Widow Killer

by Pavel Kohout

  And imagination!

  Immediately, he confided to the guy in strictest confidence who he really was. The story was so convincing that he believed it himself. With his military background, it was easy to create the impression that he was still active in the now-illegal Czechslovak Army.

  By the end of the trip, the runt was bursting with pride. After all, he was sitting in the same compartment as a real parachutist, just back from England!

  At Smichov station, he pulled the contents of his bag out of the concrete pipe in the guy's presence, dispelling any remaining doubts. Of course, he was taking a risk, even there on the deserted railway platform, but now he was sure he was back on track.

  Her hand protects me!

  His old army pistol clinched the deal. The guy—naive beyond his years!—enthusiastically promised to hide him in his own home.

  THANKS, MOTHER!

  Jitka Modra died at exactly five a.m., and with her died what would have been her child.

  The firm grasp of a man's hand accompanied her on her journey into oblivion.

  Jan Morava slept soundly through it, waking only later to Erwin Buback's sympathetic hug.

  The sun had just peered over the crown of the nearby hill, silhouetting the stadiums against the morning sky, when the car pulled up outside the house.

  Buback could hear the music even over the noise of the motor. A raucous melody split the air, one that supposedly had the whole American army grooving wildly on the dance floors. It was the Glenn Miller Orchestra playing boogie-woogie; Grete seemed to think this Miller fellow was some sort of god.

  The young driver in the cap with skull and crossbones listened carefully. When his eyes met Buback's, he smiled almost conspiratorially.

  Throwing custom and protocol to the winds, Buback slipped the driver a fifty-mark note. The SS agent took it as calmly as a waiter would a tip.

  Now I know the war is ending! The thought pleased Buback, but he immediately remembered the living man and the dead woman he had just left. Evil, however, goes on....

  The staff car vanished around the curve below. Upstairs, the noise went on unchecked, a testimony to the gradual depopulation of Little Berlin. However, as he rummaged for his keys on the sidewalk, the house's front door opened, revealing the judge. Dressed already, at this early hour? No. The man's unshaven cheeks suggested that he had not yet gone to bed.

  "There's no need to go around the back, Herr Oberkriminalrat, come this way...."

  From up close he confirmed that the radiogram Grete had recently moved to his place was even louder here than outside. Evidently it was now set to its highest volume. He realized it had undoubtedly kept the judge up, but he did not feel the slightest desire to apologize.

  "Thank you, but I'm used to it by now."

  "What are you going to do," the judge wailed after him in despair.

  Buback tried to imagine how many anguished howls this pitiful, sleepy figure had caused, screams torn from the throats of countless men and women before the bullet or blade reached its mark. He responded with barely disguised glee. "Apparently, we're going to dance."

  On a volcano, he thought, climbing the winding back stairs that shook with the syncopations of degenerate music. As he pressed down the door handle, it flooded over him as if he had opened the sluice gates.

  Grete half lay, half sat on the bed in black ski pants and a black T-shirt; its long sleeves gripped and further flattened her chest. One hand clutched a cigarette holder, the other curled around a glass; all around her were stains and cigarette butts from an overflowing ashtray. Her eyes were unfocused; she was so engulfed in the melody, humming along wordlessly with it, that it took several seconds for her to realize he was home. First she smiled dreamily at him, then flung away the holder, cigarette, and glass, and, jumping up, threw her arms around his neck.

  "The bastard croaked," she exulted, "bit the dust!"

  And so he learned of the death of Adolf Hitler, who supposedly fell in the defense of Berlin.

  Once she cooled down a bit, he extinguished the smoking carpet and prevailed on her to turn down the gramophone—not because of the judge (who had no power anymore), but so that they could hear each other speak. She listened to his story so intently that all the alcohol seemed to evaporate from her completely; her gray-green irises stared at him without blinking, like the eyes of a beast of prey. When he reached the part where they found the dead policeman and the wounded Jitka, she interrupted him with a shout.

  "No! That son of a bitch saved me?"

  She was clearly still tipsy; forgetting about his story, she launched directly into her own. There hadn't been any performance, she said, pointing to her morning message still lying there with his afternoon postscript. That son of a bitch, she repeated, that pig Meckerle had her brought over like a cheap whore to a hotel outside Prague, one she knew the officers used as a high-class flophouse, but she didn't realize what was happening even when the unfamiliar driver took her to the suite and told her to wait there for her colleagues and wardrobe, until she entered the bedroom ("stupid cow," she fumed), where the colonel was waiting for her ("naked, the swine!") in a state of drunken anticipation; he locked the door and threatened to rip off her clothes if she wouldn't undress herself, and that really made her blood boil: She grabbed him, threw him down on the bed, and then went from his head to his chest past his belly down to his lap, and then ...

