“Just when did you take your eye off your brother-in-law, Viktor?”
“We’ve been hard-pressed here, sir. We have only so much manpower, as you know. The cells are nearly full.”
“When, Viktor? When?”
“Toward the end of the summer, I think, sir.”
“Ah, and now he’s here.”
“He’s to stay at my wife’s cousin’s town house, close by. It will be easy to keep him under surveillance.”
“Ah, my dear boy,” Novosiltsev said, as if bringing down a hammer, “he has already met again with the prince.”
Viktor took in a sharp breath and struggled to keep his composure. He was not so worried about anything of real import Michał could be up to, but he was concerned that Novosiltsev was pointing out a failure in the department, which was to say, a failing in Viktor.
The Imperial Commissioner commenced on a long, cynical diatribe, measured and circuitous, concerning loyalty among family, how it was only natural, but that there were greater loyalties to be held to, namely loyalty to the Emperor and loyalty in descending fashion to the Grand Duke Konstantin, to the Imperial Commissioner Nikolai Novosiltsev himself, and ultimately to the Third Department. Somehow Viktor interpreted that any disloyalty to the Imperial Commissioner was the most reprehensible of all. Anyone displaying such disloyalty, Viktor knew, would be crushed.
Viktor sat, watching the general pace about, his words, like his gait, both slow and precise but nonetheless blurring in Viktor’s mind, which was wandering. The man was a bit of a mystery. He had once been one of three great friends to advise Aleksander, the late Russian tsar. Prince Adam Czartoryski had been one, as well. It was well known that Novosiltsev and Tsar Aleksander had once shared liberal attitudes in regard to Poland, attitudes that influenced the former tsar in no small ways. But times had changed with Tsar Nicholas. Novosiltsev had become rabidly conservative politically and anti-Polish, resulting in his relationship with Czartoryski disintegrating to the point at which the Polish patriot was an enemy worthy of being watched. And discovered—at what? Was this distrust of Prince Czartoryski valid—or a product of Novosiltsev’s personal feelings and delusions?
As the general droned on about fealty, Viktor wondered at the irony of the lost comradeship between Novosiltsev and Czartoryski.
At last the general brought his lesson on loyalty to a conclusion and turned on Viktor. “I’ll tell you this: if something does happen, if something significant slips past us, Viktor Baklanov, the Grand Duke will have both of our goddamned heads!” The general leaned over Viktor, his expression menacing, his breath sour. “And you can be certain, my friend, that yours will go first.”
Viktor was dismissed and as he passed through the outer office, Larissa avoided his eyes. At the door, however, he felt her gaze upon him and swung quickly around. She looked away, but she had been watching him with those steel gray eyes and the oddest hint of a smile. With what intent? What emotion?
He said nothing, closed the door behind him, and began maneuvering his way down the four flights.
Viktor sat for some minutes at his desk thinking about his meeting with Novosiltsev. The man was insufferable, despicable. It grated on Viktor that he was answerable to him, that he was fully dependent on him for his job and for any hope of advancement. He grudgingly admired—and aspired to—the Imperial Commissioner’s innate intelligence, administrative acumen, and political cunning. And Viktor felt his own blind ambition equaled that of his superior’s. But Nikollai Novosiltsev’s dissipation, alcoholism, and pathological cynicism were intolerable.
Viktor had considered the possibility of attaining a transfer. But his marriage to Barbara complicated notions of leaving Warsaw. That Novosiltsev would be transferred was a preferred scenario but unlikely: the man was entrenched in Polish affairs, having represented the Russian Empire in Poland since 1815. Retirement was more likely, for Novosiltsev was old. Still, it might be years before he relinquished power. Old men died hard. Old powerful men died hardest.
His mind came back to Larissa. The image of her expression as he left the office stayed with him. There had been a haughty smugness in the lines of a half- smile that chilled him. He had wanted to slap her. Had she known of the substance of the interview? It occurred to him then that it might have been she who brought the information about Michał Stelnicki to Novosiltsev.
