The Day of the Lie (10 page)

‘The file ought to
contain everything compiled by this unit to catch Róża,’ said John,
fidgeting with a button on the cuff of his jacket. ‘And that would include the
name of the informer.’

‘Whom Róża has, in
effect, protected from Otto Brack,’ mumbled the Prior, recapitulating.

‘Yes,’ said John.

‘Because if she accuses
Brack he, in turn, will accuse his own informer.’

‘Exactly’

‘Who would then be
exposed for what they were and are.’

‘Which Róża, until
now, has refused to contemplate.’

‘For fear they’d take
desperate measures to avoid the shame.’

This was Róża’s
dilemma, neatly summarised. For a long while, the two monks and their guest
meditated on Otto Brack’s scheme to avoid justice, their heavy silence almost
certainly shared by Sylvester who, ear to the door, was straining to catch the
Prior’s considered response. Finally, Larkwood’s reluctant superior made a kind
of speech. If Anselm hadn’t sought the conference that morning he’d have
thought the Prior had prepared his words the night before. He spoke
deliberately with measured phrasing:

‘Such is the ingenious
plan of Otto Brack. But Róża’s is all the braver, all the more daring and
all the more laden with risk. Her aim is nothing less than to turn Brack’s
world-view upside down. She’s placing all her hopes in the hands of the one
person who has everything to lose. Brack, it seems, has no faith in the human
condition, in
humanity.
He has never contemplated that his informer
might be prepared, if asked, to face their past. Róża, on the other hand,
holds firm to a belief that I sometimes fear is waning … that a longing for
truth lingers in every man. This, I suspect, is why she dares — at last — to
seek their co-operation. She thinks they’ll agree to a manner of dying. For
their own sake if not for hers.’ The Prior adjusted his glasses and a trace of
Glasgow pragmatism entered his voice. ‘As with any great endeavour the risk of
failure far exceeds the chances of success. Someone has to reach out and tip
the balance. Someone with the right kind of experience.’

‘My sentiments precisely’
endorsed John.

‘Anything else?’

‘No:

‘We’re all agreed then.’

Anselm frowned, not
quite following the drift of accord that had left him behind. Puzzled, he
watched the Prior worm a hand into his chest habit pocket and take out a diary
and the chewed stub of a pencil. Flicking the pages, he said, ‘Anselm, I take
it you’ve persuaded more than one criminal to enter a guilty plea?’

‘Indeed I have.’

It was an art. They had
to come out of the discussion believing abject surrender was a smart move. He
coughed modestly.

‘Well, you better go to
Warsaw and read that file. The sooner you find this informer and get to work
the better. It seems Róża needs your kind of help.’

Anselm’s mouth dropped
open. What had happened to ‘monastery walls’? It was the Prior’s phrase, used
to emphasise the importance of the enclosure, and not just when restless monks
fancied a jaunt up the road for some ostensibly worthwhile purpose. The remark
enshrined the withdrawn nature of Larkwood’s communal life, its witness of
recollection and stability to people forever on the move. And yet here he was,
trading dates and times with John, resolving incidental details.

‘I’ll meet all the
expenses,’ insisted John. ‘There’s a reasonable hotel right by the IPN:

‘We’ll contribute.’

‘No, really’

‘Three days?’

‘A week, he might as
well visit the place.’

‘Call it ten. We’ll pay
the difference.’

‘I think not.’

At the close of the
meeting, the two negotiators shook hands and, with a curiously solemn nod to
Anselm, the Prior disappeared through the arched door that led to the cloister.
It was as though his companions had just finished one of their old walks, when
John had been overrun by despair and Anselm had kept watch from a distance. His
presence had finally been acknowledged.

Quite apart from the ‘monastic
walls’ aspect, the Prior’s decision had been unprecedentedly swift. Ordinarily
he didn’t sleep on a proposal; he hibernated with it, emerging after some
private winter of reflection. But now, without the slightest equivocation, he’d
agreed to Anselm acting on John’s behalf. Leaving his old friend in the parlour,
Anselm hurried over to Sylvester who was back behind his desk, eyeing the
telephone as if it were a child that might talk back.

‘Were you listening?’
whispered Anselm, leaning down.

