The Day of the Lie (25 page)

Sebastian turned a page.
One finger moved slowly down a margin.

‘I can imagine Kaminsky
squaring historical materialism with his belief in God.” continued Anselm, as
if delivering judgment in the Court of Appeal, ‘and I can accept that he
dreamed a costly dream, but the sand in the gears is capital. He got paid —’ at
the back of an expenses file Sebastian had found an account of monthly instalments,
running, without interruption, between 1949 and 1982 — ‘so what was his motive?
The money or the dream? And who could dream dreams after Stalin?.’

Sebastian looked up. ‘Sorry?’

‘Oh nothing, just the
idle thoughts of the disenchanted: Anselm dropped Róża’s statement on the
floor by his side and knitted his fingers on his chest. ‘Tell me what you’ve
learned about my confrere. Since I’m going to wrestle with his conscience I’ll
need to know what he’s done, and why.’

Sebastian closed a file,
pushing it away as though he’d tasted foreign food. He hadn’t enjoyed himself.

‘Brack became his
handler in nineteen fifty,’ said Sebastian, drawing a hand through his tangled
hair. He swung round, crossing his feet on the edge of his desk. ‘They met
every month for three decades. He informed on friends, associates, priests,
bishops, two cardinals and a shooting gallery of dissident thinkers. He moved
around, did Kaminsky In high places and low And he told Brack everything he
heard. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

The overall effect,
laughed Sebastian, mordantly, was a kind of multi-volume encyclopaedia on
opposition thinking. Quite apart from entries revealing the informed
reflections of ‘ordinary’ citizens.’ the views of almost every major dissident
intellectual in Warsaw were represented in the files. Their arguments, neatly
laid out and persuasively presented, were frequently penned in Father Kaminsky’s
elegant script. Sometimes he’d obtained a Samizdat draft from the author’s own
hand, with key passages underlined in red. It’s a howling irony: the SB
preserved for posterity the very ideas that had been banned by the Party They’d
built up an archive of the books the censor would never have printed. Come on,
you’ve got to laugh.

Anselm tried and failed.
‘I’m troubled.’

‘By?’

‘Two questions. First,
Kaminsky knows the Shoemaker. He was the Threshold. But he never told Brack. He
kept quiet, leaving his handler to look under all the beds in Warsaw. Meanwhile
Róża is being tortured. Her husband is taken out and shot. So is Stefan
Binkowski. How does all that fit into the price worth paying? Why didn’t
Kaminsky lead Brack to the Shoemaker in nineteen fifty-one?’

Sebastian had been
nodding while Anselm spoke. The point had struck him, too. He’d arrived at an
answer while examining the files.

‘My guess is this. When
Kaminsky presented himself after the war, he was planning on a long and
lucrative arrangement. Long, because he genuinely believed in Stalinist socialism;
lucrative because, as he said, tongue in cheek, he’d counted the cost of losing
and wanted to be paid for his trouble … up front, right now’ Sebastian
loosened his tie, one finger pulling at the knot. ‘He retained the one piece of
information that his controller wanted because that kept their relationship
vital
… and it kept the payments coming. He gave his controller a few gems
close to the target, like Róża and Pavel, but the main prize, the
Shoemaker, is left out of reach, keeping Brack on the move. And along the way,
rebel voices, drawn to the Shoemaker like bees to jam, are systematically
betrayed.’

The snapshot appalled
Anselm: Kaminsky had been using Brack in a counter-subversion operation of his
own invention; by leaving the Shoemaker free, he’d caught more insects. In that
light, the money appeared more as a salary for having managed his handler than
a top-up for his stipend. Anselm stared at the night sky behind his own
reflection. ‘And Brack thought he was running the show when, in fact, he was
being led by the hand …’

‘Yes, led to do the
rough stuff required by an “uncompromising engagement with the times’.’.” added
Sebastian, swinging his feet off the table. He walked to the shelving units
that covered the wall and pulled out a box file. Back at his desk he flipped
open the cover and took out a flimsy publication.

‘This is a copy of
Freedom
and Independence,’
he said, bringing it to Anselm, ‘the last edition before
printing ceased in October nineteen fifty-one.’

