The Widow Killer

MARCH

An insistent thought woke him: TODAY! He kept his eyes closed so as not to frighten off the long-awaited images.

He saw himself there again as she lay down on the dining-room table transformed into a sacrificial altar. A couple of times in the past few days he’d heard HER reproach him sternly for losing his nerve. He countered that he had a cold, that he must have caught a draft as the pressure wave (he’d remembered it only later) blew out the window-panes. He knew, though, that it was a feeble excuse. Something in him balked; he had gone soft again, and it took all his strength just to keep his workmates from noticing.

Brno still haunted him, though it hadn’t been a complete catastrophe. Even if he had screwed it up, at least he’d saved his skin for the next attempt. And after all, the newspapers had hashed and rehashed the story; even in the words they used to humiliate him — labeling him mentally ill — he heard a poorly concealed sense of admiration and horror. In the end, though, a depressing sense of his own failure won out. Add to it the memory of how the girl screamed and fouled herself, and the whole affair had tied his hands for years.

Now that he had finally dared to ACCEPT THE MISSION again, he was eager to see what the newspapers would say. On the second and third days he was patient when the news brought only pictures of disfigured victims from the first Prague air raid — although it annoyed him that his IMMACULATE WORK would not be contrasted with the random results of bomb explosions.

On the fourth day he was constantly tempted to break the strict rules he had set for himself and sneak into the director’s office — where the daily papers resided — during the man’s short daytime absences. In the end he held out and was all the more disappointed. The focus of attention was the Prague air-raid victims’ state funeral; there was not a word of his DEED.

He was alone in the enormous building; he had locked up and made his rounds, and could therefore head home. There, however, he would have to REPORT. Instead, he sat down on the wide marble staircase, turned out the light, and tried in the dark to make sense of it. The silence began to hum unbearably, and the sound, which had no discernible source, made him wonder if he was crazy. Or in shock? After all, a large bomb had fallen close by. He knew from the army what a concussion was; a Hungarian grenade had practically fallen on his head in 1920, instantly ending a promising military career. What if this new shock had turned his wishful thinking into a hallucination?

Finally, a thought saved him. The narrow beam of his flashlight led him down to the cellar; years of practice let him choose the keys from the large ring by touch. He spat angrily at the stone-cold furnace; they’d shivered all through February in winter coats, since the Krauts had requisitioned all the coal. By the back wall, blocks of ice gleamed.

In December, when they stacked the cellar with thick slices cut from the frozen river, he had prudently scouted out a corner where there were already more than three dozen pieces; IT would be safe here through May. Although he could now turn the lights on, he stuck with his flashlight. He leaned against the wall, stretching his free hand behind the ice slabs as far as it would go. His fingers grasped and dislodged a small package.

He put the light on the ground to have both hands free, and unwrapped the wax paper very nervously, because the item inside was unnaturally hard. But it was THE ONE! It was frozen, that’s all; how could he have doubted? He congratulated himself for having anticipated this crisis. It was here, his DEED, imprisoning the wretched soul which could not fly away.

He arrived home at peace. His mind, free now of distractions, was calm: those fucking policemen had kept his triumph secret! It seemed even more unfair to him when he remembered the way they had harped on his first failure. Will and ambition made him bold again. Finally he had something to tell HER.

So be it: I will strike again, and SOONER than I planned to! And then AGAIN AND AGAIN! We’ll see whose nerves are stronger. Three will be enough to start it going; censorship is powerless in this country against rumors.

Still, he lacked the strength he had last felt in the house on the embankment. It had melted away as he wearily half sat, half lay on the park bench. Lunch at Angel’s had seemed to set him right, but later on the train he had fallen into a torpor he could not shake off.

The next day he managed to leave work while it was still light. He chose a longer route through the city park to air the unheated building’s mildewy stench out of his clothes and noticed the celebrations. A couple of pathetic booths were bravely pretending, in this sixth wartime winter, to be a Lenten fair. He passed a shooting range, where a youth in a long coat hit five paper roses and the owner grudgingly gave him a prize. He stopped and stared. It was the thing he’d longed for since childhood: a Habean. Of course, the large puppet was only a shadow of the prewar ones in their shiny colored satins, but here it shone brightly among the other trophies, the highest attainable goal.

He found himself enviously eyeing the happy winner as a handful of the youth’s peers applauded. The boy gave the black turbaned doll to a girl, making another nearby plead for one as well. The sharpshooter looked embarrassed and balked. He dismissed his friends’ insistence and the overlooked girl’s reproaches. “I’d never be able to do it twice,” he said.

The stand owner must have thought so too and sensed a chance to recoup part of his losses. Finally the young man could not resist the pressure and bought five more shots.

He looked on, paralyzed, recognizing his own dilemma: he too was holding back, out of fear that his single success could not be repeated, that next time he would make a laughingstock of himself again. He knew from his stint in the army that even with a well-maintained weapon, there was almost no likelihood of a second round as good as the first. He faced his own failure as the youth carefully lined up his five lead shots, breaking open and reloading the gun. His fate is my fate, he told himself despondently.

His head cleared when he heard the clamor. The angry stall owner was giving the second girl a Habean as well.

The image of the puppet lulled him to sleep that night. And when he woke up, he knew he was READY again. Time to find himself an alibi, the instruments, and some new clothes.

Quiet wonder was the only description that fit Jan and Jitka’s state “afterward.” Throughout their lovemaking she remained silent, although her rushed breath would slowly grow calmer and her eyes, even now, would look at him with the same surprised expression as on the night of February fourteenth, when a new furrow of bombs had threatened to rip across Prague. At that moment he firmly believed that not only would he survive the death throes of the war, but he would live eternally in a suspended moment of grace named Jitka.

Even in that first darkness, which stripped them of their inborn shame with unexpected ease, he felt that this was a moment of truth for both of them. Both came from honorable Moravian stock, where, from time immemorial, couples had first known each other on their wedding night. They confessed the next day how shocked they were at their own boldness, but soon their consciences were appeased by the tacit understanding that they would marry as soon as possible.

Without even asking, he accompanied her home the next day as well, and she did not seem at all surprised. She made him her grandmother’s potato soup with dried mushrooms, and then they talked about their families — as it turned out, from villages quite near each other. The conversation was so ordinary that he felt ashamed again. Everything he had ignored the day before, when immediate, irrepressible desire had made it so simple and natural, suddenly became a puzzle. What would happen from here? Where to start? What to say? How to touch her? He bitterly regretted the awkward ignorance and powerlessness that made him feel so uncertain, and finally he decided to slink home to his den. But Jitka just smiled at him and stretched out her hand to the lamp. How simple, he thought gratefully amid the rustling of sheets and clothes; his cheeks were still burning, but after that there was nothing but bliss.

This ritual repeated itself every evening, and Morava soon realized that the same steps led a different way each time. It seemed he was constantly charting a new path across an unknown landscape, but at the same time Jitka was uncovering more layers in him as well.

Morning celebrations soon joined their evening ones. They grew accustomed to falling asleep and waking up in each other’s arms: his chin in her hair, her mouth clinging to his breast. They would greet each other with sleepy smiles and a kiss scented with childhood, and close their eyes again until the shrill ring of the alarm clock drove them out of bed.

This silent morning motionlessness opened a new dimension of love in him, and when he would meet Jitka at work later or even just think about her, this was what he remembered. Those Moravian traditions were so ingrained in his character that he never imagined his loved one as she gave herself to him; instead he pictured her in that miraculous state of repose, where instead of touching her body he seemed to approach her soul.

The horrors of their work were implicitly left behind on Bartolomjská Street when the day ended, and they did not waste words on them at home. However, they consciously let the atrocities of war intrude on them more and more each evening. Jan Morava would plug a well-hidden spool (commonly called a churchill) into the radio and cast through the signal jammers’ waves for Czech voices bringing hope and fear. Day by day it grew clearer that the world’s struggle against the Third Reich would be decided in the battle for the Protectorate of Böhmen und Mähren.

Morava had never frightened easily, despite his peaceful nature. He was from a line of blacksmiths and was never afraid of the older kids; they quickly learned that little Jan would do his level best to return every blow he received. Although at work he saw on a daily basis the horrors people inflict on one another, it had never occurred to him that he himself might become a victim. Strange, but true: love awakened this instinctual, animal fear in him overnight.

He remembered how as a small child he would wake up in the middle of the night, sure that something awful had happened to his mother. In a flannel nightshirt soaked with warm sweat, he would pad to the door of the sitting room where his parents’ solid bed stood, noiselessly open it, and strain his ears to catch his mother’s soft breathing beneath his father’s loud snores. If he was unsure, he would glide up to the frame, confirming with a careful touch that her hand and cheek were still warm. Although his father was a tall, sturdy man, Jan could not imagine him surviving without her.

More than twenty years later, a similar fear consumed him that an evil force would rip Jitka from his life. While they were making love, death was absurd; together they formed a magnetic field that repelled all harm. However, once he released her from his embrace, she seemed all the more vulnerable, and so he continued to hold her long after the alarm clock rang.

That March morning the heady scent of live soil wafted into their attic from Vyehrad, Císaská Louka, and the fields of Pankrác and Braník. Ever since he had come to Prague he had lived near the center, and despite the spartan police dormitory room he inhabited, he never tired of the city. My grass is now asphalt and my trees chimneys, he had once written home, scandalizing his mother. From the first he had fit into the city like a native, and he realized belatedly what a wise move it had been not to take over the family smithy. The only thing he occasionally missed were the smells of the land, which at home had told him as he woke what nature and the weather had in store.

That pungent reek, he knew, marked the point when winter suddenly relaxes its grip and sprouting begins. Years earlier, his grandfather had led him onto the dike of the pond and pointed his callused finger at the frozen surface, just minutes before a great expanse of it suddenly cracked in half with a dark thunder, the liberated water gushing forth from the rift.

Morava was sure that scene would repeat itself this morning, but he did not feel the country boy’s customary joy at winter’s end; instead, fear coursed through him, sharpening as his feelings for Jitka grew stronger.

Tears sprang to his eyes; never had he felt anything like this, not even when his father died. He did not realize that she could see his face.

“Are you crying?” He heard the surprise in her voice.

Unable to speak, he nodded.

“But why?”

“I’m afraid for you.”

“But why…?” she repeated, puzzled.

It was the first time he had voiced his fear that they were both trapped in the lions’ den. If the war reached Prague, neither Germans nor patriots would be gentle with the Protectorate’s functionaries; the dirtier their own hands were, the fiercer they would be.

“When it looks like the end is near, Jitka, you have to get out of Bartolomjská at any cost.”

“Where should I go?”

“Definitely not home, the front will come that way and they might tar you with the mess your father’s in. You can stay here a couple of days, at worst in the cellar. I’ll tell Beran not to look for you, he’ll certainly understand. Just promise me, if by some chance I’m not here, that at the first sign of danger you’ll do what I said.”

“And you…?” she said, without understanding.

“I have to stay with Beran, but don’t worry about me; I can take care of myself.”

He could see her eyes begin to draw back, and didn’t understand at first what was happening. She pulled away from him, rolled onto her back, and threw off the thin quilt. Light had begun to filter into the room, and for the first time he both felt and saw her naked. Her white body, with its full breasts and the shadow of her sex, seemed even more defenseless than before.

“Jan, I’ll do as you say, but I also have a request.”

“Yes?”

She spoke self-assuredly, in a voice that rang with a mother’s severity.

“On the off chance that you can’t take care of yourself, I at least want to have your child.”

At eight hundred hours Chief Inspector Buback was meeting with Colonel Meckerle. So far, he informed him, he had no reason to criticize the Prague criminal police in their investigation. The Czechs had swiftly collected data on all the sadistic murders from the beginning of the century onward; their records stretched back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It was three weeks since Buback had settled into the office they hastily cleared for him on Bartolomjská Street. After appearing there at random on an almost daily basis, he was reporting on what he had observed.

“I haven’t found the slightest sign of activity outside the purview of the criminal police. Superintendent Beran has apparently stayed true to his prewar principle that police work should remain apolitical. As far as the Gestapo is aware, only one of Beran’s subordinates violated that commandment — the one who was subsequently executed in July 1942 for sympathizing with Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination. His guilt, however, is questionable, since his accuser was an informer he had jailed several times for fraud.”

Meckerle, tightly wedged into a chair that would have comfortably fit two normal men, smirked knowingly.

“Now comes the ’but.’ ”

Buback nodded. His supervisor did not have many likable traits, but at least he was direct; long speeches bored Meckerle and brought out his aggressive side.

“Despite this I do not believe Commissioner Rajner’s assertion that the professional departments of the police will remain loyal to us; Rajner is completely in the dark. Although none of the Czech detectives sense or even imagine that I understand them, there is a heightened vigilance in my presence. My frequent visits have blunted this somewhat, and not all of the Czechs manage to hide all their feelings. What’s especially interesting is the mood early in the morning, when people trade fresh news and rumors. Even if they aren’t listening to enemy radio themselves, the Protectorate’s newspapers unfortunately give them more than enough information; the names of eastern cities in the old Czechoslovak Republic appear more and more frequently in announcements from the Reich armed forces high command. During their morning break for rye coffee or herb tea — which they brew up by the hundred-liter — there is a palpable air of excitement throughout the building. Now and then one of them will even drop the pretense of decorum in my presence.”

“Do we have an agent in the building?”

“Two, in fact: one is a technician, the primary one is the garage manager. Their reports are muddled, and all I can read from them is that they no longer believe Germany will eventually prevail, and that they are afraid for their own skins. To judge by what happened in the Netherlands, they will be the first to stab us in the back, if it gives them an alibi. Things will certainly be even worse in the operations units of the Czech police, since they are part of the repressive apparatus of a collaborationist government. As the front moves closer to Prague, the danger will grow that they’ll turn against us at the eleventh hour to rehabilitate themselves.”

“How can we avoid it? Should we lock a couple of them up? Or shoot them?”

What a waste of time, Buback thought; if he can’t even come up with a more intelligent idea….

“I’m afraid it would radicalize the Czech police; in Prague alone there are up to two thousand of them — badly armed, it’s true, but well trained.”

“So then what?”

Meckerle was evidently starting to feel bored.

“Give me a bit of time, Standartenführer. I’ll try to gain the confidence of one of the office workers, Beran’s secretary.”

The giant’s eyes once again showed interest.

“Aha. A little ’give-and-take’? At last. You’re too young and handsome to play the lifelong widower. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“That’s exactly what I have in mind. ..”

My God, he stopped short; what am I thinking?

He recalled his first sight of the young woman: in the Czech police superintendent’s anteroom, the eyes of his Hilde had looked shyly and touchingly out at him, just like when he had seen her for the first time….

“What’s new with the deviant?” Meckerle remembered as Chief Inspector Erwin Buback stood up to take his leave.

“The most promising trail leads to Brno. I’m going there with Beran’s assistant this afternoon. Brno’s close to the front; it will be easier to assess our overall situation from there as well.”

At the very same moment as Buback was filling Meckerle in, Morava was reporting his preliminary results to Beran.

The superintendent did not interrupt with his usual treacherous questions; he followed Morava’s conclusions without taking notes, and with every page of his notebook Morava’s self-confidence grew.

“It can be asserted with almost complete confidence that the perpetrator is the very person who in 1938 committed the sadistic and still unexplained murder of a widowed seamstress, Maruka Kubílkova, in Brno. Regardless of differences in the implements used“—Morava raised his voice to drown out his nervousness, for this was the point where he felt his theory was most vulnerable—“it seems probable that the same perpetrator has attempted again what he failed at seven years ago, whether because of inexperience or because the first victim defended herself ferociously.”

Even now the superintendent made no objections and took no notes. Morava was already regretting that he had closed the connecting door for fear of exposing himself to ridicule. Jitka could have witnessed his first genuine success; she could have heard his superior appreciatively pronounce that magic phrase, “Good work, Morava!”

“I conclude,” he therefore continued at an undiminished volume, “that it would be appropriate to reopen the Kubílková case. Its investigation was interrupted in March 1939 when the two officers assigned to it on the Brno criminal police fled to England after the establishment of the Bohemian and Moravian Protectorate. The file ends with the statement that all significant suspects produced alibis and no crime remotely like it has occurred since then in this country, from which they deduced that the murderer managed to escape abroad as well. Our recent investigation, however, forces me to raise the possibility that he was here the whole time and should be sought first among the ranks of the original suspects.”

He finished and, in a new wave of doubt, expected his suspiciously inactive boss to shoot him down with a glance or an observation that would reduce his careful argument to nonsense. Instead, Beran stood up, surprising him with an odd question.

“Would you like to go for a walk? The papers have been claiming for a week already that spring’s here.”

As he followed Beran out through the anteroom, Morava tried to signal Jitka with a shrug of his shoulders that he had no idea what was happening. The superintendent walked so fast that in spite of his height Morava could barely keep up. He let himself be led as far as Stelecký Island, in the middle of the Vltava River, without daring to break the silence. As the stone steps led them down from the bridge to the park path, he decided that his superior had merely wanted a breath of fresh air, and that there was no harm in asking a question.

“Chief Inspector Buback is waiting to hear what time we’re to leave for Brno.”

“I know,” Beran reassured him. “That’s why we’ve gone for a little stroll.”

Morava must have had a somewhat silly expression on his face. The superintendent smiled in amusement.

