Florian's Gate (38 page)

“Things were quite fluid and confused after the war. Our curator had thought it would be a matter of months before he could slip away to the West in some delegation, and there find a buyer for the original. Questions would not have been asked in the West. Even from within our Soviet-made cell we knew that there was such a place as a Swiss bank vault,
where buyers could be brought to view a work, with absolute secrecy as to the seller's identity. The forgery in Cracow would immediately be denounced, and the experts would cluck and say they suspected it all along, and would quietly blame the Soviets' artistic judgment for having thought it a true Rubens in the first place.

“But the curator was not permitted to leave. He knew too much about art, about what art the Soviets had stolen and what had been confiscated during the war and never returned. He was also a little too outspoken for the regime's own good. And so they denied his application for a passport, and posted him to the art history museum in Kielce.”

“I've never heard of it,” Jeffrey said.

“Hardly anyone ever has. It is a small provincial town—for a man such as him, it was a Polish Siberia. He died soon after, never having exchanged the Rubens for his freedom. A few days after his death, I received a visit from my new curator, who warned me that a factory job at the Lenin Steelworks awaited anyone in our section who ever tried to escape.”

Jeffrey had trouble getting out the words. “Where is the Rubens now?”

The old man shrugged. “I imagine the curator hid it.”

“Where?”

Henryk reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. “If I wanted to hide this coin, I could put it here, under the sugar bowl. But there is always the risk that someone will come by and move the bowl and find my coin.”

He reached back into his pocket, pulled out a handful of change, and placed the single coin in along with the others. “But if I place my coin here, no one would pay it any attention. I would be the only one to know that it had any special value.”

“It's still in the museum,” Jeffrey breathed. “He put it in a crate with false markings and stored it somewhere in a cellar.”

“It would not be questioned,” the old man said.

“And you've found it,” Jeffrey pressed.

Henryk looked Jeffrey square in the eye. “I would so very much like to see Paris before I die.”

CHAPTER 20

On the way to their first appointment the following day, they stopped at a crossroads where Jeffrey found himself staring at a soot-darkened entrance to an apartment house. A middle-aged man had pried open vast double doors and set down a chair. He had no teeth, so his chin almost met the tip of his nose. One shoulder looked sawn off, leaving a sharp slope that began at his neck and ended with his rib cage. He eyed the passersby with a narrowed squint, showing no reaction, following them in one direction, then taking hold of another with his rheumy eyes and following them back as far as he could see.

When the light changed and they drove on, Jeffrey found he could not leave behind the image of that man's slanted frame, nor the lines that had turned his face old far before his time. “I don't understand how there can be so many people with such awful health problems. It's like a trip back to the Dark Ages.”

Katya's voice took on the tone of the patient teacher. “Will you do something for me?”

“Sure. Anything.”

“Think of the times in your life when you had to have surgery.”

“Okay. Do you want me to tell you?”

“If you like.”

“I had my tonsils and adenoids out when I was a kid. I broke my leg and it had to be set by surgery when I was fourteen. Let's see, I had problems with my wisdom teeth and they finally decided to put me under to take them out. I think that's all. Oh, and I tore a tendon in my shoulder playing touch football in college and they had to sew it back.”

“Okay,” Katya said. “Now imagine that each one of these is a major calamity, a life-or-death risk.”

“A torn tendon?”

“What if there's no doctor? Worse yet, what if the doctor says your shoulder's not worth worrying about, go home and rest for a week. Or a month. Or six months. Then you can either apply for a pension or go back to work—it's your choice, but whatever you do you're going to have to live with the pain and weakness of a badly healed tendon for the rest of your life.”

Katya shook her head. “In a place like this, the smallest splinter in a child's hand can break a mother's health with worry.”

The
Komenda Wojewodzka
, or Cracow regional police headquarters, was on the main road running from town to the Nova Huta steelworks. From the gate it appeared to be a single ten-story high-rise. The driver pulled up in front of the main gates, spoke at length to Katya.

