A Family Madness (32 page)

The lieutenant lost one more of his companions through suicide and another was shot by a Russian sentry near Bialystok.

Ostrowsky continued to comfort the lieutenant during our time with him today, but we need no intelligence officer to explain to us the significance of the boy's experiences. Belorussia must be recaptured frontally. It cannot be recaptured by infiltration. The President's network of agents has been obliterated.

Ostrowsky continued to hide his true feelings from me. Atmosphere dismal in the car returning to Alexanderplatz. On arrival the President asked me not to go home yet but to join him for a drink in his office. Friendly drinking after office hours was not at all characteristic of him, and the oddity of the request made me accept.

He poured the vodka himself, quickly, in case I changed my mind and went home to Danielle. Both of us drank the first shot at the same hectic pace. As they say, if ever men needed it …

Ostrowsky said, “There are agents, Soviet agents, working among us. It is amply apparent that they're from the other faction.”

Wondered if it was amply apparent, but Ostrowsky too tired and heartsick to argue with.

“It's essential the Americans don't find this out. We must be able to offer them networks. We can tell them later the networks have gone and have to be rebuilt. But in the first instance, at the first meeting with them, they must not know what happened to Vitushka or what the lieutenant found out.” The proposition that it as well that the lieutenant will not live to meet the Americans hung for a moment in the air.

Remarked that the Soviets themselves might let the United States know. But Ostrowsky is sure the Americans will believe us and not their Godless and temporary allies.

“Two men,” he said, “of whom I can be sure neither have Soviet affiliations. Yourself and Hrynkievich.”

Do not consider it a compliment being compared to Hrynkievich, who runs Belorussian self-help here in Berlin. The good Dr. Hrynkievich cunning, venal, not very clever.

“I call upon you again, Stanek, for something of a special contribution. At a given moment, I would like yourself and Hrynkievich to go as my representatives and to make contact with the Americans, preferably with Patton, in Bavaria.”

Proposal is of course attractive. But thought at once of Danielle. Asked a question which in my good will toward Ostrowsky I would never once have asked. “Hrynkievich to lead the mission?”

Ostrowsky nodded. “He has seniority as my Minister of Welfare.”

Mentioned to Ostrowsky Danielle's unease about the coming flight from Berlin. Her anxiety would treble if she knew I would be gone somewhere to the west and that she had to make it unaccompanied.

He poured another glass of liquor like a supplicant. He would be very grateful, he told me.

As I drank second glass, became increasingly enraged at him. He would shackle me to a barely competent minister like Hrynkievich and send me out on the roads of Bavaria to offer the Americans a nonexistent agent network. Later he might be able to say to General Patton, “After all, I cannot be responsible for what a fool and a junior minister tell you.”

Idea was that I should discuss the thing with Danielle and give Ostrowsky an answer—no doubt a positive one—in the morning. As I drank, found the true answer come out of my mouth of its own accord. “I regret, Mr. President, that any idea of leaving Danielle behind me in Berlin would amount to a betrayal worse than adultery.”

“But I would see her safely to the West when the appropriate moment came,” he assured me.

Delighted to find myself unrelenting. “I am afraid those are guarantees that in the circumstances would bring her no comfort, Mr. President.”

Leaving his office, felt more of a free agent than I have in a dozen years. In back of car on way home, found myself saying aloud, “Let him send Redich.”

47

As the weather turned humid, Delaney found his own flat in Saint Mary's. Gina resisted the urge to return to Bringelly and adopt the status of wronged child, preferring to live on in Penrith as a wronged woman, too proud however to speak openly of the damage which had been done her.

Delaney's flat was one bedroom, no phone. He had to continue his search for the Kabbels from public telephone booths. He drove a $1500 Holden with rust problems. You had to avoid poking it with your index finger lest you knock a hole in the door paneling. In it he traveled around Parramatta, looking in ethnic coffee bars for Kabbel's Belorussian “uncle,” the one he'd heard about from Danielle and from Kabbel himself. Swarthy men of indefinable origins watched him, his Celtic fairness, as he approached the bar owner and asked did they know a man called Kabbel, a Belorussian who perhaps visited and chatted With any elderly relatives the proprietor might have. Searching for a Belorussian coffee shop owner with an uncle, he traveled as far east as Aunurn, even though they were mainly Turks and Armenians there.

