The Day of the Lie (40 page)

‘Is this for the trial?
Is this going to bring him down? Am I part of it again?’

‘I hope so, Irina. Do
you want a hot drink? A cold one?’

‘Nothing. Will it help?’
She pointed at the box in Anselm’s hands. ‘I don’t know I want to understand
him, that’s all. If we understand someone, we can reach them … far into
them, even if it’s something they don’t want; often without them knowing.’

‘Why do you want to
reach him? No one can reach him. I should know’

‘Because I’m concerned
he might try to escape the grip of the court.’

‘How? No. It’s not
possible.’

‘I’m just being
cautious.’ He smiled an assurance into her darkness and glimpsed the hygienic
hair net. ‘You’ve helped me again, Irina. You reminded me of a truth beloved by
Mr Frenzel. A man’s mistakes, his past? They can work like a key to his future.
I want to make sure Róża can turn the lock.’

She sniffed and reached
into her sleeve for a handkerchief. A sneeze followed. ‘This is my trial, too,
you know I’m there, watching every day Working nights. I don’t need the sleep.’
Woodenly she held out a cold hand. ‘I’ve got to go.

Abruptly she turned and
hurried away out of the light and off the carpet, heading back to the queues of
people wanting a Big Mac. Anselm almost ran outside after her. But he didn’t
because he had nothing to offer; he wanted to give her something — so much more
than a hot or cold drink — but all he had was thanks for the tip about
mistakes, and he’d furnished that already.

Back at his desk
overlooking the glittering skyline, he rang Sebastian. Of course, there might
be nothing of interest in the brown box. But if there was … well, time was on
the short side. Róża was due to give evidence at 10.30 a.m. the next
morning.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Anselm and Sebastian reached Róża’s
flat shortly before 11 p.m. The room shocked Anselm by its simplicity: a table,
some chairs, scraps of furniture, a mirror, a standing lamp with a yellow
shade. He looked again … a bullet on a shelf beneath a mirror. She made tea,
not speaking, her soft footfalls pattering around the kitchen. The place was
tidy and clean: the surroundings of an ordered mind; the ambience of someone
who’d tamed restlessness.

‘We have to do to him
what he has done to others,’ said Sebastian. ‘We have to use his past against
him.’

‘Have to?’ The question
displayed a certain moral revulsion in Róża which unsettled Anselm. He’d
had no such sensibility.

‘It’s the only way’ said
Sebastian. ‘Otherwise I’m sure he’s going to take something out of Pavel’s file
— something made up, something planted before you left Mokotów We have to think
like that now; we have to act like it, too, just for tomorrow Afterwards—’

‘No other tomorrow will
ever be the same again,’ said Róża.

She sat at her dining
table, her black pullover drawing her into the shadows. The light from the lamp
was weak. Her face caught a faint glamour.

It was, of course,
incongruous to rely on any file as a guide to the truth. Despite appearances,
Father Nicodem’s was dramatically incomplete and utterly misleading. Even when
the papers gave a full picture, like that of Edward, the image was distorted.
But the rub was this: truths were in there. They might need stripping down and
cleaning up, but the files contained information. And information, as Brack
knew, was power.

‘Róża, we have to
get to him first,’ continued Sebastian. He was still wearing his suit. The tie
was loose, the top button open. ‘You should meet him. Before you give evidence.
I’m convinced that—’

‘Tell me what’s in the
file,’ said Róża, in a voice of strained patience.

‘Then we’ll talk about
tomorrow’

Sebastian had ploughed through every
document generated by the secret police machinery between 1948 and 1989. He’d
read Brack’s application form, a memo from Moscow, appraisals by Major Strenk
and a string of increasingly critical internal reports from 1965 onwards. It
seemed that the further Brack got away from the Stalinist culture of his early
manhood, the more out of step he became with the system he served. Promotions
ground to a halt. By 1982 they weren’t allowed to beat Politicals any more. He’d
been out of his depth, no doubt. But that was all by-the-by Sebastian had
distilled the facts into two broad areas. The first was small and important, if
only to explain Brack’s obsessions. It was all set out in his application form.

