“I have no plan, John.”
“Just over here to visit a family friend, are we? A pleasure trip?”
“Yeah. Like you, I would imagine. As CSIS does not indulge in intelligence-gathering operations overseas.”
“We are here simply to help our French colleagues. At their invitation, and so on and so forth.”
“I see.”
Delaney could see Hilferty was in a bit of a sour mood and would not stand for idle banter much longer.
“Look Francis, this thing is getting a bit more delicate than we thought. We don’t want to fuck up on this one.”
“What have you got?”
“What have you got?”
“You’re the civil servant, John. So serve.”
“Well, it looks like maybe UOP. Polish State Security.”
“We knew that, I thought.”
“Yeah, well the signals traffic is a bit unclear on this one, Francis. Their embassy in Ottawa is making a lot of weird sounds. We’re not sure exactly who’s who, who’s working for whom anymore.”
“You better hope an investigative reporter doesn’t get wind of the Communications Security Establishment guys listening in on supposedly friendly embassies again, my friend,” Delaney said.
He had often wanted to do up a long article about what exactly went on lately inside that fourstory CSE building in an Ottawa suburb, but had never gotten round to it. The Canadians had for years, ever since the war, dined out among friendly spy agencies on their signals-intelligence prowess. They had been able to trade important information with the Americans and the British for years thanks to their CSE intercepts and thereby avoid having to make the hard decision to set up a foreign intelligence capability of their own. But Delaney knew that couldn’t last much longer. The world was changing too fast.
Hilferty ignored Delaney’s reporter games. “My guys are getting a little edgy about the possibility of some of Walesa’s people snuffing old pensioners on Canadian soil,” he said. “Is it Walesa’s people?” Delaney said.
“Can’t be sure. He probably doesn’t even know anymore, the dumb fuck. But if it is his people, and it possibly is, my people want to know.”
“Communists, maybe? Maybe not Walesa’s guys at all.”
“What would they want with an old guy in Montreal?” Hilferty said.
“What would Walesa’s people want with him?” Delaney asked.
“Fucked if I know.”
“Was he murdered?”
“Yeah,” Hilferty said. “Looks like it now.”
“By Poles? You sure?”
“Yeah. Looks like it. Some faction or other.” Hilferty paused. “Of course, we’re way off the record here, as you hacks like to say.”
Delaney was still reluctant to ask about the dead priest in Lachine, in case CSIS was by some incredible inefficiency or oversight still unaware of that death. But he had to think that one was murder too, and murder by the same people.
“What about Borowski?” Delaney asked.
“Nah,” Hilferty said. “Not involved. Doesn’t wash anymore. He looks clean as a whistle. But it looks like he may have another try at the presidency in November, for what that’s worth. He’s trying to drum up nomination signatures on the fucking Internet from Toronto as we speak. Or so I’m told.”
They drank in silence for a while. Then Hilferty said: “Look Francis. We don’t want to lose control of this thing, OK? Maybe it’s not really the place for an amateur anymore. Never was, probably. But who would have figured.”
“This morning I’m a Maple Leaf spook. Tonight I’m an amateur.”
“Yeah well, I’ve been on the phone to Ottawa this afternoon. We don’t want a fuck-up is all I’m saying. My people get nervous. So watch your ass and don’t get us all into trouble at home. Or over here. Get my drift?”
Hilferty pushed a small Boutiques de l’Aéroport de Paris duty-free bag over Delaney’s way.Through the clear plastic Delaney could see what looked like a box for a small appliance.
“Travel iron,” Hilferty said, smiling at his wit. “Presuming you didn’t carry yours over on the plane with you.”
Delaney had thought very briefly in Montreal of packing the CSIS-issue Browning in his checked bags but had decided it was not worth the risk. He could not see himself using it in France, or anywhere else for that matter. Needing it maybe, but not using it.
“Another gun. From the gunless Canadian spy service,” Delaney said. “You seem to have a healthy supply.”
“Some of us, that way inclined,” Hilferty said. “Don’t get caught with it over here. We don’t know you over here.”
“Check.”
“Don’t use it. Just wave it at someone if you get into a jam and get into a cab. Comprenez?”
“Check.”
“You’re a pain in the ass tonight, Delaney, you know that?” Hilferty said. He pushed the bar tab over, before getting up to go. “Here. Your round.”
Delaney knocked lightly on Natalia’s door when he got back to the fifteenth floor. He chose the hall door this time, not the one that separated their rooms. There was light shining through the peephole.
She let him in and went straight back over to the desk where she’d been writing in what looked like a ledger. She was in the Méridien bathrobe. It was very white and far too large. She did not ask him about his duty-free bag.
“You all right?” he said. The room smelled like bath oils and creams.
She finished what she was writing and closed the book before turning to him. In felt-tip pen across the leather cover was written “Commonplace.”
“I’m doing up my journal,” she said.
“Your diary?”
“More than that. It’s a dream book and a place to record interior dialogues and some other things. It’s called Intensive Journal Therapy. Or it is when it’s used in therapy.”
“Is this your therapy?”
“No. Not really. For me, it’s just my Commonplace book. I’ve had one for years.”
