Widow Killer

by Pavel Kohout

  He had spent the whole war tracking cheats, criminals, and other wrongdoers in the Germans' own ranks. The front he knew only from rumors; as soon as they burned their evidence, they moved him one country further. Was that why he had been so sure his hands were clean? Blaming the German catastrophe on these blank-eyed savages, who had seen too little good or too much evil in their lives, was like blaming the hands of a clock for the time it shows. He, however, had been part of the mechanism—at first enthusiastically, later less so, but nonetheless an obedient cog in the workings of the Fiihrer and Reich clockmaker.

  Oh, Hilde, why didn't you argue with me years sooner?

  Oh, Buback, maybe in your blindness you'd have left her…

  Oh Grete, if only late repentance could restore us to grace!

  But who now would bestow it on the Germans? Even at this late hour, when all their lies were revealed and the Reich had reached the end of the line, they were loading inhabitants of a foreign city onto a truck like cattle destined for slaughter. What would come next? The only thing that made sense was to exchange them for Germans fallen into Czech hands. If that happened, he would offer to mediate under the condition that the SS finally start to behave in a civilized manner.

  The truck stopped and the escort began to shove them out of the back. Anyone who misjudged the height or lacked agility landed on all fours. One older man could not stand and keened in pain; he had taken a bad blow to the knee. Buback looked around for the commander—now would be the time to step out of anonymity—but saw no officers in the circle around them. Two of the Czechs were already picking up the moaning man, their hands locked to form a seat beneath him, and carried him off after the others to a hall Buback knew well.

  It belonged to the terminus railway station. International runs had never stopped here, only trains bound for the smaller Czech towns. In earlier days, it was the departure point for Prague children during the summer holidays. Despite the circumstances a memory of his mother caressed him: She pressed his teary face against her fragrant blouse and promised him that in seven days she and Daddy would come to visit. And he could even taste the mandarin oranges they always gave him for train trips to ward off thirst; oh, where are the snows of yesteryear?

  The vast turn-of-the-century hall bore traces of recent fighting and swarmed with uniforms, overwhelmingly black in color. They pulled the prisoners at a swift pace to the front of the first platform. Strangely enough, there were no trains around, not even outside the hall where the tracks fanned out. And then, from out on the rails, a noise rang out like the cracking of an enormous whip. He realized what it was when they pushed the Czechs into long rows and began to count them off: one, two, three, four, five. Every fifth one was forced to jump down from the platform onto the rails; the four before him were herded between rows of guards into the parcel post storerooms.

  As he waited among the last for them to get to him, a new salvo crackled from up front and he made a firm decision. It was barbarous of his countrymen to execute people this way when peace was just around the corner. As a German, he could only compensate for it by putting his own life on the line. If he were fifth, he would not speak up! To escape by condemning another man to death was beyond the bounds of humanity; he would cease to be himself.

  If the worst happened, he would be sending his love to her fate as well, and would die with her in his thoughts.

  All the Czechs knew what was happening—he could read it in their faces—but no one gave the slightest sign of despair. They all seemed to understand that their personal honor was the only thing they had left, and all their efforts were focused on preserving it. The foursomes not selected suppressed their relief, the fifth ones concealed their deathly fear. Buback had always found Czechs to be too cunning, too evasive, too openly selfish for his taste, but in this fateful test that arbitrarily consigned them to life or death, they seemed to him almost noble.

  The Nazis were shifting the man with a wounded leg down to the tracks; a bullet would now end his pain. When the Germans reached Buback, he straightened up like the rest and stared them in the face. He saw nothing there but the effort to keep correct count. O German justice, point at me! He was fourth.

  As they tried to drive him down to the storerooms, he finally reached down to his right sock and addressed his SS guard so imperiously that the man did not even check his documents, but hurried with him, as directed, out to the track branching. The guard obediently broke into a trot when Buback pressed him to overtake the condemned men from his own group.

  From the end of the platform he could see the carnage. They were shooting the Czechs in front of the engine-shed wall, placing each new row a body's length in front of the one before. The dead formed an extensive, multicolored field in which red predominated. As another platoon of executioners stepped forward, the gunners just relieved all lit their cigarettes at once. Behind them, another dozen victims were arriving, among them men from Buback's truck.

  The closest officer was a sergeant who seemed to be directing the executions. Buback pressed his document into the man s hand and quite exceptionally made use of his borrowed military rank.

  "Sturmbannfuhrer Buback, Prague Gestapo! What is going on here?"

  The man turned his equine face toward him. Despite its expressiveness, two empty eyes once again stared out from beneath the helmet. After a brief pause he simply greeted Buback.

  "The executions are to warn bandits."

  "These are random pedestrians! I know because I was detained along with them. Stop this immediately; I will bring this case to the attention of Lieutenant General Meckerle!"