‘How dare you.’
Sylvester lurched for his walking stick as if it were a Lee Enfield with fixed
bayonet.

‘Why did he let me go
without a fight?’ pursued Anselm, fearlessly ‘Can’t you guess? Or are you just
plain stupid?’

‘There are two schools
of thought on that one. But seriously why?’

‘Exodus Twenty-two.’

‘Yer wot?’

‘Defend the widow and
the orphan:

Anselm gave a knowing
sigh, but before he could pull away Sylvester gestured him closer, nodding
towards John. ‘I’ve seen him before.’

‘You have.’

‘Thought so.

‘Countless times.’

‘Really? Well, I forgot
to ask … was he ever in the scouts?’

‘No.’

‘Ah, that’s a pity’ The
Watchman tried to fathom a boyhood without a knife, a ball of string and nights
under canvas. ‘It would have made all the difference.’

‘Steady on, he was still
the outdoor type,’ objected Anselm defensively ‘Took his trombone into the
bush, damn it. Marched through nettles.’

‘Good heavens.’ The old
man frowned, reluctantly won over. ‘All right, you can tell him.’

‘Tell him what?’

‘That as a lad I met
Baden Powell. At Olympia. Shook his hand, I did. Do you know, it was during the
Second Matabele War that he first…’

After lunch Anselm drove John to Cambridge.
They waited on the platform, John tapping an erratic rhythm on his toecaps.
Anselm wanted to snatch the half-white stick and break it over his knee. A sort
of chasm had been growing between them since they’d left the parlour. It had
been filled by practical chat and Baden Powell and, finally, that
tat-tat-tatting. But both of them knew that something of importance had been
left unsaid. As the train approached, Anselm took a deep breath and stepped
back nearly three decades.

‘Do you remember I asked
for a character witness? Someone who could speak to your professional
integrity?’

‘Yes:

In the car, Anselm had
suffered a sudden and terrible premonition that John still loved her; that part
of his desire to fulfil Róża’s appeal was a crazy attempt to somehow win
her back. He didn’t dare say it, and he couldn’t say it now. But he sensed he
was close to the reason for their separation.

‘Did you ask Celina?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘She refused.’

‘Do you know why?’

John’s stick made a sort
of full stop and the carriages crashed along the rails. ‘I never asked. She’d
gone before I could pop the question.’

Chapter Eleven

It was not, perhaps, the most prudent
decision. Having decided to brush up his German, Anselm had turned not to the
likes of
Der Spiegel
or any number of crackling long-wave radio
programmes, but to the ruminations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Drawn by the remark,
‘I don’t know why we’re here but I’m pretty sure that it isn’t to enjoy
ourselves’ he’d made a cursory examination of selected oeuvres (expecting more
laughs) only to find the insight unambiguously confirmed. It was therefore with
mild relief that he abandoned a knotty paragraph in
Philosophische
Untersuchungen
to answer the library telephone. It was from the Prior. Ten
minutes later they were on the Bluebell Walk, heading towards Our Lady’s Lake.
The summons had been far from unexpected. Since John’s departure two days
earlier, Larkwood’s guardian had been observing Anselm across the nave with a
paternal, subdued disquiet.

‘I want you to be
vigilant, Anselm,’ began the Prior, watching where he was putting his feet.
Branches had fallen during the recent bout of high winds. His solemn manner
evoked the conference, erasing the interlude. ‘I don’t wish to offend you, but
regardless of your many years in the criminal courts, you have no experience of
the place to which you’re now going and the dangers it holds. It’s not the Old
Bailey, with hefty policemen at the door. Nor is it a prison cell where you’re
protected by that strange respect which even the most violent men hold for
representatives of the law, including those who propose to demonstrate their
guilt. You’ll be entering the world of Otto Brack, this frightening man who
learned how to bring about evil by exploiting someone who is good, laying — in
part — the evil at their door. I have never come across that before. You must
take special precautions.’

Anselm was unnerved by
the Prior’s declamatory tone. It was reserved for funerals. He was surprised,
too, by the warning. The plan was to fly to Warsaw, open a file, have a quick
read, eat some pickled cucumber, drink himself senseless, and then come home,
The chances of mishap were remote. He said so.

