by Anya Lipska
‘He’ll be out soon,’ said Janusz. And no sooner had he spoken than the air was split by a rising shriek: four jet engines accelerating for take-off.
As the cab pulled away, Janusz surveyed the airport car park opposite. Finding the white expanse unbroken but for a single vintage Polski Fiat, he gave a satisfied nod.
It had been a stressful day for nineteen-year-old aircraft technician Boguslaw Witorski, and he was looking forward to his dinner. When he worked late his mama would always leave a pot of stew – usually pork, sometimes beef – simmering on the stove for him, and a loaf of rye bread under a fresh tea towel. When he climbed into the driving seat, he was so focused on his first mouthful of stew that he couldn’t work out at first what it was that felt wrong. Then it hit him: the smell of cigar smoke. Suddenly, a gravelly voice spoke his name from the rear seat.
‘Kurwa mac!’ he shouted, jumping so violently that his skull smacked against the roof of the Fiat.
‘Don’t turn around. And don’t try to run away. I don’t want to make a nasty mess of your Fiat.’
Boguslaw gasped as he felt something jab him through the seat back, just to the right of his spine. ‘I haven’t got any money!’ he said. ‘Take my bank card!’ He went to pull the card from his back pocket, but the movement was rewarded with another warning prod.
‘Keep still. I don’t want your money, just some information.’
‘Anything, prosze pana, I’ll tell you everything I know, just don’t shoot me!’
‘Where’s your boss?’
‘He left an hour ago. These days he leaves me to turn the power off once the flight’s left.’
‘I bet he told you to make yourself scarce while the English cops were here, right?’
‘Yes! But I forgot and went back to finish the job I was doing. After they left he was mad as a cut snake.’
With that gorilla Mazurek off the premises and the boy babbling like a mountain brook, Janusz allowed himself to relax a little.
‘When does the plane fly back in?’ he asked.
‘5.30 tomorrow morning.’
Janusz frowned. If these so-called cargo flights were illegally trafficking women from the east, then arriving during daylight hours would surely be courting disaster, especially since by that time of the morning, the airport would be gearing up for the London flight.
‘So how do you disembark the laski?’ he asked.
‘Girls?’ The boy sounded mystified. ‘What girls?’
Janusz could see the boy’s frown reflected in the rear-view mirror. ‘You’re lying,’ he growled. But even as he said it, he knew the boy wasn’t smart enough – or brave enough – for that.
He paused, his brain racing. ‘What are these flights bringing in then?’
‘They don’t bring anything in, prosze pana. They take stuff out.’
‘Out where?’
‘Someplace called Sukur – in Turkey.’
Turkey? Janusz sat in stunned silence, seeing again the garish-coloured pastries and smelling the fruity shisha at the Pasha Café. A muffled mobile tone from the front seat broke into his thoughts.
‘It’s probably my mama,’ said Boguslaw, sheepish. ‘She worries if I’m not home on the dot.’
‘Well, she’ll have to fret for a while longer,’ Janusz growled. ‘And turn the engine on before our dicks get frostbite.’
The boy told him that, in the eighteen months he’d worked there, the pattern had remained more or less the same. A big freight truck would arrive a couple of hours before take-off and its two man crew would use the engineering department’s forklift to transfer large wooden crates onto the plane via a loading ramp.
‘So what’s in the crates?’ Janusz chafed his upper arms: he could hear the rattle of the Fiat’s heater but the feeble warmth it produced didn’t seem to reach the back seat.
‘Pan Mazurek told me it was industrial fridges and freezers.’ The boy glanced up at Janusz in the mirror, a look that said he didn’t believe the story. ‘But he never let me anywhere near the plane during loading. He said it was because of health and safety – I wasn’t insured if they dropped a fridge on my head.’
‘Do I look like a kretyn?’ snorted Janusz. ‘All this time watching this little scene, you never got a single clue as to what was really inside those crates?’ When the boy didn’t answer, Janusz delivered another incentivising jab in the back.
‘Dobrze! Dobrze!’ he said. ‘There was one time when they dropped a crate. I was just coming back from the bogs and I got a glimpse of what was inside.’
