The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  To that end the prosecution would call evidence from experts to present the context within which the alleged crimes took place. An historian would describe the architecture of Stalinism in general and the Terror in particular; another would explain the organisation, powers and objectives of the secret police; yet another would outline the crucial importance of underground printing as a means of preserving an independent culture. The line of attack was clear:

  Madam Czerny would lead the court down to the foundations of a forgotten time, that it might better understand Brack’s place in the cellar.

  Then it would be Róża’s turn.

  ‘She will be on her own, as she was, once, long ago,’ said Madam Czerny ‘There is no other living witness to what took place in that prison. She will tell you what she saw’

  After lunch on the second day of evidence, Anselm sent a message to the translator: owing to a previous engagement, he wouldn’t be attending the hearing that afternoon — apologies for having forgotten to mention it sooner. In fact it was a spontaneous decision. He’d been listening, hour after hour, tormented by the sight of Brack’s leather document case; he’d fidgeted constantly watching Brack make rushed notes while a professor from Kraków mocked, with scholarly detachment, the acclamation of Stalin as a ‘Philologist of Genius’ and the ‘Greatest Man of All Times’ (two of 300 unctuous tributes that had appeared in the national press in 1949 to mark his seventieth birthday); he’d been troubled by the growing certainty that even the prosecutor’s evidence formed part of Brack’s final scheme to escape the power of a rightly constituted court.

  Outside, away from the growing tension, Anselm went to a fishmonger’s and bought a fresh oyster.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  ‘Well … Hail, Mary,’ said Frenzel, with a wave, full of surprise. ‘Or should that be Our Father?’

  Anselm shut the door and came to the edge of the desk. Frenzel’s eyes were alight with pleasure at the swiftness of his jokes.

  ‘If I’d known you wanted all the stuff to have a swipe at Brack, well, you could’ve paid by monthly instalments. I felt sorry for him, mind, when I saw him on the telly Made me think of those show trials in the fifties. You know, the hype and the conceit. Hypocrites, the lot of you. What was it? Whited sepulchres or something? When I saw that bitchy prosecutor—’

  His gaze settled hard on the oyster. Anselm had placed it carefully in the middle of his desk.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t. Last time round I ate a dodgy one. Sick as a dog I was and I vowed never to—’

  ‘I want Brack’s personnel file. Not just the first page and not just the last. I’d like the lot.’

  Frenzel’s pink lips made a curve analogous to a smile. He didn’t speak at first, preferring to nod a kind of dawning avuncular support for the workings of Anselm’s mind. He approved.

  ‘It makes sense, I suppose,’ he murmured, scratching his paunch. ‘You lot always want the pearl of great price.

  He picked up the phone, dialled and waited. After a second’s thought he seemed to spew into the receiver from a height, keeping it well away from his mouth as though it were dirty. He was talking to Irina’s son, presumably He left a message from his mother. It took an effort of will for Anselm not to lean over and thump that sagging jaw Frenzel wouldn’t expect that from someone who was meant to turn the other cheek. He clenched his fists, feeling the guilt of a bystander watching back-street violence — the frenzied kicking of the racist and homophobe.

  ‘You played that one well,’ Frenzel said with a wink, cleaning his hands on a wet-wipe pulled from a shiny plastic packet. ‘If you’d started off asking for the earth, you’d have paid through the nose. But you’ve shown some good footwork. Made yourself look stupid when you weren’t. Now you’ve got Brack on his knees, you want his file. Smart move. Well, you can have it for nothing. I’d like to contribute to his execution. I’ll have it sent over. Where are you staying? Don’t tell me! Same place?’ He nestled deeper into his chair. ‘Thought so. You’re all the same. Nothing ever changes.’ He paused to lick his lips. ‘You’ll be getting a brown box … Don’t go just yet, I thought we might talk about old times, you know, the days of wine and roses. What did you make of the pierogi? If you want my view, when all’s said and done, you can’t do much with a dumpling.’

