The Day of the Lie

by William Brodrick

  ‘I’ll start with Klara,’ said Sebastian, moving to the far end of the table. He’d taken off his jacket and thrown it on the back of a chair. ‘Her file is missing. Maybe it went into one of the shredders. Its absence is unfortunate but not fatal to our purpose. There are lots of clues left behind and they give us a fairly clear picture of her value as an agent and the kind of work she carried out.’

  He pointed at an open ledger, very much like a school attendance register. His finger tapped ‘Klara Fielding’ in a left-hand column. Alongside, to the right, was the agent name: JULITA.

  ‘While we have confirmation of her recruitment,’ he said, loosening his tie, ‘we don’t know whether she was a volunteer or whether she agreed to co-operate following an approach. The timing is significant. She goes into the book within a month of her marriage. That suggests a friendly tap on the shoulder after the exchange of rings:

  Confirmed by her friends, thought Anselm. They’d found her changed by close proximity to English phlegm. She’d lost her sense of fun.

  ‘Obviously as the wife of a British diplomat, she was a well—placed and potentially high-value source.’ Sebastian stepped from left to right, drawing Anselm along. He picked up a sheaf of photocopied correspondence. ‘She didn’t disappoint. This letter is typical and shows what kind of material she was feeding to her handlers. When Churchill went to Washington in January fifty-two to show the world that the Brits and the Americans were ever the best of friends, JULITA had reported that there were, in fact, strong differences over policy to the Middle and Far East, defence strategy and the supply of US steel. I suppose Klara just listened to table talk and repeated what she’d heard.’ Sebastian tapped an annotation at the bottom of the page. ‘But it was important: this missive was copied to Vyshinsky in the Foreign Affairs Department in Moscow Klara was listening for Stalin. She’d become his ears in the British Embassy’

  Sebastian shuffled further to the right.

  ‘Now these are as frustrating as they are enticing.’

  Three books lay open in a line, like new acquisitions in a public library, the pages chosen to seize the curiosity of anyone who happened to pass by.

  ‘It seems Klara’s value was domestic as well as foreign. These are entry and exit registers. They show that Klara attended various locations, presumably to report back to her handler or other interested parties. The addresses are revealing, as are the names of the persons she met. Klara was talking to members of the Public Security Commission.’ Sebastian spoke with heavy significance, but it was lost on Anselm, so he spelled out the implication. ‘The Commission coordinated the Terror. Presumably Klara had information on friends and contacts of the UK government. Or the Commission was asking her to keep an ear to the ground about certain people. Without her file, we’ll never know’

  He moved a step to the left, stopping in front of the third volume. Slowly he ran his finger across the bottom of the page as if to underline an entry.

  ‘JULITA came to Mokotów in nineteen fifty-two,’ he said, drily ‘She’d an appointment with Major Strenk. I’d love to know what they talked about.’

  ‘Me, too,’ said Anselm, managing to make a contribution at last.

  They both read the sepia script several times. Anselm wanted to lift each word off the page and squeeze out the meaning, as if they were so many sponges soaked in blood.

  ‘She was in the building at the same time as Róża,’ said Anselm.

  ‘Yes:

  ‘Pure chance, but it makes my skin crawl.’

  ‘Mine, too.’

  ‘Is there anything in there —’ Anselm gestured towards the neat piles thinking of bodies in a morgue — ‘which links Klara to Brack?’

  ‘No. But they could easily have met; Brack was Strenk’s immediate subordinate.’

  He sure was. Father Kaminsky had called them pupil and master, father and son. ‘Anything that links Klara to Róża?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Sebastian sighed. ‘Being under the one roof is just a coincidence. The Commission were talking to Róża. Klara was talking to the Commission. All it shows is two women on different sides of the fence. They’d made contrary choices. They each paid a price … the cost, in the end, being roughly similar.’