“You thought I wanted to show you the pussy willows blooming? Jitka can take care of that, I think.”

The assistant detective felt his burning cheeks betray him again. But Beran — uncharacteristically — clapped him on the shoulder.

“You can’t seriously think I only have eyes for corpses. My congratulations; I’m very happy for both of you. Now all you have to do is survive the war.”

“Exactly. She’s terribly afraid for her father. He’s been locked up for that illegal pig slaughter.”

“T haven’t forgotten. I’ll get to it.”

The circular path led them to the tip of the island pointing toward the Charles Bridge. In the clear air the Prague castle rose up before them, from this angle unmarred by the occupiers’ flag — not the sarcophagus of an inferior people destined for extermination, but the undying symbol of a metropolis whose glory, according to the old Czech legend, would reach the stars. Even in this distant and deserted place, Beran looked cautiously around.

“What’s your opinion of Buback?”

“He’s a capable detective… to judge by his position, at least.”

“Exactly. Kind of a big gun for a little case, don’t you think?”

Morava felt hurt, as if his own importance had just been downgraded.

“I had the impression that you were giving this matter the highest priority, sir.”

“Of course, of course,” Beran said, as if trying to soothe him. “That’s why I took the case myself. But in reality, you’re the one working on it while I continue directing daily operations. Consider that Buback runs the whole Prague office of the German criminal police; isn’t he spending a bit too much time and attention on this?”

“Not given the victim’s significance,” Morava objected. “After all, she was—”

“That’s precisely the point: she wasn’t! I put out some feelers and discovered something interesting. The Nazis were deeply suspicious of the von Pommeren family. The general’s posthumous decoration was supposed to signal that even the old German nobility supported Hitler, but there’s a rumor circulating in Prague’s German community that the Russian partisans got him just before the Gestapo did. Von Pommeren had long been suspected of supporting the ideas that led to last year’s assassination attempt on the Führer.”

“Aha.” Morava tried quickly to pick up the thread. “So they’re just feigning an interest so they can terrorize us?”

“Berlin — and State Secretary Frank here in Prague — can hardly risk inflaming the populace for no reason, given how close the front is and the way the war is going. No, Morava, the Germans’ plan is to keep the lid on us.”

“Why should they be so interested in our criminal police?”

“Because in every time and place, it’s the heart of the whole force. There’s only a handful of us, but we outlast regimes; I’m a living example. And under certain circumstances, our knowledge of the system would let us run the whole force, and not only the force.”

Morava was still in the dark.

“Under what circumstances…?”

“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 Jindich 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 Jarouek, my love,” she begged in a whisper. For a moment her desires seemed hideously carnal and she weighed writing Jindich 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 Bedich 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 Jindich 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 Koice, 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 Maruka Kubílková to death was curious. He spent it in jail in the town of Ivanice 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.

The third suspect was therefore of exceptional interest.

Jakub Malatínský, born 6 April 1905 in Mikulov in south Moravia, was the son of a vintner who worked his way up to cellar master in the fabled Valtice vintners’ school. His career ended overnight in 1926 when he stabbed his young wife, whom he suspected — probably correctly — of infidelity. What was more, he cut off both the dead woman’s breasts, which in court he explained as insane jealousy that another man had been allowed to touch them. The prosecutor asked for life, but after an evidently outstanding defense counsel’s fiery closing argument, the court was persuaded that the defendant had acted in a moment of passion and capped the sentence at fifteen years. In spring 1937 he was released for good behavior and sincere repentance and was hired as a custodian for the court building. He was the only one resident in Brno on the day of the murder, albeit as an appendectomy patient. At the time of the crime he was already ambulatory and sharing a room with a demented patient, but even so it was highly improbable that he could have obtained clothing, latched onto the young widow— where there was no evidence that he even knew her — brutally murdered her, and returned to his hospital bed by midnight, when the duty nurse spoke with him. The year before last, he had decided to return to his home county, where his good commendations helped him regain the post of cellar master.

Bruno Thaler rounded out the foursome of potential perpetrators. Born 12 August 1913 in Jihlava of German descent, this trained butcher was sent for psychological treatment when, after repeated vivisections of animals (for instance, disembowling pigs before slaughtering them), he threatened a female coworker with the same fate if she reported him. His statement that on the day of the murder he had been in Austria as an agent of Henlein’s storm troopers was supported by the regional leader’s stamp. After the country’s annexation, no one dared reopen the investigation.

“… And because of his German background, Thaler was removed from the Czech office’s files,” Morava said, wrapping up his briefing.

“We’ll look into it,” Buback commented laconically.

Then he leaned stiffly into his corner and sat out the remaining four long hours, eyes open, until they rolled into Brno amid the military and civilian trucks. Morava fought sleep strenuously; he did not want to display the slightest weakness, especially in front of this man. He almost regretted that Buback was not trying to squeeze information out of him….

Here,” she said to the luckless Moravian, “choose yourself something warm.”

Barbora Pospíchalová was standing in front of the open wardrobe and had to fight the temptation to close it under some pretext or other. Once again she felt she was treacherously writing Jaroslav off, although as she poured out her whole story, Jindich included, to this poor man on the way home, her heart told her everything was as it should be. Now her guest stood motionless beside her with his suitcase in hand; he looked uncomfortable, as if he were reading her thoughts. Gallantly she encouraged him, to have it over with quickly.

“Don’t be shy; I’d give them away in any event.”

The refugee set his case down, opened it, and scrabbled through it. A swath of green material folded several times fell out onto the carpet. As it unfolded, Barbora recognized it as a well-preserved hunting coat.

“But look, you’ve got…,” she blurted, confused, then lost her voice as she saw the straps in the man’s hand.

Instantly he struck her between the eyes with the base of his free hand. In the midday light, the familiar room burst into a colored kaleidoscope. She fell into the wardrobe, slowly sinking into the dense mass of hanging clothes, and the reek of moth powder gave way to Jaroslav’s scent.

Erwin Buback was not particularly worried about the Czech detective. The impression the school notebook had made at their first meeting had deepened over time. The kid was capable and hardworking; it was no surprise that Beran trusted him so. At the same time he was a perfect example of a “lotus flower,” as Hilde called those too-open and guileless souls. (She’d soon proved herself worthy of the title in his eyes.) In the Prague criminal police’s head office, where he had least expected it, he had found two of these characters: in addition to Beran’s adjutant, there was his secretary, a near likeness of young Hilde.

As he sat motionless in the car (his standard wartime tactic around citizens of occupied nations, since he felt that a Prussian military bearing induced respect), the faces of the two women merged into a single image in his mind; he could not determine which of them his inner eye was seeing. It was the first time this had happened since Antwerp, and it confused him. Was the Czech girl strengthening his memory of his beloved wife, or had the indelible image of Hilde awakened a connection he’d first sensed that evening in the bar of German House? This striking similarity of features and characters had to be a signal from fate — didn’t it?

It was days before he learned anything about the girl, and therefore, in an impossibly short time, he imposed on her many of the feelings he had lost with the passing of his first and only true love. He caught sight of her only in the moments when she walked past behind the eternally open door of Beran’s anteroom or when he passed through it himself on the way to see her superior.

A further sign from fate was that he had first seen Hilde in exactly this way. Though she was the daughter of the owner of Dresden’s Schlosskonditerei, her responsibilities as a newly trained confectioner kept her behind the scenes of the business, while her parents and brother moved about the stage of the city’s favorite cafe. Buback took a parade of girlfriends there until one day this shy creature appeared behind the café’s new technological wonder — a refrigerated counter from Electrolux — to check which delicacies needed replenishment.

This brief eventless event turned his life upside down. He began to spend all his free time in the cafe, but even so was rarely rewarded with her long-awaited appearance. He prepared his best admiring gaze for her, which, he smugly knew, was infallible — but it never hit its mark: not once did the girl raise her eyes from the sweets.

Later she confessed to a small deception. From the very beginning she had seen him through the grating in the kitchen, so she knew of his numerous companions. He had captivated her from the first with his masculine good looks and suave manner, and for precisely this reason she resolved not even to look his way lest she fall victim to his charm. She was afraid of ending up like the rest of his transitory acquaintances. Hilde had been born and raised for one great relationship; she intended to offer her love only once and forever. If she were mistaken, she told him soon after the wedding, she would crack. How? he said, not understanding. The way bells crack, she answered; they keep their form, but lose their sound and with it their purpose.

He had no choice but to bring the mountain to Muhammad and, for the first time in his life, take sole responsibility for meeting a girl, instead of letting her do the work. The only polite way of doing so at the time entailed more serious obligations.

“Dear Miss Schäfer,” he wrote her,

I beg your forgiveness for troubling you; as an excuse I can offer that I know you by sight, as a regular customer of your establishment. If I may be permitted to make a request of you and your parents, I would like to invite you this Sunday for tea at five o’clock at the Waldruhe Restaurant. Should this request meet with your favor, I will call for you at the private entrance of the Schlosskonditerei at half past four. With deepest respect, I remain

Police Clerk Erwin Bubach.

Eventually he received Ludwig Schäfer’s letter of cautious agreement (which, he later learned, Hilde’s parents had argued over for two days and nights). On the day, he arrived with a bouquet for her mother and had the carriage wait outside so he could converse politely with Hilde’s parents, all of which made a suitable impression. Hilde was released with the admonition to be home no later than half past seven.

As it turned out, he only needed the first ten minutes. Before they brought out the service, he had the opportunity to look through her tender eyes into the depths of her soul, and as they stirred the tea, he addressed her.

“Dear Miss Schäfer, I don’t know how it happened, and I know this flies in the face of convention, but I am simply in love with you. I’ve never actually loved anyone before in my life, and I thought I lacked the capacity for true feeling. Then I saw you, and from that moment I’ve known what love is. I beg you, put aside your shyness and the suspicion you feel toward me, a man you barely know. Please hear me out; I’ve felt love for the first time and now I know I cannot live without you. What do you say?”

Even now, in the car heading down the shattered road toward Brno, he could see the scene in his mind’s eye as if it were yesterday, and suddenly he realized that he could honestly and forthrightly say virtually the same words to the young Czech woman, whom he had known roughly as long as he had Hilde when he proposed to her.

In his comic fashion, Morava coughed timidly before addressing him.

“We’re already in the suburbs of Brno, Herr Oberkriminalrat….”

“So?”

“Would you like to go to the hotel first?”

His body ached from sitting turned toward the right; he would gladly have lain down for an hour, but knew that he’d do better to break this train of thought.

“No. Let’s get straight to work.”

He sat in the rocking chair and slowly swung his weight there and back. Forward. Backward. Forward. Backward. The regular motion calmed him; it was all he could manage at the moment. His arms and legs had become burdens again; whatever it was that made them part of his living body had evaporated. They had no feeling, no substance to them; they merely WEIGHED.

His mind was fully occupied by the two commands rocking the chair. Backward. Forward. Backward. Forward. Yes, that made him feel good, now he was comfortable! The most effective way to rest and renew his strength would be to lie down on the double bed; he could see it through the adjoining doors at each rock of the chair, but it was too far. So instead he just kept on. Forward. Backward. Forward. Backward.

He had the impression that white smoke was rolling over his brain, as in the Turkish baths he liked so much. It was usually so refreshing; so why did resting exhaust him instead of reviving his muscles? If it became necessary, he was sure he could… aha, he realized, but there’s no reason to hurry, and nowhere to go. She had said HERSELF that she lived by HERSELF! The repeated word with its different meanings amused him; he rocked again with renewed interest.

Backward. Forward. Backward. Forward.

He felt safe and blissfully aware that he had done it AGAIN. And FLAWLESSLY. And not only that: out of thousands of widows he had found this one. He had been right to deceive her; she had DESERVED it! After all, she had shamelessly confessed that she was a WHORE! Her new John would be shocked tomorrow when he saw her laid out for her wedding night.

With this thought his strength returned so unexpectedly that it threw him out of the chair. Almost broke my neck, he thought, his heart pounding from fear; they would have found me here unconscious. .. He shook off his fright and stood up. His legs held steady. On the table beneath him he could see his achievement and felt a sudden pride.

No WHITE DOVE!

Today SHE would be happy to hear his news.

The entire Brno contingent was waiting for them. Matulka, the head of the city’s criminal police, owed his job to his faithful collaboration; he was a member of the Fascist organization Flag, the pro-German National Union Party in the Protectorate government, and the Anti-Bolshevism League — and was probably an informer to boot. That morning on the island, Beran had described him to Morava as the biggest stain on what remained of the Czech criminal police’s honor. Matulka was even permitted the luxury of not speaking German; it was whispered that through the whole war he had only made it as far as lesson three. Morava therefore translated for Buback and his local Gestapo equivalent.

Matulka first fawningly dismissed Bruno Thaler from suspicion, thanks to his Germanic origins and, as he called it, his demonstrated patriotic activity outside the Protectorate at the time the seamstress Kubílková was murdered. Buback commented that the crime took place before the Protectorate existed, and that he would personally look into Thaler’s alibi, thus completely derailing Matulka from his script. Morava was struck by the Germans’ open condescension toward their local ally. Does treason stink even to those who profit from it?

It clearly affected the man; he began to sweat and stammer until finally he relinquished the floor to his deputy Váca, who seemed equally unprofessional. Reading from a paper he was evidently seeing for the first time, he stumbled through a report on two of the suspects from 1938.

Josef Jurajda had been an invalid ever since he fell down a long flight of stairs while painting the Brno town hall. Currently he was employed as a night watchman in the registry office. Only his wife could supply him with an alibi for the fourteenth of February. According to her, he had slept all day while she had washed dishes at the Grand Hotel. There were no direct witnesses as to when he began his rounds of the building, although the cleaning ladies met him there at five the next morning. The gentlemen from Prague could interrogate him here whenever they wished.

Jakub Malatínský had taken a holiday that day and refused to give details, but stated that in a pinch he could produce an airtight alibi. Brno had directed him, via a local police order, not to leave his workplace. If the gentlemen so desired, he could be escorted here immediately.

Morava was delighted when Buback announced he intended to drop in at Castle Celtice tomorrow for Malatínský. My God, he thought, maybe I’ll see my mother on the way….

As far as Alfons Hunyady was concerned, Váca concluded, wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief, the Gypsy had been transferred to the authority of the Reich’s Commission on the Racial Question; further investigation lay outside the purview of the Protectorate police, who could offer the gentlemen no further help….

When he had finished translating, Morava asked Buback whether he would check on Hunyady’s case as well as Thaler’s. For the first time, his request met with uncomprehending eyes. Then the German told him he could safely forget about the Gypsy. With this the agenda for the meeting was exhausted.

Matulka apparently considered the meeting a mere pretext, since he invited all present to a festive evening which he had organized at the Grand Hotel. Buback declined fairly rudely, set Jurajda’s interrogation for 8:00 A.M., and left with the Brno Gestapo agent. So much for Beran’s theory that this investigation was a red herring designed to distract the whole Czech police force, Morava thought.

The young Czech could not refuse the invitation and, what was more, did not want to; he was not satisfied with the way the session had gone and hoped to extract more information from Matulka and Váca. Not long into dinner he realized that Buback had their number. The two policemen had failed to invite the rest of their office in the hope of hogging all the credit for the research, and they themselves apparently knew only what their subordinates had put on their desks. The pair even fawned over him, a run-of-the-mill assistant detective, and he quickly sensed that they were in the grip of a practically demented fear.

What plans did the central office have once the front got here, Brno’s defender of the law asked when he’d briskly gobbled down the Moravian roast (obtained without ration coupons, which was in and of itself a punishable crime). Everyone in Brno was sure — he assured Morava emphatically, so the message would make it to Prague — that the great German Reich would be victorious, but how should they carry on in the short term if for strategic reasons the Führer found it expedient to withdraw the front temporarily past Brno? Were they perhaps counting on the Brno team’s experience to reinforce the Prague police? After all, criminal elements in Prague would be sure to exploit the political confusion.

Morava lost patience with them. They were officers just like their colleagues in Prague, he told them sternly, and he didn’t know anyone there who was as obsessed with what would happen after the war. As long as they maintained public order — which was, after all, their only obligation — and had not engaged in extracurricular political activities of their own accord, they’d have nothing to fear. After all, every regime needs criminal police. Now, if they’d kindly excuse him, he’d had a tough day and tomorrow wouldn’t be any easier; he had to finish up the investigations their subordinates hadn’t completed, so he wanted to get some sleep.

He left them there with their half-empty glasses and looming fears and walked swiftly back to the hotel down dark, deserted streets that he had almost forgotten in his years in Prague. Before he rang for the doorman, he stopped and listened. No, he was not imagining it; a weak but perceptible rumbling rippled through the cold, still air, first weakening, now strengthening and overflowing like the April thunderstorms he remembered over south Moravia.

The front, he realized. They’re that close!

Then his thoughts turned to Jitka, because it was the first time in their three weeks together that he would sleep alone.

The man from the Brno Gestapo assured Buback that he could forget about two of the suspects immediately. If Bruno Thaler’s alibi for 1938 was problematic, he had one for this February fourteenth that was unimpeachable: he was working as a prison guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp and had not taken any days off this year. Alfons Hunyady had left for another unidentified camp three years ago in a transport of Moravian Gypsies, wearing the label Parasite.

Buback had refused Matulka’s dinner invitation primarily because the Czech and his deputy were useless to him. Every word they spoke dripped with proof that they were Nazier than the most fanatical Nazis. In a police uprising, worthless toadies like them would be the first to lose their heads.

