The Warsaw Conspiracy

by James Conroyd Martin

  “No, sir.” The question—bizarrely off topic, Józef thought—tore at his heart. His right hand instinctively moved up toward his jacket’s inside pocket that held Emilia’s miniature. Realizing that hand held the Virtuti Militari, he aborted the move. He could not help but think what a strange turn this visit had taken.

  “Ah, well, it won’t be long, I’m certain, a handsome lad like you, in or out of uniform.—Do you know, after I have you help me with my medals, I’d like to see your horse. How does that sound?”

  Stranger still. “Fine, sir.”

  “Good! When this is all over, Cadet Stelnicki, I hope you go back to your music.” The general was already up from his chair and moving toward his jacket, the peg of the wooden leg punctuating every other step.

  At the stable the two talked at some length of the Polish Arabian line of horses. Half an hour later, the general left him alone with Tad without any further inquiry as to why Józef had gone to see him.

  Józef lay in bed that night, the visit and the general’s comments replaying in his mind. The general was a clever man. He had known what Józef wanted and somehow the words, the medals, the wooden leg had impacted Józef in such a way, inexplicable even to him as he lay there fully wake, that the issue had been closed.

  The boil had been lanced. Obedience was all.

  Only later—much later—would he come to understand the lesson about glory and war—and that General Sowiński had brought him to a place where two paths met.

  June 1831, Warsaw

  “COME HERE, WILL YOU?” VIKTOR called to Bartosz, who had just arrived home from marketing.

  Bartosz stepped into the Rozniecki office, where Viktor spent a good deal of his time, having grown bolder with the weeks and tired of the restraints of the stuffy, hidden room.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What news today?”

  Bartosz gave a little shrug. Like so many harnessed into household service, he was a serious man but he seemed even more so today.

  “What is it, Bartosz? Why are you so tight-lipped?”

  “My mind was elsewhere. There’s talk of a setback, sir.”

  “A setback? For whom? For God’s sake, man, put down your packages and tell me!”

  Bartosz spilled his six or seven packages on a table near the door but moved no closer to Viktor. “The Poles. It was not unexpected.”

  Viktor had become used to hearing of miraculous minor victories on the part of the insurgents so that this news was news. It was no setback in his eyes. “When and where, Bartosz? What is the talk?”

  “End of last month at Ostrołęka. It’s about seventy-five miles northeast.”

  “I know where it is! Get on with it, man.”

  “Well, no one has heard the story first hand yet, but what is known is that the Poles were stubbornly fighting to hold the town and keep General Diebitsch from crossing the River Narew. The fighting was intense and while the Russians lost plenty, the Poles lost the best of their infantry, thousands, they say, along with hundreds of officers and two generals.”

  “Two generals? Was Skrzynecki one?”

  “I did not hear his name mentioned.” Bartosz turned to retrieve his packages. Evidently he had revealed all he had heard.

  “One can hope, Bartosz. One can hope.” Viktor longed to hear that the usually adroit General Skrzynecki was among the killed. But what about Bartosz? What were his hopes? He had delivered earlier reports with a seeming objectivity. And yet, at first coming into the room, he had seemed downcast. Did this man who had worked, quite willingly and profitably, for a Pole who was employed by Russia as a spy truly lack—like Rozniecki himself—a vested interest in his own country?

  It was a point to ponder . . . later, for now there came a knocking at the front door and both Viktor and Bartosz came to attention.

  “Go see who it is, Bartosz.”

  Even before he could fully secrete himself in the hidden room, Bartosz hurried back into the office. “It’s the woman, sir!”

  “Larissa?” Viktor found himself saying her name even though he knew it could be no other. “The same one from before, you mean?”

  Bartosz nodded, his face paling.

  “You know the plan, Bartosz. Are you prepared to follow through on it?”

  Another nod.

  “Good man. Now let her in.”

  Viktor remained in the office. He carefully closed the door to the hidden room and moved the huge painting of peacocks into place.

  “Peacocks, indeed!” The voice behind him was Larissa’s. “How befitting.”

