The priest took them through a door to the left of the altar, and they were in a much warmer hallway, painted yellow, with blond woodwork. Heated air wafted through old brass registers set in the floor. There was an office with a door of frosted glass. Natalia and Francis sat on metal folding chairs. Father Lessard leaned against the edge of the gun-metal office desk, uncomfortable, perhaps, with the formality of taking the seat behind it. A framed photograph of Pope John Paul II was in pride of place, and there was the requisite large statue of Jesus baring his ruby-red sacred heart.
“You have troubles,” Father Lessard said.
“Not troubles. Not really. No,” Natalia said.
Father Lessard looked ever so slightly disappointed at this news.
“How can I help you today?”
Natalia looked over at Delaney. He saw no reason for her not to continue. He shrugged and nodded slightly. Father Lessard missed very little in such interviews. He looked over at Delaney.
“It is something very grave, monsieur?” he asked.
“Something important,” Delaney said. “To us and some others. An old man who has died.Two old men who have died.”
“My uncle was married in this church,” Natalia said.
“When, madame?”
“Many years ago. In the 1950s.”
“I was priest here then,” he said. “I have been here a very long time.”
Natalia’s glance at Delaney showed her excitement.
“Then you may be able to help us,” she said. “My uncle’s name was Stanislaw Janovski. He was Polish. He came to Canada after the war and he was married here to a Polish woman, Margot. They would have had a small group with them, mainly Poles. Do you remember anything like that. From the 1950s?”
“I remember it very well, madame.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I was a young priest then, performing many marriages. But your uncle, I remember very, very well.”
“Why would that be, Father? Among so many people you married then?” Delaney asked.
“Perhaps it should be you who tells me why that might be so, my friends,” Father Lessard said. “Why I might remember this Polish man so well.”
“He came back to see you another time after that, I think,” Natalia said. “Is that correct?”
“When would that have been, madame?”
“In 1959.”
Father Lessard said nothing at all.
“Do you remember my uncle coming back to see you in 1959, Father?”
“You will have to refresh my memory.”
“He was a solider, a pilot, in the Polish Air Force. He flew with a squadron of Poles out of Scotland. Their squadron was called Mazovia, after a province in Poland. Where Warsaw is located. Did he tell you about that?”
“Possibly.”
“Did he tell you about a special password they all used in those years? So no one could damage their planes?”
Delaney thought he could detect a slight reddening of Father Lessard’s already ruddy face. Nothing else. “A password?”
“Yes.”
“And what would that password have been, my dear?”
“Mazovia for Poland.”
There was a long pause. Father Lessard looked closely at Natalia, and then at Delaney. He crossed his arms and leaned his head back slightly, studying them. Then a broad smile broke out over his face. He looked genuinely pleased.
“It has been a very long time since I heard that phrase, my dear. It is a very unusual phrase. Mazovia for Poland.”
“You’ve heard it before?”
“Yes. Of course. In 1959. Just as you said.” Now it was Natalia’s turn to smile. “My goodness,” she said.
“You are in the right place,” Father Lessard said. “I knew that someone would eventually come. After all these years.”
“My goodness,” Natalia said again.
“What is your name, madame?”
“Natalia. And Janovski like my uncle.”
“And yours, monsieur?”
“Delaney. Francis Delaney.”
“What became of your uncle, Natalia?” the priest asked. “After I married him? And after I saw him that last time.”
“He worked at various things. He was a broadcaster for a long while. For Radio Canada. And this winter, he died.”
“He would have been a very old man.”
“Yes he was.”
“And his wife?”
“She died before him. Many years before.”
“Usually it is the other way, non?”
“I suppose.”
“And he asked you to do something for him before he died?”
“Not exactly, Father. We found out after he died that there was something important that we should do for him.”
This seemed to trouble the priest somewhat.
“He didn’t tell you what he wanted done?”
“No,” Natalia said. “But in letters he had written it was clear there was something important hidden, something that he would have wanted us to take care of for him.”
“For him?”
“For whoever deserves to have it?”
“And who might that be, Natalia?” the priest asked.
“We will have to decide that when we find it.” Delaney wished Natalia could be slightly less frank. He did not want the priest to have a crisis of conscience just now. Her look in his direction told him she knew that he was thinking this.
“My uncle was murdered, Father Lessard,” she said.
“Ah,” the priest said.
“He was murdered because of this secret he had. And he would have wanted us to make sure these things he hid with you were made safe.”
“His oldest friend was also murdered because of this, father,” Delaney said. “We want to make sure that was not for nothing.”
“Murder,” said the priest.
“Three murders,” Delaney said. “A priest as well.”
“Mon Dieu, seigneur,” Father Lessard said.
“Where are those things you hid for him, Father?” Natalia asked.
“What will be done with them?” the priest asked again.
“We will make sure that they never fall into the wrong hands, Father Lessard,” Delaney said.
