts. Just ahead, the path ended at a locked gate in a massive wall. The local Gestapo man had mentioned earlier a Brno castle that had been a notorious political prison in Austro-Hungarian days. The good life, compared to today's prisons, his local colleague had said, grinning; Vienna treated them with kid gloves and look what happened!

  Now Buback could make out the rustling of last year's leaves, the sound of panting, and two Czech voices whispering.

  "Love me! Yes! Love me! Yes yes yes!"

  Incredible! A chill night, a steep slope, the gloomy cells a stone's throw away, mass slaughter within earshot, and with all this, two fragile human beings fall in love. And that means hope: an eternal new beginning that repairs the worst brutalities of history.

  Suddenly he wanted to live to see it. And the face he pictured belonged to the Czech girl with the brown eyes.

  He found a dozen small jars of lard in the pantry—apparently she'd made individual monthly portions—and a pot of lentil soup with a surprisingly large chunk of sausage, which he heated up on the cylinder stove; all he had to do was shove some wood in. He even discovered a bottle of elderberry wine and tucked into a feast prepared for another man. There was a store of logs by the stove; soon it was almost hot in the apartment kitchen. He packed his booty in wax paper next to the rolled-up straps in the suitcase and placed it out in the chilly entrance hall.

  The pale body on the dining table grew warm. He touched the skin on the shoulder. It was rough and dry. He realized with a shock: dead people don't sweat! His own shirt was quite damp after the meal, and the wine had flushed his cheeks. But he did not go into the bedroom, although it might have been more pleasant. This was his first opportunity to get a good, uninterrupted look at what he'd done.

  My deed!

  He was pleased he had finally worked out his opening lines. He'd behaved like an idiot and taken a terrible risk by almost frightening the first two to death. The one in Brno had become an animal fighting for her life; he barely overpowered her. In the second case she had fortunately recognized him and given herself up; anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would have put up a fight. He had finally hit on it after puzzling the matter over and over at home, and he had decided to start next time by gaining their trust.

  Today's events had proved him right. He had stunned her so perfectly that he was able to make all the necessary preparations without hurrying. She had come to on the table, naked, bound, and trussed, in time to see what was happening to her. He retained the same procedures and was satisfied at how effortless it was compared to the woman on the embankment. This time, all he heard was some weak moaning. The body's jerking did not prevent him from making all the cuts just as he was supposed to. She held out surprisingly long; almost, it seemed, until he cut it out.

  He took his gloves off again and touched first her, then himself, to see if a dead body felt different from a live one. It did not seem to. Her hair was thus all the more surprising. He had held her by it—it was long—when she fell into the wardrobe; the strands had flowed through his palms as he tied her to the tabletop, and were still hairs. As he examined them now, they did not separate; they reminded him of the hemp fiber he had used to clean his freshly oiled implements. So this was a new discovery:

  The hair dies first.

  He studied her fingers close up to confirm what he knew from the Hungarian campaign:

  nails and mustaches live the longest.

  He remembered helping to bury a lad who had barely grown his first whiskers before they closed the tulle-covered lid on his coffin. Now he raised the severed head and nodded, satisfied: a small mustache was clearly growing on the black-haired woman's upper lip.

  Enough for today; it was time to head back. He pulled the gloves back on, changed his clothes, checked carefully that he had left no telltale traces, put on his hunting coat, and on sudden impulse stuffed the brightly glowing stove with wood until it would not close. Let the rottenness here truly rot for when her paramour arrives!

  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.