The Day of the Lie (22 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ murmured
Anselm. ‘I don’t understand … I’m a stranger … I’m just passing by.’

On hearing his voice,
realising that he didn’t speak her language, she suddenly stopped crying. Her
emotions were sucked back inwards. A numb, glazed appearance displaced the
turbulence. Looking through Anselm, she pushed past him on to the street and
wandered aimlessly away.

Anselm looked down and
saw that his hands were shaking. Powerlessness doesn’t erase a sense of responsibility,
and he felt he owed something to the woman whose cries had fallen on ears
attuned to desperation but not meaning. She’d given him something important,
even if he didn’t recognise it. In a most dramatic and disturbing way, she was,
for him, Róża Mojeska. The past had returned to the present, and Anselm
had been there to see her walk away from Otto Brack. He’d seen all the women
walk out of all the prisons in the world.

At that very moment,
Anselm received a sort of kick to the stomach. Deconstructive insights aside,
he at last understood why he’d found something incongruous with Róża’s
statement. It was obvious, really.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The rich crimson carpet of the lobby bar
reminded Anselm of the fractured pattern in the restaurant, making him wonder
if Frenzel was nearby, listening while he licked his fingers. The interior
design people had plumped heavily for variants of red. Scarlet fixtures, ruby
lights, cherry napkins. The choice seemed incongruous. Anselm would’ve picked
green. Something to do with spring. Outside the evening sky was a tender, pale
orange, visible through vast glass panelling.

Before turning to the
question of money raised by Frenzel.’ Anselm decided to resume his last
conversation with Sebastian. The driven lawyer had listened on the phone to
Anselm’s anger and disgust with the former SB officer, but there’d been too
many moments of silence on the line and too few return shots of indignation.
Anselm had waited, bracing himself, but the ball had simply died on the other
side of the net. He wanted to know why He sensed a rift between them.

‘Strange man, Frenzel,’
began Anselm, pouring fizzy water into two glasses, making sure the
distribution was fair.

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t imagine how his
mind works.’

‘No.’

‘I’m not sure I want to.’

‘No.’

‘But I’m still
intrigued.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’

‘What about the dark
places? Don’t you want to understand why he does what he does?’

‘No.’

Dressed in tatty jeans,
split trainers and an expensive pink shirt, Sebastian looked as if he owned the
place and was thinking of selling. He sat, elbow on the chair rest, his hand
locked in his tousled black hair. Anselm advanced a little further.

‘You surprise me. Maybe
it’s just a monk’s view on to the mental engine, but I wouldn’t mind a quick
look beneath the bodywork to see the state of his shock-absorbers.’ Anselm
watched the irritation grow on Sebastian’s face. The lawyer reached for his
glass as if he didn’t like water.

‘He handled people’s
lives as if they were tools in a drawer,’ resumed Anselm, carelessly ‘He
blunted them, one by one, and then threw them away Even now he’d pick up some
chipped and broken file if he needed it to force open a window’

‘But he got results.’

‘Pardon?’

Anselm had arrived at
the fault line between them. He played out the surprise, giving Sebastian room
to show where he was standing and why.

‘What do you mean,
results?’

‘He found out what he
needed to know He opened windows. He got inside without having to kick down the
front door. The alarm didn’t go off. The kids were left sleeping upstairs.’

‘But at what cost?’

‘I suppose that depends
on who’s paying and what they got in return.’

Anselm’s bemusement was
genuine. He waited for enlightenment, sipping his water.

‘We, too, need to apply
some leverage, continued Sebastian, almost harshly ‘Maybe quite a lot. Maybe to
the point of damaging the house … waking up not just the kids but the
neighbours on all sides:

‘You mean
I
have
to apply some leverage.’

‘If it fell to me.’ I’d
pull with both hands But Róża didn’t ask for my help.’

‘Doesn’t that tell you
something?’

‘Like what?’

‘That she wants things
done differently. That she doesn’t want us to behave like
them.’

Sebastian put down his
glass, the water untasted. He became politely firm, repressing impatience like
a teacher tasked with instructing a dim fee-paying pupil whose parents he
couldn’t afford to upset. He raised his hands as if he were holding out the
bleeding obvious.