  On reaching the door, Anselm turned around — not to say anything but just to have one last look at the man who’d never be brought to court. By the time the European Cup kicked off in Praga, he’d be a very rich man. There’d be a wine bar called Frenzel’s or a boutique selling silk ties and brightly coloured cotton socks. He flicked open a pocket knife and began prising open the oyster.

  ‘I’m having this one,’ he said, smirking. ‘Even if it kills me.’

  The phone in Anselm’s room rang at 8.39 p.m. Krystyna said his visitor had arrived. She was waiting in the foyer.

  ‘I’m on my way down.’

  It was a stab in the dark, but while listening to the evidence Anselm had tuned into the voices of other witnesses, other experts on the Terror. Irina had said Frenzel used people’s mistakes; Father Nicodem had said Brack trapped people with their past. And Anselm had wondered if there might just be some handle on to Róża’s persecutor, some mistake, some element of his past that might be used to avert what he was planning.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Irina, holding out the brown cardboard box as if it were Christmas. ‘I don’t know what’s inside. Mr Frenzel told me it was for your eyes only’

  The jokes didn’t end. He even played at spies.

  ‘Thank you.

  She was standing marooned on the red carpet, a short distance from the entrance, exposed, it seemed, by the bright lights. She wasn’t comfortable with the opulence. She didn’t belong with decent, well dressed people. Her shapeless coat was wet again with rain. The hood was up, as at their first meeting. She’d come from work in her green McDonald’s trousers and black sensible shoes. She spoke in a rushed, sore voice.

  ‘Is this for the trial? Is this going to bring him down? Am I part of it again?’

  ‘I hope so, Irina. Do you want a hot drink? A cold one?’

  ‘Nothing. Will it help?’ She pointed at the box in Anselm’s hands. ‘I don’t know I want to understand him, that’s all. If we understand someone, we can reach them … far into them, even if it’s something they don’t want; often without them knowing.’

  ‘Why do you want to reach him? No one can reach him. I should know’

  ‘Because I’m concerned he might try to escape the grip of the court.’

  ‘How? No. It’s not possible.’

  ‘I’m just being cautious.’ He smiled an assurance into her darkness and glimpsed the hygienic hair net. ‘You’ve helped me again, Irina. You reminded me of a truth beloved by Mr Frenzel. A man’s mistakes, his past? They can work like a key to his future. I want to make sure Róża can turn the lock.’

  She sniffed and reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief. A sneeze followed. ‘This is my trial, too, you know I’m there, watching every day Working nights. I don’t need the sleep.’ Woodenly she held out a cold hand. ‘I’ve got to go.

  Abruptly she turned and hurried away out of the light and off the carpet, heading back to the queues of people wanting a Big Mac. Anselm almost ran outside after her. But he didn’t because he had nothing to offer; he wanted to give her something — so much more than a hot or cold drink — but all he had was thanks for the tip about mistakes, and he’d furnished that already.

  Back at his desk overlooking the glittering skyline, he rang Sebastian. Of course, there might be nothing of interest in the brown box. But if there was … well, time was on the short side. Róża was due to give evidence at 10.30 a.m. the next morning.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Anselm and Sebastian reached Róża’s flat shortly before 11 p.m. The room shocked Anselm by its simplicity: a table, some chairs, scraps of furniture, a mirror, a standing lamp with a yellow shade. He looked again … a bullet o
n a shelf beneath a mirror. She made tea, not speaking, her soft footfalls pattering around the kitchen. The place was tidy and clean: the surroundings of an ordered mind; the ambience of someone who’d tamed restlessness.

  ‘We have to do to him what he has done to others,’ said Sebastian. ‘We have to use his past against him.’

  ‘Have to?’ The question displayed a certain moral revulsion in Róża which unsettled Anselm. He’d had no such sensibility.

  ‘It’s the only way’ said Sebastian. ‘Otherwise I’m sure he’s going to take something out of Pavel’s file — something made up, something planted before you left Mokotów We have to think like that now; we have to act like it, too, just for tomorrow Afterwards—’

  ‘No other tomorrow will ever be the same again,’ said Róża.