Anselm held the paper in
his hands with an instinctive reverence. His eyes ran across the imposing
letters and words, his finger traced the soft indentations made by the stamp of
the press. Not being able to understand anything, a blasphemy instantly
suggested itself: why would anyone die for these impressions on paper? How on
earth could they matter so much? They were just shapes; they made an arresting
pattern. But then again, what was an idea if not flotsam in the mind? How could
anything so insubstantial turn out to be so strong; so insignificant, and yet
so important?

‘The publication was
silent until thirty years later,’ said Sebastian, leaning against the front of
his desk, arms folded. ‘He only spoke because Róża insisted. Prior to that
moment he’d been silenced by Kaminsky Even the Shoemaker was being led by the
hand.’

Anselm looked up, ‘How?’

‘It all comes back to
those executions,’ replied Sebastian. ‘As the Threshold, Kaminsky knew how the
organisation was structured. He knew that the Shoemaker was the indispensable
figure who had to stay out of reach, for the sake of
Freedom and
Independence.
Others could die, but not him, never him; he was the living
breath behind the living word. He had to be protected. But that was all in
theory. No one had been killed. But then Pavel and Stefan were shot in Mokotów
What did Kaminsky say to the Shoemaker afterwards? I reckon he told him enough
is enough. He told him the cost of his words was a touch too high. He roused
the guilt that came with the privileged position of the protected. Who’d argue
with that? Who’d want to write about freedom after Róża had been tortured
and widowed?’ Sebastian drew breath, arching his eyebrows. ‘Kaminsky ran a
brilliant operation: he hid the Shoemaker from the SB because he was a lure;
manipulating that lure, he snagged the capitalists who were out for a fight
with Marx; and, almost by default, he secured what he and Brack wanted above
all, the suppression of the most powerful and respected dissident voice in the
country. The real professional was Kaminsky Brack, with his obsession for one
man in hiding showed himself to be what he was … an amateur. The butcher used
by the State to work in its secret abattoir.’

Anselm couldn’t argue
with the harsh lines drawn by Sebastian. The former Gilbertine was the still
point in a world of whispering and death. He was, ironically a man who’d
skilfully effected a ‘withdrawal from the crisis’, leaving Brack to think he
was leading the charge, using the likes of Edward Kolba to watch Róża the
widow and Magda the Zionist. Far away in his parish, with his eye on the
greater picture, and without attracting the slightest suspicion, he’d no doubt
consoled the Shoemaker. Assured him that he’d done his bit. Cried with him over
the untold fate of the unsung martyrs. And as soon as Róża turned up, he
sucked in a few more flies and then told Brack where to catch them.

‘You have a second
question?’

Sebastian was looking
upon Anselm with the camaraderie of shared disappointment. While it was
illogical, he understood only too well that Kaminsky’s standing as a religious
figure affected him personally.

‘How am I going to speak
to such a man?’ murmured Anselm, trying to envisage the encounter. The former
monk was alive and well, his address listed at the back of Róża’s
statement, along with all the others. ‘What can I appeal to in his past that
might have some bearing on the present? Why would he agree to co-operate with Róża’s
quest for justice?’

Sebastian’s humph showed
he had no answers this time. As if to leave him completely empty-handed he took
back
Freedom and Independence
and filed it away.

‘Funny, really, that he
never cleared off altogether,’ said Anselm, recalling Róża’s cited dictum:
no church, no solidarity, no revolution. ‘He stayed on as part of the institution.
An institution that had helped put a nail in the coffin of his beliefs … his
political beliefs.’

The mirroring of that
word gave Anselm a fresh angle on to Father Kaminsky’s complex character. ‘He
still
believes,’
said Anselm, obviously.

‘What?’

‘Roughly what I believe
and what Róża believes about the silence in Saint Klement’s. It’s got a
shape, a pattern, like those strange marks on the page.’ even if you can’t
understand them half the time … and to him who listens, to him who believes,
it’s important. It’s worth a fight with a lion, knowing you’re going to lose.
And whatever else, Kaminsky cares enough about his church to forgive her role
in the demise of his utopia:

‘You’ve lost me.’
Sebastian had returned to his desk and was bending a paperclip to occupy his
hands.

