“What exactly would you want me to do?”
“There is an expression in Polish that says, ‘He walks after things.’ It refers to a man who can get things done, especially when dealing with the government. That is what you require. Someone who will walk your export documents through a different labyrinth, this one inside a government ministry.”
“So how do I go about finding someone like that?”
Alexander paused, said finally, “Perhaps this should wait until I am feeling better and can come down to help you, Jeffrey.”
“Maybe so, but at least let me try.”
“Very well. You are looking for someone whose interests coincide with yours. Perhaps it will be someone with whom I dealt in the old government—Gregor knows most of them. This is doubtful, as past services rendered to a disgraced regime will not carry much weight now. No, it will most likely be someone from within the art world who knew of my earlier efforts, who now has a position in the government.”
“Any ideas who that might be?”
“Again, Gregor may be able to tell you. It is part of his responsibility to keep track of such things while I am not around. But because you will be working with someone new to our operation, you are going to need some gift, some important favor or service to offer them. He or she will want to make sure that we still have either assistance or articles of value to bring to the table.”
“That’s not a lot to go on.”
“No, but keep your eyes and ears open. Something may turn up. If you can find that hook, obtaining the export documents should not be too difficult. Many of the new administrators have a very real contempt for the laws instituted by the Communists, and rumor has it that regulations governing the export of antiques are soon to be changed in any case.”
“So I’m to find both a person who can actually write the documents, and find something that I can offer them, like maybe an antique of Polish importance.”
“That would be the best, of course. But such items do not grow on trees. Have you come across anything you might use?”
“A Polish Biedermeier chest of drawers. Not enough on its own to warrant this kind of special treatment.”
“No. Well, a service of some kind, something you can offer that no one else can do, this too would be an excellent gift.”
“Sounds impossible.”
“Yes, it may well be. In that case, we shall simply have to hope that our friends in the salt mine do not decide to sell the merchandise twice.”
“And that you get well soon,” Jeffrey added.
“Thank you, yes, it would be very nice if we were to be able to seek this new door together. I have often thought in the past that it would be so much nicer to work with another.”
“You have Gregor.”
“Ah, but Gregor is often ill, as you can see for yourself. Not to mention the fact that his somewhat peculiar attitudes make him unsuitable for the rough and tumble of business.”
“What would you use as leverage if you were here?”
“That, my friend, is what we must apply ourselves to identifying,” Alexander replied. “And with great diligence.”
Friend, Alexander had said. “Gregor has somebody he wants me to go see tomorrow. It’s a long shot, something he hasn’t felt was all that important until this came up.”
“He gave you no details?”
“He said he didn’t have any to give me, except that the man spoke English, and that I needed to go alone.”
“Strange that he would not have mentioned it before.”
“It’s a long shot at best, like I said.” Jeffrey took a breath. “And the meeting has to take place at Florian’s Gate.”
“Ah. Well.” The life drained from Alexander’s voice. “It is certainly one that you must handle yourself, then. Call me when you return. And watch your back.”
CHAPTER 19
Dawn painted the promise of a beautiful day in heaven-wide hues of gold and blue when Jeffrey left the hotel the next morning. He walked the brief distance to Gregor’s apartment and found him moving painfully about his little alcove fixing tea.
Jeffrey took him by the elbow and guided him back to bed. “Let me do that for you.”
Gregor did not complain. “I am most grateful, my dear boy. Just be careful that the stove does not singe your fingers as it has mine.”
The kitchen was nothing more than a walk-through closet with a cramped little bathroom at the back. On one side wall, a tiny refrigerator clanked and shivered beneath a dripping faucet and battered sink. Set into the wall overhead was a draining rack for all the utensils and plates Gregor owned—none of which matched. On the opposite wall, twin gas pressure tanks supported a plywood board, upon which rested a portable cooker. A safe distance above this were more shelves, containing a bare minimum of canned and boxed food.
Jeffrey filled a pot with water, lit the stove with a kitchen match, set the pot in place, and went back to the main room. “Do you mind if I ask why you returned to Poland after having escaped?”
“Because I was called,” Gregor replied simply.
“That’s it?”
“That is more than enough, and all I can offer to someone who has never known the experience. But the how of my return is perhaps more interesting. Would you like to hear of it?”
“Sure.”
“Very well. On March 5, 1946, Sir Winston Churchill gave an address in America, and we heard it on the air the next day. You are too young to remember, but in these times the radio was our lifeline, our source of joy and entertainment and news. That particular talk became famous later, but it was new then. I still recall the words. He said, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.”
“I know the expression,” Jeffrey said. “I suppose everybody does these days.”
“An iron curtain. I can’t tell you what an impact those words had on me. I felt the iron curtain had come down inside me, and my life’s work was waiting on the other side. It was a very wounded time for me. Zosha, my wife, had died—just before Christmas of that first year in London. Her health had never been good, and she had not really recovered from the strain of our escape from Poland. On rare occasions when my anguish would subside, I would catch hold of this feeling, a very clear sensation that I was being called back home.
