The Mazovia Legacy (6 page)

“Yes, we are friends of Father Bernard and we have been trying to reach him to tell him some important news and we have been unable to do this,” Natalia said, a little breathlessly. “I have called many times and left messages and he does not reply. We would like to speak to him if possible.”

The priest did not give them his name or invite them inside. His irritation appeared to increase. “I'm afraid that will not be possible,” he said.

“Why not?” Delaney asked, then realized this was perhaps not quite the moment for that tone, for journalistic proddings. He sensed that Natalia wished he would stay quiet. The priest looked intently at him. Something about the quality of Delaney's French made him switch, in the baroque logic of Quebec social relations, to English.

“
Monsieur,
Father Bernard has unfortunately died,” the priest said.

He had delivered the bad news to the other male in the group, as would have been his practice, but now he turned his gaze to Natalia to gauge her woman's reaction. She was shaken, and looked it. The priest offered no further information or explanation. He did not ask any more about their connection to the dead man. The death, apparently, was all the news he was willing to give, the end of the story he was willing to tell.

“He's dead,” Natalia repeated.

“
Oui, madame.
”

“When did he die?”

“Some time ago,
madame
.”

“But when exactly?” she insisted, looking over at Delaney with fear in her eyes.
Stay cool,
Delaney told her wordlessly.
Stay on it.

The priest stood silently, angrily, for a few moments before speaking.

“You are friends of Father Bernard?” he asked.

“Well, my uncle was his friend,” Natalia said. “Stanislaw Janovski. And my uncle has died too and I know he would have wanted Father Bernard to come to his funeral and when he did not come I telephoned to find out why.”

“Was Father Bernard your uncle's confessor?”

“No. A very old friend.”

“He did not come because he was dead,
madame,
” the priest repeated.

“But when did he die? What happened to him?” Natalia asked again.

“Why does that matter to you? He was an old man. As your uncle was probably an old man.
Le bon Dieu
called them both and now they are gone,” the priest said.

He looked over their shoulders into the parking lot and then back over his own shoulder into the dark hallway behind him. Delaney thought he could make out the dim form of the Ursuline housekeeper deep in the shadows.

“Look,” Delaney said. “My friend here just wants a little information about what happened to Father Bernard. Her uncle was very close to him and she would like to know a little about the circumstances of his death. Why would that be a problem?”

The priest had clearly decided he did not like this tall anglophone with a beard.

“I did not say it was a problem,
monsieur
.”

“Then why not just tell us what happened?” It was apparently easier for the priest to give them the information than to tell them why doing so might be a problem.

“Father Bernard met with an unfortunate accident,” he said.

“What kind of accident?” Delaney suspected that the news was not going to be good, that somehow the news would be very, very significant, for Natalia and, by extension now, for himself.

“He drowned,
monsieur
.”

“Drowned,” Delaney repeated. “He drowned.”

“Oui, monsieur.”

“In the wintertime.”

“When? When did he drown?” Natalia seemed very alarmed now. Her eyes had widened and she looked over at Delaney briefly.

“It was in January. About four weeks ago.”

“What date? What date was it, please?” she asked.

“The date? Well,
madame,
that is hard for me to remember.”

“What week? What week? The second week?”

“Yes. I think that would be correct. Yes, the second week of January.”

“What date? What day?”

The priest looked intently at her and then at Delaney. He could clearly see her distress, but he just as clearly did not want to know why she was distressed. Delaney knew that a priest of this vintage would be unused to being questioned. There would be far too much questioning going on nowadays, in his view. This priest would prefer the days when the Catholic Church in Quebec was above question, when the authority of priests was unquestioned, when two young people, who were not French Canadians and possibly not even Catholics, would not dare to stand on his doorstep and demand information.

He would be wishing for a return to the old days, before the Quiet Revolution when the new Liberal government after Premier Duplessis's death had changed everything, had taken control of the schools and the hospitals and the charities away from the Church and made it their own. He would not like the changes of the last thirty-five years in Quebec very much at all.

“I believe it was a Friday,
madame,
” he said at last. “A Thursday or a Friday in the second week in January.

This news alarmed Natalia even further. “Friday is the day I got back from Zurich,” she said to Delaney. “That's the day I found my uncle. He had been dead for maybe one or two days, the police said.”

At the mention of the word
police
the old priest moved to conclude their interview.

“I'm afraid I must go,” he said. “I have other duties this morning.”

He made as if to close the door but Delaney stopped him with a hard look and a question.

“How did Father Bernard drown?” Delaney asked. “What happened to him?”

The priest saw this as the line these impertinent visitors should not be allowed to cross.

“That is a private matter,
monsieur.
I have tried to help you with some information, and now I must go.
Bonjour, merci
.”

He moved again to close the door but Delaney took a step forward and that stopped him. “No,” Delaney said. “It's important for us to know how he died. You must tell us. How did he drown?”

“Yes, how did he drown? Did he drown in the bath?” Natalia asked. Her voice was higher, insistent now. She looked over at Delaney to see if he thought she was making the situation worse.