“He says that there are three identical buildings erected behind each other, so that from the street they won't seem so imposing,” she told Jeffrey. “And the rumor is that they go almost as far underground as they rise up.”

“I'm afraid to ask what's down there.”

“Prison cells and interrogation rooms,” she said, staring out the window at the buildings. “Come on, let's go before I lose my nerve.”

Their documents were carefully searched by the guard before calling the name Gregor had printed on a card. They waited under the guard's undisguised suspicion before a small officer with sad eyes and nervous gestures came up, shook hands, and ushered them through.

“This gentleman is responsible for the children's section,” Katya explained as they walked past the trio of the high-rises, and came to a vast paved lot filled with armed personnel carriers, riot buses with wire screens for windows, water cannons, bales of barbed wire, and mountains of crowd-control barriers.

“Tell him I hope he won't be offended, but this is the strangest place I've ever been to look at antiques.”

The man laughed, and the atmosphere lightened considerably. “He says that they heard of Gregor through the state orphanages where they sometimes take kids.”

“I thought it was supposed to be a secret.”

“It is,” the officer reassured him through Katya. “Not all of them know how Gregor gets his money, and those who do wouldn't dare endanger this income. For many of the village orphanages, Gregor's money is the difference between providing homes to needy children and catastrophe. They told me because they trust me. They know my first concern is for the children.”

At the far corner of the back lot stood a yellow cottage. Beside it was a small fenced-in lawn with a rusty slide and swing. He ushered them through the door and into the front office, its desk spilling papers, the air smelling of cheap disinfectant. They sat at the small conference table and accepted his offer of tea. He left and returned swiftly bearing the customary steaming glasses.

The police officer did not mince words. “It is impossible for an outsider to comprehend how crime is increasing,” Katya translated. “The criminal mind senses the growing lack of authority and
leaps
at the opportunity.”

“A lot of people have talked about this power vacuum,” Jeffrey said.

“It is on everybody's mind,” the officer agreed. “The new government is trying to rebuild a democratic process and at the same time dismantle the Communist power structure. You cannot imagine the problems this is causing. All laws passed under the Communists are now being questioned, which means that nobody is really sure what the laws will be tomorrow.

“The police situation is even worse. I was originally placed in the children's division, which other policemen call the nursery and say it's not real police work, because I refused to
join the Communist party. Now they have to replace most of the officers, all at the same time, with untrained people. Why? Because only party members could rise through the ranks.

“To make matters worse, there is a tremendous budget crisis. The government is basically broke. Our own police budget has been cut thirty percent in two months, while in this same two-month period, prices have almost doubled. And so with an exploding crime problem, our hands are being chained. This week, for example, the Cracow police did not have enough money to buy petrol for their cars. All but the emergency police had to do their beats on foot. No Cracow police car has radio. At the same time, the criminals are driving around in stolen Mercedes with car radios and telephones, and more and more of them are getting away.”

“What about the kids?” Jeffrey asked.

The officer blew out his cheeks. “Families are being hit hard by rising prices and unemployment. The pressures are breaking some of them apart. We see a lot of young children being either kicked out or running away. The mafia groups are using young children for a lot of their thefts because sentences are lighter and the children will basically work for food and a place to sleep.”

“That's what you call them? Mafia?” Jeffrey interrupted.

The officer smiled and replied through Katya, “Too much American TV. Organized gangs are mafia. Police officers are called Smurfs. Detectives like me are Kojaks.”

The smile disappeared. “At the same time that the government has a money crunch, housing and living costs have skyrocketed. This has hit orphanages, hospitals, foster homes, everything that relies on state money. Last month, orphanages in the Cracow area had to cut down on the amount of food each child could have.”

He leaned across the table, his eyes boring into Jeffrey. “One thing I want you to understand. There are police, good men, who have gone on the take. I can't blame them anymore. They have families to take care of, and they've seen their salaries
cut by thirty, sometimes even fifty percent. But I want you to know that every cent I will get from this is going to our children. They have cut my budget to almost nothing. I don't have enough to buy clothes for the ones in rags, or feed them.”