  "You won't have far to go," the man said, pointing at a group of officers in conversation, protected from the rain by the switch tower's awning. "He's over there."

  The giant had already spotted him and was striding over.

  We're almost there, beloved, his mother said; she was sitting in the driver's seat because when he had begun to choke, his father was at the castle (they'd fired up the furnace there to shoe the lord's horses, so they would not have to brave the snowdrifts), but his mother knew how to hitch the sleigh and the horse ran just as well for her as for Papa—breathe through your nose, beloved, she called out, worried, over her shoulder to where she'd balled him into a thick blanket... that word, Jitka was the only person to call me beloved, he thought, bewildered despite the burning pain in his forehead; why should my head hurt when it's my tonsils.... now she turned to him from the driver's seat, and it was Jitka, but he was already deep in his fever.

  Then the sleigh stopped and he knew in a moment the kindly face of Doctor Baburek would appear over him. So he opened his eyes and saw Litera.

  "Lie down, Jan," the driver insisted solicitously. "We ran over some glass shards; we're changing the wheel."

  By the time they finished, he had come around and remembered everything. And when he realized they were in another police car, taking him to have his dressings changed properly, he stopped them immediately.

  "We have to arrest him!"

  "Jan," Litera cautioned, "it might have been your imagination after that bang you took. I didn't notice him."

  Morava halted; yes, after all, he'd just seen his mother and Jitka ... but his detective's memory rebelled.

  "It was him! Rypl and his gang. And they're probably still there; turn around, we have to go back right away."

  "You could get blood poisoning."

  "If he gets away from me again, I'll have soul poisoning!"

  Seeing that he was resolved to return on foot if necessary, they obeyed him.

  They were too late; the gang was gone, but from the barricaders' stories and the descriptions of the foursome they realized Morava had been right. Strengthened by the addition of the machine gunner, the suspected Ryplites had headed up toward Pankrac in a Mercedes with Berlin plates as soon as it was confirmed the SS were on the defensive.

  Morava instantly set out after them.

  The square by the Pankrac court building, wher
e two tanks were burning, proffered an unbelievable image of Czech and German brotherhood. The soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms were, of course, the infamous Russians of General Vlasov. Their thick Slavic accents were ample proof for the Praguers, who had just lived through a day of horrors and celebrated them as liberators in their hour of need. Thanks to Beran and Buback, Morava knew these ovations would only deepen the soldiers' despair, since nothing now could save them. One of them was playing a wild melody on the accordion while the others danced a bravura display. They wore the faces of guests at their own funeral.

  Morava caught these images in passing. All his senses were focused on his prey. He soon realized that they could go no farther without Rypl's picture, and sent the new driver off for another batch of portraits from Bartolomejska.

  "If anyone's at the department, bring him along as well," Litera suggested. "Matlak's sure to be there; he's a crack shot. We can't go after them barehanded. And if there are any decent German submachine guns lying around..."

  Morava acceded, and because there was a first-aid ambulance a few paces along, Litera coaxed him into letting them have a look. He was glad in the end; the unsightly bullet wound, which had removed the skin, had dried. Soon, a large bandage had replaced the turban so similar to Brunat's. Then he began combing the streets again, stubbornly convinced that Rypl would come into his own in exactly this sort of anarchy.

  Confusion reigned on the square and the surrounding streets: Explosions of joy at surviving the day and perhaps even the whole war mingled with laments for lost loved ones. There were rows of cellars the SS had emptied with hand grenades. Volunteers carried the disfigured corpses out into the unrelenting rain and laid them temporarily on canvasses in front of the buildings. The victims were predominantly women and children.

  Then a murmur rippled through the populace. A group of rebels wearing RG armbands, all with trophy weapons, marched down the middle of the thoroughfare. In their midst was a small crowd of German civilians, mainly women and children. In one hand the Germans carried suitcases and bundles, as much as each could hold; the other hand was raised above their heads. As their exhaustion grew they shifted hands more and more often. The Czech onlookers left their dead in front of the houses and realigned themselves along the procession route. Two columns of frosty silence greeted the parade of pale faces.

  What do I feel toward these Germans, Morava wondered, and was suddenly surprised to find: nothing. The innocent rain-drenched victims on tarpaulins ruled out regret. But neither could he feel hate; these were defenseless and horrified people paying for what were by and large the sins of others. Most of all, he felt like packing every one of them—even those who were born here—off to the ruins of their ancestral homeland. Germany had unleashed this hell with their blessing, and he never wanted to see or hear them again.

