Where the Devil Can't Go

by Anya Lipska

  Janusz recalled his own upbringing. While he’d been moaning to his Mama about sweet rationing and not having enough toys, thousands of children must have endured a childhood like Pawel and Ela’s.

  “She looked after me like a sister. Once, when she found the big boys trying to burn me with a cigarette, she went for them like a wild boar!” Pawel’s smile faded. “She couldn’t do anything about Witold Struk though.”

  Janusz felt a pulse start to drum in his throat.

  Adamski lit a cigarette, the lighter flame trembling. “The first time, we were just excited to get a ride in his big fancy car,” he said. “He drove us into the forest, and then we met him, waiting at the dacza.”

  Janusz’s gaze darted around the room as his brain tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Then his hands bunched, like he’d grabbed a live mains wire.

  “Zamorski,” he said.

  Pawel gave a single nod. “Yes – except I didn’t know his name, then.”

  He frowned at the palms of his hands. “The first few times... nothing happened. We played checkers and he gave us things we never got in the home – Captain Kloss comics, Toblerone.” He tapped some ash off his cigarette into an empty beer can, never meeting Janusz’s eyes. “He was just softening us up, to make it harder to say no in the end. Later, he would say ‘What about all the sweets and the toys – how else are you going to pay me back?’”

  He shook his head violently, as though trying to dislodge some image.

  “Every time, I swore I would fight him, and every time I just froze, like a statue.” He pulled his jacket tighter. “Do you know what the worst thing was? Realising that Ela couldn’t protect me – or herself.”

  “How old were you?” asked Janusz, his voice gruff.

  “Six years old.” Pawel looked him straight in the eye for the first time since beginning his story. “Ela was seven.”

  Janusz dug his nails into his palms. “What about the people at the home – couldn’t you tell them what was happening?”

  Pawel snorted. “They all looked the other way, they didn’t want to lose their jobs by pissing off an esbek.”

  “What about Struk?” asked Janusz, after a moment. “Was he involved in...the abuse?”

  “No, he just played postman.” Pawel spat the word out. “But in a way I hated him more. He bundled us in and out of that place, week after week, pretending nothing bad was happening.” He cradled his arms across his body. “The one time I got up the guts to say that me and Ela weren’t going back there, he shouted at me, told me I was garbage, just like my straszna family.”

  Janusz had to stand up and walk around.

  “What about him and Zamorski?” he said, once he could trust his voice. “Did you ever see them exchange packages, or cash?”

  “No, they hardly even spoke.” One side of Pawel’s face twisted in a bitter grin. “They couldn’t stand each other. Zamorski treated Struk like a doormat – one time he slapped him, right in front of us, for forgetting to bring some magazine he wanted.”

  Janusz frowned. In the SB file he’d taken from Struk’s house, Lieutenant Struk had meticulously recorded his personal deliveries of Magpie/Zamorski’s ‘wyplaty’, his wage packets, which Janusz had always assumed to be envelopes stuffed with foreign currency. A second later, it dawned on him. The ‘wage packets’ had been six-year-old Pawel and seven-year-old Ela, taken from the children’s home and delivered to the Bureau’s star agent – like takeaway meals, he thought.

  An image flashed up before him.

  “This dacza. Was it by a lake?” asked Janusz.

  Pawel nodded.

  A view of a green-painted wooden dacza on the bank of a lake...set in a stand of birch trees...the curtains always drawn – Struk’s bizarre attic gallery and the scene that he had painted over and over again.

  The sense of menace emanating from the paintings, and the almost malevolent intensity of Struk’s vision had puzzled Janusz. Now he understood. Struk had hated Zamorski, not for being a child abuser, but for reducing an SB Lieutenant to the role of pimp and delivery boy, and for causing his ultimate demotion. Maybe painting the dacza had started as a way of passing the time till he collected the children, but it became an obsession – the repeated depictions of the scene a kind of voodoo charm, an implacable oath of vengeance against his enemy.

  His gaze flickered over Pawel’s long sad face. “How long did all this go on?”

  “The whole summer. Then it just stopped. We never saw either of them again.”

