The National Treasure

by William P Wood

  “We’re loaded, sir,” Peszek said needlessly again.

  “I heard you the first time, sergeant.”

  “Just in case you had further orders. Sir.”

  “Keep an eye out for anybody approaching,” Jozef said. Then to Janusz, “I’m imploring you.”

  Janusz gave him the same cold stare he used on fumbling string sections when he was a guest conductor, “At the first opportunity, I will get out and make my own way.”

  That should set this military automaton back on his well-groomed heels, he thought grimly.

  But Jozef appeared sad. “I wish you hadn’t said that, Janusz. I’ll have to make sure that can’t happen.” He straightened up. “Corporal Dunin!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’m putting Mr Rudzinski in your personal charge from this moment until we reach Swiss territory. Guard him with your life. You are to accompany him everywhere. He is not to be out of your sight. For any period of time. Is that clear?”

  “Not completely, sir,” Dunin said, glancing questioningly at Janusz.

  “Just stay with him, corporal,” Jozef said sharply. “Sergeant Peszek, let’s get out of here. You drive. I’ll direct you.”

  Janusz scrunched into his seat, mind working rapidly, heart pounding, the rictus smile on his face. He must get to Lidia, for her sake as well as his. He kept hearing her anguished voice, abruptly cut off. He would not be thwarted or obstructed by Henryk’s probably obsolete instructions or Jozef’s military rigidity.

  Dunin slid in bedside him. “Sorry, sir,” he said, uneasily smiling. He really did look barely old enough to shave. From several ribald comments Pezek had made before Jozef barked him into sullen silence, Janusz gathered that young Dunin was very popular with the ladies. Peszek and his fellow soldiers had done quite well with Dunin’s cast-offs.

  Janusz glanced at him as Peszek started the car and, with Jozef pointing, made a left turn down a row of worn warehouses. “Now I’m a prisoner.”

  “Oh, no, sir. I don’t think so.”

  “I’m not free to go, you’re guarding me from now on. I think that qualifies as being a prisoner.”

  Dunin nodded and looked more unhappy. “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I’m sorry. But I’m not giving up” Janusz said, staring out his window. He saw a ripple ahead just beyond the last warehouse on their left. He leaned forward. The ripple resolved into moving things, coming at them fast.

  “Jozef, I see cars. I believe I see guns.”

  Seven

  He crouched against the car as shots raged around him.

  When he was twenty-five, his first great success was the complex score for a ballet called The Termite King. He really didn’t understand the story when the choreographer and the arm-waving librettist tried to act it out for him, but he grasped the essentials: the cosmopolitan hive city much like their own capital city; the love of a lowly worker for a great lady; his rivals, and then their erotic courtship; and finally, his days until his long distant death, as her drone and fixture necessary only for sex. Moral: he got what he wanted, but at great cost.

  “Do you grasp it, Janusz?” shouted the hoarse librettist, a Catholic turned anarcho-syndicalist, “The futility of dreams even when we get them? It’s humanity’s destiny to yearn and our destiny to be cheated by that yearning. It’s an insect world!”

  Leave it to a lapsed Catholic to revel in futility and feeling swindled, Janusz had thought. After a certain number of unanswered prayers and entreaties, even a believer had to conclude that the switchboard was out of order or that the operator had stepped away.

  The Termite King involved a complicated crowd scene in the second act, many bodies moving around and stepping over each other, jostling, lifted overhead. He supplied contrapuntal lines of melody to the apparently chaotic motion on stage and it drew the first spontaneous applause he ever got, and was most gratifying for that reason alone.

  As he crouched against the brown sedan, guns firing all around him and men shouting, Janusz felt like he had wandered inadvertently onto the stage of a production that, like The Termite King, was difficult to comprehend but for which he could write very serviceable music. A fusillade of bullets banged into the tin wall near him with wild pinging. This production was probably thematically like the ballet he scored, striving for profundity by celebrating nihilism. If I was a believer, he thought, I could give it up right now with good reason.