  From that perspective, the last document on the conference table was a kind of receipt. In August 1953 a functionary in the Ministry of Public Security had circulated a letter to Departments I, IV, V, VII and section heads at Bureaus A and B informing them (in terms) that JULITA’s stream of intelligence had dried up, a nice enough phrase, sufficiently wide to encompass death.

  Sebastian moved along two paces, stopping at the beginning of the second group of records. Again they lay in a row like today’s specials in the canteen.

  ‘Now we come to John,’ said Sebastian, almost brightly.

  Who didn’t know that JULITA had been found hanging from a set of railings. He knew nothing of her self-accusation. Maybe John had tracked down his proud maternal grandparents and seen the two medals that had been slipped under the door by Strenk or whoever.

  She’d done important work for the future, they’d have said. She’d made a difference.

  ‘There is a file on John,’ began Sebastian, opening the green cover and closing it again as if it wasn’t worth a glance. ‘Like every other journalist he was watched but nothing of interest was picked up. His profile and conduct are just like any other correspondent. He doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t attract any attention. The only record of relevance is his expulsion from Warsaw for activities consistent with espionage.’

  ‘Any mention of Brack?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Thought not.’

  A second phone had appeared on Brack’s desk. He’d told Irina not to breathe a word of the Dentist to Frenzel. He’d been up to something that couldn’t make a bleep on anyone’s radar, neither the SB’s nor the Stasi’s.

  ‘At this point, I thought I’d come to a dead end,’ said Sebastian, hands deep in his pockets. The black stubble showed he hadn’t shaved. He’d been working hard. ‘Just to be sure, I sent off a string of emails to other archive holders throughout the former communist bloc. Nothing came back until this afternoon —’ he began that relentless drift again from left to right — ‘when these arrived from Bucharest. This time Brack does make an appearance.

  Though not immediately explained Sebastian, holding up a report dated 8th August 1979. John Fielding had been arrested by the Securitate at the airport as he was preparing to board a plane for Prague. They’d previously tailed him to a mountain village where he’d met a professor considered to have fallen foul of the social order.

  ‘I’ll spare you the boring bits,’ said Sebastian, turning the page to a paragraph marked with a yellow Post-it. ‘They already knew the family history from previous correspondence with Warsaw Maybe that’s why they let him go … but not before writing up a quite interesting character description. A wide-ranging interview had shown him to be broadly disenchanted with western politics. A Hollywood actor had finally made it to the Oval Office. He was “embittered” —’ Sebastian’s fingers opened and closed the inverted commas — ‘following the election victory of Margaret Thatcher the previous May She was, he said, “no friend of the labour movement”. The Securitate analyst deemed John a potential “co-worker”. Someone who might turn if approached in the right way’ Sebastian dropped the report back on the table and picked up the next papers in line. ‘… a prospect that was brought to Brack’s attention two years later.’

  In early 1982 he’d carried out a routine check on a journalist newly arrived in Warsaw and had been delighted to receive a copy of the report and the recommendation. Brack — terse and obscure — gave no hint of his intentions.

  ‘Did he take it up?’ asked Anselm, as if he needed to know.

  ‘Well, this is where it all gets very interesting,’ said Sebastian, reaching the end of the table and the last selection of documents. ‘You’d have thought that Brack would have put this stuff fr
om the Securitate in John’s file, but he didn’t. He didn’t put it anywhere — remember, I had to get it from Bucharest — instead he seems to have binned the lot or shredded it later, leaving behind one tantalising clue …

  Sebastian opened the cover of a large brown ring binder.

  ‘Now, on its own, this is not a helpful resource,’ he said, sliding his thumb on to another yellow Post-it. He lifted the top pages and lay the binder flat. ‘This is simply an inventory of names comprising agents, potential agents and targets.’

  ‘Perpetrators and victims?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘All mixed up?’

  ‘Exactly and, as I say not much use if you’ve got nothing else to go on.

  ‘Unlike ourselves.’