  The two men fell silent.

  After a few moments, Pawel said: “Afterwards, I would go crazy for no reason, hitting the other kids, the teachers. A few months later, I tried to hang myself, but Ela found me, saved my life.” He lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. “It drove a wedge between us though. I knew the sight of me reminded her of... things she needed to forget.”

  Janusz nodded his understanding.

  “You know, even after she got adopted by the English lady, I think he kept tabs on her, like he must have kept tabs on me. But she never made any trouble,” He thumped his scrawny chest punishingly hard. “It was me who had to go and wake the dragon.”

  For many Polish children, it was the first story they ever heard: the tale of a dragon who had slept for centuries in a cave near Krakow, until he was roused by some curious and foolhardy children. The monster exacted a murderous revenge, killing scores of young girls, before he was finally outwitted and destroyed.

  “That’s why I went to the concert,” Pawel continued. “To tell Ela I’d found out the bastard who did it to us, this big politician who was all over the news.”

  “What did she say?” asked Janusz.

  “She told me to forget about it, the past was gone, there was no point raking it up. She was talking sense, but I lost my temper and shouted at her.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “And now I’ll never see her again.”

  There was no self-pity in the young man’s voice, Janusz noted, only an acceptance of responsibility for what he had unleashed. “You grew up not realising that it was Zamorski who... did those terrible things,” said Janusz awkwardly. “Until Struk told you?”

  “We never knew their names and as time went by, I couldn’t remember their faces. I didn’t forget what happened, exactly, but I stopped myself thinking about it.” He tapped his knuckles against his temple, “It went into a box in my head which never got opened.” He met Janusz’s eyes. “Does that sound crazy?”

  “No, not at all,” Janusz held his gaze, thinking of the box he’d constructed in his own head for past regrets – and failings. “So, you followed up the ad he put in the paper, about his antique furniture.”

  Pawel nodded. “When he answered the door I didn’t recognise him. He was old and skinny,” he sucked in his cheeks to demonstrate. “He asked me what I thought of this guy Zamorski, who was about to become president. I told him I didn’t give a shit for politics.” Pawel pinched out his cig. “Then he said, ‘You don’t know who he is, do you?’”

  He said that Struk had scuttled down into his cellar, leaving Pawel standing in the hallway, and returned brandishing some kind of file.

  “He started shoving it under my nose, gabbling on about what a terrible man Zamorski was, how personally he had never agreed with what happened.” Pawel stared up at the ceiling squinting to remember the words. “He said if they hadn’t stopped the rabble-rousers causing trouble for the country, the Russians would have invaded.” He shrugged. “I thought he was just some crazy old man.”

  Janusz nodded. After the decades Struk had spent plotting to destroy his old enemy it must have been a thrilling moment to have the instrument of his vengeance standing before him.

  “He kept saying ‘look, look, there’s your proof’,” Pawel mimed Struk’s crooked finger, his fervent prodding. “At the top was the name Edward Zamorski, his birth date, something about Nowa Huta. None of it meant anything to me, but then he points again, and I see it – the
name ‘Magpie’.”

  “Zamorski’s SB codename. But I don’t understand – why would that mean anything to you?”

  “It was what Struk always called him, when he took us in the car – ‘Pan Sroka has some new Titus comics for you today, Pan Sroka has a special game for you to take home...”

  Using his enemy’s secret codename in front of the children had probably given the old bastard a transgressive thrill, thought Janusz.

  “When he saw me recognise the name, he laughed.” Pawel clapped his hands together once. “And it all fell into place. The man who drove us to the dacza had the exact same high-pitched laugh, like a gate that wants oiling. Suddenly, I was six years old again, holding Ela’s hand in the back seat of his car.

  “I started shouting at him, I don’t remember what, I had him up against the doorframe.” Pawel shot his hand out, gripping the phantom Struk by the throat. “He was saying ‘take the file, take the file, you can destroy him!’”

  Pawel clutched his forehead, enduring some silent agony.

  “There isn’t a man alive who would blame you for killing him,” said Janusz.

