“Fine,” said Henry. “I’ll keep you informed if anything comes up that we should worry about.”
“You must get it through your head, Henry, that there’s nothing for us to worry about. We have your friend, Mr. Kane by the balls and I now intend to squeeze them very slowly.”
“I’ll enjoy watching that,” said Henry, sounding a little happier.
“Sometimes I think you hate Kane more than I do.”
Henry laughed nervously. “Have a good time in Europe.”
Abel put the phone back on the hook and sat staring into space as he considered his next move, his fingers still tapping noisily on the desk. His secretary came in.
“Get Mr. Curtis Fenton at the Continental Trust Bank,” he said without looking at her. His fingers continued to tap. His eyes continued to stare. A few moments later the phone rang.
“Fenton?”
“Good morning, Mr. Rosnovski, how are you?”
“I want you to close all my accounts with your bank.”
There was no reply from the other end.
“Did you hear me, Fenton?”
“Yes,” said the stupefied banker. “May I ask why, Mr. Rosnovski?”
“Because Judas never was my favorite apostle, Fenton, that’s why. As of this moment, you are no longer on the board of the Baron Group. You will shortly receive written instructions confirming this conversation and telling you to which bank the accounts should be transferred.”
“But I don’t understand why, Mr. Rosnovski. What have I done … ?”
Abel hung up as his daughter walked into the office. “That didn’t sound very pleasant, Daddy.”
“It wasn’t meant to be pleasant, but it’s nothing to concern yourself with, darling,” said Abel, his tone changing immediately. “Did you manage to find all the clothes you’ll need?”
“Yes, thank you, Daddy, but I’m not absolutely sure what they’re wearing in London and Paris. I can only hope I’ve got it right. I don’t want to be a sore thumb.”
“You’ll stick out, all right, my darling—anyone would with your taste. You’ll be the most beautiful thing Europe’s seen in years. They’ll know your clothes didn’t come out of a ration book. Those young Europeans will be falling all over themselves to get at you, but I’ll be there to stop them. Now, let’s go and have some lunch and discuss what we’re going to do while we’re in London.”
Ten days later, after Florentyna had spent a long weekend with her mother—Abel never inquired after her—father and daughter flew from New York’s Idlewild Airport to London’s Heathrow. The flight in a Boeing 377 took nearly fourteen hours, and although they had private berths, when they arrived at Claridge’s in Brook Street, the only thing they both wanted was another long sleep.
Abel was making the trip for three reasons: first, to confirm building contracts for new Baron hotels in London, Paris and possibly Rome; second, to give Florentyna her first view of Europe before she went to Radcliffe to study modern languages; and third, and most important, to revisit his castle in Poland to see if there was even an outside chance of proving his ownership.
London turned out to be a success for both of them. Abel’s advisors had found a site on Hyde Park corner, and he instructed his solicitors to begin negotiations immediately for the land and the permits that would be needed before England’s capital could boast a Baron. Florentyna found the austerity of postwar London forbidding after the excess of her own home, but the Londoners seemed to be undaunted by their war-damaged city, still believing themselves to be a world power. She was invited to lunches, dinners and balls, and her father was proved right about her taste in clothes and the effect she had on young male Europeans. She returned each night with sparkling eyes and stories of new conquests—most forgotten by the following morning, but not all: she couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to marry an Etonian from the Grenadier Guards who liked to salute her, or a member of the House of Lords who was in waiting to the King. She wasn’t quite sure what “in waiting” meant, but he certainly knew exactly how to treat a lady.
In Paris the pace never slackened and because they both spoke good French, they got along as well with the Parisians as they had with the English. Abel was normally bored by the end of the second week of any vacation and would start counting the days until he could return home to work. But not while he had Florentyna as his companion. She had, since his separation from Zaphia, become the center of his life and the sole heir to his fortune.
When the time came to leave Paris, neither of them wanted to go, so they stayed on a few more days, claiming as an excuse that Abel was still negotiating to buy a famous but now run-down hotel on the Boulevard Raspail. He did not inform the owner, a M. Neuffe, who looked, if it were possible, even more run-down than the hotel, that he planned to demolish the building and start again from scratch. When M. Neuffe signed the papers a few days later, Abel ordered the building razed while he and Florentyna, with no more excuses left for remaining in Paris, reluctantly departed for Rome.
After the friendliness of the British and the gaiety of the French capital, the sullen and dilapidated Eternal City immediately dampened their spirits, for the Romans felt they had nothing to celebrate. For the two travelers, the pleasures of London and Paris seemed infinitely far behind them. In London they had strolled through the magnificent Royal parks together and admired historic buildings, and Florentyna had danced until the wee hours. In Paris they had been to the Opera, lunched on the banks of the Seine and taken a boat down the river past Notre Dame and on to supper in the Latin Quarter. In Rome, Abel found only an overpowering sense of financial instability and decided that he would have to shelve his plans to build a Baron in the Italian capital. Florentyna sensed her father’s growing impatience to see his castle in Poland once again, so she suggested they leave Italy a day early.
