A Death in Pilsen

Chapter 1

April 1946

“Seems like every day now there’s another story about a ship loaded with war brides coming over here,” Dirk O’Farrell of the Chicago Sun observed between slurps of coffee as he paged through his paper’s final edition. “Wonder how all the good old American girls feel about these English and French and Dutch honeys, and even some frauleins, of all things, taking GIs off the marriage market. It doesn’t seem quite right to me, somehow.”

“And just how would you have stopped it, Dirk?” asked Packy Farmer of the Herald American, contemplating one of his misshapen little hand-rolled cigarettes before he lit it. “Put blinders on our soldiers when they’re not on duty? Or maybe lock them in their barracks at night? You’d have had a full-scale revolt on your hands, I’ll wager.”

“True enough,” O’Farrell answered. “There’s no way of keeping nature from... well, from taking its course, shall we say. Not that all of our boys over there were exactly honest with the young ladies of Europe. You may remember a story a few weeks back — it was in your very own Tribune, Malek — about this girl over there, England I think, who fell for this soldier from North Carolina.

“He fed her this line about how he had a plantation back home. When she got there, she learned it was nothing but a shack deep in the backwoods, miles from civilization. She took one look, got the hell out of there, and grabbed the very next train up to New York. They found her later holed up in some Manhattan hotel, mad as hell.”

“She ever go back to the guy?” Farmer asked.

“Story didn’t say,” O’Farrell answered, “but I’d lay eight to five that she ended up on a boat back to where she came from.”

“What do you think, Snap?” Farmer posed, swiveling to face me. “You were over there toward the end. You must have seen lots of romances blooming between our boys and the local sweeties.”

“Yeah, Malek,” the sawed-off Eddie Metz of the Times piped up, after blowing his pathetic version of a smoke ring. “Even though you’re married, I’ll bet you had all kinds of chances to... you know.”

“No, Eddie, I don’t know,” I shot back. “I wasn’t there in uniform, as you damn well are aware; I was a correspondent for the Tribune. And my editors back here in Chicago didn’t leave me a whole lot of time to go out on the town. They labored under some quaint theory that I was there to grind out copy, lots of it. I worked harder than I ever have.”

“If that’s your story, by all means, stick with it, Snap,” O’Farrell said with a smirk. He leaned back and contemplated the peeling paint of indeterminate color on the ceiling. “No one on this side of the drink will ever be the wiser. What puzzles me, though, is why, after the paper brought you home from Europe, you actually asked to have your old beat back. I mean, you had all those bylines from England and Germany, and then you want to park yourself in this grimy dump with us again.”

“It was just that I couldn’t bear to be away from you fine fellows any longer,” I deadpanned as they guffawed and groaned.

But Dirk O’Farrell had a point. For years, I had toiled as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune, biggest of the city’s five daily newspapers, in the pressroom at Police Headquarters, 1121 S. State St., Chicago, USA. Beginning shortly after Pearl Harbor, I had nagged various of the Trib editors to make me a foreign correspondent. Early in ’45, not long after Catherine and I were married, they finally got tired of hearing me whine and sent me off to the paper’s London bureau, where there was a temporary opening. Catherine stayed home, as it was clear I wouldn’t be there for more than a few months.

It was an exciting, energizing time to be in England, along with all the other newspaper correspondents from across the country and around the world, to say nothing of the likes of Eric Sevareid and Edward R. Murrow. I even met Eisenhower twice and went to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference where Truman, Stalin, and Churchill decided, for good or ill, on the shape postwar Europe would take. It was there, in mid-conference, that Clement Attlee, the Labor Party candidate who had defeated Churchill as prime minister in the summer election, took over Britain’s seat at the table.

When I returned to Chicago late in ’45, my stock at the paper was high, and I almost surely could have landed a spot as a general assignment reporter. But now that I was married again, I found I liked keeping regular hours, and the editors were happy to have me back in the Headquarters Press Room on the day shift.

I replaced a guy who was both lazy and incompetent, and who now works in public relations, writing florid press releases that extol, among other things, the gastronomic delights of dining at a chain of cut-rate steak houses in the city.

So here I was, back with the same crew that had been at Police Headquarters for a decade or longer — the aforementioned O’Farrell, Farmer, and Metz, plus Anson Masters of the Daily News.

“While we are on the subject of war brides, Mr. Malek,” rumbled Masters, the dean of this press room corps, “I recall that you told us that a cousin of yours had married one.”

“Ah, Anson, your memory still functions despite your advanced years,” I told him. “Corporal Charlie Malek, late of our very own United States Army, has brought himself home a bride from England, name of Edwina. The couple is now ensconced in a four-room flat in that fine old Czech enclave of Pilsen, the very neighborhood where yours truly was himself born and reared.”

“And they are happy, I presume?” Masters asked, running a hand over his bald and freckled pate.

“Moderately, as far as one can tell,” I said, neglecting to mention that both Catherine and I had felt the tension between the couple on the two occasions we had been with them. In particular, Edwina had snapped at Charlie several times, usually because of his long working hours as a welder for the gas company.

My cousin, a quiet sort — some might go so far as to call him humble — pointed out to her that if they were to buy a house in the suburbs, they needed the money his overtime work brought in for the down payment.

“Well, Charles,” she told him in a tone that seemed to be mimicking some British actress playing a duchess, “if having a house is more important to you than having a wife who is happy, then so be it. Sitting alone in an empty flat night after night is no lark for me, to that I can attest.”

After they had left our place in Oak Park that night following a chicken dinner, Catherine shook her head in bewilderment. “What do you think of her, Steve?” she asked as she washed, and I dried, the dishes.

“The woman doesn’t exactly hide her displeasure, does she? I wonder what kind of life she thought she was getting over here.”

“Obviously not the kind she’s got now. Did you see a lot of others like her in England who were anxious to come to this country?”

“Only one that I can recall offhand. I was in a pub near Russell Square in London one evening, standing alone at the bar with a pint, minding my own business. A little redhead, she couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, was sitting with a girlfriend in a corner, bragging somewhat loudly about how she was going to be marrying this American pilot. ‘We’ll be living the high life,’ she told her friend between puffs on a cigarette. ‘His people, they’re nobs, truly loaded. His Daddy owns some sort of business in Nebraska, what they call a drugstore over there, and I figure my Tommy will someday inherit it.’”

“‘You are very lucky,’ her friend said with a combination of awe and envy in her voice.

“The redhead nodded. ‘I do feel fortunate,’ she answered smugly. ‘But don’t you go fretting, dear; maybe you’ll find yourself a nice, generous Yank, too. It’s the only way to get out of this place, this life. I think we’re all entitled to better times after what we’ve had to go through for these last six years.’”

Catherine dried her hands on a dishtowel and shook her head again. “That sounds like it could have been Edwina talking,” she murmured. “I wonder how life has turned out for that redhead, especially if she found out that her father-in-law is only a small-town corner druggist in a tiny burg, and her husband is his only employee in the store.”

“That’s a very likely scenario,” I agreed, “and the guy probably wants to spend the rest of his life in that little town smack in the middle of nowhere. Well, I don’t blame these girls for wanting to come over here. Things are really tough in England right now — shortages of everything... food, clothes, housing, you name it. To say nothing of the bombed-out rubble and unexploded bombs, especially in London and the bigger industrial cities. It’ll be years before they fully recover. I just hope things work themselves out between Charlie and Edwina.”

“I do, too,” Catherine said, her voice lacking the same conviction mine did.