by Pavel Kohout
"So do it."
It's not real till you say it, he chanted to himself for the last time, but now there was no way out.
"No matter what language you speak, that's called treason, Grete."
"Aha ... and who are you betraying?"
"Well..."
Now he stopped short.
"Your homeland, maybe," she snapped. "That lunatic and his henchmen betrayed it a long time ago. Their secret weapon was a con game for the softheaded from day one, and you'll excuse me, but they've made a fuckup of the war—how long do you intend to keep this up, Buback?"
He felt awkward, but couldn't not say it.
"I took an oath."
"Loyalty to Fuehrer and the Reich, right? But he's stone dead and the Reich's practically fallen apart. Anything else you'd like to die for? Or anyone? Maybe you'd care to show your devotion to the Nibelungen, to have the honor of falling in battle for Schorner and Meckerle? Now that's what I call a disgrace! Disgrace? Try stupidity!"
She poured herself a nearly full glass of rum and topped it off with boiling water.
"If you think you can prevent those sons of bitches from destroying this city too, then you should tell this Morava of yours what you know; you made him out to be a decent person, and he looks it, but there's got to be some give-and-take!"
He did not understand. She bristled again.
"Do you need me to point out the obvious? We're in a lion's den. All Prague knows this is the German quarter, and believe me, the lions will come—excuse me, did I say lions? More like hyenas!— as soon as they sense Germany is flat on its back. And for them you're Gestapo and I'm a Kraut whore; there'll be no mercy for us. My love, why leave me hanging here? Do you want me to end up like those widows?"
He was shocked by the thought.
"Why would you—?"
"The murderers' holiday is already starting, love. They're flying in, converging on the feast like bugs on a lamp; the killing is never better than when your nation has its moment in the spotlight, and Germany is proof of it." Then she spoke calmly and practically, as he'd never heard her before.
"I'm a silly woman and can't understand how a man of your position can and should act in this situation. But I'm depending on you to find a way to save us both in time. At the very least your Czechs owe me something."
As if reading his furtive thought, she continued.
"It was fate's doing, not mine, that she died; her death isn't on my conscience, nor should it be on yours. Good night."
She suddenly rose and headed for the bathroom.
"I want to hold you," he said.
"Not today. Your weakness is catching. I need your strength, so I'll have to hold off. I'd rather go home, but he might be there, so let me stay, but pretend I'm not here."
He bounced up so quickly that he was able to block her way.
"Grete! Everyone has the right to weak moments. And that's what the other person is—"
"Don't count on it," she said brusquely. "I have to be strong when I'm alone. When we're together, it's your job. That's why I love you."
“Get up, Jan!" Jitka said. "Enough sleep; time to go to work." He could sense the touch of her face, which had moved next to his, but he did not want to open his eyes; those morning visits with her in the unknown reaches of sleep were now the most important moments of his life. He had no idea how he could have ever woken up alone and spent whole days without knowing they would fall asleep that night together. "Jan," Jitka called again, "time to get up, beloved; today's a big day for you!" He pretended he was sound asleep, so she would use her tender wiles, brushing lips against lips and blowing on his closed eyelids. Instead, she said despairingly, "Jan, enough already; go find that monster—he did kill me, you know!"
He blinked. On the night table was a daily calendar, frozen in time at February 14. The woman he had escorted home and stayed with ever since was dead, and he was hugging his mother's old featherbed in his dormitory room near Number Four. He stood up, so as to be entirely awake before hopelessness hit, did a couple of stretches, and let the cold shower pound into him. By the time he had finished brewing his mother's rose-hip tea, his defensive armor had closed around him again, impervious to thoughts of the body in the dark icebox.
He was in her service and had to fulfill the task she had set him; then he'd see what happened.
He got only Matlak and Jetel for his plan and was satisfied. He didn't see Beran or even look for him. Most of his colleagues, who would normally have been around, were absent. Even a simpleton could tell that the brain stem of the Czech police was securing itself against the danger of another attack.
He realized that he had not seen a single German uniform on his way over. He had seen the film The Invisible Man several times before the war, and it always gave him goose bumps. The Germans, hidden behind the walls of former schools, universities, dormitories, and hotels now serving as barracks and offices, were suddenly more malevolent than they had been in full view. It reminded him of the stony plain above his village, where what appeared to be an innocent heap of brushwood would in the blink of an eye become a tangle of attacking vipers. Prague now seemed much the same way.
He therefore agreed at once when Buback offered to come along; the German could vouch for them in any confrontations with his countrymen.
The four of them formed a chain as each train arrived from Plzen, and questioned all the passengers. Most knew each other by sight from traveling to and from work. No one knew the man in the policemen's photograph.