He had two surprisingly good whiskeys with his colleague and compatriot in the local German casino and managed an hour of small talk. How funny, he thought, that since… when was it, Stalingrad, or maybe the Allied landing at Normandy, conversations like this had lost all substance. Under certain conditions even a sarcastic remark about the weather could prove dangerous; after all, it could be a gibe at the constant excuses emanating from the armed forces high command. The situation on the fronts was completely taboo.

They exhausted the murder of Baroness von Pommeren, chatted a bit about Moravian wine, which Buback had not drunk since his youth, and called it a night when they caught each other simultaneously yawning. The chief inspector politely refused an escort home, and when he reached the hotel decided to prolong his walk. Against the dark sky the even darker silhouette of a steep knoll rose close by. He decided he could do with a bit of exercise and set off at a brisk clip up the slope.

Soon the metropolis lay at his feet, darkened, unfriendly, and unknown, the second largest city in the land where he was born. Where does a bilingual German from nonexistent Czechoslovakia belong anyway? Especially one from Prague?

The product of a mixed marriage in which his mother prevailed, Erwin Buback had therefore gone to a Czech grammar school in his native Prague. When his mother died, his father, an insurance agent, married a wealthy German woman from Karlsbad. Erwin attended the German gymnasium there and was sent to Dresden to study law. His parents, who had no further children, wanted to strengthen Erwin’s identification with the nationality they shared.

Buback had met Hilde in that wonderful city on the Elbe and stayed until the war broke out. He soon earned his stripes in a field which had never interested him, but which proved reasonably secure in a time of economic and political upheaval. The criminal police, of course, came under Nazi supervision in time, but at least the Nazis understood that to have a dependable judicial and corrective system they had to let some professionals remain at their posts.

That did not mean that the detectives resisted the Nazis, far from it. Buback felt admiration for the verve with which they quickly returned order to a shattered Germany. He too welcomed the Führer as the re-newer of German honor, which the Versailles dictates had trampled. His loyalty, though, was a far cry from the fanaticism in other branches of the Reich’s government. He was a German, and that was that.

Buback, his young wife, her parents, and their acquaintances applauded enthusiastically when the Führer resolved to return misappropriated territories to a resurrected Germany. They wholeheartedly welcomed the annexation of Austria in 1938. Erwin was greatly pleased when Bohemia returned to Greater Germany’s embrace. He experienced a heady Night of Torches in liberated Karlsbad, and tears sprang to his eyes when the banner of new Germany waved over his native Prague as well. He and his colleagues celebrated the lightning victories in Poland and the west.

While at first the newly formed security detachments repelled him with their ostentatious brutality, he came to see his office’s connection to them as a necessary evil, an unavoidable consolidation of forces in a nation at war. Sent to France, Holland, and Belgium to ensure the peaceful coexistence of his kinsmen in occupied territories, he devoted his energies, as before, to that task and no other. Some things he saw shocked him others he observed with disapproval; but he felt a direct personal responsibility for all of it.

It was a Sunday in June of 1941, the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union, when he first began to feel uneasy. When he asked Hilde why she wasn’t joining the domestic festivities, she brought Heidi’s geography textbook and opened it to the map of Europe and Asia. The speck that was Germany butted up against the gigantic expanse of Russia. He controlled his irritation and chided her mildly: she should have stuck to pastries instead of teaching if she couldn’t recognize cartographic distortions and, more important, if she couldn’t understand that territory was not the only factor involved.

After that the war only permitted him the occasional visit home, when he would drink in as much of Hilde and Heidi’s presence as he could. Understandably they kept to personal topics, but he noticed that his wife avoided everything political to the point of awkwardness. Once, however, she slipped, and it led to the one bitter argument of their life together.

On a walk through the Franconian vineyards just one year ago, he had been trying to explain an idea he had just had to Hilde. In retrospect, he had probably been attempting to convince himself more than her. By retreating on all fronts, he had claimed, the Führer was coiling his people into a spring that would then fling the Allies into the Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean Sea and across the Urals. Then Hilde unexpectedly asked him if the Führer hadn’t lost touch with “his people” long ago.

The low curtains of grapevines stretched out far and wide around them, with not a person in sight, and so he shouted at her. How could she, how dare she lend her voice to such filthy suspicions — now of all times, when only the iron will of a united Germany could overcome their ideologically confused and disorganized enemies?

Endless times since then he had imagined this scene, seen the colors, smelled the scents, heard Hilde and himself, and his regret at spoiling their last day together grew stronger with the suspicion that maybe she had been right after all.

If Germany won, the defeated Allies would rebuild its shattered cities and would cede their poorly managed and sparsely populated eastern territories as reparations — but was there any hope for the basic human values that years of mutual slaughter had ruined? And could anyone anywhere even begin to take the place of his Hilde and Heidi?

Tonight, high above a city that would soon be celebrating its freedom from the Occupation, a devastating analogy occurred to him for the first time: could the German Führer derive the same perverted satisfaction from the worldwide butchery he’d unleashed as the unknown murderer did from his bloody slaughter of women?

He was freezing. Chills crept across his body; he must have goose-bumps! Then he realized why.

The reckless comparison he had just drawn instantly made him the worst sort of criminal, the kind most of his colleagues at Bredovská Street would send to the basement and then (after a short trial) to the camps or the old military shooting range in the northern suburbs. He imagined how Meckerle would react if he said it aloud. If it happened face-to-face, Meckerle would relieve him of duty and lock him in the asylum; if it happened during a staff meeting, he would probably kill Buback on the spot.

But it was not fear that made Buback shiver; fear was one thing he had never been prone to, and he knew he was too experienced — or too cunning? — to be hoisted by his own petard. However, he was alarmed at what was happening to him. What was anything worth if out of the blue, after years of faith, he gave in to suspicions that went far beyond Hilde’s small question on that final afternoon? Was he a common traitor? A coward, afraid of defeat? A victim of enemy propaganda? Or… or had he simply been slow to discover a historic blunder that he helped perpetrate, and now stood horrified at the chilling fate awaiting him and his country?

This last explanation was the most morally justifiable one — but then what difference was there between him and countless other Germans, who, he had heard, paid for far milder speculations in penal gangs, colonies, camps, and at the gallows?

A strange rhythmic sound drowned out the distant gunfire and distracted him from his thoughts. Just ahead, the path ended at a locked gate in a massive wall. The local Gestapo man had mentioned earlier a Brno castle that had been a notorious political prison in Austro-Hungarian days. The good life, compared to today’s prisons, his local colleague had said, grinning; Vienna treated them with kid gloves and look what happened!

Now Buback could make out the rustling of last year’s leaves, the sound of panting, and two Czech voices whispering.

“Love me! Yes! Love me! Yes yes yes!”

Incredible! A chill night, a steep slope, the gloomy cells a stone’s throw away, mass slaughter within earshot, and with all this, two fragile human beings fall in love. And that means hope: an eternal new beginning that repairs the worst brutalities of history.

Suddenly he wanted to live to see it. And the face he pictured belonged to the Czech girl with the brown eyes.

He found a dozen small jars of lard in the pantry — apparently she’d made individual monthly portions — and a pot of lentil soup with a surprisingly large chunk of sausage, which he heated up on the cylinder stove; all he had to do was shove some wood in. He even discovered a bottle of elderberry wine and tucked into a feast prepared for another man. There was a store of logs by the stove; soon it was almost hot in the apartment kitchen. He packed his booty in wax paper next to the rolled-up straps in the suitcase and placed it out in the chilly entrance hall.

The pale body on the dining table grew warm. He touched the skin on the shoulder. It was rough and dry. He realized with a shock: dead people don’t sweat! His own shirt was quite damp after the meal, and the wine had flushed his cheeks. But he did not go into the bedroom, although it might have been more pleasant. This was his first opportunity to get a good, uninterrupted look at what he’d done.

MY DEED!

He was pleased he had finally worked out his opening lines. He’d behaved like an idiot and taken a terrible risk by almost frightening the first two to death. The one in Brno had become an animal fighting for her life; he barely overpowered her. In the second case she had fortunately RECOGNIZED HIM and given herself up; anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would have put up a fight. He had finally hit on it after puzzling the matter over and over at home, and he had decided to start next time by gaining their TRUST.

Today’s events had proved him right. He had stunned her so perfectly that he was able to make all the NECESSARY PREPARATIONS without hurrying. She had come to on the table, naked, bound, and trussed, in time to see what was happening to her. He retained the same procedures and was satisfied at how effortless it was compared to the woman on the embankment. This time, all he heard was some weak moaning. The body’s jerking did not prevent him from making all the cuts just as he was supposed to. She held out surprisingly long; almost, it seemed, until he cut IT out.

He took his gloves off again and touched first her, then himself, to see if a dead body felt different from a live one. It did not seem to. Her hair was thus all the more surprising. He had held her by it — it was long — when she fell into the wardrobe; the strands had flowed through his palms as he tied her to the tabletop, and were still hairs. As he examined them now, they did not separate; they reminded him of the hemp fiber he had used to clean his freshly oiled implements. So this was a new discovery:

THE HAIR DIES FIRST.

He studied her fingers close up to confirm what he knew from the Hungarian campaign:

NAILS AND MUSTACHES LIVE THE LONGEST.

He remembered helping to bury a lad who had barely grown his first whiskers before they closed the tulle-covered lid on his coffin. Now he raised the severed head and nodded, satisfied: a small mustache was clearly growing on the black-haired woman’s upper lip.

Enough for today; it was time to head back. He pulled the gloves back on, changed his clothes, checked carefully that he had left no telltale traces, put on his hunting coat, and on sudden impulse stuffed the brightly glowing stove with wood until it would not close. Let the ROTTENNESS here truly ROT for when her paramour arrives!

He listened at the door. The staircase was silent. The short street was empty as well when he peered cautiously out. He walked down it without meeting a soul. Still he was burdened by the nagging thought that he had forgotten something. At the main train station, he remembered: the caretaker! He had wanted to finish him off before leaving today. But it was still light and night trains were infrequent these days. Anyway, the man couldn’t recognize him unless they were brought face-to-face. The main thing, then, was the alibi; he could not afford even a shadow of suspicion to fall on him.

The station loudspeaker in the waiting room boomed a warning over and over about how to behave during the low-flying “tinker” machine-gun attacks from Allied pilots, which strafed locomotives on the tracks of the Protectorate. He knew the announcement by heart; although he firmly believed that SHE would protect him, he always sat in the last car anyway.

In the darkened compartment he read newspaper articles about sunken registered tons of British goods, American planes shot down, and destroyed Soviet tanks, but he barely noticed the figures. He was imagining what they would write in two days’ time about HIM.

The sometime room painter Josef Jurajda, now a night watchman, was dragged from under his quilt early the next morning by Váca; he had had a night off. Yes, sir, his wife had gone to Olomouc, he muttered, to bring their daughter and grandchildren back; it looked like there would be fighting in the city, and they had a one-story house there with a shallow cellar. No, sir, he hadn’t gone; got to catch up on sleep when you can, never enough of it with this job. Yes, sir, February fourteenth was just an ordinary day for him: he got home at six in the morning, slept through till evening, and at eight was back at work. No, sir, he couldn’t swear to it; the years went round like a spinning wheel, one night was pretty much like the rest and he knew even less about the days, but his wife remembered they’d bombed Prague that afternoon, and he’d heard about it from her in the evening. Yes, sir, he remembered her saying it as she woke him up to go to work; he was always the last to know, once the train had left the station, so to speak. No, sir, who would he have run into at work? He gets there long after everyone’s gone, and the cleaning girls don’t come till morning.

Morava ran out of questions and glanced at Buback. The German shook his head. He too seemed surprised that ten years ago this chubby guy — with the eyes of a rabbit and the cheeks of a hamster — had been jabbing tied-up prostitutes with pins and masturbating at them.

In any event, he made a note that this half-educated retired sadist spoke a quite literary Czech. Like most Moravians, he thought proudly — and immediately remembered what the caretaker from Vltava Embankment had said about the man who carved up the Pomeranian baroness. Of course! A fellow Moravian. That didn’t excuse him, but it did narrow the field of possible perpetrators from seven million to three….

He realized that Buback would be missing the telltale linguistic signs, but kept it to himself until he could consult with Beran. He snapped face-on and profile shots of the watchman for the Prague caretaker and recommended to Váca that he let the man go back to bed for the meanwhile. Then they set off southward.

He got in next to the German and asked if he had a particular route in mind. No, he learned, and risked a suggestion: would Herr Oberkriminalrat like to stop for lunch along the way? When Buback nodded, Morava even felt brave enough to propose a location: there was a decent pub on the main road; they would reach it around noon and — if this was acceptable — Morava could meanwhile stop briefly to visit his mother.

For the first time the German showed something like human interest. Morava briefly explained to him that he came, as his surname suggested, from Moravia — more precisely from what was once the Moravian-Austrian border region where they were headed. That was why he’d spoken passable German since childhood. His father, he continued, died a long time ago, and his mother lived alone next to the old family smithy, now rented out, since he, her only son, had fled to Prague to study law and his sister had married a vicar. Later, the Germans closed the Czech colleges and universities, halting Morava’s studies, and he’d landed, degreeless, in the police force.

Was an hour enough, Buback asked in telegraphic style, and the assistant detective made a mental note of the debt, one to pay back even if the creditor was a Nazi.

They fell silent (their driver, Litera, Beran’s favorite, was more taciturn today than usual) as the car wound along narrow country roads not built for the double load of spring farming and war traffic. When possible they passed the trucks carrying fertilizer and the army kitchen, and were themselves passed by official cars and couriers on powerful motorcycles.

Some soldiers with the insignia of the feared German field troopers (which reminded Morava of a tin spitoon) surfaced unexpectedly just past Rakvice. The policemen’s Protectorate identification papers got a good laugh out of them, but as the troopers were turning the car back, Morava’s companion showed his usefulness.

My God, Morava realized as he watched the three bandits change instantly into sheep, Buback really is a much bigger cheese than Beran.

The war had by this point squeezed spring off the carriageway; every once in a while deep ruts in the fields leading to the nearby woods hinted at huge quantities of hidden military machinery.

They found the pub on the village square closed. A toothless old man who did not recognize Morava whistled that the landlord had left with his family for Brno. Before the assistant detective’s spirits could sink, the German remarked dryly that he was not hungry anyway and would rather have a half-hour walk in the fresh air. Morava was decidedly grateful. They let Buback out, and Litera veered as directed down the muddy lanes toward the smithy. The tenant smith was finishing one horseshoe while Morava’s mother tended to the horse.

“Jan! My baby!” she shouted joyfully, and carefully put the hoof down onto the hard-packed soil. “It can’t be! It can’t! Oh!”

While the driver swallowed slabs of bread and bacon in the kitchen, washing it down with huge gulps of rose-hip tea, Morava’s mother repeated those words over and over again in the neatly kept sitting room. Her son, meanwhile, hastily told her that he had fallen in love with the sweetest girl under the sun and wanted to make her his wife, and that he intended to bring his mother back to Prague as soon as possible, so that he and Jitka could give her grandchildren while they were still working.

The farther they traveled, the more the land resembled a giant army encampment, and Erwin Buback became more and more ashamed of his nighttime funk.

The faces of officers and soldiers on the truck beds and the seats of the official jeeps were not shining with enthusiasm, but that is how members of any army look when they have been practicing the dreary art of war for years on end. On the other hand, there was no faintheartedness in their faces or even fatigue; they looked rested, radiating a calm resolve and certainty that they would succeed and survive.

He had noticed this phenomenon before. Despite the retreats on all European theaters, a single successful strike was enough to change the soldiers’ mood overnight. A step forward, Buback knew, was a cure, even if only for a couple of days; it gave the German soldiers a reserve of moral and physical strength for another month on the defensive.

This broken terrain, its southern slopes covered with vineyards, would be suitable for a new main line of defense. However, treadmarks in the wet soil indicated that a large number of tanks had recently passed by. That suggested this might be the very place where the long-awaited counteroffensive would begin.

Colonel Meckerle, who had excellent connections in the Führer’s main council, had recently made it known that the retreat was part of the most magnificent trap in military history. This was no fairy tale, no rumor, gentlemen! Not just one but two Bolshevik army divisions — one and a half million troops — would be flung into a gigantic cauldron and boiled into borscht. Meckerle had the Gestapo officers’ cafeteria serve the dish, and its dark red color had a very vivid and encouraging effect.

During his short walk around the village green, a massive artillery column rolled by that they had not seen on the way there; it had evidently joined the main road from a side track. The heavy cabs with their long trailers were a dead giveaway: they had to be transporting howitzers beneath their camouflaged canvasses. And it was the howitzer’s percussive fire that launched every major offensive. Buback reproached himself again for his weakness the day before.

Maybe it wasn’t wrong for him and Hilde to be so suspicious of Germany’s highest leader, however awful it sounded. What difference did it make, in the end? This bloody war would decide the fate of the German people for generations to come — and perhaps even their right to exist. Even if Buback had been right to think that Hitler had failed his country, shouldn’t Germans keep trying to avert a total defeat and at least achieve an honorable peace?