The priest's anger, displeasure, and frustration were intense. He stood and waited, but then seemed to realize that his unwanted guests might now create a scene on the porch of his retreat. He would want that even less.

“Father Bernard died on the ice,
monsieur
.He was a fisherman, an ice fisherman, and the ice under his fishing shack gave away.”

“He would fish,” Delaney said.

“
Oui
. It was his hobby,
monsieur
. He liked the quiet of it.”

“He went into the river? Through the ice?” Delaney recalled seeing as they drove through the gates a couple of ice-fishing shacks out where the river widened into what was known as Lac-SaintLouis. He wondered how anyone living in a place like this would crave a quiet refuge.

“
Oui.
”

“Did they find his body?”

“Why do you want to know so much?” the priest asked. “Yes, they found his body. He was able to climb back onto the ice.”

“He climbed out of the water and died on the ice,” Delaney said. “
Oui, monsieur
.”

“He drowned, but they found him on the ice.”

“
Oui, monsieur
.”

“That's not possible,” Delaney said.

“How would
monsieur
know what is possible and what is not?” the priest demanded. “I have tried to help you and that it is all for today.
Bonjour
. I must go.”

“Look, people do not drown like that,” Delaney insisted. “If he could get back onto the ice he was not drowned. He would have frozen to death maybe, but not drowned.”

“
Monsieur,
I have told you it was an unfortunate accident. It was very cold. His head must have rolled back into the water and he drowned. This is what the police said. The police have been here and they have said it was like this. And now I go.”

The door slammed shut and Delaney and Natalia were left alone on the silent porch. Natalia stood looking shell-shocked. She said nothing. Delaney said nothing either. An intense feeling began to build, however, in Delaney's guts, a feeling he had had just a few times in his life before.

It was not fear, though he had felt intense fear many times before. Fear was what you feel when rebels point their AK-47s at you and grin the toothy grin they grin when they are thinking about killing a
gringo periodista
in the rain. Fear is what you feel when border guards somewhere else take away your passport and throw you in the back of a dank armoured personnel carrier and argue loudly in Spanish about whether you may be a Yankee spy.

Fear was what you felt interviewing a Cuban dissident at his rundown Havana home and suddenly hearing military boots kicking down the front door and the howls of the Neighbourhood Brigades urging soldiers on.

No, the feeling Delaney felt just then was not fear. It was a deep sense of dread. Dread of entanglement, of ensnarement. It was not at all the same as fear. He remembered clearly the first time he had this feeling. He was sixteen, and intensely, hormonally, involved with a buxom young high school sweetheart. They had been kissing and fondling each other with teenage ferocity for weeks and in her ardour the girl had one night whispered: “Oh Francis, I love you.” His reaction had been unmistakable and it had not been joy. He had thought, instead:
How will I ever get out of this now?

Delaney felt that dread of entanglement once again as he stood with Natalia on the old wooden porch. He knew that what they had learned that morning was important, that the facts they had uncovered meant there was much more to the death of Stanislaw Janovski than he had suspected. The coincidence in the timing and nature of the second death was simply too great. So far, he had been simply taking a journalist's interest in what Natalia had told him of her uncle's story. But he knew that he was now also personally implicated in this increasingly complex affair, that he was connected to this other human being because he had said that he would help her. He was becoming involved in a way in which he, the professional passive observer, had spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

*

They walked the short distance out the gates and across St. Joseph Boulevard to the canal. They strolled for a short while along the bicycle path that ran beside it and then stood looking out over the frozen lake to the group of three ice-fishing huts sitting brown-black against the brilliant white expanse. Delaney had left the car where it was parked, apparently not caring that it would trouble and annoy the priest if he saw it still there. They did not talk much immediately after the encounter on the porch. Natalia walked with her hands in her pockets, and felt the fear that Delaney had not felt.
The priest has been murdered too,
she thought. She looked over at Delaney, but he also was deep in thought.
Francis thinks so too.

“He was murdered too,” she said.

“We can't be sure of that, Natalia,” Delaney said slowly. “We don't even know if your uncle was murdered.”

But she knew he was not stupid, that he had been around the world. She knew that he, too, found it a most disturbing coincidence.

“I would like to know if my uncle came out here to visit Father Bernard around the time they died,” she said.

“I wouldn't count on our friend across the street to help us out on that,” Delaney said. “I could possibly make some inquiries about this so-called drowning through the ice, though. I know some reporters who find that sort of thing interesting. It might have hit the French police tabloids.”

They had stopped, and were leaning against the old iron railing that separated the path from the frozen water in the canal. The municipal authorities had spent a lot of money fixing up the area. There were benches and picnic tables, now heaped with a season's fall of snow, beside the bike path. Small bronze plaques here and there described the history of the place. A squat building of ancient stones to their right was the main trading post of the early fur trade, one such plaque said. It was now a museum, and brightly dressed schoolchildren were filing inside behind an impossibly young teacher.

Natalia looked across the street and saw on the second story of the main convent building a solitary nun rocking slowly on the balcony, bundled up against the cold air. Perhaps, Natalia thought, she had been there the whole time they had been with the priest. Perhaps she was often there, watching the street below.