  Dunin, ahead of him and hunched over, fired at the line of cars firing at them. He reached back to push Janusz closer to the ground. The window of a shed nearby blew out. Jozef and Peszek were trying to break into the warehouse by the car, but every time one of them half-rose to shoot at the padlocked metal door, a swarm of shots drove them down again. Jozef was sweating, talking harshly to Peszek and pointing with his right hand.

  Janusz cautiously looked over Dunin when the shooting paused. There were four cars raggedly blocking the roadway ahead. He was astonished to note that the men aiming and firing the rifles and pistols wore regular khaki army uniforms. Our army, he thought.

  “Jozef,” he whispered, “our own soldiers are shooting at us.”

  “They must think we’re spies or fifth columnists.” Jozef stared ahead, pointing at his civilian dark suit and tie. “They must have seen us loading the guns.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Janusz said and he realised he was not afraid. Angry, indeed, but the stupidity of the situation apparently had anaesthetised his fear. “I can tell them who I am. They’ll let us pass.”

  Before Jozef could reply, Peszek succeeded in blowing off the padlock. The shots aimed at them instantly resumed, bits of paving and dirt spattering into the air. Dunin pushed him down again and was close enough for Janusz to feel his husking breath. Then Dunin jerked and flipped backward as the side of his head sprayed red. His pipe clinked to the cobblestones.

  Janusz froze. He was in a dream. He saw Peszek excitedly waving to him and Jozef from the warehouse doorway. Janusz picked up Dunin’s gun. When the shooting started, they hadn’t been able to reach the rifles stowed in the trunk of the sedan. They had few shots left. Young Dunin had just been killed. So Janusz was going to hold up the gun as he stood, shouting his name, maybe even reciting from the last stanza of ‘Song: ‘No enemy can defeat the children devoted to the fatherland!’

  But Jozef shouted first, his rank and his name. He used his parade ground voice. No one fired. Janusz held his breath. Jozef shouted again, raised one black gloved hand, waving it. Janusz felt Dunin’s shoes against his leg. Jozef slowly raised up, one hand waving. He called out his rank and name again. Sheltered in the doorway of the warehouse, Peszek had a wild terrified grin as he watched the cars and soldiers, then Jozef. Janusz started to stand up too. Dunin’s gun dangled in his right hand. This was a very strange ballet to be sure.

  Someone from one of the cars yelled and then more shots. Jozef shuddered, twisted, sat down and folded face forward onto the cobblestone, red streaming from him, running into the centre of the roadway.

  Janusz blinked and began firing Dunin’s gun. He was still firing when he was yanked bodily into the warehouse, thrown violently to the dirty concrete floor and the door clanged behind him as bullets hit the warehouse with furious hammering.

  Eight

  For a moment, he was stunned. Peszek hoarsely cursed him, pulling him deeper into the dim warehouse where they were surrounded by pale yellow towers of wax paper-wrapped automobile tyres. He squirmed as Peszek dragged him behind several towers, obscuring the two of them from the rest of the warehouse.

  “Shut up and don’t move, you stupid arsehole,” Peszek breathed harshly on him. He peered through a small gap in the tyre towers almost like a castle’s arrow slit. “I’ve got to figure out what’s happening.”

  Janusz leaned against the cool metal wall behind them. It was a little like playing fort when he was a child. His father, of course, forbade it. Because I enjoyed it, he thought. And a few of the other children weren’t in our socia
l set. There was a risk I might have been contaminated by their vulgarity and boorishness. He raised one hand and noticed that he had dropped Dunin’s gun at some point. He also noticed that it was abruptly very quiet. No more shots. He heard a voice shout and another answered.

  “What are they doing?” he whispered to Peszek.

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “I don’t have a weapon.”

  “Well, I don’t have one,” Peszek snapped. “No ammunition.” He cursed volubly and creatively.

  “So they can just come in a kill us.”

  “Yes, sir. I think that’s what the bastards intend to do.” He shook his head and Janusz noticed that even though he must have shaved that morning, dark stubble was showing and he was heavily sweating. “Christ. I don’t want to die like this.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here.” Peszek angrily grabbed Janusz’ shirt in one fist, pulling him closer, eyes wide and furious. He’s walleyed, Janusz realised. He’s looking in two places at the same time. We must be desperate to take soldier like this. “Goddamn you. I wouldn’t be here except for you.”