Between trains Morava sat on a bench beneath the roof of the first platform and stared straight ahead. The others left him alone, and he tried to distract himself by fixing his thoughts on the insignificant. He calculated the length and height of the buildings opposite, counted the crossties in his vision, concentratedly followed the crooked flight path of one of the birds in a flock circling above the station.
At noon the others brought him bread with some kind of spread, in the evening a warm potato pancake; after the last train they took him off to sleep and brought him back before the first one the next morning. All of this he sensed as if in a dream, one he left only when another train arrived from Plzen. And no one, not one passenger, recognized that face.
"It's the same people as yesterday," Matlak said near evening.
Morava could see that himself. Rumors of the hunt for the widow killer had spread. When they saw the four men with photographs, the passengers would shake their heads or hands, and the men were stung by the first sharp retorts: Why were they still hanging around doing nothing? By now even that killer must know where they were. But Morava never raised an eyebrow or doubted his decision. The first thing Beran had taught him was patience.
That evening it paid off.
It was the novice Jetel who excitedly brought over an older man returning from his shift at the Beroun locomotive depot. Yes, he confirmed, he remembered the man well; on Sunday he had seen him waiting for the night tram with his coworker Karel Malina. He himself had waited behind a tree, because Malina was a well-known motor mouth. He'd been glad enough to be rid of him on the train; Malina had gone to look for matches and never came back. At the last moment, the railway worker had boarded the rear car of the tram and dozed all the way to the last stop. No, he didn't know where Malina lived; surely the police could find out?
Malina's other potential acquaintances had long since left the station. The only thing left to do today was follow up the lead. There were eleven Karel Malinas in Prague. When Morava began to plot a route for visiting them, Buback raised his first objection.
"It's quite late and we could start a panic. They'll think it's the Gestapo."
He stared in surprise at the German.
"Yes," he said, "you're right, thanks. Good night."
In his room, it seemed he barely closed and opened his eyes only to find it was morning. He broke through the horrible moment of awakening when she died for him again, and set off on the trail of her murderer. As a good m
orning, Matlak and Jetel announced that only the German newspapers had published Rypl's picture. The Czech papers had objected, saying that the Gestapo had used this method a few times already to try to catch Resistance workers; they could not risk taking the Germans' bait in the eleventh hour.
As they left, Morava noticed a further gesture from Buback: he let the lanky Matlak have the front seat instead of himself, so he would not be cramped in the back of the car. Matlak took advantage of the language barrier to make a biting comment in Czech. "So they've finally decided they have enough 'living space'."
At the depot they easily obtained Malina's Prague address. Alarmingly, the repairman had not shown up for work yesterday or today, and had not notified them why. The personnel department clerk added that, sadly enough, this was a common occurrence these days; people find a thousand excuses, and this was probably just the beginning.
For Buback's sake Morava conducted the conversation in German, and the clerk in his shirtsleeves suddenly wagged his finger at the liaison officer, like an old-fashioned teacher lecturing an unruly pupil.
"You promised Europe order, and you leave behind havoc and anarchy!"
Buback knew the four Czechs were waiting to see what he would say to this bold reproach.
He looked briefly from one face to the next, ending with the clerk's.
"If an individual can apologize for a whole nation, then I hereby do so.
No one said anything to that, and he was glad when Morava gave the order to leave. On the way back to the car he overheard another of Maflak's sotto voce comments to Jetel.
"Is he that decent or just chicken?"
Yes, he admitted, it was a good question; was he, an insignificant German, truly convinced he bore all his nation's guilt on his shoulders, or had Grete's "give-and-take" infected him? Was he simply a better sort of opportunist, abandoning ship in a slightly more genteel fashion than the bosses who fled with their loot?
After all, he'd only needed one thing all his life: self-respect!
Buback mused on this on the way back to Prague, as the driver and his companion boldly compared notes in Czech on the illegal radio stations' war reports. What he was doing now made him the lowest sort of stool pigeon, if for no other reason than that Morava had trusted him. It was wrong to continue deceiving him. But how could he end the deception? And should he really give up his last and only advantage in this godforsaken posting?
On the way through a small town halfway to Prague, the Czech contingent suddenly fell silent and stared in the same direction. A man stood on a ladder in front of a pub with a bucket hung at his side, painting over the sign warme und kalte kuche, bier, wein, limon-aden with circular strokes of his brush. The meaning of this spectacle evaded Buback, and they had already turned the corner when he understood: The man was not getting rid of all the lettering, only the German phrases. And he was not doing it surreptitiously by night, but in broad daylight, in full view of the German soldiers passing constantly through on the main road.
An SS man taking a tip; a clerk admonishing a Gestapo agent for destroying Europe; and a man with a bucket of lime—the first three visible cracks in the facade of the Third Reich. It reminded Buback of the time during the retreat from Belgium when he had watched the military engineers destroy a bridge. After the blast it rose upward along its whole length and seemed to hang in the air for an unbelievably long time before it hurtled into the water, disintegrating into a thousand pieces. He felt that all Germany was now in that deceptive state of elevation preceding collapse, and would carry both him and the woman depending on him down with it.
