A familiar face leaped out from a small group of armed men arguing with an indignant crowd. He could not believe his eyes.
“Mr. Litera…” He looked around for him. “Josef…!”
“Lie down,” the girl insisted. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. Your colleague is hunting up a car.”
He strained his eyes.
It was him.
Rypl!
Then the image dissolved again like a phantasm.
The pretty boy behind the wheel of the Mercedes looked glassily toward the bridge; his chalk-white cheeks made the violet bruise under his right eye all the more noticeable.
“I hear he doesn’t like us anymore,” Lojza explained. “Should we give him to Pepik too?”
The driver’s mustache trembled noiselessly like a guinea pig.
“Or what should we do with him, boss?”
The title warmed him.
DID YOU HEAR THAT, MOTHER?
“Any of you know how to drive?” he asked his men.
They shook their heads in unison. He repeated Lojza’s phrase.
“His bad luck, then. He’ll have to put up with us until we get a replacement. Pepik!” He handed the boy the pistol he had confiscated on the hill from that stupid cop in civvies. “The next one’s yours as well. Forward!”
Then he looked at the bridge and was unpleasantly surprised.
“Where’s…?”
“I sent him over the edge,” his boy crowed proudly. “He’s gone for a swim!”
Over by the towpath’s stone wall, the caretaker’s body bobbed and floated close under the black tower, just above the weir. With this slow movement the past closed behind him.
NOW NO ONE CAN PROVE ME GUILTY!
Meanwhile the rain and the distant gunfire intensified. He decided to follow the battle’s voice. However, false echoes plagued Prague’s hills and valleys, and they were no closer to the uprising when they reached the last barricade in the Nusle valley. Here they were leery of turning up toward Pánkrac, which was supposedly swarming with Germans, and he was just about to turn around when the messengers brought two pieces of news.
The first brought murmurs of horror: the SS were driving whole blocks of residents uphill as human shields. They were trying to break through to the city center, and that meant going through Nusle. The second seemed too wonderful to be true, but because enough telephones were fortunately working, several randomly dialed extensions in the suburbs immediately confirmed it.
Yes, they insisted one after the other enthusiastically, they were already celebrating; an hour ago the Russians had liberated them, or more precisely some Russian units disguised as Germans — no one really understood it, but the soldiers were definitely moving onward to clear Pankrác.
He ordered that the Mercedes be left in the next side street, so that in an emergency they would have it at hand, unscathed. The boy took the keys; the driver had obeyed him like clockwork since the incident with the caretaker.
MY APPRENTICE!
Not that he didn’t trust the other two, but he felt absolutely sure he could always trust the boy with his back.
As the four well-armed fighters approached, a man in the uniform of a prewar staff reserve captain hurried over and welcomed them to his unit. He was trying, he explained eagerly, to bring some order to yesterday’s chaos by securing an effective defense at the price of minimal losses in at least this one place.
Were any of them officers? He was the only one to come forward. Yes? And what rank? He remembered Brno and conferred on himself the rank Králik had been preparing him for.
“Sergeant.”
“No!” The captain was overjoyed. “Heaven must have sent you!”
Taking his new sergeant aside, he confided that even after repeated requests for reinforcement, he still had no experienced men here, despite their strategic location. The sergeant’s arrival had increased the barricade’s firepower almost twofold; otherwise all they had was a light machine gun and a couple of ordinary rifles. The captain was nevertheless determined to defend the barricade and expected the sergeant to insure the precise execution of all his orders.
Once he had gotten rid of the old fool, he told his men, “My grandma knows more about war than that office boy. I’ve seen battle. Keep an eye on me. When I leave, we’ll meet right away at the car.”
“Watch it!” the boy warned the drooping mustache. “Run off early and I’ll mow you down!”
To their surprise, a nearby pub brought them out some quite decent pork, dumplings, and cabbage, but afterward there was just more waiting and boredom. Meanwhile, they heard that reinforcements had gotten through to the Germans in the city center, the other central train station had fallen into their hands, and a new attack on the radio station was expected. He had already begun to consider heading in that direction when the captain hurried over. The Germans on the hill had moved, he announced breathlessly, and were driving Czech civilians in front of them as hostages, but in a short while — on good authority! — they would themselves be attacked from behind by General Vla-sov’s Russian corps. Their task on the barricade was to hold their fire and let the hostages approach, so they would have a chance to escape behind the barricade. He would remain at the telephone, while Sergeant Roubínek would see to it that there was no premature firing or a premature retreat.
The now-sergeant nodded at his men to indicate the final decision still rested with him.
A rumble reached them that could only be tank treads. The roadblock here was more than solid, a core of tramcars strengthened with various construction materials rising to the second floor of the corner buildings. Tanks could not roll past without partially clearing it first. He could imagine, however, what one tank grenade could do: Paving stones from the barricade would fly in all directions like huge fragments of shrapnel. Where would he aim, he mused, if he were their gunner? Over there, where the outlines of an openable passage were visible. He therefore selected a post on the opposite side.
The captain, he had to admit, had had his cement-bag gunners’ nests atop the barricade built straight by the book; now he lay down behind them between Lojza and Ladislav. The boy kept watch on the mustache down below and — just in case — covered their backs.
In that strange suspended time that vibrated with an ever-louder rumbling, he could finally think over everything that had happened since morning. He had long known that nothing in his life was an accident. For years SHE had given him inspiration; from that other world it was even stronger than when SHE had been alive. Sometimes, when his strength unexpectedly deserted him, he had doubted himself. Now he knew SHE was with him again, showing him a path he had almost given up on.
FROM SHADOW INTO THE SUNLIGHT!
Antonín Rypl was dead, killed in the battle for the radio, and would never be reborn; he could not let a few whores threaten the new avenger of Czech shame. Not even Ludvík Roubínek, who had lent him his name and face, was a final solution. The man’s unknown life concealed unknown people who might come looking for him. Mere exchanges would not help in the long run.
I NEED A BRAND-NEW ME!
His experiences yesterday and today showed, unfortunately, that even if a brand-new Czech state arose from the ashes of the Protectorate, its pillars would be the very same policemen. The fact that he was not alone gave him hope; for just under twenty-four hours he had led a small but determined company, which had now become the fighting core of this barricade. His inner voice told him something significant would occur here, placing him one step closer to his final goaclass="underline"
To TAKE POWER INTO MY OWN HANDS!
No, he didn’t want to play the hero and perish senselessly on this godforsaken watch, but he definitely had to risk something to seize control and widen his power base. Then his NEW SELF would be born: a refugee from the Totaleinsatz, a freed prisoner, a partisan (or whatever, there was time to figure that out). The timid office mice of the new regime wouldn’t dare question his past; they would give him any papers he asked for.