At once he discredited that notion. It was impossible. What was more credible was the notion that Novosiltsev had confided in her. Had this old man taken her as his confidante? Or worse, as his lover? Like himself, Larissa was ambitious.
Viktor chided himself for his imagination. Novosiltsev and Larissa? It was too repellent a thought. Besides, Novosiltsev was known to anyone worth his salt in the Third Department for his predilection not for pretty secretaries but for prostitutes.
Or, if Larissa did indeed have knowledge of the meeting’s content, it was more than possible that she had listened at the door. She was capable of doing so.
Another thought. It chilled Viktor to think Novosiltsev received classified information from sources other than the Third Department, but he was notorious for working one branch of the Russian bureaucracy against another. Viktor had no illusions that the Third Department was the sole purveyor in clandestine activity. Competition abounded.
3
“YOUR BAG ARRIVED EARLIER THIS morning, milord.”
Michał thanked the Gronska stable boy, affecting a smile as he dismounted.
“I’ll take good care of this fine stallion, sir.”
“Do that. His name is Bonaparte.” This drew a smile from the boy. “But he’s not French or Corsican,” Michał continued. “He’s a Polish Arabian.”
“I saw that, milord. Smaller than an average stallion—more adaptable in battle.”
“Indeed. What’s your name, lad?” Michał took him for eighteen or nineteen.
“Kasper, milord.”
“Ah, keeper of the treasure, is it? Most appropriate.”
“Milord?”
“Your name, Kasper, that’s what it means.”
“Oh.”
“I’m going to take a turn about the city before I go in to see the Countess Gronska—should anyone ask.”
Michał left the carriage house, moving down the alleyway toward the street. The sick feeling at the pit of his stomach had not abated. The late night meeting with Prince Adam Czartoryski had not gone well. Not well at all. The prince had fumed with anger, fired stern questions at him. How had he presumed to just show up at the prince’s residence unannounced, under cover of night notwithstanding? Didn’t he realize the mansion would be under surveillance day and night? Hadn’t the prince told him back in May that his moves were watched? Didn’t he realize the danger, the need for absolute secrecy?
Michał had reacted with the obsequiousness due the statesman but thought him a bit overwrought, a bit overly suspicious. However, as he rode away from the prince’s city mansion before dawn, his keen ears picked up the sound of another horse’s clip-clopping some distance behind, and when he alternated speeds between a walk and a trot, so too did the other rider. His arrival in Warsaw and his visit with the prince were no secret, it seemed. He was being followed. Coming to the Market Square, he dismounted and led the chestnut Arabian in among the crush of shops, stalls, vendors, and early shoppers. In time he looked back but saw no one trailing him. At least not a rider. However, the person following him might easily have given his horse over to someone, and with no image of a face to go by, Michał knew he might be any one of the faces in the market. His eyes on alert, he had briskly led his chestnut past admiring or curious eyes to the opening of a side street and remounted, taking a roundabout route through various narrow streets, then doubling back to Piwna Street and the Gronska town house.
Now, his horse safely stowed with Kasper, he strode along the alley abutting Zofia’s town house, coming out at Piwna Street. To his left and across the street, the narrow lane was dominated by Saint Martin’s Chu
rch. Farther down, it emptied out into the Castle Square. He turned right, his mind still burning with the knowledge that his nighttime visit to the prince had been noted and recorded. The prince had had every right to be angry. He had been foolish. Stupid. He, like the prince himself, would be under suspicion now, under watch by the government. It suddenly occurred to him that the person tailing him had been obvious—too obvious. Was someone deliberately trying to intimidate him?
Impulsively, Michał stopped, turned back, retraced his steps, crossed the street, and entered Saint Martin’s Church, slipping into a back pew. The church was empty, but for a handful of veiled women lighting candles at Mary’s statue. The quietude welcomed him. The coolness of the marble, the scents of the yellow and white crysthanthemums and beeswax candles coalesced to calm him.