  Sebastian nodded, his lips firm and unsmiling. His finger pointed at John’s name, as he’d pointed at Klara’s. In a parallel column was the chosen title: CONRAD.

  ‘Of course, it’s not unequivocal evidence,’ said Sebastian, moving across the room towards the coffee pot. ‘But it doesn’t get much stronger.’

  ‘Oh yes, it does,’ said Anselm, taking the little jug of milk. He made a splash in two polystyrene cups. Do you have details on special telephone lines set up during SB covert operations in nineteen eighty-two?’

  Sebastian turned slowly appraising Anselm with guarded respect, interested to know what the monk easily distracted by the meaning of life had been up to when he wasn’t talking to Father Kaminsky and Bernard Kolba. ‘Yes, we do.’

  ‘John can’t even remember his own birth date. He left a phone number in a Warsaw guidebook. 55876. Check it out. I think you’ll find it rang on Brack’s desk.’

  Anselm’s investigation had run its term. In a way he’d come full circle, beginning with John and ending with John. For the moment — lying in bed, hands behind his neck — he simply couldn’t grasp the distance between the person he thought he knew and the person whose secret life he’d uncovered. He was stunned and couldn’t reflect with the necessary detachment. Quite apart from any personal considerations, he couldn’t imagine how John might occupy the central plank in Brack’s scheme — and how that scheme could silence Róża for so long. But he did and it had. The Dentist’s private operation had been a ringing success. For some reason, Róża would never contemplate John’s exposure …

  But she’d changed her mind. She’d come to London. She’d come to John’s door. She’d come with a statement to help him walk through fire: an account of her life that only showed her understanding of his circumstances; that held out no blame for what he’d done to her in return. And John had stood there, blind, playing the dumb waiter. She’d left him, devastated, as when he’d last seen her; when he’d gone to her Warsaw flat protesting his innocence, offering to find the informer. She’d left him to his blindness. She’d thrown her statement in a bin. Once again, she’d taken pity on someone who deserved to suffer.

  But why on earth should Róża want to protect John? As the Prior said, she’d only known him a matter of months.

  The following morning — Anselm’s last in Warsaw — he took a listless breakfast. Even the personal hurt seemed far off, shrinking from his nerves. In a daze he packed his bag; he tidied the room; and, coat on, he rang Bernard Kolba to apologise for his crass accusation the day before. The lurch to make reparation yielded an unexpected dividend: the conversation rolled on to the next steps and the mystery of Róża’s present location. She’s still in London, said Bernard. Staying with Magda Samovitz in Stockwell Green. Róża had taken her first holiday in living memory. Was there any better diversion, thought Anselm, entering the lift, than to shatter everyone’s illusions, including your own?

  Sebastian was waiting for Anselm in the hotel foyer. He took his bag and drove him to the airport with the solicitude of an undertaker holding up the traffic, his mood similar to that of the quiet monk at his side. He’d come dark-suited with a mumbling apology of his own, for how things had turned out. He’d have preferred it if Róża’s informer had been someone at arm’s length.

  ‘But, then, the point of informers is that they get close. It’s a pity you got burned, too.’

  Yes, that was the right word — Anselm woke as the aircraft tilted into dense cloud over England — it was a pity all round.

  A pity for Róża. A pity for Klara and for Irina, blunted tools thrown aside. A pity for the fat young man with the plastic Kalashnikov. A pity for Edward, who knew more than he could ever say A pity for Bernard and Aniela who knew nothing. A pity for George Fielding whose love turned sour and Melanie who came on as substitute to play Misery. And John, too. There was pity for John somewhere.

  The scale of these dark reflections obscured all thought of Anselm’s one remaining task: the confrontation of his old school friend, the person who’d sent him to Warsaw to find out why Róża had come to London. Instead his mind went elsewhere, seeking a diversion of its own. And it went somewhere altogether interesting.

