Widow Killer

by Pavel Kohout

  The man in black stepped forward in front of Morava, this time making no effort to back up his statement.

  "My name is Svoboda; I'm a member of the Czech National Council and of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Who are you?"

  The bristling trio drooped; their spokesman was almost embarrassingly unctuous in response.

  "Excuse me, sir ... I mean, comrade ... I'm Lokajik, assistant to the local commander...."

  The black-clad man interested Morava more and more. He remembered his grandfather, father, and all their neighbors sitting in the taproom after Corpus Christi service, pointing at a diminutive man who stood at the bar, sipping plum brandy. Look over there, his father nudged little Jan, who had been teasing the house cat under the bench and was already a mass of scratches; that's a Communist! What's that, Jan had inquired, and he had learned: He doesn't go to church and wants to take everything we own away from us.

  He had timidly watched the unshaven man with his luxuriant forelock, but the Communist's stubborn aloofness somehow attracted the boy at the same time. Whenever Morava heard or read about Communist crimes during the war he thought of this man, a black sheep in a pious and pitifully barren land.

  The prisoners, crammed into children's cloakrooms, observed the scene mutely. It was as evidently unpleasant for the Communist as it was for Morava.

  "Let's move along!"

  They went around the corner into the entrance hall.

  "Why haven't they been split among the classrooms?" he asked Lokajik quietly. "For God's sake, whose idea was it to lock them up like animals?"

  "The team decided ...," the assistant commander said defensively. "Well, they were acting like animals earlier!"

  One of his escorts flared up.

  "Do you know what they were doing? Throwing grenades into shelters with children in them! Chasing us with tanks!"

  "These people?"

  "A German's a German!" the man countered angrily. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! And for the record: I'm a Communist too."

  "Is that so?" Svoboda answered icily. "Then instead of the Bible, quote this: 'Hitlers come and go, but the German nation remains.' Do you know who said it?"

  Once again Svoboda was a teacher, and the man stumbled like a pupil caught unprepared.

  "No...."

  "Comrade Stalin. And if you're really a comrade, you should employ a class approach, not a nationalist one. Listen up!" Svoboda addressed the guardsmen, police, and soldiers, trying to rally the motley bunch around a common task. "Any Germans who have committed crimes will be punished severely and mercilessly, but we are depending on the German workers to help us bring about a worldwide socialist revolution. This human menagerie," he pointed to the hallway, "is a stain on our ideals. Comrades, transfer them into classrooms immediately, men apart, women with children!"

  "Yes ...," his men chirped, including the rebel.

  "And what's happening there?"

  Svoboda pointed, and Morava could hear a clamor of men's voices in the distance. The trio were even more hesitant.

  "There...," Lokajik forced the words out, "that's where they're interrogating—"

  "Who, whom, and why?"

  "Our men are interviewing the Germans ... about hidden valuables. ..."

  The high functionary headed toward it. The rest of them followed him wordlessly down that depressing hall past the cages, where only the sniffling of a child's nose could be heard. The din grew louder until only a door separated them from its source.

  "You first," Svoboda ordered the three locals.

  They proceeded behind him into the school gymnasium, so similar to the one where young Jan Morava had trained his muscles. It had never occurred to him that a gym could serve admirably as a torture chamber.

  Like school classes practicing in teams on various contraptions, groups of guardsmen were gathered around the equipment. One of them always had a notebook, pad, or piece of paper in his hand, as if grading their efforts. The focus of their attention however, was not gymnasts, but half-naked men, each tied to an apparatus: one to the handles of the pommel horse, another to the crosspieces of the wall bars, a further one to the grips of the Swedish box. The fourth, on a diagonal ladder, was stretched out by his hands and feet, like in the dungeons of old. The final man was swinging, arms and legs bound, from low-hanging rings.

  The outsiders' entrance attracted no attention; the guardsmen were apparently engrossed in the task at hand. On the rings nearby, the hanging man had just gotten a slap hard enough to start him swinging again.

  "Make sure you remember all your stashes," the man with the paper encouraged him in German. "If we find any more in your apartment you can kiss good-bye to any hope of ever seeing your family again."

  "We had all our valuables with us," the swinging man rasped brokenly. "You already took those...."

  Morava forced himself to suppress his emotions and scour the ghastly scene for his man.

  It was clear that Svoboda was also on the brink of exploding.

  "Put a stop to it," he ordered Lokajik. "Have them unbound and taken away. Then I want to have a talk with all the Czechs. And introduce me!"

  The surprise order was not welcomed, but it was carried out. Morava, however, was already sure that Rypl was not in the gymnasium, and Litera, Matlak, and Jetel shrugged in unison as well. However, he saw an unfamiliar bald man hastily leave the room through the doors opposite. There had been someone similar in the radio station gang....

