No, he did not want to go back. No, he thought, what he really wanted to do was see if some Polish agents were following him. He wanted to see if some CSIS agents were following him, he wanted to see if his editors or his readers or his accountant or his ex-wife’s lawyers were following him. In fact, he now thought he saw a large car with two men in the front pull over on Mount Royal Street as his taxi turned down Esplanade, but he couldn’t be sure. How could you be sure? But Delaney had to stop his thoughts from wandering. The cab driver wanted his money.
Gustavo, the Chilean refugee social-worker soccer-player ladies’ man, was with Natalia when Delaney arrived. Very tall, very thin, very balding, but with what hair he had left fashionably gathered in a long grey ponytail. Despite the weather, Gustavo wore only a light denim jacket, replete with pins declaring his various social and political allegiances. He worked with Natalia, apparently, doing Good Works with refugees, torture victims, coup victims. Art therapy, or some such thing.
Gustavo was just leaving, he said. No, no, he told Natalia, he wouldn’t stay for coffee with them. No, gracias, no. Delaney and Gustavo eyed each other as male primates do. Been here all night, amigo? Delaney asked wordlessly. Going to be staying the night, gringo? Gustavo was likely asking wordlessly back. He was gone after a brief hug and a light kiss on both cheeks from Natalia. He showed no desire to be embraced by Delaney.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. He’s in love with you,” Delaney for some reason thought it necessary to say.
“He thinks he is,” Natalia said.
“Therefore he is. That’s how it worked when I was a boy.”
“He’s projecting. He’s in love with the idea of being in love with me.”
“Oh, please,” Delaney said. “No wonder I stopped paying you for therapy.”
“Learning to withdraw your projections, Francis, that’s the hardest thing. All the psychic figures you need for completeness are with-in. Any good Jungian will tell you that.”
Was that a wicked smile he saw on her face, or just a smile?
“Makes it a bit hard to connect with real people then, doesn’t it?” Delaney said. Not that I’m any authority, he thought.
Natalia seemed taken aback by this remark. “I’ve had my small successes making connections, Francis,” she said quietly. “Not as many as most, of course. Perhaps not as many as you. But I have always preferred to live alone in any case.”
“It’s none of my business anyway,” Delaney said quickly. He didn’t bother correcting her version of his prowess at making connections, especially recently. “It’s none of my business.”
She spared him her explicit agreement. They let the proddings about love lives go at that.
Natalia’s explanation of the supposed break-in was vague at best, in Delaney’s view. She thought she noticed things slightly rearranged. She had a strong intuition someone had been inside. There was even a different smell about the place when she got back the day before. The whole thing had made her very anxious. Still, he had a good look around for himself.
It was his first time in her apartment. He had always very much enjoyed looking around an attractive woman’s apartment.The little things — the pictures and the books and the mementoes — told you a lot about a woman, and there was a pleasant element of voyeurism about it. In Delaney’s experience, being allowed to look at a woman’s things, or doing it surreptitiously, was a prelude to further intimacy. Maybe.
He examined the heavy inner-city door lock and could see nothing amiss. He suddenly felt very foolish doing so. I’m no detective, for Christ’s sake, he thought as he straightened up. Perhaps the tiny scratches he thought he saw on the brass key cylinder were normal. He wasn’t able to say. Natalia showed him how books appeared to have been moved and replaced on her many bookcases.
There were scores, hundreds, of books. Jung, of course. The Collected Works and just about everything else written about Jung’s work. Jungians by the bushel. Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Hillman, Progov, Campbell, O’Connor. The titles on these shelves were intriguing. The Death and Rebirth of Psychology. Synchronicity and Human Destiny. The Discovery of the Unconscious. The Psychology of Romantic Love. Care of the Soul. The Soul’s Code. Others on other shelves equally intriguing. The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Idea of the Holy. Tristan and Iseult: A Study of the Sources of the Romance. Delaney very much enjoyed looking at a woman’s books and wished he could linger over these for a long while.
“Why did you get into this sort of work?” he asked, pulling a volume from a shelf.
“Oh, some broken part of my own personality that needed fixing, I suppose,” she said, smiling.
“Seriously,” he said.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Almost serious.”
“Why Jung?”
“Because he links everything together for me. Behaviour, and the unconscious reasons for it. Human experience and symbolic representation. Rational, irrational. Inside, outside. Light and shadow.”
“All right, all right,” Delaney said, laughing as he put the book away.
“You asked for it,” she said, laughing too. She showed him her neat consulting-psychologist’s desk and he wondered how anyone would dare meddle with the ordered stacks of papers and journal articles and notebooks. Here and there, however, a scrap of paper or a brightly coloured note was slightly out of place, or tucked roughly in amongst other pages. Her pens were fantastic shades of purple, green, and pink. Many crumpled balls of paper, too many, sat discarded in a wastebasket. A very small flash of exuberance, of disorder, hereby betrayed. Of course she would deny this is a hint of some kind of inner chaos, Delaney thought.