‘Look.’ Róża has
given us … you … a document designed to lead you to the door of an
informer. She thinks a quiet chat is all that it’ll take … a few well chosen
words out of everyone’s earshot. She wants the informer to take responsibility
for what they’ve done … and it’s crazy What she doesn’t understand is this:
the informer isn’t going to admit
anything,
even if we ask him nicely
You know, Father, blunted tools aren’t what they once were. There’s no longer
any point in handling them carefully.’

‘I don’t believe you
mean that.’

‘In these circumstances,
with this individual, I do.’

‘It isn’t what Róża
wants.’

‘It’s what Róża
needs.’ Sebastian appraised Anselm as if he, too.’ was eyeing up a tool for the
job. ‘For some reason, she pities them. You don’t have to. She needs
you
to
act differently She needs
you
to be merciless. Look —’ the teacher emerged
again, smiling woodenly, trying to wipe up the spilled impatience — we’re not
trying to understand the human condition, or work out why someone ticks in the
way that they do.’ we’re trying to bring Otto Brack to court. And to do that we
need the informer to play ball — this time for us. Subject to our rules and
timekeeping.’

‘And so we become like
Frenzel.’ after all?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we lose what sets
us apart.’

‘No, we don’t. We become
like them for the right reason. In the end, the world we’re fighting for is
better than the one they kick-started in the torture chambers. It’s as simple
as that. And if there’s a risk of getting dirty hands, well, frankly, there’s
no other way. This is the nasty business of law enforcement.’

As opposed to the
abstract pastures of monastic contemplation. Sebastian had the grace to keep
that conclusion to himself, but Anselm now fully understood the irritation he’d
detected on the telephone. And he wasn’t enjoying the elucidation, the
substance of which was that the mumbling monk might be swayed to compassion by
the calamity of human frailty; that the former barrister, softened by his
prayers, would neglect to confront FELIKS, or whoever, with the degree of
animosity required to secure his co-operation.

Sebastian hadn’t finished.

‘Whatever the pressures,
these low—life agent runners and their collaborators played
God
with
people’s lives for a benefit,’ he said.’ introducing an analogy that might
reach Anselm. He’d seen the blank face, not sure if it was scruple or
persisting incomprehension. ‘The runners got
information.
The collabos?
They’ve had their passport, their reprieve, their promotion. Now they have to
pay the people they robbed. We want our information.’ He sighed, still not
convinced that Anselm was ready for the exam. ‘Do you really think that an
appeal to conscience is enough? That remorse will come so cheaply, so easily?
Don’t you realise, this informer, whoever it is … he’s already watched Róża
grow old? He’s eaten at the same table and said
nothing.
He’s waiting
for her to die.’ Sebastian sat back, dragging a hand through his hair. ‘When
she’s gone, they’re free. You see, Father, whoever it is, and whatever goes
through their clouded mind when they drift off to sleep, they’re not that
different to Brack. He’s waiting too.’

Anselm had taken a
mental and judicious step backwards — it was his way of managing rising anger.
He considered himself an old hand when it came to handling a witness. He knew
when to take the gloves off and experience had taught him that the occasion
rarely, if ever arose, because there’s nothing quite so effective as kindness
and courtesy And Anselm had never come across a case where, in the end, the
deeper human question — the how and why of the ticking — hadn’t been a matter
of decisive importance, all the more so when it wasn’t evident on the face of
the papers.

But having stepped
backwards, he’d gained a sudden perspective on something he hadn’t noticed, and
it calmed his irritation:

Sebastian’s altogether
personal
engagement in the hunt for justice. All at once.’ Róża appeared less
the victim and more the means of his way of getting to Brack. He examined the
lawyer’s troubled features, seeing the strain in a subtly different light.

‘I’ll bear all that in
mind, he said, magnanimously.

‘Thanks. I hope you don’t
mind me being so direct.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Once we get the name
from the file, you’ll have to lean on the informer.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Hard.’