“Don’t let it fall into the wrong hands,” Delaney said. “Now that it contains state secrets.”
“None of those so far.”
They looked quietly at each other for a moment in the still room and then said their good-nights. Now was still not the time.
Delaney fell asleep thinking, ever so slightly amused, of Natalia at her secret work next door, carefully recording dreams and interior dialogues and possibly some other things in a language he did not yet understand.
They indulged in a little cloak-and-dagger activity the next morning. Delaney knew it would infuriate Hilferty and would likely bring whatever relationship they had to a head, if not to an end, but he didn’t want to lead the Canadians or the Poles or anyone else to Zbigniew if they didn’t already know where he lived.
The concierge beamed in Pavlovian pleasure when he saw Delaney approaching him in the lobby. Could he possibly arrange, Delaney asked him, for a Taxi Bleu to be waiting out in the laneway behind the hotel in a few minutes’ time? A little matter of a young lady, a family matter. One must be très, très discret in hotels these days, n’est-ce pas?
The concierge protested only briefly before putting the first of this day’s crop of banknotes into his waistcoat.
“A pourboire is really not necessary for this service, monsieur,” he said.
Delaney then went out on the street to the line of cabs waiting at the curbside. It was busy on the streets now, the beginning of a weekday in Paris, and a wan sunlight was shining on the bustle. He leaned over into one of the Peugeots and asked various inane tourist questions in English before straightening up and looking ostentatiously at his watch.Then he went back in to call Natalia from the house phone.
“The cabbie said it was about a two-minute drive from here,” he said. “There are a lot of them out front. You ready?
”
“I’m ready,” Natalia said, as arranged. “I’ll meet you out front.”
Delaney went back up to the fifteenth floor to pick up the battered old equipment bag that had been with him on so many assignments. It had carried many things over the years but never a Browning semi-automatic pistol. He wrapped the gun in a hotel facecloth and placed it under his reporter’s notebook. Tools of the trade.
They got off the elevator not on the main floor but at the mezzanine level and walked quickly down a flight of service stairs into the banquet kitchen. Some of the chefs and underlings looked annoyed at the intrusion but Delaney and Natalia walked on through in the French way: never apologize, never explain. Out the delivery entrance at the back of the hotel and into a waiting Volvo station wagon. The driver had been smoking heavily and the car stank of Gauloises. He threw away his cigarette when they got in and told them that rue Julien Lacroix could be as much as half an hour away, depending on traffic, depending on where les boutillages might be.
“Go,” Delaney said.
No one seemed to be behind them. A natural, Delaney thought, as he settled in for the ride.
Zbigniew Tomaszewski lived in a somewhat disreputable building off rue de Belleville. It was an area of Paris Delaney didn’t know well. The side of the building had a giant mural of a black face smoking acigarette in a pair of ruby-red lips. The street was so narrow that the taxi blocked traffic as they paid the fare. The sound of the car horns echoed off old brick walls and windows. Some African and Arab kids were noisily playing soccer in the small square under the giant smoker’s gaze. They did not ease up their game even as Delaney and Natalia walked through it.
Natalia had the exterior security code for the building. The heavy door gave a small electric click after she punched the code into a small keypad outside, and the lock opened for them.The hallway was damp, dark, and not terribly clean. Bright green garbage bins were haphazardly pushed into a small alcove to their left. There didn’t seem to be a concierge.They were a dying breed in the new Paris. But if there was still to be a concierge this would be the neighbourhood for it. She would be Portuguese, more than likely, with a tiny cluttered apartment at the back of the building and canaries in a cage.
The ground floor apartment behind Zbigniew’s battered door, however, was a revelation. It was gigantic, by Paris standards, with magnificent gigantic furniture and it was blessed with its own garden courtyard. The apartment walls formed two sides of the garden, and the stone back wall and high fence of a small church the other two. The old man led them out there immediately and stood proudly while they admired the flowers and trees. He explained to them that he had bought this oasis many years ago before prices went skyward even in this unfashionable neighbourhood. It was something no retired lithographer could ever hope to afford these days, he told them, and he himself could barely keep up with the building charges and taxes anymore.
Zbigniew was well past seventy, with an intensely white thatch of thick hair and equally thick thatched eyebrows. He walked with a slight limp and his arms were thin, their skin loosening, but he looked reasonably robust for a man of his age. His face was well tanned, probably from hours spent out in the garden. Today Zbigniew was wearing an old tweed jacket, cravat, flannels, and a pair of deepblue velvet slippers with gold brocade. A pair of half-frame glasses hung on his chest from a gold chain. He offered them coffee.
“To think, Natalia, that we have never met but once before,” he said as he prepared espresso cups. He spoke English better than Delaney had expected. “You were one of those backpacks, backpackers, then.”
“Yes. But I’m no longer a backpacker of nineteen, I’m afraid.”
“Still lovely, however.”
“Thank-you.”
“And Mr. Delaney, you are a not a backpacker anymore either, I would assume.”
“No. I’m a writer,” Delaney said.
He did not wish to set off alarms with the word journalist. Natalia did that for him “A journalist,” she said.
Zbigniew looked at her for some sign as to why she would bring a journalist along with her.
