Where the Devil Can't Go

by Anya Lipska

  He padded deeper into the shadowed recesses of the cellar, using an outstretched hand to navigate his way, crablike, along the damp wall, praying that he might find another way out. The crazed farm girl grinned malevolently from her poster as he passed. As he left the pool of feeble light cast by the desk lamp, the darkness closed around him. Then his boot met something with a tinny clunk.

  The voices above fell silent, then one piped up cautiously, interrogatively. Janusz’s groping hand found cold metal – an old bedstead. Peering desperately into the gloom, he felt his pupils stretching to maximize the light. He heard the footsteps overhead leave the salon and re-enter the hall. If they cornered him down here... As he groped his way around the bedstead, he thought he glimpsed a chink of light. And started praying in earnest.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee...

  Shuffling forward, eyes stretched wide, he saw it again – a narrow crack of daylight ahead. He made out a pair of rough timber doors. Was it a timber store? That would mean a trapdoor to the outside – if Struk hadn’t nailed it permanently shut.

  Blessed art thou amongst women... Reaching the doors, he opened them with infinite care, and felt his stomach swoop at the sight of the trapdoor overhead. He reached up to his full height, and holding his breath, used the flats of his hands to push gently at the lid.

  Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. It opened as sweetly and silently as if it had been used yesterday, blinding him with an inrush of daylight.

  He heard muffled shouts and footsteps hurrying toward the rear of the house, to the kitchen. Any minute now they’d find the cellar door. Gripping the trapdoor frame with both hands, Janusz put the toe of his boot into a loose bit of brickwork and started to lever himself up.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God... A trickle of mortar spilled out of the hole. He straightened his knees, and gripped the edges of the frame firmly.

  Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death ...

  A strident chirruping shattered the silence – and nearly gave him a heart attack. His mobile phone. He heard shouts – louder than before. They were through the cellar door and had seen the light below. Abandoning all attempts at stealth, he flexed every muscle in his upper body, braced his foot against the wall, and heaved. He just managed to get his backside onto the edge of the trapdoor frame, which creaked ominously.

  Feet were clattering down the iron stairs at the cellar’s far end. Janusz swung his legs out onto some long grass, and scrambled upright. Finding himself in the back garden he sprinted for a line of trees that seemed to mark the boundary, hurdling a low thicket in his path.

  His mobile was still chirping but he dared not stop to shut it off, concentrating on putting as much ground between himself and his pursuers as humanly possible – as humanly possible for an old man of forty five with a cracked rib, that is, he thought grimly. Beyond the boundary the land sloped sharply down into forest. He barely slowed his pace, running headlong through thickening trees and scrub, praying he wouldn’t trip.

  Judging by the shouts coming from his rear, the men were outside, and gaining on him. He threw a look behind him, but could see nothing through the trees. Skidding on last year’s leaves he reached the bottom of the slope, and stopped, panting noisily.

  He found himself in a heavily wooded valley, with his path barred by a stream – a deep one, fast flowing. He looked up and downstream, trying to work out the best way to go. Then he saw a movement through the leaves, fifty metres away. A middle-aged man wearing old-fashioned hunting garb strolled out of the woods, a bulging game bag slung over his shoulder. He possessed two things that Janusz prized above all else at that moment: a trustworthy face and, crooked over his arm, a great big double-barreled shotgun.

  Janusz shouted, and as the guy turned, loped to meet him, holding his side. “Panie, there are two men chasing me,” he panted out. “I think they’re gangsters,” he waved back at the hill, “up there.” The gunman’s seamed face grew stern. Without a word, he broke his weapon and slipped two fat red cartridges into its gaping nostrils.

  Suddenly, the silhouette of a man appeared up on the crest of the slope, about seventy metres away. Without a word, Janusz’s companion swung his gun up, narrowed his eye along the barrel, and loosed off a mighty bang. As the smoke cleared, they could make out the figure stumbling back through the trees. Even at this distance, Janusz could see that the man wore a hat.

  “I think I winged the bastard,” said the gunman with modest satisfaction, pulling out two fresh cartridges.

