Once Upon a Time (20 page)

Before Sullivan could even speak, the woman gasped, dropped the leash and clutched her throat. “Oh my God, no!”

He reached forward instinctively to steady her, and she recoiled. “What is it? What's happened?”

He retrieved the leash. “Nothing's wrong, ma'am, I'm looking for a Mr. Josef Gryszkiewicz.”

“Why?”

“Is this his residence?”

“Yes. No.” As the woman recovered her wits, her alarm turned to wariness, and she backed towards the front door, tugging the dog behind her. “What is it?”

Patiently, Sullivan tried to reassure her and glean whether his witness did indeed live there without revealing any details. Finally he was able to determine that Josef Gryszkiewicz was her father, and that he lived with her. However, he was asleep right now, and she was reluctant to disturb him.

“I'm sorry, Officer, but you have to understand my father is old and frail. He's from Eastern Europe, and an official visit from the police would upset him. Can you come back in half an hour when I've had a chance to tell him what it's about?”

Sullivan evaluated the request rapidly. Green would never stand for it, for Green preferred his witnesses unrehearsed. Yet there might be an advantage in giving the elderly man a chance to get his bearings and to gather memories that had been long buried. He glanced at his watch, calculated the time remaining before his return flight, factored in possible gridlock along the QEW, and told her she could have ten minutes.

The woman snapped a thank you before nearly slamming the door on Sullivan's nose. Before he could even turn away, bedlam erupted from inside the house.

“Mama! Mama!” the daughter shouted, and another woman's voice could be heard from deeper inside. Curious, he tested the knob and eased the door open a crack.

“It's the police! He wants Tata!”

A shrill babble ensured in a language Sullivan assumed to be Polish, of which he recognized only one word. Ottawa.

“But what should I tell him? He's waiting for Tata.”

“Say he go to store…” More Polish. “...come back later.”

“But Mama, maybe he can help.”

“No help!” he heard, followed by indecipherable arguing. “Not from police!”

“The police won't hurt him, Mama. Not here in Canada. And I'm scared!”

The two shouted in an excited mixture of Polish and English, and the din even managed to excite the dog, who began to bark. “Well, I'm calling Glen!” the daughter said.

Sullivan hoped he'd be able to hear what she told Glen, but there was no fear of that. The daughter was forced to shout over both her mother and the dog. From the tone of the conversation, Sullivan guessed that Glen was her husband, and not very sympathetic to his mother-in-law's fears. Nor even to his wife's, from the sound of it.

“But can you at least come home?” she pleaded. “Be here while we talk to the cop? Mama won't listen to me, but she believes you… We need to tell someone! Dad may be lost or hurt, and lying somewhere in the snow. Just like that poor woman who died in the snowbank in Winnipeg.”

The mother-in-law burst in with a volley of protest, and the woman had to shout her down. “I know that's what he said, Mama, but it's been two days! He wouldn't go for that long without calling us. And with all this snow and ice, he could have slipped and fallen.”

More yelling, followed by the slamming of the phone and the daughter's announcement that Glen was on his way and would solve everything. Abruptly, silence fell. Standing on the porch, Sullivan had a sudden feeling that she had sensed his presence. He beat a hasty retreat to his car and was sitting quietly listening to the radio and making notes when a late model Chevy Blazer rumbled into the drive. Pure, sleek black muscle, the kind of car Sullivan dreamed about while he repatched the rust holes in his Malibu one more time. A large man hauled himself from the driver's seat, and Sullivan stepped out of his car to meet him.

Glen had a salesman air about him. Hearty smile, sporty tie and a loud, friendly voice. He stuck out a beefy hand.

“Glen Louks. Ottawa, eh? So what's this about, officer?”

“I'm here gathering background on an Ottawa matter.”

“How'd my father-in-law's name come up?”

Sullivan decided to let a little truth slip by, so he mentioned the cousin in Renfrew.

The man's face, far from clearing with relief, grew more confused. “But he hasn't seen him in years. Refuses to go up there.”