‘I hope you’re right,’
replied the Prior. ‘Perhaps you can walk into Brack’s world and walk out again
unscathed, but I have my doubts. Twisted people lead twisted lives and the
roads they build around them are never straight and true. You might find
yourself on some back street wondering where to turn next.’

The evening sun filtered
through the copper leaves overhead. Water glinted at the end of the winding
track. Listening to the fall of each other’s feet, they stepped out from under
the trees on to a pebble beach that skirted the edge of the lake. To one side
lay a blackened railway sleeper, sunk deep into the bank by Sylvester when he
was a young man who couldn’t stop talking. He’d been banished here by his
novice master to work alone and learn the infinite vocabulary of silence. It
was here, too, that Father Herbert Moore, one of the founding fathers, had
broken the rule against speaking to suggest a name for the derelict buildings
under restoration, for this hidden school dedicated to sane living. He’d
uttered one word: ‘Larkwood’.

‘You mentioned
precautions,’ said Anselm, hitching his habit to sit by the Prior. He picked up
a handful of stones and threw one towards the reflections of yellow and crimson
cloud. John had sat here thirty years back when the Prior didn’t need glasses.
Anselm had wondered what the Prior had been saying.

‘First, your task isn’t
simply to find a name. Anyone can read a word upon the page. You need to look
far deeper. You can’t arrange to meet this informer until you know why they
betrayed Róża. They, like Brack, occupy a world very different to yours,
but you must enter it, seeking to understand its logic, its values, its Gods
and idols … its empty spaces that long for meaning. All you will have are the
papers in the file. Peel back the words. Look inside.’

Anselm nodded and threw
another pebble along the same trajectory as the first. The water creased and
the colours ran from the splash of light and dark.

‘Remember they have
lived unchallenged for over thirty years, continued the Prior. ‘They’ll have
restructured their past to make it manageable, perhaps even attractive and
virtuous. We all do. We all write these narratives so that we have something
good to read when we wake up at night, troubled and unsure. You need to find a
better story. That’s the only way to bring them back on to Róża’s side of
tragedy and injustice.’

Anselm nodded again and
lobbed another stone.

‘Secondly, bring this
place with you. Bring all it represents and means. Though you leave the
enclosure keep faith with the rhythms of our day This is your best precaution on
entering Brack’s world. I don’t know why, but it changes what you do, how you
see things and what you say It’s what separates you from many a better
detective.’

The Prior had finished.
He picked up a dried twig and cast it high in the air. It landed almost without
a sound, floating on the water’s surface, barely visible against the reflected
evening sky. Beyond, on a plinth in the middle of the lake, the statue of a
woman looked down in calm resignation, isolated but resplendent.

‘Be careful, Anselm,’ he
said, quietly ‘Don’t let Brack know that you’re coming.’

A week later, after Lauds, Anselm knelt
down in the nave to receive Larkwood’s traditional blessing for the travelling
monk. Surrounded by hunched figures who almost certainly weren’t listening, the
Prior commended his son to the dispensations of Providence, adding a few
suggestions for compliance with best practice: to guide his steps, thoughts,
and deeds, and procure a safe return. In the afternoon Anselm met John for
lunch at the airport. They sat in a bar, Anselm stirring a preposterously large
carton of strong coffee, John — forbidden by law to smoke — nervously chewing a
match, his hand squeezing a pack of crumpled Black Russians. As if in tandem
with the Prior, he, too, had come with warnings and a kind of blessing.

‘You need to understand
where you’re going,’ he said. ‘It’s no ordinary place. The people in the
street … they buy bread and milk, like me and you, but they breathe a
different air. It carries the memory of ancestral insurrection — seventeen
ninety-four, eighteen thirty, eighteen sixty—three; it carries the heat of
recent destruction. Brack, Róża, the informer … the Shoemaker, the
Friends … they all know the taste of history. It set them against each other
in a fight to the death.

‘During the Second World
War, eighty-five per cent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed, seven
hundred thousand people perished in the displacement, fighting and massacres.
There were two uprisings and then the districts west of the Vistula were
systematically blown apart street by street. The suffering was apocalyptic, the
latter stages observed by the Soviets calmly eating borscht on the eastern
banks of the river.