The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  Treasures being moved out of Ottawa in the dead of night, after the Communists took over in Poland and demanded that Canada send them back. Hiding places in convents and monasteries. Secret passwords. Disputes among custodians. Then the fiercely anti-Communist premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, sending his provincial police force to help agents of the government-in-exile hide the treasures somewhere else in the province. And Duplessis refusing for years to send them back. The Warsaw regime outraged and the Canadian government no longer willing, or no longer able, to step in against Quebec.

  Delaney himself had later been in the thick of Quebec political reporting in the seventies and eighties, and had had to learn all too much about the Duplessis era and the battles for constitutional turf that the man they called “le chef ” had waged with the federal government. It would be natural for Duplessis to seize on the art treasures issue to make a stand against Ottawa when the federal government formally recognized the new Polish government after the war, and to vent his spleen at the Communists at the same time. Some of the details were hazy in Delaney’s mind, but he knew the outlines and they still intrigued him.

  “Did your uncle talk a lot about the art treasures story to you? Was he involved in the negotiations at the end to send them back?” Delaney asked.

  “He would sometimes mention bits of that business, but never really in detail,” Natalia said. “I was just a baby when the things were eventually sent back, in 1959, or 1960, I think it was. And later I suppose I didn’t take enough of an interest. They were just war stories to me, really.”

  “But war stories that had a chapter in Quebec with your uncle as a player,” Delaney said.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was a man who would say a little bit once in a while about something like that, and then smile and stop, as if to tease people or maybe because he didn’t want to say more. Maybe both. He would always hint that he knew a lot about the government-in-exile and the secret diplomatic things they did in London during the war, and the secrets he was entrusted with in Romania, and I guess in coming here too with the treasures. But I suppose my father had heard all this too many times and probably thought Stanislaw was just exaggerating. And I was just a child. My uncle liked to tickle me and say, ‘Ah, Natalia, there are secrets within secrets. Secrets within secrets.’ But that’s the sort of nonsense things old uncles and grandfathers say to children.”

  “I don’t know,” Delaney said. “Would your parents remember more about this?”

  “They’re both dead. For many years now.”

  “I see.”

  Delaney thought he had said he was sorry enough for one morning so he went straight to the next question.

  “Did he keep in touch with any of the art treasures people?”

  “Which people do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, the people who came over here with them. Or the ones who argued about where they should go. Or the London Poles. Anyone really. Did he want to see the treasures go back or stay here?”

  “I think he thought they should stay. He had fought in the war and he didn’t think they should be just handed over to the Communists afterward.”

  “Just like Duplessis,” Delaney said.

  “I suppose,” Natalia said. “Stanislaw was close to Jozef Kozlowski, I remember. And Kozlowski was the man who argued with the other official custodian I mentioned to you, this Piotr Zdunek, about whether the treasures should be sent back to Poland. Kozlowski didn’t want them to go back. I remember my uncle telling us that. But Kozlowski has been dead for a very long time now, since not long after I was born if I remember.”

  “Was he a friend of your uncle, as well as someone he had to work with on this during the war?”

  “I don’t really know. I suppose so, yes. He was much older than Stanislaw, of course. But they were friends. My uncle’s closest friend was not in Montreal in those days. He was in Paris. Zbigniew Tomaszewski. That was his closest friend. Zbigniew was Stanislaw’s navigator on the bombers. But he settled in Paris after the war and they didn’t see each other much. They wrote to each other often, for many years.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did your uncle have a lot of friends at Radio Canada International?”

  “Not really,” Natalia said. “I think they were just acquaintances, Polish work acquaintances. I think he didn’t like many of them but he would have drinks with them and they would argue about politics. For fun, though, I think. But they were not really his close friends.”

  “And you say your uncle was worried toward the end,” Delaney said. “Troubled about something.”

  “Yes. It seemed so. I thought he was worried about how things were going in Poland, mainly, with all the changes of government in the last few years, and the splits and the infighting and the old Solidarity people turning on Walesa after he became president. I thought he was just fretting about what would happen in the elections this year. Things like that.”

  “Did he keep in touch with people in Poland or in London?”

  “I don’t really know. Possibly.”

  “But he watched things closely over there.”

  “He was a newsman, a sort of newsman. A radio announcer. And even Poles who never went back after the war never forgot they were Polish.”

  “You’re sure they never went back? Not even after Walesa became president in 1990? A lot of the old émigrés and government-in-exile people in London went back at that point, apparently. To hand over the official insignia they’d been holding, I think it was. Or just to see Walesa sworn in.”

  “No, he didn’t go,” Natalia said. “I know it infuriated him when some of the younger ones at Radio Canada International used to mock him and say he and the old ones were too scared to go over when Solidarity was taking on the government. But he never went. He said he had done enough in the war.”

  Delaney said nothing for a moment. Natalia was again the one who eventually broke the silence.