  Janusz grinned nervously. “Maybe you’d better not, Panie?” he said, putting a hand on his arm, as the guy made to reload the shotgun. “You know what the police are like these days about citizens defending themselves.”

  The man frowned, but returned the cartridges to their pouch, shaking his head. “You’re probably right,” he grumbled, “nothing is sacred any more.”

  Janusz scanned the crest of the hill again, but all was still. Seconds later came the distant screech of a car burning rubber on the road above. His breathing was almost back to normal when the mobile started chirping again.

  He flicked it open. “Czesc?” he said wearily.

  “It’s me, sisterfucker,” a voice boomed. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kershaw had to hand it to Godfrey Dearbourne. Once she’d told him that a member of Andrew Treneman’s own staff had fingered him as the tape thief, he moved with impressive speed. Less than an hour after their chat, the nick’s Uniform Skipper was calling up to say Dearbourne was at the desk asking for Detective Constable Kershaw – no demand to ‘speak to your DI’ this time, she noted.

  Now she sat across the table from him in the interview room, arms folded. Dearbourne opened his briefcase and extracting a bulky package, placed it delicately on the table between them, like it might contain a very large stool sample. Then he flashed a set of perfect veneers, the exact same shade as his creamy Oxford-weave shirt, and unleashed a tsunami of the famous Dearbourne charm. Kershaw was so keen to get her hands on the contents of the envelope that she didn’t pay much attention, but she got the gist. Mr Treneman wishes to convey his sincere apologies... moment of madness ...understandable fear of blackmail...etc etc

  “I don’t need to tell you how seriously the CPS takes conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” said Kershaw. “I’m not a legal expert, but I seem to recall there’s no maximum sentence – it’s entirely up to the judge?”

  Dearbourne twinkled at her: “I am sure that any judge would take into account my client’s desire to co-operate fully with the police, once he realised the seriousness of the investigation,” he clasped his hands in front of him. “It is our sincere hope, Detective Constable, that now Mr Treneman has provided the investigation with the items in question, you might be minded to show some consideration of the uh...awkward position he found himself in vis-a-vis the tapes.”

  Yeah, I can imagine what that position might be, thought Kershaw – I nearly ended up in it myself the other night.

  She was suddenly sick to death of Dearbourne’s oily charm, the Philippe Patek watch that probably cost what she earned in a year – anyway, the old bastard would be quids in whether Treneman went to jail or not. Unfolding her arms, she picked up the envelope.

  “You had better advise your client to take some urgent personal leave from the hotel while we pursue our investigation,” she said, standing up and fixing him with a look. “And at the risk of stating the obvious, if Mr Treneman has any contact whatsoever with the witness Alex Hurley, he’ll find himself in even more serious trouble than he is already.”

  As porn videos went, thought Kershaw, it wasn’t exactly a fine example of the form – apart from the crap tape quality, there was very little plot and zero character development.

  At 11.38 pm, according to the tape’s time code, the paunchy balding bloke – Treneman – followed the short, blonde girl in the clinging animal print dress – u
nidentified sex worker – into the North Lift. He leaned against the rear wall, and she stood to one side, each ignoring the other. But soon after the lift started moving, Treneman hit a button, bringing it to a halt. The girl turned, and without any preliminaries, dropped to her knees, unzipped his flies, and started giving him a BJ. Eeeow! Kershaw watched the bobbing blonde head and Treneman’s gurning face, one hand planted on the sidewall to steady himself, with a kind of queasy fascination.

  According to Alex, it was common knowledge that Treneman got freebies in return for allowing working girls to tout for trade in the hotel bar. But Kershaw still couldn’t work out why the manager of a five star hotel would take the insane risk of getting blown in the lift? The advice ‘get a room’ had never seemed more appropriate. Derek and Milo might not be the brightest stars in the security firmament, but they could easily have been watching their screens at this moment, as could anyone passing through security. As Treneman reached climax, he looked straight up into the camera lens and Kershaw realised that for him, the risk of getting caught was an essential part of the thrill.

  Kershaw sped through the rest of the tape from the North Lift camera. When the time code reached 1.10pm, just after hat man had checked in, she pressed play, aware of a pulse starting to quiver in her throat. What if, after all the graft she’d done to recover the tape, it turned out he’d snuck Kozlowska up the back stairs?

