The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  ‘Thought so.

  ‘Countless times.’

  ‘Really? Well, I forgot to ask … was he ever in the scouts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a pity’ The Watchman tried to fathom a boyhood without a knife, a ball of string and nights under canvas. ‘It would have made all the difference.’

  ‘Steady on, he was still the outdoor type,’ objected Anselm defensively ‘Took his trombone into the bush, damn it. Marched through nettles.’

  ‘Good heavens.’ The old man frowned, reluctantly won over. ‘All right, you can tell him.’

  ‘Tell him what?’

  ‘That as a lad I met Baden Powell. At Olympia. Shook his hand, I did. Do you know, it was during the Second Matabele War that he first…’

  After lunch Anselm drove John to Cambridge. They waited on the platform, John tapping an erratic rhythm on his toecaps. Anselm wanted to snatch the half-white stick and break it over his knee. A sort of chasm had been growing between them since they’d left the parlour. It had been filled by practical chat and Baden Powell and, finally, that tat-tat-tatting. But both of them knew that something of importance had been left unsaid. As the train approached, Anselm took a deep breath and stepped back nearly three decades.

  ‘Do you remember I asked for a character witness? Someone who could speak to your professional integrity?’

  ‘Yes:

  In the car, Anselm had suffered a sudden and terrible premonition that John still loved her; that part of his desire to fulfil Róża’s appeal was a crazy attempt to somehow win her back. He didn’t dare say it, and he couldn’t say it now. But he sensed he was close to the reason for their separation.

  ‘Did you ask Celina?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She refused.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  John’s stick made a sort of full stop and the carriages crashed along the rails. ‘I never asked. She’d gone before I could pop the question.’

  Chapter Eleven

  It was not, perhaps, the most prudent decision. Having decided to brush up his German, Anselm had turned not to the likes of Der Spiegel or any number of crackling long-wave radio programmes, but to the ruminations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Drawn by the remark, ‘I don’t know why we’re here but I’m pretty sure that it isn’t to enjoy ourselves’ he’d made a cursory examination of selected oeuvres (expecting more laughs) only to find the insight unambiguously confirmed. It was therefore with mild relief that he abandoned a knotty paragraph in Philosophische Untersuchungen to answer the library telephone. It was from the Prior. Ten minutes later they were on the Bluebell Walk, heading towards Our Lady’s Lake. The summons had been far from unexpected. Since John’s departure two days earlier, Larkwood’s guardian had been observing Anselm across the nave with a paternal, subdued disquiet.

  ‘I want you to be vigilant, Anselm,’ began the Prior, watching where he was putting his feet. Branches had fallen during the recent bout of high winds. His solemn manner evoked the conference, erasing the interlude. ‘I don’t wish to offend you, but regardless of your many years in the criminal courts, you have no experience of the place to which you’re now going and the dangers it holds. It’s not the Old Bailey, with hefty policemen at the door. Nor is it a prison cell where you’re protected by that strange respect which even the most violent men hold for representatives of the law, including those who propose to demonstrate their guilt. You’ll be entering the world of Otto Brack, this frightening man who learned how to bring about evil by exploiting someone who is good, laying — in part — the evil at their door. I have never come across that before. You must take special precautions.’

  Anselm was unnerved by the Prior’s declamatory tone. It was reserved for funerals. He was surprised, too, by the warning. The plan was to fly to Warsaw, open a file, have a quick read, eat some pickled cucumber, drink himself senseless, and then come home, The chances of mishap were remote. He said so.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ replied the Prior. ‘Perhaps you can walk into Brack’s world and walk out again unscathed, but I have my doubts. Twisted people lead twisted lives and the roads they build around them are never straight and true. You might find yourself on some back street wondering where to turn next.’

  The evening sun filtered through the copper leaves overhead. Water glinted at the end of the winding track. Listening to the fall of each other’s feet, they stepped out from under the trees on to a pebble beach that skirted the edge of the lake. To one side lay a blackened railway sleeper, sunk deep into the bank by Sylvester when he was a young man who couldn’t stop talking. He’d been banished here by his novice master to work alone and learn the infinite vocabulary of silence. It was here, too, that Father Herbert Moore, one of the founding fathers, had broken the rule against speaking to suggest a name for the derelict buildings under restoration, for this hidden school dedicated to sane living. He’d uttered one word: ‘Larkwood’.