Only a year ago he and everyone else had condemned the assassination attempt on the Führer as a monstrous act, carried out by traitors in the pay of the enemy. But maybe the conspirators were simply patriots who had given in to their doubts, just as he and Hilde had. If so, they were not alone. And if Buback was right, there would be more brave men to come who would risk the punishment Meckerle had supposedly described to his closest advisers: being hanged from a butcher hook on a thin string, to die a slow, shameful death.

Buback did not believe there were any altruists of that sort in the Gestapo. There weren’t even any real detectives among his own men. They all came straight from SS schools with a political mission, loosely interpreted as knocking out the teeth of true or imagined Resistance workers. After all, they had stopped investigating their fellow Germans’ minor offenses a long time ago. But one scenario was probable enough to be vexing. There were many who would be interested in Buback’s inner thoughts, because that was their job: to neutralize anyone harboring harmful opinions.

There was only one solution: to support anyone who could promise Germany would not be trampled underfoot, and then wait until they could finally carry out what they’d failed at the year before. And that meant supporting the very army he was now watching and admiring, as it trudged unbroken toward its decisive battle.

His new resolve had an impact on his behavior toward the two Czechs. He knew that for them, Hitler probably embodied all Germans. Suddenly he no longer wanted to contribute to this false impression. And so, to his own surprise, he accepted the gift they brought him: bread with bacon in a fresh white napkin. He continued to keep his distance, so as not to arouse suspicion. However, he felt sure that Beran’s assistant was indebted to him, and so, like it or not, would come out of his shell. The kid even explained that he had wanted to let his mother know he had gotten engaged.

Buback kept up the flow of conversation without asking suspicious questions. A competent young man in a demanding job, like Morava, had to be aware that a police liaison officer to the Gestapo might be interested in other things besides a brutal murderer. And that in itself said a lot about the Czech mentality, which had changed drastically during the Occupation.

Then, later on, Morava began to repeat a certain woman’s name. Belatedly Buback realized it belonged to the very girl he had been thinking about — these days, more often than about Hilde. ..

The conversation with his mother comforted Morava. For years he had felt guilty for ruining her dream of keeping the smithy in the family. He visited her regularly, but the weight never lifted.

Until today, that is, when a miracle occurred. As he raced to tell her about Jitka, the tears in her eyes frightened him at first. Would she be jealous now, as well? But suddenly she hugged him and said he had made her unbelievably happy.

He suggested to her that she move to Prague, at least for a while. She could stay in his room, since he would be living at Jitka’s anyway. That way, she’d get to know Jitka and they wouldn’t have to fear for her safety here, where the war loomed larger every day. Then, with his head turned, his conscience clear for the first time in a long while, he watched the place where his life began to shrink away, until all that remained was a bright spot soon swallowed by the horizon of grapevines.

To add to Morava’s unusually good mood, the German’s priggish-ness was noticeably on the wane. Of course, Morava turned even the most innocent of questions inside out before answering, swiftly figuring how Beran would read it. But Buback seemed more interested in the area they were passing through, so Morava told stories about his childhood, confident that he was on safe ground. In some places here the road formed an unguarded border between the Protectorate and the Sudeten territories of the former Czechoslovak Republic, which the Munich agreement had effectively given to the Reich, a goodwill gesture that foreshadowed the annexation. How would things look after the war, he suddenly wondered, would he meet his classmates — if they hadn’t fallen in battle, that is — who had saluted Hitler and roared “Heim ins Reich“? Could they still live here, side by side?

To Buback, however, Morava simply described how ten years ago they had thought nothing of switching back and forth between Czech and German; no one would ever have claimed that one was better than the other. Emboldened by a further innocent question, he recalled how they had sung in both languages during wine tastings in the cellars and invited anyone they wanted to the zabijaka, regardless of nationality. What was a zabijaka? the German queried, and Beran’s instructions flashed through Morava’s head.

He described carefully and yet vividly the Moravian custom of the pig slaughter, in which the most basic human need for nourishment merges with a time-honored ritual of civilization and culture. By offering another person food from your own plate, you prevent the elemental greed at the root of all wars. Without using exactly those words, he emphasized that even in times like these, when food became a rare commodity traded on the black market, in south Moravia the old laws still held. If you had given your neighbor a share of the pig slaughter in times past, then you did it now as well. Which these days could be dangerous for someone who gives generously, he said. Suddenly Morava found himself describing — somewhat more boldly than Beran had advised — the story of Jitka’s father, who had slaughtered a pig, not to sell it on the black market, but to divide it among his relatives and friends.

He instantly regretted his move when his neighbor stiffened again, but before he could reproach himself for his simplemindedness, he heard the relatively affable reply that the Reich’s offices respect the law but know it needs to be interpreted at times. He, Buback, personally did not believe that the father of this.. what was her name again? Jitka Modrá… yes, of this Miss Modrá—surely she was unmarried, at her age? — would be punished for black marketeering if the facts were as Detective Morava reported them. When they got back to Prague, Morava should tell the young lady that she could call on Buback for help in this matter; the German would certainly look into the case — all he needed was the personnel file.

Ahead, the tower of the castle was rising out of the vineyards; the suspect Jakub Malatínský was supposed to be waiting for them. His absence, however, was not to be the last surprise that day.

The conversation about Jitka Modrá excited Buback. She was undoubtedly a delicate chip off the old paternal block; the girl’s father had probably been acting in the spirit of the old traditions, and if so, then he could help her.

Buback’s new task assumed a scenario which, if expressed aloud a short while ago, would have been grounds for a charge of high treason: that the proud Reich which had covered most of the continent would shrink back to its core. It was no longer possible to evacuate or liquidate the millions of Czechs living here who had never submitted to their loss of independence; at best Germany might persuade them not to revolt through deft use of the carrot and the stick.

Buback was sure that in the given instance, Meckerle would not object. He could extend a helping hand to Beran and his men that cost nothing and might prove fruitful. The Prague Gestapo supervisor had seen the need for a change of priorities last fall, and now reined in his subordinates as zealously as he had earlier applied the spurs. The girl’s father was just a pawn in the game, and Buback, while respecting its rules, could spare the reincarnation of his Hilde any further fear and misfortune.

Then his musings were cut short. As it turned out, the suspect Jakub Malatínský, despite the order from Brno, was not there, and no one had any idea where he might be. Before Buback was forced to dress down the officers, Morava translated for him that the summons could not have reached him; Malatínský had taken two days’ leave earlier.

“So what are you waiting for?” Buback snarled at the local policeman, who turned white as a sheet. “Send for him, have him tracked down, whatever, but don’t just stand there like God’s gift to mankind. I want to be in Prague tonight.”

Morava cautiously intervened.

“Could it wait half an hour?”

“Why?” he barked in irritation.

“He should come of his own accord. His shift starts at two.”

Is he trying to show me up in public? Buback wondered, but when he looked into those eyes again, even his professionally suspicious glare could find no hint of intrigue. He assented, but as punishment haughtily declined their offer to visit the renowned castle wine cellar. While his guide diligently filled lined pages with facts about the suspect, he continued his pretense of not understanding Czech and stubbornly fixed his sight on a flock of circling crows outside who were choosing a suitable tree to land in.

Malatínský was hauled in by a sweat-drenched police officer at two minutes after two. A giant in linen clothes and felt boots, the suspect barely fit under the door frame. Buback inadvertently thought of Meckerle but immediately dismissed the comparison. Malatínský was a sheaf of sinew and muscle, not a sack of meat. He had a nice, well-proportioned, and sturdy face beneath a black mane without a single gray hair. As he walked he thrust his knees and hips forward, almost like a ballerina, but one with a wild animal’s strength.

Buback caught the deferential glance of the assistant detective and signaled him to start. The Czech asked the cellar workers to leave and ordered the suspect to sit down. This too Malatínský did in a surprisingly refined manner, crossing his legs at the knee and clasping his hands in his lap. A native of this mixed border region, he offered to speak German with them. His accent was strong, but his vocabulary was adequate to the task.

After the usual preliminaries, where Morava verified his identity and instructed him, the giant got the same question they had put to Jurajda that morning in Brno. Where had he been on February fourteenth and who could confirm it?

“I don’t like to write down where I go.” The questioned man grinned.

“Then you’ll just have to remember.”

“Why is it so important?”

The kid went right to the point, and Buback knew he would have done the same in Morava’s place.

“In 1929 you were convicted of a brutal murder. After your release, you were investigated in the fall of 1938 in connection with another one; the investigation was never completed. We are looking for the person who murdered a woman in Prague on February fourteenth of this year in a very similar fashion.”

Yes, Buback approved; keep going, if he’s the murderer, he knows exactly why we’re here and will give himself away. Instead, the vintner laughed as if he had just heard a good joke.

“And why look for him here?”

“The best way to start an investigation is to look in places you know,” Buback’s famulus said just as casually. “Sometimes it’s the best way to finish one as well. Was it you?”

“No,” the vintner responded, still with a hint of amusement in his voice. “I’m done with crazy stunts like that. If I’d given her a few good slaps and tossed her rags out on the street behind her, I could have saved myself ten years of life and not missed out on a hundred better women. Except I was twenty, and a complete fool.”

“There was nothing crazy about the way you did it,” the kid continued in a conversational tone. “The jury called it a repulsive display of extreme sadism. The prosecutor asked for life.”

“But the court gave me fifteen years; fortunately they got the point. It was my first woman, you see; I was terribly jealous. I got over it in prison once and for all.”

“Where were you on February fourteenth?”

“What day was it?”

“Wednesday.”

“At work, I guess.”

“No you weren’t,” Morava shot back. “We already know you took two days’ vacation. Why?”

“I was probably exhausted. We’d spent a week cleaning the big barrels.”

“So you often take Vácations.”

“I take them when I want to and when I can. Don’t you?”

“And how do you spend them? Today, for instance. You can’t have forgotten that already?”

Malatínský laughed until his pearly white teeth flashed.

“No, that I remember.”

Not a single filling, Buback noticed enviously. It made the vintner even more irritating. If one of Meckerle’s boxers got his hands on you…, he thought, and was immediately ashamed: I’m becoming just like them!

“Mr. Malatínský,” his companion continued in a suddenly solemn tone, “I should warn you: the victim was a citizen of the Third Reich. This is why Chief Inspector Buback from the Prague Gestapo is overseeing this investigation. If you don’t give me proof of your innocence, the Germans will be the next to ask. It’s your choice.”

He’s reading my mind, Buback thought with amazement, and shot Malatínský an icy glare he had perfected. The man opposite them stopped laughing.

“It really wasn’t me. I have the same alibi for February as for yesterday. But it’ll cost me my job.. ”

A widening crack appeared in the suspect’s self-confidence. The interrogator turned to the local keeper of the peace.

“Could you wait outside for a minute?”

The policeman, who had been following the interrogation with evident interest, misunderstood what Morava meant. Grabbing Malatínský by the elbow, he began to lead him out. When he heard the request a second time, he blushed like a scolded schoolboy and made a quick exit. Only then did the youngster continue, now in an almost affable manner.

“We don’t want to make trouble for innocent people. If your alibi holds up, we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

“ I was in Brno.”

“ What were you doing there?”

“ Fucking,” the man said in his native language. “ I don’t know how to say it in German.”

Buback enjoyed watching the Czech’s discomfort as he translated. The German had been the first in his class to know that word.

“ You understand,“ —Morava turned to Malatínský again—“ that we’ll have to confirm it.”

“ Yes. That’s the problem.”

“ Is the lady married?”

“ Which one?”

“ What do you mean, which one?”

“ Do you mean the one in February or the one now?”

“ We’re talking about February now!”

“ Yes, okay… but could you ask her when the other one isn’t around?”

“ Why should she be…?”

“ They’re mother and daughter.”

The assistant detective suddenly looked like an openmouthed teenager, and Buback had the impression that their suspect was looking for some masculine understanding. It was time to jump in.

“ Which one was it in February?”

“ The mother.”

“ And where can we find her?”

“ Well, here.”

“ You mentioned Brno.”

“ We were at a hotel in the city. I was just there with the daughter too.”

“ And who is the mother?”

“ My boss’s wife. He’s the administrator. They live here at the castle. But you won’t tell her about her daughter?”

“ No,” Buback said.

“ And could you interview her… inconspicuously, somehow?”

“ Yes,” Buback said.

What is it with me? he wondered. First I wish he would get beaten to a pulp and now I’m ready to throw up a triple smoke screen for him? Am I really going to cover for him to his boss and two mistresses?

Except… what was the point in turning him in? His detective’s sixth sense told Buback that although this man had committed an atrocity, it was not a sign of any inborn deviance, but an eruption of anger at his humiliated masculinity. He felt sure the alibi would hold up. The man radiated charisma; he would not need to substitute torture and murder for pleasure — not with women young and old beating a path to his door. No, today’s trip would serve only one purpose: Buback could try to get closer to his guide, and in doing so, fulfill his true mission.

But given his midday musings, what was his true mission anyway…?

Morava was more and more surprised. Throughout their unequal cooperation (with Morava doing all the work while the other merely watched over his shoulder), he had found the German to be a patronizing prig, possibly not as arrogant as others from the Gestapo, but certainly not a colleague one could trust. However, in the last couple of hours Buback had changed beyond belief.

Letting Morava visit his mother, offering to intervene on behalf of Jitka’s father, and finally jumping in so unconventionally during the vintner’s interrogation could all be classic tricks — if Beran was right— but it was certainly easier to breathe in this new atmosphere. A thaw in relations would bring advantages to both sides; you just had to prick up your ears and watch your mouth a bit more closely.

They turned Malatínský over to the policeman and casually asked the administrator’s wife for some rye coffee while her husband was down in the cellars. When she brought it to them, Morava abruptly translated Buback’s question for her: where had she been on February fourteenth and whom had she been with? The handsome woman’s jaw fell open and her lips trembled; suddenly she sagged into a heap of misery. Before she could burst into tears or faint, Buback had Morava tell her that everything she said would remain confidential; her husband would not find out.

She collected herself with surprising speed, grabbed their promise like a life preserver, and made such an ardent confession that Morava felt hot under the collar. Yes, they had been together those two days and nights in February as usual, but this month they hadn’t gone, because he thought they shouldn’t always leave at the same time, so instead he went to visit his mother; yes, they always registered legally in the hotel, with his friend the reception clerk putting them in separate rooms, but she’d been with him in one of them and swore he hadn’t gone farther than the toilet the whole time; yes, she would even put it in writing, but for God’s sake, she was relying on their word that none of the local men would see it, because otherwise it’d be her husband doing the murdering.

With Buback’s permission, Morava wrote out a rather short declaration; her hands shook, but she managed to sign it. The two of them finished their drink and returned to the office. Malatínský was chatting affably with the officer. He was still laughing as they walked in, but stood up respectfully. And it was Buback who with an almost genial nod indicated to him that his account had been confirmed. In return, Malatínský docilely let Morava photograph him head-on and in both profiles to show to the Prague caretaker (can’t be too careful!). With that they were finished and could go home.

Just before they left, Morava had a memorable experience. As he relieved himself at the employees’ ramshackle urinal while Buback went to take in some fresh air, the door banged open and the local policeman appeared at his side.

“Sir, what should we do?” the policeman asked.

“Nothing. Unless we send for him, you can leave him alone,” Morava replied.

“That’s not what I mean. What should we do in general? If things heat up? Say, if the Germans try to mobilize us. Who do we answer to?”

“How long have you been in the police?”

“Urn… since 1920.”

Morava searched the man’s eyes. This was not the panicky fear of a collaborator, but the understandable anguish of a man who for twenty-five years had served the law under various changing powers. The young Czech thanked fate that his work, dismal as it could be, was basically independent of the political weather.

“Or if the Russians come, the way things are looking,” the man continued nervously. “Who should we listen to?”

Morava was too much Beran’s pupil to trust his feelings completely. A cop who had survived every regime could be a perfectly corrupt bastard and a provocateur, maybe even in the Germans’ pay and under Buback’s thumb. He decided to play the wise man.

“Did you serve in the army?”

“Yes, the Czechoslovak one.”

“So you took an oath?”

“Yes. But under the Germans I also….”

“Willingly?”

“No…”

“So what’s your question?”

They both buttoned their flies.

“Thank you,” the uniformed man said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed until it blows over.”

Before he climbed into the car, Morava spotted the administrator’s wife on the second floor of the castle. Her corpulent husband in his vest, plus fours, and rubber galoshes did not seem like a passionate soul prone to murderous rages. Despite this, the woman in the window above him briefly clasped her hands and put a finger to her lips. A woman beloved by her husband loved her lover, who made love to her beloved and apparently loving daughter. Jan Morava could not understand their behavior; he felt a deep repugnance toward them.

Why not give this shady vintner a draft of the truth? he wondered. Idiot, he rebuked himself instantly; you work in a cemetery, where every day new graves fill with victims of the chain of abandoned passion and instinctual reaction. Maybe the only reason those feelings don’t affect you is that heaven sent you an angel in the form of Jitka. So don’t play the righteous man, to yourself or to her!

The face of the land they had crossed not long ago had changed beyond recognition. In the twilight, only teams with ploughs, harrows, and seed drills passed by; the earth appeared to have simply swallowed up the gigantic army, if it had not in fact been a mere hallucination. Buback, who was used to the appearances and disappearances of military forces, could easily spot the traces of their presence everywhere and was impressed by their unbroken discipline.