  Viktor had expected her to return weeks ago and had since begun to think he was well rid of her so that when he said, “What a surprise this is, Larissa,” he was speaking the truth. He turned away from the painting to face her, wondering if she had seen him swing it into place over the doorway to the hidden room, then deeming that possibility of no matter. Not now.

  Larissa wore a beige dress he had seen before when he took her to a ball—before he had been bewitched by Basia. The garment was soiled and fraying in places—ruined finery. Her hair was unkempt, her face gaunt, the gray eyes somehow dulled.

  “Don’t worry, Viktor, I’ve not come to ask you to take me back now that you are without your loving wife.”

  Viktor bristled at the mention of Barbara and the memory of Larissa’s meeting with her. “It is a temporary separation—until Russia regains control of Warsaw.”

  Viktor made a show of calling to Bartosz to bring two glasses of wine, good wine from the cellar.

  “You are an optimist, Viktor—about your wife, I mean.”

  “Sit, won’t you?” Viktor motioned to the chair in front of the desk. He moved around to the desk chair. “And you, Larissa,” he said, taking his seat, “have loose lips.”

  Her eyes widened slightly. She took his meaning at once.

  “You’ve done your worst in trying to alienate my wife. To no avail,” he lied. “Now tell me what you want.”

  “You’re a fool if you think she still loves you and twice the fool if you think you ever loved her.”

  Viktor tasted bile rising in his throat. “What do you want?”

  “Money, Viktor,” Larissa sniffed. “I’ve been put out of two pensions and refused housing at a dozen others. I want enough money to live on until such a time when there are safe carriages again to St. Petersburg.”

  Under the guise of concern, Viktor plied her with questions about her experiences of the last few months, even suggesting two places that might take her in.

  Bartosz entered now with two glasses of red wine. Viktor stood and offered one to Larissa, who took it and drank, rather greedily. As for himself he took the crystal goblet with the slight chip on the rim.

  “About the money,” Viktor stated after Bartosz had left the room, “had you asked me a few months ago, Larissa, I did have a good deal of money. But no more. It’s quite costly keeping house, I’m finding. While the shops are open, the best meats and fish are to be found on the black market at exorbitant prices.” He continued in this vein, speaking the truth, watching her eyes slowly glaze over as the poison did its work.

  When they closed, he called for Bartosz.

  In her bedchamber Iza drew on her nurse’s blue dress in preparation to take up her shift at the hospital. News of the disaster at Ostrołęka had been the subject for days in Warsaw. After a good many victories, it had come as a shock. Lists of the dead and wounded had yet to arrive. What of Michał? He had been there under General Skyzynecki’s command. She prayed that he was not one of the 300 officers who had been—no, she wouldn’t even voice it to herself. He was safe. He had to be. And what of her father, Jerzy? No one knew where he was.

  Iza heard the sounds of marching in the street below and went to the window. The soldiers had already passed. Just soldiers assigned to the city, she assumed. She wished she could do more than she was doing. She was still relatively young and strong. If only the Polish Sejm had not vetoed Madame Hoffman-Tanska’s prop
osal for their women’s aid group. She had suggested that there be three companies of women: the first to stay behind the lines of battle in order to carry off the wounded; the second to attend to the wounded in the vehicles that carried the wounded; and the third to help with the many provisions needed, such as bandages and wrappings of cotton and wool. If the all-male Sejm had not been so obstinate as to reject the idea, Iza would have chosen the first group.

  On the ground floor she discovered her mother in the reception room.

  “Izabel, come in here. There’s been some news.”

  Iza grew faint, her mouth falling slack. She hurried in. “What? What is it, Mother?”

  “Anna’s had a letter.”

  “From whom?” She felt her heart pounding in her chest. “About whom?”

  “It is from Jan.”

  “Jan Michał?”

  “No, Izabel, Anna’s husband Jan.”

  “Oh. He’s still at Zamość? And safe?”

  “He is—and he tells Anna that Jerzy is there, as well.”

  “Thank God. I’m so relieved to hear it. You would think he’d have gotten word to us before this.”

  “Izabel, you must know where he comes from, that little village on the River Vistula. Child, he can’t write.”