Abel had found bureaucracy more reluctant to grant a visa for Florentyna and himself to enter an Iron Curtain country than it had been to issue a permit to build a new 500-room hotel in London. A less persistent visitor would probably have given up, but with the appropriate visas firmly stamped in their passports, Abel and Florentyna set off in a hired car for Slonim. They were kept waiting for hours at the Polish border, helped along only by the fact that Abel was fluent in the language. Had the border guards known why his Polish was so good, they would doubtless have taken an entirely different attitude toward allowing his entry. Abel changed $500 into zlotys—that at least seemed to please the Poles—and motored on. The nearer they came to Slonim, the more Florentyna was aware of how much the journey meant to her father.
“Daddy, I can never remember you so excited about anything.”
“This is where I was born,” Abel explained. “After such a long time in America, where things change every day, it’s almost unreal to be back where it looks as if nothing has changed since I left.”
As they drove on toward Slonim, Abel’s senses heightened in anticipation of seeing his birthplace once again. Across a time span of nearly forty years he heard his childish voice ask the Baron whether the hour of the submerged peoples of Europe had arrived and would he be able to play his part, and tears came to his eyes to think how short that hour had been, and what a little part he had played.
At last they rounded the final corner before approaching the Baron’s estate and saw the great iron gates that led to the castle. Abel laughed aloud in excitement as he brought the car to a halt.
“It’s all just as I remember it. Nothing’s changed. Come on, let’s go see the cottage where I spent the first five years of my life—I don’t expect anyone is living there now. Then we’ll go and see my castle.”
Florentyna followed her father as he marched confidently down a small track into the forest of moss-covered birches and oaks that was not going to change in a hundred years. After they had walked for about twenty minutes, they came into a small clearing, and there in front of them was the trapper’s cottage. Abel stood and stared. He had forgotten how tin
y his first home was: could nine people really have lived there? The thatched roof was now in disrepair, its stone eroded, its windows broken. The once tidy vegetable garden was indistinguishable in the matted overgrowth.
Had the cottage been deserted? Florentyna took her father by the arm and led him slowly to the front door. Abel stood there motionless, so Florentyna knocked. They waited in silence. Florentyna knocked again, this time a little more loudly, and they heard someone moving within.
“All right, all right,” said a querulous voice in Polish, and a few moments later the door inched open. They were being studied by an old woman, bent and thin, dressed entirely in black. Wisps of untidy snow-white hair escaped from her kerchief, and her gray eyes looked vacantly at the visitors.
“It’s not possible,” Abel said softly in English.
“What do you want?” asked the old woman suspiciously. She had no teeth, and the line of her nose, mouth and chin formed a perfect concave arc.
Abel answered in Polish, “May we come in and talk to you?”
Her eyes looked from one to the other fearfully. “Old Helena hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said in a whine.
“I know,” said Abel gently. “I have brought good news for you.”
With some reluctance the woman allowed them to enter the bare, cold room, but she didn’t offer them a seat. The room hadn’t changed—two chairs, one table and the memory that until he had left the cottage he hadn’t known what a carpet was. Florentyna shuddered.
“I can’t get the fire going,” wheezed the old woman, prodding the grate with her stick. The faintly glowing log refused to rekindle and she scrabbled ineffectually in her pocket. “I need paper.” She looked at Abel, showing a spark of interest for the first time. “Do you have any paper?”
Abel looked at her steadily. “Don’t you remember me?” he said.
“No, I don’t know you.”
“You do, Helena. My name is—Wladek.”
“You knew my little Wladek?”
“I am Wladek.”
“Oh, no,” she said with sad and distant finality. “He was too good for me—the mark of God was upon him. The Baron took him away to be an angel. Yes, he took away Matka’s littlest one—”
Her old voice cracked and died away. She sat down, but the ancient, lined hands were busy in her lap.
“I have returned,” said Abel, more insistently, but the old woman paid him no attention and her old voice, quavered on as though she were quite alone in the room.
“They killed my husband, my Jasio, and all my lovely children were taken to the camps except little Sophia. I hid her and they went away.” Her voice was even and resigned.
“What happened to little Sophia?” asked Abel.
“The Russians took her away in the other war,” she said dully.
Abel shuddered.
The old woman roused herself from her memories. “What do you want? Why are you asking me these questions?” she demanded.
“I wanted you to meet my daughter, Florentyna.”
“I had a daughter called Florentyna once, but now there’s only me.”
“But I—” began Abel, starting to unbutton his shirt.
Florentyna stopped him. “We know,” she said, smiling at the old lady.
“How can you possibly know? It was all so long before you were even born.”
“They told us in the village,” said Florentyna.
“Have you any paper with you?” the old lady asked. “I need paper for the fire.”
Abel looked at Florentyna helplessly. “No,” he replied, “I am sorry we didn’t bring any with us.”
“Then, what do you want?” reiterated the old woman, once again hostile.
