The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  Carefully wrapped sandwiches in an insulated bag. A Thermos of coffee, still only very slightly warm. Chocolate. A high-tech aluminized emergency blanket. Flashlight. A bottle of Bushmills whiskey. Six freezing cans of Molson’s Export Ale. A box of shotgun shells. A Gideon Bible.

  “He’s lovely,” Natalia said, laughing in particular at the Bible. “This is a nice touch.”

  Inside the Bible a sticker said: “Propriété de Motel Reine de la Rivière, Sept-Îsles, Québec.”

  “He is really lovely,” she said.

  “A madman,” Delaney said.

  The car started easily, despite being parked overnight in winter-windswept Quebec farmland. The gas tank was full. They sat for a moment while the engine warmed and the defroster cleared the glass.

  “So,” Delaney said. “Do I get to know where we’re going now? You trust me enough?”

  “Yes,” Natalia said. She reached over and pulled his head down to her with a leather-gloved hand. Her lips as she kissed him were still cool from the snowmobile ride.

  “Where?”

  “Saint-Sauveur.”

  They ate some of O’Keefe’s excellent sandwiches as they drove toward the Laurentian hills north of Montreal, and they ate some of his chocolate. But even if they had stayed where the car had been parked they could not have heard any sounds coming from the O’Keefe family farm. Even if they had still been on their snowmobile, hurtling toward where the car had been parked, they could not have heard the sounds — the loud and urgent sounds. They would have had to be much closer, much quieter, to hear.

  They were well away from it when the noises came, many kilometres away. So they could not hear the sounds of large cars pulling slowly up the driveway to the O’Keefe farmhouse in the failing afternoon light, tires crunching on the mixture of ice and gravel that extended a long way from the main road. Quiet again, for a time. Then the crackle of a radio, possibly official.The sound of car doors closing, and voices, as men climb out. Boots on gravel and ice, then boots on wooden steps and verandah. O’Keefe’s dogs barking, barking, barking.

  Shouted exchanges, a door slamming, silence. For a time. Then, wood splintering, gunfire, shouting, barking, gunfire. Silence again.Then urgent conversations, the sound of urgent boot-clad feet running, shouted commands, and a child crying, crying.

  All of which Delaney and Natalia, as they drove, could not hear, could not have been expected to hear.

  Chapter 16

  They were tired. It was late in the day after a long flight in from Europe and they realized it made no sense to continue on any farther that night.The church in Saint-Sauveur where they were heading would soon be closed up tightly against the Laurentian cold; the priest, or priests, they would have to see would be easier to deal with in the light of day. So they pulled off the Laurentian Autoroute just north of the Montreal island, in Laval.

  It was the same suburb where Delaney had practised his pistol shooting, so long ago now it seemed. Parts of Laval were filled with new brick suburban homes, parts were still light industrial, and parts, such as where they now stopped, were given over to shopping malls and stark, cheaply built motels. For some reason known only to cultural historians, when the Quebecois built motels in the seventies and eighties, they too often insisted on including bars and restaurants of the most garish kind. The bars, more often than not, also offered intensely vulgar strip shows avec nonstop danseuses nues.Thin girls, recently in from small-town Quebec, took off their cheap clothes on grimy, too-small stages and wiggled and shook for the men hiding for an evening from chills of various kinds.

  It was into one of these motels that Delaney pulled the Mercedes just as it was getting dark. The giant neon sign, with the gyrating dancer in a hula skirt, threw yellow and blood-red light on the windshield and on the wet slush of the parking lot. Trucks and rundown cars filled most of the spaces.

  The thump of overamplified disco music reverberated from the bar.

  Delaney reasoned that Hilferty and Company, and the local police if they had now been called into this, would hardly be looking for them in a place like this. He also liked the fact that the parking lot was around behind the motel, away from the main road. They would likely be undisturbed here, except for the music and whatever alcohol-induced fist fights might eventuate among the regulars. Delaney resisted the temptation to comment to Natalia how unlike Como their next hotel room was going to be. Natalia said nothing at all.

  They declined the offer from an anorexic desk clerk of a prix très spéciale on continuous pornographic movies via satellite in their room and she seemed perturbed at their indifference to her offer of a round bed at no extra charge. Their room, when they eventually got to it, was cold, but surprisingly clean, clinical, and acceptable. Delaney turned the heat on as high as it would go, and they stood shivering in their coats as they waited for the room to warm.

  “Don’t say I never take you anywhere,” Delaney said.

  The room warmed nicely and they could not hear the noise from the bar. The bed was comfortable, and with only the dimmest of lights on they could have been anywhere. Delaney had always liked that feeling when he was in a hotel room with a woman. It did not come often, either because of the place, or because of the woman, or both. He had that feeling tonight, however, and allowed himself to enjoy it. He was allowing himself to enjoy this woman’s presence more than he would have ever, in another incarnation of himself, thought wise.

  He considered the implications of this as he lay beside her.They had talked for a long time after they made love, a couple of lovers in their bed in the middle of the world. They could have been any lovers, anywhere, planning together in a warm bed in the middle of the world. But they were not able to plan very far ahead. It was wise not to jump very far ahead. Delaney knew that there was too much to be done before they could hope to get to that.