  Iza was thunderstruck. Jerzy was well-spoken and always neatly dressed, but he had little formal education and was a simple man at heart. She felt her face burning with embarrassment.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?—Anna’s husband there with my

  . . . your father. All these years later.”

  There was a strangeness to it, but Iza couldn’t quite bring the irony into clear focus. “Mother, did you once love Jan?”

  Zofia flinched. “Why would you ask that, Izabel?”

  “Just little things I picked up over the years from Cousin Anna and Basia—and you.”

  “Ah, a lifetime ago I thought to marry him. I admit it. But he became smitten with Anna. And I—I saw marriage to him as a way of avoiding the arranged marriage my parents had planned. But no, I didn’t love him. I came between Jan and Anna. It was a terrible thing I did.”

  What her mother didn’t say was that Anna had been pressured into marrying Zofia’s intended and that it ended badly. There was more to the story of the two cousins, Iza could tell, but for now she pursued the subject of her father. “And Jerzy?”

  “Oh, Izabel, Jerzy and I come from different worlds.” Zofia turned her back to Iza. “There was no future for Jerzy and me.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Love? It was not for us.” Zofia turned to face Iza, a smile somehow more bitter than sweet. “And you, Izabel, have you found love?”

  How easily her mother could turn the tables. “Yes, Mother,” Iza said, her voice catching.

  Zofia was clearly waiting for her to say more, but Iza—heart and mind on Michał—pivoted and swept from the room, moving quickly for the door lest her mother see the tears already spilling down her cheeks.

  24

  July 1831, Zamosc, Poland

  HAVING RIDDEN SEVERAL MILES NORTHEAST of the Zamość Fortress, Jerzy Lesiak and two other soldiers were reconnoitering the area for sign of enemy movement.

  “We’ll ride to that ridge,” Lieutenant Albin Klimek called and the three rode on, taking the long, gently sloping way, Klimek in the lead with Jerzy and a cadet, Kazimierz, flanking him. A perfect lookout point. It was an easy order, Jerzy thought, a predictable one. And one he would have given—had he been born into the szlachta, been educated as one of the minor nobility and completed studies at the Officer Cadets School. Had that been the case, he would not have left the army years before and he might be a general this day, not taking the lead from a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant.

  Once, in the advance on Russia, he had saved the life of an aide-de-camp of Napoleon. Word had gotten to the little Corsican himself and Napoleon made a point of congratulating him in public and was about to promote him to major. It took Jerzy’s poor French and a good deal of crudely spontaneous sign language for Jerzy to convey to l‘Emperor that he could not read and write—French or Polish—and, as such, was unsuited for promotion.

  Jerzy shrugged off these inequities. They seldom bothered him anymore. Fate goes as it must. On the battlefield he was equal to every man at his side. But there were other differences having to do with his birth that stung as deeply today as in the past. Were it not for his birth, he might have married the young woman he had drawn from the river so many years ago. Zofia . . . she had been his for such a short time. Were it not for his birth, he would have been the father to Iza he had wanted to be. And there might have been other children, too.

  The three soldiers came to the top of the ridge and looked out over the prairie below that extended less than a mile, ending at the cusp of a thick birch forest. It was a perfect summer day, the trees standing like bleached sentinels against the cloudless sky, the thick grasses below dotted with wildflowers of white, yellow, and blue, bending and stirring gracefully with the wind. On such a day Jerzy wondered how it was that country fought country, man fought man.

  It seemed that the three simultaneously sighted the figure on horseback.

  “One of ours,” Lieutenant Klimek whispered.

  Unless, Jerzy thought, not without sarcasm, the Russians were now wearing czapkas and blue uniforms trimmed with crimson.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” Klimek hissed.

  “Scouting,” Kazimierz said.

  Jerzy was remarking to himself that the cadet had more sense than Klimek when something about the figure caught his attention. He watched him closely. It was an officer—and one whose posture betrayed the fact that he was not so very young. As if sensing their presence, or hearing Klimek’s rambling complaints—rising in volume—that he had no business scouting out his area, the officer looked up, caught sight of them and gave a little wave. He then directed his horse closer to the forest.