From the snatches of conversation he had overheard in the office and Prague’s German House bar, he pieced the picture together with what he dimly remembered from school geography lessons. This hilly landscape stretching north across the Moravian-Slovak borderland to Silesia and linking up with the Czech-Moravian highlands farther west took the shape of a mighty natural bulwark. The battle that would decide the fate of the war and the future shape of the world would definitely be fought here.

How must the boy feel, with his mother here, he thought, and immediately asked him. He learned that his companion had convinced her to move to Prague until the wedding. In return, he got an equally intimate question: did the chief inspector also have a family?

“No!” he nearly snapped, and bristled again, but right away he realized that there was no reason to; after all, it was he who had started the personal questions, and he did not want to behave like a member of a master race. So he added, “My wife and daughter were killed last year in an air raid.”

Darkness had long since enveloped the car, but when he heard nothing and turned his head to his companion, he saw sympathy in the boy’s eyes. The reaction surprised and nonplussed him, and they sat staring at each other this way for a few long seconds before the Czech spoke again.

“I’m truly sorry, Mr. Buback.”

He did not remember when anyone last confused him as much as this young man, and the only thing he could think to say was “Thank you.”

In Brno they stopped at the vintner’s hotel, and the horrified clerk, stammering, corroborated the facts. The onetime sadistic murderer, now tender paramour to two generations of women, was in the clear, and they were back where they had started.

The two of them spent the remainder of the trip in the back seat, half asleep, half awake. Litera could only drive as fast as the narrow beams of the car’s blue-painted headlamps permitted. Buback was silent. From time to time he fell into phantasmagoric, contentless dreams, only to wake staring over the unmoving shoulders of the driver into an inky darkness, unbroken by the blacked-out towns that seemed more like stage sets.

Long past midnight he heard the driver’s voice informing the rear of the car that they were in Prague; where should he drop them off? Buback nearly answered in Czech and froze: to his surprise, he was less frightened of losing his secret advantage than he was of looking foolish in front of his traveling companion. The Czech deferred to him, and in his fatigue Buback made a further slip when, quite irregularly, he gave his home address. He tried to make up for it by getting out at the very foot of the road. With a brisk good-bye, he headed up the steep slope on foot.

The Czechs now called this neighborhood Little Berlin. What had mostly been Jewish homes were now apartments for functionaries sent here from the Reich. Buback had arrived late, and the only place left for him was an attic studio in a turn-of-the-century house occupied by the chairman of the Prague Volksgericht—“People’s Court“—and his large family. They had been overjoyed when he asked for the key to the servants’ staircase in the back; it meant he barely ever saw them. Several times, however, the judge had given him a lift to work in his official car, which passed the Gestapo building on its way to the Pankrác prison.

During these rides the corpulent judge, sweating despite the winter cold, would haltingly ask Buback’s opinion on the state of the war. As a matter of principle, Buback hewed to the editorial line of the Völkischer Beobachter in his answers: the situation on the battlefield was not a reliable indicator, since the brilliant and therefore unpredictable hand of the Führer would make the decisive move, as it had many times before. The judge would enthusiastically echo him, and later, on the evening radio program, Buback would hear news of his neighbor’s fresh successes at work, as reflected in the number of new executions.

Now, as he reached the top of the street, he noticed hushed sounds and movements in front of his darkened house. He halted; for the first time the thought occurred to him that these days, with the advancing front so close, he should be carrying a pistol. The voices were German, however, so he decided to approach them. A large, bulky shadow resolved into a moving van; four strapping fellows were hoisting a long piano into it. Before Christmas Eve dinner last year, his neighbor’s wife had played carols on it and boasted that it was a famed Steinway, left behind by the original owners. Even the men’s blacked-out flashlights showed Buback that the capacious interior of the van was almost full.

Another hulk loomed out of the darkness and barked at him, “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” he coldly retorted. “This is where I live.”

The man, doubtless an officer in civilian clothes, took him for an ordinary Aryan he could push around a bit.

“Your documents!”

“It’s all right, officer,” a muffled voice called breathlessly; the judge was rushing over to them. “That’s Herr Buback, the chief criminal detective; he’s our neighbor. Good evening, Herr Buback.”

“Evening…,” Buback said, and continued to observe the scene until the import of it hit him.

“My mother-in-law“—the words tumbled out of the judge—“has taken seriously ill, and my father-in-law is alone in the Black Forest, so my wife is going to look after her parents….”

Buback could understand why this man, who had ample reason to fear for his own skin, would send his family to safety while there was still time. However, the sight of the Reich’s local judiciary chief looting the house with the aid of his wardens took Buback’s breath away. For the second time that night he was at a loss for words, and silently watched the grand piano vanish into the van.

“The children are just learning to play,” the judge hastened to explain, desperate for an excuse. “We don’t want them to be out of practice by the time they come back here….”

You rat, you dirty rat, Buback thought angrily; bloodthirsty rats like you provoked all of Europe until it united against us and now you’re the first to leave the ship with your plunder. He lunged toward the back entrance so suddenly that the cowed overseer barely managed to step out of his way. The judge who had sent hundreds to the firing squad and under the knife called after him almost beseechingly.

“Herr Buback! I have permission from the office of the Reich’s protector, and of course I personally will remain at my post—”

Buback put all his venom into slamming the door; the blow shook the house, but he knew that no one was asleep there anyway. The judge’s spouse and children were doubtless safe in a government car, racing westward through the darkness.

The army advanced toward its historic engagement while this cowardly capitulator snuck away. The thought upset him so greatly that he could not even think about sleep. He ferreted out an unfinished bottle of brandy from the cramped kitchenette and poured it straight down his throat. The pressure in his skull immediately lessened; agitation gave way to a woolly exhaustion. Then he noticed an envelope lying on the parquet flooring near the door.

He ripped it open and read Kroloff’s news.

Morava was shocked to find Jitka up so late. “What’s wrong?”

“With me? Nothing. Just waiting for you.”

“But I had no idea when we’d be back. We could have been stuck there for days.”

“Didn’t you get Beran’s message?”

“No, was there one?”

“I telexed it to the police station there after lunch.”

“Aha,” he realized. “The local cop was with us the whole time. And what did it say?”

“He did it again. The butcher.”

“No! When?”

“Yesterday. Actually the day before, but they only found her yesterday.”

“Who? Where?”

She summarized the latest gruesome tale for him as if they were still at the office. The fire in the ground-floor apartment on Podskalska Street (building 131 in the district register) went unnoticed until relatively late, because the remodeled kitchen had no window. Although the blaze remained localized, the affected apartment was almost completely burned out. The partially charred body was apparently that of the tenant, Barbora Pospíchalová. But yesterday at noon, at the court medical department, a finding turned the investigation on its head: before the fire broke out, the woman — identified by her jewelry and teeth — had been brutally murdered and mutilated in exactly the same manner as the German baroness. The firemen had unfortunately destroyed all the evidence with a stream of water, and then, when they carted the smoking remains off to the dump with the rest of the wreckage, the sliced-off breasts disappeared as well. The missing heart confirmed the link between this brutal murder and the preceding one; the killer had evidently taken the organ with him.

Interviews with the building’s inhabitants revealed nothing of any use. The victim’s only regular visitor was her brother-in-law, who at the first incomplete account fainted and had to be hospitalized. She had never been seen with any other men. The single, barely credible lead was the testimony of a small girl, who had been watching for her mother from the mezzanine before the fire and insisted that a water sprite had left the building with a big suitcase. From this they deduced that a green coat was involved.

“Want some tea?” Jitka asked when she had finished.

“With plum brandy,” he said automatically, trying to digest the realization that the trail he had been following for almost a month had been a dead end from the start. The man who had probably tortured the Brno seamstress before killing Elisabeth von Pommeren and Barbora Pospíchalová was not one of the original suspects. In all likelihood he had a clean criminal record. Because he had taken six and a half years to commit his second murder and less than a month for his third, it was reasonable to surmise he had finally settled on a form of murder that was to his taste.

Morava felt the sharp scent of wartime tea concentrate, softened with home-brewed brandy, rising into his nostrils as Jitka lightly but securely wound her arms around his neck.

“You’ll catch him, I’m sure of it!” she said, and he was sure he would not disappoint her.

“My mother,” he answered, “is well and is looking forward to meeting you. She sent you her favorite kerchief. And Buback promised he would help your father.”

“So what else do we need, Jan?” she asked him. “Just the baby, then, I guess. Are you too tired?”

“Jitka…,” he whispered and looked into her eyes, hoping that all those awful images would dissolve in her warm brownness. “My love, where have you been all these years? I waited for you my whole life past, and our whole next life you’ll never be rid of me.”

Curiosity was stronger than caution. Just to be sure, he pretended to be fixing the lock on the canteen door until the director and his secretary had sat down to lunch (some sort of gray porridge with red beets, ugh!). Then, for the sake of prying eyes, he casually sauntered up to their office with his equipment in hand. He knocked and waited before entering. In the back room he put down his hammer and pliers on the desk and swiftly yet carefully paged through the daily press. NOTHING!

As he stared unbelieving at the back page of the last paper, he noticed that the police blotter reported a fire in Podskalská Street. The sign on the corner the day before yesterday had engraved itself on his memory, because first he had read the German name, Podskalaergasse, which made no sense to him. He had to read the article out loud before he realized what it meant. Fortunately, he managed to fold the newspapers up, remember his equipment, and leave before he lost control completely.

Locking himself in the toilet, he sat down fully dressed on the bowl, his hands and legs shaking uncontrollably. Who was foiling his plans! How could sheer coincidence have ruined the next of his masterpieces! He had thought that this time they would have to take notice of him, to start piecing together his motive. Instead, once again there was NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING!!

In the meanwhile he had become convinced that his actions should have a regular rhythm, so they could COUNT ON THEM. Discounting the poor start in Brno that had paralyzed him for several years, he had been sure that things would go more or less like last time: he needed two weeks to EXPERIENCE IT, and two weeks to PREPARE FOR IT. Like the moon in the heavens, he realized; he would wane, then wax again.

Twelve a year; the number seemed appropriate and at the same time significant. It too had a SYMBOL in it. But to warn them properly, first he had to let them know he existed; everyone had to understand the rhythm and anticipate the coming PUNISHMENT. That was the only way it could possibly work, the only way the ones who deserved it would fear and repent, become better people, follow the example that would gradually cease to be exceptional, until the world was CLEANSED.

Without the fire, which only SATAN himself could have set, his intention would have been clear by the middle of next month; he would have set a fateful pendulum in motion, destroying another sinner’s heart at each swing. And instead? “The flames spared the rest of the building,” the item had read, “but raged so wildly in the apartment that the tenant could only be identified by her rings and teeth.”

Someone entered the lavatory, pressed down on the doorhandle of his stall, and then began to jiggle it impatiently. Had they found him? How? In a panic he considered opening the ventilation window behind him and crawling out into the light shaft. At the thought of the drop he felt a terrible cramp in his testicles. Vertigo always sapped his strength; he was sure to fall and kill himself at the bottom of the shaft. No! He would turn the lock and open the door so sharply that he’d knock the guy behind it off balance for a few seconds; out in the hall and on the staircase he’d never catch up… unless there were more of them!

He broke into a sweat as he realized that he might be uncovered so quickly and simply. A thorough search and it’d all be over: they’d get the straps from his apartment, and here in the basement they’d find his SOULS! He’d never convince them that he was GOOD. They would sentence him just as easily as they condemned hundreds of ordinary people every day. And none of them had come anywhere as close to humbling EVIL as he had. An image sprang to mind — they were dragging him, bound, to the bloody chopping block — and he felt sick.

The unknown man outside swore, promptly exited, and slammed the door behind him. Meanwhile, he barely managed to turn around and lean over the worn bowl before forcefully throwing up his breakfast. He felt better but remained on his knees, his palms splayed on the filthy tiling and his chin against the cold porcelain, eyes blinded by a gush of tears. Finally his nose felt a piercing sourness. He flushed, scooping the running water into his palms to rinse his mouth out. Checking that he had not soiled his shirt or sweater, he carefully wiped the stall clean with shredded newsprint, and when he flushed again he noticed that his hands had stopped shaking. He could go.

Out in the hallway, fresh air coursed over him. He could see his long-dead friend, one of the first army pilots, who had once saved himself by jumping from a biplane in a parachute. The first thing his friend had requested afterward was to get right into another cockpit again. “Otherwise I would have been afraid the rest of my life,” he confided later.

He realized that he too must overcome his bad luck IMMEDIATELY!

Morava got barely two hours of sleep that night. He gave Jitka a detailed description of his visit with his mother and the trip with Buback. She hung anxiously on his every word, and he realized how worried she was about her father. The first flowering of love in the shadow of death, he thought. There was nothing else he could say, so he took her in his arms and stroked her hair and cheeks until the two of them began to fade with exhaustion and simultaneously fell asleep. He came to in her embrace when the alarm clock had just started to rattle, and she dozed on his shoulder as they rode in on the tram.

When Beran arrived, Morava gave him a brief summary of his trip with Buback and asked, heart in his mouth, what he should be working on.

“This case isn’t enough for you?” Beran queried.

“You’re leaving me on it?”

“Have you lost your courage?”

“I just don’t want to cause you any difficulties….”

“So don’t, then.”

His superior looked meaningfully into his eyes. Morava had to clear his throat again nervously.

“You’re aware that it’s not just our prestige at stake here,” Beran continued. “I tried to explain that to you the other day.” Yes___

“If your head is starting to spin again, we can go for another walk.”

“Yes….”

“Besides, I heard your cooperation with our colleague was going well.”

“Yes, he doesn’t seem to have any reservations about our work.”

“If the Germans see the second murder the same way we do, they might drop the theory that this is the work of the Czech Resistance.”

“But then there’d be no reason…,” Morava objected, but fell silent when the superintendent put his index finger to his lips.

“I assume,” Beran said, “that out of simple collegiality they won’t recall the chief detective just yet. The killer has shown that he doesn’t play favorites; German women are still in danger, just as Czech ones are. Mr. Buback can still assist you with security measures for potential victims on both sides. What ideas do you have?”

Morava put forth the conclusion he had reached that morning on the tram. In none of the three cases to date — including Brno, if it belonged among them — was there any sign that the perpetrator had used violence to gain entrance to the apartment; on the contrary, all indications were that he had been admitted willingly, although both Prague women had been mistrustful loners. How did he do it? Where did he first speak to them? How did he win their trust?

“This leads me to question our rationale for placing the case under strict censorship. Panic and fear can’t overshadow the positive effect of publicity: women would be warier of unfamiliar men who try to win their favor.”

“There’s still a risk that the killer might gain confidence from the publicity and increase his activity, like an egotistical artist,” Beran countered. “You and Mr. Buback should weigh your options together; both sides need to agree on a single approach.”

“It only makes sense to do so,” Morava continued, spinning his thread further, “if we have the courage to describe his method in detail. This butchery has a ritual element to it that must have a source. Given how repulsive it is, it has to be some sort of dark art.”

Beran frowned. “I’d be afraid of that. At a certain extreme these things exert a repulsive fascination. I’ve met any number of copycats in my day; I’d rather not inspire some other deviant to try and top the one we’ve got now. No, Morava, you’ll think I’m old-fashioned, but I won’t sign off on hocus-pocus like that. Don’t be disappointed; a compromise can always be found.”

“What sort, in the given case?” Morava asked skeptically.

“Send out a brief official announcement about a deviant murderer who preys on gullible women. And at the same time — I’ve got it now— send out detailed factual information to all our offices. They’ll distribute the description confidentially to individuals whose work brings them into contact with large numbers of people; they might uncover some connection between one of them and what you’re calling a ritual. I’m thinking of doctors, teachers, postmen too; you’ll certainly come up with others. If you’re right, there must be something that inspired him. Assuming Mr. Buback agrees, you can start today; my nose tells me we don’t have much time.”

Morava also mentioned his conversation with Buback about Jitka’s father, and was assured that the superintendent would intervene as well at the first opportunity.

“But, Morava, don’t give her any illusions,” Beran finished after checking that Jitka was not in the anteroom. “We are all more mortal than we’ve ever been. Even as we speak, this war is gathering its own momentum, independent of the warlords. Soon laws, institutions, and governments will have no force, and even logic itself — not to speak of morality — will go by the wayside. You can fight an elemental force up to a certain critical point; after that it may be all you can do just to survive it.”

With this, his boss dismissed him.

As Morava was dictating a brief message for confidential distribution to doctors, teachers, postal carriers, and other public-sector workers, Jitka asked, “What about clergymen?”

Like Morava, Buback had kept his report short and sweet. And the chief inspector also concluded that the latest crime made any political motivation for the murders seem doubtful. He agreed that they would nonetheless continue to play up the baroness’s case as a threat to German women in Prague, so that the Gestapo’s continuing interest would seem plausible. Sharing his observations about the Brno police, he mentioned what he had noticed on their trip to southern Moravia. At this even the powerful Meckerle lowered his voice.

“My dear Buback,” he addressed him more confidentially than he’d ever done before, “you are the only detective here with the slightest bit of sense; the rest are worthless shit-for-brains who got in on their connections. That’s why I’ve given you this assignment; it’s more important than you probably realize. My sources tell me the secret weapon — the one that will wrap up the war in a matter of days — will be ready for launch in mid-May. I don’t have to make borscht for you, and I can spare myself Goebbels’s nonsense about luring the Anglo-Americans and the Bolsheviks into the greatest trap in military history. We are retreating because right now the enemy has a severalfold advantage in manpower and materials, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. Until the new weapon can turn the tide, we simply have to hold on and to prepare ourselves for every eventuality; do you understand what I’m saying?”