  Suddenly one of the Czechs, to judge by her expression half crazed with grief, slipped through the escort and fell upon a tall German woman with a blond braid, who even in her humbled state reminded Morava of the Nazi ideal of Germanic beauty as extolled in films and posters. As if lashing out at all Germans through this one, she scratched the woman's face with her nails and lacerated her skin. The victim cried out in pain, dropped her overflowing bag, and covered her face with both hands; two little girls beside her burst into tears.

  Instantly two escorts were there; they pulled the attacker off and tried to return her as carefully as possible to the sidewalk, but just then pure hatred erupted. There was a forest of menacing fists, insults, and threats, gobs of spit flying over the guard's heads and onto them as well. Morava could see lunacy in many of the onlookers' eyes and realized he might have behaved just like this after Jitka's death, if his task had not imposed an iron self-discipline on him.

  When stones started to fly, the escort commander drew his pistol and fired into the air. This drew a deafening whistle of contempt from the crowd; the threatening guardsmen began to fire as well, and a massacre seemed inevitable. Morava quickly formulated a plan.

  "Litera," he shouted, "you take the back!"

  Meanwhile, he pushed toward the front of the escort, where the commander was, and made himself heard over the restless crowd.

  "Clear the way! In the name of the law! Offenders will be prosecuted! Clear the way for the law!"

  Surprisingly, the presence of two uniformed policemen had the desired effect; the more levelheaded members of the throng helped calm the distraught ones. The German woman obediently hefted her baggage again. Seeing the bloody slashes on her face and the sobbing children helped the crowd's fever die down. The people returned to their dead, walking awkwardly past the attacker, who was now crying bitterly on another woman's shoulder. Morava sensed that for many of them—him included—the need for retribution clashed with the fear of becoming just like the men who so recently murdered their loved ones.

  This brought him back to his original question: What would follow this war with the Germans? It was a wonderfully seductive picture: Czech would be the only language of Bohemia and Moravia, and the time bomb that had twice destroyed the Czech state would disappear.

  However, it implied a new danger. Antonin Rypl was a Czech too— and now a national avenger. The killer's latest move unfortunately proved that despite his insane depravity, he was gifted with extraordinary intelligence and intuition. Morava longed for a quick meeting with Beran to try out his newest hypothesis:

  Rypl had discarded his old identity upon finding the unknown corpse and was founding his own armed force. With their help, he would compel goodwill toward himself on the street and in the new revolutionary organs through exceptional brutality against Germans, thereby cementing his new persona.

  Instead of just "Good work, Morava," he wanted to hear that Police Commissioners Beran and Brunat understood this terrible threat to the future of the free republic and would mobilize all the police reserves, even in the current situation. Once the country was cleansed of Germans, they could not allow a new bunch of scoundrels to occupy it just because they spoke the local language.

  He learned from the grateful escort commander that for now they were rounding up the local Germans at a nearby primary school. This information triggered an instinct that was often more reliable than logic. The widow killer's choice of victims had never made the slightest sense, so why should the mass murder of Germans be any different? As the superintendent had once told him, intuition carries the same weight in police work as a lifetime's worth of experience, good organization, and dedication.

  Why would Rypl, why would his hatchetmen leave this Eldorado, where the sort of mass psychosis he'd just seen would be congenial to butchers with primitive notions of revenge? Yes, he felt, they were here somewhere, but as he drew closer he realized it would be easier to find than to catch them. They must not frighten the gang away prematurely.

  In front of the school where the column had disappeared, he instructed Litera to go wait for their reinforcements at the designated spot and bring them here as inconspicuously as possible.

  Then Litera grabbed his sleeve and whispered excitedly, "There!"

  "What... ?"

  "A Mercedes ... didn't they say it had Berlin plates?"

  "Yes...."

  The car stood right opposite the entrance to the school, which was guarded by two youths; the policemen decided not to approach them.

  "You go ahead," Morava urged. "Meanwhile I'll figure out what to do first."

  "Don't you want to wait for us? So he doesn't kill you first?"

  "He doesn't even know me. At most I'm a policeman he saw at the barricade."

  "Do you have your pistol?" Yes.

  Both simultaneously remembered the shot he had loosed by accident in the car. Morava laughed.

  "No fear. In an emergency I'll try to bite him first."

  Litera did not find it as amusing.

  "He's got a small army with him."

  "That's why I have to try to find out unobtrusively what their role is here. One advantage is tha
t people will hardly join forces with a depraved murderer of Czech women."

  "But how will you convince them?"

  "I'll worry about that later. You'd better move along; our men might be there already."

  Litera hurried off. Morava then slowly moved toward the Mercedes. Crossing the street next to it, he inconspicuously peered inside. Nothing caught his eye.

  At the gates, he was shocked to find that the two guards, SS-gun-toting Czech youths in white armbands painted with the large letters RG, would not let him into the school.

  "Who instructed you not to admit the police?" he asked incredulously.

  "Our commander," the left-hand one said.