The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  He had seen her name sometime earlier in a newspaper article about her work with torture victims, victims of war trauma, and he had clipped the piece for future reference. But it had been his dreams that had sent him, in the end, to her. Deeply unsettling dreams and the overwhelming sense of dread he began to feel — the sense that somehow, somewhere, he had made a terribly wrong turn and could never hope to turn back.

  Or perhaps it was that he felt he had made no turn at all, that all the important turns had been made for him, that he had made no real commitments to any issue, task, or person, and that this was somehow about to catch up with him. Catch up with him, he thought in his less lucid moments in that period, and destroy him. The episode had turned him almost overnight — though Natalia would insist later that there are no sudden psychic turnings, that all such turnings stem from seeds sown years before — from a man with his feet planted firmly on the ground to one completely at sea.

  The episode had not lasted long. He had not allowed it to last long and the number of sessions he had had with Natalia was relatively small. Smaller, he liked to think, than more self-indulgent people would have allowed themselves. Were the sessions useful? Perhaps a little. He allowed himself to admit this. Perhaps he had found it useful to tell someone his story, to try to see the patterns that it presented, to try, for a time, to see what his dreams and intuitions could tell him. But these were not things he wished to be detained by for very long.

  The problem now, when he allowed himself to acknowledge it, was that two years later he found himself not in a state of confusion or panic but quite simply numb.

  His career, of course, had never been in better shape. His latest book, on CIA surveillance of Quebec separatist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, was selling well. His earlier book, on the diplomatic conflict between Canada and the U.S. over Cuban policy and the secret American pressures being applied to Canada at high levels, had been an unexpected big seller in the U.S. market, and he had made more money than he ever thought possible from a piece of journalism.

  His designation as investigative journalist, however, amused him. He had only used what came easily to him: the ability to ask the right questions to the right people, to know what to look for and where to look for it, to link complex scenarios in his mind, to make people trust him, and, most impor tant of all, to sense when people were lying or had reason to lie. He knew that these skills were highly valued, by others if not by himself.

  He was now on a vaguely defined leave of absence from Forum magazine, enjoying a cashing in of sorts, of all the stock he had built up while on difficult assignments for them in Cuba, Grenada, Haiti, and Central America. So far he had resisted the editors’ repeated requests that he do the same thing again for them in Bosnia. Research grants from a high-minded foundation, another book advance, and freelance bits of this and that meant that he could now work at home, not troubled by daily or even weekly deadlines. He was able and encouraged to produce more articles on any subject, more books on any subject, more media babble on any subject.

  But as he stared at the too-tidy, too-empty desk before him, he knew, as he had known when he crept away two years earlier from the commitment that Natalia had demanded if their sessions were to continue, that it was all becoming a very elaborate and very empty charade. He knew that he had spent all of his adult life observing and recording the misfortunes and weaknesses and strivings of others without ever having to decide what side he was on, or if any side were worth joining, or if there were really any sides at all.

  He was a professional observer who no longer wished to observe. As he observed his own thoughts on that cold grey Montreal afternoon he knew that he did not very much care anymore, if indeed he had ever cared, about journalism, about career, about politics, about corruption, or even, if he really let such thoughts take their dangerous course, about himself.

  *

  He dreams he is a soldier or a commander making a long trek back from a difficult campaign. He walks exhausted across a blasted, smoking landscape with other soldiers and refugees who are also trailing home from the wars. His assignment in this dream is to find his former headquarters and his comrades-in-arms to regroup for a new assignment in peacetime. He finally locates the bomb-pocked old building in a ruined city and enters a cavernous hall of aging desks and office equipment. He sees an old schoolmate, whose name he cannot remember. This man, too, is in a tattered uniform and returned from the wars. Delaney begins taking stock — looking in desk drawers, examining the contents of storage lockers. He sees several uniforms on hangers, and military hats of various sorts on shelves. There is a dunce cap there as well. Then he finds some personal items he left behind years before: mementoes, and some books he had treasured before the wars. He gathers up various items and takes them back to where he is now to resume work. It is a large newsroom. He feels an overwhelming sense of loss, boredom, and emptiness, and dreads the pointless drudgery ahead of him. He renews acquaintances but is repulsed by all the tired, dejected faces. He is resigned, however, to settling back into his old routine because there is nothing else. He has been away for twenty years.

  *

  Natalia was nervous when she arrived the next day, more nervous than Delaney imagined she could have any reason to be. She was dressed in a long, downfilled overcoat in a fashionable purple shade and a yellow scarf and beret. When she took off her outdoor clothes, he saw that she wore the same sort of soft wool outfit in earth tones that she had generally worn when he first knew her, the cut and texture accentuating her dancer’s body and her fine smooth skin. As she had always done, she wore heavy, vaguely Latin American silver jewellery on her ears, neck, wrists, fingers.