With half an absent mind on his career, he went to his parents' place for dinner twice a week, knowing that the dormant player within him needed Mrs. Delaney's comprehensive meals. An air of baffled forgiveness made the evenings painful. Once Mrs. Delaney stood over him and asked plaintively was there any chance of him and Gina reconciling, but then fled the kitchen in tears as he prepared a flinching answer. Old Greg poured Delaney a beer and said, “You've got to remember the sort of place Penrith was when your mother and I were young. You could walk for miles, pass gate after gate, fence after fence, and every adult was married and stayed married.” Old Greg winked. “Of course, there was plenty of misery and boredom though. Not hard to come across the old misery!”

Delaney played cricket on Saturdays for the sake of his sanity. He had once liked to believe that if he'd had an inch or two more in height he would have been a good pace bowler. He was beyond such vanities now. But his medium-pace deliveries, the occasional wrong'un thrown in, earned him some respect from local batsmen.

On a night of berserk heat in January, Delaney sat on the apron-sized balcony of his bachelor flat drinking beer and watching the migraine-yellow lights along the highway. On such a night he had first met Kabbel, and this happened to be very nearly the anniversary. Somewhere out to sea, beyond the harbor, a merciful south wind was said (just as on that night of the meeting with Kabbel) to be gathering itself. The Penrith squads were already in training in this subtropical stew of humid air for a winter which seemed even more remote than the promised cleansing wind. When his door knocked he went to it without enthusiasm. It was Stanton, sweat standing in globules all over his face. One of his arms was thrust up against the doorjamb for support and he was panting. His left hand held a shopping bag.

“I'm sick,” he said. He ran to the tiny bathroom. It sported, in fact, no bath, just a basin, a loo, a shower, with space between them for someone slim. Delaney heard Stanton run his hip against the rim of the basin. He did that himself every time for the first few weeks. While the shopping bag stood abandoned in the middle of the hallway, Stanton threw up near the base of the toilet and lay for a time gasping, with his head against the cool tiles. Delaney went and got him some iced water. On the way with it he toppled the bag with his foot, and could make out inside it notes in bunched form and the muzzle of something like the .38 with which he and Stanton had armed themselves every night of their career at Kabbel's.

“Bloody hell!” Delaney said. “You've done it.”

It was Stanton's office in life to talk about these things. You had to have other talents altogether to
do
them.

Stanton seemed to agree. He began to weep. “I've been hurt once before. Hurt a dozen times if you could count the bloody scars. I'm shit-scared of bodily damage.” His face contorted further. “I can't do any more of them. I can't do any more of the bastards.”

“How many have you done, for Christ's sake?”

“This is the second. I
had
to do one at Christmas, Terry. The kids don't understand economy. It's those bloody irresponsible television people. They show the kids one goodie after another. There's no mention of these things costing cash—the message is that everyone has these things as a matter of bloody course. I stole a Commodore in Villawood and held up a service station in Liverpool. I didn't mind that one. The bloke was a student or something—he was reading an accounting textbook. It was like doing business. I asked for the money and he gave it to me very politely. Only $380—they have people running around to those places all night so that the money doesn't accumulate in the till. The boy knew what it was worth, knew what the exchange rate was. I was buying Christmas, and he was buying a future in a nice brick house in North Rocks and a nice wife and two ankle-biters. A really sensible, businesslike kid! Listen, Delaney, do you have scotch or brandy or something?”

“Come outside,” said Delaney. The bathroom did not smell fresh.

“I'll clean it up after my scotch,” Stanton offered, rising painfully from the tiles. His face was still swollen and muddied with tears. The picture of a man doing his duty as parent, husband, wild colonial boy.

Outside, at the doll's table large enough, as Delaney often told himself, for four anorexic Vietnamese, he poured some whisky for Stanton. He had placed Stanton's bag at
that
end of the table, against his friend's leg. Stanton's match fees, appearance money, premiership bonus. “And tonight's little raid?” Delaney asked.

“Stole a car in a quiet street in Lalor Park, drove it to Wentworthville—a little too far, I reckon—and another service station. This bloke scared me. He was on speed or something. They reckon those blokes are dangerous to be mugged by, but it's dangerous to hold them up, too; they're likely to do anything. He obeyed everything I said, but he kept laughing in a stupid way, as if he had an alarm or a weapon behind the counter. He was slow and bloody theatrical as hell emptying the till—it was more than $600—and when I was running to the car I was sure he'd do me some harm, shoot me in the back or run after me with a knife. I was in a hell of a fright; otherwise I would have thought to lock him in the men's. Had an awful drive back to Lalor Park, to where I'd left my car. I was wearing driving gloves see. In this weather! Not during the holdup, but driving.”