  ‘You mentioned precautions,’ said Anselm, hitching his habit to sit by the Prior. He picked up a handful of stones and threw one towards the reflections of yellow and crimson cloud. John had sat here thirty years back when the Prior didn’t need glasses. Anselm had wondered what the Prior had been saying.

  ‘First, your task isn’t simply to find a name. Anyone can read a word upon the page. You need to look far deeper. You can’t arrange to meet this informer until you know why they betrayed Róża. They, like Brack, occupy a world very different to yours, but you must enter it, seeking to understand its logic, its values, its Gods and idols … its empty spaces that long for meaning. All you will have are the papers in the file. Peel back the words. Look inside.’

  Anselm nodded and threw another pebble along the same trajectory as the first. The water creased and the colours ran from the splash of light and dark.

  ‘Remember they have lived unchallenged for over thirty years, continued the Prior. ‘They’ll have restructured their past to make it manageable, perhaps even attractive and virtuous. We all do. We all write these narratives so that we have something good to read when we wake up at night, troubled and unsure. You need to find a better story. That’s the only way to bring them back on to Róża’s side of tragedy and injustice.’

  Anselm nodded again and lobbed another stone.

  ‘Secondly, bring this place with you. Bring all it represents and means. Though you leave the enclosure keep faith with the rhythms of our day This is your best precaution on entering Brack’s world. I don’t know why, but it changes what you do, how you see things and what you say It’s what separates you from many a better detective.’

  The Prior had finished. He picked up a dried twig and cast it high in the air. It landed almost without a sound, floating on the water’s surface, barely visible against the reflected evening sky. Beyond, on a plinth in the middle of the lake, the statue of a woman looked down in calm resignation, isolated but resplendent.

  ‘Be careful, Anselm,’ he said, quietly ‘Don’t let Brack know that you’re coming.’

  A week later, after Lauds, Anselm knelt down in the nave to receive Larkwood’s traditional blessing for the travelling monk. Surrounded by hunched figures who almost certainly weren’t listening, the Prior commended his son to the dispensations of Providence, adding a few suggestions for compliance with best practice: to guide his steps, thoughts, and deeds, and procure a safe return. In the afternoon Anselm met John for lunch at the airport. They sat in a bar, Anselm stirring a preposterously large carton of strong coffee, John — forbidden by law to smoke — nervously chewing a match, his hand squeezing a pack of crumpled Black Russians. As if in tandem with the Prior, he, too, had come with warnings and a kind of blessing.

  ‘You need to understand where you’re going,’ he said. ‘It’s no ordinary place. The people in the street … they buy bread and milk, like me and you, but they breathe a different air. It carries the memory of ancestral insurrection — seventeen ninety-four, eighteen thirty,
eighteen sixty—three; it carries the heat of recent destruction. Brack, Róża, the informer … the Shoemaker, the Friends … they all know the taste of history. It set them against each other in a fight to the death.

  ‘During the Second World War, eighty-five per cent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed, seven hundred thousand people perished in the displacement, fighting and massacres. There were two uprisings and then the districts west of the Vistula were systematically blown apart street by street. The suffering was apocalyptic, the latter stages observed by the Soviets calmly eating borscht on the eastern banks of the river.

  ‘When the Nazis had finished, the Red Army crossed over to liberate the ashes. They never went home. Their opposition lay buried under the rubble. People like Róża crawled out of a hole and managed to stand up again. Brack and his like were waiting. They’re always waiting …’

  Anselm made a grimace, and not just at the history and warning. His friend was pale and tense, suffering from exclusion. Anselm was standing in his place. Fighting Róża’s war, however hopeless the odds, had always been John’s domain. He’d already explored the territory Before going to Warsaw, he’d travelled widely throughout the Communist bloc. Protected by a pseudonym, he’d written of high cultures brought to ruin and dissident voices who kept the faith in hiding. A smart operator, the nearest he’d come to trouble was when he got arrested at Bucharest airport and had to explain to the Securitate that The Secret Agent was a novel by Conrad and not an instruction manual produced by MI6. By the time he’d met Róża he was already an ally committed to the struggle. And now, when she faced her most important battle, he was … indisposed.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s me who’s catching a plane and not you,’ said Anselm. ‘I know how you must feel.’