He knelt for no longer than a minute before sitting back. The kneeling was a perfunctory action. It was expected and so he complied. Not many years before, he had come to realize his attitude toward religion was much like that of his stepfather’s. On one occasion, they had been hunting and had brought down a deer. The death scene, strangely echoing in some small way the many battles in which Michał had taken part, prompted him to ask Jan whether he believed in God.
“I do,” Jan said. A long pause ensued and Michał somehow knew to wait. “I will say,” Jan continued at last, ‘that I don’t believe God has chosen any one church or any one religion in which to dwell.”
“But you go to church.”
“More for your mother than for me or my God.”
“Your God?”
“Yes, Michał. Look at the trees here in the forest, their height, their strength and majesty. Look at the light coming from the bluest of skies and slanting through the treetops and falling through a mist to the ground. Take in the earthy smells about us. Listen to the songs of the birds above, the rabbits rustling in the briar below. My God is here.” Jan pointed to the lifeless stag. “Even in this gift there. He has sent it.”
“Have you spoken of this to Mother?”
“Once, in a meadow, many years ago.”
“Did she understand?
“I think so. Oh, I’m not saying I don’t believe in the God of her church, Michał. What I’m saying is that I believe in the God of all the churches, synagogues, and temples where people believe him to dwell. How could it be otherwise? He was in that long-ago meadow and he’s here today.”
Sitting now in Saint Martin’s, Michał could not help but hope—and pray—for guidance. Rankling thoughts of his blundering visit to Prince Czartoryski persisted. He put down his recklessness to too many years on the estate, away from wars, away from soldiering, away from politics and intrigue. He had not grown fat, but he had grown comfortable. They were good years, those, he thought, and the temptation to return to Sochaczew as soon as possible arose now, beckoning. As the minutes passed, and as Michał sorted out his thoughts within the cocoon of the church, he confronted the temptation and put it to rest, admitting now that those had been bland and colorless years. Just the mere acceleration of his pulse at the thought of his being followed underscored the lack of excitement in his life at Sochaczew. The years in the military—long, lonely, grueling, and bloody as they were—had provided intermittent adventure, a dark war joy, and, more importantly, a hard and fast purpose. A noble purpose. And now, as he thought back on the real meat of his tête à tête with the prince, the real danger to Poland, he came to realize in his heart of hearts, that the recent years of inactivity, however comfortable, were over.
As a young man—boy, in truth—he had joined the cavalry. He had done his duty. Now, at thirty-eight, his duty had come to him, a duty not to be taken lightly, for Poland herself hung in the balance.
“Welcome to Warsaw, Michał!” Zofia chimed.
Michał had been admiring a painted porcelain clock on the mantle, and he turned to see her gliding across the well-appointed reception room, toward him. “Thank you, Cousin Zofia,” he said, meeting her half way and kissing her on either cheek, ever so lightly for they were powdered. She wore a scent of roses.
“Sit down, sit down. I’ve ordered afternoon tea for us. Now, you must tell me how the summer was passed at Sochaczew. And how is my cousin?”
Michał sat in a French styled tub chair, too low to the tiled floor for his long legs. “Mother is well and as for—”
“Do you know, Michał,” Zofia asked, settling into a high-backed wing chair, “there was a time I dreaded the summers in the country? No parties, no opera, no theater. But now, from time to time, I do long for the slower months. The peace, you know. The returning storks tending their new little ones in their nests next to our chimneys, the scent of fresh-cut wheat and rye at Harvest Home. The sense that time will go on. Oh, I could do without the deafening sounds of the cicadas.” With much animation Zofia launched into the telling of one summer invasion of cicadas in Halicz during her girlhood at Hawthorn House, the Gronski family estate in Southern Poland, long sequestered now by the Russians. The bringing of a tea tray by a young maid and the serving of tea did not slow the tale.
Michał sipped at his tea, marveling at this woman’s verve and great beauty. She was nearing sixty and yet her her face was unlined and her high, ornately arranged hair was still as black as her eyes. Oh, he knew she bathed her face in a yogurt concoction with some regularity, but what kept the silver from her hair he could not fathom. She wore a shimmering gray day dress, high-waisted with straight lines and daringly low-cut in what he thought must be the most recent style. Beneath her hem the silver buckles of her matching slippers glinted in the light given off by the fire in the grate.