He saw that Buback was confused, so he leaned his trunk forward over the desk to make the point more forcefully.

“The Führer has just issued an order, and personally transmitted it to the highest party functionaries in the army, security forces, and state and public offices. According to him, policies we previously applied only in occupied countries will now come into effect in the territory of the Reich as we retreat. I’m talking about the total annihilation of all transportation, communication, industrial, and distribution networks. Total, Buback. Do you understand what this means?”

He did, and felt himself flush. I’m afraid, he realized, my God, I’m afraid! It was an unfamiliar feeling for him; at critical moments he tended to be coolly inquisitive, never frightened. This, however, was truly horrifying news. He nodded in assent.

“I’ll tell you more, just so someone intelligent will know what to do and how to do it, in case I don’t make it. According to witnesses, Imperial Minister Speer objected. ’my Führer,’ he said, ’if we follow through on your instructions we will destroy any hope of keeping Germany alive.’ To which the Führer responded: If we lose this war, Speer, then the German people are as good as lost; failure means they don’t deserve to exist.’”

A clear question played across Meckerle’s face, but Buback could not bring himself to answer it. Is he trying to provoke me? Buback’s head spun; is he testing me? What does he want? After a moment of silence the giant suddenly grinned.

“I know what’s worrying you. No, I don’t want your opinion; I’m simply giving you mine, at my own risk. I’ve had you thoroughly checked out and there wasn’t any indication that you’re a fanatic or a traitor. Your lack of party activity indicates that you joined to keep your job, one you thought would be honorable in any society. And your behavior leads me to believe that your highest goal is the survival of our people, whether or not they achieve what they aspired to. Anyway, if I had the slightest suspicion that you’d betray my confidence, I’d finish you off, Buback, once and for all.”

He made his point by banging both fists down, shaking the solidly built desk. Then he relaxed into his armchair again and continued in an almost casual tone.

“The imperial minister and an overwhelming majority of those present at the following session decided to interpret Plan Nero (that’s what someone called it) as a grave warning from the Führer, meant to galvanize the nation’s heroic resistance. They resolved unanimously to carry out the order — what else could they decide, of course — but to modify its goals. The western imperial territories, whose loss is inevitable, will be handed over with minimal damages, so they can become the initial base for our people after the battles end. All forces and materials will be withdrawn to strategic areas of the center, where the new weapon will be launched. This territory will be defended to the last man, and in tactical retreats will be destroyed as the Führer requests. Because most of this area is within the Protectorate, the non-German nation and its economic base must be wiped out. Now do you see?”

“Yes,” he said finally. “But I still don’t understand what my role is.”

“What you saw in Moravia was the beginning of this operation: one of the largest military movements of all time. Within a month it will be a stronghold capable of repulsing any attack. The eastern line alone will consist of two million soldiers; its nucleus will be the military command of General Field Marshal Schörner. I want to rule out in advance any possibility of internal resistance. And that’s where you come in, Buback. We both know that only the Czech police are capable of organizing that sort of activity. We could, of course, take their light weapons away, but that would have a drastic effect on public order, again to our disadvantage. Those few thousand policemen know from experience how to fight and lead; each one of them could organize an attack on a smaller German unit and teach a hundred people how to fire a weapon. We’d have to round them up and possibly shoot them as a precaution, but in doing so we might set a Warsaw ghetto effect in motion — an uprising out of sheer despair. So, Buback, let Baroness von Pommeren continue to be a German foot in the Czech door, and you can be our Trojan horse. Keep your eyes and ears open and don’t be afraid to ask for whatever help you need.”

Immediately the images of apocalypse gave way to the memory of a shy girlish face.

Buback said, “I need the cooperation of the department dealing with black-market meat sales. The father of Beran’s secretary has been imprisoned for an alleged violation of these rules. Leniency on our side would greatly simplify my job.”

“I’ll have Hinterpichler get in touch with you.”

Buback felt tremendously relieved. His reaction amazed him. I must be in love with her, he admitted to himself finally; my God, I must really be… He stood up and said good-bye, hoping to leave before Meckerle got annoyed, but surprisingly the colonel was in no hurry to let him go. He scratched his shaved chin until it reddened.

“And… Buback…,” he spoke hesitantly, “do you think you could do me a personal favor?”

Buback had never been taken into Meckerle’s confidence this way; unprepared, he stood motionless, with no idea how to react.

“But of course, StandartenFührer,” he managed to squeeze out just in time.

“There’s a ball at German House today; you must know about it.”

“No….”

“It’s not a real ball; they’re forbidden till after the victory and we know and respect that. It’s more like a sixth anniversary celebration of our occupation of Prague. The Castle has exceptionally permitted us a few dances, to lift the mood of our leaders and their wives. I invited a charming German artiste to accompany me a while ago, but as you know my wife escaped Dresden alive and has joined me here. Naturally I’ll go to the ball with her, but I’d prefer not to insult or humiliate my… this sensitive woman. That’s why I’d like to invite her to my table along with you as her… let’s say her close friend.”

“But I don’t dance…,” Buback offered helplessly.

“She’ll teach you fast enough. She even taught me.”

He stood, showing Buback a figure sturdy as a Greek column. Then he extended his right hand aimiably.

“It’s agreed, then. Eight o’clock; wear your dress uniform. I’ll send my driver round; he knows everything.”

“It’s less than a year since my wife and child died…,” Buback objected again.

“Listen, in a war like this, different standards apply. It’s high time you found someone to comfort you. But watch out!”

Meckerle released his painful grip and jokingly threatened Buback with a finger large enough to break an ordinary wrist.

“Not her. I’m the jealous type, all right?”

By afternoon Morava knew all there was to know. It wasn’t much. Any traces, if the killer had left them, had been completely obliterated by the fire and water. The little girl from the mezzanine still stuck by her water sprite; aside from the suitcase and the color she could not remember anything else. The victim’s brother-in-law, whom he visited in the hospital, was still deep in shock; between torrents of tears he told them far less about the deceased than her neighbors did. The descriptions matched: a quiet, good-hearted woman who took exemplary care of her husband until his painful death and then touchingly revered his memory. She lived modestly on his pension, probably with support from his brother. Apparentiy he was the only person who had visited the two of them and later the widow alone. There was a substantial chain lock on the door. The mystery was why she too, just like the baroness, had let her murderer in. Did she know him? Impossible! He must inspire trust. How? Of course! The suitcase. Was he a traveling salesman with goods in demand? Candles for air raids? Household soap? Quality rye coffee? Some other article that vanished from the shops long ago? But why wouldn’t the caretaker have remembered something as conspicuous as a large suitcase? Why hadn’t the clothing’s unusual color caught his attention, since he noticed the man’s unusual pronunciation? And the serious little girl showed no signs of having a wild imagination. The autopsy confirmed beyond a doubt that it was the same perpetrator. Why, then, were there so many different indicators? Had he deliberately changed his appearance? So, this was no primitive on the rampage; there was a mind behind it. Then his method of killing must have a deeper meaning. Is it a symbol? Of what? A message? What sort?

Even before Morava’s return from Brno, Beran had assigned two more men to him: ebesta and Marek, experienced sleuths who were not at all offended to be working under a youth their sons’ age. They shared Beran’s good opinion of him and, in their time, had voluntarily chosen careers as “sniffing dogs,” because they enjoyed working in the field and had no desire to learn German. They quickly reconstructed the daily habits and routes of Barbora Pospíchalová. On the last day of her life she had gone to the post office to deposit part of her pension; at the butcher’s she had bought sausage worth a quarter of her month’s rations, and at the grocery store she had arranged for lentils on her allotment and elderberry wine, procured for a special occasion. Her husband’s brother was coming the next day, she had told the shopkeeper with unusual animation. Just before noon she had taken her bed linens to be pressed and bought a bunch of cowslips, which they later found in a small vase at the cemetery. According to the sexton she went there every other day, sometimes more often.

No one had noticed when she returned home. Because of the fire, the exact time of her death could not be determined; she must have had several hours to let her murderer in (assuming she did not bring him back with her — and the possibility remained that she had). The origin of the fire was a further question mark. Had it been set deliberately? Then why had this crazy man taken such care with the baroness to make an altar of death and this time destroyed his work? Maybe it had not turned out the way he’d expected?

That afternoon they assembled, crossed out, rewrote, and rerefined both texts, for public and selective distribution. For the latter Morava more or less copied out of his notebook his first, raw impressions from the embankment.

At five in the afternoon he gave his report to Buback first. The cooperativeness that had replaced the German’s earlier primness on their trip seemed to have evaporated; he was practically sleepwalking. Finally Buback said he agreed with the suggestion in principle, but they would go over it together in detail the next day; now he had to leave.

As Morava walked past Jitka to Beran, he managed to surprise her in the anteroom while she was on the telephone. He bent toward her and blew gently on her hair from behind, but when she quickly swiveled toward him he saw alarm on her face instead of a smile. She covered the mouthpiece.

“Jan, stop it,” she whispered forcefully.

She was apparently dictating some statistical data to the presidium about office supplies — quite absurd as the apocalypse approached! — and in the meanwhile Beran returned. He read through each version carefully twice and gave them his blessing. Buback’s delay meant their publication and distribution would have to wait a day, which disappointed him.

“Let’s hope the murderer isn’t conceited to boot,” Beran remarked gloomily. “If he’s trying to send the world a message, we may be torturing him with this silence. He might strike again immediately to get the word out.”

“Then why did he burn the last one to cinders?”

“The fire definitely started near the stove; he might not have closed it all the way.”

“So what else can we do?”

Beran fixed him with questioning eyes.

“You’re a Christian, aren’t you?”

“Yes… Czech Brethren….”

“Then you can definitely do more than I can as an agnostic: pray. Sadly enough, Morava, the toughest hours in this job are dealing with maniacs like this one. He has to continue in this game until he makes the fatal mistake that betrays him. All we can do is wait; wait and not despair.”

He went with Beran to pick up the mail from Jitka, and so Morava only found out what had scared his beloved so badly as they came out late that evening onto Bartolomjská Street.

“Buback came to see me.”

“Will he help your father?”

“He didn’t say…”

“So what did he want?”

“He invited me…”

Morava halted, confused.

“What?”

Shadows moved across the darkening Narodní Avenue. The trams and cars acridly belching wood gas had narrow cats-eyes scraped from their blued-out headlights. They stood face to face and could barely see each other.

“He invited me to dinner,” she finished.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“He said he’d pick me up if I liked.”

“And you said…?”

“I said yes…”

He knew it was the only possible answer, and he also knew it was good; after all, he himself had arranged this opportunity for her. For Jitka? Now he was not so sure; maybe it was for Buback? His heart rose into his throat and so, for the first time, he knew what it was like to be horribly jealous.

“Was that wrong?” she asked timidly.

“No.” He brushed it off bravely. “Buback is a German, Gestapo even, and I barely know him, but I don’t think he’s an extortionist or a rapist. When he told me that a bomb had killed his wife and daughter, there was no hatred in it, just grief. That surprised me. I’d say he’ll help your father.”

They still stood on the corner of the narrow street, although they were both going the same way.

“I’m still afraid…”

Morava was too, but as the man it was his job to provide solace.

He clasped his palms behind her back, pressed her close, and tried to talk himself into believing it.

“War or no war, German or not, even evil has to stop somewhere; that’s why God made people like you, Jitka, whom no one would ever dare harm.”

Like evil itself howling with rage at how little he appreciated its omnipotence, sirens suddenly began to wail across the city. The closest, right above their heads, deafened them. The tram shadows stopped, and human ones hurried forward. Holding hands, the two young Czechs set off at a slow pace back to the air-raid shelter in the police complex, as alone as lovers on an evening stroll.

The air-raid siren nipped Buback’s problem in the bud. Before they even got to dance, he offered Marleen Baumann his arm and instead of leading her to the floor took her down to the cellar. Everyone politely made way for Meckerle and his spouse; they sailed to the steps as if in an air bubble while the other two moved elbow to elbow in a pack toward the mouth of the funnel. Fortunately the ominous hum of bomber squadrons did not materialize, and the crowd’s nervousness did not grow into panic. He could just imagine the ladies’ hysterics; most of them had never felt the daily breath of war.

The woman beside him seemed made of sterner stuff. When he called for her at the relatively modern apartment house in Prague’s New Town, where Meckerle’s driver took him before picking up his boss, her appearance surprised him. She was not much shorter than he — the pants of her close-fitting suit showed her long legs to good advantage — but she seemed dainty, not only in body. Her face as well was unusually long and thin, accentuated by blond hair combed straight back over her ears, contrary to the current fashion, and caught at the nape in a short ponytail. He was intrigued by her reaction when he said he was honored to accompany her in the place of Colonel Meckerle. Without raising an eyebrow, she answered, “That’s both gallant and prudent on his part. Dancing with me seems to exhaust him.”

The driver apparently knew her well, so they limited themselves to pleasantries. He knew no more about her when he presented her to the Meckerles; but he did catch himself admiring how easily and naturally she behaved when being introduced to her lover. So what, he thought, trying to quash an absurd feeling of sympathy; she’s just playing a role.

The giant’s wife, whom Buback was also seeing for the first time (she was huge and square like a dish cupboard), seemed like a real shrew, probably the only person on this earth who knew how to keep Meckerle in line. From that perspective he understood his superior’s choice of a mistress; she could hardly have presented a greater contrast. As the companion of an important colleague — which was how Meckerle introduced Buback — Marleen Baumann aroused no suspicions, and Meckerle’s spouse accepted her with relative affability.

While real champagne was being poured for some of the more important tables, the giantess continued her laments about the loss of their Dresden villa and her complaints about the drabness of life in Prague. None of them could get a word in edgewise. Mrs. Meckerle seemed to forget completely about the other woman’s existence until after the state secretary’s short yet interminable speech toasting the Füh-rer as creator of the Protectorate, when the first notes of a waltz sounded. Rising from her seat before her husband could ask for the dance, she turned to Marleen.

“Shall we take the boys out for a spin, then?”

The next second, with no warning, the sirens announced an air raid. The horrifying memory of February fourteenth and the sudden bomb explosions was still fresh. Even this group, with numerous experienced soldiers, was not immune to it as the crush of the crowd inched toward an illusion of safety. A proverbial deathly quiet reigned, broken only by the shuffling of soles. The bodily warmth of this mass in a heated building led to a greenhouse effect. Sweat stood out on the men’s foreheads; powder trickled down the women’s cheeks.

Buback at first led his date to clear a path for her. After a while he felt the throng push her sharply against his back, and managed by turning around to get her in front of him. She realized that he was trying to make room for her to breathe, and gratefully turned her head back toward him.

“Thanks. ..”

A better reward was the pleasantly bitter scent of her hair, and he buried his head in it.

The bombs had not yet begun to fall, and they maneuvered fairly quickly into the narrowest part of the flow to the head of the stairs, which led them down to an extensive complex of shelters. The spacious cellars of German House were furnished with relatively comfortable benches, and it turned out — when after the shock of heat there came a gust of cool air — that the climate was pleasant down there as well. Following the militia’s orders, they pressed onward, passing a cellar alcove restricted to VIPs; towering above the others in a gray haze was Meckerle, talking to State Secretary Frank. Buback was suddenly glad that his boss had not noticed them.

He and Marleen Baumann ended up among unfamiliar couples in a cozy corner, where there was only seating for two. There she thanked him again.

“You were both polite and skilled. What a shame we didn’t get to dance; you must be good on the ballroom floor.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said directly. “I’m sure I would have disappointed you.”

“You don’t dance?” she asked, surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

For the second time in twenty-four hours he repeated the fact that he had suppressed for months in the vain hope that what went unsaid might not be true.

“I lost my family in an air raid last year.”

And then he added quite superfluously: “I don’t feel ready for dancing yet.” He gazed into her gray eyes and saw there the same sympathy that had so surprised him yesterday in the young Czech.

“Please accept my condolences, Herr Buback. You have no idea how well I understand. My parents and brothers perished in the first raid on Hamburg. A stroke of bad luck that both my brothers were on leave at the same time. I lost my husband last year in the retreat from East Prussia. But as opposed to you, I’ve lost the strength to mourn. It’s not just that as a woman, I can’t allow myself to; to be honest, I didn’t really feel like it. With him, at least…”

She gestured with her head in the direction where her expansive lover was taking cover with his wife and the cream of party and government society. Then she fell silent, rooting energetically through her handbag until she found a gold ladies’ cigarette case and a matching lighter. She offered him the box.

“It’s not allowed down here,” he said, drawing her attention to a notice on the wall.

“But they“—once again that sharp motion toward the leaders’ sanctuary—“they were smoking.”

“Quod licit Iovi… Fine for the brasses, but not for the masses,” he translated freely.

She swore softly like a man, threw the items back in her bag, and glanced around the cellar. This was his first opportunity to really look at her. What he saw surprised him. Why would a beast so powerful that even his equals trembled before him choose precisely this one — out of all the young German women running around Prague? And was she young? In the darkened entranceway of her building, in the half-lit car, even in the ballroom where she sat next to him, her slenderness helped her pass as a young girl. The bright light of the shelter, however, mercilessly revealed the truth. Thirty? Thirty-five? Even more? The energy of her every movement spoke against it.