“By that time, there was a tremendous amount of suspicion and numerous rumors—and a growing body of hard factual evidence as well—about Stalin’s death grip upon Poland. We heard ever more horrific stories of mass arrests and executions. Polish patriots, officers, and intellectuals were being denounced as fascists and shot. Stalin’s true nature was being shown by wave after wave of oppression and terror. I knew exactly what I was going to find upon my return. It was impossible for a Pole to meet a Pole anywhere—on the street, in a shop, at the club—without hearing of another atrocity. Street-sweeps were being instituted again, just as in the time of the Nazi occupation. The secret police were again arriving in the middle of the night to steal away whole families and relocate them to Siberia. Yes. I knew what awaited me. But I also knew I was called, and that I was going to go.
“There was one main problem, however. No, that is incorrect. There were two. The first was, how on earth was I going to escape back into Poland. The Polish border police mirrored Stalin’s growing paranoia and hatred of everything tainted by the West. All arriving Poles were viewed as spies. After all, why would anyone who had managed to escape wish to return, unless it was to overthrow Stalin’s puppet government?
“My second problem, and my greatest worry, was Alexander. I realize that in this day and age you will find this difficult to understand, but I did not want to go against his wishes. I loved and admired him very much. I wanted to go back, yes. I knew I was going to return. But I also wanted to do so with Alexander’s blessings.
“I began by dropping hints, making it as clear as possible to a man who had no faith in God that I felt this same God was callin
g me back. But I did not tell him directly that I was going, so he did not have a reason to ask me to stay, do you see? I simply let him know of my desire, and I waited. And I prayed.”
Jeffrey caught a whiff of steam from the boiling pot. He moved into the alcove, dropped a pinch of tea leaves into two glasses, filled them with water, picked them up gingerly around the rims, and returned.
“Ah, excellent. Thank you so much, my dear boy. This first cup of tea has become a ritual that holds my mornings together.” Gregor blew on the tea and sipped it.
“I don’t see how you can drink it like that. The water’s still almost boiling.”
“Practice, my boy. A practice best done on winter mornings when you have passed a night without heat, and when you awaken to an apartment so cold you are not sure that your pipes are still running.” He sipped again. “That night in London, I switched off the radio and went down to the Ognisko. Do you know it?”
“Sure. The Polish Club in South Kensington. Alexander takes me there whenever he’s in town.”
“It was quite a place back then, not a club in the sense of being exclusive. Anyone could enter. It was a place where the Poles of London would gather and feel that they belonged. It always made me feel better just to go in there, to hear the Polish voices, smell the stuffed cabbage cooking. I am sure many others felt the same. The atmosphere was always lively in the evenings, filled with serious flirtations and mock conspiracies—and laced with good vodka and cheap cigarettes.
“I went upstairs to a room devoted to the most serious of pursuits—bridge. The stakes were by our standards very high. A game had just broken up, and in the corner of the room I saw Alexander talking with Piotr.”
Jeffrey straightened up with a jolt. “Piotr my grandfather?”
“Indeed. I don’t know how much you know about what your grandfather did during the war—”
“Nothing at all,” Jeffrey replied. “I’ve never even heard anybody mention it before.”
“I thought not.” There was a mischievous twinkle to Gregor’s eyes. “You didn’t think he had been a jeweler all his life, did you?”
“I guess I never thought of it.”
“The steady hands and the trained eye that made him a good jeweler in America made him a master at the forgery of documents.”
“My grandfather?”
“I assure you, my dear boy, I am not exaggerating. A true master forgerer. He had been very active in the Polish Underground Army. He was an artist of sorts. He had a name for creating the best false documents anyone had ever seen.”
Jeffrey leaned back. “Incredible.”
“Indeed. War has a tendency to bring out the strangest traits in men, the best and the worst. In your grandfather’s case, I am happy to say, it was the best. In any case, he and Alexander were talking to a man in uniform that everyone addressed as Prosze Pana Kapitana, or Mister Captain Sir. I suppose he had a name, but to me and the others he was an aristocrat and a war hero, someone who bolstered our own feelings of patriotism by simply allowing us to recognize him in this honorable way.
“London was really the center for maintaining the struggle for Poland during and after the war. The Polish government-in-exile was headquartered there. Almost everywhere you went in Polish circles, there was some bit of intrigue, some preparation for rescue or revolution. The Captain-Sir was talking to Alexander and Piotr about a man who had worked undercover for them just outside of Warsaw. The man knew a tremendous amount about Red Army activities and intentions. The Soviets had almost consolidated both their position and their new political power. To be sure, they often made promises to hold elections, but by the end of 1945, it was clear to almost everyone that any elections which were held would be rigged. Moscow-trained Communists held key posts in the ministries of Justice and the Interior. They completely controlled the police, the courts, the press, and the new government propaganda machine. It was simply a matter of time before they would eliminate the remaining nationalists in the government structure, and consolidate their power.