  The first people into the lift were the pissed-up office types she’d seen on the lobby cam. A second later one of the guys reached a hand out to hit their floor. But a split second later, it became clear he’d been pressing the ‘doors open’ button, because in walked someone else: a girl with long dark hair. Justyna Kozlowska. She stood there alone for what seemed like an age while Kershaw stared at the screen, worrying at the nail on her forefinger. Then the guy in the hat sauntered in. But as he turned to hit the button, Kershaw groaned out loud – between the positioning of the camera high on the wall, and the fact that he was stood right next to the doors, the shot was ninety per cent fucking hat.

  Until he glanced up for a split-second, probably to check the floor indicator. She rewound, and hit pause. Gotcha!

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After their little woodland dramat, Janusz’s shotgun-toting saviour introduced himself as Krzyzstof Bielska.

  A farmer with arable land on the other side of the lake, Pan Bielska had been out shooting rabbits for the pot when their paths crossed. He showed a refreshing lack of curiosity as to why Janusz should find himself being chased by gangsters, but as they parted, Janusz couldn’t resist asking, “What made you trust me, Panie?”

  The farmer furrowed his leathery face. “It’s true you speak Polish like a foreigner,” he said at last. “But you’ve got an old-fashioned face.”

  As he headed back through the woodland, Janusz felt strangely calm for a man who’d just had such a narrow escape. Without being quite aware how it got there, he found himself phone in hand, ringing Marta’s number. The long, lazy Polish ring tone sounded half a dozen times before he heard his wife’s voice. The answer machine. He left a message saying that he was in Poland unexpectedly on business, and if he took the train down to Warsaw tomorrow, could he spend some time with Bobek? Remembering that he’d put the phone down on her the last time they spoke, he made a big effort to sound friendly.

  As rain started to patter softly on the leaves, Janusz turned up his collar and tried to make sense of what had happened up at Struk’s house.

  Maybe Adamski had somehow followed him from Gdansk, or perhaps one of the locals had alerted him, told him someone was sniffing around in Gorodnik. Either way, Adamski appeared to be deadly serious. God only knew where Weronika was – safe in London, Janusz fervently hoped.

  As Janusz arrived on Gorodnik’s outskirts he remembered that the Hotel Pomorski’s main entrance opened directly onto the town square. If Adamski and his cronies had found out where he was staying, the square offered them a dozen vantage points from which to watch the front door. He stopped to pull out his tourist map.

  The old wooden door set in a high wall at the back of the Hotel looked like it hadn’t been used in a hundred years. At first, it wouldn’t budge but a couple of good shoulder shoves opened a gap wide enough for him to squeeze through. He picked his way past a discarded plastic table and a pile of broken chairs, eyes fixed on a solid-looking double door at the rear of the hotel. As he got closer, he grinned – its single lock was an old Yale. A minute later he was creeping up the stairs to his room having stowed the homemade bump key he always carried back in his wallet.

  After making himself comfortable on the bed, Janusz started to read through the sheaf of SB documents from Struk’s secret hiding place. They all dated from the early 1980s and each document carried the heading ‘Operational File number 37909/07’, suggesting they had been extracted from the same SB dossier.

  It took him a while to decipher the documents, which were couched in the opaque language beloved of the secret services. Opponents of the Communist regime whom Struk and his comrades had under clandestine surveillance were described as ‘targets’. Aside from the inevitable phone taps, most of the information on these unwitting victims appeared to come from people designated by the initials TW, followed by a codename. Trying to decode the mysterious yet familiar initials sent Janusz half-mad with frustration, until his middle-aged brain suddenly relented, delivering the answer. Back in the days when the media had been full of stories about newly opened secret files, he remembered reading that TW stood for Tajny Wspolpracownik – ‘Secret Collaborator’. These were ordinary people, recruited – whether by bribery or coercion – as informers, freelance spies able to move unsuspected among their fellow Poles.

