Pavel Kohout - The Widow Killer

“Didn’t it ever occur to you, Morava, that, railway workers and firemen aside, only the Prague police could defend this castle — and all of Prague with it — from destruction? And who can block the Germans’ retreat to the west once the great flight from the Russians begins? Won’t it be crucial for the Germans, then, to sound us out up close and neutralize us in time? Buback isn’t just a detective, Morava; he’s Gestapo.”

Barbora Pospíchalová actually enjoyed going to the cemetery. Death had taken a cruelly long time to claim her husband, playing with him like a well-fed cat with a mouse. Its final strike meant freedom for both him and his wife.

After taking years to choose the right man, she had married Jaroslav at thirty for love; the rapid onset of his chronic illness thereafter only strengthened her feelings for him. Therefore she was more surprised than anyone at how quickly she resigned herself to his death. She would have sworn it would be months, perhaps years, before she could lead a normal existence. And it was absurd to think — yes, she had found the very idea distasteful — that she might ever again have a lover, let alone a husband. A month after the funeral, however, she heard a new confession of love and a marriage proposal.

Her suitor was Jaroslav’s brother, who had cared for him unflaggingly by her side until he breathed his last. During that whole time Jind ich had never revealed his feelings and even now agreed to her request. This only endeared him to her more.

She had decided to mourn for half a year, and that period was just over. Tomorrow her brother-in-law was coming for dinner, and Barbora was sure he would stay the night. She suddenly realized that even here — where only a layer of clay divided her from the body she had touched so tenderly — she was looking forward to their lovemaking. “Forgive me, Jaroslav, my Jarou ek, my love,” she begged in a whisper. For a moment her desires seemed hideously carnal and she weighed writing Jind ich not to come.

Then, as if swimming up from the chilly depths, she heard the voices of the first birds as they returned after winter to the treetops and transformed the cemetery into a park. In the breeze she felt a hint of spring scents and her misgivings seemed senselessly cold. Jaroslav was dead; he was changing slowly into earth, which would soon nourish the fresh greenery. Why shouldn’t new feelings grow here too from the love two people bore him, feelings that would join all three of them together?

Barbora had brought water for the bouquet of cowslips and a rag she used to wash the marble stone with its gilded name and two dates. Then, as always, she cleaned out the small blue lantern she had brought for better days: after the February bombing, Praguers had bought up all the unreliable ersatz candles for their cellars, and anyway cemeteries were subject to strict blackout laws. When she had finally finished her prayers, crossed herself, and stepped back from the grave, she bumped into a man.

It frightened her, because she was usually alone here among the dead at noon. The man hastily apologized. His Czech had an unusual accent, but what caught her attention was his odd appearance. The smart black suit, a prewar cut, clashed with a battered brown suitcase. Had he come straight from the train station to a funeral? But there were none scheduled today. Maybe he’d got the time or place wrong?

Of course she had no intention of asking; she simply assured him she was fine and didn’t analyze what else in him disturbed her. She had set off toward the exit when he asked her where he could find the grave of Bed ich Smetana. She led him to it; those with loved ones here followed an unwritten code, helping visitors to find the graves of the national heroes who a hundred years before had revived the Czech nation from a similar deadly slumber.

On the way, she could not help asking where he was from, and was shaken by his story. He had lost his wife and home in the recent bombing of Zlín in east Moravia and had set off for Prague, to his divorced sister’s. Before she got home from work, he told Barbora, he wanted to lift his spirits by visiting some historic sights he’d longed to see since his school days.

As she bade him farewell at Slavín, a piercing wind blew up and he remarked that winter was far from over. She realized what had disturbed her about him, and asked why he didn’t have a coat. It had been in his house, he explained simply, and she reddened with shame that it hadn’t occurred to her. Her wardrobe was still full of Jaroslav’s outerwear, which would have made slim Jind ich look like a scarecrow, and anyway, she’d feel better without them….

“I don’t live far,” she said in a wave of sympathy, “and I still have lots of my husband’s things. You can take something for yourself.”

“God bless you, thank you kindly,” he said in his old-fashioned Moravian way — now she could place the accent! He picked up the bulging suitcase and strode after her.

Assistant Detective Morava had met with Chief Inspector Buback several times already, but never for so long and in such close quarters. First he offered Buback the front seat, then tried at least to leave him alone in the back, but the German more or less ordered Morava to sit next to him; otherwise they’d have to shout at each other, he said. With Beran’s instructions fresh in his mind, he expected the Gestapo agent to press him for information about the police, and was surprised: Buback merely wanted to hear the facts about the four suspects who had been investigated and cleared of the murder in Brno. With the help of Morava’s notebook this task was easily and quickly behind them.

Josef Jurajda, born 5 March 1905 in Olomouc, Moravia (the Brno office had promised to track down his address) was by trade a room painter with the firm Valnoha and Son, which had branches all over the region. Prosecuted several times for sexual deviance, he climaxed without having sexual relations with women. He had tied two prostitutes up with a clothesline, silenced them with a gag, and masturbated in front of them while jabbing them in the chest with pins. His alibi for the fateful moment seemed airtight: he had been working for his firm in Ko ice, two hundred miles to the east, and the train connections between times when his coworkers had seen him would have allowed him a scant twenty minutes for a complex crime in Brno. Given the low volume of traffic on Slovakian roads, the investigators decided he would not have had time to hitchhike to Brno and back.

Alfons Hunyady was born 16 December 1915 in what was then the north bank of the Hungarian city Komárom. An illiterate Gypsy, he lived off earnings as a day laborer and more often as a petty thief. Among other crimes, he was convicted of rape in 1931 as a juvenile and in 1935 sent to prison for the same offense. In both cases he had tied his victims with wire and cut their breasts to lessen their resistance. Only a miracle stopped the second woman from bleeding to death. Hunyady’s alibi for the October night when someone tortured Maru ka Kubílková to death was curious. He spent it in jail in the town of Ivan ice near Brno; a notorious and therefore oft-imprisoned local criminal would lend out the master key for a small payment. Although other witnesses corroborated the fact, the director of the police station denied the charge vehemently, calling it slander, and for public interest reasons neither the judge nor the prosecutor wanted to risk a perjury trial involving a government official. Alfons Hunyady was tracked until 1941 as the political situation allowed; then the file ended with an ominous note of his disappearance from the personnel register.