by Ben Pastor
“This is an official investigation, Captain. Without the body…” Nowotny flicked his finger at the box, and the box fell over.
“I know. I’ll try again.”
“It’s been twelve damn days. Unless she’s like Jesus Christ and has got up and walked off, you had better get the dead nun here before too much longer.”
An hour later, Father Malecki said he certainly didn’t have the authority to have the body exhumed. Bora had a drumming headache, and grew angry.
“I don’t understand why you have to be so reticent. All courtesy has been extended to the sisters so far, and you’re giving me some lip service about authority! I could get the SS involved and have you give me the body.”
Malecki felt it was an empty threat, and tightened his jaw. “Apparently you will have to do just that.”
As it turned out, at the SS command north-west of the Old City, Hauptsturmführer Salle-Weber didn’t seem interested at first, but eventually began paying attention to what Bora was telling him.
“Well, that’s a good one! I’d just like to know what the nun did, that someone put a bullet through her.”
“None of us know. That’s why I’ve come.”
“To get the muscle to enter the nunnery, eh?”
“Yes. The sisters have dispensation to bury their own in the vault of the chapel.”
“Now then!” Salle-Weber rocked on the soles of his shiny boots for some time. “Are you sure you don’t have other reasons to want to get in?”
“What other reasons could I possibly have?”
“That’s what I’m asking. What should any of us care about a Polack nun? We’ll end up having to kill a few in time. Maybe there’s something worthwhile in the nunnery that the Army knows about.”
“I know of no such thing.”
“Precious manuscripts, holy vessels - hidden Jews?” Salle-Weber smirked at Bora’s impatience. “Well, then? The novices, maybe.”
“I’m not interested in those either.”
Fists on his sides, Salle-Weber stepped to the wall map of Cracow. “Only because I’m curious, Bora. We’ll get you the dead nun.”
“What methods will you use to enter?”
“That’s none of your business. We’ll handle things our way. Just wait outside with an army ambulance, and I promise you, you’ll have the carcass before this evening.”
Seen from behind on the sidewalk, the girl had a nice round crupper, and very nice calves even in her cotton stockings. Retz pulled in close to the kerb and rolled down his window.
“Dzien dobry,” he greeted her gallantly. “May I offer you a ride?”
The girl didn’t answer. She stopped, however, and gave him the impression of debating with herself whether she would accept.
“Thank you,” she said in fairly good German. “You could take me to work, maybe?”
Retz opened the car door for her. “Sure, come right in. Just tell me where, darling.”
She gave him the address. He looked at her legs and started the car. A mischievous hostility lined her smile when he asked, “What sort of place do you work in?”
She moved his hand away from her knee. “A busy one, Major. The city morgue.”
At the convent, Father Malecki rushed out of the main door in a distracted manner. He looked around and saw the German staff car and the ambulance next to it. Bora rolled up his window in the time it took the priest to come striding from the threshold to the car.
Bora let him fret for some time, but when his driver asked if he wanted him to remove the priest, he said, “No, no,” and came out of the car.
Within moments he was arguing with the American. “Well, you could have given us the body the easy way! I told you we needed it.”
“Do you know what the penalty is for those who break church rules by forcing their way into a convent?”
“I doubt very much that the German SS worry about excommunication.”
“I’m talking about you: you are Catholic!”
“And if you notice, I haven’t entered the convent. If I were you, Father, I’d go back inside and see how things are coming along.”
It took two hours, and it was Salle-Weber who came out first, followed by two of his men. He had red spots on his face and was short of breath.
“Why the devil did you get me involved in this, Bora? There’s no damn body in there!” He ignored Bora’s attempt to say something. “The coffin’s empty, and so’s the wall hole in the vault. We checked the place from top to bottom - huge, damn place it is, too. Kitchen, refectory, cells, the garden, attic, cellar, church, chapel-Idon’t know what in hell they did with a rotting nun, and I don’t care if they shoved her down the latrine at this point!”
Bora took a sideways look at Father Malecki. He stood a few steps away and might not have understood the exchange, but bore an indefinable expression that seemed to him one of relief.
It seemed impossible, but an idea made its way into Bora’s mind. “Where were the other nuns?” he asked the SS.
“They all flocked to kneel before the altar, the geese. The chapel was packed with them. The coffin was in the vault all right, but the damn body was not.”
“And they were all kneeling?”
“Yes, yes! All kneeling, that’s what I said!”
Bora would not remove his glance from the priest. He told Salle-Weber, slowly, “You should have asked all the nuns to stand up.”
Salle-Weber blasphemed, and was gone again. This time Bora followed him in.
4 November
Nowotny laughed when he heard the story. “They pulled the dead nun out of the coffin and got her to kneel among them? What precious hypocrites these holy folks are!”