  The documents all appeared to relate to a single SB informer, recruited in 1981, referred to throughout only as TW Sroka – Secret Collaborator ‘Magpie’ – and his case officer had been Lieutenant Witold Struk. From what Janusz could glean, Magpie had been a regular source of high-level information regarding pro-democracy activists: their clandestine meetings, planned strikes and vigils, as well as their mistresses, drinking problems and gambling habits.

  Magpie’s job clearly brought him into frequent contact with dissidents in Solidarnosc and the Church, but Janusz could find no clue to his identity or even his occupation. The informer might have been anybody – a male prostitute, a priest, a piano tuner... the SB had been an equal opportunities employer. Magpie’s targets, too, were only ever called by their cryptonyms, names such as ‘hunter’ and ‘redhair’ clearly referred to personal traits, while ‘cutter’ and ‘blackboard’ appeared to hint at the victim’s occupation.

  One of Magpie’s victims, a target called Papiezek, earned more entries than all the rest put together. The intelligence on him was invariably cross-referenced to several other files, and several entries recorded Struk’s persistent demands that Magpie produce more detailed information on Target Papiezek’s activities. He was clearly a well-connected figure, but once again Janusz could glean no clues to his true identity. Papieziek could be a surname, but that was hardly likely. The name could also be taken to mean ‘little pope’, so he might have been a priest, or a union leader or intellectual given to long speeches – the codename a mocking reference to his ‘preaching’.

  Towards the end of the sheaf, Janusz found a series of entries, beginning in May 1985, which recorded Struk’s weekly meetings with Magpie and the delivery of his ‘wyplata’ – his wages. The SB often paid their informers sweeteners, usually in foreign currency, to reward them for the risk they were running and to make them financially dependent. Struk, however, appeared to find his role as paymaster demeaning. “Lieutenant Struk once again requests that the delivery of TW Magpie’s wage packets be handled by a more junior officer” was a typical entry.

  Several entries in similar vein followed, and then, on 19th August 1985, Janusz came across a new twist in the story. “Lieutenant Struk wishes to record his respectful recommendation that in the light
of Magpie’s character and unsocialist attitudes, the Service should consider discontinuing his wage packets and ending its relationship with him.”

  Lieutenant Struk evidently nurtured a dislike of the Magpie so strong he was willing to risk his own position to attack him. Perhaps he had even been the one to name him after the greedy bird, infamous in folklore for stealing shiny baubles.

  The final act of the drama came on 11th September 1985. The entry said simply: “Lieutenant Struk will henceforth relinquish his duties as case officer and take over the reorganization of filing systems for SB Office 371. Lieutenant Grazyc will assume responsibility for Lt Struk’s collaborators, and for future delivery of TW Magpie’s wage packets.”

  Janusz sat back on the bed frowning. He was no expert on the SB hierarchy, but it was pretty obvious that Comrade Struk would have viewed his transfer – from managing an important informant to tinkering with filing systems back at the office – as a big fat kick in the teeth for a loyal servant of the struggle. Magpie appeared to be more important to the SB top brass than one of its own senior officers.

  He closed the file and rubbed his eyes. What had he learned from it all, anyway? He still couldn’t imagine what possible link there might be between Adamski and Struk.

  As he fiddled restlessly with the file ties that held the sheaf of documents together, his eye fell on something he hadn’t noticed before. A tiny fragment of paper, clinging to the green string of the file tie. No, not paper, he realised, holding it under the bedside light – thin card. Pale and buff-coloured, the type that medical files used to be written on. There had been a further page, a cover page, at the front of the bundle, which had been removed. Feeling suddenly bone-weary after the day’s drama, Janusz leaned against the pillow to mull it over. Within seconds, sleep reached up and grappled him down like a great bear.

  When he awoke, the room was almost dark, and according to the phosphorescent hands of his watch, he had slept for more than three hours. A fierce gurgle from his gut reminded him that his last meal had been a breakfast pastry. Gathering the documents together, he stared at them again, willing them to surrender their mysteries. Something stirred in the back of his mind – but in his befuddled state he couldn’t quite join the dots. It would have to wait till he’d filled his belly and had a good night’s sleep. He scanned the room, looking for somewhere to hide them, but decided to take them with him – he wouldn’t put it past the hotel landlady to nose around his room while he was out.