  She sat at her dining table, her black pullover drawing her into the shadows. The light from the lamp was weak. Her face caught a faint glamour.

  It was, of course, incongruous to rely on any file as a guide to the truth. Despite appearances, Father Nicodem’s was dramatically incomplete and utterly misleading. Even when the papers gave a full picture, like that of Edward, the image was distorted. But the rub was this: truths were in there. They might need stripping down and cleaning up, but the files contained information. And information, as Brack knew, was power.

  ‘Róża, we have to get to him first,’ continued Sebastian. He was still wearing his suit. The tie was loose, the top button open. ‘You should meet him. Before you give evidence. I’m convinced that—’

  ‘Tell me what’s in the file,’ said Róża, in a voice of strained patience.

  ‘Then we’ll talk about tomorrow’

  Sebastian had ploughed through every document generated by the secret police machinery between 1948 and 1989. He’d read Brack’s application form, a memo from Moscow, appraisals by Major Strenk and a string of increasingly critical internal reports from 1965 onwards. It seemed that the further Brack got away from the Stalinist culture of his early manhood, the more out of step he became with the system he served. Promotions ground to a halt. By 1982 they weren’t allowed to beat Politicals any more. He’d been out of his depth, no doubt. But that was all by-the-by Sebastian had distilled the facts into two broad areas. The first was small and important, if only to explain Brack’s obsessions. It was all set out in his application form.

  ‘He was born in Polana,’ said Sebastian. ‘He mentions the place several times. It’s as though, looking back, Polana was the safe place, as if the family should have stayed there and everything would have been different. But Leon, his father, brought them all to Warsaw He left behind the safe and conventional because he was a man with a mission greater than any individual’s pursuit of happiness. Leon’s life had been given to the oppressed workers. By the late thirties he was a leading light in the Communist Party. A man with ideas and ambition. The Party was dissolved in thirty-eight by the Comintern but Leon appears to have reinvented himself, surviving the purges of the time — purges his son appears to have known nothing about. Leon, above all, was a man who—’

  ‘—made toys out of old bits of wood and plumbing.’ Róża spoke quietly.

  ‘Sorry?’ Sebastian glanced at Anselm.

  ‘Toys. He once made a musket out of a wooden spindle and … I forget.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Leon.’

  Sebastian nodded sympathetically Anselm watched Róża, sensing, like a hesitant mariner, the approach of something immense beneath the surface of rising waves. It wasn’t dangerous, but it had power. Whatever it was slipped away and Sebastian was talking again.

  ‘The Germans invaded in—’

  ‘September nineteen thirty-nine,’ supplied Róża, archly.

  ‘Sorry, absolutely You know better than me.’ Sebastian took the rebuke but he didn’t slow down. ‘And they immediately began tracking down their ideological enemies, prominent amongst whom, of course, stood Leon Brack.’

  Leon and his family went into hiding. What happened next was not entirely clear. Brack’s application form was silent on the matter, but at some point he was hidden in an orphanage where he remained for the duration of the war. Róża’s orphanage. He never saw his parents again. Shortly after Brack had been spirited away they’d been denounced and deported.

  ‘She cooked fish in lemonade,’ added Róża, and again Anselm sensed that swell of power deep beneath the water. ‘It makes the fish sweet.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sebastian, uncertainly ‘I’ll give that a try.’

  ‘How does all this affect the trial?’

  Sebastian joined his hands into a sort of wedge, pointing forwards. ‘Directly it doesn’t … but it gives the background to your only chance to silence him.’

  ‘Tell me how this affects the trial,’ repeated Róża, her voice lowered ever so slightly.