  John snapped a match between his teeth. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But there’s a bright side, at least for me,’ confessed Anselm. ‘I wanted to help years ago, do you remember, when you came to stay at Larkwood after the accident? I’d planned to dish out some of the stuff I’d read in books or heard in the Chapter Room … anything that might help you deal with your blindness. Things didn’t quite work out that way Which is good, in retrospect, because I had nothing of my own to offer.’

  ‘The time wasn’t right, Anselm.’

  ‘I know’

  ‘But it is now.’

  The plane nosed into the mist. Down below, buildings climbed in a kind of rush towards the sky proud and victorious, as if defying the memory of so much devastation. Glass, chrome and steel glinted amongst the flanks of brick and concrete. Leaning on the window, however, Anselm let his mind scurry back to a sort of forbidden universe.

  While throwing stones by the lake and sipping coffee at the airport bar, his thoughts — at intervals — had run wild, and he’d been obliged to haul them into line, ashamed of their force and direction. Despite the Prior’s warnings — and like a man drawn to the thrill of a street fight — Anselm was intrigued by Otto Brack and his dangerous world. He appeared to be a man beyond redemption. Anselm wanted to know how he’d got there and why What could have happened in his life that had taught him to use good for evil? What was his story, once the words had been peeled back? The questions seemed indecent, unseemly given the depravity of his actions. But Anselm still wanted to know He reproved himself, closing an eye to the absence of any real conviction.

  On leaving Warsaw’s airport, a garrulous taxi driver — singing more than talking, and not requiring any reciprocal commitment — took Anselm to the Warsaw Hilton, a towering edifice devoted to contemporary extravagance and the acute embarrassment of mendicant travellers compelled by circumstance to stay there. The appointment of his room was lavish: burgundy covers, cream sheets and heavy wood furnishings. Vaguely disorientated, he unpacked his bag and placed two battered books on a large desk near a floor-to-ceiling window.

  As to the purpose of his stay, John had organised everything. A faxed application to view the Polana file had been processed by return and an appointment made for Anselm to consult its contents. He was expected at ten the following morning at the IPN building, another modern tower whose external lights clung to the walls like limpet mines, ready to explode if anyone’s secret history bumped against them. Anselm could see them now, a mere stone’s throw away resolute against a waning skyline. With a sigh, he sat down, reaching for one of the books: his Psalter, given to him by Sylvester on his first day at the monastery. Recalling the Prior’s injunction to keep step with Larkwood’s rhythms, he mouthed the words for Compline … but found himself whispering questions — of all people — to John’s absent mother. Where did you go? She, too, had a story to tell, beginning with her name. On closing the cover and formally entering his Great Silence, Anselm was instantly sidetracked. Instead of turning off the light and choosing which of the five pillows would be his solace and comfort, he opted for the second volume on the table.

  ‘It’s out of date,’ John had said, at the Departure Gate, another match between his teeth, ‘but the important stuff never changes.’

  Anselm flicked through the guidebook as if it might contain a clue to the mystery of Otto Brack’s character. All at once he stopped, warmed by a sudden melancholy: he’d landed on a passage underlined in pencil … it was a schoolboy code linking numbers to the alphabet, the means by which Anselm and John had noted timings for a raid on the top floor dormitory. Underlined words had been thrown in to distract imagined enemies; it was only the selected letters that had mattered. Anselm smiled. It was as though John, boy and man, had come with him to Warsaw. He studied the paragraph closely looking for more high mischief. EEHGF. 55876.