“It was the Communists they were afraid of then, monsieur.”
“There are even more people to be afraid of these days, Father,” Delaney said. “It is not as simple as it was then.”
“That is true, monsieur.”
“You must trust us that we’ll do the right thing. We can’t just leave these things hidden away forever,” Natalia said.
“Some things are perhaps better left hidden,” the priest said.
“Not these things, Father,” said Delaney. “Other people have found out there may be something valuable involved here, and they may eventually come.”
“Here?”
“Possibly,” Delaney said.
“With the passwords?” the priest asked.
“No,” Natalia said firmly. “Only we have the password.”
“Perhaps I should get advice now on this.” Father Lessard said. “From the Church.”
“That would be a very bad idea, Father,” said Delaney. “It is Natalia’s uncle who took responsibility for this. Only people who know the whole story can make the right decision.” Father Lessard was wavering.
“I will die soon too,” he said suddenly. “I would have to decide myself what to do with this information.”
“Yes,” Delaney said. “You would.”
“My uncle was the one who trusted you with this, Father,” Natalia said. “I loved him very much and I know he would want you to pass these things on to me.”
They waited. The priest waited, for what seemed a very long tim
e.
“They are not here, my dear,” he said eventually. “They were never here.”
“What do you mean?” Natalia said. “Please.”
“We thought it wiser to make them even harder to find. That afternoon when they came. So I arranged for them to be hidden in another church. They are in that church in a very small town some way from here. In Saint-Jean-de-Mantha.”
“I know where that is,” Delaney said.
“You must go to the only church in the village. By the lake. The priest there will help you.”
“Someone else knows about this?” Natalia said.
“He will know as little as he needs to know. He was not there then. I prevailed upon another priest in that parish to help us. Then I went along with your uncle in the little truck he and Duplessis’s man were driving that day. Your uncle and myself only. Duplessis’s man we left behind here, to wait. I found a hiding place for their goods and then the other priest and I went away while your uncle did his work. It was very heavy work, he said, and it took him a long time. I cannot tell you what he hid there. But I know where it is hidden.”
“And the other priest?” Delaney asked.
“Dead now, monsieur. But he never knew more than I told him. He did not know what was hidden in his church or who the men with me that day were. But he is dead now.”
“Has anyone ever come to you before us with the password?”
“No, monsieur. Never. You are the first.”
“How do you know the things are still there?” Father Lessard regarded Delaney with what looked like pity.
“Because they were entrusted to a priest, monsieur,” he said.
“How will we get these things then?” Natalia asked.
“There is a new priest there now, Natalia. A young man. I will tell him to help you.”
“Does he know there is something in his church?”
“No. It is well hidden.”
“And he will let us go in there? He’ll help us on this?”
“Yes, Natalia.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because I will ask him,” Father Lessard said. “I will tell him what needs to be done.”
“We must go today,” Natalia said.
“I will call him for you. He will be expecting you. But it is a long drive on poor roads.”
“And he will let us into his church, to search for something, and take it out with us?” Delaney asked again.
“Yes,” said Father Lessard. “Yes. Have faith, monsieur.”
They wanted to leave immediately, but Father Lessard seemed unwilling to end his involvement in this great secret so quickly. He asked them about themselves, and more about Stanislaw and Zbigniew. They told him as little as they could. Delaney became very anxious to go, and eventually the old priest saw he could keep them no longer.
He walked with them back into the main church.
“Perhaps you could tell me what becomes of all this,” he said.
“Yes,” Natalia said.
“If we can,” Delaney said.
“It was something I kept with me for so many years, you see. And now there is a natural curiosity. To know that it has ended well.” Still the priest did not want to let them go.
“Are you married?” he asked them.
“No, Father,” Natalia said.
“Perhaps, if you marry, you could come here to do it. I could marry you as I did your uncle and his wife.”
“Perhaps,” Natalia said.
“Your uncle would have liked that, I think. He liked this church very much.”
“Yes,” Natalia said. Delaney said nothing. He very much doubted things would turn out just that way.
Father Lessard had shaken their hands gravely at the door to his church, before turning suddenly to walk back into the dimness. They waited in the chilly vestibule for a moment, adjusting gloves and scarves. Through the doors, Delaney suddenly saw an olive-green-and-yellow Sûreté de Québec police car parked not far from the Mercedes. A uniformed officer was peering inside. Then he went back to the police car and began to use the radio. “Police,” Delaney said. Natalia saw the car.
“Maybe it’s not connected,” she said.
“Of course it’s connected,” Delaney said. “We’ll have to get out of here.”
“How?”
“We’ll just go. Walk with me from the direction of those stores.”
They took a side path, and then walked along the slippery sidewalk in front of the church with the lunchtime crowd of skiers and shoppers. Delaney had keys at the ready. When they reached the car he quickly went to the driver’s side and opened it. He pulled up the electric lock for Natalia’s door and she got in.
