Where the Devil Can't Go

by Anya Lipska

  Janusz eyes narrowed – remembering the pornographic photos, he’d half-guessed that was coming.

  “Edward read the letter out to me on the phone,” Nowak went on. “It said that Adamski was ‘enjoying fucking his little girl’ – excuse me – and if he didn’t send half a million Euros, he would kill her.”

  “And by this time, Adamski had run off with Weronika?”

  Nodding, Nowak waved a hand. “Gone without a trace.”

  A thought struck Janusz. “Does Zamorski have anyone else out looking for them?”

  Nowak shook his head. “Good God, no – as far as Edward’s concerned, the fewer people who know about the whole ugly business, the better.”

  Janusz decided not to share his hunch about the gangsters on Adamski’s tail; he wanted time to digest all this, decide if any of it changed the plans he’d already made.

  “So what are you asking me to do?” he asked. “Get the girl away from Adamski, obviously.” Nowak nodded. “And destroy the birth certificate, I assume. But what’s to stop him getting another one issued?”

  “Edward tells me that the original no longer exists,” Nowak raised a sardonic eyebrow. “You know politicians – they always have a friend in the right department.” A grimace of distaste crossed his face. “It’s all a shabby business. But whatever mistakes Edward has made, he doesn’t deserve to have his future destroyed by someone like Adamski.”

  “So Adamski gets to walk away? After what he did to Justyna?” said Janusz, anger roughening his voice.

  Nowak struck the table with the flat of his hand: “Absolutely not,” his voice hard. “That must not happen. Apparently, there’s a warrant out for Adamski’s arrest back home – he tried to force an old man to sell him some antique furniture, and when he said no, he knocked him about quite badly.”

  He raised a finger: “When you find him, Edward will make sure the scumbag gets extradited – and he’ll get a prison sentence. Even if the English police can prove Adamski was with Justyna when she died, they would probably only charge him with supplying drugs.” He shrugged. “What do you get for that, here? Probation and a few weeks picking up dogshit in the park.”

  He was right, thought Janusz. Adamski would be handed down a much tougher sentence in Poland and his prison wouldn’t resemble a university campus. He shivered at a sudden memory: Montepulich’s interrogation room. He could barely remember what it looked like, but the smell of the place, a ferrous reek of blood and sweat overlaid with cleaning fluids, would stay with him forever.

  Nowak sought his gaze. “You’re an honourable man, and I know that your decision won’t be based on financial considerations...” He hesitated. “But Edward is anxious that you have sufficient funds to continue your investigation.” Reaching into the pocket of his windcheater jacket, he pulled out a manila envelope, and held it out to Janusz, looking embarrassed. “He has doubled the instalment Pani Tosik paid you, and he will pay the same amount again when everything is settled. You don’t need to make your mind up right away – if you should decide against continuing, just return the money to Father Pietruzki.”

  Janusz paused a moment, then took the envelope with a nod.

  Nowak walked with him to the door. “I doubt either of us are particularly fond of politicians,” he said, looking searchingly into Janusz’s eyes, “And Edward is my friend, so perhaps I am biased, but I am sure of one thing. He has always chosen the hard road when he could have taken the easy road, and I think you are the same kind of man.”

  Downstairs, Janusz craned his head around the main salon’s doorway, looking for Father Pietruzki. The guests had become rowdier, their chatter and laughter louder and higher pitched. He saw the Countess Jagielska leaning on the arm of a smirking businessman, regaling him, no doubt, with some three-centuries-old family anecdote.

  The priest stood in a corner, talking to a tall guy in a long black robe with a pink sash who looked surprisingly young to be a Monsignor. Noticing Janusz, the Monsignor put a hand on Father Pietruzki’s shoulder, and bent to whisper into his ear. Following his pointing finger, the priest saw Janusz and, dipping his head in a respectful farewell, made his way over.

  They stepped out into the street and he looked up into Janusz’s eyes, his gaze full of almost comic penitence. Janusz looked down at his friend and confessor, the strands of white hair falling across his forehead. He was a long way from forgiving the lying old bastard, he realised. Pulling out the brown envelope, he leafed through the notes and extracted about a third – the amount he’d need for the next few days. He handed the rest to the priest who looked up at him in surprise.