  Mooching round his cell before Compline, warmed to the point of injury by that first sound of bells, he recalled that Róża Mojeska and Father Kaminsky had something in common. Unknown to the other, they’d each shared a friend: Mr Lasky the caretaker at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. The name had cropped up in Róża’s statement as it had fallen from the mouth of Father Kaminsky In one of those flashes of certainty-without-good-cause — sudden perceptions that Anselm no longer presumed to question — he was sure that the relationship between the three people — an orphan, a caretaker and a priest — lay at the centre of the greater picture, the canvas upon which John had made a late and troubled entry.

  ‘Maybe Mr Lasky is part of the pity of it all,’ said Anselm, heading down to Compline. ‘A man whom Róża had known as a child, long before she faced the terrors of the night.’

  Part Six

  The Mind of Otto Brack

  Chapter Forty

  The woodshed at Larkwood remained standing by some mystery of physics not yet known to modern science. Two of three central beams were cracked. Most of the dark rafters seemed to be unattached at either end. All the main uprights, already bent, were gravely aslant. The caramel wattle and daub was crazed with deep fissures. Chunks were missing, leaving ancient silver twigs peeping out like the stems of dried flowers, their heads long gone.

  ‘You were right,’ said Anselm to the Prior.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Brack’s world. It’s a dangerous place. I wish I’d never been there. I wish I’d never tried to understand these people, the Bracks and Frenzels. You can’t get close without losing something essential to yourself. They’re leeches on your soul, they suck and suck and then excrete your best intentions in some dark corner.

  He was sitting on an old piano stool. The Prior faced him, the sleeves of his habit rolled up, the scapular tucked into his belt. But for the accent, distilled from the Clyde and the Lark, he’d have stepped straight out of a Turgenev short story. In his hands was a large axe.

  ‘You were right,’ repeated Anselm. His tone had changed from lament to accusation. ‘I grubbed around buying information from a man who chewed up people’s lives over a bottle of Bollinger. Why did you let me go?’

  ‘I thought you wanted to help John,’ replied the Prior, reasonably ‘Perhaps John more than Róża.’

  ‘I did. I went to Warsaw for him. He asked me for help.’

  ‘With good reason, it seems.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ The Prior seemed to test the weight of the axe, letting it swing like a pendulum. ‘I get the impression you wanted to give one kind of help and you’re discomfited to find you’ve been asked for another. But that’s what happens when you grasp someone’s outstretched hand: you don’t know what will happen once you start to pull.’

  Relatively speaking, the Prior had been unmoved by the revelation of John’s betrayal. There’d been a lifting of an eyebrow; a slight tilt of the head as if to acknowledge that a Lebanon cedar had just crashed through the main Do
rter window. But he wasn’t overly troubled by the glass on the floor and the fault in the exposed grain. These were his woods, he seemed to say He knew all about trees and why they fell. And how to cut them down, too. He tapped the axe on the ground.

  ‘When someone asks for assistance, Anselm, you count the dangers, you eye up the risks, and you take precautions. And then you help. You don’t count and appraise so as to take the preventative measure of leaving. You stay. You reach out, perhaps with fear in your heart, knowing that you, too, might fall.’

  ‘Why did he ask me to go?’ mumbled Anselm, not quite hearing the Prior’s rebuke. ‘He knew I’d find out about his mother. He knew I’d find out that he’d worked with Brack. He even gave me Brack’s old number as if he wanted me to give him a call to talk over the life and times of agent CONRAD. Why not tell me himself, outright?’

  ‘Because there’s more to John’s story than a betrayal. His life is more than a list of facts. Perhaps there is too much to tell, too much to reveal, too much to explain; because he’s lost to simple declarations. In those circumstances, the lost man doesn’t want to talk, he wants to be found. He wants his friend to find him. He wants him to learn everything along the way so that when they finally meet a discussion can take place, one that is deep and honest and true.’

  I want you to coax them out of the dark, John had said. Failing that, bring them kicking and screaming into the light. Rough or smooth, give them a helping hand.