He had the engine started and the Mercedes in reverse before the policeman had time to get out of his car. The cruiser was in the way of the heavy traffic and he had trouble getting out on the street side.
“Hé, là, arrêtez! Arrêtez là, vous deux,” the officer said in the joual accents of rural Quebec. “Un instant, mes amis.”
Delaney backed out fast. Cars slithered dangerously to a stop on the icy road. The policeman was shouting louder now, but Delaney was on the other side and roaring off in the opposite direction. The heavy old Mercedes was good on slippery roads. In the rear-view mirror he saw the policeman leaning into his car for the radio. A chase today was apparently not to this officer’s taste. That was to be left for others, it seemed.
*
Father Lessard was still not convinced that he had made a mistake, but the worm of moral doubt had begun to eat away at his insides.
It had been a most intense day and it had left him morally and physically fatigued. Not long after the two young people had left, an hour afterward perhaps, the church secretary had rushed into his rooms with the news that the police were outside, that there was commotion. He had walked to the main doors and seen uniformed policemen arguing on the street with some other men in suits. Cars were blocking the way. A small crowd stood and watched, despite the cold.
Then the men and the police had come up the neatly shovelled pathway to the door of the church itself. They wished to speak to him urgently, they said. The Quebec police, and the men in suits, all of whom spoke French with accents not Quebecois. The anglophone, the leader of the group, was in a terrible rage. He had shouted at the uniformed police in the street and gestured wildly at them as he yelled. Father Lessard could not hear what the dispute was about. Now this same man was raising his voice to him, in his church, his own church. Who were the two people who had come out of the church when a policeman was looking at their car? Where had they come from? What had they wanted? Where were they now?
Father Lessard had had to warn this young anglophone — from Ottawa, or so he had said as he showed official identification of some sort — that, diplomats or not, if they were indeed what they all claimed to be, none of them would be allowed to shout in the church. The anglophone calmed himself. He said something was probably hidden in the church, that a search would have to be conducted immediately. But Father Lessard knew this should not be allowed to be done. This was still a Catholic church in Quebec, despite any changes over the years in the society outside, and he was not one who would allow secular people, particularly impolite anglophone Protestants from Ottawa, to do as they pleased. Even though he had nothing whatever to hide.
And so he had told them, all of them. Particularly, he had thought, as they made no mention of passwords. The Quebec police stood silently by, hoping not to be pulled into such a fundamental debate between an old priest in his church and the apparatus of various states.
But then the worm of doubt had been made to gnaw at Father Lessard’s insides. The tall man who spoke French like a Parisian said nothing much at all. But the other two, dark heavy men who spoke yet another sort of French, seemed more menacing somehow, even though they
spoke much more calmly and quietly than the young one.They did not look like diplomats, but they were, they insisted, Vatican envoys.They showed papers, they offered to call the Vatican right from his own church, there, that day, to prove to him how grave a matter he had become involved in.
Father Lessard’s heart began to pound as he remembered it. Surely, he had not made a moral error? Surely, he had been correct to release his secret information to those two young people with the password? The anxiety of it began to make him sweat, made his face redden, and made him feel ill.
They had threatened him with grave consequences if he did not cooperate. The Bishop would be called, immediately. The Pope’s own advisers. Anyone necessary would be called if he did not cooperate. And they wanted an answer immediately. He had searched all their faces, wanted a chance to ponder this alone, to pray for guidance, to be left alone. They would not grant him this, he knew.
So he had decided, eventually, that it was his duty, to the Vatican, to name the place where the two young people had gone. To say simply that they were looking for something there. Not to tell these diplomats about hidden goods, or locations. Not to tell them of passwords and Poles and Duplessis’s man. Just to name the place where the two others had gone and hope that bon Dieu seigneur would intervene on the side of the just.
Father Daniel Emile Hippolyte Lessard had done his duty as best he could in uncertain times. He had betrayed no secrets. His church had not been violated, the rough men had gone, and only one policeman was now left inside. There was peace again, of a kind. He sat in one of the pews near the candles that flickered before statues of saints and rested himself after the trials of that day. He would discuss this, some of this, with the Bishop at the earliest possible moment.
He had done his duty as best be could. He had been relieved of one burden but now had quite another. The worm of moral doubt gnawed incessantly at his insides.
Chapter 17
Their most immediate concern was to avoid being stopped by the provincial police before they made it to Saint-Jean-de-Mantha. Most of the way would be on back roads, probably snow covered and with little traffic. But to get to the right road they would have to take the Laurentian Autoroute for a short while, from Saint-Sauveur to Saint-Jérôme and then on through Saint-Félix-deValois. Most of the Laurentian towns were named after saints, Delaney thought ruefully as he drove south on the highway to the turnoff he needed, and today’s route would take them through much of Quebec Catholicism’s hagiography.
The Mazovia Legacy Page 28