  The church where they were headed was SaintSauveur’s main one. Again, like most Catholic churches in Quebec, it was enormous, grey, stone, and very old. Delaney knew the church, and he knew Saint-Sauveur well. It was a small skiing town — or had been originally — about another hour’s drive north from where they were. It had been overdeveloped in recent years, however, and the church was now on a street usually jammed with traffic and surrounded by restaurants, bars, gift shops, and ski shops. Delaney hoped the congestion might help them if things got complicated.

  Natalia’s uncle had been married there, she said. In 1951. It had been easy for his friend Zbigniew, and for Natalia too, when she sat with Zbigniew that afternoon in Paris before he was murdered, to guess from Stanislaw’s letters that this was the church where they must now go. This is where Stanislaw and his co-conspirator from Maurice Duplessis’s staff had gone in 1959 when they had something they wanted to hide. A picture of Stanislaw and his wife and their small wedding party in front of that church had sat for many years on the mantelpiece of the house in Westmount where he had died, Natalia said. She had remembered that photo well, and the glimpse of the church it had provided. What Delaney and Natalia were to do when they got there, thirty-six years after the fact, and whom they would have to see, whom they could trust — this was more complicated.

  Natalia seemed confident it would all become clear when they got there. Delaney was not so sure.

  “We have the password, after all,” she said.

  “We don’t know who to try it out with. How do we know there’s even anyone left there who will remember it?” Delaney asked.

  “We don’t. But I have an intuition it will be easier than you think.”

  “The intuitive personality type is at work again.”

  “You should get more in touch with your intuitive side, Francis. I have been telling you that.”

  “My intuition is that when things can go wrong, they usually do go wrong.”

  “You are in dire need of more therapy.”

  “I’m in need of more i
nformation. Like a password.”

  Natalia paused.

  “It really bothers you that I have not given you the password yet, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Not for the reasons you think.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because on something like this it would be better for someone else to have it too.”

  “In case something goes wrong.”

  “Something like that.”

  “In case I get hurt.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why? What would you do with the password if I weren’t around?”

  “Finish it.”

  “How?”

  I don’t know. I’d have to use my intuition,” Delaney said.

  “Mazovia for Poland,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Mazovia for Poland. The password. OK?”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes. It’s what my uncle and his friend and all the other young flyers used for a password in Scotland during the war. In the Mazovia Squadron.”

  “You sure that’s it?”

  “Zbigniew was sure.”

  Natalia was looking at him intently now.

  Delaney knew that despite all her best efforts there was still a lingering doubt, an intuition, that perhaps he was not what he seemed to be. She was wondering, clearly, if giving him this new information might somehow change things, be a catalyst that would turn him back into what he was before they had met or what he might subsequently have become. But then he saw the brief cloud pass, as she put the thought away somewhere deep.

  “Do you expect me to get dressed quickly now and race out into the night to share this with my spy pals somehow?” he asked, unnecessarily cruel, unwilling to leave her to her private fears. “Leave you here, race up to the church, and steal something away from you?”

  “No.” She was embarrassed. “No.”

  “I’m with you on this, Natalia. I am not a spy.”

  “I’m not either, Francis. I don’t want to be.” He had known this from the beginning. It didn’t need to be said.

  *

  Father Daniel Emile Hippolyte Lessard had almost given up hope that someone would come to relieve him of his burden. Indeed, Father Daniel Emile Hippolyte Lessard, priest all these many years of L’Eglise de L’Annonciation in Saint-Sauveur, Québec, could be forgiven if from time to time he forgot entirely about his secret and his burden. There had been months, if not years, over the past three-and-a-half decades when his thoughts had not turned at all to those secret arrangements from so long ago.

  He was able for months at a time to go on about the increasingly complicated and difficult business of being a good priest in a Laurentian church with parishioners, if they came at all anymore, who were more interested in skiing and real estate and shiny four-wheel-drive cars than they were with their souls and confession and the life after death. The few who came any more often than Christmas and Easter to his great echoing old church on rue Principale seemed less and less interested each year in the edicts of the Holy Roman Catholic Church on contraception, Immaculate Conception, demoniacal deception.

  They did not need the Church as his rural parishioners in the past had needed the Church. It was rare now that he would be called out in a desperate Quebecois winter night to rush through snow and wind to save a soul, to perform last rites, to learn some dark habitant family secret, or to help in some terrible accident or crisis. Father Lessard was not needed by many people in Saint-Sauveur anymore.The Church and its priests were not needed much in general anymore, and these thoughts, no matter how he tried to push them away, preoccupied him, an old priest considering his fate.

  So it was not surprising that he could go for months without thinking of that time three-and-ahalf decades ago when the European man and the policeman from Premier Maurice Duplessis’s own staff had come to ask for his assistance on an urgent matter of State. When he thought of this at all now, he realized that, yes, he was still needed, if only as custodian of that secret they had shared with him, or the part of the secret they had been willing to share. They, in those days, had known whom to trust in Quebec, who could be relied on for years, decades, forever. That is what the Catholic Church was for and what its legions of priests were for. Then, at least. Much less so now. The thought cheered Father Lessard when it came. The memory that he had been needed, trusted, in the old way cheered him when it infrequently came.

