At Smíchov station, he pulled the contents of his bag out of the concrete pipe in the guy’s presence, dispelling any remaining doubts. Of course, he was taking a risk, even there on the deserted railway platform, but now he was sure he was back on track.
HER HAND PROTECTS ME!
His old army pistol clinched the deal. The guy — naive beyond his years! — enthusiastically promised to hide him in his own home.
THANKS, MOTHER!
Jitka Modrá died at exactly five A.M., and with her died what would have been her child.
The firm grasp of a man’s hand accompanied her on her journey into oblivion.
Jan Morava slept soundly through it, waking only later to Erwin Buback’s sympathetic hug.
The sun had just peered over the crown of the nearby hill, silhouetting the stadiums against the morning sky, when the car pulled up outside the house.
Buback could hear the music even over the noise of the motor. A raucous melody split the air, one that supposedly had the whole American army grooving wildly on the dance floors. It was the Glenn Miller Orchestra playing boogie-woogie; Grete seemed to think this Miller fellow was some sort of god.
The young driver in the cap with skull and crossbones listened carefully. When his eyes met Buback’s, he smiled almost conspiratorially.
Throwing custom and protocol to the winds, Buback slipped the driver a fifty-mark note. The SS agent took it as calmly as a waiter would a tip.
Now I know the war is ending! The thought pleased Buback, but he immediately remembered the living man and the dead woman he had just left. Evil, however, goes on….
The staff car vanished around the curve below. Upstairs, the noise went on unchecked, a testimony to the gradual depopulation of Little Berlin. However, as he rummaged for his keys on the sidewalk, the house’s front door opened, revealing the judge. Dressed already, at this early hour? No. The man’s unshaven cheeks suggested that he had not yet gone to bed.
“There’s no need to go around the back, Herr Oberkriminalrat, come this way….”
From up close he confirmed that the radiogram Grete had recently moved to his place was even louder here than outside. Evidently it was now set to its highest volume. He realized it had undoubtedly kept the judge up, but he did not feel the slightest desire to apologize.
“Thank you, but I’m used to it by now.”
“What are you going to do,” the judge wailed after him in despair.
Buback tried to imagine how many anguished howls this pitiful, sleepy figure had caused, screams torn from the throats of countless men and women before the bullet or blade reached its mark. He responded with barely disguised glee. “Apparently, we’re going to dance.”
On a volcano, he thought, climbing the winding back stairs that shook with the syncopations of degenerate music. As he pressed down the door handle, it flooded over him as if he had opened the sluice gates.
Grete half lay, half sat on the bed in black ski pants and a black T-shirt; its long sleeves gripped and further flattened her chest. One hand clutched a cigarette holder, the other curled around a glass; all around her were stains and cigarette butts from an overflowing ashtray. Her eyes were unfocused; she was so engulfed in the melody, humming along wordlessly with it, that it took several seconds for her to realize he was home. First she smiled dreamily at him, then flung away the holder, cigarette, and glass, and, jumping up, threw her arms around his neck.
“The bastard croaked,” she exulted, “bit the dust!”
And so he learned of the death of Adolf Hitler, who supposedly fell in the defense of Berlin.
Once she cooled down a bit, he extinguished the smoking carpet and prevailed on her to turn down the gramophone — not because of the judge (who had no power anymore), but so that they could hear each other speak. She listened to his story so intently that all the alcohol seemed to evaporate from her completely; her gray-green irises stared at him without blinking, like the eyes of a beast of prey. When he reached the part where they found the dead policeman and the wounded Jitka, she interrupted him with a shout.
“No! That son of a bitch saved me?”
She was clearly still tipsy; forgetting about his story, she launched directly into her own. There hadn’t been any performance, she said, pointing to her morning message still lying there with his afternoon postscript. That son of a bitch, she repeated, that pig Meckerle had her brought over like a cheap whore to a hotel outside Prague, one she knew the officers used as a high-class flophouse, but she didn’t realize what was happening even when the unfamiliar driver took her to the suite and told her to wait there for her colleagues and wardrobe, until she entered the bedroom (“stupid cow,” she fumed), where the colonel was waiting for her (“naked, the swine!“) in a state of drunken anticipation; he locked the door and threatened to rip off her clothes if she wouldn’t undress herself, and that really made her blood boiclass="underline" She grabbed him, threw him down on the bed, and then went from his head to his chest past his belly down to his lap, and then…
“I bit him as hard as I could!” she grinned. “Right in his stiff dick!”
She said he’d let out a dreadful scream; he must have thought she’d bitten it off, she continued, shaking with laughter, but he wasn’t even bleeding, and when she thought he’d regained enough strength to beat her to death…
“Then I started to shriek; I never knew I could make such a loud noise, and he was so terrified that he just fled, naked, in a panic.”
Buback remembered Meckerle’s painful grimaces that afternoon and marveled that he had escaped his superior’s office alive.
Leaving the hotel room, Grete had gone down to the reception desk, where they pretended they had never seen her before. No, they didn’t know what happened to the car that brought her, and there were none available, but she’d certainly have no problem hitching a ride along the road with a German officer. By the time someone finally stopped, she had practically walked back to Prague.
“But it was worth it to hear that the bastard of Berlin had snuffed it.”
And she nearly paid the officer back with a slap when he tried to force his way upstairs with her.
” ’to grieve together,’ he suggested; not a bad-looking guy, but with one basic flaw: He wasn’t you.”
And then she had waited, longing impatiently for him, reading his message over and over, shaken by the fact that she could have been the murderer’s victim.
Now she bent forward, stretched out her hands to him and pulled him toward her.
“Love! My love! Where were you all my life? Why did you let me wait and lie for so long?”
She held his head in her outstretched arms and then pulled him close, covering his forehead, temples, eyes, and chin with almost childlike kisses.
He held her and wished it would never end. Slowly he felt their passion dissolve into tenderness.
“Come to me,” she whispered after a long while. “I want you so much! No, wait….”
She slipped away from him to the gramophone, where the record crackled at the end of the last track. She replaced it and then stopped short.
“How is she? You must be sick to death of my interruptions.”
He took off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt.
“She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She died an hour ago.”
He sat down on the bed and everything he had been through since that morning suddenly hit him.
Grete stood motionless. She glanced at the gramophone as if she could see and feel on her body the slow, heavy melody she had chosen for their lovemaking. When the piano and percussion began their variations, she lifted both hands and swayed into the rhythm. Her supple arms drooped to the floor and encircled the lamp overhead. Then her long legs joined in, and the slender figure in black seemed to fill the entire space.