Death Can’t Take a Joke (17 page)

By the time they emerged from their hotel – an unremarkable budget chain affair on the edge of town – early that evening, the snow was falling steadily in flakes as big as a child’s hand. Kershaw dived straight into the cab waiting at the kerb, but Janusz stood for a moment, absorbing the deep and pillowy silence snow always seemed to bring, feeling an echo of his childhood excitement at the first proper fall of winter.

They soon left behind the dreary post-war architecture of the Soviet era and entered the
stare miasto,
a labyrinth of medieval cobbled streets. A soft glow – almost certainly candlelight – spilled from the Gothic windows of several of the churches they passed.

‘Is there some kind of religious festival on today?’ asked Kershaw, frowning.

‘It’s probably just a saint’s day.’

‘Are there many of them?’

‘One for every day of the year.’ He grinned. ‘I think yours is in July, Natalia.’

The cab dropped them beside the
Rynek
, the town’s cobbled main square. As Janusz paid the driver, Kershaw gazed up at the imposing Hapsburgian merchants’ houses, their steep roofs frosted white by the snow, and the turquoise coppered bell towers of the massive brick-built church that loomed over the wide sloping square.

‘It’s just like
Prague!’ she exclaimed after a moment.

‘What did you expect? Mud huts?’ asked Janusz. The girl’s reaction wasn’t uncommon, though. Sometimes it felt as though Poland’s thousand-year history, its place as one of Europe’s great powers, had been snuffed out when the country disappeared behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain after the war. Poland might be a member of the EU now, but how long would it be before it was restored to the heart of Europe in people’s consciousness?

They started looking for somewhere to eat, hugging the edge of the square where there was as yet only a thin covering of snow, but Janusz could see that the girl was struggling nonetheless.

‘It’s these boots,’ she said with an apologetic grimace, pausing to show him an unridged sole.

He shook his head in mock exasperation, then offered her his arm, a gesture so old-fashioned, so
gallant
, that she almost expected him to click his heels.

Five minutes later, Janusz had dismissed every restaurant they had passed. ‘Mother of God!’ he grumbled. ‘McDonald’s, Starbucks … a
sushi bar!
’

‘That Italian looked okay,’ said Kershaw, tottering along on her slippery soles, hanging off his arm.

‘I don’t come to my homeland to eat
pizza
,’ he growled.

In a side turning off the square Janusz finally found what he was looking for: a traditional restaurant with a menu in Polish stuffed with his favourite dishes. A glowing log fire and timber-beamed ceiling made the interior feel as cosy as some
babcia
’s country parlour.

After their menus had been delivered by the softly spoken, middle-aged lady owner, Janusz asked Kershaw: ‘So, what do you feel like eating?’ For a moment, he couldn’t understand why she was looking at him so blankly, before realising that he’d spoken in Polish. ‘Sorry,’ he said, scratching his ear. ‘Let me tell you what they have. Okay. I’m going to start with the
kaszanka.
That’s duck’s blood sausage fried with buckwheat.’

Her almost-comical look of horror advised him to move on.

‘Something lighter maybe? How about
zurek –
fermented wheat soup with boiled egg and some pork sausage? … No?’

‘I am usually quite an adventurous eater,’ she said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘But this stuff is a bit out of my comfort zone.’

After a few moments of negotiation Janusz had managed to persuade Natalia that smoked herring and potato pancakes followed by duck breast with sour cherry sauce didn’t sound too daunting.

Once their starters had arrived, he said, ‘You know, if you’d come to a town like this ten years ago, there would have been half a dozen restaurants like this on the main square – not all that fast food crap that’s there now. Excuse my language.’

‘These. Are. Amazing,’ she said, eyes wide, pointing at the golden-brown potato cakes with her knife.

Her unselfconscious delight in the
placki ziemniaczane
made Janusz smile. So many young women were neurotic about eating these days, as though enjoying food were some kind of moral failing. He suddenly remembered one of Oskar’s pet theories: that women whose idea of a meal was picking at a salad were, without exception, cold and uptight in the sack, while a love of food was a sure-fire indicator of a healthy appetite elsewhere. Watching Natalia tucking in, Janusz found himself wondering whether she’d bear out the theory.

