The Day of the Lie (24 page)

‘It was him.” said the
woman. She seemed to share his shock and dismay, only she’d got used to it. She
seemed vaguely apologetic. ‘He worked for Colonel Brack.’

Anselm was still shaking
his head.

‘He was well paid, thank
you,’ she said, growing confident; wanting to get her own back. She’d been
stung by Anselm’s manner. ‘Signed for every instalment.’

Anselm put the papers
back in the envelope and went to the bathroom. In a daze he counted out two
thousand five hundred Euros and came back to the woman and her son.

‘Here,’ he said, holding
out the notes. He was like an automaton. ‘This is a one-off. You don’t have to
sign for anything.’

She took the money
hurriedly and said, ‘There’s more, if you’re interested.’

Anselm’s eyes came into
focus. She was trying to fit the envelope into an inside pocket of her coat.

‘Sorry?’

‘That lot, she said,
nodding towards the bed. ‘That’s everything he gave them … for over thirty
years.’

‘
Them?’
Anselm
looked from the woman to the bin liners and back again.
‘You’re
one of
them.’

‘There are forty-two
files,’ she said, ignoring the jibe. ‘All his reports. They’re from the main SB
archive. Mr Frenzel thought you might be interested. He says they’re special.
If you want them it’s going to—’

‘What?’ snapped Anselm,
exhausted by this wrangling in a cesspool. ‘Cost the earth? The skin off my
back? Or yours?’ He looked at her with a sudden savage pity. She was still
fumbling with the first wedge of profit, trying to get it past the pocket
lining. Mouth open, the son was lost. Languages weren’t his thing. ‘How much
did Frenzel tell you to go for? Five? I bet it was five. Well.’ I’ll give you
three.’

Anselm didn’t wait for
the woman to work out what she’d say to Frenzel. He went back to the bathroom,
counted out the notes and then returned, throwing them on the bedroom floor.
Sinking into his chair, he paled with loathing as she brushed them together and
made a pile, watched stupidly by her son with an arm around the refuse bags.
Housework wasn’t his thing.

‘How much does Frenzel
take?’ asked Anselm, quietly, His anger had gone like a popped balloon. His
ears were ringing. ‘Half?’

She didn’t reply. Her
problem was trying to find a pocket big enough for the cash.

‘He checks out the
punters, he sends them to you, he gets his cut?’ Anselm angled his neck, trying
to look up into her face. ‘If need be he’ll break a bone or two?’

He’s the pimp. And
you? You’re the poor woman who takes all the risks. If anyone’s going to get
busted, it’s you. Mr Frenzel just looks after the house and its contents.
Anselm
kept the thought to himself.

He was calm now, with
the shuddering stillness that follows an accident; when the shock of seeing
mutilated bodies has lost its primal power; when one’s mind turns to how anyone
will live normally once the wreckage has been towed away.

‘You don’t know what it’s
like,’ said the woman, tying the belt on her coat. She pointed at her son.
There wasn’t much affection in her look, just indebtedness and resentment. ‘You
didn’t grow up getting beaten up for what your mother did during the communist
years. You could walk safely down the street. You had friends, you had birthday
parties … you had good times. No one turned their back on you.’

Anselm nodded. Her eyes
were clear behind her flimsy glasses. She came closer, lowering her voice, just
in case a saint was listening.

‘I just took a job, you
know,’ she said, one hand pressed against a bulging pocket. ‘I knew two
languages, I could type. I had a child. I needed money. That’s all. I wasn’t
for them, I wasn’t against them. I just wanted a job. All I did was type up
what other people had said. I never gave an opinion; I never shopped on my
neighbours. I just wanted some security … for him, for me.’ She appealed to Anselm
with open hands as if she were begging at the door to some church. ‘I’ll always
be an outcast. And all because I spoke two …’
Languages,
thought
Anselm.
And you could type. And you were neither for nor against.
She
didn’t say it in her defence but she could have done: how many people did no
worse than her?

The woman was at the
door. The son was already outside, idly running the zip of his fleece up and
down. Looking at her straight back Anselm wanted to say sorry, but his mouth
wouldn’t open. But he meant it: he was sorry for what had happened to her; and
sorry for his behaviour. He’d forsworn the power of kindness and courtesy — and
all because he wanted to tell Sebastian he could hold his own with Frenzel.