In any case, she was the exact opposite of the Germanic ideal of womanhood as portrayed by the Freie Körperkultur. But she was equally unlike his Hilde and the Prague girl he had invited tomorrow… where indeed? And what would he say to the girl once they had covered her father’s case? Would he invite her home? How would she react? And how should he behave? If she agrees? If she refuses?

As he pondered these questions, he must have been staring intently at Marleen Baumann, who brought him back to the present with an unexpected question,

“You take me for a better sort of whore, don’t you? If not for a worse sort?”

Put on the spot, he stammered a confused protest. Surprisingly it satisfied her.

“I’m glad to hear it. You see, I’d been alone for so long. I find most German men repulsive. At least he“—again she nodded her chin in that direction, and Buback sensed that she was avoiding his name and title—“isn’t a gutless ass-kisser.”

She gave a gruff laugh, which matched her dainty appearance as poorly as her vocabulary did. In fact, her whole face, as he could now see up close, was a collection of disturbing details. Her dovecolored eyes sat strikingly far from one another; eyebrows rising from the bridge of a large nose drooped to the outer edges of her face in an arc reminiscent of clown’s makeup. She had a long chin, a forehead that was too high, and very narrow lips set quite deep beneath her nose, which further increased the sharpness of her profile when she stopped speaking. Suddenly he noticed an oblique line falling from her left earlobe almost across her whole throat; how did he miss it earlier? Oh, of course! She had probably covered it with powder. This wrinkle or scar of a hard-to-distinguish shade between light green and pale yellow indicated a secret.

As if reading his last unspoken thought, she said: “Anyone who hasn’t seen me in a year doesn’t recognize me, Herr Buback. In the course of a few days I lost my reason for living and came to know every kind of depravity on earth. When I realized that I could not kill myself — because more than anything I fear my own death — I learned to survive. I can lie so perfectly that even you would believe me if I wanted you to.”

“Why don’t you want me to?” he asked her, purely to keep the conversation going; he was completely captivated by his new discovery. Yes, her whole face was disturbingly mysterious; as soon as she spoke she changed beyond belief. Her lips became her dominant feature, suddenly so full that they surrounded him, and all her apparent defects coalesced at once into an image far from “beautiful” in the ordinary sense but nonetheless provocatively attractive.

Erwin Buback now knew why his boss kept her. That face was omnipresent; you could not overlook it nor, apparently, forget it.

“Why don’t I want you to?” she repeated, and laughed again. “Apparently I trust you.”

“What did I do to deserve that?”

“As long as fate lets them exist, men only half as interesting as you,” she said to his face without a speck of coquetry, “can live in the present moment, here in our twilight of the gods, day by day, night by night. But you’ve stayed faithful to your old loves. I admire it all the more for being incapable of it myself.”

He remembered the young Czech woman again, but he did not have the strength or at the moment any reason to correct her. Instead, he gladly acceded to her next request, and began to talk about his wife and daughter. She listened to him attentively, her palms planted firmly on the bench, and he soon noticed the burden of his grief lightening and dispersing slowly into his own words, melding painful facts into comforting memories.

The Allied squadrons crisscrossing the Protectorate held them in the cellar until almost midnight. When the all clear sounded, a thoroughly bored Meckerle had to go off to bed with his wife, who had developed a headache in the cellar air. He managed to pay his respects to his mistress and convey to Buback that his personal chauffeur would return for them. Although the party was starting to gain steam again, both of them understood what the message meant. When later he kissed her hand at the car door and she realized that he was not coming with her, she used the curtain of sound from the motors and voices to ask a further unexpected question.

“Would you be interested in meeting again, when I have time?”

“No,” he answered forthrightly. “The colonel made it clear that was out of the question.”

“I’m not his property,” she announced flatly. “I’m no one’s, not anymore. I’m a free spirit. If some day you feel ready to listen to me the way I listened to you today, you know where to find me. And don’t worry, our number one spy won’t find out.”

During the whole trip home on foot — an impulse he’d suddenly succumbed to — Buback found himself unable to concentrate. He felt torn asunder: He belonged to his old love, as he headed towards new hope, but out of the blue he had found a strange affinity with this unknown creature, who had captured the heart of the Protectorate’s third-in-command.

Hedvika Horáková found a friend at the graveyard. For three months she had stood alone, twice a week, at the grave of her spouse, killed by a toppled crane during the Totaleinsatz — the total deployment — in Essen. Then, one February day, a fresh hole greeted her from nearby. The next day it had been filled in, and she found a sister in grief sobbing over it.

They hit it off right away. On the fourteenth of February, Marta Pavlátová had been making lunch for her husband, who was on the afternoon shift at the Pragovka factory. As usual, he was hanging around the kitchen getting on her nerves, so she chased him off to the grocery store on the opposite corner for their potato rations. From the kitchen’s second-floor window she could see him leaving the store with a full string bag, when all of a sudden a giant invisible hand picked her up and carried her across the apartment; the weight of her body smashed open the door into the hallway and landed her with a blow against the door onto the staircase.

When she managed to stand up and scramble back into the kitchen, the view from the dusty window opened onto a completely unfamiliar street. The grocery store building was split in two; its left half had collapsed into the small square. Only afterward did she notice that the rag doll lying in the center of it was wearing her husband’s pants and sweater.

Hedvika’s tragedy was a hundred days older; she could lend Marta courage. Both were twenty-seven; both had waited to start a family until after the war and were now left alone. They thanked fate that they had met. Hedvika sewed at home; the cinema owner had taken Marta on as an usher. For the moment, they had no reason or desire to look for new partners. Every Wednesday and Saturday before noon they would meet at the Vyehrad cemetery, which was roughly the same distance for both of them — Marta from Pankrac and Hedvika from Emauzy — clean up the gravesites, and set off along the ramparts of the old castle. They would stroll around the accessible portions, taking in the panorama of their native city, which was pulling free from winter’s grip just as slowly and unhurriedly as spring approached.

Then they would head back to one house or the other, depending on whose turn it was to prepare lunch. Over the meal they would talk about what had happened to them, and try to guess when and how the war would end — and what they would do then. They soon admitted to each other that their husbands had disappointed them. They honored the memory of the departed, but believed that once freedom came, a new and better chapter of their lives as women would then begin.

Today they had met as usual, Marta still in black, Hedvika — who simply could not stand the color anymore — in long beige slacks and a quilted bodice, with a kerchief tied around the top of her head. This time they set off for Pankrác, where at Maria’s a rare treat awaited them: potato pasta with poppyseeds.

She had barely begun to cook it, adding the rabbit lard sparingly, when the doorbell rang. Marta’s husband had worked the night shift every third week; at his wife’s request he had equipped the door with a solid chain lock. Now it allowed her to open the door without fear. She spotted an unknown man in a smallish winter coat, unbuttoned to reveal a mouse-colored suit. In one hand he held the stuffed briefcase of an office worker; with the other he raised a flattened hat.

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” he said politely, “but I was told that I might find Mrs. Horáková here.”

“Yes, of course….”

Although only a month had passed since they met, it did not surprise Marta to find someone asking after her friend here. Out of habitual caution she left the chain hitched and called into the kitchen.

“Hedvika, there’s a man here looking for you….”

Even the other woman was not too surprised; she too, in the short time they had known each other, had started thinking of her friend’s house as home. She came into the entrance hall, and the man through the slit in the door raise his hat again.

“Mrs. Horáková?”

“Yes….”

“I’m sorry to drop in on you like this, but it’s in your interest. Your husband perished in the February air raid, didn’t he?”

“No! There’s been a mistake.”

His hand, which was just replacing the hat, suddenly shook severely. It seemed to both women that he was about to faint.

“That was my husband,” Marta exclaimed, “Radomír Pavlát.”

“My husband, Ludvík Horák,” Hedvika added, “lost his life last year during the Totaleinsatz in the Reich.”

The visitor immediately calmed down.

“I must just have mixed up the names, then; I do apologize. As it happens, it concerns both of you. The offices of the Protectorate will be paying the families of air-raid and Totaleinsatz casualties a lumpsum compensation. I’m distributing questionnaires that must be filled out and signed. When they sent me here, I never thought I’d be able to take care of both you ladies.”

“Why don’t you come in?” Marta offered, and pushed the door to, so she could unhook the chain.

“But who sent you here?” Hedvika suddenly wondered. “I don’t think anyone in my building knew—”

The man was already in the apartment and slammed the door behind him. His free hand suddenly held a long, thin knife.

“One word out of you,” he hissed, “and I’ll cut your throats.”

At first glance Lieutenant Colonel Hinterpichler was a lover of good drink, better suited to lederhosen than a buttoned-up uniform. As head of the anti-black market and economic sabotage division, he had apparently been appropriately instructed by Meckerle. Hinterpichler passed his assistant the sheet of paper where Buback had written the name and address of Jitka’s father (obtained from Beran that morning by telephone), and ordered the man to connect him immediately with the head of the appropriate office.

He offered Buback a cognac, which he claimed was an old French variety just seized from a black marketeer, and for a few minutes made small talk with him as if they were old chums in a pub. Finally one of the phones on his desk rang. Like an actor finishing his coffee and stepping onstage to play a sovereign, he instantly modified his voice and demeanor. Suddenly he was every inch a high functionary of the forces everyone feared so greatly, including their own employees.

Having demonstrated his authority, he listened silently to his subordinate in Moravia. The gold pen in his hand hung poised over the paper. Finally he asked a question.

“How is he physically? Can he stand a few knocks?”

Shortly thereafter he nodded contentedly and made his pronouncement.

“Slap him around a bit, but don’t overdo it. Then stick him with a heavy fine and let him go. Heil Hitler.”

He replaced the handset and, back behind the curtains, was jovial again, giving Buback a conspiratorial wink.

“A bit of a drubbing will squelch any suspicions that we’ve recruited him as an informer; that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

He grudgingly admitted that it was; he just did not know how he would explain it to the man’s daughter. He stood up, so as not to put his discomfort on display.

“Thank you, Obersturmbannführer; it will make my work considerably easier.”

“It’s nothing, really,” Hinterpichler grinned smugly. “Pig slaughtering is probably part of the local culture; we’d have to hang all of them. Better to punish a few randomly and keep it under control that way.”

Back in his old office Buback breathed deeply in and out a few times, but could not calm down. Getting angry at himself helped; it was an old habit that had pulled him through many a life crisis. Have I lost my mind? Why am I behaving like an adolescent? He had the switchboard put him through to the Czech criminal police and instantly heard her voice (what was so special about it? Yes! Now he knew: She always sounded like she was just waking up).

“Buback here,” he managed to say impersonally. “Is this Miss Modrá?”

“Yes….”

“You were kind enough to accept my invitation for dinner tonight.”

“Yes…”

“Would half past seven suit you?”

“Yes…”

“Where shall I pick you up?”

He noted the address and closed the conversation as officially as he had begun it.

“Please inform Mr. Morava that I expect him in my office at Bredovska Street as soon as possible.”

He hung up none the wiser about what he was after that evening. Having no other work at the moment to distract his attention, he continued to fret over it.

He had no illusions that any normal Czech woman would, given the current situation, fall in love with a German, much less a Gestapo agent (she would certainly think he was one, and he was not allowed to disabuse her of the notion). And he was almost a quarter-century older than her — easily enough to be her father. He probed deeper, asking himself what led him to hope against hope, and realized what it was. In these five years of war he had met countless people in extreme situations, and more than once had seen relationships develop that would be completely unthinkable under normal conditions.

After all, the situation in the Protectorate could (and apparently would) become so dire overnight that the father’s savior might well become the daughter’s only protection as well. He could even remove her from Bartolomjská before Meckerle’s strike against the Prague police— which he would help prepare.

But, for God’s sake, how should he behave tonight? This Czech twin of his Hilde, just like her predecessor, lowered her eyes every time he entered. What if he tried to overcome that shyness in a stroke, as he’d done in his first life in Dresden…?

He cut short his musings when Beran’s boy entered. Buback had pretended to have desk duty here today, as if he had to explain why they were not meeting in his office at Bartolomjská Street. This ploy made him even angrier at himself, so he was not particularly pleasant to Morava, which irritated him further. It’s a vicious circle; discipline, Erwin. He concentrated on the official announcements Morava had provided him with, and saw that the drafts were fine. Approving both texts without changes, he ordered Kroloff to arrange for the publication of the shorter one tomorrow in all the German papers across the Protectorate.

With this they were done, but the kid remained seated. Earlier he had conducted himself in a calm, efficient manner, but now his eyes searched Buback’s face with a tense expression.

“Is there something else?” Buback queried.

The Czech shook his head and stood up awkwardly, but before he took his leave and turned toward the door his face flushed red. What was on his mind? Another request for help? Then why didn’t he say so? Meckerle had basically given him a green light; he could help in other matters as well, as long as the Gestapo’s magnanimity didn’t become too obvious. The more personally he could intervene on behalf of Jitka Modrá, the happier Buback would be to work toward the success of his mission.

Remembering her diverted his thoughts again down that same channel with an insistence that almost frightened him. How could this be? A month ago only Hilde had existed for him; even dead, she had filled his life and blocked even the slightest flicker of other emotions.

He felt it again that evening, as the girl appeared beneath the blinded lantern in front of her house, on a suburban street his driver had spent ages searching for in the darkened city.

Her placid beauty (he could describe it no other way) was even more vivid in the near-darkness; her eternally sleepy voice moved him, though she was merely explaining that she had not been waiting long; no, she had just come outside, because it occurred to her they’d have trouble finding the house. He opened the rear right door for her and then got in on the other side. What sort of rare perfume was she wearing, he almost asked, before he realized that it was the smell of soap.

Of course, he did not intend to take her to German House, although they could have eaten there without ration coupons. He opted instead for Repre, visited mainly by the few Czechs who could afford it (collaborators, he thought with a certain malicious glee, who’d bet on the wrong horse). He remembered the famous turn-of-the-century restaurant from his childhood, when he had eaten New Year’s and Easter meals there with his real mother. Just after his return to Prague he had come here to jog his memories of her; it had still made him feel sentimental, but inside it had been empty and deserted as a burgled home.

But not now, not now. Beneath the restaurant’s glowing chandeliers, he led the girl in the long black skirt and white blouse to their reserved table, and the tension that had gripped him since morning blossomed into a feeling he had not had in months: joy, so strong it caught at his throat. He was grateful when the headwaiter — who could hold up both ends of a conversation — stepped in. The girl had no special requests, so he recommended the Vienna sliced sirloin tips for both of them. However, she flatly refused Buback’s ration coupons and pulled out her own.

The ritual seemed doubly absurd in a fancy establishment: the head-waiter pulled scissors from the tail of his frock-coat and cut off squares representing decagrams of meat, flour, and fat. Buback squirmed at how much smaller the Czech rations were than his. Either it seemed natural to her or too awkward to mention; she carefully placed the remaining tickets into separate compartments in her plastic purse, clasped her hands on the table, and turned her great brown eyes on his with an unspoken question.

“Gnädiges Fräulein,” he then said, “I took the liberty of looking into your father’s case; I’m interested in the well-being of the Czech police, since we’re cooperating so closely. I can assure you that his only punishment will be a fine and that hell soon be released. However, to be completely honest with you, I could not prevent them from. .. They didn’t exactly handle him with kid gloves, I regret to say. What’s important is that nothing more will happen to him.”

“My father is strong,” she said simply.

“Anyway,” he added, as if to excuse Hinterpichler’s idea, “now no one will suspect him of buying his way out with a relatively mild punishment.”

“No one in our town would ever think that.”

He admired that directness in her; it did not strike him as haughty. When she was sure of something, she expressed it in the simplest possible way. This too he had only ever experienced with Hilde.

“Thank you, Herr Oberkriminalrat,” she added.

He took a step toward intimacy.

“Do you think you could forget about that title?”

She flashed him a heartfelt smile.

“Thank you, Herr Buback.”

“Erwin. ..”

She nodded.

“I know.”

He did not insist and tried instead to draw her gently into a conversation that might bring them closer. In decent German she told him about her family and her youth — as she said with her still childlike lisp — in a land where several languages met; her description matched the one he had heard two days earlier as they drove through that very countryside.

“So you’re from the same area as Mr. Morava?”

“Yes…” she answered more shyly than usual. “In peacetime we would undoubtedly have met a long time ago at socials; the war saw to it that we only met here, in Prague. He even speaks the same way; there’s a lot of Slovak in our dialect.”

For a couple of seconds he weighed addressing her now in Czech, so her speech could leave its narrow channel of foreign words and fill in his picture of her personality. Immediately he rejected the idea. He was acting like a college student smitten by a first crush!

The food interrupted Buback, letting him marvel at her long fingers holding the silverware with an unusual grace, at the small mouth, which barely moved as she ate; at the slight tilt of her head toward her left shoulder, causing her hair to cast an artful shadow on her right temple. Involuntarily he remembered Marleen Baumann’s dramatic lines, arousing an anticipation of revolutionary acts, while this face radiated spiritual equilibrium, the sort that brings peace and happiness. I can’t keep up this act for long, he realized; I’ll end up telling her the truth.

And why not? Why not try it? What was he risking except a polite refusal? Wouldn’t he lose far more if he let this opportunity slide by? Why not transform intent into action?

