The Mazovia Legacy (34 page)

Natalia had worked for many years with dreams, her own and the dreams of others, and she did not fear them. Jungians welcomed dreams, trusted them, and acted on their hints and allusions. So, because this afternoon had been very much like a dream, Natalia was not afraid. She was simply dreaming, and she expected the meaning of the dream to become clear as she pondered it. She had that faith. She turned the afternoon's dreamings around and around in her mind as she lay warm and comfortable on soft cushions of snow. She wondered:
What is archetypal about all of this?

The black leafless branches above her spread intricate patterns against the dull grey sky and she studied them for secret signs.

She saw how it all had started but not yet how it was to end. She was all of the figures in all of the dreams and she saw things from all perspectives at once. She was her Uncle Stanislaw flying sorties over Germany with his comrade Zbigniew. She spirited secret things away from Europe and into Quebec. She felt Stanislaw's sorrow when the wife he loved so much had had to die. She felt that intensely. She was Zbigniew making small lunches alone in his apartment off rue de Belleville. She saw the pathos in that. She saw herself running through Europe with Francis, dear Francis. She saw them running together in Paris, Rome, and Como. She was skating with Francis, and then with Emma Jung, on Beaver Lake in Montreal. Mrs. Jung was very pleased the Grail had been found. Their skate blades left portentous inscriptions on the ice. Natalia saw the wonder in that.

Then all of their pursuers were running after them, singly and in a group all at the same time — running and running after her and Delaney everywhere they tried to hide.Their pursuers meant them only harm, the purest harm. The Shadow archetype, clearly. But part of life too, she thought as she lay in the snow. Something to be feared only if not accepted as part of life too. Natalia had that faith.

Of course she had dreamed all this before, or most of it. She had just not seen with such clarity how the many parts could begin to fit together. She felt no fear, no sadness.

But then there was sudden intense pain in her side. It intruded sharply on her dreamings. Her head felt light and the branches of the trees over her seemed now to sway too fast. Her feet began to feel cold. She wished in her dream that Francis would come back, wished that he had not gone at all. She imagined him hurrying through the silent woods. Hurrying because he loved her. She could imagine the intense concentration on his face as he walked. She could hear the crunch of his footsteps on the snow.

The footsteps stopped suddenly. They were now close by. But Natalia knew when she turned her head to see that it would not be Francis beside her. The snow felt cold when it touched her left cheek after she turned. She lay with her face on this freezing pillow to see how the waking dream would end. The shadow man in the dark overcoat who stood there was a stranger. He had come from the direction of the lake and the church. Not from where Francis had gone. So Francis, she knew, was safe. The man came closer. He was all of their pursuers at once and she had suspected all of them would eventually come.

There was intense fear now. And sadness. All the fearful images of all the past days and weeks began to well up in her mind in one last overwhelming sequence. She put her gloved hands over her eyes and forehead to block these nightmare images out, to force them back to the place where they were from. This was too much. Even for a psychologist. She wanted to rest now. She interlaced her fingers on the top of her head and pressed down hard to stop the mass of images from tumbling out.

*

Delaney knew immediately when he heard the faroff gunshot that Natalia was dead. The blood ran suddenly ice cold in his veins. He was almost at the village when he heard it: one shot, a handgun, far away. He had met no one along the way, and this, he now knew, was a very bad sign, the worst of signs. He hesitated only a moment before starting to run back the way he had come. He hoped, he dared to dream, that he was wrong, but he knew as he ran clumsily along the snowy path that it was over.

He started to cry as he ran. The emotions were intense, raw, exposed. He cried and he shouted Natalia's name and hurled curses as he ran. When he got there he was overheated, panting, with hot rivulets of sweat streaming under his shirt and sweater. Snowflakes had started to fall again gently. The body of the man he had killed was now lightly covered with snow. The blood on the snow around the body was frozen into a granular light red patch.

Delaney did not stop there. He ran to where Natalia lay, much as she lay when he had so rashly left her there only a short while ago.

The snow all around her was trampled now with footprints. She lay on her back as he had left her, with her head tilted to the left. Her hands were interlocked over her head, as if to protect it from the shot she had known was coming. But the bullet had smashed through her hands, and now her hair and dead fingers were a sticky mass of blood. Delaney fell to his knees; nausea and numbness gripped him. His shotgun fell useless on the snow.

It was a good and private place for mourning. The woods were intensely silent. The falling snow made no sound. He knelt with her for a long time while tears burned slow freezing lines down his cheeks. When the tears eventually stopped, the numbness began to increase. He felt a great circle of emptiness spreading out from the centre of his guts. He was no stranger to numbness, had known it well throughout his life. He had ceased being numb for a time; he had forgotten or escaped it these past weeks with Natalia, but he hoped it would now come back. It would be welcome.

Eventually, he got to his feet. He had no taste anymore for clues or searches, but he felt compelled to look around in the snow nonetheless. At least as a witness to what had been done. He did not look at Natalia or at her wound. One look was all he would need for a lifetime.

There was nothing around her that told him exactly how it had been. Her gun, his gun, lay a short distance away. He left it there. The leather chalice case was gone. He did not want it anyway. The Mazovia Squadron pennant lay all but buried in the snow, one edge fluttering in the chill air. He did not retrieve it. He saw footprints leading in every direction: his own, hers, her killer's. He did not wish to run and chase. He felt no immediate desire for vengeance. There was no longer any reason for action or haste or violence. Perhaps that would come again later. Perhaps not.

He cried again for a long while, standing on the darkening path. When he turned to look again, Natalia was covered with a thin clean layer of snow. That was a good thing. He could not see her face anymore or her hideously wounded head. The guns were covered too. The snow in an overlong Quebec winter covers a multitude of sins.