  "I bit him as hard as I could!" she grinned. "Right in his stiff dick!"

  She said he'd let out a dreadful scream; he must have thought she'd bitten it off, she continued, shaking with laughter, but he wasn't even bleeding, and when she thought he'd regained enough strength to beat her to death ...

  "Then I started to shriek; I never knew I could make such a loud noise, and he was so terrified that he just fled, naked, in a panic."

  Buback remembered Meckerle's painful grimaces that afternoon and marveled that he had escaped his superior's office alive.

  Leaving the hotel room, Grete had gone down to the reception desk, where they pretended they had never seen her before. No, they didn't know what happened to the car that brought her, and there were none available, but she'd certainly have no problem hitching a ride along the road with a German officer. By the time someone finally stopped, she had practically walked back to Prague.

  "But it was worth it to hear that the bastard of Berlin had snuffed it."

  And she nearly paid the officer back with a slap when he tried to force his way upstairs with her.

  " 'To grieve together,' he suggested; not a bad-looking guy, but with one basic flaw: He wasn't you."

  And then she had waited, longing impatiently for him, reading his message over and over, shaken by the fact that she could have been the murderer's victim.

  Now she bent forward, stretched out her hands to him and pulled him toward her.

  "Love! My love! Where were you all my life? Why did you let me wait and lie for so long?"

  She held his head in her outstretched arms and then pulled him close, covering his forehead, temples, eyes, and chin with almost childlike kisses.

  He held her and wished it would never end. Slowly he felt their passion dissolve into tenderness.

  "Come to me," she whispered after a long while. "I want you so much! No, wait...."

  She slipped away from him to the gramophone, where the record crackled at the end of the last track. She replaced it and then stopped short.

  "How is she? You must be sick to death of my interruptions."

  He took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt.

  "She's dead."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "She died an hour ago."

  He sat down on the bed and everything he had been through since that morning suddenly hit him.

  Grete stood motionless. She glanced at the gramophone as if she could see and feel on her body the slow, heavy melody she had chosen for their lovemaking. When the piano and percussion began their variations, she lifted both hands and swaye
d into the rhythm. Her supple arms drooped to the floor and encircled the lamp overhead. Then her long legs joined in, and the slender figure in black seemed to fill the entire space.

  It was as if the music were dictating thoughts to Grete, and her motions turned them into words of sorrow and hope.

  As he watched her, captivated, his sorrow and revulsion dissolved. Two unbelievable gifts of fate shone brightly above the filth and blood of the miserable world.

  He was alive.

  And he had her.

  She stopped and knelt down at his side.

  "And why were you so horribly afraid when you thought it was me?"

  "Suddenly I realized I loved you...."

  "Oh, Buback! Now you really are perfect!"

  MAY

  The little guy protected and threatened him at the same time. On the train, his bold openness had brought them together, but even at home he would not shut up. He was sure to tell his foreman at the locomotive depot in Beroun that he was hiding a parachutist. If he didn't spill it to the other railwaymen himself, his boss would see to that. By evening some informer would know, and that night they'd seize him.

  From the frying pan into the fire. Murderer or spy? The blade or the bullet?

  The warmed-over potato stew tasted of bad beer, but at least it filled his empty stomach; he chewed and listened to the tripe that his host served up.

  "Give this to your signaler," the runt was whispering urgently. "No, don't tell me where he is, we'll all get together for a drink once it's over, but the train schedules for the Protectorate could help the Allies considerably, couldn't they?"

  He realized swearing this man to silence would be useless. The runt would promise, but wouldn't obey. This was a man who longed to live an interesting life, and finally his dream had come true—except it would be wasted without spectators.

  Even so, he felt calmer already. The situation still wasn't rosy, but he had averted the catastrophe facing him in Plzeii. And now he had time to think what came next, before the half-pint set off for work.

  FIRST I HAVE TO GET TO KNOW HIM.

  In case I need to stay a while: Inquire how he lives, what his habits are, his acquaintances, friends, who visits him, why and when.

  His host's temperament made it easy. Despite the late hour the guy kept talking, questions or no. He longed desperately to engrave himself on the memory and heart of his unexpected guest, who had accepted him into the Resistance.

  The story matched the storyteller. It was primitive. In an hour he was sure.

  I KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT HIM.

  Karel Malina lived alone but carried on with his married neighbor, who—he winked knowingly—cleaned for him and fed him for free. Her husband was also a railway engineer who slept every other night in a different city, leaving Malina to warm his bed. Everything was taken care of; Malina was snug as a bug in a rug.

  SO, THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR!

  He knew, he told the runt, that for his own safety, Malina would need to watch his tongue. However, if Malina was going to hide him till the coup, he would have to mention the arrangement to his neighbor.

  The guy shone with bliss.

