The Widow Killer by Pavel Kohout Page A

his life. While they were making love, death was absurd; together they formed a magnetic field that repelled all harm. However, once he released her from his embrace, she seemed all the more vulnerable, and so he continued to hold her long after the alarm clock rang.
    That March morning the heady scent of live soil wafted into their attic from Vysehrad, Cisafska Louka, and the fields of Pankrac and Branik. Ever since he had come to Prague he had lived near the center, and despite the spartan police dormitory room he inhabited, he never tired of the city. My grass is now asphalt and my trees chimneys, he had once written home, scandalizing his mother. From the first he had fit into the city like a native, and he realized belatedly what a wise move it had been not to take over the family smithy. The only thing he occasionally missed were the smells of the land, which at home had told him as he woke what nature and the weather had in store.
    That pungent reek, he knew, marked the point when winter suddenly relaxes its grip and sprouting begins. Years earlier, his grandfather had led him onto the dike of the pond and pointed his callused finger at the frozen surface, just minutes before a great expanse of it suddenly cracked in half with a dark thunder, the liberated water gushing forth from the rift.
    Morava was sure that scene would repeat itself this morning, but he did not feel the country boy’s customary joy at winter’s end; instead, fear coursed through him, sharpening as his feelings for Jitka grew stronger.
    Tears sprang to his eyes; never had he felt anything like this, not even when his father died. He did not realize that she could see his face.
    “Are you crying?” He heard the surprise in her voice.
    Unable to speak, he nodded.
    “But why?”
    “I’m afraid for you.”
    “But why… ?” she repeated, puzzled.
    It was the first time he had voiced his fear that they were both trapped in the lions’ den. If the war reached Prague, neither Germans nor patriots would be gentle with the Protectorate’s functionaries; the dirtier their own hands were, the fiercer they would be.
    “When it looks like the end is near, Jitka, you have to get out of Bartolomejska at any cost.”
    “Where should I go?”
    “Definitely not home, the front will come that way and they might tar you with the mess your father’s in. You can stay here a couple of days, at worst in the cellar. I’ll tell Beran not to look for you, he’ll certainly understand. Just promise me, if by some chance I’m not here, that at the first sign of danger you’ll do what I said.”
    “And you… ?” she said, without understanding.
    “I have to stay with Beran, but don’t worry about me; I can take care of myself.”
    He could see her eyes begin to draw back, and didn’t understand at first what was happening. She pulled away from him, rolled onto her back, and threw off the thin quilt. Light had begun to filter into the room, and for the first time he both felt and saw her naked. Her white body, with its full breasts and the shadow of her sex, seemed even more defenseless than before.
    “Jan, I’ll do as you say, but I also have a request.”
    “Yes?”
    She spoke self-assuredly, in a voice that rang with a mother’s severity.
    “On the off chance that you can’t take care of yourself, I at least want to have your child.”
    At eight hundred hours Chief Inspector Buback was meeting with Colonel Meckerle. So far, he informed him, he had no reason to criticize the Prague criminal police in their investigation. The Czechs had swiftly collected data on all the sadistic murders from the beginning of the century onward; their records stretched back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
    It was three weeks since Buback had settled into the office they hastily cleared for him on Bartolomejska Street. After appearing there at random on an almost daily basis, he was reporting on what he had observed.
    “I haven’t found the slightest sign of