The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  Natalia pored over maps from the glove compartment even though he had assured her he knew the way. She, like Delaney, often looked behind them and over to the lanes on the other side of the continuous mound of dirty snow that divided the highway. He was careful to keep to the speed limit, despite their desire to rush onward to the last stop on this journey and to complete this complex task of theirs. How exactly to end it, how it might be allowed to end, Delaney could not say.

  “I hope Father Lessard calls the other priest for us like he said he would,” Natalia said.

  “I think he will,” Delaney said.

  “I hope the other priest will cooperate.”

  “He should.”

  “I hope we can find those things.”

  “Me too. And find a way to get them out of there. Father Lessard said your uncle had some heavy work to do back then.”

  This silenced her. She sat stiffly, nursing her various hopes until they reached Saint-Jérôme. Then she seemed to relax as they turned east onto Route 158. Delaney relaxed a little too. Now they were off the main highway used by Montrealers heading for the ski hills and on a secondary road used mainly by the farmers who had neither the taste nor the time for skiing. The white fields were featureless except for the odd stretch of wood-and-wire fence, greyblack against the whiteness, or the leafless maple trees, or the aging farm buildings that stood like islands in a sea of snow.

  The car was warm, running well. It felt safe inside. Natalia looked out the window for a long time, saying nothing. Then she said suddenly: “I realize now that I haven’t been dreaming at all lately. It has only just occurred to me now.”

  “Neither have I,” Delaney said.

  He had started to enjoy, in Europe, playing her therapist games with a morning’s stock of dreams. Now there were none.

  “We have been completely extraverted since we left Como,” she said. “Completely outer-directed.”

  “Does that always have to be quite such a bad thing?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said.

  “Where’s the harm?”

  “Things can creep up on you,” she said. “From the unconscious. If you don’t pay attention.”

  Delaney was someone whose energies for years had been neither innernor outer-directed. He had simply been a paid observer of the directed energies of others, writing down observations from the sidelines in his reporter’s notebook. This had all changed, of course, after he met Natalia. But for today he thought it wise to remain very much outerdirected. He left Natalia to her introversion, and drove.

  *

  Hilferty no longer knew where to direct his mounting anxiety. He was sick to death of this whole disastrous operation. He really was. It had been a disaster from start to finish. He was trying, as he drove fast down the Autoroute in his oversized government automobile, to understand just where it had started to go so badly off the rails.

  You could pick any number of points on this one, he realized. Not watching those first two Polish agents closely enough after they hit Montreal, for example. That was probably the first mistake in the series. That gave them an opening to go after the old man, and then the shit had very quickly started to hit the fan.Then they had stupidly let those same two guys take out the old priest in Lachine. Asleep at the switch again. And the next mistake, maybe the biggest, though God knows he would never admit this to Smithson and Rawson, was probably approaching Delaney in Montreal. Getting him involved at all. That had also been a very, very bad move. In retrospect.

  Hilferty looked over to where Stoufflet was sitting on the passenger side of the car. This guy was another mistake. How did CSIS allow itself to always get saddled with all of this inter-agency bullshit anyway? The diplomatic niceties, the giveand-take for services rendered overseas. First the French, in this one anyway. Now the fucking Vatican. God knows who else he’d have to shepherd around this godforsaken province next.

  He looked in the rear-view mirror. The Vatican bastards were keeping up all right. He resisted the urge to speed up, to lose them on the slippery highway, and to finish this up the way he wanted to finish it up. But they were along for this ride and there was not a damn thing he could do about it. For services rendered. He did not at all buy into the argument that when a friendly security service helped CSIS out in an operation they should then be allowed to land right in the thick of it when things went back over to home turf. They were now on his ass, breathing down his goddamn neck, and everything was going to hell.

  He did not like their style, any of these Vatican guys. He had not liked it when their crowd sidelined him in Rome, allowed the Poles to get heavy, way too heavy, with the girl. He had wanted to step in, but it was not his turf, they said they wanted to wait and watch, and they sidelined him. That could have turned very bad. They could quite easily have had two dead Canadians on their hands back there, rather than two dead Poles. Things could have gone much worse. But then he had owed them. They had cleaned up the little mess that Delaney left them, and CSIS owed them.