The whine of engines ended this first period of mourning. It came from the direction of the village. The sound grew louder, closer, but he waited without fear. Soon an olive-green-and-yellow
Sûreté de Québec
snowmobile bounced into sight, and then another. Two uniformed SQ officers in big coats sat astride them. They wore goggles and black fur hats. When the first policeman saw Delaney and the body of a man lying across the path he raised his hand and motioned for his partner to stop behind him. Both of them drew pistols and crouched behind their machines.

“
OK, là, les mains sur la tête!
” one of the policemen shouted.

Delaney doubted very much they would shoot if he refused to put his hands on his head. He simply stood and stared. Slowly the policemen stood up, both of their guns still pointed at this staring, unarmed, coatless man as they tried to make sense of what they had found.

They brought the broken amateur spy back to the church parking lot, carrying on along the path to the frozen lake and then across it. Delaney was on the back of the lead snowmobile, watched over by the policeman who followed on the one behind. The police had touched nothing they found lying in the snow. But they had muttered often to each other in French as they began to realize exactly what they had discovered. They had spoken tersely into walkie-talkies, but asked few questions as they searched Delaney for weapons, handcuffed him, and helped him climb onto one of their machines for the ride back.

There were many cars in the parking lot now: SQ cruisers, unmarked cars, his own Mercedes. There was no sign of the large white Ford. The man nominally in charge seemed to be one uniformed, ruddy-faced, and apparently very unhappy member of the
Sûreté de Québec
. He wore an oversized green nylon parka and giant rubber boots with thick bluefelt liners showing at the tops. A small droplet of crystal-clear mucus sat poised to fall from the end of his nose as he listened to the report from the two officers who had brought Delaney in.

The man actually in charge, Delaney soon discovered, was someone else. This one wore a very urban wool topcoat of midnight blue and only small rubber protectors pulled over his brown wing-tip shoes. He had removed his fine brown leather gloves and placed them in a coat pocket. This man listened gravely as the police sergeant briefed him, in turn, on what had apparently been discovered in the woods. He then closely examined the contents of the two wallets that had been taken from Delaney.

The city man rubbed his hand over his closecropped, salt-and-pepper hair. He considered Delaney for a long time from afar, and he stared at him intently before he and the senior police officer came over.

“
Je pense qu'avec celui ci, c'est préférable si on pose les questions en anglais,
” he said to the policeman in perfect Ottawa civil servant's French. “
Je pense qu'avec celui ci, c'est préférable, si vous êtes d'accord.
”

The man in the blue topcoat looked politely over at the policeman to see if there could possibly be any political objection to the use of the English language in this freezing parking lot somewhere in the wilds of Quebec.

“And you of course would prefer that too, wouldn't you, Mr. Delaney?” he said in civil servant's English, delivered with a thin smile.

“It makes no difference to me one way or the other,” Delaney said.

“Would it make a difference to you if we asked Sergeant Morier here to remove those handcuffs and get you a jacket? You can't be very comfortable.”

“Whatever you like,” Delaney told him. The request was made in French to Morier, who called one of his snowmobile patrol over to take off the handcuffs and give Delaney a policeman's parka from the trunk of one of the cars. Delaney put it on. He had been shivering from the sweat that had cooled on his skin.

The man in charge saw fit to introduce himself formally as this was done.

“I am Jonathan W. Rawson. I'm with CSIS, as you may have already deduced. This gentleman is Sergeant Raoul Morier,
Sûreté de Québec
. Sergeant Morier has consented to assist us with our investigations while we are in the province of Quebec today. That is very kind of him.”

Morier listened with a slight scowl. Rawson nodded slightly, diplomatically, in Morier's direction.

“I have told Sergeant Morier that you are known to us at CSIS and that all may not be quite as it seems here,” he said. “That's why we thought there was no need for handcuffs.”

Rawson waited for some sign from Delaney about how things might best be played. But this smooth CSIS gamesman was intruding on Delaney's numbness, intruding on his grief. Delaney did not reply.

“I must say, Mr. Delaney,” Rawson continued, “that we seem to have what my people in Ottawa like to call a very delicate situation here this afternoon.”

Delaney still gave him no opening.

“They tell me there are two bodies over there in the woods,” Rawson said. “One of them is a young woman, they tell me. I have to assume that would be Natalia Janovski. Is that correct?”

“You know who that is in there,” Delaney said, angry now. “Both of them.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“It's obvious who they both are,” Delaney said. “If you've been tracking this operation.”

“I would not assume too much, Delaney,” Rawson said. “That may in fact be what's led you and some others into this little situation this afternoon.”

“It is far more than a little situation, my friend,” Delaney said.

“I'm extremely sorry about the girl,” Rawson said. “Sincerely sorry.”

Rawson blinked rapidly in a brief civil servant's display of empathy. “Fuck you,” Delaney said.

Morier now took a renewed interest in the conversation.

“Who is the other person in the woods, Delaney? Who would you say that is?” Rawson asked, his period of mourning now over.

“You've got his papers over there. With mine.”

“Papers can be quite easily faked these days, Delaney. Who would you say is lying dead in those woods besides Ms. Janovski?”

“He's a Vatican agent, probably,” Delaney said. “Or if he's not, he's learned something awfully important from Vatican people and he came over here to follow up. He's dead because he tried to kill us.”

“Did he kill Ms. Janovski?”

“No, his partner did. Who probably just left here in the big white Ford that was parked up against my car.”

Rawson looked quickly over at Morier and then back at Delaney.