“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you at least leave her with a gun?”
“No… I don’t think she’d know how—”
“What? You didn’t know she was crazy about guns? I think one of her lovers got her interested in pistols. She even knew how to take mine apart; just to be sure, I always unloaded it. Wait….”
Finally he found it. What he gave Buback was a small ladies’ revolver with a handle of inlaid pearl.
“This little jewel, which makes perfectly good holes, was going to be a present for her. If it doesn’t bother you, give it to her with my apology. She can shoot me with it later. That’s all.”
Buback could not think of anything better than to stick the thing in his pocket. From behind as he left he heard Meckerle say nostalgically, “Tell her I said hello… that pretty little bitch.”
He felt another of the stabs inside which love used to scare war away.
While the photographer made more and more enlargements, Morava sat writing notes. He was taking the first five hundred prints out to Litera’s car, wracking his brains over how to arrange transport around the shattered city without Buback’s help, when he spotted him. The chief inspector was walking toward him from a controlled crossing point, waving at him like a friend arriving for a social get-together. From up close he did not seem as relaxed; he urgently requested a meeting with Beran.
The latter, now ensconced in Rajner’s office, made time for him immediately and got hold of Brunát as well, whose turban had lost its snow-white color overnight. The injured man looked as if he’d been wandering the sewers, the former superintendent (now the other half of their commissionership) joked, and Brunát, to their surprise, confirmed it. He had been directing work on the sewage-main barricades, so they wouldn’t find themselves — as he put it — with visitors up their asses.
Buback described the mood at the Gestapo and then went through Meckerle’s suggestions in detail; at that they sent him into the antechamber. After what Beran had said the night before, Morava would have expected him to be pleased at the disintegration of the unified German command, but the serious faces of both men told him there was a problem: The end of the war, in Prague and all over Bohemia, was sliding out of control.
He was even more shocked at the political problem presented by Vlasov’s anticipated attack on his former allies. The outlaw Russian general was expected to turn on the Germans, a move that would greatly help the insurgents. According to Beran, an increasing faction within the council believed that any cooperation with Vlasov was tantamount to approving the Russian rebels’ original motive for fighting against their native country.
The commanders from the city’s southeastern edge were asking urgently for an explanation: Why couldn’t they accept Vlasov’s men as emergency protectors? They were exasperated to see the Germans’ death grip closing around them, and made it clear how little these breaking and re-forming political ice floes interested them.
However, both commanders thought the suggested German retreat from the area around the main train station — a dangerous reinforcement source if Schörner should attack Prague — should be accepted as a local decision not affecting the Allied principle of total and unconditional capitulation.
Beran and Brunát therefore decided to recommend that the Czech National Council accept a political resolution to the situation.
And what about Vlasov? Beran claimed — and Brunát backed him on it — that the Russian would not want to attack unless necessary. Then he reached for the telephone.
“If the Germans attack you,” he ordered someone, “Vlasov’s people can fight alongside you; I’ll take the heat for it.”
In the meanwhile, Buback would wait there, the chiefs decided in conclusion; they would guard him against the ever-growing numbers of patriots who were trying to set a sharper tone at Bartolom
jská. Several colleagues, supposedly led by the garage manager, had adorned themselves with armbands marked RG, calling themselves the Revolutionary Guards.
How strange, Morava thought. Tetera — nicknamed “Pretty Boy” for his skirt chasing — never let a word against the Germans pass his lips; they’d always watched their words in his presence. But the young detective had already noticed at the radio station how quickly the cowards became heroes. After all, the woman called Andula (who, at a critical moment, had asked them to heed the Germans’ request to cease broadcasting distress calls) had become the first to compile a list of “radio station fighters.”
Finally he had finished his tasks. As he left, he agreed with Buback on three times and places to meet (just in case) and picked up Litera and the car in the courtyard. After confirming with the operations officer that, excepting the center, Bubene
and Pánkrac, there were still contiguous bands of the city in Czech hands, he decided to wear his uniform so they would not be held up with constant identification checks. The others wanted to avoid Germans, but Morava now believed he might be able to reason with many of them. They could always ask to be taken to the Gestapo building; curiously, thanks to Buback, it might offer them the greatest degree of safety.
First they visited the caretaker. The house on the embankment was locked and they had almost given up ringing when unexpectedly something moved in the raised ground-floor window. The Germans had had guards here till Friday, he explained once he’d opened the door; yesterday they’d disappeared with a truckload of papers, so he was on his own. They still hadn’t caught the murderer? No, Morava admitted, and now they couldn’t even help the caretaker. Surely he could see what was afoot, so in future: Keep the door locked and don’t open it! Still, they would like to test his memory once more.
In putting nine other photographs chosen randomly from the archive on the table along with Rypl’s, he was satisfying the conscience Beran’s training had drilled into him, rather than his intellect; he had long since ruled out the caretaker as a reliable witness. Instantly he realized his error.
The shock of the murder, the bombardment and his resulting shameful bowel trouble must have temporarily clouded the man’s memory, but a few months’ distance had refreshed it; the caretaker pointed without hesitation to Rypl.
Finally, a state’s witness!
Could he move somewhere else for the meanwhile, Morava asked. Where, the man replied; the front would cut off his path to safety in eastern Bohemia any day now, and how would he get out of Prague, anyway? It occurred to Morava that he could requisition a guard for the man under the pretext of securing German secret offices; his boss had been right once again.
On the way over Morava had thought it strange he was fighting so hard for one witness while Rypl was conducting public executions. Or does murder stop being murder, legally, when the victim belongs to a stronger nation that forces its law on others through violence? And what does it mean when a new police force starts to form within the old one? Would the garage manager Tetera dare say he served the law better than Beran did? He persisted in his gloomy thoughts as they crossed a dozen or so barricades. Finally they were at the house where earlier he had come looking for Karel Malina, the Beroun depot employee.
“Take something we can pry with,” he suggested to Litera.
He headed straight for the neighbor’s bell. A bony man opened the door.
“Come in. Eli
ka’s been expecting you.”
She greeted the policemen. Her cheeks burned with repentance.
“Why didn’t you tell us the truth?” Morava scolded her, although he was mainly angry at himself.