Janusz grinned to himself: who needed a gun when an empty cigar tube did the job just as well?
‘And?’ he said.
‘Brown metal boxes, maybe a metre and half long?’
Janusz frowned. ‘Plain boxes?’
‘I saw yellow numbers, letters, printed on one.’ The boy shrugged. ‘Not words, more like a code. It meant nothing to me.’
A distant bell chimed in Janusz’s brain but right now he didn’t have time to interrogate his ageing memory banks.
‘What about the office – do they know what’s going on?’
‘The director, perhaps, but not Angelika – no way.’
As he mentioned the girl, his tone became resolute – maybe the boy did have some jaja after all, thought Janusz approvingly.
‘She definitely thinks the cargo is fridges, because she’s always joking with me.’ Janusz saw a smile curl one side of the boy’s mouth. ‘She says my job is sending Polish ice cubes to Turkey.’
‘Maybe as you say, the girl is as innocent as a lamb,’ Janusz conceded, ‘but all this cloak and dagger business over a few fridges – you knew something illegal was going on, didn’t you?’
Boguslaw hung his head. ‘I didn’t want to get into trouble, prosze pana,’ he said. ‘There are hardly any jobs round here that pay a half-decent wage and my mama made me promise I wouldn’t go to England to work.’
‘Have you ever come across a Romanian called Romescu – visiting your boss maybe? Big scar down one side of his face?’
The boy shook his head in the mirror. ‘Nie, pana.’
Janusz grunted. Pulling a shot of the dead stowaway out of his pocket, he leaned forward to show the boy. ‘What about this guy the English cops are trying to identify, the one who fell out of one of your planes?’
‘I’ve never seen him before,’ said the boy, frowning down at the picture.
Suddenly, Janusz’s door flew open. A powerful hand grabbed him roughly by the lapels of his coat and started to drag him through the open door. Janusz brought up both fists but before he could throw a punch he felt the icy kiss of a gun barrel jabbed against his throat. He unbunched his hands and as he was bundled through the doorway, he caught a glimpse of his assailant – a big man in a padded jacket wearing a dark green balaclava, the sort Janusz himself had been issued back when he’d started his national service.
The next thing he knew, the glittering white surface of the car park swung up crazily to meet him and he found himself lying face down, mouth and nostrils packed with snow. From that single glimpse of the man’s eyes Janusz might not have recognised him, but the bulky outline and the faint smell of kerosene supplied the rest. Mazurek. Mama must have phoned the boss to ask where her baby boy had got to.
Janusz had a vivid premonition of the next frame of this dramat: he would be pinned down and shot through the back of the neck. Executed.
As he felt a boot land between his shoulder blades he knew he had only a split second. Tensing his upper body, and bracing his left arm against the snowy ground, he threw back his right arm and shoulder with all the force he could muster, a roar issuing from his throat. A moment of resistance, and then the weight disappeared from his back, accompanied by a grunt of surprise. Thrown onto his left foot, Mazurek staggered on the snow, his outstretched gun arm waving wildly as he tried to regain his balance. Janusz rolled his body and made a desperate grab for his leg. He couldn’t get a proper grip, but he felt his scrab
bling fingers close around the seam of his attacker’s jeans, and tugged. There was barely any force behind the action – but it was enough. The off-balance Mazurek swayed like a tall ship in a high gale, and then, eyes wide at this unexpected turn of events, went down with a mighty thwack.
Janusz scrambled to his feet, looking for the gun, saw the black shape of it against the snow, centimetres from his assailant’s outstretched hand. He’d have liked to boot it away but, deciding he couldn’t reach it fast enough, kicked Mazurek in the nuts instead. He jack-knifed with an animal howl, making himself into a surprisingly small ball for such a big man, giving Janusz time to pick up the pistol.
The chuj didn’t look like he’d be up and about anytime soon, Janusz decided, but just to be on the safe side he stooped to unlace Mazurek’s trainers, keeping the gun pointed at his chest. Pulling them off by the heel, he heaved one, then the other into the snowy distance.
