Pavel Kohout - The Widow Killer

Remembering with gratitude my long-term late friend and agent, Joan Daves, New York

P.K.

When the doorbell rang just after the siren, Elisabeth, baroness of Pomerania, was sure the caretaker had come to escort her down to the shelter; she donned the black fur coat she had just hung up, picked up her small emergency suitcase, unhooked the door chain, and realized that she had just let her murderer in.

Earlier, at the Vy ehrad cemetery, she had noticed a man with a bulging bag over his shoulder; it was common these days to see Czechs decorating the graves of their patron saints. His appearance reminded her of a repairman, and she could barely see him because his face was obscured by the sun. Now she saw eyes of glass: no color or expression. He calmly wedged a scuffed shoe into the crack; a lanky body bundled in a cotton jacket followed it through the door. And there, finally, she saw the long and strangely slim blade. A poultry knife! she thought.

The baroness knew she was going to die, but she did nothing to prevent it. She was the only occupant left on the top floor, and the roar of airplane motors would have drowned out her screams. Besides, she had no desire to live.

For a Catholic, suicide was unthinkable; divine punishment was the best she could hope for. This unjust war would only end when those who began it were destroyed. A Russian partisan had shot her husband; a Maquis had killed her son in Brittany. It seemed logical that now a man from the Czech Resistance had come for her.

The patrician house began to shake as the eerie ringing grew more and more insistent. With each approaching explosion the window-panes, the chandelier crystals, and the goblets in the sideboard shuddered wildly.

Merciful God, Elisabeth of Pomerania prayed to herself, retreating into the salon as if he were her guest; a bomb, a knife — who cares, as long as it’s quick!

Her killer’s foot slammed the door shut behind him, while his free hand opened a satchel of straps.

Thunder, mused Chief Inspector Buback, in February ? It was over before he knew it. A large aerial bomb, he realized, and it had fallen uncomfortably close by.

The building of the Prague Gestapo, where Buback worked as liaison officer for the Reich’s criminal police office, swayed wildly for what seemed like an eternity, but did not collapse. The proverbial quiet followed the storm; time stopped. Eventually sirens began to wail, and the officers and secretaries trooped down to the shelter.

He stared, motionless, at the two faces on his desk.

Buback disliked the shelter, in the basement of the old Petschke Bank. Some of its safes had been converted into cells; he’d heard a good interrogation there helped political prisoners remember all sorts of forgotten details. So he stayed upstairs, thunderstruck: the blast and the shaking had brought Hilde and Heidi back to life.

Their framed picture had traveled with him throughout the war. The offices changed, as did the cities and countries, but everywhere they had smiled radiantly at him, older and younger versions of a quiet, soothing loveliness. He conducted meetings and interrogations as they gazed at him from that final peacetime summer on the Isle of Sylt; for the most part he barely noticed them. But not an hour went by without Buback remembering in a flash of joy that they were alive.

They had been on his desk last year in Antwerp as men in other departments prepared for the retreat by burning documents in the courtyard. He had sneezed as the pungent smoke tickled his nose, and for a moment he did not understand the voice on the telephone telling him that both of them were dead. The smiles in the picture still glowed inside him; they flatly contradicted what he heard. Then the official from Berlin headquarters read him the police report.

Two years earlier he had sighed with relief when Hilde and Heidi were sent away from threatened Dresden. Wine was the only significant industry in the medieval Franconian village where Hilde went to teach war orphans. Therefore, it could not possibly be on the Allied target list. A stray bomb killed Hilde and Heidi — and them alone — when it fell unexpectedly in broad daylight on their apartment.

When the news finally hit him, the picture’s glowing expressions froze into lifeless grimaces. He still kept the little frame on his desk, but when he looked at it he felt nothing, not even regret. Until just now, when another bomb fell close by.

Yes! Suddenly he was sure: they had been sitting opposite each other, with an empty chair and place setting for him at the end of the table, as always. Which meant that, in a sense, he had been with them even at the moment the blast and heat transformed them instantly into smoke and ash.

With the unexpected bomb, a feeling of liberation exploded inside him: it was an angel of merciful death that had first carried off his loves and now returned them to him. The motionless features softened; their old warmth returned. Entranced, he noticed only dimly that Kroloff had come in with a stack of papers.

Buback’s adjutant — and, he suspected, his secret overseer — had been assigned to him by the Gestapo; Kroloff shaved his high, narrow brow every other day so that his thinning hair would look fuller come peacetime. He announced that a direct attack had taken out the corner house on the block. Just opposite the National Museum, he said regretfully; a few yards further and the Czechs would have had a taste of what happened in Dresden!

A few yards further, Buback thought, and I would have been with them, smoke and ash…. Only half listening, he had to ask Kroloff to repeat the second piece of news. He had thought he was beyond surprise, but Kroloff’s announcement quickly proved him wrong. Colonel Meckerle should hear about this directly from him, he decided.

Morava barely recognized Prague. It was as if seven years later the city had finally recovered from the shock of the German occupation. As they left the police station on Národni Avenue, his driver had to wait for long lines of fire engines and ambulances to roar past, belching acrid fumes from wartime gasoline substitute. People hurried along the sidewalks toward the river Vltava. All day the illegal foreign broadcasters in Krom í had been reporting last night’s deadly Allied bombing of Dresden. The recent air raid, despite its brevity, had panicked the Czechs: would Prague meet the same fate?

Assistant Detective Morava didn’t think it would. In the first place, he was a born optimist, and in the second, he didn’t believe that at this stage of the war the Allies would flatten the capital of an occupied nation. What was more, Air-Raid Control had already determined that only a couple of bombs from a few planes had hit Prague. The prevailing opinion at police headquarters was that a navigator had confused the two cities and made a tragic mistake.

Even so, emergency plans were automatically set in motion. Workers from all departments spread out to the affected areas to supervise the excavation work and report on the damages and losses. Moments earlier, Morava had been heading out as well, but Superintendent Beran sent him back up to his desk.

“Catastrophes bring out the criminals as well as the Samaritans; you’ll hold down the fort here, Morava.”