“This is about an incident that occurred twenty years ago.”

Glen shrugged. “Before my time.”

“Your father-in-law's not in trouble. He was the victim. But his assailant has been...” Sullivan paused on the wording, “...in some more trouble, and we're interested in revisiting the assault.”

“Oh Christ, is that all!” Glen shook his head in exasperation. “My mother-in-law's all worked up because she thinks he's in trouble. They're from Poland, and over there, you can understand, the police were not always your friend. But come on in, I'll tell her it's just about this old business.”

Glen ushered him in the door, and Sullivan was assailed by the smell of onions, garlic and old dog in the over-heated air. The dog had evidently exhausted itself, because it had subsided into a snoring heap by the kitchen door. The two women were perched tensely on the edge of the sofa in the living room. Seeing them side by side, Sullivan could clearly detect the family resemblance despite the thirty-year age difference. Both had deep-set blue eyes, high slanted cheeks, and identical worry lines across their brows. When Glen explained the purpose of Sullivan's visit, the worry lines deepened.

The older woman shook her head vigorously. “No fight. Mistake.”

“Your husband ended up in the hospital,” Sullivan said.

“Sick.” The woman tapped her heart.

“Mama, the guy who attacked him is in trouble again,” Glen interjected. “That's why the officer's asking.”

“Trouble? What trouble?” the mother asked. Stubborn as a mule, this one, Sullivan thought. The true immigrant grit with which Canada was built.

“I'm afraid I can't—” He began but was cut off by the daughter's gasp.

“My God! Dad! Could he have hurt Dad?”

“Are you saying something happened to your father?”

Both women exchanged quick looks.

“He's missing,” Glen said flatly.

“No, no, no,” the mother snapped. “Gone to friend.”

Once again, the son-in-law refused to play along. “He left two days ago. He received a phone call Saturday afternoon, got dressed, said he was going out to meet a friend and never came back.”

“Old friend,” the mother repeated. “He went to help old friend. He come back.”

Sullivan did some quick calculations. Saturday afternoon was the day he and Green had been in Renfrew asking questions about the assault. The day they interviewed the resentful and reluctant cousin Karl Dubroskie.

“What's the friend's name?”

Glen had no idea, but an argument ensued in Polish between the two women which Glen watched with bemusement. The gist seemed to be the mother's refusal to supply the police with any names. Sullivan sighed. With all the fear and distrust, this was going to take longer than he'd imagined. He forced himself to sit back on the couch and be patient. When he could get a word in edgewise, he tried to reassure the mother that her husband was not in any trouble, nor were any of his friends, but it was vitally important that the police know what really happened in the assault.

The woman was unconvinced. “My Josef not want trouble. He's good man, work hard. Good citizen.”

Sullivan assured her that immigrants like herself and her husband were the backbone of the country and rarely caused trouble for the police. He wished everyone worked as hard as new Canadians. The flattery worked, and the woman's face finally softened. She began to nod in agreement, and her English improved markedly.

“Canada is wonderful country. Here, you work hard, get better life. Not like Poland, small group of people have power and money, give to friends, keep other people down.”

Sullivan quickly assessed how to proceed. He seemed to have hit a roadblock in finding out about Gryszkiewicz's disappearance, but here was an opportunity to explore another important avenue in the investigation. Green thought that Walker's death was connected to events in wartime Europe and that the fight between Walker and Josef Gryszkiewicz had its roots in their mutual past. He needed to know that past, and perhaps here was the small opening he could use.

He began carefully. “I know times were difficult in Poland during the war, and even after. When did you come to Canada?”

“Nineteen fifty-nine.” Without further prodding, she launched into her story. It was disjointed and inelegant, but her pride shone through. Her husband had been an anticommunist, and after the war when the Soviets took over, he'd been blacklisted and was unable to find work. Only those who joined the communist party and had the right connections got ahead. Others like him had been arrested and sent to work camps in Russia, so he decided to escape. They were both young, in love, but as yet without children, so he contacted some friends he'd made during the war who were now in South America and helping dissidents escape. They were smuggled out of the country and across the border into West Germany in the back of a truck. Her eyes shone like a young girl's as she relived their moment of triumph.