“I’m really interested in the preliminary results of your examination, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
“Sure. Here it is.” Nowotny handed him a form, handwritten in minute Gothic script, resembling chicken scratches on the page. “It was a Polish bullet that did her in. Pierced the left lung from a few feet away, and lodged right in the heart. Death was instantaneous, though by now we can’t pinpoint the time of death.” Nowotny grinned, placing the bullet on his desk. “I’m going to play with it for a while - the body, that is - to see about these stigmata and the miraculous phenomenon of its reasonably incorrupted and pliable state after two weeks. If I had the time and the equipment, I’d take a good look at her brain to see what was in it that was so holy.”
Bora stared at the bit of metal, then put it in his pocket along with Nowotny’s form. “We already have an official protest from the archbishop. I’m afraid we have to give the body back at once.”
At Headquarters, since Hofer had come to move his things from the commander’s office, Colonel Schenck invited him to hear Bora’s first report. Hofer sat through it with his head in his hands, listlessly following what was being said.
“It’s true that no weapons were retrieved so far, but the convent is a large complex of buildings, and there are more nooks and crannies than one can count. No shell casing has turned up in the cloister or in the upper balconies around it. In any case, I found out that on the morning of the day the abbess was killed, there were outsiders in the convent.”
“What do you mean?”
Bora turned to Schenck, who had asked the question. “It seems that a stray bomb had damaged the roof of the chapel during the invasion, so workers were called in to repair it. I doubt very much that we can trace them now, but I’ll do my best.”
Schenck made a wry face. “Ha. So, there’s a chance that Polish workers killed a saint.”
Bora could see the words annoyed Hofer, and was careful to defuse the tension.
“Whom else do we have to suspect, Colonel? ‘Everybody in the convent loved the abbess,’ the nuns tell me. Father Malecki doesn’t seem to have been wholly convinced of her mystic powers, but I doubt his Jesuit scepticism would bring him to kill her. Besides, he wasn’t in the convent at the time of her death.”
“They could have shot her fr
om the outside,” Schenck suggested. “After all there are tall buildings around the convent.”
“I’ll do the rounds of the neighbourhood, to see from where a shot could have been fired. However, the bullet entered her chest straight on. Hardly the angle that would suggest a shot fired from a distant vantage point.”
Hofer, who’d been slouching, sat bolt upright, as if words said before were just now reaching him. “What do you mean, the priest doesn’t believe in her mystic powers?”
“Well, he’s an investigator in his own right - he shouldn’t be biased to begin with.”
“But disbelieving is a bias all the same. What do you believe, Bora?”
Bora knew Schenck was curious to hear the answer as much as Hofer was, and weighed his words. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s important what I believe about the abbess. The German command wants to know who killed her, and I’m trying to figure it out.”
“But you must believe in miracles if you’re Catholic!”
Schenck inwardly smiled when Bora kept silent.
3
7 November
Colonel Hofer’s departure was as quick as it had been predictable. Bora went to see him off at the Cracow Glowny station on Tuesday. He was himself on his way north to question ethnic Germans on their complaints about violence by retreating Polish troops.
Hofer seemed to appreciate Bora’s presence. Pale but composed, he let his bitterness through by commenting on how a “hair-line crack causes the whole pot to be thrown away”.
“I hate to say I’ll be better off in Germany, Bora. I know how your generation hankers to expand. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Colonel, did the abbess give you reason to think that she feared for her life, or that she might die shortly?”
Hofer’s composure gave way a little. “No.”
“But do you think she knew?”
“Please let us not speak of it, Captain. I cannot add any piece of information that will help you solve her murder. I’d rather not speak of it.” The train was preparing to leave, so Hofer boarded. Without leaning out of the window, he added, “Goodbye, Bora. When you talk to your farmers today, keep in mind they’ll tell you what you want to hear.”
Bora saluted. “It’s unlikely, sir. I don’t know myself what I want to hear.”
“Hopefully the truth - whatever the truth means to you.” Hofer cleared his throat. “Try not to be more self-assured than the situation calls for. It won’t serve you well.” Slowly he answered Bora’s salute, as if raising his hand to the temple were too much for him, or he no longer cared for the gesture. “Remember Adam and the apple.”
The train began to move. In the time it took Hofer to leave the Cracow metropolitan area, Bora and Hannes had already taken the road into the countryside. When the train stopped in Kielce, Bora was sitting on the rubble wall of a fly-infested farmyard, surrounded by disgruntled Silesians who wanted to have their say.
9 November
“Was L.C.A.N. the abbess’s motto?”
Father Malecki didn’t need to look at the photograph Bora held in his hand to answer. “Yes, it was her Latin maxim. You may know it translates into ‘Light of Christ, Succour Us’.”
“Yes, I know.”
The evergreens in the cloister gave an illusion of spring which the low temperature dispelled as soon as the men walked out into it. Bora regretted his decision not to wear his greatcoat this morning, since he was soon uncomfortable in his woollen uniform. The news of a failed attempt on Hitler’s life the day before had thrown the military establishment into such confusion, the wearing of a coat seemed a superfluous preoccupation.
Bundled around the neck with a bulky scarf, Malecki wore nothing over his cassock, but had already taken care to wear long johns underneath.