  “Get your hands off me,” Janusz said and pushed hard, shoving Peszek against one tower of tyres which quivered and toppled over. They both scurried back deeper into the shadows, huddled together. Janusz felt the sergeant’s rage radiating from him like sunshine. It made Janusz react childishly. “I didn’t want to be here. One minute I’m in bed with my wife, then your Lieutenant shows up and the next minute I’m being ordered around, my wife’s run away, I’m essentially kidnapped and taken to Switzerland …”

  Peszek, still raging, controlled himself for a moment and stared disconcertingly with his stubbled face, sweating and an imprecise gaze at Janusz. “Right. Right. Okay, he’s dead. The kid’s dead. We’re okay. Who the holy Christ are you? Why are you so goddamn valuable?” There was bewilderment in his voice.

  Janusz wondered that himself, but he was keenly aware of the silence beyond the warehouse, not the beat between notes or measures, but the end of a movement. The shots had stopped moments earlier. Now the voices had stopped too. There were no engine sounds outside either.

  “Listen,” he said, low.

  “Who the hell are you? Can you get us out of here?”

  “No. I can’t even get help for myself.” He recalled Henryk’s and the late Lieutenant Walicki’s blunt recital of his predicament.

  “You’ve got to be somebody important,” Peszek said eagerly. “Why are they going to all this trouble if you’re not? You’re a big man, right? You’re rich, you bought your way out of this shithole. You knew this was going to happen. You can buy us out of it now.”

  Janusz was exasperated, cold and hot simultaneously, inundated with unfamiliar physical sensations, and the searing images of Dunin and Jozef outside. “Listen to me,” he said, “I’m not rich. I’m not important. At least not the way you think. I’m just a man like you.”

  “They wouldn’t be going to all this trouble,” Peszek said obstinately.

  “I write music. That’s it. I write music.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no, no. There’s more to it than that. Fancy Lieutenant Walicki, the kid, me, we wouldn’t be out here getting our arses shot at just for a bastard who writes songs. You’re somebody.”

  To Lidia, once, yes certainly. To his circle of friends, like any man. Perhaps to the public, who appreciated his music. But somebody worth lives and suffering?

  “Listen,” Janusz repeated sharply. “I think they’ve gone.”

  Peszek quieted. “Maybe you’re right. Go and see.” He pushed Janusz forward.

  “You’re the soldier,” he protested. “You should go.”

  “Yeah, I am and I say, go and see what’s happening, big man,” and he grinned savagely and waved what he claimed was his empty gun at Janusz. He wiped sweat off his face with the other hand and when he did, his face was streaked with red. He didn’t notice.

  Janusz said, “You’re wounded.” He pointed and the sergeant frowned, raising his hand again. It looked like a broken candelabrum, two fingers missing, the hand and his suit sleeve coated red.

  “Fuck,” Peszek said wonderingly, then grimaced as if aware for the first time of the pain. “I know you’re worth it. I know it. You’re getting us out of here.”

  “All right. I’ll take a look,” he said, giving in to the one thing the sergeant had grasped onto with all of his might, the notion that he was very powerful, in some hard-to-see way and that fact will be their salvation. Janusz crept forward, feeling a little silly, like he was indeed back playing forts and invaders with the neighbour children. He got to the grimy window and cautiously raised his head. The roadway was dusty, warehouses lining it, the Lieutenant and Dunin lying in it. But the other cars and the soldiers were gone.

  “They’ve left,” he said to Peszek, who was slowly and painfully wrapping a handkerchief around his bloody hand.

  “What about our car?”

  Janusz peered again. Like the bodies in the roadway, it appeared unchanged. “It’s all right.”

  Peszek stood up quickly. “I can’t stop the goddamn bleeding.” He made it sound impersonal, like a leaking tap in someone else’s kitchen. “Need a tourniquet.” He took two steps and seemed to melt from the middle until Janusz rushed over and swung the injured arm over his own shoulder. The man’s growing dead weight settled on him like a penance, and he accepted it as such. He lowered Peszek back to the ground. The handkerchief around the broken hand was sodden with blood. “What should I do?” Janusz asked.

