As Time Goes By (40 page)

"Victor!" she screamed, and tried to run toward the
car. "Where are you?"

He slapped her. "He's dead," he said. In the twisted
debris he could just make out Victor's body, Hey-
drich's knife protruding from his chest, his eyes open,
gazing toward the sky.

For the first time, he saw Victor Laszlo at peace.

Ilsa's eyes cleared. "You tried to stop him! You tried
to sabotage us!
Why?"

Now it was her turn to slap his face. That hurt worse
that anything he had ever suffered.

"You bastard! You killed my husband!" she said.

She was pounding on his chest now, raining blows
down on his head. He could hear the whistles of the police and sirens and shouts. There was no time.

He socked her, hard. She fell unconscious into his
arms. He slung her over his shoulders and ran as fast
as he could, away from the bomb site, away from the bullets, away from the river, away from the bodies, toward the church. Of all things, the church.

A hundred yards ahead of him he could see Kubiš
and
Gabčík
. They were fleeing to different places, but
they were all going to sanctuary. He and Ilsa to the
Church of St. Charles Borromeo, the patron saint of
administrators and diplomats. The Czechs to the
Church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the
Slavs.

The Protector of Bohemia and Moravia lay sprawled
on the pavement. At a glance Rick couldn't tell whether
he was alive or dead. Then he saw his right leg twitch
and heard him calling for help, softly, in German. Heydrich's trigger finger was still firing, but his hands were
empty. He thought about shooting him right there. But
there was no time. Let God take care of him, if He cared to. If not, let him go straight to hell, where he
belonged.

The Czech civilians were too stunned to do anything.
No one tried to stop them. No one was quite sure ex
actly what had happened yet. It was like a hit in a
Bronx restaurant. Everybody had seen it, yet nobody knew what he had seen.

They passed Louis Renault's body as they ran. The
little man looked as dapper in death as he had in life.
"So long, Louis," said Rick. "It was a hell of a beautiful friendship. I just wish it could have lasted longer."

The church was close by. Its doors were opened to
receive them.' They made it through. The doors
slammed shut

"This way," said a priest.

Ilsa woke up. "Can you walk?" Rick asked her.

The fight had gone out of her. "I think so," she re
plied in the voice of a woman who couldn't believe she
was still alive. She was missing a shoe. She kicked off
the other one and walked barefoot. Her brilliant red dress was soaked with blood. Heydrich's, of course,
and Victor's.

From a distance, he could hear sirens. In the distance, he thought he could hear screams. In his head,
he could hear the voices of the dead. Victor Laszlo had
just joined the chorus.

The priest led them through the sacristy, down some
stairs, and into the crypt: the bones of the saints and
martyrs and those who were just plain unlucky, who had died for their beliefs or were killed for their faith
or who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crypt led into a tunnel, which led into another tun
nel, which led under the street. How far under the
street, Rick was not exactly sure. He supposed this was
what Pell Street in New York
,
must be like, minus the saints and martyrs and plus the Chinese food. He had
never been to Pell Street, but then he had never ex
pected to be down here, among the honored Christian
dead, either. He had never expected to find Chinatown
in Czechoslovakia.

Some stairs rose up to the street.

"Are you all right?" Rick asked Ilsa. She said noth
ing. She just stared at him with the most profound
sense of disbelief he
had ever seen in the eyes of an
other human being.

"Why did you do it?" she said bitterly.

"Later," he wheezed.

"I hate you," she said.

Then they were up the stairs and into the street. They
piled into the back of a waiting produce truck. "Get
down," advised the padre, "and stay down." A couple
of workmen dumped a pile of rotting, discarded lettuce
over them, and then the truck started to move away,
slowly, toward Lidice.

Huddled together under the cargo, they were locked
in each other's arms as intimately as lovers. Never had they felt so far apart.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
S
EVEN

Rick and Ilsa were fortunate. Jan Kubiš
 
and Josef
Gabčík
never made it back to Lidice. The Nazis caught
up with them in the crypt of the Church of Sts. Cyril
and Methodius. An Underground meeting was going on in the church at that time, where 120 members of
the Czech resistance were awaiting word of the assassination.

The Czech patriots gave a good account of them
selves, but they were outnumbered and outgunned.
They shot the Germans coming down the stairs, shot them crashing through holes they had blown through
the church floor, shot them until they were out of ammunition, and then continued fighting with rocks and
stones and knives and their bare hands until the Ger
man troops poured down the stairs and into the crypt
in such numbers that there were no longer enough
Czechs to withstand them. The last two left alive, down
to their last two bullets, shook hands, kissed each other,
shot themselves, and fell dead on the floor alongside
the saints and the martyrs.

The Nazi intelligence apparatus finally was able to separate Jan and Josef from the rest. The priests tried
to sprinkle holy water on their bodies, but the Germans
would have none of that. They cut off Jan's head and
they cut off Josefs head, and then they stuck both
heads on the points of bayonets. The Germans brought
the bayonets aboveground, onto the streets and into the
city and back down to the Charles Bridge. There they
fixed the bayonets with the heads still on them into the
arms of two of the statues of the saints, into the arms
of St. John of Nepomuk and St. Luitgard, and left them
there until the birds of the air so beloved of St. Francis
had pecked away the eyes and taken off their noses;
left them there until they had rotted away to just a pair
of skulls. Then the Nazis smashed the skulls to bits
with rifle butts and threw the shards into the river for
the fish to eat.

The bodies they hacked to pieces with cleavers and
axes. They dug a hole in unconsecrated ground in a
farmer's field in the dead of night and threw the pieces
in. They covered them with lime and then they covered
them with dirt and then they spat on the dirt and pissed
on it. The other bodies they burned in the concentration
camp at nearby Theresienstadt, the model camp, which
was the only one the Red Cross was allowed to visit.

From the identity papers found on Josef
Gabčík
, they
learned he was a resident of the village of Lidice.

Victor Laszlo's body was never seen again.
      

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, the Protector of
Bohemia and Moravia, the host of the Wannsee Con
ference, the architect of the Final Solution, lingered for eight agonizing days. His back had been broken by the blast. Much of his handsome face was gone, including
his aquiline nose, of which he had been so vain. His
body had been penetrated by shrapnel from the explo
sion and by the horsehair from the stuffing in the seats;
the wounds became infected and suppurating. The gun
shot wound to his abdomen, which Victor Laszlo had inflicted with his last dying effort, finally killed him.
The best doctors in the Reich could not stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the agony. On June 4, 1942,
Reinhard Heydrich died. He was thirty-eight years old,
the same age as Rick Blaine.

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler proclaimed a month of na
tional mourning. In Prague, fifty thousand sympathetic
Czechs took to the streets to protest an act of Allied
terrorism.

Heinrich Himmler vowed that the SS and the Ge
stapo would not rest until everyone responsible had
been brought to justice. From behind thick glasses and
a weak mustache, he read the speech that Goebbels had
written for him. "German justice," he proclaimed,
"will be bom swift and terrible."

Ernst Kaltenbrunner moved a notch up the ladder.
The night Heydrich died, he removed his former
chief's Gestapo file from his private safe and burned it.
He had no further use for it

In Prague Castle, SS men went over Heydrich's of
fice carefully, confiscating any sensitive
Akten,
or files,
that could have proved damaging to any of the surviv
ing members of the Third Reich hierarchy. One of
them took Heydrich's priceless violin and stomped it
to pieces with his boots, which had been polished to
perfection just that morning. Then he threw the shards
out the window, in the direction of Dalibor Tower.

The first to suffer were the Jews. A few hours after
the attack, 3,000 Jews from Theresienstadt, not far
from Prague, were ordered shipped to Auschwitz im
mediately. Nobody ever returned to Theresienstadt
from Auschwitz.

In the aftermath of the bombing, Goebbels ordered 500 of the remaining Jews in Berlin arrested. The day
of Heydrich's death, 152 of them were executed in re
prisal. No one informed them why they were being
killed.

Neither Rick nor Ilsa knew anything of these devel
opments. They were at the farmhouse in Lidice, recuperating from their injuries and waiting for the British
plane that had been promised them. They did not know
when it would come. They did not know if it would
come. They could only hope the British would keep
their promise.

On the third day, Karel
Gabčík
came to see Rick. Containing his emotions, Karel told Rick what had
happened in Prague. "Heydrich lives," said the boy,
and then he broke down and started to cry. "He is severely wounded—they say his spine is shattered. But
he is still... alive...."

"At least"! hope he's suffering badly," said Rick.
"Nobody deserves it more."

"What if he doesn't die?"

"What difference does it make? We're in just as
much trouble if he does. What do you hear from the
Underground?"

"Nothing."

Nothing: that was all they'd heard so far. Where was
that plane? The agreement was that it would be dispatched shortly after news of the attack was relayed to
London. Surely Major Miles would have received word
by now. One possible explanation was that the weather
had remained sunny. Sunshine was good for normal
flying, but bad for covert operations: they needed a cloudy day for the light-wing aircraft to slip in under
cover and, more important, get out the same way.

Rick had not seen Ilsa since they had arrived. She
had been taken to a back room on the second floor of
the farmhouse, and when he had inquired about her, he had been told that she was all right—bruised and still a
little stunned from the events on the bridge, but otherwise unharmed. She did not wish to see him.

For the first few days he respected her wishes. Today
he didn't care. He knocked at the door of her room.
"It's me," he said quietly. "We have to talk. You've
got to let me explain."

On the other side of the heavy oak door there was
only silence.

"Ilsa?"
     

Rick put his ear to the keyhole. Very faintly he could
hear her breathing.

He walked away, feeling more dead than alive.

On the eighth day, word came that Heydrich had died
of his wounds. Karel
Gabčík
told him the news as they took their evening meal.

"The Protector is dead," Karel announced without preamble. "Our names will echo down through his
tory."

Rick took no pleasure from Karel's triumph. "Don't
be too sure of that," he warned the youth. "History has
a way of forgetting about a lot of things. It always finds
something else to remember."

They ate in silence. The fare of bread, farmer's
cheese, and slices of roast pork was simple. Rick's
emotions were not.

"I'd get ready for trouble, if I were you," he told
Karel
Gabčík
. "In the meantime, is there any word
about us? About the plane?" He meant about him and
Ilsa. He meant about the promised extraction. He
meant about getting out of there.

"No," said Karel.

Where the hell was that plane? Or was this just one more double cross? The last one?

In her room, Ilsa was dining alone. Rick had still not
laid eyes on her.

On the ninth day, Rick Blaine was still waiting for
the airplane and still trying to speak with Ilsa. He was
disappointed on both counts.