‘Madam, you do have a
name,’ said Anselm, at last. ‘He can’t take that from you.

The woman didn’t even
turn around. She closed the door with a trailing hand.

Anselm didn’t move for a
long time. He sat facing the television and the shopping trolley with the
sacks. He thought of the agent whose codename was SABINA and his long,
dedicated service to the secret police. He thought of the woman who’d just
left, Irina Orlosky, Brack’s bilingual personal assistant, thankful that he’d
resisted the temptation to use her name; glad that by so doing he’d cut back on
her due quota of humiliation.

Anselm pushed the
trolley to the reception desk. The manager was troubled. He ran a clean
establishment. His eyes lingered on the sacks while Anselm paid for the room he
wouldn’t be needing after all. There were no farewell wishes.’ Father; no
bon
voyage.
Turning to leave, Anselm noticed a crucifix above the entrance. And
he knew with a cold certainty, that Frenzel was somewhere near, perhaps in a
car outside sucking a remembered shell. He stayed up late to watch the fun. The
joke was far too good to be missed.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

IPN/RM/13129/2010

EDITED TRANSCRIPT OF A STATEMENT
MADE BY

RÓŻA
MOJESKA

4h.16

I only told Mateusz, Bernard and John about
the meeting with the Shoemaker. They were a group representing more than
themselves: the Worker, the Intellectual, and the Messenger.

4h.22

I chose the 1st November because it’s All
Souls Day A day of memorial, a day for Pavel and that other man. I knew there’d
be thousands of lit candles. I knew there’d be lots of people. I knew it would
be easy to blend into a crowd if Father Nicodem had been right and I had been
wrong. Of course.’ I was about to break Pavel’s Golden Rule, to never meet a
stranger. I was about to meet the Shoemaker.

4h.37

I don’t know who saw who first. I hadn’t
seen Brack in thirty years. He’d been twenty-odd and he was now in his fifties.
But our eyes met over the hats and headscarves. Nothing essential had changed.
He’d always looked hungry; he’d always scraped his lower lip with his teeth. I
was about to slip away when I saw Father Nicodem.

4h.39

He was standing ten yards or so from Brack,
hands in his coat pockets, as if there was nothing to be frightened of … and
then my mind blurred. I realised that I wasn’t the only one who’d been
betrayed. The Shoemaker was somewhere nearby; and he was only there because of
me. I had to cause a diversion so that he could get away. So I walked over to
Brack and said.’

‘Well done, Comrade.’

4h.42

And then all hell let loose. John appeared
with his camera, just as two
ubeks
grabbed my arms. More of them pushed
through the crowd and seized him. I was marched straight past Father Nicodem.
He looked on carelessly. I’ve thought often since: in the circumstances, there
was nothing else he could do. He was simply being professional.

4h.50

I was brought to the same interrogation
room that they’d used in the fifties. The colours had changed, that’s all …
from a sickly green to a sickly yellow The desk looked the same and Brack was
behind it. The lamp had gone. They gave me a chair rather than a footstool. The
door closed and we were alone.

‘I don’t suppose there’s
any point in my asking about the Shoemaker?’ he asked.

‘None,’ I replied.

He leaned back and
opened the desk drawer. Looking inside, angling his head, he muttered.’

‘If you’d only answered
that question all those years ago, then everything would have been so
different. For both of us.’

He seemed to be blaming
me
for what
he
had done.

With his head still
bent, he said.’

‘I wanted you, this time
… as much as the Shoemaker. There’s something I think you ought to know’

He slid the drawer back
and forth.

‘Do you remember you
once said there’ll be laws one day to get at people like me?’ He glanced up,
just to make sure I’d heard him.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That day
will come.

‘I think it will, too,’
he said, ‘given how the Party has messed up everything. But that doesn’t change
a thing for you.’

‘What do you mean?’ I
asked.

‘You called it justice,’
he said, dropping his gaze into the drawer again. ‘You need to understand that
you won’t be getting any’

I stared at him,
waiting.