  None the wiser, Anselm gazed over a twinkling, sleepless Warsaw Numberless white and yellow stars seemed to have fallen from the sky, jostling for space on the ground, colliding and blending in the darkness. The IPN building stood tall, still and curiously alone, like a gatecrasher at a cocktail party, someone who’d spoiled the fun with talk of Crime and Punishment. Somewhere inside its walls lay the file on the Shoemaker. Apparently it contained a copy of Róża’s interrogations, carried out during the Stalinist Terror.

  Anselm wondered what they’d done to her.

  Part Three

  Mokotów Prison

  Chapter Twelve

  A guard kicked away the low stool. Róża collapsed to one side, but the guard caught her by the hair. Swung to her feet, she was thrown from the interrogation room into the corridor of low, yellow light. Another guard appeared walking lazily his dull boots sagging like half fallen socks. Róża backed against the wall, facing the open door. Major Strenk was troubled, examining a fish hook under the glare of a desk lamp. Looking up, as if he’d just remembered something, he nodded at Lieutenant Brack who’d been sitting in the corner.

  ‘I warned you, Róża,’ said Brack, after carefully shutting the door. ‘You should have listened to me in the sewers.

  He gave a nod, just like Major Strenk’s, and the guards dragged Róża, feet trailing, to an iron staircase at the end of the corridor. Three floors down they came to a wet, freezing cellar, the air misting with the rush of their gasps and panting. Ahead, to the left, was a grey iron door.

  ‘I warned you Róża,’ he said, flicking keys on a big ring. He turned his soured face on to hers. His hair was shaved all around, leaving a high crown of copper metallic bristles. ‘You should have listened.’

  He yanked open the door and the guards, slipping and grunting, dragged Róża into a low, dripping room. A single bulb flickered like a fading life. Thick pipes ran the length of the ceiling, water drizzling from bandaged cracks and joints. Heavy globules dripped from a rusty central spout. Beneath it was an open cage. The guards kicked and shoved and then locked her in.

  ‘I warned you in the sewers, Róża,’ said Brack, as if all this were her fault.

  The room became silent, except for the patter of splashing. Suddenly, the twitching light went out. Róża stared at the afterglow, the fast-fading sallow bulb on the wall of he
r mind. She found a word, but it came as a whisper: ‘Help …’

  And then the pipes shuddered and the water exploded above her head.

  Róża did not know whether it was night or day when the interrogation began again. She hadn’t been conscious when they took her from the cage. She’d opened her eyes to find herself strapped to a chair by a belt. On seeing her move, the watching guard had stubbed out his cigarette and brought Róża back to Major Strenk and the footstool. Otto was sitting in the corner.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Róża Mojeska … you know already, I’m—’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  She breathed out the answers, and Major Strenk wrote them down with a pencil. It had been the same with every interrogation since her arrest six weeks previously Always beginning again as if nothing had gone before. The same wearing questions with a few afterthoughts. Only this last time they’d led to the cage, a first departure from the routine.

  ‘You say you’re an orphan?’ Major Strenk spoke as if he’d lifted the lid of a dustbin.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From birth?’ This was an afterthought.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Misfortune or abandonment?’

  ‘I don’t know’

  ‘Do you know anything about your parents?’ His tone of disgust suggested she might not, in fact, have any.

  ‘No. I like to think that—’

  Major Strenk seemed to lower the lid. He’d smelled enough. Dutifully, he went back to work, wanting — again — the names of teachers, staff and all the other children at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. He listened, yawning, checking the replies against his existing list. Not entirely satisfied, he moved on to slowly cover the German Occupation seeking, as ever, names along the way For names gave associations. Associations gave suspects. And suspects were suspect. At no point throughout this quest for other degenerates did Róża so much as glance at Otto, who was watching intently from the corner. She simply left him out of the reckoning, though he too had been at Saint Justyn’s, in hiding during the war. He’d turned up in l943. They’d met in the attic by a window Róża just kept her eyes firmly, perhaps too firmly, upon Major Strenk, recounting her early life as if Otto had never been there. It was a kind of inverted Russian roulette: Otto was taunting her, daring her to pull the trigger and mention his name; and she refused each time, not to save him, but to save herself, for she’d settled on a way to survive this measured annihilation of her humanity.