‘Absolutely Right from
the shoulder.’ He frowned, innocently mystified. ‘I appreciate that material
considerations aren’t my
forte,
but aren’t you forgetting something?
Frenzel wants more money Rather a lot, in fact.’

‘I’ve asked for a
shoebox to be lodged in the hotel safe.’ Sebastian reached for his glass of
water but thought better of it. ‘You’ll find ten grand inside. He’ll keep
holding back what we want, raising the price along the way, dragging out the
premiums. Let him have his day Give him what he wants. As we used to say, ours
is the spring. Now, can I offer you something stronger than water?
Żubrówka.
Bison Grass. Róża drinks it every Sunday’

Anselm didn’t notice the approach of the
beast, so to speak, until an hour or so later. It came from behind, its hooves
in slippers, and whacked him on the back of the knees, just as he stood up to
shake Sebastian’s hand. Smiling inanely, he shambled to the lift, prepared to
catch his head just in case it rolled off his neck. Lying in the dark of his
bedroom he pondered the one part of Sebastian’s argument that had roused no
anger. Instead, it had disturbed him: the recognition that people who set out
to clean up a mess always end up dirty It was, indeed, bleeding obvious. There
was no escape, even for the kind and courteous. John had said something
similar: in the search for the truth, sometimes you had put your hand in the
sewer. Maybe Sebastian and the Prior were right after all: Anselm hadn’t been
trained for this, either at the Bar or at Larkwood. He wasn’t entering a
courtroom or the confessional, he was crawling behind a skirting board …
perhaps he’d have to learn some new tricks, even from a rat like Marek Fre—

The phone rang, jolting
Anselm upright. He turned on the light, squinting and blinded.

‘Do you have the funds?’
came a woman’s trembling voice in heavily accented German.

‘Yes.’

‘Then present yourself
at the following hotel …’

Anselm swung out of bed,
abruptly sober, and jotted down the details using the pen and paper ready to
hand.

‘Make a booking for room
forty-three.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘I will arrive at eight
p.m.’

‘Your name?’

‘You will come alone.
Sebastian Voight stays behind.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I have no name. I just
have what you’re looking for.’

The line cut dead. A
sort of echo rang in Anselm’s mind, carrying that alarming confession: ‘I have
no name’. He listened for a long time, discerning more fear than authority,
inexperience rather than the familiar exercise of low trade. Who was she?
Frenzel had almost certainly been there in the background, feet up, picking his
teeth, unrelenting.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

IPN/RM/13129/2010

EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF A STATEMENT
MADE BY

RÓŻA
MOJESKA

2h.04

The Shoemaker had not lost his eloquence.
He spoke like one released from a long and imposed confinement. An outpouring
of fresh ideas filled the pages of
Freedom and Independence,
born from
having watched events in silence and from having reflected deeply upon them. He
wrote simply speaking directly to the crisis of the times. It was his gift …
to choose words and order them in such a way as to light a fire in winter. He
wrote about the past as if it was ours and the future as if it had already
arrived. It was the rhymes and rhythms of independence; a meter first heard
during the Nazi Occupation. The Shoemaker was back. And I felt proud; he’d only
spoken because I asked him to. I’d set him free to speak again.

2h.33

His words travelled further than I
imagined. An English journalist from the BBC sent a message from a café along
the distribution chain. It reached Barbara, who told me. John Fielding he was
called. He wanted to meet the Shoemaker. Mateusz delivered my reply: he was to
wear his overcoat like a cloak and wait at the grave of Prus. I tailed him from
the entrance of the cemetery … but he didn’t go straight to where he’d been
directed. He went first to another grave, lingered there a while, and then made
his way to the meeting point. I lingered, too, and then joined him.

2h.39

He was writing a number of articles on the
underground media entitled ‘Lives Lived in Secret for the Truth’ and wanted a
representative for print, radio and film. To that end he hoped to interview the
Shoemaker. He had to make do with me, and I spelled out his ideas. The piece,
derived from several interviews, appeared under a pseudonym in the
Observer
but
then got reported on all over the place …
Le Figaro, The Washington Post,
Die Welt. Voice of America
even did a broadcast on his thinking, sending
his words right back to Warsaw.