  “I didn’t! That is...I never meant to,” said Pawel, raising his eyes to Janusz. “He was standing in the doorway to the cellar, holding the door open with one hand,” he demonstrated with an outstretched arm, “and the file in the other. As we struggled, he dropped them, and overbalanced.” He made a wild clutching motion with his left hand. “He grabbed the door frame, but it gave way.”

  He took a big breath and blew it out slowly. “I was in London before I even heard that he was dead.”

  “But you picked up the papers Struk dropped?”

  He nodded. “I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them there for anyone to read. I realised that after ruining my life and Ela’s, Zamorski had gone on to become rich and famous. Somebody people respected.” He hissed the word. “I wanted to make him suffer.”

  “And when you started blackmailing him, he sent money,” said Janusz. “So where did Weronika come into it? Why go after her?”

  “The money didn’t make me feel any better. The whole thing was just making me crazy again.” Pawel stared at the wall, lifting one shoulder.

  “It was all in Struk’s papers – that Zamorski had this little girl he adored who worked in a restaurant in England.”

  It made sense. For someone with a lifetime’s experience of recruiting informers it would be easy for Struk to monitor Zamorski’s dealings with Weronika’s mother.

  “I decided to kidnap her,” Pawel went on, hanging his head. “I’d torture him with the terrible things I was doing to her, and then I’d kill her.” He looked at Janusz sheepishly. “I never expected her to come with me of her own accord – or that I’d fall in love with her.”

  Janusz was struck by the irony of Pawel Adamski’s situation: having first been destroyed by Zamorski, his life had been redeemed by his love for Zamorski’s daughter.

  There followed a long silence that Janusz was the first to break. “I should think you’re hungry,” he said. “I’ll get you some wiejska – and then we’ll work out how to get you and Weronika out of this mess.”

  When Janusz returned with a plateful of food, Pawel took it, looking up at him with hopeful eyes. Then he slipped his right hand inside his shirt and pulled out a buff envelope. “It’s all in there,” he said.

  As Pawel ate, Janusz extracted two closely typed A4-size pieces of card – still warm to the touch. Clearly the first two pages of Zamorski’s SB file, they summarised the highlights of the presidential candidate’s career as star informer for the SB.

  On the first page, the informer Magpie was named as ‘Edward Zamorski – steel fabricator, Solidarnosc representative, Nowa Huta.’ Zamorski had been recruited in June 1981 by an SB Agent, codenamed Byk, or bull.

  He was described as a ‘highly-valued collaborator’ and a prolific supplier of intelligence from ‘well-orientated sources’, SB-speak for his colleagues – and unwitting sources – in Solidarnosc and the Church.

  The second sheet listed Zamorski’s principal targets. It included several well-known opposition figures, but the one that caught Janusz’s eye was Father Marek Kuba, the courageous pro-democracy priest murdered by the SB. Beside it was the codename Papiezek, which had appeared so frequently in the documents from Struk’s desk.

  So, thought Janusz, it was the twenty-six-year-old Kuba who the SB had sarcastically dubbed ‘Little Pope’. He recalled the photograph he’d seen, of friends and fellow activists Edward Zamorski and Marek Kuba at the front line of a rally, fending off ZOMO batons. He read on, heaviness gathering in his chest. Father Kuba was described as an ‘anti-Soviet, anti-government, extremist; a committed enemy of socialism,’ his sermons to packed congregations ‘material in fomenting industrial unrest’.

  The final mention of Kuba came in May 1986. After three striking steelworkers had been arrested and badly beaten, Zamorski passed the SB a juicy snippet of intelligence. Father Kuba had told him that the contents of his next sermon would go much further than the usual calls to rein in ZOMO and the milicja. He would speak instead of the ‘moral vacuum’ at the heart of Communism and question the Party’s right to govern. Janusz drew an involuntary breath, and raised his eyes from the document, not wanting to go on.

  The entry was dated May 18th 1986. It said that as a result of a tip-off by Collaborator Sroka, officers had secretly detained Papiezek and conducted a ‘special interrogation’. The final sentence read: ‘Refusing to recognise the objective reality of his situation, Papiezek chose instead a full immersion baptism.’ Janusz felt a wave of nausea – Father Kuba’s badly beaten body had been found face down in the Biala River.