‘Justice,’ he said,
quietly, drawing out the word. ‘You won’t be getting any’

I stood up, feeling so
much bigger than him, his system, his prison, and I said so, but he shut me up
with a small gesture … a closing of the thumb and third finger, like when you
extinguish a candle. I sat down, suddenly obedient.

‘Have you any idea who
betrayed you?’ he asked, smiling.

‘No,’ I replied.

He took a passport out
of his coat pocket and slid it across the table.

‘I’ve always given you a
choice, Róża,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been fair. I’ve always let you pick
the consequences of your actions. So, here’s another choice: if you ever want
to bring me to court, then bear this in mind — I don’t want to speak on my own
behalf. I’ll rely on my informer, and they can tell the judge what I did to
defend my country from agitators and parasites. How, together, we fought and
lost. I’ll stand up and be counted, Róża, but not on my own.

And then he told me the
name and what they’d been doing for years on end. That was all he had to do. He
knew I’d never want to see their story spread all over the papers. That’s when
I noticed he’d dressed for the occasion; he’d shaved, combed his hair … for
this moment with me in Mokotów Without waiting for a reply, he slowly shut the
drawer and walked out of the room, not even bothering to close to the door.

I went home, leaving the
passport on the desk. That was his one act of mercy — a chance to get away from
where my life had fallen apart. To start another in the West. This was his
moment of complete triumph. He knew I wouldn’t take it, because we both knew he’d
locked me in Mokotów for ever. He’d even left me with the key. I hold it still,
in my hand.

END OF TRANSCRIPTION (4h.56)

Chapter Thirty

The
Polana
file named SABINA as
Father Nicodem Kaminsky According to his ‘Statement of Intent’, written in 1949
and carefully filed away in the dossier bearing his chosen code-name, he’d been
a dedicated communist since reading the
Manifesto
of Marx and Engels,
considering its trenchant paragraphs to be a ‘watershed document in the
history of social, political and economic thinking’. Fair enough, thought
Anselm; but he’d volunteered his services to the organs of State Security. He’d
wanted to do his bit in the struggle between the age-old servants of Capital
and the newly woken brotherhood of oppressed Labour. He’d counted the cost of
losing; and a price was to be paid for the winning.

‘He wrote it with his
own hand,’ observed Anselm, recalling the precise signature. ‘He chose his own
words. He knew what securing the win would involve.’

‘And he lost.” observed
Sebastian, drily ‘Now he picks up the tab:

Sebastian was lodged at
his cramped desk.’ slowly turning the pages of an orange folder. Stripped of
their plastic sacks, SABINA’s massive output lay on the floor like columns of
paving stones in a builder’s yard. For an hour and a half Sebastian had been
leafing through selected volumes, murmuring to himself, occasionally swearing
under his breath. Legs crossed in an armchair, Anselm had reviewed Róża’s
statement, his gaze shifting on occasion to the night sky and the fallen stars
on the streets below.

‘And to think … he’s
one of
my
lot, a
Gilbertine,’
said Anselm, ruefully. ‘Where are
the Jesuits when you need them?’

Father Kaminsky’s short
manifesto revealed that the priest had left his monastery before the war and
never returned. His political convictions would not sanction a ‘self-interested’
withdrawal from the crisis. The forging of a new future, built on the
disillusionment of yesterday, required ‘uncompromising engagement with the
times’. He had committed himself to social action within the concrete
circumstances of history.

Anselm berated himself
for not having recognised Róża’s guiding hint, now seen as glaring and
underlined in red pen. Only once in her entire statement did she explicitly
refer to the activity of informers: she’d identified those men of God who’d
become men of Brack. And if that wasn’t enough, Anselm’s own deconstruction of Róża’s
text had drawn a bright yellow highlighter over the priest’s name. He’d topped
the poll of references, in a document crafted to lead its reader to one
specific individual.

‘He’s the last person
she’d have suspected,’ said Anselm, talking to himself. ‘Why? Because she and
her husband had entrusted him with their lives. He’s the last person she’d want
to see exposed. Why? Because a bombshell would hit the arches of Saint Klement’s
and every other church in the country; because the Shoemaker would find out
that his closest confidant had betrayed him from the outset; because Róża
was worried that Kaminsky might choose to drown himself rather than face the
jeering in the street.’