  “I’ll do it,” he growled. “Send this to Justyna’s people.” And he left, without a word of farewell.

  He walked on autopilot for a good ten, fifteen minutes, as though in a bubble. Across bus-choked Oxford Circus, all the way down Carnaby Street, through drifting shoals of tourists and laser-guided office workers on their lunch break, till he hit Beak Street – at which point he realised he was heading straight for Kasia’s club.

  He slowed his pace, and took a detour through Berwick Street. The sun was out, the fruit and veg market was in full swing, and the cacophony of the market traders’ calls, like a flock of raucous magpies, pushed the clamour of thoughts from his head. Fuck it. He decided to take a peace offering to Kasia. He wouldn’t be seeing her for a few days and he had to know if there was anything to be salvaged between them.

  He browsed the best of the produce stalls, at the market’s southernmost end, near the junction with Peter Street. These guys supplied the finest produce to £100-a-head restaurants where the chefs, according to Oskar, for some unfathomable reason, turned good honest food into foam. He spotted the perfect thing: a basket of fresh, wavy-edge chanterelles which, fried in butter and garlic and finished with a spoonful of crème fraiche and some chopped dill, would make a delicious breakfast.

  Holding the brown paper bag of fragile mushrooms carefully in his big fist, Janusz left the market’s semi-rural scene and ducked into the darkened piss-smelling alley that served as the gateway to Soho’s warren of sex aid shops, strip joints, and lap dancing clubs. Here, pretty girls with tired faces leaned from doorways, touting for business from punters, but on seeing him, their sales pitch gave way to a smile of recognition, and, from the occasional Polish or Ukrainian girl, a Dzien dobry, Panu.

  He was pleased to find Kasia fully dressed behind the bar of the club today. “Pale chickens!” she exclaimed when she saw his face – a saying he hadn’t heard since he was a child. “Just a little bump in a car,” he said. She lifted a sceptical eyebrow.

  “I’m brewing a cold,” she said, when he asked why she wasn’t dancing today. “So Ray promoted me to club manager while he goes to Costco.” She seemed pleased to be given the responsibility, however temporary.

  The bag of chanterelles earned him a sexy lopsided smile, which made him absurdly happy, and after making them both a lemon tea, Kasia sat on a bar stool beside him to drink it. Fifteen metres away, through an archway, a girl in a G-string and feather boa gyrated to a thumping pop track, watched with dog-like concentration by a handful of motionless punters. It was hardly a romantic backdrop but after a few moments Janusz had completely blanked it out.

  There was warmth in Kasia’s half-smile, but also a wariness around those long, lovely eyes that didn’t bode well for their future. He tried to formulate the words that might repair this breach between them, but the prospect of another depressing trudge around the topic of her jealousy, and the everlasting nature of her marriage to Steve depressed him. And there was something else nagging at him, something they probably both knew: the uncomfortable question that even if she were to leave Steve, did he really have the stomach to set up home with a woman again?

  They sipped their tea and said nothing for perhaps a minute. Shifting on his bar stool, he felt a blade-thrust of pain from his damaged rib so fierce that it made sweat prickle coldly on his upper lip.

  “I’ve never to
ld you about Iza, my first real girlfriend, the one before Marta,” he said, his hand cradling the hot glass. Kasia became stock-still: she’d often wondered how Janusz had ended up married to Marta, but he had never volunteered any details about his love life before meeting her. “She died...or rather, she was killed,” he went on, almost as though to himself, “when I took her to a demonstration in Gdansk. In ‘82.”

  He shivered suddenly, violently, at the force of the memories. A bitterly cold dusk, snow blizzarding down.

  As Janusz told Kasia the story, the words seemed to fall from his mouth without him being aware of his lips forming them.

  He had taken Iza to his home city at Christmas, to meet his mother, but once he’d heard whispers of an illegal march to commemorate four people who’d been killed in a protest over food shortages, he was determined to go. His Mama had tried to talk him out of it, and even Iza wasn’t that keen, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. It was a matter of national duty, he said, with the certainty of youth. His real reason for going was more shameful – and more compelling – but he could say nothing of that – either then, or now, to Kasia.