  The European would have been perhaps thirtyfive, no more than forty, when he first came to L’Eglise de L’Annonciation in, what was it — 1950 or 1951? A good Catholic, a Polish Catholic. They had been welcome additions to the Quebec Church, the Poles, in those years after the war. Even if some of them turned to English-Catholic parishes, the Irish parishes, and others, in Montreal. They were still welcome additions to the Quebec Catholic flock. And this one, this Pole, had very much wanted to be married in the Saint-Sauveur church, he said, because they were skiers and because the place reminded them of Poland.

  So Father Lessard had married them, in 1950 or 1951, and he thought he would not see them or any among their small group of Polish friends again. Father Lessard himself had been just twenty-five or twenty-six then, too eager as a young and energetic priest to get on with his demanding parish work than to wonder about the fate of just one immigrant couple in Montreal.

  But then the Polish man had returned. In 1959. Father Lessard could remember that particular date very well. The Polish man and Duplessis’s policeman had carried with them official letters from the premier himself. They had said they needed help on an urgent matter. Duplessis’s letter said that the Catholic Church hierarchy in Montreal was very much in favour of this undertaking. What choice could Father Lessard have possibly had? Of course he had helped them. Of course he located an even more remote church for them to hide something away from the Communists. Polish Church property, they had said it was.

  Father Lessard had already been aware of the intrigue swirling around some of these Polish treasures: how Duplessis had defied the Protestants in Ottawa for many years, had himself arranged for certain things to be hidden for a time in other churches and convents around the province. So of course Father Lessard had helped them and had memorized the strange password phrase the Polish man had given him. Of course he had been able to keep this secret over all these years. He was a priest of the Catholic Church in Quebec and that was the way these things were done. In those years, in any case.

  Still, Father Lessard had almost given up hope that someone would ever come. Now that he was seventy years of age and never sure when he would say his last Mass for an ever-dwindling flock. It was a small enough burden, he supposed, among the burdens occasionally given over to priests and the Catholic Church. If he carried it to his grave, so be it. But, in the end, he was able to do his duty, to fulfill the trust of the Polish man and of Duplessis and of his beloved, troubled church, because on that overcast late-winter day the two young people had come and asked for his help.

  Father Lessard thought when he first saw them coming into his church they were a young couple wanting to be married. It was starting to happen again more often now; young modern couples deciding that it would be a good thing to be married amidst the wooden pews and the wooden saints carved by Quebecois artisans now long dead. In such beautiful surroundings, they said. They would come to him many weeks ahead to discuss their plans and set a date for weddings in beautiful surroundings. He did not question the motivation of such young people too much these days. As long as they were Catholics, they would be welcome.

  But the young couple who hurried into this church on this March day did not wish to be married. As Father Lessard came out of the confessional and kneeled to kiss his embroidered priestly scarf, he saw immediately from their hurried step and grave faces that there would be more to it than that.

  *

  Natalia’s intuition was
correct. It was easier than Delaney had thought it would be. They parked the car in front of L’Eglise de L’Annonciation, among all the other cars with ski racks and skis on their roofs. The cars were angle-parked, front wheels to curb, as they all used to be in such rural towns years ago. Rue Principale was as busy as always at this time of the year, and the intense activity made them feel safely anonymous. They went through the massive oak main doors of the church and saw an old priest coming out of the confessional. A penitent, an even older woman wearing a farmer’s rubber boots and a down ski jacket, hurried past them to a pew where she knelt and began her Hail Marys. Delaney wondered what sins were being committed these days on Quebec farms in winter.

  They did not discuss any further what was to be done. Natalia simply went up to the old priest and said, in French: “Father, may we speak to you for a moment?”

  The old man looked at them both carefully. He had a shock of very white wavy hair, having lost none of it to baldness despite his age. He pushed his right hand over it to smooth it — a young man’s gesture, impossible to unlearn after decades of use. He answered in English.

  “Do you wish confession, madame?” The priest looked over at Delaney, wondering, apparently, what role this older companion may have had in the young woman’s sins.

  “No, Father. Thank-you,” Natalia said. “We have a small matter we would like to discuss with you in private somewhere, if you wouldn’t mind. Are you very busy?”

  “Madame, I very much wish I could be busier in this church. It is empty today as you can see. It is too often empty. Would you like to speak in here? The church is as private a place as you can find these days.”

  “Well, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps we could go somewhere else. In an office, perhaps?” Natalia said.

  “D’accord. Come with me. I am Father Lessard.” He didn’t ask for their names. They walked toward the huge wooden altar. The wall behind it had been painted a dramatic shade of mauve. Small floodlights bathed it brilliantly even during the day. A large crucified Jesus with a wooden crown of thorns was raised high on the wall. The odour of decades of incense and floor wax lay heavily everywhere. Red lamps burned dimly. The faithful had lit candles before various saints.