The Canceled Czech

Chapter 11

“Evan darling,” she said, “there are some things I do not understand.”

We were alone now. Well, not entirely alone; Kotacek, snug in the arms of living death, lay motionless a few yards from us. But my fellow Sternists had left. With them on their way, I was able to relax for the first time. As long as they remained with us in the basement, I kept waiting for Kotacek to come out of his funk and get himself executed all over again. Once they had finished their experiment in surgery, I couldn’t get rid of them fast enough.

And they were in no rush to be gone. Ari still had hopes of horizontal pleasantries with Greta, a thought which had apparently occurred to one or two of his comrades as well. Zvi was concerned about the disposal of the corpse. I insisted that it was dangerous for them to stay and selflessly assumed the task of tucking Kotacek’s corpse into the gentle waters of the Vltava. They felt I was taking an unnecessary risk. “We can all do it,” Zvi said, “and then we can all leave together in the car.” I told him to take the car, explaining that I had to get Greta back to Germany. We clasped hands all around, and each of them kissed Greta with rather more than pure fraternal affection. “You must come to Israel,” Ari insisted. “You will be truly welcome there, Greta.” She agreed that she would love to see their country. They all kissed her again, and felt her body against them, and remembered how grand she had looked, all soft and nude, in the arms of one Czech guard after another. I didn’t think I would ever get rid of them, but, reluctantly, they left.

And we were alone, alone with Kotacek, and there were some things she did not understand.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“He is dead.”

“Yes.”

“They were going to kill him, weren’t they? The Jews?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered what you were going to do. I thought you might have a plan, a good plan, but then all at once he died. It was his heart?”

“Probably.”

“My father will be very sad to hear that. He was so proud of me, going with you on a mission of such great importance. He had hoped we would succeed, and now I must tell him of our failure.”

She looked exceptionally appealing just then. There was a little-girl tone to her voice, a look of abiding innocence in her blue eyes. And that, incredibly, was the girl’s chief quality – her innocence. No amount of furious and forbidden activity, whether sexual or political, could triumph over it. She remained, despite it all, a blonde and blue-eyed child.

“It was not a failure,” I told her. “Not entirely.”

“No?”

“Certainly not. Kotacek was in jail. He would have had a dreadful trial followed by a public hanging. We spared him that. Then the Israelis had him, the Jews, and he would have gone through another trial. And, unless we managed to save him, they would have hanged him. So instead what happened?”

“He died.”

“He would have died anyway, sooner or later. He was an old man, a sick old man. At least he died easily. At least we managed to spirit him from under the noses of the Czechs, and then cheat the Jews of their revenge. We have not failed, Greta.”

She looked at me. “Then I have done my part.”

“Your part and more. You were wonderful at the castle, you know.”

“Was I?”

“You were excellent. The guards-”

She giggled. “The poor men. The expressions on their faces, the strength of their desire. They wanted me very badly, you know.”

“I know.”

“To expect to make love and to get hit over the head for your troubles. They will wake up with headaches and with no pleasant memories. I thought perhaps we could wait until they had finished making love, and then knock them out.”

“It would have taken too much time.”

“Oh, I know, but it seemed more kind, don’t you think?” She walked over to the fallen Kotacek. “Ah, but look what they have done to him. I had always wondered how it was done, you know? And if it was painful. Of course there can be no pain when it is performed upon a dead man, can there? What did they do with it?”

“They took it along.”

“Back to Israel? Why?”

“As a trophy. Like a deer’s head, or a stuffed fish.”

“How odd.”

“They got the idea from the Bible.”

“Like the haircut for Samson?”

“A different part of the Bible.”

“Oh. It is a shame you were unable to hypnotize him before he had his heart attack. That was your plan, was it not? And thus you made him look at the flashlight?”

“You noticed that?”

“Of course. And you were not translating what they said. I don’t know Slovak, but much of it is like Czech. Some sounds are different. You were telling him to look at the light, were you not? It is unfortunate that it did not work.”

“Unfortunate.”

“Oh, Evan,” she said. What was I going to do with her? She thought that Kotacek was dead, and that was just what I wanted her to think. She could tell her father and he would spread the word, and the Stern Gang would leak the news in Tel Aviv, and the more people who thought he was dead, the fewer would be looking for him. I couldn’t keep her around and I didn’t have the time to take her back to Pisek. What was I supposed to do with her?