"Excuse me," Morava's voice broke in. "I have to work out with my colleagues what we're doing next."
He nodded, knowing that the majority of men from the Prague criminal police had formally passed the required examination in German, but like Litera could not hold a conversation; for ordinary workers the Reich offices had had to turn a blind eye to keep the Protectorate government functioning at all.
"Whether he's hiding there or not," Morava began in Czech, "he has Sebesta's pistol, and yours were taken in the raid."
Angular Matlak turned toward the back and waved a powerful paw dismissively.
"That's all right."
"Don't overestimate your bare hands."
"They're not bare."
"What do you mean ... ?"
Now Jetel grinned as well.
"They left us our gun permits, so we dug into the old reserves, as the super—"
"That's enough!" Morava warned them almost casually.
He doesn't trust me, Buback realized, noticing only now that his companions' jackets bulged gently. So they've opened the secret cache! Meckerle had sensed it, while they'd managed to lead Buback away from it from February till now. But maybe he'd let them succeed. Had he already given up the Germans' war when he got to know Jitka Modra and the young man beside him? The Czechs' brief conversation yielded one important fact. Morava had not disappointed him; even his own people, the Czechs, knew he was a "lotus flower" incapable of deceit, so for safety's sake they had isolated him from all information. How should he treat his relationship with Morava and the whole confounded situation now, after his last conversation with Grete?
He never finished the thought. They had come to a halt in front of a house that stood out like a poor relation in this well-to-do neighborhood, which bore the name Kralovske Vinohrady—"Royal Vineyards." On the crumbling facade of the late-twenties apartment building was a barely legible stucco sign: railway house.
The lady caretaker, clucking like a chicken at the police's arrival, informed them in one long sentence that the man they were looking for lived on the third floor, number fourteen; was orderly and friendly; paid her, without arguing, to unlock his door when he forgot his key; and was a bachelor, so the wife of his friend Mr. Kratina in number fifteen looked after him, cleaning and doing his laundry. No, she herself hadn't seen Mr. Malina since Sunday and didn't know the man in the picture.
The card on the apartment door read malina and was handsomely executed in prewar style, with India ink. Morava motioned to his subordinates to wait on the stairs below the landing. Buback understood he was worried about the peephole, and retreated. He watched Morava expertly press his ear to the door before ringing, to catch any possible reaction, but the building was too noisy. Two more rings and still no reaction; Morava stepped over to the neighboring apartment.
An attractive forty-year-old woman opened the door in her apron; she looked feisty, but the foursome made an impression on her. Like a schoolchild called on in class, she answered them in complete sentences. Mr. Malina? Yes, she knew Mr. Malina; she earned some money helping him with the housework. The keys to his apartment? She only picked up the keys to his apartment on Wednesdays, she didn't want to be responsible for someone else's home these days, she's sure they understood why. Yesterday? Yesterday she saw Mr. Malina when she returned the keys to him; he'd mentioned he might go see his mother. Where? She didn't know where, maybe Kladno, west of Prague ... or was it Kolin, to the east? Someone else in the apartment? No, there was no one else in the apartment; she'd been there to clean, after all!
When Morava began to translate for Buback, the German could not help noticing that the woman was trembling with nervousness. As a Czech she was certainly within her rights to do so. Involuntarily her eyes strayed over to him; she averted them instantly and turned back to the assistant detective.
"Sir, he ... Karel... I mean Mr. Malina sometimes talked too much, but he wasn't the type to get involved in anything, especially anything political!"
"He wouldn't have let anyone stay over here, by any chance?" Morava asked.
"I would have known!"
"Just so we understand each other: I'm asking in his own interest. We're looking for a man he was seen with the day before yesterday, that evening at the train station. The man is most probably a murderer we've been tracking; he could easily kill Mr. Malina as well."
"Do you really believe
I'd want that on my conscience!"
She's got something with him, Buback sensed. Morava was apparently thinking the same thing.
"Listen to me, then," he said, giving her Rypl's photograph. "As soon as he returns, send him immediately—day or night—to number four, Bartolomejska Street; my name is Morava. If he did meet this man, he has to tell me everything he knows. You're sure you've never seen him?"
"No!" she said plainly and convincingly, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her. "As God is my witness, on the lives of everyone I love, never!"
It was all worked out and rehearsed in advance. For two long days he'd done nothing besides listen to the building. He heard the steps of four men on the staircase at that odd hour and was at the door in his rubber-soled shoes before they rang. She had taught him to plan for the worst: Life stinks, Tony; it's always got more lousy tricks up its sleeve! The runt had probably opened his big mouth on his morning grocery run and now someone had blown his cover.