‘Kaminsky has two
faiths,’ explained Anselm, tentatively ‘One for this world and another for the
next. How they impinge on each other is anyone’s guess, but a meeting point
might be murder. Maybe the executions were a step too far, a price he didn’t
want to see paid by anyone — least of all on the back of his informing.’

A picture of Father
Kaminsky radically different to that described by Sebastian began to filter
into Anselm’s imagination: a tormented man, perhaps, limping through the years,
powerless to go back and erase his footprints, not daring to turn around and
see once more where they’d been. Leaving the monthly payments aside — a feature
difficult to excuse from any angle — Kaminsky could have been horrified by
Brack’s brutality, finding himself implicated in actions he would never have
sanctioned.

‘He handed over
information, reflected Anselm. ‘He gave them essays, lectures, illegal books
… the ideas he didn’t like … it’s a long way from endorsing summary
justice.’

‘Where are you going
with this?’ asked Sebastian.

‘I have one chance,’
said Anselm, increasingly sure of his ground. ‘If Kaminsky feels any compassion
for what happened to Róża, then he might be prepared to help her —
especially when I tell him that the only reason she chose silence over justice
was out of respect for their shared beliefs.’

Sebastian leaned back,
agreeably surprised. From a height he dropped the paperclip into a wastebasket,
and said, ‘Looks like I was wrong. The way folk tick matters.’

‘You were right, though,’
replied Anselm, with reciprocal charm. ‘Kaminsky did use Brack — in relation to
the procurement of
information;
but Brack also used Kaminsky — to suppress
evidence of gutter killings, State murder beyond the law. It’s all there on the
last page of Róża’s statement: he placed Kaminsky’s name and his faith
right at the heart of his scheme to silence Róża, and I don’t think
Kaminsky would swallow that … not even for the sake of a better tomorrow He
didn’t sign up in forty-eight to finish his days as Brack’s spattered shield. I’m
hoping it’s the one price he won’t pay.’

Chapter Thirty-One

When a journey ends one looks back. Certain
features that were obscure
en route
stand out with ruthless clarity And
the one that most troubled Anselm, now that he’d arrived at the guilt of
SABINA, was his treatment of Irina Orlosky He’d trampled over a weak, already
defeated woman. He’d stomped around in the mud of her failings, showing off
that Old Bailey footwork. It had been ugly, unnecessary and almost certainly
harmful. Again he found that the Hilton’s showers weren’t up to the task. And
this time the situation was worse than before: the inner dirt that wouldn’t
shift was of his own making and he couldn’t blame Frenzel.

The recognition sent
Anselm first to a florist and then to a rundown corner of Praga, a central
district on the east bank of the river. This was where Stalin’s army had
watched the Nazis crush the Uprising of 1944. It was where the Tsar’s troops
had massacred 20,000 civilians following the Uprising of 1794. It was where
Brack’s personal assistant now lived, a survivor without her name.

Anselm walked into a
narrow courtyard of tall cramped buildings. Paint blistered off the crooked
window frames. Red and black graffiti marked the cracked walls as if they were
stitching to hold the place together. Higher up, the stucco had fallen away,
the remnant oval sections like flaking scabs on the facade of orange brick. It
was early evening and the light was slipping away with something like relief.
Having stepped gingerly through an open, communal door.’ Anselm mounted a
creaking staircase and halted on a second floor landing. Rapid gunfire sounded
from behind Flat 8. It ceased abruptly on Anselm’s firm knock. A long, sliver
of light appeared like a drawn blade.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Anselm
to the dark, spectacled face. ‘I was rude, superior and insulting. You were
right. I have no idea what it was like. Can I have some tea? My name is Anselm.’

The door chain slid from
its groove.

‘Yes, of course, come in
… I’m … I’m Irina.’

Taking the flowers, she
smiled uneasily, one hand nervously brushing back her grey hair. Set against
the dull wallpaper, the bunched yellows and greens turned bright. She held them
out like an Olympic torch, beckoning Anselm to follow, but he paused by an open
door just inside the entrance. Stretched out on the faded carpet lay the podgy
son dressed in a Man United top and camouflage trousers.’ his legs splayed,
his hands gripping a plastic Kalashnikov. Secure behind a cushion for a sandbag,
he was shooting Afghan insurgents on a large computer screen, his kill rate
mounting against the clock.