She brought him to the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom, as if to complete the tour, as if he were thinking about renting the apartment. The kitchen was somewhat New Age for his taste, but it was a true cook’s kitchen. Meals were actually prepared here. Stainless steel, and open shelving, and serious knives, and eggs in wire baskets. Tall glass jars of pasta and politically correct Third World lentils and peas and beans. I bet Gustavo enjoys that, Delaney thought.
The bathroom was woman-fragrant; stirringly so. Oils, powders, creams. One toothbrush only.The bedroom was dim, secret, the bed surprisingly large, its cover a deep maroon. A comfortable reading chair with a serious spotlight beside it told of many bookish nights. He sensed that this was where she hid herself from things she had heard in sessions with clients, from things that had happened to her, from deaths of parents, deaths of uncles, war stories, torture victims; the usual household accidents. He stood at the threshold of the bedroom, looking in.
“So nothing has been taken?”
“No. I don’t think so,” she said.
“Well, I’m not sure what we can do. Unless you want to call your friends in the Montreal Police.”
“No, thank-you.”
They were standing by her desk. Delaney wanted to tell her about what O’Keefe had discovered, but his paranoia was increasing daily so he suggested a walk. She looked surprised, but something in his look made her simply put on coat and boots and go with him. They walked across Esplanade and past the hockey rink using a path that had recently been plowed. A few kids had wisely stayed home from school to scrape around on the hard Quebec ice instead. Their shouts echoed off the apartment buildings that lined the street.
There was a dangerous race against the traffic on l’avenue Parc and then they were in Mount Royal Park, just below the giant electric cross on the hill whose light had for years dominated the Montreal skyline. Delaney suddenly hailed a cab. Again, Natalia looked surprised, but she said nothing. In a couple of minutes, after a risky U-turn in the cascade of traffic, they were up what passed for Montreal’s mountain and under the snow-laden trees around Beaver Lake. If they were being followed, their pursuers would surely now be dead in traffic behind them. They watched more kids skating on the man-made
lake for a while, and then walked and talked.
Delaney told Natalia what O’Keefe had told him, or almost all of it. He spared her, however, the image of intruders possibly forcing her old uncle’s head into a bathful of water, of a possible interrogation. Her eyes told him she was frightened enough with this near-confirmation that someone had killed him, no matter what means they may have chosen. Her eyes also told him, if he had not already known, that he was now irretrievably implicated in this affair with her and that she very much wanted him to be.
He told her he had been able to ascertain there was at least the possibility of Polish agents being in the city. He told her that he thought it best if they limited their conversations on the phone from now on, and kept a sharp eye out for people who might be watching their movements.
He did not, however, tell her about Hilferty, or about the CSIS proposition, and he did not tell her about the gun that he had put carefully away in his filing cabinet for safekeeping. He did not tell her about the $5,000 being offered, in advance, for “expenses.” He decided that he didn’t want to know why he did or did not do things today. He just wanted to trust his intuitions, as Natalia might, under other circumstances, have advised.
She stopped suddenly in the path and brushed snowflakes from her eyelashes. He thought she was going to ask about why Polish agents might want anything from her uncle and he was ready with precisely the same question for her. But she had something else on her mind.
“Francis,” she said, “I think you may be angry about this, but I may have done a silly thing.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“Sunday night, I called my uncle’s friend in Paris. This Zbigniew I told you about when I first came to see you. The man who flew with Stanislaw in the war.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Well, I had already phoned him just after Stanislaw died, but of course he couldn’t come to the funeral. He is too old, and he hasn’t got much money. I just told him his old friend had died and that the funeral was on such and such a date and that I would be in touch afterward maybe to tell him how it all went. I was in a sort of dream state then anyway. He sent me a card soon after that, asking for news of how it went.”
“Did you tell him how your uncle died?”
“Yes, I told him he had drowned in the bath.”
“The first time you called?”
“Yes.”
“How did he react to that?”
“I don’t really remember. Of course he was sad. It’s a sad story.”
“Did he ask you for details?”
“Like what?”
“Did he seem to think it was an odd way for his friend to die?”
“It is an odd way for anyone to die, Francis.” Delaney could not debate that.
“But when I talked to him on Sunday night,” Natalia continued, “I asked him things. I asked him whether he knew why anyone would hate my uncle enough to do him some harm. I asked him if when Stanislaw had spoken to him last he had thought maybe something was wrong. I needed to know something, Francis. After we found out about the priest in Lachine.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
“No. Nothing. I was going to tell you anyway except I was distracted by the break-in. Zbigniew went very silent on the telephone and then, this is a little odd, he said what you have just now said. That maybe we’d best not talk about these things on the phone. He said perhaps a letter was best, seeing we lived so far apart and there was so much to tell and phone calls were so expensive and so on. And then he seemed to be upset. I thought because I had stirred memories about his friend, and so we hung up. I told him I would write to him.”
“Did you tell him about me?”
“No.”
“Did you tell him about the dead priest?”
“No.”
“What does he do over there?”
“He doesn’t work anymore. He was a printer, after the war. Now he owns a little shop of some kind I think. For posters, antique posters, or something like that. Someone runs it for him now, I think. He was my uncle’s navigator, in Scotland. His best friend.”