“It was time, the Captain-Sir declared, for their undercover man to get out. His situation was becoming too dangerous, and they needed his information back in London. Your grandfather was very concerned, because this man was a friend. The Red Army and the Polish government were cracking down quite severely. No Poles were being allowed out—of course, this had been the situation since the Russians had invaded, but it was growing continually worse. Stalin’s paranoia was mounting. He had secret police planted everywhere.”
Gregor cradled his cooling glass with both hands, his gaze bright with remembering. “The captain and Piotr were discussing a plan to make their man a set of American documents. You see, there were quite a few Americans going in and out of Poland on these inspection-evaluation missions for reconstruction and foreign aid. What concerned them, and what they were trying to work out, was how to get the documents safely into Poland and in his hands.
“I positively jumped forward, as though struck by a lightning bolt. ‘Send me,’ I said.
“ ‘Impossible,’ Piotr replied. ‘There’s a slim chance you could get through, but it’s very unlikely. The situation is becoming impossibly tough at the borders. They could ransack everything you have, find an American passport among your things in someone else’s name, and then what?’
“The captain agreed. ‘They would have you drawn and quartered, and our missions both in England and in Poland could collapse.’
“ ‘Then send me with one set of travel documents,’ I replied. They did not understand. ‘I will enter on the American passport, then turn it over to your man for him to exit with. We will simply need to have someone on the other side insert his picture where mine had been before. Or place his under mine, so that I can peel mine off. There must be a way to do that.’
“The captain thought it could work. The document would be stamped upon entering Poland, and there would be no problem exiting a few days later.
“ ‘Impossible,’ Piotr repeated. ‘Gregor gets in, delivers the documents, and then what? He’d be trapped there.’
“Alexander spoke for the first time, and told them, ‘That has been my cousin’s plan all along.’ He looked at me with an expression of sadness and defeat, because he knew I had found the one way of returning to Poland to which he would never object. Then and there, it was decided that I would be the courier.”
Gregor smiled at Jeffrey. “As you know, Piotr by then had a very good connection in the American Embassy.”
“My grandmother?”
He nodded. “She was already his wife by that time, your grandmother. She was so much in love, terribly infatuated with Piotr. When he asked for her help, she could not refuse. Her first sense of loyalty was to him and his causes.
“She dug out an American passport from the vaults, one of hundreds that had been returned to the embassy over the years—perhaps stolen, perhaps lost, who knows. It did not matter. She found one for a Mr. Paul W. Mason. Older than I, not as old as the man waiting near Warsaw. A few travel stamps—Mexico, Canada, Italy, some of the places that I had once dreamed of visiting and now never would.
“Your grandmother prepared a lovely letter of introduction on embassy stationery, and once I had used the letter to obtain a Polish visa, she arranged for a Mr. Paul W. Mason to travel to Warsaw with an American engineering delegation. She booked his return for four days later with a different group.
“Then Piotr worked his magic. He substituted my picture on the passport and forged the embassy seal that covered the photograph’s right side. He then took a photograph of the man in Warsaw and embossed it with the same quadrant of seal. I hid this photograph in my package of playing cards, glued between the joker and the ace of hearts. Once I was safely in the country, I lifted my photograph off with a razor and glued his into place. The documents were passed on to our man, and he returned to London in my place.
“When I arrived in Cracow, I informed the authorities that we had fled the Nazis and woun
d up in a small Carpathian village, someplace so remote that they would not bother to check. There my wife fell ill, I explained, and after her death I returned.”
Jeffrey asked, “And all this time, you could never tell anyone here you ever went to the West?”
“The world of an oppressed people is a world of secrecy, my boy,” Gregor replied. “There were many things no one told anyone, not even their family. It was not discussed, it was not questioned, it was simply done. For myself, I was forced to pretend that the West had never existed for me.”
“Did you ever regret coming back?”
“I have only one regret. And that is, when I die I will not be buried next to my beloved Zosha, whom I laid to rest in London. I must leave it to the Lord above to bring us together somehow.” Gregor glanced at his watch. “Goodness, look at the time. You must be on your way, my boy. This is one appointment for which you cannot be late.”
* * *
Florian’s Gate was one of the few remaining portals from the fortified medieval city walls. Beyond it ran a street open only to pedestrian traffic and lined with small shops making the transition from dingy government-run outlets to colorful Western-style boutiques.
Just to the right through the archway was a long stone wall where dozens of artists hung their works in hopes of obtaining a few foreign dollars or marks or francs—anything that would help them to buy further art supplies and feed the hungry mouths at home. Most of the art was very bad—amateurish landscapes, gaudy nudes, predictable still-lifes. A few were good, two or three truly exceptional.
Jeffrey strolled along the makeshift outdoor gallery until he came upon a man fitting the description Gregor had given him. The man was of small stature, with a long thick silver moustache and hands with fingers like stubby cigar ends. He wore a pale gray oversized shirt as an artist’s smock over navy-blue pants and shoes so scuffed the color had long since disappeared. He was working intently on what appeared to be a Monet landscape, a scene from the artist’s garden at Giverny.
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