  Delaney felt again the alternating current of sexual attraction he had felt for her when she sat across from him in her office during their short-lived attempts, many months before, to delve into the depths of his personality. Those feelings of sexual attraction for a therapist, she assured him in an early session, were common, should he find himself having them. She had been correct.

  Now, he watched her as she wandered a little around his nearly empty, white living room, remarking as everyone did about the view, which on that day was sunny and spectacular. She remarked, as everyone did, on the spareness of the apartment, on its extreme order, its obsessive neatness, on the austere furnishings, on the bare wood floors. She looked briefly at the titles on his bookshelf and then sat down suddenly on his black leather sofa. She declined his offer of coffee, cold drinks, whisky, wine. He knew before she started that she would be telling him a long and involved story.

  “Thank-you for agreeing to see me, Francis,” she said — quiet, tentative, too formal.

  “It’s no problem,” Delaney said, feeling awkward himself.

  “You were surprised to hear from me, I suppose.”

  “You could say that. But I surprised myself by calling you a couple of years ago, so there you go. I’m used to surprises in my line of work.”

  “How are you now?” she asked, professional for a moment.

  “How was I then?” he asked.

  “Well, you would know that better than I.” Delaney paused.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that the patient has made a miraculous recovery,” he said. “Back on the job, pumping out high-quality rubbish for the media just as before.”

  “Miraculous,” she said. “And after so few sessions. I’m flattered. But what did you recover from?”

  Delaney didn’t want to talk further about his glimpse into the abyss, so like all good interviewers, he simply didn’t answer. He let the silence build for a moment. She knew this trick as well, however. They looked at each other intently. Two professional questioners, silently duelling.

  “I shouldn’t really be bringing personal business into a professional relationship,” Natalia said finally.

  “We no longer have a professional relationship,” he reminded her.

  “N
o, of course we don’t,” she said.

  “Look,” Delaney said. “I’m not going to turn you over to the Canadian Psychological Association for giving me a call. How can I help you? You said you wanted to talk about something.”

  “I do,” she said. “It’s a family matter. It’s complicated.”

  He let the silence build again, knowing she would fill it.

  “My uncle died a few weeks ago, about a month ago,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “He was a very old man, and the police say he drowned one night while getting into the bath.”

  Delaney knew from her eyes and from the ever so slight tremor around her lips that this was hard for her. He watched how she handled it.

  “The police say,” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t buy that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I see. And you would like me to help you find out what really happened to your uncle. Is that it? Investigative journalist, knows his way around the police stations, that sort of thing?” Delaney was surprised at how hard that sounded. “Do you think I might get a story out of it, is that it?” he asked.

  This sounded even worse. He didn’t bother trying to correct the impression he must be giving.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Natalia said. “That would depend. But, no, I was wondering if you would perhaps just help me find out what happened.”

  “Why would I do that?” he said, for some reason still wanting to appear cruel and uncaring. “Especially if there is no story in it.”

  “Oh, I think there is a story in it,” she said. “But maybe not the kind you are used to. Not the kind you would use for your magazine. Or, no. Maybe not the kind I would want you to use for your magazine.”

  “So why would I bother?” He wondered whether she would still want such a person to help her now.

  “Because, and I know I shouldn’t mix my professional knowledge of you . . .”

  “Such as it is.”

  “. . . mix my professional knowledge of you with my own needs, but I know that you are experienced in these things, that you’ve travelled a lot, and you’ve been in difficult and complicated situations, and that despite all your defence mechanisms and your attempts this morning to make me think the contrary, I think you still have a curiosity . . .”

  “Curiosity,” Delaney repeated, smiling bitterly.

  “Well, perhaps that’s too silly a word. You have a desire to understand things and I think you are a kind person and, again I am being unprofessional in saying this because of what I learned about you some time ago, I think you may simply decide to help me because the opportunity presents itself and you are that sort of person and you are at that stage of your life.”

  “Oh, please,” he said.“Do reasons for things have to be always complicated by all of that?”

  “Well, I don’t know then,” Natalia said. “I was just hoping you would be able to help me. That’s really all there is to say.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, considering the situation, several situations. For a moment, Delaney thought she might be about to get up and leave. But she continued to sit quietly on his couch, watching him watch her. He observed that the tremor was gone from her mouth, that her hands did not move at all as they lay in her lap. Whatever she was feeling was now not betrayed by her body movements. She is probably thinking the same thing about me, he thought.

  “Why would anyone want to kill your uncle?” Delaney said suddenly.

  “That’s what the police have asked me,” she said.

  “It’s a natural question,” he replied. “The police ask the natural questions. Reporters may stay around to ask other ones.”

  “I don’t know who would want to murder him,” she said. “I have an intuition that someone did. And besides that, some things didn’t seem right at his house on the night I found him.

  “It was you who found him,” Delaney said.