‘It is a shame there aren’t more places like this still,’ she said, putting her knife and fork together on her empty plate. ‘But then, I suppose that’s what people were fighting for when you threw out the Communist government, right?’

‘I didn’t spend my youth dodging rubber bullets for the right to drink weak American coffee,’ he protested. ‘I knew people who were jailed, who
died
fighting for democracy. Now all anyone seems to care about is flat screen televisions and shopping in IKEA.’

She shrugged. ‘When people have the freedom to make choices, they don’t always choose what you’d like them to.’

Janusz knew the girl had a point. Whenever he returned home he still half-hoped to find the traditional Poland he’d so loved when he was growing up – the Poland everyone had said they were fighting to reclaim from Soviet rule. Yet the irony was that communism – by uniting the country in opposition for nearly fifty years – had unwittingly helped to preserve its traditions and culture, its powerful sense of identity. And now that the battle for freedom was over, what did the younger generation want? For Poland to be just like every other European country.

‘What do you make of the Orzelair set-up?’ she asked, over their main courses.

He shot her a surreptitious glance but the expression in her grey-blue eyes appeared guileless.

‘Nothing much.’ He shrugged. ‘They’re the Ryanair of Eastern Europe, but with better customer service.’ He made to top up her glass with the Hungarian Merlot they were drinking but she shook her head.

‘You don’t think they could be dodgy?’

‘Dodgy how?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She met his gaze. ‘Drug smuggling? People smuggling? We’re right on the border with Ukraine here, aren’t we? From what I’ve read, that’s practically the developing world.’

He wondered how Varenka would take to her homeland being described this way – even if it was more or less true. In any event, he didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. He sneaked a look at his watch. Nearly 8.30 p.m. He needed to get going. But he had a nasty suspicion that the girl wouldn’t believe him if he claimed to fancy an early night. And since the hotel was in the opposite direction to the airport, the elaborate masquerade of pretending to go to bed would only waste valuable time.

‘Let’s go and get a drink somewhere,’ he said, signalling for the bill.

Just as he’d hoped, Natalia decided to use the bathroom before leaving.

As soon as she’d disappeared up the spiral staircase, he went over to the little desk where the lady proprietor was making out the bill.
Przepraszam pania bardzo
, could she please see the young lady safely into a cab, as regretfully he had to dash. Spying a rack of cigars in aluminium tubes he selected one – his favourite, a Romeo y Julieta – and handed her enough
zlotych
to cover everything. Then he left, using his hand to still the bell above the door on the way out.

It felt liberating to be striding across the creaking snow alone, taking great breaths of the chilly mentholated air, but by the time he hailed a passing taxi, he found himself struggling with a feeling of remorse. He was picturing the look on the girl’s face when she discovered she’d been dumped.

‘You want go to the airport? You know there’s no flight until the morning?’ The cab driver was an elderly man, probably working to supplement a meagre pension.

‘I’m meeting someone who works there,’ said Janusz, knocking the snow off his boots against the sill of the car before climbing in. ‘He works on the night flights.’

While chatting to Angelika, the director’s assistant, during the airport tour, he’d discovered that the daily UK departure was not the only international flight after all; Przeczokow also operated ‘cargo flights’ involving three departures and arrivals a week. But when he’d started asking where they went and what cargo they brought back, she’d clammed up. Janusz had a powerful intuition that these flights lay at the heart of Barbu Romescu’s real business interests. He might, as far as Orzelair’s management were concerned, have left the company, but Janusz suspected Przeczokow remained his private fiefdom – the perfect backwoods spot to take delivery of a planeful of contraband ‘cargo’– girls being trafficked into the UK sex trade. After landing at night they could be issued with faked or stolen passports, and transferred straight onto the morning flight to London. Janusz did a few sums, and calculated that if every girl paid a couple of thousand for the promise of a new life in the West, Romescu could be making £300,000 plus per flight – not even taking into account what the girls would be worth at the other end.

‘
Tak,’
said the driver, easing the car away from the kerb. ‘There was a bit of a fuss around here when they started up.’

‘Really? When was that?’