“Nothing,” said Abel, now resigned to the impossibility that she might remember him. “We just wanted to say hello.” He took out his wallet, removed all the new zloty notes he had acquired at the border and handed them over to her.
“Thank you, thank you,” she said as she took each note, her old eyes watering with pleasure.
Abel bent over to kiss his foster mother, but she backed away.
Florentyna took her father’s arm and led him out of the cottage and back down the forest track in the direction of their car.
The old woman watched from her window until she was sure they were out of sight. Then she took the new bank notes, crumpled each one into a little ball and placed them all carefully in the grate. They kindled immediately. She placed twigs and small logs on top of the blazing zlotys and sat slowly down by her fire, the best in weeks, rubbing her hands together at the comfort of the warmth.
Abel did not speak on the walk back to the car until the iron gates were once again in sight. Then he promised Florentyna, trying his best to forget the little cottage, “You are about to see the most beautiful castle in the world.”
“You must stop exaggerating, Daddy.”
“In the world,” Abel repeated quietly.
Florentyna laughed. “I’ll let you know how it compares with Versailles.”
They climbed back into the car and Abel drove through the gates, remembering the vehicle he had been in when he last passed through them, and up the mile-long drive to the castle. Memories came flooding back to him. Happy days as a child with the Baron and Leon, unhappy days in the dungeon under the Germans’ command, and the worst days of his life when he was taken away from his beloved castle by the Russians, imagining he would never see the building again. But now he, Wladek Koskiewicz, was returning, returning in triumph to reclaim what was his.
The car bumped up the winding road and both remained silent in anticipation as they rounded the final bend to the first sight of Baron Rosnovski’s home. Abel brought the car to a halt and gazed at his castle. Neither of them spoke—what was there to say?—but simply stared in disbelief at the devastation, at the bombed-out remains of his dream.
Abel and Florentyna climbed slowly out of the car. Still neither spoke. Florentyna held her father’s hand very, very tightly as the tears rolled down his cheeks. Only one wall remained, precariously standing in a semblance of its former glory; the rest was nothing more than a pile of rubble and red stone. He could not bear to tell her of the great halls, the wings, the kitchens, the bedrooms. Abel walked over to the three mounds, now smooth with thick green grass, that were the graves of the Baron and his son Leon and the other beloved Florentyna. He paused at each one and couldn’t help but think that Leon and Florentyna should still be alive today. He knelt at their heads, the dreadful visions of their final moments returning to him vividly. His daughter stood by his side, her hand now resting on his shoulder, saying nothing. A long time passed before Abel rose slowly and then they tramped over the ruins together, broken slabs of stone masking the places where once magnificent rooms had been filled with laughter. Abel still said nothing. Holding hands, they reached the dungeons. There Abel sat down on the floor of the damp little room near the grille, or the half of the grille that was still left. He twisted the silver band around and around on his arm.
“This is where your father spent four years of his life.”
“It can’t be possible,” said Florentyna, who did not sit down.
“It’s better now than it was then,” said Abel. “At least now there is fresh air, birds, the sun and a feeling of freedom. Then there was nothing, only darkness, death, the stench of death and worst of all the hope of death.”
“Come on, Daddy, let’s get out of here. Staying can only make you feel worse.”
Florentyna led her reluctant father to the car and she drove him slowly down the long drive. Abel didn’t look back toward the ruined castle as they passed for the last time through its iron gates.
On the return journey to Warsaw, Abel hardly spoke and Florentyna abandoned attempts at vivacity. When her father said, “There is now only one thing left that I must achieve in this life,” Florentyna wondered what he could possibly mean. But she did not press him to explain. She did, however, manage to coax him into spendi
ng another weekend in London on the return journey, which she convinced herself would cheer her father up a little and perhaps even help him to forget his demented old foster mother and the bombed-out remains of his castle in Poland.
They flew to London the next day. Abel was glad to be back in a country where he could communicate quickly with America. Once they had booked into Claridge’s, Florentyna went off to see old friends and make new ones. Abel spent his time reading the back-number newspapers that had been accumulating at the hotel. He did not like knowing that things could happen while he was away; it reminded him only too clearly that the world would keep turning without him. An item on an inside page of that day’s Times caught his eye. Something had happened while he was away. An Interstate Airways Vickers Viscount had crashed immediately after takeoff at the Mexico City airport the previous morning. The seventeen passengers and crew had all been killed. The Mexican authorities had been quick to place the blame on Interstate’s bad servicing of its aircraft. Abel picked up the phone and asked the girl for the overseas operator.
Saturday, he’s probably back in Chicago, thought Abel. He thumbed through his little address book to find the home number.
“There’ll be a delay of about thirty minutes,” said a precise English voice.
“Thank you,” said Abel, and he lay down on the bed with the phone by his side, thinking. It rang twenty minutes later.
“Your overseas call is on the line, sir,” said the same precise voice.
“Abel, is that you? Where are you?”
“Sure is, Henry. I’m in London.”
“Are you through?” said the girl, who was back on the line.
“I haven’t even started,” said Abel.
Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Page 45