  It had begun as a peaceful march to a Catholic shrine to lay flowers for the dead. But as the sun set, and the snow started to fall, the helmeted ranks of ZOMO riot police started pressing in, shoving the demonstrators with their shields. The familiar chant of “Ge-sta-po! Ge-sta-po!” rose from the crowd, and the snatch squads went in, pulling out young men at random, beating them unconscious and throwing them into the back of the pale blue milicja vans like sacks of turnips. Then the unmistakable crack of an AK47 sent the crowd into a panic. Helicopters wheeled overhead, their loudhailers ordering the crowd to disperse, but there was nowhere to go: the ZOMO had everyone hemmed into one corner of the square, trampling their red and white banners into the slush underfoot. The crowd, old and young, workers and students, were cornered and panic-stricken, all the earlier wild elation of resistance gone.

  At the crowd’s back stood the famous Gdansk Post Office, its windows boarded up. Still the visored police pushed them back. Above the screams and curses and the clattering of horses’ hooves, the sound he would never forget – the obscene thump thump of lead-filled rubber truncheons striking human flesh.

  He sucked in a breath, remembering the sensation of being crushed: the weight of humanity like a massive door closing inexorably on his chest.

  He’d still got Iza’s hand in a tight grip but he couldn’t always see her, she was so tiny and so far beneath him in that crush. He felt a wave of relief when he caught sight of her. Her face, jammed sideways against a man’s chest, was papery-white, set, every ounce of will bent on getting air into her compacted lungs.

  “I shouted to her ‘I’ll get you out!’” he told Kasia. “But really, I wasn’t too sure about getting either of us out by then.”

  His stomach had been jumping with fear. Taller than anyone else in the heaving mob, he had at least been able to turn his head, and realised they were only a couple of metres from a wide ledge, shoulder-height, behind them on the Post Office facade. A scream rang out as another surge of the human tide felled two, three people. Their heads disappeared beneath the surface, which closed above them in an instant. He tightened his grip on Iza’s gloved hand and flexing the big muscles in his legs started to carve a path through the wall of flesh toward the ledge. He trod on something soft, felt bone snap beneath his boots. As he forced his way on, a girl in a red wool hat sank beneath his elbow without a sound.

  With a last heave he managed to drag Iza to the ledge, and used it to brace himself against the press. With no breath left for words of reassurance, he sent her a look that said he would get them up there but first he’d have to let go of her hand for a moment. Panting, he levered himself up and drew his legs up behind him. Grasping a window bar to brace himself with one hand he reached down with the other and gripped Iza’s hand. Between the freckles her face had a bluish tinge now like skimmed milk, but she rested her gaze on him and smiled, and his heart opened.

  He started to pull her upwards, like a stubborn cork from a bottle. Her shoulders emerged above the wedged morass of people, but then the crowd surged again. He saw something go out of her face at that and felt her grip on his hand loosen. He made a desperate grab for her wrists. But as he did so, her section of crowd lurched sideways, then started to topple. Half a dozen went down as one, dragging her from his grasp.

  Some of his mates found him, later, amid the wreckage of the demo, as paramedics tended to the injured and checked bodies for signs of life.

  He was slumped against the wall under the ledge, among torn banners, hats, shoes – shell-shocked and mute, but uninjured, and still clutching one of Iza’s gloves.

  He found the lemon tea still in his curled fist, tepid now, and Kasia’s shocked gaze locked on his face.

  “They all thought it strange that I never asked what happened to her,” he shrugged, “as if I needed to.”

  “And Marta?” asked Kasia after a moment.

  “She was Iza’s best friend. We clung together to survive, I suppose. The wedding was six weeks later. Madness.”

  Just then, Kasia’s boss, Ray returned.

  “What’s all this then, a Polish tea party?” he said, in his flat London accent, seemingly oblivious to the sombre moment he was interrupting. He grinned in that unpleasant way he had, as though enjoying a private joke at someone else’s expense. “You keeping my staff from their duties, Janek?”