‘He was born in Polana,’
said Sebastian. ‘He mentions the place several times. It’s as though, looking
back, Polana was the safe place, as if the family should have stayed there and
everything would have been different. But Leon, his father, brought them all to
Warsaw He left behind the safe and conventional because he was a man with a
mission greater than any individual’s pursuit of happiness. Leon’s life had
been given to the oppressed workers. By the late thirties he was a leading light
in the Communist Party. A man with ideas and ambition. The Party was dissolved
in thirty-eight by the Comintern but Leon appears to have reinvented himself,
surviving the purges of the time — purges his son appears to have known nothing
about. Leon, above all, was a man who—’

‘—made toys out of old
bits of wood and plumbing.’ Róża spoke quietly.

‘Sorry?’ Sebastian
glanced at Anselm.

‘Toys. He once made a
musket out of a wooden spindle and … I forget.’

‘Who did?’

‘Leon.’

Sebastian nodded
sympathetically Anselm watched Róża, sensing, like a hesitant mariner, the
approach of something immense beneath the surface of rising waves. It wasn’t
dangerous, but it had power. Whatever it was slipped away and Sebastian was
talking again.

‘The Germans invaded in—’

‘September nineteen
thirty-nine,’ supplied Róża, archly.

‘Sorry, absolutely You
know better than me.’ Sebastian took the rebuke but he didn’t slow down. ‘And
they immediately began tracking down their ideological enemies, prominent
amongst whom, of course, stood Leon Brack.’

Leon and his family went
into hiding. What happened next was not entirely clear. Brack’s application
form was silent on the matter, but at some point he was hidden in an orphanage
where he remained for the duration of the war. Róża’s orphanage. He never
saw his parents again. Shortly after Brack had been spirited away they’d been
denounced and deported.

‘She cooked fish in
lemonade,’ added Róża, and again Anselm sensed that swell of power deep
beneath the water. ‘It makes the fish sweet.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Sebastian,
uncertainly ‘I’ll give that a try.’

‘How does all this
affect the trial?’

Sebastian joined his
hands into a sort of wedge, pointing forwards. ‘Directly it doesn’t … but it
gives the background to your only chance to silence him.’

‘Tell me how this
affects the trial,’ repeated Róża, her voice lowered ever so slightly.

‘Brack joined the secret
police believing that his parents had died in Mauthausen. He served the cause
year on year, motivated, I am sure, by genuine socialist convictions. For some
reason the focus of his drive and grief came to centre upon the Shoemaker,
almost certainly because his ideas were the complete antithesis of his own. The
Shoemaker was exactly what he set himself up to be: the challenger to
Communist ideology. And Brack was looking for him in nineteen forty-eight and
he didn’t stop until nineteen eighty-nine. Between times he—’

‘Shot my husband and
Stefan Binkowski. How is all this related to tomorrow morning?’

‘Everything he did — his
entire life — rests upon a tragic misunderstanding and a profound deceit.’
Sebastian was leaning forward over his wedged hands. ‘If you tell him the
truth, the naked truth laid out in his file, I think he’ll lose heart. I don’t
think he’ll want to go on. I think it will break him.’

Róża stood up and
walked aimlessly into the middle of the room, lost in thought. She turned her
eyes on to the mirror … or the bullet. Curiously the earlier impression of
old age and round shouldered weariness — evident only a matter of moments ago
— had suddenly vanished, as if dropped on the carpet, sloughed off when no one
was looking. She returned to the table focused and erect.

‘Do you have the file?’

‘Yes.’ Sebastian tapped
the shoulder bag, heaped at his feet.

‘Let me see it.’

For the next hour or so Róża
sat absorbed in her reading, slowly turning the pages, while Sebastian made
quiet remarks, like a librarian, pointing up key passages and documents of
special interest. She pored over the early appraisals written by Major Strenk.
She stared, expressionless, at the NKVD memo from Moscow, the blunt tool (said
Sebastian) that would, if used, stun Brack like an animal in an abattoir.

‘Yes, I’m sure it would,’
she replied, pushing the closed file towards Sebastian.

‘I’ll organise a meeting
for tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘But not with Brack,’
clarified Róża, with a quick wag from her finger. ‘There will be no
meeting with Brack. It won’t be necessary.

‘Who, then?’