She said Oh, Evan a second time, and I looked at her, first at her eyes and then at the rest of her. I remembered the way she had looked on the grounds of Hradecy Castle and the way she had felt in my arms in her father’s house in Pisek. And I saw how she looked now, flicking her pink tongue over her lower lip, standing with shoulders back, breasts pressing against the front of the sexiest dress in Prague, legs longer than ever in high-heeled black pumps.

Something that had been drained from me by the tension of the rescue mission had returned to me now that the mission, or at least a stage of it, had been completed. And my eyes must have showed it, because she said Oh, Evan a third time, and took a quick step forward and was in my arms.

“You look pretty in your uniform,” she said.

I kissed her.

“You would look prettier without it.”

I kissed her again. She ground her hips into me, giggled, took a quick step back and out of my arms. “They have left mattresses all over the floor for us,” she said. “Wasn’t that considerate of them?”

“Very.”

“Let me see how pretty you look without your uniform.”

I undressed. She watched me with hungry eyes. Then she laughed again and turned her back to me. “Help me,” she said.

I opened the hooks and unzipped the zipper.

“I have certainly had a lot of practice with this dress,” she said, slipping it over her shoulders, stepping out of it, kicking it aside. “On and off, on and off, on and off. Do you dare to embrace me, Evan? Some Jew will hit you over the head just as you take me in your arms.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“How daring!”

She came to me. I kissed her, and she pressed against me, and I did not even try to tell myself that she was a Nazi. We found a mattress and lay side by side upon it. I could see Kotacek out of the corner of my eye, so I turned a little until I could not see him anymore. I could see only Greta, and that was enough.

My fingers drew swastikas upon her breasts. She giggled, and her hands reached and found. “Just like the poor old Slovak,” she said. “Just like the Jews. Ah, what have I done!”

“You have performed miracles.”

“I have indeed. Oh, Evan…”

I held her and kissed her. Our flesh met. Perhaps I ought to take her along, I thought. Even smuggle her all the way back to America. Keep her around the apartment. How fine she was, and how soft and firm and warm, and how she moved, and what sounds she made…

Until, at the peak, the apex, the real nitty-gritty, her eyes rolled in her head and her whole body went bone-rigid and her mouth twisted and she tore the air with screaming. And then, just as suddenly, her muscles went limp and her eyes closed and the scream died and she very quietly passed out.

I could hardly believe it. I had never had quite that dramatic an effect upon a woman. Laughter, tears, sighs, moans, perhaps. But screams and unconsciousness…

And then, as I turned from her, I saw that it had not been all my doing. Kotacek was standing beside us, staring down at us. She must have caught a glimpse of him, alive and hovering, just at the moment of truth. It was no wonder that she passed out. It was, now that I thought of it, rather remarkable that she hadn’t dropped dead on the spot.

“What is going on? Where are we? What happened to the Jews?” He was babbling like an idiot. “Who is this girl? What are you doing to her? What is happening to us?” And, stopping suddenly to look down at himself, where, now that his blood had again resumed circulation, he was slightly bleeding, “What in the name of God has been done to me?”

I was a long time calming him. He was purple with rage and white with fear all at once, an unholy color scheme for a human being. He was also, I decided, a thoroughly ungrateful son of a bitch. Here I had saved his life twice in one night and he was berating me as though I had done something horrible.

I kept explaining the whole thing to him. I had trouble getting past the curtain of blind rage, but gradually bits and pieces of what I was saying began to soak in.

“You made me have a seizure,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Otherwise the Jews would have hanged you.”

“Why did you bring me here in the first place? Why take me from the prison only to bring me into a nest of filthy Jews?”

“I needed their help.”

“Help? From them?”

“They helped me rescue you. I had to use them, and then I had to trick them to get you away from them.”

“But look what they have done to me!”

“You won’t miss it. And would you rather have hanged?”

“I have been mutilated!”

“But you’re alive. And you can still devote yourself to the cause.”

“That is true. You have performed a service to the Reich, Major Tanner. I will not forget that.”

“I’m only a captain.”

“I promote you. An on-the-field promotion.” He smiled, but the smile didn’t last. “The Jews escaped?”