  “You think it might have something to do with the war?” she asked.

  “I’m not even sure yet there’s anything here at all, whether to do with the war or not. But if there is something, it’s helpful to know at what points your uncle’s life was out of the ordinary. If there is something going on.”

  “Something is going on, Francis,” Natalia said. “Even if you don’t accept that he was killed, there is someone watching me, I’m almost sure of that.”

  “Almost sure,” Delaney said.

  “There is someone following me,” she said.

  “Did they follow you here?”

  “I think so. Yes. That’s one thing. I’ve told you about the address book.That’s gone. And there’s the priest.”

  “Tell me again about the priest,” Delaney said. “More details.”

  “My uncle was a Catholic, a good one, as I’ve said. Maybe a little bit of a critical one sometimes, but a good Catholic. When he first came here he lived in Lachine and his priest there was this Father Bernard I’ve told you about. He became almost like a friend to my uncle. I’m not sure why. So much so that Stanislaw apparently stopped going to him for confession, or so my mother told me when I was a girl. That was the family story in any case. My uncle and aunt moved in closer to the city around then anyway, and started going to the Catholic church in Westmount, but I know that my uncle would still see Father Bernard as a friend, eventually as a very old and close friend.”

  “And tell me again why this is a problem.”

  “Because he was not at the funeral,” Natalia said. “Father Bernard was not at the funeral and he would most certainly have wanted to be there. I called the church in Lachine after Stanislaw died, to tell him, and they said he was ill and couldn’t come, and then after the funeral I still couldn’t reach him and I can’t reach him now. It’s impossible he would not have come to the funeral or at least ca
ll me now to ask what happened, to pay his respects. I left the messages with his people. It’s a big church, with a convent and a school and a lot of priests and nuns and brothers. This is another strange thing that’s happening.”

  “Could this Father Bernard really be as close as you say to your uncle?”

  “Yes. I think so. Very close.”

  “A priest.”

  “Why can’t someone have a priest for a friend, Francis?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know many people who do, I suppose,” he said.

  Delaney felt a familiar stirring of interest beginning to grow in him now. He had felt it from early in this long conversation. He knew the signs and knew that he would want to know more about this story than Natalia had told him. He would want to know if her uncle had indeed been killed, whether someone was following her, and more about this Father Bernard. He knew that he would want to know more, but in this case he did not yet understand why. That, too, intrigued him.

  *

  He went down to the lobby of the building with her, to see for himself if someone was following her around the city as she suspected. They had talked for a very long time and then they came to a point at which it was clear to both of them that they should stop. Delaney wanted to consider what she had told him and to make absolutely sure that he wanted to get involved. But the answer to the question was already reasonably clear in his mind, if he were honest about it.

  They rode the elevator looking silently up at the numbers changing over the doors. The lobby was not busy at that time on a weekday. It was overdecorated, with smoked mirrors and chandeliers, and a doorman named George in a vaguely military uniform. George opened the door for them onto University Street and a cold blast of air rushed in.

  “You’ll need more than a sweater if you’re going out today, Mr. Delaney,” he said. George was the eyes and ears of the building, but absolutely discreet if matters involved people he liked.

  “We’re just going to get a taxi for my guest here, George,” Delaney said. “Back in a second.”

  They stood for a moment on the windy sidewalk, looking around them. Cars rushed by, and a couple of Volkswagen Jetta taxis idled at the curb. The Haitian drivers looked expectantly through the watery glass, hoping for a fare.

  “See anyone familiar?” Delaney asked.

  “No. I don’t,” Natalia said. “I’m sorry. I don’t see anyone now.”

  “OK. I’ll get you a cab.”

  He motioned to the first Jetta and the driver leaned over the back seat to open the rear passenger door.

  “You better get in before this guy freezes to death,” Delaney said.

  “What have you . . .” she stopped before finishing the obvious question.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “Give me a little while.”

  “You know, Francis, even I realize that not all problems are solved by therapy and dreams,” she said. “Sometimes even a good Jungian thinks action in the world is required.”

  “Give me a little while,” he said again.

  Natalia climbed into the back seat of the taxi and told the driver in French her address on the Plateau Mount Royal.

  “Better lock up when you get home,” Delaney said. “Call me if there’s a problem.”

  “You sound like a doctor,” she said. “Or a policeman.”

  She looked resigned to something as she sat back in the seat. Or perhaps it was a trace of fear he saw in her face. He watched the taxi roar off up University Street, trailing steam.

  It’s been a long time since I put a woman into a cab down here, Delaney thought. And the doorman will think so too. Chilled by the icy wind, he turned back into the building.

  “Nice-looking woman,” George said. He had thick ginger eyelashes like the spines of tiny sea animals, and these flicked higher as his eyes widened and he gave Delaney his toothiest grin. “Business, George,” Delaney said.