  “Get a shoelace from one of them,” Peszek snapped. “Keep low just in case somebody’s out there.”

  All right. Janusz understood that instruction and, very much like Peszek, stepped away from the reality of the wound and the blood and the need to strip one of the dead outside at least of a shoelace. It was like watching a performance or maybe just a dress rehearsal. Things had to go right but it wasn’t real.

  He crouched low, feeling foolish again, and crept into the road. Dunin lay closest so he undid one of the corporal’s brown shoelaces and brought it back to Pesezk who proceeded with grunts and half-groans to tie off his wrist and cover his wounded hand again with the sodden handkerchief.

  Then Janusz slowly half dragged Peszek to the door, paused, checked outside, squinted. The September morning sun flared overhead among drifting wisps of smoke and the not distant whine and explosion gave the silent warehouse district a surreal aura, as if flames, explosions and bombs were the natural order and dead bodies lying like discarded scarecrows were supposed to be there.

  They fumbled at the car. “You drive,” Peszek said, pushing him. “They may be coming back with more guys.”

  “I can’t drive. I don’t know where we are.”

  “I can’t drive, sir.” He shook the bloody handkerchief hand at Janusz. “I’ve got Walicki‘s map here, so you drive.” He pointed the gun again, which even in his pain he had also kept a grip on.

  Janusz got behind the wheel, the sergeant groaned and slid in. The windshield had spidery cracks in it but was otherwise intact. The hood had two holes in it and Janusz was afraid the engine was damaged, but when he turned the key, it started. “What about Jozef and the corporal?” He stared at the bodies.

  “What about them? You think they give a shit? Get going.” He groaned and pressed his bloody hand to his chest.

  Janusz thought of a week ago: the first difficult rehearsal with the state radio orchestra for the mostly Beethoven, partly Rudzinski programme next month, then dinner at the most expansive restaurant in the city, Zosia on his arm, his music publisher and wife hanging on his mediocre jokes and gossip about the various well-known people he had been with that day. Champagne. Stuffed rabbit leg with foie gras. Cherries. Endless cigarettes. (He hadn’t even thought about smoking since Zosia left.) And all of them, eating and having such a fine time, were so confident that nothing would happen to change their lives for a whi
le, perhaps never. We lived in a penthouse and bad things, horrible things, happened to people who didn’t, the ones below.

  And here he was now, with a bleeding, sweating, vulgar soldier half-threatening, half-begging him to drive, drive. It’s all changed, he thought, and I’m going to find Lidia.

  I’m being ground up in a crucible, he thought clearly. This is a testing of my resolve and talent. The world was disintegrating in smoke, fire, and death around him, but the truth was, it was all about him. He was that consequential. Good Lord, he realised with a sinking heart. Like seeing himself in the mirror earlier. What a monster of egotism.

  Nine

  “You need a doctor,” he said, “you’re still bleeding.”

  “Fuck a doctor. Turn left here, turn, turn!” Peszek shouted, gesturing with

  his bloody hand, “we’ll never get out of the city.”

  “I’m following your directions,” Janusz protested as they jerked to a stop yet again in their snail-like pace, hemmed in all sides by the tumultuous tide of people, cars, trucks and wagons clogging the streets, the tide swelling no matter which different street they tried, came back on, detoured around. It was like the whole city was conspiring to slow them down, immobilise them in the frantic exodus.

  “You’re not following anything I say! You go left when I tell you right, you turn around, you stop, holy mother of Christ, you stop and then go right when I show you,” Peszek slapped the brilliantly coloured map on his lap, “exactly where to go. It’s like you want to get lost.”

  “I want to get out of the city,” Janusz said, “but so does everyone else.”

  “You drive in fucking circles!” He stared around them, the families and men and women in hastily thrown on clothes pressing forward, oblivious to everything but desperate flight. “Go left now! Now!”

  Janusz spun the wheel, honked, stepped on the gas, and they inched forward through the noisy, molasses-thick river of the city on the move. “You have to have a doctor,” he persisted. Every so often, Pesezk loosened the shoelace tourniquet, cursed, and blood dripped from his hand. He tightened the tourniquet again, grimacing as he did so.