Because his fingerprints were filed from his days as a cop and his career as a security man. “I would have stuck out like a dog's balls if a patrol car came along.” Tears appeared in Stanton's eyes again. The man was ready for a merciful hospital, a sanitarium. Delaney told him he could lend him fifty dollars a week, and pride temporarily seized up Stanton's tear ducts. A loan, a loan, Delaney insisted. Till April. One of Pioneer's older hands was retiring in April. (It was at least a fantasy and at best a chance that Stanton would get the vacancy if old Greg could be mobilized to use his influence.)

“Look at it this way. You can't do any more of these Ned Kelly stunts. You've nearly killed yourself tonight for a total of six hundred, and that's less than thirty dollars a week between now and April. Take a loan from a mate for more, eh? It's less dangerous.” So now, Delaney realized in bewilderment, I am maintaining three homes, and I won't get a match fee till the end of next month. The whisky and the release from fear seemed to make Stanton sentimental.

“You're a fucking saint,” said Stanton.

“That's about right.”

Then Stanton hard-headedly asked Delaney to keep the cash for him. In case the police were waiting for him outside the house in Emu Plains. He was sure they weren't. If Delaney did it that way though, he could put it in envelopes and hand it to the Stantons in installments along with his weekly loan. Then Denise wouldn't have to worry where in the hell the sudden money had come from.

“And the gun?” asked Delaney.

“I'll take that. I've got a license.” If the police were waiting, he said, he'd tell them he'd been out to the Gap, contemplating suicide. “Not far from the bloody truth,” he said.

That is a moral lever I must use with old Greg. Stanton, in spite of his terror of scarring, talked like someone with suicide in mind. “If driven to extremes of want,” Delaney found himself saying aloud later, as if rehearsing for conversations with his father. (He was then rinsing the surrounds of the loo with Pine-O-Cleen and had a handkerchief tied over his face for fear the stench would unsettle him.) “If driven to extremes of want,” he repeated, soothed by the muffled words.

He had not considered how hard it would be to hide the money. At last he packed it inside the base of a trophy he had won as a schoolboy. He would have an explanation—savings, match fees.

He was still awake and dreaming of Danielle's rescue when the southerly raged in from sea and through the balcony window, upsetting one of the lightweight chairs.

“They were here,” said Delaney's source at the Newnes pub when Delaney visited it the following Saturday. Delaney had begun to beg off cricket so that he could come searching for the Kabbels in Heather's Glen more often. “Looked like they'd come to stay—two cars towing two trailers.”

But they'd left two days later, said the man. Same arrangement—two cars, two trailers, the four of them. Delaney pressed some dollars into the man's hand. “Call me reversed charges as soon as they come back.” He fled the bar. He desired the loneliness of the drive back across the mountains. In the space it gave him he believed he could puzzle out this brief Kabbel apparition. But more than an hour later, driving down Main Street, he had still not been able to discern any meaning to it.

48

R
ADISLAW
K
ABBEL'S
H
ISTORY OF THE
K
ABBELSKI
F
AMILY

Yuri was the genius of our escape to the West. He arrived outside Frau Zusters's house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, one evening in late April 1945. The passenger seat in the front was piled high with ordnance maps and my father was alone in the back, sharing the vehicle with no other member of the Belorussian government-in-exile. I noticed this exclusivity at once. In spite of the noise from the east of the city, it signified something like a return to normalcy. My father had filled the trunk of the car with ham and tea and cognac. I suspect that behind the light shades, the upholstery, even the hubcaps of the vehicle he had placed a few further small treasures, bullion or diamonds, though being a genuinely political man he had never owned much of either. Neither he nor Yuri carried any weapons. It was, as Yuri would say during the journey, like farting in the wind, carrying weapons at a time like this. My father's intention was to reach the salient in the south, cut out by General Patton's Third U.S. Army, and to surrender to them, to the sundry John Waynes, to the chewers of grass, gum, and tobacco whom I had last seen just before the war in indelibly remembered films at the Paris Theater in Warsaw.