  “Not your ex-wife anyhow, eh?” George said. George knew the story of every tenant’s life by the people who came in and out to see them, and by those who suddenly did not. Delaney had lived in the building for a long time.

  God damn these doormen, Delaney thought. “You see anybody strange around here when we were upstairs, George?” he said.

  “Couple of foreign guys came in just after that lady, in fact,” George said. “They looked at the bell panel for a long time, but when I asked them who they were looking for they said they had the wrong building.”

  “They ask you where she went?”

  “Nope. Not sure they were looking for her anyway. Went back out, that was it.”

  “In a car?”

  “Nope. Walking.”

  “How did you know they were foreign?”

  “They sure didn’t sound like you and me.” George was a big grinner, and he grinned again. A sea creature descended briefly over one eye as he winked. “They weren’t Anglos like ourselves, an endangered species around here these days, and they sure as hell weren’t Quebecois, so what does that leave us?”

  “What nationality?”

  “Christ knows. Europe somewhere, probably. You know this neighbourhood. Could be from anywhere.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “Working on a story?”

  “I’m always working on a story, George. You know that. Why should today be any different?”

  After Natalia had left, Delaney found it hard to do much except sit and ponder what he had been told that morning. Her perfume had left a new scent in his apartment and he looked for a long time at the empty couch where she had sat and talked for so long. He moved over to his desk and looked at the notebooks and the pens and the cassette tapes and the laptop computer that lay there. The tools of his trade, lately untouched.

  Why would I bother with this? he thought. There is no story in this for me and if there is she won’t want me to run it anyway. So why would I bother?

  But Delaney already sensed that in this case getting a story would perhaps not matter very much. And perhaps he knew already that in the end this was precisely why he would bother.

  Chapter 4

  They drove out to Lachine in Delaney’s car. Natalia had said she didn’t drive in winter and that her car was covered in a season’s worth of snow in the alley behind her apartment. Delaney didn’t drive his gracefully aging Mercedes much either, especially in winter, but he parked it in the underground garage in his building, it would be clear of snow and he knew it would start, so he agreed to pick her up on Esplanade Street.

  She was waiting at the top of the old staircase that led to her door on the second floor, and she was dressed in the same purple overcoat she had worn to his place two days earlier. She moved down right away when he pulled up, as if she had known his car. When she got inside she gave him a very brief smile and didn’t seem to want to talk much, so Delaney pulled off immediately and did not try to fill the silence.

  They hadn’t talked since the night of their first meeting. Delaney had surprised himself by phoning her that night, ostensibly to tell her he would help her make some inquiries. Only for a while, he heard himself insisting. He was, he told her, very busy with other projects, with his book. But he had also want ed to make sure she was all right, though he didn’t tell her that. Something about her story had touched an alarm somewhere inside him and he wanted to know she was safely back in her place. They had ended up talking again for a long time on the phone about the circumstances of Stanislaw’s death and about what was to be done first. It seemed to both of them that the natural place to start was Lachine, with the priest who had been Stanislaw’s friend. A priest who didn’t go to funerals.

  Delaney looked often in his rear-view mirror to see if anyone appeared to be following them, but if someone was, he wasn’t able to tell. It was a brilliant winter day, unusual
ly warm, and the sun had melted all the snow on the roads. The glistening black asphalt contrasted starkly with the piles of wet, white snow that still covered everything else. The heavy snow tires on the car hummed loudly on the wet road surface. For Montrealers this was one of the sounds of spring, but it was not yet spring. Delaney glanced over at Natalia and saw she was looking intently into the mirror on the passenger side. When she caught him looking at her as they stopped at a traffic light, she smiled somewhat guiltily. Delaney smiled back, but didn’t bother trying to reassure her that he thought no one was behind them.

  He was feeling intensely pleased that morning. He had not realized just how much he was looking for a reason not to continue the charade of his next book, not to sit all day and fail to achieve anything at his desk, not to have to write anything. He felt an unmistakable sense of liberation at not having to do anything at all except what he wished to do. That meant not having to look at things like a journalist today — although that was why Natalia had asked for his help — and not, unless he wished to do so, writing or reporting anything about what they might discover.

  It had been a long time since he had been in that position. It was like the infrequent times when he and his first wife had taken a vacation together and he quite deliberately failed to bring along a camera or a notebook so that for a short time he could just look at things and not record or interpret them for anyone. Today he was also enjoying the feeling, less intense and slightly more difficult to identify, of simply having a woman beside him in his elegant old car. He drove slowly: motoring, basking in the proximity of this pensive, attractive being.

  He took the long route out to Lachine. On the highway, the trip from the inner city to the old industrial suburb would have been no more than fifteen minutes. His route, through Westmount, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, and Montreal West would take almost twice that long. It took him past the corner where Stanislaw had gotten off the bus the day he died.

  “My uncle lived just up there,” Natalia said without apparent emotion, pointing up Claremont Street north of Sherbrooke. “Just off that street there.”