‘My Friends. Everyone
who’s come this far with me, but leave out Madam Czerny I don’t think she’d
appreciate what I’m planning to do, even though it’s a kind of justice.’

Stray filtered light patterned the walls of
Anselm’s hotel bedroom. Shards with soft edges, like the design in the carpet
downstairs. They came like echoes from the city on the other side of the
windows. What was Róża going to do? Why had she changed so dramatically?
These were the main questions but, ever ill-disciplined, Anselm’s curiosity
strayed along a couple of byways. He was trying to work out if they led back to
the main road.

First, Róża had
evidently known Brack long before she’d been interrogated in Mokotów They’d
known each other during the war, at Saint Justyn’s. Would it be stretching
probability to infer that they’d been more than friends? Anselm thought not.
Frenzel had sniffed something personal in Brack’s obsession with catching Róża.
A lost or failed love, that’s the fruit he’d detected, drawn in through those
flaring nostrils. The connoisseur of old mistakes had smelled a hidden blunder.
Was Brack simply Brack — at least in part — because, through some wrong
turning, he’d lost his hold on Róża? A hold which he’d tried to reinstate
through murder and a perverted scheme that left him as the father of her child
— even as he convinced himself that he’d pulled the trigger for the sake of a
better set of ideas?

The second byway intrigued
Anselm even more, because it represented a short step back in time: Brack must
have met Mr Lasky He was there in the orphanage, guiding Róża with his
homespun maxims. Brack had told Strenk about Róża, but there’d been no
mention of the caretaker. Why? Because — Anselm concluded — he’d been grateful.
In the epoch where naming names was a means to salvation, he’d shown a hidden,
redundant loyalty — even to a dead man, executed by the Nazis. But why
grateful? Presumably for saving his life. This byway extremely narrow and now
overgrown, led to the person whom Róża had met as a girl … Otto, a youth
separated from his family because of his father’s political convictions,
someone capable of gratitude and love. And who, tomorrow, would meet Róża’s
kind of justice.

What was she planning?
How did the all the roads come together? How would she take account of who he
was, set against who he’d become and what he’d done?

Chapter Forty-Eight

The first Anselm knew of the hullabaloo was
when he saw armed police running past the room where he was waiting for the meeting
with Róża. Celina, John and Sebastian followed him out into the corridor.
Shouts came echoing from round a corner, court officials walked into view with
strained urgency Sebastian intercepted one of them with a pull to the elbow He
listened and his mouth fell open.

‘Róża’s been
arrested,’ he gasped, swinging around. ‘She’s come with a bullet in her
handbag. A live round, for God’s sake:

After further frantic
enquiries it transpired she’d been taken to a holding cell two floors down.
Strenuous representations from Sebastian, Celina and John, with a brisk
appearance from Madam Czerny eventually secured her release after forty-five
minutes. Yes, criminal charges might be pressed. No, you can’t have it back
when you leave the building. Yes, the court will be informed of Róża’s
conduct.

‘Why did you bring it?’
exclaimed Sebastian when they were settled in the conference room. ‘What was
going through your mind?’

‘I just wanted to return
it,’ she said, completely unflustered. ‘I never managed to find a use for it:

‘Return it? Who to?’

Róża didn’t answer.
She looked different … younger than the night before. Just as striking was
her appearance: the
Jaeger
dress had been left in a wardrobe, along with
the accessories. She’d put on rough and ready clothes, as if she were off to
the market: black woollen trousers that had lost their front pleats; a loose
grey woollen jumper, darned at the elbows; a white blouse. On the floor by her
feet was a plastic bag bulging with old newspapers. One of the more
enthusiastic policemen had raised the possibility of poisoned ink. She was
lucky they’d returned it without insisting on forensic examination.

‘I was only thinking the
other day — when that professor from Kraków was describing the old days — I was
saying to myself, this isn’t really working.’

‘What isn’t?’ asked
Sebastian.

‘The trial. It’s just
not what I’d expected and hoped for. It’s narrow, somehow I can’t find myself
in what’s happening in the courtroom. It’s as though something’s missing. You
see, unless you were there, you can’t imagine what it was like. It was so much
worse than any list of wrongs. It was a climate. And I don’t want justice
simply for what happened to Pavel. It has to reach wider than his or my
experience.’