  Janusz hated the over-familiar way Ray used the diminutive of his name, but he could hardly pull him up on it – not because he was a good customer for the booze, but because he was Kasia’s boss. The truth was, Janusz didn’t like Ray. He told himself it was because he couldn’t respect any man who lived off women, but now and again it occurred to him that maybe his dislike was rooted in the fact that it was Ray who had talked Kasia into showing strange men her pizda for money.

  Kasia rose from her bar stool with dignity and spoke to Ray in English: “I already finish stock take, call the Rentokil for get rid of the mice, and throw out one drunk,” she said. “Tell me other things you like me to do, and I do it.” With that she clip-clopped in her high heels out the back, Janusz gazing after her in admiration.

  Grinning, Ray took Kasia’s stool at the bar, slinging his leather jacket over the seatback. “Did you two have a falling-out?” he said, nodding at Janusz’s injured face. “I’ve always thought that one would have a good right hook on her.” Janusz shot him a look, but deciding he was just taking the piss, let it ride.

  “I had a crash in a cab,” he said, in a voice that discouraged further enquiry, and drained the dregs of his cold tea.

  Ray started cleaning his fingernails with a business card. “By the way,” he said. “You wouldn’t know anything about some bloke hanging around, scaring off the punters, would you?”

  Janusz raised his eyebrows with polite interest. “No, why?” he asked, meeting Ray’s penetrating gaze.

  “I had some bloke’s lawyer on the phone yesterday. Turns out some idiot has been going round telling people that we film them in the booths – y’know, bashing the bishop,” he chuckled, “and put it on fucking YouTube or YouWank or something.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off Janusz, who started laughing, too.

  “You’re kidding!” said Janusz, shaking his head. “London is full of crazy people.”

  Ray seemed to accept Janusz’s performance. “Yeah, well, business is already shit without losing any more punters,” he said. “Especially since I hear I might be losing Kasia.” He raised a questioning eyebrow at Janusz, who frowned.

  “I thought you’d know all about it,” he said. “I heard her on the phone yesterday to that girlfriend of hers in Poland – you know, the one with the funny name...”

  “Basia?” offered Janusz: the diminutive of Barbara always amused Londoners.

  “Yeah, Basher,” said Ray, shaking his head at the hilariousness of foreign names. “So I’m down in the cellar putting a
new barrel on – you can hear everything down there – and from what I can make out, they’re chattering away about setting up a nail bar. In Warsaw, believe it or not.”

  Janusz denied any knowledge of the plan, but as the news sank in he felt a horrible sense of inevitability. He recalled Kasia enthusing, a few weeks back, about Basia’s fantastik business plan to set up some beauty clinic in the capital. Several big multinationals, banks and so on, had relocated there, and it seemed the business district was awash with well-off women.

  Kasia had never hinted that she might be part of the venture, but he knew that chuj Steve had been trying to persuade her that they should leave London and start afresh in Poland, where it was cheaper to set up a business. Typical of Steve that the business in question would be one in which his wife did all the graft.

  Having dropped his bombshell, Ray disappeared into the office to do some paperwork and Janusz called out a goodbye to Kasia. She came out and they kissed farewell in the Polish way. “I’m going to be away for a few days on business,” Janusz told her, examining the toe of one boot. “Maybe I will see you when I come back?”

  She hesitated, then inclined her head and smiled that crooked half-smile of hers. “Of course. We are friends, no?” she said, which only deepened his gloom. He must have looked depressed, because she leaned close to him. “Listen, Janek, maybe you will tell me it is none of my business, but... Iza’s death, I think maybe you still need to forgive yourself for what happened,” she paused and gazed into his eyes. “Maybe she just didn’t have the will to live.”

  Great, he thought, she was off to Poland with her worthless husband, but at least he got some free psychoanalysis as a parting gift.

  He pounded the pavement, head down, his whole body aching and his head befuddled by the day’s revelations. As for the last hour, he had no clue what made him spill his guts to Kasia about Iza, the demo, all that ancient history. Maybe to make her see that staying with Steve was a criminal waste of her life.