Suddenly one of the Czechs, to judge by her expression half crazed with grief, slipped through the escort and fell upon a tall German woman with a blond braid, who even in her humbled state reminded Morava of the Nazi ideal of Germanic beauty as extolled in films and posters. As if lashing out at all Germans through this one, she scratched the woman’s face with her nails and lacerated her skin. The victim cried out in pain, dropped her overflowing bag, and covered her face with both hands; two little girls beside her burst into tears.
Instantly two escorts were there; they pulled the attacker off and tried to return her as carefully as possible to the sidewalk, but just then pure hatred erupted. There was a forest of menacing fists, insults, and threats, gobs of spit flying over the guard’s heads and onto them as well. Morava could see lunacy in many of the onlookers’ eyes and realized he might have behaved just like this after Jitka’s death, if his task had not imposed an iron self-discipline on him.
When stones started to fly, the escort commander drew his pistol and fired into the air. This drew a deafening whistle of contempt from the crowd; the threatening guardsmen began to fire as well, and a massacre seemed inevitable. Morava quickly formulated a plan.
“Litera,” he shouted, “you take the back!”
Meanwhile, he pushed toward the front of the escort, where the commander was, and made himself heard over the restless crowd.
“Clear the way! In the name of the law! Offenders will be prosecuted! Clear the way for the law!”
Surprisingly, the presence of two uniformed policemen had the desired effect; the more levelheaded members of the throng helped calm the distraught ones. The German woman obediently hefted her baggage again. Seeing the bloody slashes on her face and the sobbing children helped the crowd’s fever die down. The people returned to their dead, walking awkwardly past the attacker, who was now crying bitterly on another woman’s shoulder. Morava sensed that for many of them — him included — the need for retribution clashed with the fear of becoming just like the men who so recently murdered their loved ones.
This brought him back to his original question: What would follow this war with the Germans? It was a wonderfully seductive picture: Czech would be the only language of Bohemia and Moravia, and the time bomb that had twice destroyed the Czech state would disappear.
However, it implied a new danger. Antonín Rypl was a Czech too— and now a national avenger. The killer’s latest move unfortunately proved that despite his insane depravity, he was gifted with extraordinary intelligence and intuition. Morava longed for a quick meeting with Beran to try out his newest hypothesis:
Rypl had discarded his old identity upon finding the unknown corpse and was founding his own armed force. With their help, he would compel goodwill toward himself on the street and in the new revolutionary organs through exceptional brutality against Germans, thereby cementing his new persona.
Instead of just “Good work, Morava,” he wanted to hear that Police Commissioners Beran and Brunát understood this terrible threat to the future of the free republic and would mobilize all the police reserves, even in the current situation. Once the country was cleansed of Germans, they could not allow a new bunch of scoundrels to occupy it just because they spoke the local language.
He learned from the grateful escort commander that for now they were rounding up the local Germans at a nearby primary school. This information triggered an instinct that was often more reliable than logic. The widow killer’s choice of victims had never made the slightest sense, so why should the mass murder of Germans be any different? As the superintendent had once told him, intuition carries the same weight in police work as a lifetime’s worth of experience, good organization, and dedication.
Why would Rypl, why would his hatchetmen leave this Eldorado, where the sort of mass psychosis he’d just seen would be congenial to butchers with primitive notions of revenge? Yes, he felt, they were here somewhere, but as he drew closer he realized it would be easier to find than to catch them. They must not frighten the gang away prematurely.
In front of the school where the column had disappeared, he instructed Litera to go wait for their reinforcements at the designated spot and bring them here as inconspicuously as possible.
Then Litera grabbed his sleeve and whispered excitedly, “There!”
“What…?”
“A Mercedes… didn’t they say it had Berlin plates?”
“Yes….”
The car stood right opposite the entrance to the school, which was guarded by two youths; the policemen decided not to approach them.
“You go ahead,” Morava urged. “Meanwhile I’ll figure out what to do first.”
“Don’t you want to wait for us? So he doesn’t kill you first?”
“He doesn’t even know me. At most I’m a policeman he saw at the barricade.”
“Do you have your pistol?”
“Yes.”
Both simultaneously remembered the shot he had loosed by accident in the car. Morava laughed.
“No fear. In an emergency I’ll try to bite him first.”
Litera did not find it as amusing.
“He’s got a small army with him.”
“That’s why I have to try to find out unobtrusively what their role is here. One advantage is that people will hardly join forces with a depraved murderer of Czech women.”
“But how will you convince them?”
“I’ll worry about that later. You’d better move along; our men might be there already.”
Litera hurried off. Morava then slowly moved toward the Mercedes. Crossing the street next to it, he inconspicuously peered inside. Nothing caught his eye.
At the gates, he was shocked to find that the two guards, SS-gun-toting Czech youths in white armbands painted with the large letters RG, would not let him into the school.
“Who instructed you not to admit the police?” he asked incredulously.
“Our commander,” the left-hand one said.
“Call him out here!”
“Get lost, you kolou
,” the right-hand one advised him, “before we blow you away!”
What’s a kolou? he wondered, baffled.
Mlove,” Grete said, “know what I’ve decided?” “No….”
Buback could still see the horrible scene at the train station of his childhood, and the trek behind him had pushed him to the limits of his strength. He had seen unmistakable signs of the coming hunt for German civilians and avoided the last barricade by clambering over courtyard walls.
“Guess!”
He had found Grete lying prone on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling, and let her be. He looked quickly around for an empty bottle before remembering that there was not a drop of alcohol left.
“I give in…”
“I’ve decided how we’re going to live until, as they say, death divides us.”
What must go through her head here, alone in this dilapidated hideout! He threw off his wet raincoat and then his soaking jacket, lay down beside her, and tucked his arm beneath her head. For the moment he tried to put his recent experiences out of his head.
“Tell me. How?”
“We’ll go to Sylt together.”
“Aha… and why precisely…?”
“Because that was the last place you were happy in peacetime. And a little way from there, in Hamburg, mussels from Sylt kept me happy for years. We’ll go back there to recapture that happiness, and once we find it together, you’ll take a picture of me in the same place you photographed them. The circle closes, and another begins. We’ll be in Germany, but almost not in Germany. Trying to be different Germans than we were before.”