“I’m not sure that’s the right word. But yes, they’re gone now.”

“You let them go without killing them?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose it could not be helped.” He looked down at Greta. For a moment he simply stared at her, and then his gaze changed to something beyond simple observation. “This girl,” he said, rolling the word lovingly on his thick tongue. “Who is she?”

“A German girl.”

“Of course, what else could she be? Such purity of features, such true wholesome beauty. What were you doing to her?”

“We were discussing philosophy.”

“Do not make jokes, Captain Tanner.” He lowered himself onto one knee, peered intently at Greta’s breasts. “Like cream,” he said. “Like silk, like satin.”

He reached out a hand to touch her, and I kicked it out of the way. He looked up at me, puzzlement and fury mixed in his eyes. “What is wrong with you?”

“Don’t touch her.”

“Are you mad?”

“I made a promise to her father,” I said. “I told him I would not permit you to lay a hand on her.” It was only fair, I thought, that I should keep at least one small portion of the promise I had made to the crippled little dwarf. I had taken the fullest possible advantage of Kurt Neumann’s hospitality, and I had not paid him back as well as I might have. If nothing else, I could keep the old Slovak’s hands off his sweet and pure daughter.

“You talk as if she were a virgin,” Kotacek said.

“In a way, she is.”

“I told you, do not make jokes. And would she miss it? Look, the girl is unconscious. I am an old man. How often do I have a young girl like this? She will never know the difference. Never. Why begrudge me a moment of pleasure?”

I had always despised him. A Nazi, a racist, a collaborator, a quisling, a Judas – I had despised him from the moment the rotten mission had been assigned to me. But now he was turning my feelings to something more personal. Now I loathed him, not just for what he had done but for what he was. I should have let him rot in jail. I should have let the Israelis hang him. And now, mission or no mission, I felt like kicking his teeth in.

Instead I said, “There is simply no time. And besides that, I have given my word to a faithful National Socialist. Also” – pointing to his wound – “you will be sore there for some time. Several days at the very least. It would not do to irritate it, or to risk an infection.”

He saw the point of that. He drew himself unwillingly away from Greta. At the last moment he looked as though he was going to reach for her again, to touch her breasts or loins. He didn’t. If he had, I really think I might have killed him. I hated him very deeply at that moment. But he didn’t, and my fury passed.

“What do we do now, Major?”

My title changed every minute. “We get out of here.”

“There are friends in Slovakia who would shelter me. Shall we go there?”

“We’ll see.” I wanted to go to my friends, not his. “First we get out of Prague.”

“And the girl?”

I didn’t like the way he was looking at her. I covered her with a bed sheet. She seemed to have lapsed from coma into simple sleep. I put my ear to her lips, listened to her breathing. It was gentle and shallow. It sounded as though she would go on sleeping for a few hours.

“The girl will stay here.”

“She lives in Prague?”

“No.”

I began dressing, putting on my own clothes instead of the Czech guard’s uniform. I wrapped up the uniform in a bed sheet and tucked the Czech’s pistol into my pocket. I didn’t want to leave anything incriminating behind, in case some officials entered the basement before Greta had a chance to get up and out. I didn’t think this would happen, but I wanted to make it as safe as possible for her. It bothered me a little, abandoning her in Prague. Still, I was confident she would get out of it all right, either returning to Pisek on her own or finding a new life for herself in Prague or elsewhere. For all I know, she might decide to go to Tel Aviv. She might like it there. An endless supply of Jewish lovers, and a paucity of Rhine maidens to compete with her for their attention. I tucked a sheaf of Czech banknotes into her hand, gave her a parting kiss, and gripped Kotacek by the hand. On the way out, I picked up the pencil-beam flashlight and shoved it in my pocket.

“You used that before,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You made me look into it, and you blinked it into my eyes. And then after that I had a seizure.”

“That’s right.”

“You made me have a seizure?”

“Yes.”

“You are able to do that to me, just by blinking the light in my eyes? That and that alone makes me have a seizure?” I nodded. “Perhaps,” he said, “we ought to leave that behind. After all, Major, we will have no further need of it.”

“I’ll keep it,” I said.