I don’t know how it happened, my dear young lady; I know it goes against all the rules of this age, but in spite of it I love you. I’ve loved only once in my life, but my feelings were all the stronger for it; I loved my wife until the moment she died, and afterward as well — I thought that a love like that left no room for another. Then I saw you and from that moment I’ve known that her death made my love for you even deeper and stronger. I truly believe that she’s sent you to me, and I implore you: overcome the revulsion you feel for me, a German. Hear me out, as a man who has never knowingly harmed another and who has tried amid the madness to maintain an island of justice. As proof I’ll put an end to this charade by speaking to you in your native language, which is mine as well. What do you say?

He must have been staring silently at her with such intentness that she finally asked, “Is something wrong?”

The question tore him from his musings. Confusion filled her eyes. He had no idea how long his reverie had lasted. In the meantime, she had finished eating. He placed his silver on his half-full plate and tried to gain time for a good-faith effort.

“I’m sorry…. Would you like some dessert?”

She looked him straight in the eye again when she answered.

“No, thank you. It was very kind of you to invite me for such a nice dinner with such good news, but it’s late already. My fiance would worry.”

Did you say who it was?” Morava interrupted her tensely. She shook her head. “That was enough; he called the waiter over immediately.”

He forced himself to laugh.

“I guess everyone falls in love with you.” Jan!

He wanted to hug her, but for once she would not let him. He saw that Buback was still uppermost in her mind, and it irritated him.

“You served it to him straight up, and in spite of that he still drove you right home, kissed your hand, and said good night, everything as it should be; why let it eat at you?”

“What if he leaves my dad in jail…?”

“He’s not the extortionist type. No, I think your father’s coming home.”

“I don’t know why I told him,” she continued to fret. “He’ll find out it’s you in no time.”

“So? Fortunately that’s not a capital offense yet.”

“He could harm you some other way.”

He tried to reassure himself, so he could reassure her as well. “Jitka, my love, there’s a decent chance he has other plans for me, which don’t allow for personal revenge.”

“What kind?”

He decided to risk letting her in on Beran’s suspicions.

“And therefore it’s entirely possible,” he said, finishing his brief summary, “that his interest in you is part of the game as well.”

Up till now she had been nodding sympathetically, but this point she rejected.

“That’s not the way it’s played, Jan. After all, he didn’t say anything; he just looked. And he was completely lost… You’re right, though, that’s his business, and I’ll just act normally. But please, watch out for yourself!”

They both heard a car approaching that caught their attention as it braked out front. Jitka jumped up, horrified.

“It’s him!”

Her fear galvanized him. “Then I’ll get the door.”

She slipped around the kitchen table and whispered despairingly, “Go upstairs, I can manage him. Please!”

The bell rang.

“There’s no point,” he objected. “He’ll hear me.”

“He knows I’m not single. But he doesn’t have to know who my fiance is just yet. Don’t worry, I just don’t see any reason.. Run along, I can handle it!”

The doorbell rang again.

“Hello,” called a familiar voice. “Hello, hello!”

They both went to open it. The superintendent had eyes only for Morava.

“Am I glad you’re here. I couldn’t track Buback down. Grab your notebook and give her a kiss good night. He’s done it again — twice.”

Kroloff sent an envelope with the news to be stuck under Erwin Buback’s door early that evening, but the chief inspector had not returned.

When the door of the suburban house swung shut behind Jitka Modrá, he had the same feeling as last year, when an unfamiliar voice impersonally informed him that he was now alone in the world. It was neither despair nor regret; instead, he felt his old emptiness fill him again. He examined himself coolly as if from outside. Yes, this was his true, unretouched, unaltered state: solitude of body and soul. How had he let himself be swayed by such absurd feelings?

However, he could not return to his post-Antwerp method of survival. Something fundamental in him had changed. He had no desire to mope over a glass in the German House bar and go home to his impersonal one-room apartment. A strong need, buried these last twenty years, awoke in him. Dismissing his driver on Wenceslas Square, he strode energetically across the empty city center. He gave the top bell a long ring despite the risk that she might have company. It was a while before a tired voice answered.

“Yes?”

“Erwin Buback,” he announced, sounding more decisive than he felt. “May I come up?”

“Of course,” she said, just as abruptly. “One moment.”

A minute later a key wrapped in newsprint landed next to him on the sidewalk.

By the time the elevator delivered him up to the top floor of the 1930s building, she looked ready for an evening on the town in her shaggy white dressing gown. The door of the cozy attic apartment closed behind him.

“So, the great Meckerle’s jealousy no longer makes you quake in your boots?” she asked.

He decided to be frank. “I didn’t come to sleep with you.”

“Fabulous.” She laughed. “I’ve always longed for a girlfriend.”

Her miraculous appearance was quickly explained. She had just returned, exhausted, from a trip to the German troops; her troupe of opera singers performed operetta tunes for them every day, and she had not yet removed her makeup. He drained a bottle of champagne practically on his own, as if dying of thirst. When she realized he was absorbed in his own problems, she opened another one (apparently from the colonel’s reserves), put some wild American music on the gramophone, and excused herself to go shower.

He felt each swallow electrify him like the galvanized strips of tin his chemistry professor had once given him to hold. The emptiness inside him warmed and became more tolerable, and he stopped seeing himself from outside. Even his exacting and intractable brain, which never stopped thinking, was beguiled by the bubbles; he turned off time and space and simply existed, like a pleasantly sated animal. Only his fingers moved, lifting the bottle regularly, filling the goblet and raising it to his lips.

He did not even speak when she came out of the bathroom in her terry robe, removed the old record from the gramophone, opened a new bottle, and lit one cigarette after another from a short pearl holder, putting on album after album of music forbidden in the Reich as the product of inferior races. Despite the wail of saxophones, he must have fallen asleep for a while; when he awoke it was quiet, and she was trying to remove his jacket.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “please feel free to make yourself comfortable and stay. Our lord and leader is temporarily out of the picture. Total house arrest.”

He slowly began to regain consciousness.

“Thank you, Marleen, but I’d better not complicate your life any further.”

“First of all, Marleen is my stage name. The director of our group hoped it would remind people of Lili the whore from that hit song; I’m an ordinary German Gretchen. Second, even if his wife weren’t around, he has no idea I’m here today; we were supposed to spend the night in Karlsbad. And third, I’ll complicate my life if it pleases me to do so, which you definitely shouldn’t take as an attempt to seduce you. I just thought you needed a bit of company today.”

He shivered with a kind of shame.

“Lord knows I do….”

“When you want to sleep, I’ll make you up a bed.”

He had no strength to protest. After a hot shower that tired him further, he put on his white undershirt again and his shorts, and wrapped a bath towel around his waist to seem more fully dressed. She greeted his appearance with a hearty laugh.

“A chastity belt? I have seen a naked man before, once.”

Soon after, he lay on a narrow couch in the living room-kitchen, staring into the darkness. Complete calm reigned in the building and the yard out back, but he was as hopelessly alert as in broad daylight. Now! Now it will come, he was sure; first all his own wounds would open before his eyes, and then the abyss where his people’s fateful piper had resolved to lure their entire nation.

At that moment he knew for sure that the glorious secret weapon was nothing more than a final deadly lie — a bluff, a boast, a dodge, a trap — base deception and trickery meant to prolong for another few weeks this twilight of the idols. The ones who fell for it would obey Hitler’s monstrous order, transforming their homeland into a desert that would never support life again, much less support all those thousands of young Germans freezing in the pre-spring night in the south Moravian woods — and all of them together were doomed to rack and ruin, just as he was; he would consider himself lucky if they merely shot him without torturing him first.

Why wait around? He had lost all the ties that force a man to live for others’ sake. The only remaining reason for his existence was to snoop around the Czech police force, which would influence the course of the war about as much as a swarm of mosquitoes influences the weather. Why not do the one thing that was within his power, since he actually had the means…?

He’d left his pistol at home, but the solitude of this attic apartment would be the perfect place!

He got up, turned on the light, and managed to open the kitchen door noiselessly. Grete Baumann’s forehead was creased in sleep, and her chin was propped against her hand; she looked as if she were deep in thought. He left the door ajar, and in the scattered beam of light he searched for the hanger with his dark suit on it. As he returned to the kitchen on tiptoes, he looked over at her one last time and found her eyes open.

“Would you like to come in?” she asked.

“Yes, I would….”

He stripped off his underclothes and she lifted the blanket. She was naked and drew him close with no overtures or ceremony.

When he clasped Grete in his arms, it was like barriers collapsing. He became his old unrestrained self once more, the one Hilde had tamed with her tenderness, and his long abstinence made him even more passionate.

He felt his life depended on their love.

And he realized that Grete was opening every corner of herself to him.

Morning found them in a lovers’ competition over who could give the other more and better pleasure; they were acrid and ashen from physical exhaustion but, aware that this night would never be repeated, they neither were able nor wanted to break apart.

Hour after hour they barely spoke; occasionally he heard her call weakly, “Oh, ja!” or “Oh, Gott!” but if he said anything himself, he did not notice.

At seven the alarm clock went off. They were so engrossed in each other that moments went by before she flung her hand over her head to turn it off.

“Sorry,” she said hoarsely, “got to catch the tour….”

“And I’ve got to get to work….”

“Good thing I’m in a chorus.”

“Good thing I have subordinates.”

She returned from the bathroom a few short minutes later, dressed, coiffed, and made up. He was further impressed.

“You’re like a soldier.”

“I’m a wartime lover.”

When he came out of the bathroom the scent of strong Dutch cocoa, like he had not had since childhood, wafted from the table. She held her cup to her mouth with both hands, but did not drink, merely shook her head thoughtfully.

He felt uneasy. “What’s happened?”

“Something very strange. As soon as I find the words for it, I’ll tell you.”

SHE had praised him. Yes, he should be proud! What a great idea, having them tape EACH OTHER’s mouths and bind EACH OTHER’s legs! Except AGAIN there was NOTHING in the papers.

By now he was sure he wasn’t hallucinating. He already had FOUR OF THEM in the cellar behind the ice blocks. So why the silence?

At the same time, something told him they were CLOSE TO BREAKING. He would just have to do it OVER AND OVER AGAIN!

This time he settled on a Sunday, so he could vanish without being noticed. There would be lots of people there, but it might help him to blend in; he’d manage as he managed WITH THE REST.

The third day, when he had already lost hope, he found what he was looking for.

“Beware of the sadist!” warned a small but unmissable headline. “Several brutal murders have been committed in Prague; the victims were single women who let the murderer into their apartments. The unknown assailant then sadistically slaughtered and disfigured the corpses without robbing them. The police are looking for a perpetrator and a motive, and ask the populace to take note of all suspicious persons. Women, especially those living alone, are cautioned not to admit anyone they do not know well. Information, anonymous and otherwise, will be accepted at any police station in the Protectorate.”

He was quite satisfied. Especially pleasing was their admission that he was NOT A BURGLAR. And the knowledge that he could finally take a well-deserved rest before CONTINUING ON SCHEDULE.

On Easter, bombs fell on Prague for the second time. Again it was broad daylight, but this time their targets were factory complexes outside the city center. Because of the holiday, human losses were low, although the buildings were largely reduced to ruins.

“A clean job,” Beran remarked as they returned from their survey. “Or maybe just a tiny bit dirty.”

Morava did not understand.

“Two years ago,” the superintendent explained, “it might have shortened the war by a month. But at this point I have to wonder if this isn’t the first volley of a postwar rivalry.”

“But they’re allies.”

“Morava, Morava, dear little Morava, when this war ends, take care your world doesn’t collapse around you. You’re a homicide detective and a Czech, so you’re living in a dream world if you think good always fights against evil. Now, I lived twenty years in a relatively good country — I mean the old Czechoslovak Republic — and I can assure you that sometimes it turns your stomach all the same.”

Morava could not see it.

“But now that the Nazis have lost the Ruhr Basin and Silesia, only the Czech factories can rearm them.”

“That’s true too,” Beran exhaled. “And anyway youth is entitled to its hopes. As for us older folk, our skepticism probably just leads to capitulation. So let’s hear it.”

They were at the station already and back on the topic of their own work.

“So far we have had four hundred twelve calls about suspects, mostly through our office. About half of them we’ve eliminated as groundless or misleading; the rest are under investigation. Especially those in Moravia; the Russian advance on Vienna may cut them off soon.”

“Any fresh trails?”

“So far all cold ones; everyone named had an airtight alibi on at least some of the dates. But information is still coming in; it’s surprising, but even in abnormal times like these people are quick to notice deviants of all sorts. Or to invent them.”

“Such as?”

“Turning in lusty ladies’ men for stealing their wives.”

“Aha. Has Buback come up with anything?”

“He confirmed that Hunyady, the Gypsy, died in a work camp, and Thaler — the butcher and Henlein’s man — is apparently working where he is supposed to be in the Reich. We can be sure our colleagues in Brno didn’t get hold of the right man.”

“Apropos of Brno,” the superintendent remembered, “is there anything new with Jitka’s father? I haven’t seen her yet today.”

“I’m sorry; I meant to tell you. She took today off. There was a telegram last night telling her to expect a phone call at the main post office, but she’s been down there since morning. Her father is already home, we hope.”

“That’s good news. Congratulations to you as well.”

As he said it he raised his eyes queryingly and Morava as usual shook his head; so far there were no signs of other activities on Buback’s part.

“We’re both happy, but a bit afraid of how our parents will manage if there’s a battle.”

“As if we know how we’ll fare here. They might get lucky and find the front whips past them like a hurricane; we’ll be the unfortunate ones if Prague is conquered bit by bit, like a fortress. It’s in the hands of fate. Or God, in your case. Anything else?”

Finally there was something Morava was on top of.

“I think it’s safe to call him a widow killer. And it occurred to Jitka that maybe he prowls the cemetery. He might count on them leading him home, where they’re probably alone. Say he claims to sell gravestones or something….”

Beran picked up the train of thought.

“And the four deceased husbands are buried…”

“All at Vyehrad!”

“Which you should have under surveillance immediately.”

“There have been two people there since this morning. I’m going straight from here to meet them, so we can set up our surveillance.”

“Good work, Morava!” It was the first time in a while Beran had praised him, and a feeling of bliss wafted over the young detective, although this rare feather belonged in Jitka’s cap. “Look smart and hop to it.”

A cold wind lashed the intermittent rain at the cemetery; there had been two or three women all told since morning and not a single man. The pair had had plenty of time to talk tactics. The problem was that there were three entrances. Lebeda, a greenhorn Morava had conscripted in desperation, suggested that they simply close two of them off. The other two warned him in unison that it was the best way to scare the murderer off to another venue. No, they’d have to spend a portion of their lives here as sweepers, stonelayers, gardeners, beggars, or the bereaved in mourning. They had no choice but to deputize the sexton, who would be sure to notice a repeat visitor. Before doing so, Morava verified that the tubby fellow had been digging graves with an assistant on the days of the murders; otherwise the sexton himself would have become a suspect.

He returned to Bartolomjská to send a third man out to the cemetery and set two shifts for the next day. Then he called Buback at Bredovská Street and learned he was back in his Czech office. The German had not appeared at Bartolomjská Street since his odd supper with Jitka; was he waiting until her father was released? Morava knocked and opened the door.

The chief inspector was poring over a mountain of papers. When he spotted Morava he started, as if caught at something.

“What is all this?” he snarled at him without a greeting.

Morava had no idea.

“Can I have a look?”

Buback shoved the papers toward him. Morava recognized them.

“I ordered that you be sent copies of all the reports that came in from our appeal—”

“And where are the translations?”

So that’s why he’s upset? Mistake!

“My fault, I’ll put someone on it right away.”

But who? he thought despairingly; it’ll take three people a week to get through it…. To his surprise the German calmed down as quickly as he had flared up.

“That’s not necessary. You don’t have the men to spare. Give me one person who can summarize the most important ones for me orally.”

Who can figure this guy out? Morava mused, but a weight lifted from him. He informed Buback about the steps they had just taken, and then sprang a request on him. Only German offices could authorize the installation of telephone lines. They needed one in the sexton’s tiny workroom, so they could call for reinforcements in an emergency.

“I’ll see to it,” Buback announced curtly.

“Your translator will be here in fifteen minutes,” Morava promised him again as he left, and it occurred to him that he owed the man more than that. “Miss Modrá is probably on the phone right now with her father. I’d like to thank you for that as well.”

“Then you’re in the wrong place,” Buback cut him off. “I told you the Reich is a government of law, and it expects in return that the Protectorate police, above all, will not waver in their respect of that law.”

“Understandably so,” Morava assured him and left.

Get as far from that guy as possible, he thought. Suddenly he believed Jitka when she said Buback could destroy him as effortlessly as he had helped her.

She must have waited so long at the post office that it wasn’t worth coming in to work, but why hadn’t she at least called?

Impatiently he sorted through the new reports, arranged a translator for the German, and stopped by the cemetery to ask his men for their first impressions. He was pleased that it took a long time to find them; even in this cramped space they had already learned how to make themselves nearly invisible.

At home, the smell of Jitka’s maddeningly delicious cabbage cakes and a bouquet of tulips, as dear and rare as meat these days, welcomed him.

“So Papa’s home,” he said joyfully, swinging her around in the air.

“Grandpa, you mean,” she corrected him.

“How’s that?”

“You’ll be the papa now,” she said, slipping into their south Moravian dialect. “Watch out or you’ll shake the baby right out of me, lover boy!”