In time Zofia did allow Michał to manage a short account of a reasonably successful harvest home, a minor roof collapse of the barn, and other mundane doings at Topolostan.
“How very interesting,” Zofia said, with more politeness than interest, “however, I have an afternoon engagement and I should get about my toilette.” She set down the cup of tea that had gone cold during her conversation. “Your portmanteau arrived this morning. You’ll find it and everything you’ll need in the front suite on the second floor.” She started to rise.
“Thank you so much, but I wanted to ask about Iza.” Michał thought it strange that Zofia had failed to mention her.
“Oh, Izabel!” Zofia said in a breathy exclamation, falling back into the well-cushioned chair. “I’d quite forgotten. I’m so glad you’re here, Michał. I hope you can engage her in some activity. She may have left the convent, but the convent has not left her, I must say.” Zofia produced her plinking little laugh. “I’m at my wit’s end with her. She keeps to her room, sometimes even for meals, and lord knows, she refuses to attend any social function. What’s to become of her? She’s many years past her girlhood and the ideal marrying age, but there are some men in the circles in which I travel—older men, you know, widowers and the like—who might take an interest, but she refuses an outing of any kind.”
“It must be hard, Cousin Zofia, coming back into the world out of a cloistered convent. Did she not seem happy there—on your visits?”
Michał thought Zofia’s face colored slightly. “Well, truth be told, Michał, I didn’t often visit.”
“Oh.”
“Now don’t think too harshly of me. I seldom hold a grudge, but I must admit to one in this regard. I hadn’t wanted her to enter the convent in the first place. We had many strong words about it. I had had plans for my only daughter. My only child. Grand plans! Why, in my youth I always said my years were golden ducats to be spent and enjoyed. And what does she do with hers but throw them away—like so many worthless pebbles down a well!”
Michał affected a laugh. “Why, Iza is younger than I by three years, I think, and I’m not yet wrinkled and arthritic, cousin, so she’s not so very old.”
Zofia shrugged and got to her feet. “Time is more heartless with women, I’m afraid.” She sighed, a stage sigh, Michał thought. “You know, she is nothing like me. I could swear
she’s a changeling. Maybe you can breathe some life into her, Michał.” She held her hand out for Michał to kiss. “I shall be hopeful for that. Now I must fly.”
“Is she in her room? Will she come down to supper?”
Zofia turned and made for the doorway, speaking as she did so. “Oh, I did manage to get her to go out. It took some doing. She’s selecting materials for dresses, and if I hadn’t lied and said I had made an appointment for her, she wouldn’t have felt compelled to go. She’s the type that wouldn’t want to disappoint even a shopkeeper, you see. Catholic guilt, I suppose. It plagued Mother, too, rest her soul.” Her laughter poured out like tinkling coins. “I guess it skipped a generation.” At the door now, Zofia turned, her lips a reddened gash beneath a perfect nose, the comedy gone. “I suppose she made a fine nun, Michał. And yet to me she has been a disappointment. A great disappointment.”
Michał found his quarters to be a two-room affair: a small sitting room leading to a larger bedchamber, the two windows of which fronted the street. The sitting room had a small sofa, writing desk and caned chair; the bedchamber a wide, comfortable-appearing bed embraced by blue velvet hangings, table nearby, capacious armoire, reading chair by the windows. After unpacking his portmanteau and storing it atop the armoire, Michał ventured out into the hallway and started down the stairs. Upon reaching the first floor landing, he heard light footsteps coming up the carpeted staircase from the ground floor. Since Zofia had gone out and the maids exclusively used the rear stairwell, he at once guessed the identity of the person ascending the stairs. He waited.
As the woman reached the first floor landing, her eyes were cast downward, one hand clutching a package, the other carefully tending the folds of her dark dress.
“Iza,” Michał said in a cautionary whisper, realizing they were about to collide.
“Oh!” the woman cried, for she had neither heard nor noticed him.
The Warsaw Conspiracy Page 7