Locating the safety on the gun, he slid it to the ‘on’ position. His instinct had been right: Mazurek hadn’t come to scare him off, but to kill him.
Leaning heavily on the roof of the car to catch his breath, he saw the boy staring out at the downed Mazurek, as if in a trance, and motioned to him to unwind his window.
‘When your boss is feeling a bit better …’ he told the boy, in between breaths, ‘give him a lift home. Remind him that I’m here with the London police, and if he wants to try any more shit, I’ll have Interpol crawling all over this place by lunchtime. You hear me?’
The boy nodded, his eyes fixed on Janusz’s right hand, which still held the gun. Janusz weighed it in his hand: a blunt nosed semi-automatic pistol, blue-black metal with a plastic grip – brand-new from the look of it. He hadn’t held a gun since his military service and he’d forgotten the instant sense of power it bestowed.
He stowed it in his pocket. ‘What’s your name, kid?’ he asked, his voice gruff but not unkind.
‘Boguslaw, pani.’
‘Well Slawek, here’s a piece of advice. Buy your mama a nice big bunch of flowers and tell her you’ve started looking on UK job websites. Sooner or later the gowno is gonna hit the fan at this place and everyone within 500 metres is going to get spattered.’
Pulling out his mobile, he punched in the number of the cab driver who’d brought him here. ‘Who knows,’ he winked at the boy. ‘Maybe you can persuade the lovely Angelika to go with you.’
Twenty-Two
Since Kershaw had emerged from the restaurant bathroom to discover that Kiszka had given her the slip, she’d been spitting feathers. Despite sending him a number of increasingly forthright texts she’d received no reply. Now she lay on the bed in her hotel room watching ancient repeats of Mr Bean on the TV’s one English language channel – a pastime that was doing little to assuage her fury. Where the fuck was he? And what was he up to?
Kershaw’s room faced the street so she was able to jump up and look out the window when she heard cabs drawing up outside to deliver guests. The cab traffic slowed to a trickle as the evening progressed and by 11 p.m., the street lay empty and silent, so quiet that when she opened the window and leaned out she could actually hear the snow falling. Finally, just before midnight, there came the rumble of a diesel engine. Looking out, she saw Kiszka haul himself out of a cab, his movements as tentative as some old geezer. After the cab pulled away, he lingered at the kerb, looking up and down the empty street before turning towards the hotel. He looked like he was swearing to himself as he forced a path through the knee-deep snow, before finally disappearing out of view beneath the entrance porch.
When she heard his footsteps reach the corridor outside – his room was almost opposite hers – she opened her door, catching him just as he was getting out his key card. He whipped around, as though ready for a fight – and from the look of him, it wouldn’t be the first one of the night. He had a trail of dried blood beneath one nostril, his greatcoat looked damp and stained like he’d been rolling around in the snow, and when she took a step closer she noticed a graze on his throat. The speech she’d been preparing for the last hour or more, about the professionalism and courtesy she expected from him while he was being paid by the Met, evaporated.
‘What the fuck happened to you?’
‘You should see the other guy,’ he grunted, turning away to put his card in the lock.
‘If you think you can fob me off like that, you can forget it,’ she said.
‘I went to a bar and got into a fight, okay?’
Kiszka was across the threshold of his room and clearly keen to shut the door on her. She planted her right foot inside the doorway and folded her arms.
‘I’m not going anywhere till you tell me what’s been going on,’ she said, raising her chin at him. ‘Were you with that girl from the airport?’
‘And what if I was? It’s none of your fucking business!’ His eyes blazed down at her. ‘You said my free time would be my own!’
‘Yes, but I …’
‘No! We’re just here to work together. I’m not your boyfriend!’
He’d taken a step towards her during this exchange. They stood a hand’s breadth apart, eyeballing each other. She felt suddenly aware of the … physicality of him in a way she hadn’t been before. Out of nowhere she was struck by the possibility that they might be about to kiss. The feeling lasted no more than a second before they both broke the gaze. From the way he was studying the wallpaper, she wondered if he’d had the same thought.