“Russian soldiers very stupid. Joined party for job, liked money and vodka. Josef 's friends pay money to them, no problem, they never even open truck.”

“Why did you choose Canada?”

“Friends in South America find cousin here. Say Canada good place for Josef, he know steel.”

“So your husband had a good trade back in Poland?”

Her chin jutted out stubbornly as she shook her head. Josef had been the youngest child of a poor widowed mother. His father had died in the First World War, and his mother did housecleaning for a rich family in Ozorkow. She raised six children in a two-room shack in the centre of the town. There was no money for school, and he'd been forced to drop out after about four grades. He came to Canada with just the shirt on his back, and he sweated it out in the steel mill. But now her children were Canadians, had professions and could live in a house like this.

She rose to pick up a picture from the piano and held it out to him. “Our son. Doctor. In Ozorkow, never.”

Dutifully, Sullivan studied the young man in a graduation gown who gazed directly into the camera. Chiselled jaw, steely blue eyes, no hint of a smile. A determined young man, Sullivan thought, perhaps a chip off the old block. But as eager as the woman was to crow about the present, he needed her to stay in Ozorkow a while longer, to give him a picture of the town which her husband and Walker may have shared.

“I grew up on a farm near a small town myself,” he said. “All the farmers brought their goods there, there was a creamery and a couple of mills, and most people lived simple lives. No one got rich, but we all stuck together. Was Ozorkow like that?”

She nodded. “Very poor. Some rich people own business like bank, shop, mill like you say. They have big houses. But people stay where born, with own…” For the first time her English failed her, and she turned to her daughter for help.

“People stayed in the communities where they'd grown up,” her daughter said. “And with their own kind. It wasn't like Canada, where all the ethnic groups mix together.”

The mother bobbed her head vigorously. “Lot of anger between peoples. And in the war, was very bad. Germans, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, all on different sides.”

Sullivan listened with half an ear while he formulated his crucial question. Now he saw his chance to slip it in, casually, as if from idle curiosity. “The man your husband was attacked by, did they fight about something that happened back then in Ozorkow?”

“Oh, no,” the woman said, “they didn't even know each other in Ozorkow.”

Sullivan waited, keeping his face deadpan. Flustered, she rushed on to cover her mistake. “How could Josef know him? He was son of cleaning woman!”

To that point Glen had been sitting quietly, letting his mother-in-law handle herself, since she was finally being cooperative. Now, out of the corner of his eye, Sullivan saw him rise from the chair and slip out of the room. Sullivan kept his eyes resolutely on the mother. “And who was the other man?”

“I—I not know him. Josef not know. Josef poor boy, not even have shoes, his mother had to clean for Jews—”

“Mama,” said the daughter quickly, “the Sergeant isn't blaming Tata. He's just trying to find out information on the assault, remember?”

Sullivan backed off. With the mother now in full retreat and the daughter running interference, he was unlikely to get more, but he had his hint. Eugene Walker and Josef Gryszkiewicz had known each other in Ozorkow before the war, and the division between them ran deep.

“That's right,” he said. “But like your daughter, I am concerned that there may be a connection with his disappearance. I think you should report his disappearance to the Hamilton Police.”

“No police.”

He tried to explain that the police helped with missing persons all the time, especially elderly people who had become confused, but she shook her head.

“No disappear,” she insisted. “With friend.” But now her eyes were full of tears.

At that moment, Glen reappeared in the doorway, stopping them all in their tracks. He was sickly pale. “Actually, Ma, I don't think he's with a friend.”

“Why?”

“Because when he left, he took my target pistol with him.”

*    *    *

In The Place Next Door, the waiters were cleaning tables all around them and the last of the other patrons was paying his bill. Sullivan downed the last dregs of his draught and pushed away his plate with a belch of satisfaction. Every gram of meat had been picked from the bone.