‘Oh, two or three years ago? Some people got up a petition to complain about the noise. Anyway, they must have changed the flight path because you don’t often hear them any more.’

I’ll bet they did,
thought Janusz.

The driver picked up speed as they left town – the main road had already been cleared and gritted – and soon they were plunging into the birch forest. The view of white trees either side illuminated by the eerie snow-light, and the black road stretching ahead in the headlights, ruler-straight, was hypnotic.

‘We haven’t passed another car since we left Przeczokow,’ observed Janusz.

‘That’s because this road only goes to the airport.’ Chuckling, the old man offered Janusz a boiled sweet from a tin. ‘Apparently the EU paid for it. More fool them, eh?’

After leaving the forest, a distant glow could be seen beyond the next rise in the road and a few minutes later the cab reached the airport perimeter fence. Beyond the wire, Janusz could see the floodlit tail of a plane sticking out from behind the terminal building. It was parked up in such a way that only its rear half was visible, but from its low-slung belly and blanked-out windows it looked like a freight plane. Using a cargo plane was no doubt part of the cover story, in case locals who saw a passenger airliner passing overhead started asking awkward questions. Behind its sightless windows the plane probably had the standard array of passenger seating.

The cab pulled up at the empty drop-off zone and Janusz handed over a note.

The cab driver peered out at the darkened terminal through the falling snow. ‘Are you going to wait for him out there, in the cold?’ he asked in a worried voice.

‘He’ll be out soon,’ said Janusz. And no sooner had he spoken than the air was split by a rising shriek: four jet engines accelerating for take-off.

As the cab pulled away, Janusz surveyed the airport car park opposite. Finding the white expanse unbroken but for a single vintage Polski Fiat, he gave a satisfied nod.

It had been a stressful day for nineteen-year-old aircraft technician Boguslaw Witorski, and he was looking forward to his dinner. When he worked late his mama would always leave a pot of stew – usually pork, sometimes beef – simmering on the stove for him, and a loaf of rye bread under a fresh tea towel. When he climbed into the driving seat, he was so focused on his first mouthful of stew that he couldn’t work out at first what it was that felt wrong. Then it hit him:
the smell of cigar smoke
. Suddenly, a gravelly voice spoke his name from the rear seat.

‘
Kurwa mac
!’ he shouted, jumping so violently that his skull smacked against the roof of the Fiat.

‘Don’t turn around. And don’t try to run away. I don’t want to make a nasty mess of your Fiat.’

Boguslaw gasped as he felt something jab him through the seat back, just to the right of his spine. ‘I haven’t got any money!’ he said. ‘Take my bank card!’ He went to pull the card from his back pocket, but the movement was rewarded with another warning prod.

‘Keep still. I don’t want your money, just some information.’

‘Anything,
prosze pana,
I’ll tell you everything I know, just don’t shoot me!’

‘Where’s your boss?’

‘He left an hour ago. These days he leaves me to turn the power off once the flight’s left.’

‘I bet he told you to make yourself scarce while the English cops were here, right?’

‘Yes! But I forgot and went back to finish the job I was doing. After they left he was mad as a cut snake.’

With that gorilla Mazurek off the premises and the boy babbling like a mountain brook, Janusz allowed himself to relax a little.

‘When does the plane fly back in?’ he asked.

‘5.30 tomorrow morning.’

Janusz frowned. If these so-called cargo flights were illegally trafficking women from the east, then arriving during daylight hours would surely be courting disaster, especially since by that time of the morning, the airport would be gearing up for the London flight.

‘So how do you disembark the
laski
?’ he asked.

‘
Girls?’
The boy sounded mystified. ‘What girls?’

Janusz could see the boy’s frown reflected in the rear-view mirror. ‘You’re lying,’ he growled. But even as he said it, he knew the boy wasn’t smart enough – or brave enough – for that.

He paused, his brain racing. ‘What
are
these flights bringing in then?’

‘They don’t bring anything in,
prosze pana.
They take stuff
out
.’

‘Out where?’

‘Someplace called Sukur – in Turkey.’

Turkey?
Janusz sat in stunned silence, seeing again the garish-coloured pastries and smelling the fruity shisha at the Pasha Café. A muffled mobile tone from the front seat broke into his thoughts.