  “The old fool!” Klimek muttered.

  “He knows the area, lieutenant,” Jerzy said.

  “You know him?”

  “I do. He’s Major Jan Stelnicki.”

  “Well, he may have done his last reconnoitering, Jerzy. Look there!”

  Jerzy looked due north and fell silent.

  “Cossacks!” the cadet cried.

  There were five of them coming over the horizon, all robed in white, their massive warhorses leaving behind them not a wake of dust, but a path of beaten grasses and flying clods of earth.

  “Jan!” Jerzy called out the alarm.

  Jan turned in his saddle and took notice. The Cossack warriors had seen him and were bearing down on him like hounds on a hare.

  “His Polish Arabian can outrun those monster destriers,” Klimek said, “but he best get moving.”

  Jerzy’s worst fear was realized as he watched Jan turn his horse—to face his attackers.

  The cadet’s mouth fell slack. “He’s going to take them on!”

  “He’s a dead man!” Klimek said.

  “Sweet Jesus in Heaven!” Jerzy cried. Jan was well into his sixties. What was he thinking—to stand his ground, mad as Don Quixote?

  Jerzy gave rein to his horse, giving spur so hard it surely drew blood. He ignored Klimek’s order to halt. He was flying down the ridge now, couldn’t stop if he wanted to, dirt and stones flying, praying not for himself but for the stability of his own Polish Arabian’s legs on the rocky, nearly vertical cliff.

  Jan had used just the pressure of his knees to direct the well-trained horse’s turnabout because his hands were already busy with weapons. He drew himself up in the saddle now, his mind filling with a sense of destiny coming for him, destiny coupled with a sense of déjà vous, for many years before he had given good fight to just such a gang of Cossacks, the same white robes, the same massive warhorses heaving and snorting. He well knew the difference between that time and this. Even then he had been no match against their numbers despite being young and strong and determined.<
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  “God’s teeth!” Jan cursed aloud as he watched one of the Cossacks pull away from the others, his dark stallion’s hoofs loudly pounding the plains. He wanted to be first to engage Jan, and his guttural warrior whoop made it evident that—in contrast to that other meeting—there would be no prisoners taken this time.

  If only he had his lance at point, he would make short work of the angry zealot. But the lance rest was empty. What good were lances on a reconnaissance mission?

  “Come, Jadwiga,” Jan whispered, withdrawing his longtime sword from her scabbard. “By God, be true as ever, Jadwiga.” His hand on her handle, he felt the old war-joy pumping through his heart now, returning to his veins. Youth was gone, strength diminished, but determination—determination abounded.

  The steel coruscated in the sunlight, so Jan knew the Cossack would be prepared. But his plan was for Jadwiga to dance with the second arrival, for he kept his loaded carbine out of sight, a sudden surprise for the most impetuous of the suitors. As for the third, fourth, and fifth Cossack callers . . . who could say?

  About halfway down the perilously steep incline, Jerzy heard another horse behind him. Somehow he knew at once it was Kazimierz and not Klimek.

  But the day was not through with providing surprises. By the time Jerzy’s horse stumbled onto the prairie grass, he could hear not one, but two, horses thumping down behind him. Klimek was not allowing them to go into battle alone. Later, Jerzy would ruminate over the truth that it often takes circumstances—or fate—to coerce some men to heroism. So it was for Klimek— a reluctant hero who fell under a Cossack’s sword that day.

  Warsaw

  ANNA AWOKE IN A SWEAT. She could not believe she had fallen asleep. She had come home tired after a long morning shift at the hospital that began at 4 A.M. After the significant loss at Ostrołęka, the main body of the Polish army had retreated to Praga, just across the river, so that all the hospitals were overflowing with men, Polish soldiers and Russian prisoners. Sitting up at the side of the bed, she gave a slight shake of her head. Her intention had been merely to lie down and rest her eyes. Focusing on the window facing the street, she saw that the afternoon sun was still strong outside. The clock on the mantel told her she had lost a full hour.