  "Where do those doors lead?" he asked Lokajik.

  "To the stairs to the auditorium, to the cellar and the toilets...."

  "Have a look there," he requested Litera, "but be careful...."

  When only the Czechs were left and Svoboda had been introduced to them, he repeated roughly what he had earlier said in the entrance hall, but this time his voice rang sonorously through the large gymnasium; he must have been wonderful at political rallies. Morava noticed admiringly that even with these frustrated torturers the Communist did not mince words.

  "Instead of revolutionary justice," he finished, "you've reintroduced the rule of torture, like in the Middle Ages!"

  The guardsmen's initial respect for his position and appearance dissipated; they progressed from muttering to open disagreement. Even then the man in black managed skillfully to keep control.

  "I am stopping all interrogations in this form. Procure some water and food for the interned. Then take personal details and question them, but in a civilized fashion. The guards we send to confiscate items from the apartments will find everything anyway. Or was anyone planning to make a private visit?"

  Morava watched the gymnasium quickly divide into three camps: One group was visibly ashamed, another was hissing like wounded geese, and a third seemed deeply indignant.

  "Look here." One of the note takers shoved his papers at Svoboda. "Every German mark, every ring, everything is recorded; I'm no criminal, I'm a patriot, and this is justified retribution!"

  "Maybe not you, comrade," Svoboda responded, "but opportunities like this make criminals. We Communists will not permit people to muddy the waters and then go fishing in them for property that rightfully belongs to the whole nation."

  To further his own goal, Morava quietly asked him, "Where's the commander?"

  The black-garbed man rephrased the question. "Who's in charge here?"

  "Captain Roubinek."

  "They didn't tell you the RG doesn't take old officers?"

  "He was a partisan. He brought a whole group here from the forests."

  "And where is he?"

  "They're in the cellar ... interrogating Germans...."

  He! They! Now Morava was sure, but suddenly he felt nervous: Where was Litera? Why wasn't he back? He had Rypl's photos too!

  "Should I go fetch him?" Lokajik asked ingratiatingly.

  "We'll drop in ourselves," the envoy decided. "Meanwhile put things in order here, comrades!"

  His speech had impressed Morava.<
br />
  "Could I ask you for a couple of words in private," he requested of the Communist.

  "Of course," Svoboda answered, still a bit defensively, "but quickly."

  A few steps were enough to give them a noisy solitude. Morava looked him straight in the eyes.

  "Call me a kolaborant, or a kolous, as they now say, but for the last three months my only 'collaboration' has been hunting a depraved murderer who sadistically tortured six women to death, killed three more people, and is now murdering Germans on a conveyer belt. That lieutenant of yours claimed that they're killing people here as well; I think we'll find the perpetrator in the cellar masquerading as one Captain Roubinek."

  Svoboda listened intently to him without interrupting.

  'I want to secure him and present him to our witness so he can be convicted. But he's already in charge of his own well-armed gang and has infiltrated your peacekeeping forces, apparently all the way to the top. Will you help us?"

  The Communist tried to digest this.

  "Are you absolutely sure?"

  "Absolutely!"

  "That's terrible...."

  These new Job-like tidings shook Svoboda, coming so soon on the heels of everything he had observed in his short time here, but he appeared to accept them.

  "What do you suggest?" he asked, practical once again.

  "He's the only one we know by name; we just have descriptions of the rest, and by now there may be more of them. The killer must have a diabolical charisma that attracts anyone who, deep in his soul, is a deviant; he knows how to unleash their blood lust. Mr. Svoboda ... I don't know how to address you, I've never been interested in politics, but at the beginning of the Nazi era, all the psychopaths who had been waiting for their moment suddenly ran riot. I'm afraid now the stench of bloodletting is luring them here, even if many don't yet know they have it in them. What will it do to my homeland? And to your ideals?"

  The dark-eyed man watched those leaving either nod respectfully or look angrily past him.

  "I approve of any action that will remove this threat," he then said. "But what's the best way to carry it out?"

  "Are your escorts reliable?"

  "I'll vouch for them. Comrades from the Resistance."

  "Then with us, my men, and those two soldiers"—he added them to the group as if it were self-evident and met with no objection— "that'll be enough. My colleague went off to find them; once he returns, we can decide how to take them."

  The gymnasium had meanwhile emptied out; those who had not cleared off in a huff were busy shepherding the Germans from the cloakroom cages into classrooms. Only the group that had first met out on the street remained. Litera was still missing. Morava repeated his news for the rest of them in more detail, and Svoboda added a fiery conclusion.

