He got only Matlak and Jetel for his plan and was satisfied. He didn’t see Beran or even look for him. Most of his colleagues, who would normally have been around, were absent. Even a simpleton could tell that the brain stem of the Czech police was securing itself against the danger of another attack.
He realized that he had not seen a single German uniform on his way over. He had seen the film The Invisible Man several times before the war, and it always gave him goose bumps. The Germans, hidden behind the walls of former schools, universities, dormitories, and hotels now serving as barracks and offices, were suddenly more malevolent than they had been in full view. It reminded him of the stony plain above his village, where what appeared to be an innocent heap of brushwood would in the blink of an eye become a tangle of attacking vipers. Prague now seemed much the same way.
He therefore agreed at once when Buback offered to come along; the German could vouch for them in any confrontations with his countrymen.
The four of them formed a chain as each train arrived from Plze
, and questioned all the passengers. Most knew each other by sight from traveling to and from work. No one knew the man in the policemen’s photograph.
Between trains Morava sat on a bench beneach the roof of the first platform and stared straight ahead. The others left him alone, and he tried to distract himself by fixing his thoughts on the insignificant. He calculated the length and height of the buildings opposite, counted the crossties in his vision, concentratedly followed the crooked flight path of one of the birds in a flock circling above the station.
At noon the others brought him bread with some kind of spread, in the evening a warm potato pancake; after the last train they took him off to sleep and brought him back before the first one the next morning. All of this he sensed as if in a dream, one he left only when another train arrived from Plze. And no one, not one passenger, recognized that face.
“It’s the same people as yesterday,” Matlák said near evening.
Morava could see that himself. Rumors of the hunt for the widow killer had spread. When they saw the four men with photographs, the passengers would shake their heads or hands, and the men were stung by the first sharp retorts: Why were they still hanging around doing nothing? By now even that killer must know where they were. But Morava never raised an eyebrow or doubted his decision. The first thing Beran had taught him was patience.
That evening it paid off.
It was the novice Jetel who excitedly brought over an older man returning from his shift at the Beroun locomotive depot. Yes, he confirmed, he remembered the man well; on Sunday he had seen him waiting for the night tram with his coworker Karel Malina. He himself had waited behind a tree, because Malina was a well-known motor mouth. He’d been glad enough to be rid of him on the train; Malina had gone to look for matches and never came back. At the last moment, the railway worker had boarded the rear car of the tram and dozed all the way to the last stop. No, he didn’t know where Malina lived; surely the police could find out?
Malina’s other potential acquaintances had long since left the station. The only thing left to do today was follow up the lead. There were eleven Karel Malinas in Prague. When Morava began to plot a route for visiting them, Buback raised his first objection.
“It’s quite late and we could start a panic. They’ll think it’s the Gestapo.”
He stared in surprise at the German.
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right, thanks. Good night.”
In his room, it seemed he barely closed and opened his eyes only to find it was morning. He broke through the horrible moment of awakening when she died for him again, and set off on the trail of her murderer. As a good morning, Matlák and Jetel announced that only the German newspapers had published Rypl’s picture. The Czech papers had objected, saying that the Gestapo had used this method a few times already to try to catch Resistance workers; they could not risk taking the Germans’ bait in the eleventh hour.
As they left, Morava noticed a further gesture from Buback: he let the lanky Matlák have the front seat instead of himself, so he would not be cramped in the back of the car. Matlák took advantage of the language barrier to make a biting comment in Czech. “So they’ve finally decided they have enough ’living space’.”
At the depot they easily obtained Malina’s Prague address. Alarmingly, the repairman had not shown up for work yesterday or today, and had not notified them why. The personnel department clerk added that, sadly enough, this was a common occurrence these days; people find a thousand excuses, and this was probably just the beginning.
For Buback’s sake Morava conducted the conversation in German, and the clerk in his shirtsleeves suddenly wagged his finger at the liaison officer, like an old-fashioned teacher lecturing an unruly pupil.
“You promised Europe order, and you leave behind havoc and anarchy!”
Buback knew the four Czechs were waiting to see what he would say to this bold reproach.
He looked briefly from one face to the next, ending with the clerk’s.
“If an individual can apologize for a whole nation, then I hereby do so.”
No one said anything to that, and he was glad when Morava gave the order to leave. On the way back to the car he overheard another of Matlák’s sotto voce comments to Jetel.
“Is he that decent or just chicken?”
Yes, he admitted, it was a good question; was he, an insignificant German, truly convinced he bore all his nation’s guilt on his shoulders, or had Grete’s “give-and-take” infected him? Was he simply a better sort of opportunist, abandoning ship in a slightly more genteel fashion than the bosses who fled with their loot?
After all, he’d only needed one thing all his life: self-respect!
Buback mused on this on the way back to Prague, as the driver and his companion boldly compared notes in Czech on the illegal radio stations’ war reports. What he was doing now made him the lowest sort of stool pigeon, if for no other reason than that Morava had trusted him. It was wrong to continue deceiving him. But how could he end the deception? And should he really give up his last and only advantage in this godforsaken posting?
On the way through a small town halfway to Prague, the Czech contingent suddenly fell silent and stared in the same direction. A man stood on a ladder in front of a pub with a bucket hung at his side, painting over the sign WARME UND KALTE KUCHE, BIER, WEIN, LIMON-ADEN with circular strokes of his brush. The meaning of this spectacle evaded Buback, and they had already turned the corner when he understood: The man was not getting rid of all the lettering, only the German phrases. And he was not doing it surreptitiously by night, but in broad daylight, in full view of the German soldiers passing constantly through on the main road.
An SS man taking a tip; a clerk admonishing a Gestapo agent for destroying Europe; and a man with a bucket of lime — the first three visible cracks in the facade of the Third Reich. It reminded Buback of the time during the retreat from Belgium when he had watched the military engineers destroy a bridge. After the blast it rose upward along its whole length and seemed to hang in the air for an unbelievably long time before it hurtled into the water, disintegrating into a thousand pieces. He felt that all Germany was now in that deceptive state of elevation preceding collapse, and would carry both him and the woman depending on him down with it.
“Excuse me,” Morava’s voice broke in. “I have to work out with my colleagues what we’re doing next.”
He nodded, knowing that the majority of men from the Prague criminal police had formally passed the required examination in German, but like Litera could not hold a conversation; for ordinary workers the Reich offices had had to turn a blind eye to keep the Protectorate government functioning at all.