By the time we left the house it was about an hour or so before dawn. The Prague streets scared me. I could see and hear plenty of activity over by the castle – official cars, bright lights. I took his arm and we headed in the opposite direction. I was beginning to wish I had parked our little stolen car where I could get my hands on it. It had seemed sensible to leave it at the garage, but now we were stuck without transportation, and every cop in Prague was hunting for us.

We had to make a run for it, of course. But we could not dash south and west on foot, nor did I want to attempt to duplicate Ari’s feat and hot-wire a car. The escape needed time to jell, and time too for Kotacek to cool off a bit. At the moment the city would be sealed up tight. In a day or two the officials would be certain that he was either dead and buried or well out of the city and the country as well, and we might be able to move around without looking constantly over our shoulders.

I hated the thought of imposing again upon Klaus Silber. It would mean putting the old man in great danger. It would also mean abusing his hospitality by giving shelter to one of the tribe of men who had taken Klaus from a professor’s chair and clapped him in Buchenwald. The alternatives had even less appeal. We could not stay in that basement – it was too close to the castle, it was known to Greta and to the Israelis as well, and if anyone was captured and talked we would be taken in no time at all. Klaus Silber’s place was the best of several bad choices.

We took a taxi there – again, the best of two bad choices. Walking would take too long and entail too great a risk. The taxi driver did not seem to recognize Kotacek. I played things on the safe side by giving him an address two blocks from Silber’s house, and we walked the rest of the way.

“We can trust Dr. Silber,” I told him. “But do not speak to him. Say nothing to him. Stay in your room and sleep as much as possible. Do you understand?”

“Silber. Another Jew?”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter. He does not know who we are or what we are doing. He will cooperate. Just stay in your room and be quiet-”

“For a National Socialist, you know a great many Jews.”

“You’re lucky I do. Otherwise you’d still be in jail.”

“Perhaps I would be better off. Will you take me to Lisbon?”

“Eventually.”

“The Czech swine stole me from my own home. Can you imagine? They searched for my records but could not find them.”

I too had searched for his records, albeit briefly. I had gone to Lisbon en route to Vienna, and while I was there I stole an hour or two to ride out to his home and have a look around. I hadn’t found a thing.

“They will never find them. My records are vital, did you know that? But perhaps that is why you were sent to rescue me. The records and the funds, the Party leaders would want to be sure of those, eh? Perhaps they did not care about me at all.”

“Your service to the Reich is the reason they sent me for you.”

“And not the records? And not the money in the Swiss account? Hah. It does not matter. I cannot walk further. Are we almost at this Jew’s house?”

“Just two doors more.”

Silber came to the door in a nightshirt. I told him that I had a man who needed shelter. He could have the same room the girl had been in, I added, as the girl was on her way out of Czechoslovakia now. My friend Klaus accepted this as he accepted everything else. He showed Kotacek to his room, then came downstairs to see me.

“My friend is very sick,” I said. “He was in one of the camps during the war. It affected his mind.”

“The poor man.”

“He’s completely lost touch with reality. He has decided that he is a Slovak collaborator, a Nazi himself. He prattles idiot slogans about exterminating Jews and others. A perfect transference.”

“Not uncommon. Wish fulfillment, perhaps. One would rather be the conqueror than the conquered. You will take him out of the country, Evan?”

“In a day or two.”

“Stay as long as you like. The poor man, such a way to wind up. And now the war is twenty years in the past, and still he has such scars on his psyche. You will stay here too, Evan?”

“I won’t need a bed. I’ll be out most of the time. But we will have time for some good conversations, Klaus.”

“I hope so, my friend. And do not worry about your poor comrade. I will see that he eats and sleeps well, and I will not let what he says affect me. I will ignore his words, the poor old fellow.”

Klaus would have liked to talk then and there, but I made him go back to bed for a few more hours of sleep. I took some food for myself – eggs, bread, cheese, a couple of cups of coffee. I tried to read some pamphlets he had lying around, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was a little worried about Greta.

I left the house and walked back to the castle. Without Kotacek, it was not a bad walk at all. When I got there, the basement was empty. She had gone, taking her new dress, her other clothes, and the money I had left for her.

I was relieved. If she was up and out, she would be all right. I had great faith in the girl’s ability to survive. No matter where life tossed her, I was confident that she would land on her feet. And roll over onto her back.