  "On the threshold of our revolution, which will secure peace and prosperity for our people without exploitation, we have met a great danger, one which has destroyed many progressive movements before us: Parasites and even ordinary murderers have slipped into our ranks amid the warriors. Despite the differences of opinion among us, I believe we are all of one mind on this matter. Where is your colleague?"

  Litera was still absent.

  "I don't know," said Morava uneasily. Suddenly a foreboding gripped him.

  "I'll go have a look," Matlak offered, removing his safety catch.

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  I've already risked too much, he feared. And someone else's hide, at that…

  "We'll all go; can I lead?" the sergeant asked. "I'm trained in house-to-house fighting."

  Spring man was about to object, but Svoboda cut him off.

  "Lead on."

  Morava appreciated the Communist more and more. Unexpectedly he'd found a firm supporter in this man.

  The sergeant described to them briefly how they should cover each other.

  "If they fire first, let's hope we have better aim," he finished simply. "And if they don't fire?" He turned to Morava. "What then, Inspector?"

  "I'm not an inspector," he corrected the sergeant, "but I still have to say that sentence."

  "What sentence?"

  "You know: T arrest you in the name of the law.''

  It sounded like something out of the good old penny dreadfuls. Everyone smiled, even Morava.

  "Except...," he admitted glumly, "I made a major mistake.... What if they're holding our colleague as a hostage?"

  He met Matlak and Jetel's shaken eyes and had to answer his own question.

  "Then we'll have to let him run...."

  No, there was no other possibility, and their only hope was that Litera, whom none of the murderers could know, had kept the gang in the dark until reinforcements could arrive.

  "You'll arrest him later; we'll help you," the Communist said un-derstandingly. "We'll hunt him down."

  My new Beran, Morava thought gratefully. It was the second time in his life someone had won his trust completely. Once it's all over I have to introduce them, these two thoroughly different sides of the coin called a virtuous character.

  The sergeant put himself at the front of the formation with Jetel's automatic weapon. Leaving the gymnasium, they found themselves at the foot of a ceremonial staircase. A sign in Czech announced that it led

  K AULE

  with an arrow pointing toward the auditorium. The part reading

  ZU DER AULA

  in German had for now simply been crossed out. The sergeant arranged the men with pistols—Morava and Svoboda—at the end. As they quietly ascended he demonstrated mutely how they could cover each other by firing if things turned ugly.

  The double doors above the staircase's horizon were ajar; the great hall was empty.

  They went back down, and the sergeant and Matlak checked the toilets, just to be sure. Nothing. Behind the staircase they found a door where wide, well-lit steps led to the cellar. The sergeant crossed the threshold and listened.

  "Silence ...," he whispered encouragingly to the others.

  Morava already knew it was the worst thing they could have heard. Meanwhile he checked the main door into the courtyard; it was not locked.

  The bald one, he remembered. He warned them. Rypl has escaped again!

  And Litera? He must be on their trail, of course, so the hunt could continue immediately. Beran's favorite driver was a policeman's policeman after all his years with the superintendent, a handy, wily Czech who could get himself out of any can of worms. Morava thought it unlikely that Litera would underestimate the danger and pounce on the bait.

  His heart a bit lighter, he set out with the others to examine the cellar. The sergeant ordered them to maintain a decent interval between entrances. Morava was once again last, and halfway down the steps he could already read what awaited him in the posture of those who reached the cellar first. The arms with weapons ready slowly sank to their sides; the men stopped and looked wordlessly before them.

  He held his breath and followed them in.

  On the cellar paving stones lay a row of women bound with wire, all apparently sleeping; at first glance there were no visible wounds. Only the closest still had a long, thin knife sticking into her chest.

  Despite this horrid sight he felt relief. Dear God, thank You for at least sparing ...

  Then he noticed that everyone else was now looking diagonally behind him, and turned around.

  In a hidden corner next to the entrance Litera lay in a pool of blood next to a good-looking fellow with a mustache. Both throats had been cut.

  She's still with me! Lojza had popped into the gym just when the whole criminal squad came marching in, and he'd recognized the policeman who'd been pretending to be seriously injured down at the barricade. It could only be her doing!

  They were in the middle of working over a rich lady; she had already confessed that she'd buried her jewels in the garden, and all that remained was to make her divulge the precise locations of her stashes. He immediately sent Pepik upstairs to sound things out. The boy
ran right into the arms of the spy they'd sent, and handled things admirably: He d poured out a story about some guy downstairs torturing a German woman while he ran for help. Then the fool drew his pistol and ran downstairs. The boy followed and managed to trip him halfway down the flight.

  He could see it in the guy's eyes, just as he'd seen it in the caretaker's: The man knew he was Rypl. There was no choice; he had the man's hands bound. The cop even tried to frighten them.

  "I'm in uniform! You'll get the rope for murdering a policeman!"