“I believe you,” Jeffrey said solemnly.

The detective led them back through a pair of locked doors, down a hall opening into bunk-rooms and a kitchen-lounge. Jeffrey looked through wire-mesh windows and saw a number of children dressed in a variety of oversized, patched clothing. They looked extremely young.

As they walked, the officer continued. “There's a Russian mafia operating in Poland these days. They steal cars mostly—Mercedes, Volkswagens, BMWs, Audis are the favorites. We know some of the tactics now; any racket this big is bound to give some clues away over the months.”

He said something further to Katya, who nodded her agreement and then said to Jeffrey, “Every week there is an entire page of the local newspaper where they list in small print the car types, years, and license numbers of those stolen in the past seven days.”

“A big business,” Jeffrey replied.

“Very big, very organized,” the policeman agreed through Katya. “They have two normal ways of taking the cars across the border to Russia—that is, two we know of. Sometimes they pack the car in a wooden crate, put it in a big truck, and fill the remainder of the truck with potatoes. The border patrol can't empty every potato truck—there are dozens every day this time of year.

“The second way is to make copies of the customs seals used to close containers that have been checked and made ready for shipment. Then the day the ship leaves Gdansk for Russia, they load twenty or thirty last-minute containers, each with anywhere from one to three cars.”

Jeffrey asked, “Can't you get help from the Russian police?”

The man shrugged. “Interpol doesn't operate in Russia, and even if they did they wouldn't bother with such a small
matter as a car. Not now. Not when the rates of crimes involving bodily harm and death are rising like rockets. The thieves know they are relatively safe, and it is making them bolder. They have border guards between Germany and Poland who are now operating on the mafia payroll. When a nice car comes driving through, the guards ask the driver where he is going and where he plans to stay, and then they sell the information. The car is tracked until a good time and place arises for it to be stolen. Nowadays, however, the thieves swiftly become impatient. We're getting reports that they follow the car to a filling station or cafe, kill the driver and the family and anyone else in the car, rob the bodies, and drive away.”

He opened another pair of steel-rimmed doors and led them through the unkempt playground toward a metal shed. “Every week we are uncovering new scams. Last week, we learned that a group was repackaging used motor oil in false brand-name cans. This week it is a major Swedish company selling frozen fish. The market has been slow because not so many people can afford their prices. So when the expiration date was reached, they repackaged the fish into boxes and bags with new expiration dates and shipped it out as fresh caught.”

He unlocked the shed door. “My men busted a ring of children used to steal household items. This was never a problem before—probably because so few houses had anything worth stealing. We were led to a warehouse full of radios, televisions, everything. We also found this.”

The officer swung open the door, reached to an upper ledge and switched on a flashlight. The yellow beam hit upon a drinking horn. Jeffrey took the light, stooped over, and entered the shed.

The horn itself came from a truly giant bull; it was well over two feet long if the curve were straightened. The horn was not chased in silver, it was
sealed
in the metal, inside and out. Three royal emblems were stamped around the horn's
mouth. A miniature knight knelt beneath the horn upon a rocky ground of solid silver, and with his back and both hands offered the horn cup to his master. From the knight's dress and the ornate hand-carved battle scenes along the horn's silvered sides, Jeffrey guessed it to be from the early sixteenth century. Gingerly he hefted the piece, guessed its weight at thirty pounds, most of it silver.

From behind him the police officer said through Katya, “I have fought with myself over this for five days. I cannot answer the questions of right and wrong. I can see no further than the needs we have. I must feed these children. I must clothe them. I must give the sick ones medicine. I must heat the building at night. Some are criminals, yes, but they still are children, not animals. The government cannot help me, so I must do it myself. No one anywhere in Poland has declared such a piece missing, I have checked. So you must sell it. But not for me. For my children.”