  Of course Malina couldn't introduce them—parachutists need to keep a low profile—but he should tell her what was going on. That way she wouldn't worry if she didn't see her neighbor around for a few days, because ... yes! He'd make Malina his contact with his signaler.

  Now the guy nearly squealed with bliss.

  Once Malina told her in the morning, he should come back to report how she took it, and then as usual set off for work. By the time he returned home, the first report, based on the information he'd given, would be ready. That evening they'd flesh it out and the next day Malina would fake illness to arrange its dispatch. From there they'd have to see.

  The half-pint was in seventh heaven. He gave his guest his own bed and went to sleep in the bathroom, where he fit comfortably in the tub.

  When he was alone in bed at last, in the quiet and the dark at the end of that crazy day, a single image occupied his mind: The slab of ice moving out of the cellar. What would happen when the hearts melted?

  WILL THE DOVE-SOULS FLY OUT?

  Nonsense, logic told him in those final moments; he'd killed them dead, time to forget about them.... Now he felt with every fiber of his being that another task was calling him.... But what was it?

  He plunged into sleep like water.

  Finally, at the tail end of the night after the day the world got rid of Hitler, Grete fell asleep, or more accurately fainted from exhaustion. Buback remained lying beside her, his senses aglow but his mind strangely clear, knowing that for the first time he was feeling the responsibility of love.

  In his first life he and Hilde had been young and Germany had been different. Back then, values that had grown and matured since their bloody birth in the French Revolution still ruled. Hilde had imparted them to Heidi and Buback had guarded the laws that kept them safe. The generation that grew up during the Great War, and then Germany's civil war, was firmly convinced that a battered and wise mankind would never put itself through hell like that again.

  Even the prosperity following the Furhrer’s rise seemed to confirm this. New job creation schemes had instantly wiped out unemployment and given the Reich—among other things—the world's most modern highway system, proof for many that an authoritarian government sometimes helps a nation more than parliaments full of idle, chattering humanists.

  When Hitler built a massive army to defend the German miracle from an envious outside world, he placed love for homeland above love for individuals. Even Buback, who tried to be an instrument of useful ideas, could not control his family's life. Its destiny was determined by the war, which played with his loves like a cat plays with mice, luring them into the idyllic land of vineyards to smite them with its paw.

  Those endless seconds yesterday afternoon, when he thought the murderer had killed Grete, shook Buback's emotions down to the very core of his being. Until that moment Grete was just what she had said: a wartime lover, linked to him by loneliness and a sudden flame of passion meant to cremate the dead in both of them. The threat of losing her opened a new dimension inside him. An icy emptiness surrounded him, as if he'd stepped across death's threshold while he was still alive. And when he found the other woman was the victim, he felt an almost inhumanly cruel relief.

  He had instantly regained control, trying to support the young Czech with his burden. Still, Buback was still deeply grateful that this time fate had passed over him. If Jitka Modra had given him the hope that even after Hilde he might love again, Grete Baumann had fulfilled it.

  He now knew that he was not here to participate in this dirty and hopeless war any longer, but rather to protect his love and lead her to safety. But how ... ?

  The man who woke at five A.M. at the bedside of a dead Jitka Modra was a completely different Jan Morava than the one who fell asleep beside her while she was still alive.

  His nighttime despair and his contention with God were gone. He helped the nurses wash her and dress her in a clean white shirt, accompanied her on the stretcher to the pathology lab, kissed her on her still-warm lips, and then waited for an hour like an errand boy in a hallway reeking of disinfectant before he was permitted to see the examination results.

  "Death from hemorrhaging into the mediastinum after a puncture wound to the aorta."

  Litera, who discovered him there, was the first person caught off guard. Before he could express his sympathy, Morava reeled off his plan for the day's excursions, as if this were a morning strategy session after an ordinary night.

  His other colleagues in the department found a man unchanged in appearance and demeanor from the day before. He returned their sympathetic handshakes just the way he would have at daily meetings; anyone who dared to express condolences got at most a nod.

  The women at Bartolomejska, confirmed in their rejection of Operation Decoy, were especially shocked. Could this sorry young man real
ly be that insensitive? The men were marginally impressed by his self-control, but it still seemed unnatural to them.

  Morava understood what was happening. During that short nap by her bed, he had died along with Jitka. She had then sent him back to the living world to complete his task. During this temporary resurrection, he had resolved not to let anything impede his work.

  Maybe it was the combined spiritual strength of all his ancestors, forged by unending blows of fate, that so mercifully numbed him. Otherwise, he knew, he would have gone mad.

  He would have cried like a child, howled like a beast, stopped eating, given up sleeping; soon he would have set off aimlessly, half awake, half asleep, down the dark streets of a city ever closer to the front until, heedless of warnings, he would probably have been shot by German guards.