“Francis is my friend,” she said. “He’s been a help to me in many ways since Stanislaw died.”
“But some stories are not to be written, Mr. Delaney. Not all stories are for the press, would you not agree?” Zbigniew said.
“Of course,” Delaney said. “I’m not working today.”
“But tomorrow perhaps.”
“I’m Natalia’s friend.”
“I see,” Zbigniew said. “A friend and a journalist. An unusual combination.”
Delaney said nothing. He took his cup of excellent espresso and looked calmly at them both. I will be asked to exit shortly, he thought.
They drank coffee and they chatted about the apartment and the neighbourhood and about the changes in Paris since the war. Stanislaw’s name was not raised again. Eventually, Zbigniew turned to Delaney; very formal, very Old World.
“I wonder, Mr. Delaney, if now, after our little coffees, you would mind if I had some time with my friend’s niece alone,” he said.
Zbigniew did not consult Natalia about this. He would not have been in the habit of asking younger people permission for what he wanted to do.
“Please do not be offended,” Zbigniew said, “but there are some family matters that bring Natalia here to me as well. In addition to my abilities as a raconteur.”
It would have been impossible not to agree. Delaney had not anticipated this when he and Natalia were making their plan. He had expected, foolishly, as he now realized, that this old Polish gentleman would simply open up to them both, sharing quite possibly dark secrets of various sorts without hesitation, without giving a thought to the presence of a stranger, and a journalist at that. Delaney got to his feet. Natalia looked flustered but made no attempt to intervene on his behalf. It would be difficult to make any sort of new plan with her in this situation or to warn her to be careful, to be discreet, to look behind her as she left. Delaney felt annoyed, worried, and cornered. Not in control.
“I’ll meet you back at the hotel, Francis,” Natalia said.
“I could come back to meet you here,” he said, looking at Zbigniew.
“It is difficult to say how long we might be,” the old man said. “I might even prepare Natalia some lunch. We have not seen each other for so many years.”
“All right,” Delaney said. “Thank-you for the coffee.”
“A pleasure,” Zbigniew said. “Enjoy your day.” He added, as he smoothed one of his unruly eyebrows with the back of an index finger: “What does a journalist do in Paris when he is not working, Mr. Delaney?”
It was a question Delaney would have at one time found difficult to answer.
Chapter 9
Natalia could see immediately why her uncle had loved his old comrade so much. After Delaney left, she and Zbigniew cried together a little in the silent old apartment about Stanislaw and about the way he had died, alone. They had told each other stories in Polish about Stanislaw and the family and the past, and had cried at some of them until they began to laugh at some of them, and suddenly it was a little easier.
Then Natalia told Zbigniew more about what the police in Montreal had said and about what Delaney had said and about what they now thought might be behind Stanislaw’s murder. For she called it murder, and Zbigniew made no attempt to debate this with her.
“He told me there were things he wanted to talk about just before he died,” Natalia said finally. “He said there were things that I should know.” She felt the tears coming again. “But he said this on my answering machine, Zbigniew, a foolish, foolish machine, on a night when I was not there for him to talk to.”
“There are indeed some things you should know, Natalia,” Zbigniew said. “Very definitely. Now that Stanislaw is gone. And I think he would want me to tell them to you. It is good y
ou have made the effort to come here.”
As he spoke, he got up to go to a massive mahogany sideboard that sat in the living room. He reached inside and pulled out a leather briefcase stuffed with what looked like letters and papers.The briefcase was so full it could not be closed and properly fastened. Zbigniew brought this over to where they sat.
“I have letters here from your uncle from twenty, thirty, forty years ago, my dear Natalia,” he said. “Letters, newspaper cuttings, and other papers he sent to me over the years. And I also know things that were best not written down. I will tell you what I know, and then you and I will decide together what is to be done. And who else should be allowed to know.”
Natalia felt a strong urge to check that the door to the apartment was locked, to draw the curtains, to indulge in what Francis liked to call “cloak-anddagger stuff.” She wished he had stayed to help her sort out what she would now discover — to take notes in his reporter’s notebook. She looked toward the door.
“This can be done safely here, I think, Natalia,” Zbigniew said quietly. “There is nothing to fear in here.”
“All right,” she said. She thought, however: This time my fear is not irrational.
Zbigniew began pulling papers and letters from his briefcase as he talked. The larger bundles of envelopes were carefully secured with string or elastic bands. Some had notes in tiny Polish script attached.
“I am the archivist, it would appear, Natalia,” he said with a small smile. “The keeper of a secret history.”
“So it seems.”
“You are lucky to have been born in Canada,” he said. “And after the war. Old men like me and Stanislaw, we are like all the Poles of our generation. We lived with the entire burden of our history on our shoulders. Or so we thought.”
He seemed to have organized the papers to his satisfaction.
“You young ones can never imagine, no matter how much you read about it or hear about it from old men like me, just what it was like to have been in Warsaw or somewhere else in Poland in the First World War and, then, after that one, the second war,” he said. “It is unimaginable for young ones like you. The Nazis cannot be described. They simply cannot be adequately described.”
The Mazovia Legacy Page 14