‘I’m going to bed,’ he growled. ‘And unless you plan on joining me, I suggest we bid each other goodnight.’
After that little late-night contretemps, Kershaw had a lousy night’s sleep and woke up feeling a vague sense of guilt, even though she’d nothing really to be ashamed of. She called Ben, feeling a surge of affection and relief when he answered.
‘Hello,’ he murmured, his voice still thickened by sleep.
‘You should be up by now,’ she scolded him. ‘It’s gone seven over there, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve still got five minutes.’
‘Where were you last night? You weren’t answering your mobile.’
‘Oh … we had a few beers after work – sorry, I should’ve checked it. What’s the weather like in the frozen East?’
‘We’ve had loads of snow,’ she said, separating the blinds with her free hand. ‘Must be knee deep, at least. But they cleared the roads overnight and the flight’s still on time – I checked.’
‘Not like Blighty then, eh?’
Ben told her he’d already moved his gear into their new place in Leytonstone, and dealt with some of the more tedious chores like taking the meter readings, bless him. She planned to box up her first batch of stuff and take it over by the end of the week. By the time she hung up, Kershaw felt a lot better. Any last-minute qualms she’d had at the prospect of losing her independence, her silly worries about Ben, seemed to have disappeared. Now she felt a kind of settled excitement, if that wasn’t a contradiction, at the thought of setting up home with him.
One person she wasn’t looking forward to seeing was Kiszka. But in the dining room where breakfast was served, he greeted her as though nothing untoward had happened. Then, over a plate of what looked – and smelt – horribly like pickled fish, he launched into a polite little speech.
‘It was an unforgivable discourtesy to leave you like that in the restaurant last night. Please accept my apologies, Natalia.’
As was no doubt his intention, this pretty little speech made it difficult for her to reignite the dispute, to press him again on where he’d gone, without seeming churlish. Anyway, she thought, what was the point when they’d be on the flight home in four or five hours’ time?
‘Apology accepted,’ she said instead. As she buttered a piece of croissant she was relieved to see that he’d spruced himself up a bit: still wearing the ever-present greatcoat – natch – but at least he’d shaved, and his face wasn’t black and blue as she’d feared it might be, his only memento of last night’s
brawl a cut lip. She hadn’t been looking forward to turning up to meet the Polish police accompanied by someone who looked more like a dangerous fugitive than a professional translator.
‘So we’re going to see the cops today, right?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I’m not really expecting them to identify our stowaway. But you never know.’ Then she checked her watch. ‘Hey, we’d better get going – the cab’s coming in five minutes. I’ve already paid the hotel bill.’
Kiszka seemed a bit alarmed at this, but she put it down to the fact that he still had a pile of pickled fish in front of him.
It was true that Janusz disliked having to rush his food, but doing justice to the rest of his sledz was the least of his problems. No, what was uppermost in his mind was the prospect of walking into Przeczokow’s police station with a loaded handgun in his pocket.
By midday, they were back at the airport, checking in for the UK flight. Once airside, Janusz made a beeline for the bar and ordered a large Zubr, one of the few Polish beers it was still hard to find in London. Natalia, who’d asked for an orange juice, looked a bit disapproving as he necked half the contents of the tall pilsner glass in one go, but what could she say, now he was off the clock? He closed his eyes and let the dopamine reward flood his synapses.
Mazurek’s pistol had been an albatross around his neck ever since he’d separated the cursed thing from its owner. He’d slept with it under his pillow with the safety on – just in case the big thug was dumb enough to come after him – with some vague idea of sneaking out early in the morning to dump it in a litterbin. But he’d overslept. The next thing he knew, he was shaking hands with the chief of police in downtown Przeczokow, while packing a concealed weapon.
‘What’s the joke?’ asked Natalia, her steely blue eyes surveying him over the lip of her glass.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said, pressing the smile from his lips. He’d been picturing the look on the face of the unsuspecting plumber who would one day lift the lid of the cistern in the cop shop toilets to discover a semi automatic pistol nestling beside the ballcock. ‘Do you fancy one of those pretzels?’