  ‘Brack joined the secret police believing that his parents had died in Mauthausen. He served the cause year on year, motivated, I am sure, by genuine socialist convictions. For some reason the focus of his drive and grief came to centre upon the Shoemaker, almost certainly because his ideas were the complete antithesis of his own. The Shoemaker was exactly what he set himself up to be: the challenger to Communist ideology. And Brack was looking for him in nineteen forty-eight and he didn’t stop until nineteen eighty-nine. Between times he—’

  ‘Shot my husband and Stefan Binkowski. How is all this related to tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Everything he did — his entire life — rests upon a tragic misunderstanding and a profound deceit.’ Sebastian was leaning forward over his wedged hands. ‘If you tell him the truth, the naked truth laid out in his file, I think he’ll lose heart. I don’t think he’ll want to go on. I think it will break him.’

  Róża stood up and walked aimlessly into the middle of the room, lost in thought. She turned her eyes on to the mirror … or the bullet. Curiously the earlier impression of old age and round shouldered weariness — evident only a matter of moments ago — had suddenly vanished, as if dropped on the carpet, sloughed off when no one was looking. She returned to the table focused and erect.

  ‘Do you have the file?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sebastian tapped the shoulder bag, heaped at his feet.

  ‘Let me see it.’

  For the next hour or so Róża sat absorbed in her reading, slowly turning the pages, while Sebastian made quiet remarks, like a librarian, pointing up key passages and documents of special interest. She pored over the early appraisals written by Major Strenk. She stared, expressionless, at the NKVD memo from Moscow, the blunt tool (said Sebastian) that would, if used, stun Brack like an animal in an abattoir.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it would,’ she replied, pushing the closed file towards Sebastian.

  ‘I’ll organise a meeting for tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But not with Brack,’ clarified Róża, with a quick wag from her finger. ‘There will be no meeting with Brack. It won’t be necessary.

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘My Friends. Everyone who’s come this far with me, but leave out Madam Czerny I don’t think she’d appreciate what I’m planning to do, even though it’s a kind of justice.’

  Stray filtered light patterned the walls of Anselm’s hotel bedroom. Shards with soft edges, like the design in the carpet downstairs. They came like echoes from the city on the other side of the windows. What was Róża going to do? Why had she changed so dramatically? These were the main questions but, ever ill-disciplined, Anselm’s curiosity strayed along a couple of byways. He was trying to work out if they led back to the main road.

  First, Róża had evidently known Brack long before she’d been interrogated in Mokotów They’d known each other during the war, at Saint Justyn’s. Would it be stretching probability to infer that they’d been more than friends? Anselm thought not. Frenzel had sniffed something personal in Brack’s obsession with catching Róża. A lost or failed love, that’s the fruit he�
��d detected, drawn in through those flaring nostrils. The connoisseur of old mistakes had smelled a hidden blunder. Was Brack simply Brack — at least in part — because, through some wrong turning, he’d lost his hold on Róża? A hold which he’d tried to reinstate through murder and a perverted scheme that left him as the father of her child — even as he convinced himself that he’d pulled the trigger for the sake of a better set of ideas?

  The second byway intrigued Anselm even more, because it represented a short step back in time: Brack must have met Mr Lasky He was there in the orphanage, guiding Róża with his homespun maxims. Brack had told Strenk about Róża, but there’d been no mention of the caretaker. Why? Because — Anselm concluded — he’d been grateful. In the epoch where naming names was a means to salvation, he’d shown a hidden, redundant loyalty — even to a dead man, executed by the Nazis. But why grateful? Presumably for saving his life. This byway extremely narrow and now overgrown, led to the person whom Róża had met as a girl … Otto, a youth separated from his family because of his father’s political convictions, someone capable of gratitude and love. And who, tomorrow, would meet Róża’s kind of justice.

  What was she planning? How did the all the roads come together? How would she take account of who he was, set against who he’d become and what he’d done?

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The first Anselm knew of the hullabaloo was when he saw armed police running past the room where he was waiting for the meeting with Róża. Celina, John and Sebastian followed him out into the corridor. Shouts came echoing from round a corner, court officials walked into view with strained urgency Sebastian intercepted one of them with a pull to the elbow He listened and his mouth fell open.

  ‘Róża’s been arrested,’ he gasped, swinging around. ‘She’s come with a bullet in her handbag. A live round, for God’s sake: