He started to run, run as fast he could along the bridge, toward the Clementinum.
He could see the big car now, turning left. He knew it was Heydrich's car. Damn the man to hell! Couldn't he listen to a warning?
Faster, faster. He was getting closer to the intersection. He was almost there. He was there. Not too late this time, please God. Not too late.
He saw Louis's body, puddling blood in the gutter.
He saw Heydrich standing in the backseat, his right hand groping for his sidearm, his nostrils flared like a wild animal's, his eyes wide and sweeping the streets for danger.
He saw Jan KubiŠ, throwing down his street sweeper's tools and coming up with a pistol.
He saw Josef GabcÍk on the ledge, a Sten gun in his hand.
He saw Victor Laszlo throwing off his cloak and stepping out in the street, approaching the left side of the car. The bomb was in his hand.
Rick was at the intersection now. The Mercedes was just starting to turn onto the bridge. Victor Laszlo was right behind it. Rick was right in front of it.
Then he saw something else, something he wasn't looking for. In the backseat, seated behind the driver. Another passenger. A woman.
Ilsa Lund.
She was sitting beside the Protector, clad in a rich red dress and clutching his left arm.
Rick hesitated. After Heydrich, she was the last person he expected to see.
Laszlo kept going. If he felt any surprise, any emotion at her presence in the car, his face did not register it.
The limousine slowed nearly to a complete stop as it turned right onto the bridge. Laszlo was two steps away.
“No!” cried Rick, sprinting toward him.
“Victor!” shouted Ilsa.“Hurry!” She pulled Heydrich hard, nearly toppling him.
Heydrich had his pistol out. Rick thought at first he was going to shoot Laszlo. Instead the Nazi pointed it at Ilsa.
Before the driver or the bodyguard could react, Rick dove into the car.
Rick hit Heydrich just as he fired at Ilsa. The shot went wild.
In the same instant, Laszlo jumped onto the running board and flung the bomb into the backseat.
Ten…
Rick lunged for the bomb, which was rolling around on the floor. Victor saw him and understood his purpose immediately.“Get away!” he shouted, clambering aboard. Heydrich hesitated, confused, uncertain whether Rick or Laszlo posed the more imminent threat.
Nine…
Ilsa was aghast. Why was Rick trying to stop her husband from killing Heydrich? Trying to stop her?“Rick, no!” she cried.
Eight …
Rick could hear the sound of gunfire as KubiŠ and GabcÍk opened up on the front seat's occupants, and he could hear the groan of the bodyguard as their shots slammed into him. Glass shattered, wood splintered, and leather split. Blood flew.
Seven …
Heydrich wheeled and smashed his gun butt on Rick's head. Rick went down. Heydrich was about to hit him again when Laszlo grabbed him from the other side.
Six …
Rick's hands shot out again, frantically seeking the bomb on the floor. He knew there wasn't much time left. His hand found Ilsa instead of the bomb.
Five …
Shot by GabcÍk, the driver's head exploded. Incongruously, his chauffeur's cap blew off his head and flew, spinning over the abutment and into the river, like a child's paper airplane.
Four…
“Come on!” Rick shouted, hauling Ilsa to her feet.
Three…
Laszlo had one hand around Heydrich's throat and jammed a gun into his midsection with the other. Heydrich flashed a knife.
Two…
“Victor!” cried Ilsa.
“Jump!” Rick screamed.
Victor shot Heydrich in the abdomen. Heydrich stabbed Victor through the heart.
One …
Rick and Ilsa were out of the car, his arms around her, rolling and tumbling together as fast and as far as they could.
Zero.
The explosion lifted the Mercedes off its wheels and into the air, as if it were a child's jack-in-the-box. Rick's head hit the pavement, and he brought his hands up to shield his face. He caught a glimpse of Ilsa, lying limp against the stone wall.
Glass and metal rained down from the sky. The smell of burning rubber was followed quickly by the sickening stench of burning flesh.
Fire, now, and then another report as the gasoline tank ignited. Rick scrabbled as fast as he could away from the burning wreck, trying to get to his feet, trying to get to Ilsa.
Ejected from the wreckage, one of Heydrich's Lugers lay at his feet. Rick grabbed it like a drowning man clutching a life preserver. It felt good in his hand; it felt like old times.
Someone yanked him to his feet: KubiŠ. With one arm around Rick, he was still spraying the wreckage with gunfire with the other.
“Ilsa,” Rick gasped.
“That Nazi whore!” spat Jan.
Rick stuck the bodyguard's gun in his ribs.“Ilsa,” he commanded.“Now.”
Commotion everywhere. Rick glanced back along the bridge. The band had dispersed to the sides of the span. Down the middle came a security detail, undermanned but on the double.
Bullets whizzed past their heads. GabcÍk returned fire. Nazi soldiers dropped. The kid was a hell of a shot, thought Rick; we could have used him way back when and oh so long ago.
Three steps, and there was Ilsa alive and conscious. He lifted her to her feet.
“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, Heydrich'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 GabcÍk. 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 exactly 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 replied 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 tunnel, 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 expected 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 nothing. She just stared at him with the most profound sense of disbelief he had ever seen in the eyes of another 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.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Rick and Ilsa were fortunate. Jan KubiŠ and Josef GabcÍk 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 themselves, 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 German 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 Josef's 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 GabcÍk, 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 Conference, 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 explosion and by the horsehair from the stuffing in the seats; the wounds became infected and suppurating. The gunshot 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 national 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 Gestapo 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 both 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 office carefully, confiscating any sensitive Akten, or files, that could have proved damaging to any of the surviving 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 immediately. 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 reprisal. No one informed them why they were being killed.
Neither Rick nor Ilsa knew anything of these developments. 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 GabcÍk 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 I 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 GabcÍk told him the news as they took their evening meal.
“The Protector is dead,” Karel announced without preamble.“Our names will echo down through history.”
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 GabcÍk.“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.
The tenth day was just like the ninth. He was beginning to give up hope.
He had lived with the artful double cross all his life. Each time he had been on the losing end. He had only half trusted Major Miles in the first place, the way he had always only half trusted the world. Hell, if he were the English, he wouldn't send a plane, either, not after what had happened. Laszlo, Renault, KubiŠ, and Josef GabcÍk were all dead. Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund might still be alive somewhere, but they were foreigners, little people, expendable.
Late that night he knocked on Ilsa's door. He had nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to.
To his surprise, the door opened.“What do you want?” she asked bitterly.
He couldn't see her face, only one red eye and a strand of hair that fell across it to cover her tears.“To explain,” he said.
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