Pavel Kohout - The Widow Killer

“Lemme see… it’s not even up!”

“What the fuck am I gonna do?”

“Get off her.” Ladislav chuckled. “You’re impotent. Or a bugger.”

“What’s that?”

The toothless man, surprisingly, took pity on him.

“Leave the kid alone. Pepik, don’t worry about it, you’re still a bit too young. I say we leave her trussed like this until morning, gentlemen, and sack out somewhere else, there’s loads of beds here. Before we go we can have some more for breakfast.”

He leered at the boy.

“Maybe your willie’ll grow overnight, then wham, bam! You might even want some too, Ludva.”

He was still not used to the name Ludvík, much less to its nickname. And this boasting was starting to annoy him. Why did they think that was all there was to manhood? Even the youth would have sobered right up, if only he’d seen… But why not recruit the kid — or all of them — for his cause? Surely the world had never seen BIGGER WHORES THAN THE GERMANS?

And why was she still looking at him that way? Yes, she recognized him as her master!

“Once you’ve had your fun,” he decided, “I’ll show you what I do with a Kraut whore!”

He considered leaving while Grete was asleep, to spare both of them the good-byes. However, when he had made tea down in the kitchen and dipped his biscuit in it, he suddenly knew he couldn’t disappear without at least kissing her for good luck.

As he had held her, sleeping, in the crook of his arms long into the night until he himself fell asleep, he realized why she attracted him more than his wife ever had. His conclusion was unfair but true: he had been Hilde’s first; she had simply belonged to him, and never had any secrets from him. With Grete, the closer she supposedly brought them with her confession, the more mysterious she seemed. He had filled Hilde’s entire life; in Grete’s he was simply the latest man, or even one man too many. Sometimes he felt himself entirely superfluous.

He was wrong, she’d said once long ago (Long ago? They’d barely known each other seven weeks!), utterly wrong to make all his predecessors into rivals. You love once in your life, for your whole life, and that love simply takes on different names — but the final one is the sum and summit of them all, and that was him, as he knew full well; why brood over it?

He could not deny that he felt the same. As if he’d never loved anyone but her.

Anyway, why worry about it? Now the point was for both of them to stay alive.

He went back upstairs in his socks and tried to wake her by staring intently at her. She slept so deeply that finally he leaned over.

“My love…,” he whispered in her ear. “Do you hear me?”

She swam to the surface of consciousness remarkably quickly.

“Why did you wake me, Buback? You’ve never woken me before? Do you want to tell me you’re staying with me?”

“No….”

“Nor that you’re taking me with you?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Then why? I could have not known for hours that you’d gone. That you’d left me in the lurch at the mercy of the first person to come. Maybe it’ll even be your murderer. Murderers like to return to the scene of the crime, don’t they?”

He was horrified.

“For God’s sake, Grete…. I tried to explain to you…”

An ironic gleam appeared in her sleepy eyes.

“Now you’ve convinced me, love. Of course you explained it. And of course I’d rather see you than wake up here alone. Now go, for real, and leave me alone. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“Grete—”

“I don’t want to see you till I see you again!”

He collected his strength to leave.

“You’ll have to lock up after me….”

“Not now. Now I have you inside me and I don’t feel so abandoned, so I’ll try to sleep some more. Lock me in and keep the key. I won’t be entertaining visitors today. Good-bye, love.”

The bedclothes billowed. The last thing to register on his retina was the tiny flicker of a flame.

Grete’s face, that battleground of despair and passion, stayed with him the whole way to Gestapo headquarters. No one noticed him; there was no gunfire, and the barricades had become social clubs, where people hashed and rehashed the possible developments while they waited for the Americans to arrive. Everywhere snatches of conversation told him people were convinced the war was over, at least in Prague.

He did not meet his own men until close to Bredovska, but even here Czechs living on “German” territory walked freely through. In the building he found the document burning was over and the drinking had begun. The collapse of Germany’s self-declared millennial values and its leading characters was turning a national tragedy into a bloodstained burlesque. In his previous workplaces, a power elite directed by Berlin’s mighty pen had managed to arrange an orderly withdrawal. Here the pen had snapped and the Gestapo had disintegrated into a frightened crowd of men arguing when and to whom they should surrender. To Buback’s horror they were unanimous on one point: that all the prisoners in the underground bunkers should be liquidated first, so they could not inform on their interrogators.

Regardless of the state of their relationship, he had to speak to Meckerle immediately, and coincidentally he ran into his boss on the way. The newly minted lieutenant general was just leaving his antechamber; when he spotted Buback, he motioned to him with a finger and retreated back into his office. There he poured two large cognacs as he walked, drank his in a single gulp, and began to speak, standing.

“You were right, that SS moron’s raid was a colossal failure, and then he slept right through that fiasco at the radio station. Prague is lost and I’ve given up on Schörner. Do you still have a direct line to the Prague police?”

Is it a trap? he considered hastily; is Meckerle after revenge? Does he want my confession so all he’ll need is a quick field trial and an execution that’s more like a dog slaying? But if Buback had been followed the day before, then saying no would only confirm his guilt. So he hedged his bet.

“Yes. Neither you nor Schörner withdrew your orders for cooperation.”

“Perfect. If it amuses you, then keep looking for that deviant in this shambles, but help your countrymen while you’re doing so.”

For the first time, Meckerle gave that word preference over the Nazi term kinsmen.

“I’m happy to, assuming I can figure out how to proceed, and if it’s in my power to do so.”

“We need to get out of this trap, nothing more, nothing less, otherwise the Russians will sweep us up and put our backs to the wall. Yes, the western front has stopped. They could let us retreat toward it. We’ll need our guns, of course — otherwise every kid we see will want to take a crack at us — but we’ll give them up as soon as we see the first Yank.”

No! Could this be his chance?

“And what are we offering?”

“Not to turn their baroque buildings into piles of rubble; what more could they ask for?”

“I don’t think that will be enough. They have the upper hand.”

“Probably so. What would you add?”

“Their people imprisoned in Pankrac. There’s talk here of executing them.”

“People are afraid the prisoners would want revenge.”

Buback had an answer to this one.

“We’ll give them the keys to the building once we’ve been allowed to leave.”

“Done,” the giant said without hesitation. “Move, then, and see to it.”

Buback could not risk having the former bank clerk change his mind and overrule him.

“I request a written order.”

“Have them write it up next door and hurry!”