  “Yes.”

  He considered this for a moment, knowing how hard that must have been for her, knowing what a drowned body looks like. He remembered watching a couple of distraught Nicaraguan mothers finding their sons floating in the river near the border with Honduras, in Contra country, when that particular war was in an especially nasty phase. He hoped that Natalia’s uncle was not long dead when she found him.

  “And someone is following me now, I think,” she said suddenly. “Since he died. I don’t think anymore that I’m imagining this. I’m getting to be a little afraid. At first I thought I was just anxious. Grieving and displacing this onto something. But now I really do think someone is following me. Or maybe I need a therapist.” She smiled a little.

  “Look,” Delaney said. “I really hate to stay with the obvious here, but it’s the way to start. Why would anyone want to kill your uncle? Why would anyone be following you?”

  “I just don’t know.”

  “How long have you thought someone was following you?”

  “Since a short time after Stanislaw died. I started to see a couple of men regularly. I thought I started to see them in places I went. On my street, near my office. I don’t think I imagine such things.”

  “Have they approached you?”

  “No.”

  “You think they are connected with your uncle in some way?”

  “Possibly. I really couldn’t say at this point. I don’t know.”

  “Did your uncle ever say people were following him?”

  “No. But he wasn’t the sort of man who would say these things even if they were true. I have no idea, really, what his thoughts were. I’ve realized that since he died.”

  “Well, let’s try this then,” Delaney said. “What’s the most interesting thing about your uncle? What would reporters want to write about if they met him?”

  “So you are going to help me?” Natalia asked.

  “Apparently. For now.”

  *

  She began to tell him things, much as they came into her mind. Delaney listened, as he had listened to so many hundreds of people before, and helped her along with questions and suggestions and requests for clarification. It was an interview, but she did not seem to mind being interviewed. He did not take notes, and she didn’t seem to mind that either.

  The story she told was, in some ways, not extraordinary. Young Polish man, Jesuit trained, then Polish Air Force officer, about twenty-six when the Nazis invaded. Father a professor at the University of Krakow, mother a musician. Both killed. But not until after young Stanislaw had left with the first wave of refugees to Romania. Then into France, then England and distinguished service with the Mazovia Squadron: Polish aces flying Wellingtons out of Scotland. But as always in such stories there was also an angle, the lead for a possible good feature item. Not that a feature lead was necessarily a clue to a possible murder, but Delaney knew that the unusual in a life often led to the even more unusual, often years later. He had untangled too many complicated stories by following up on the smallest of oddities to think otherwise.

  In this case, Natalia provided two elements that an alert reporter would underline in a notebook. Young Flight Lieutenant Stanislaw Janovski had been aide-de-camp, or one of several, to the Polish president after the headlong rush by citizens, soldiers, and senior officials out of Poland to Romania in September 1939. Possibly interesting. And he had been assigned by the Polish government-inexile, before being allowed to throw himself into the air war over Europe, to travel with some Polish officials to Canada to accompany the famous shipment of national treasures that were to be placed there for safekeeping. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of artworks, jewels, ancient armour and weapons, rare books, manuscripts, and tapestries hurriedly loaded into crates as the Nazis attacked and then onto trucks for the escape. All later to go by sea to Canada. Another possibly interesting angle in the old man’s life, Delaney
thought.

  After the war, however, there seemed nothing out of the ordinary in Stanislaw Janovski’s story. Reasonably predictable émigré experience. Never returned to Poland after the Communists took over. Montreal to resettle. A bit of bush pilot work right after the war, and then a stab at running a small bookstore. Then a sort of career at Radio Canada International. Marriage, no children, life in a solid little house in a solid little neighbourhood. Then retirement and an even quieter life. He probably had enough excitement as a young man to last him a while, Delaney thought.

  The apartment was warm now, as the latemorning sun beat through the glass in the windows that were everywhere. Natalia did not seem tired out by her storytelling, nor by the long sit. Sessions like this would be her stock-in-trade.

  “How did he get chosen to be one of the president’s aides-de-camp?” Delaney asked her.

  “I never really thought to ask him. A family connection, I suppose. His father, my grandfather, was a prominent academic. Stanislaw was in the Air Force as an officer. I suppose someone in the president’s entourage was given his name. They needed someone who could fly, I think my uncle said, in case they could get a plane in Romania.”

  “The same would go, I guess, for his being chosen to travel to Canada with the art treasures. His connections.”

  “Probably,” she said.

  Delaney, as a reporter, knew more about the Polish art treasures story than Natalia was able to tell him that morning, except for the points where the story touched her uncle’s. He had heard nothing about it for years, of course, and he was still a boy when it all came to a head in the late 1950s. But it was the sort of story that the older editors at the Montreal Tribune would know and love, and they had talked about it occasionally when Delaney was a young newspaperman. They loved the cloak-anddagger elements in particular.