Silence was what they now needed for a few minutes. For pondering things. The snow crunched and squeaked under their boots as they continued their circuit around the lake. No more snow was falling, and the sun now scattered diamonds on the morning’s fresh fall.They came eventually to a kiosk where an old man in a battered watchman’s hat rented skates. He had also been assigned the neverending task of keeping the rink clear of snow.
“Vous allez patiner, mes amis?” the old man asked. “C’t’une belle journée maintenant pour ça.” His hat said “Moniteur – Parcs Montréal.” He clearly thought they were lovers.
“Oui,” said Natalia, looking only briefly at Delaney. “On va patiner.”
Delaney somehow found it perfectly natural for people with their preoccupations to suddenly decide to rent skates and slide around Beaver Lake with ruddy-faced French kids in the middle of the day. They spent a long time fussing about the right fit and then signing little blue rental agreement cards. The Ville de Montréal wished to inform them that no responsibility could be taken for accident or injury while on the rink. They took the risk, and then added to it by both borrowing heavy socks from a wooden box of very suspect hosiery the watchman kept for the impulsive.
Their first glide out onto the ice was wobbly, but then, like all skaters young and not so young, they did their best to be elegant. They spoke very little. The smiles and the fine curved lines their skates etched behind them in the ice said what needed to be said. They hardly fell at all.
Chapter 7
On Tuesday, February 21, 1995, sometime just before midnight, investigative journalist Francis Delaney sat at a desk in a silent apartment before a flickering screen of the type he used to record his most public thoughts. He scanned databases. Not inner, like Natalia’s, but outer. Worldly databases, electronic libraries, endless repositories of news, analysis, opinion. All available instantly now, even at home, for the sleepless.
He had been searching for a long time. The online charges tonight to his magazine would be excessive, ridiculous, and he expected a stiff note to come eventually from an angry editorial comptroller with whom he had had much conflict in the past. But he did not log off just yet. He had been browsing through years of newspapers without, he thought happily, having to go into foul newsrooms and convince surly librarians and researchers to pull out old clipping files. There was not much reason, he thought with satisfaction, to go into foul newsrooms at all anymore.
In some ways, this was what he did best. Working alone and letting his journalist’s mind wander through dozens of stories and thousands of words, making connections, making linkages, crosschecking, cross-referencing, following leads down information corridors. Some of these corridors, of course, would always be dead ends. Others, he knew from previous journalistic successes, could help earn someone who still cared for such things a reputation as a reporter who knew where to look and what to look for.
Tonight, however, he wasn’t certain what to look for. The keywords Janovski and Dérôme turned up nothing, except the brief announcement in the Births and Deaths columns of the Tribune of Stanislaw Janovski’s death. Natalia couldn’t have been absolutely overwhelmed if she was organized enough to put an announcement in the paper, Delaney thought. Or maybe that’s how she deals with things like that. Just like I would. Father Bernard’s people, on the other hand, had wisely decided to let his death go unrecorded in the media, as far as Delaney could tell. The dead priest received no newspaper entry to mark his passing.
Delaney’s review of recent items out of Poland added important details to what he and Hilferty had talked about briefly the week before. Walesa was in deep trouble in Warsaw, behaving erratically, fearful he would lose the presidential elections at the end of the year. Lots of changes of gove
rnment, prime ministers dismissed, forced out, resentful.
Some of the Warsaw newspaper correspondents had filed particularly good material about the small group of advisers Walesa had recently gathered around him. In particular, one Mieczylaw Wozniak, the director of the president’s private office. A peasant, a small-time fixer from Gdansk, formerly Walesa’s chauffeur and bag carrier, and now his right-hand man and gatekeeper. Brainless, vulgar, and powerful, by all accounts. A man who liked to help the president of Poland decide foreign and domestic policy over daily games of ping-pong. Impatient, like Walesa, with the intellectuals in Solidarity who helped topple the Communists in 1989. Impatient with the inconveniences of parliamentary democracy. Likes to play with army toys. Both he and Walesa spending a lot of time, apparently, with the crowd of old generals who used to order up the water cannons, and worse, against the Solidarity crowd in the bad old days.
Some good reporting also on the wave of exCommunists now filling the Sejm. And on this young Kwasniewski, the ex-Communist technocrat who looked very like he was going to beat out Walesa and become the next president. There was further good material on the infighting over how fast to reform the creaky Polish economy, how capitalist to make it, how much to kowtow to the International Monetary Fund. Over who should get hurt most by the reforms, and when. And there were reports about bitter conflict over toughened abortion laws in the country. The Polish Catholic Church and Walesa on one side in this, and a lot of others on the other. The Communists had made it too easy, apparently, for women to get abortions, and Walesa was determined to do something about that for his friends in the Vatican.
There was a lot of news indeed to be had about Poland. The crowd of reporters in Warsaw right now knew a good story when they saw one. It was all very interesting. But where was the connection with an old Polish flyer in Montreal?
A very small news agency item from April 1993 caught Delaney’s eye. It was about the UOP foiling a plot, apparently, to kill Walesa.
The Mazovia Legacy Page 11