  He sat back on the sofa, picturing Zamorski’s reliable, kindly face and wondering what went on inside that head. At least Janusz no longer had any lingering doubts that the guy in the hat was acting on his boss’s orders.

  Pawel had finished eating and was dispatching another can of beer.

  Janusz gestured to the documents. “What were you planning to do with these?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care about any of it anymore. I just want him to leave me and Nika alone.”

  Janusz ran a hand through his hair. You’ll be lucky, he thought.

  “If you’re thinking you can just hand these over, bargain with them, forget it. You know too much, and whatever promises they make, they’ll kill you – maybe even Weronika, too.”

  Leaning forward to seek his gaze, Janusz spoke intently. “Your only hope is to get this stuff into the press – but we’ll have to work fast, the election’s the day after tomorrow.”

  Pawel stared at the floor, then nodded. “Whatever it takes to protect Nika, I’ll do it.”

  Janusz wondered briefly where he could hide the documents, in case he got a return visit from the guy in the hat.

  “Listen to me,’ he said, nodding toward the window. “They followed you here – or maybe they’ve been watching the flat all along.” With a panicked look, Pawel started to get up but Janusz motioned him back into his seat. “You should be alright going back down the fire escape, but at the bottom, climb over the wooden fence on your right – there’s an alleyway that cuts down to Drayton Park.” Standing up, he pulled a wad of notes out of his pocket. “It’s five minutes up to Holloway Rd – you can get a cab there.”

  “Dziekuje bardzo, Pan,” said Pawel, his mournful gaze locked on Janusz.

  “Then get yourself and Weronika straight to Luton Airport,” said Janusz, handing over most of the cash. “Stansted’s too obvious, they might be watching it – and take the first flight to Warsaw, Krakow, or Lodz.”

  He scanned Pawel’s face – he looked like he was getting about seventy-five per cent of this.

  “When you land, go to the news kiosk and ask for the biggest-selling daily paper, and get a cab straight to their offices.” Pawel nodded. “Tell them everything you told me, and say the documentation is with lawyers but is on its
way. I’ll be a couple of hours behind you.”

  Pawel’s face creased in a frown, “What about Struk? Won’t they think I murdered him?”

  “Not once we get you a good lawyer. Anyway, right now that’s the least of your worries, Pawel. The crucial thing is to get the story out for election day. When it breaks, Zamorski will know the game’s up and stand down. Then he’ll have nothing to gain from killing you – and you and Weronika will be safe.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Woken by the dawn light, Janusz was momentarily confused – his bedroom windows had blackout curtains – but then he remembered where he was. After Pawel had left, he’d decided that he couldn’t risk a visit from the psychol in the hat, especially now he had Zamorski’s SB file. So he’d knocked up the guy next door, the one who worked in an art gallery. OK, so it was past midnight, but he was still up and dressed. He seemed a bit shocked at his crazy neighbour’s request to sleep on the sofa, but when Janusz explained that he’d stupidly locked himself out of his flat while putting the rubbish out, piling on the middle-European charm like whipped cream, he’d finally let him in.

  Now, Janusz hoisted himself upright on the hard black leather sofa, cursing at his creaking joints, and checked the time: just past six. He reflected that he’d never slept under the same roof as a gay guy – a first he wouldn’t be sharing with Oskar, that was for sure. Leaving the front door on the latch, he crept out in his socks and listened at his own door: nothing. He unlocked the door without making a sound.

  He’d half-expected the scene that confronted him inside, but it sent a chill through him nonetheless. The place had been taken apart in the night with surgical thoroughness, every upholstery panel on the sofa and armchair slit open with a blade, and the edges of all the carpets pulled up; in the kitchen, they’d lined up the contents of the cupboards on the work surface, and emptied his coffee and flour tins into the sink. He’d clearly left just in time last night. Tough luck, skurwysyny. A wave of panic gripped him as he remembered Copernicus, but then he remembered putting him out on the kitchen window sill, splay-legged with indignation, before going next door.