Although no photographs had been taken of the body, Bora remembered the position in which it had been found. He walked to the well, and with a twig showed Malecki approximately where the head and feet of the nun had lain.
“Had it been up to me, I wouldn’t have let them move her,” Bora said as he leaned against the rim of the roofed well. “It was clear that she was dead, still the sisters hauled her inside to try to revive her. They wouldn’t have let me help even had I been so inclined.”
Malecki watched Bora pensively rub the metal-clad toe of his boot on the grout between bricks, where a dark residue was all that remained of the blood flow. He told himself he was putting up with Bora at this point. Resentment for a military presence in the convent found no open expression because there was nothing in this situation over which he had control. The archbishop of Cracow felt very differently from the Vatican on the issue of collaboration with German authorities, but he, too, had to keep it to himself. So Malecki had resolved to be here whenever the German visited, in hopes of keeping a check on him.
Bora knew it, and accepted it for the time being.
“Captain, you must believe me when I say that if you’re looking for culprits within this convent, you’re making a colossal mistake.”
“Am I?” Bora lifted his glance to him. Under the brief shade of the visor he had a look of quickly controlled animosity. “Judging by the angle of entry, the shot was fired from a few feet away, by someone standing somewhere between here and there.” He pointed to the south side of the cloister, where an arbor vitae sat in a massive clay pot. “As best as I can reconstruct the series of events, Colonel Hofer was let into the convent shortly after half-past sixteen hundred hours. Though he has no precise recollection of the time lapse, he probably entered the cloister no more than two minutes later. He had an appointment, and you know the sisters automatically let him through. When he walked into the cloister, he saw Mother Kazimierza’s body. The shock was such that it took him a few minutes to gather his wits enough to run out for help. It was fifteen minutes to seventeen hundred hours when he made it out of the convent to call me. Somebody did the abbess in just before our arrival, Father: make what you will of it.” Sensing Malecki’s disgruntlement, Bora added, “By the way, Father Malecki, I read your annotations very carefully, and I believe there are some parts missing. There’s no history of the abbess previous to her entrance into the convent, and more importantly there are no personal observations on her character. You live on Karmelicka Street.” Bora took out a notebook and flipped through it. “Number 17, third floor. I imagine you keep the rest of your papers there. I had no intention of being disrespectful, and resisted the temptation to go see for myself. May I impose on you to get the rest of the documentation for me before tomorrow? I noticed you number the pages of your notebooks, so I’d know at once if there were any missing entries.”
“I see.” Malecki felt his teeth creak in his mouth, by the tightness of his jaw. “And where do you want them delivered?”
“Kindly bring them here. I’ll be back to pick them up at sixteen hundred hours, by which time I hope to be able to start interrogating the sisters.” Bora walked away. Only after reaching the porch did he turn around to see if the priest had followed. Seeing that he had intentionally stayed behind, he retraced his steps to the well. He stood facing the priest for perhaps a minute, something which might make the American uneasy, although - unwilling like many soldiers to share physical closeness - Bora kept at some distance.
He said finally, as if rushing out of some unrehearsed, impulsive process of thinking, “We can work together or separately on this, Father Malecki. I’m not going to offer more than once.”
Malecki felt his heart race. All of a sudden, resentment and hope and his own anguished curiosity about the death struggled in his mind so fiercely, he feared the German might hear the screaming in his head. It was one of those moments when one becomes perfectly aware of what is around: time and place and circumstances, as if a revelation of eternity within the fleeting moment were granted. All Bora had asked him was to collaborate.
He suspiciously returned Bora’s attention. To him, somehow Bora looked Anglo-Saxon more than German. He had th
e face of good breeding but not of inexperience, a sensitive and disciplined expression, harder, yet not unlike the faces of idealistic young priests Malecki had known.
“But of course you wouldn’t share your findings with me, Captain.”
“I will share what I see fit.”
Bora was taking off his glove to shake hands. Malecki felt for an instant that this might just as easily be God’s way of offering him the right choice or an unrecognized compromise with virtue. He grabbed hold of the proffered hand much in excess of rude firmness.
Bora understood the warning, and laughed. “You shake hands like a longshoreman.”
“I worked among them long enough.”
11 November
“Don’t be a spoilsport, Bora! It’s only the third time I ask. Do I complain when you play your damn Beethoven and Schumann every night? Just stay away, no one is telling you you have to sleep outdoors.”
“But what does the major expect me to do in the middle of the night in this town? I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to sit in a hotel room or in my car until the major is done.”
“Well then, I’ll make it easy for you: I’m ordering you to stay away, and I don’t give a damn what you do with yourself in the meantime.”
Bora swept his coat from the back of the armchair, and left the apartment.
An hour later, Colonel Schenck was leaving the officers’ club as Bora walked in. Bora saluted. Schenck returned the salute. He stopped on the threshold, and so did Bora.
“Do you know what time it is, Captain?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to be aware that I don’t approve of junior officers staying up late. Are you alone?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“In that case, I suggest you order one drink and drive back to your quarters.”