  So here were these Vatican guys with him right now, riding around Quebec like tourists. Observers. Diplomatic niceties for him to worry about as this thing slid further and further off the rails. In his most paranoid moments, Hilferty wondered if they were really Vatican at all or just another couple of freelancers who had somehow gotten wind of this thing. Their credentials looked to be in order, but credentials weren’t worth a pinch of shit these days anyway.

  This whole mess comes from having a goddamned Polish Pope, he thought suddenly. His people then feel impelled to watch over their boy in Warsaw, watch his every goddamn move. And that’s what comes from having a former electrician, for Christ’s sake, running the show in Warsaw in the first place. When a country bumpkin Polish electrician surrounds himself with thugs and carpetbaggers and spooks and then figures out he’s got to start playing hardball to win the next election. When someone starts to get interested in some far-fetched story an old guy has to tell in Montreal and then figures there might be something in it for their side.

  But then it’s impossible for the dumb bastards to tell who’s on first anymore, with spooks and crooks falling over themselves in Warsaw at the moment, so Walesa, or somebody else over there, goes crying to Rome for help. That’s when things start to get ugly, Hilferty thought. When you lose control of these situations — allow yourself to lose control. It’s impossible to tell who the good guys are after that. Who’s working for whom. Who’s doing what on whose behalf. In Warsaw, or Rome, or, for that matter, Montreal.

  It would be hard to convince anyone that the good guys in this thing would have wanted, for example, to take out that crazy reporter O’Keefe back down in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, as the two Vatican guys had obviously wanted to do. They could barely hold themselves back. Smithson and Rawson had both sounded like they were going to have strokes when he tried to tell them how it had unfolded at the farmhouse. Rawson was so steamed that he was on his way to meet them at the church in Saint-Jean-de-Mantha at this very minute. And our man Rawson did not like straying very far from Ottawa anymore unless he absolutely had to. Especially in winter. Taking over the operation from here on in, he had said. Bringing in back-up, he said. And handling the recalcitrant Delaney himself.

  The Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu incident had been, Hilferty admitted this, a very bad fuck-up indeed.

  He could see why his masters in Ottawa were scrambling. But who would have guessed that this guy O’Keefe, a reporter, not an agent, would be armed to the teeth in there and start blasting away at them with a shotgun? With his wife and kid around, for Christ’s sake. And now jumping up and down in custody somewhere, making all sorts of threats and allegations. That’s not how these things were supposed to work. Especially in Canada. And especially, these days, on Quebec turf. Smithson and Rawson were going to have to do some very fancy explaining to those separatist bastards down in Quebec City.

  Hilfert
y turned onto Route 158. No idea, really, how far ahead Delaney and the girl might be and still a long cold drive ahead. He looked in his rearview mirror. These guys, on the other hand, were still all too close. Ferramo driving; looking jetlagged, in need of a shave, grim. And Tremonti, the really rough one, with the dead eyes. He was the problem, Hilferty knew. He’d be the one to watch from here on in. He had been the one to seriously want to take out that crazy reporter bastard back in Saint-Jean.Too quick to go for his weapon. No worries about turf, about who’d clean up after him. Just wanted to blow the guy away and worry about the consequences later. Lucky things didn’t turn out worse than they had.

  He’d bear more watching, that one would, Hilferty thought. Both of them would.Thugs. With Vatican authority. Maybe.

  Stoufflet was complaining again about how much he wanted un petit café. The fucking French simply cannot function without their coffee, Hilferty thought. But there was no way he was going to stop for coffee just when this thing was coming to a head. No way in the world. Anyway, they were in the middle of nowhere now. Rural Quebec at its windswept best. Fields for miles on either side and not a house or a restaurant in sight. Hardly the place to stop for a coffee.

  He simply could not believe it when the Italians suddenly flashed the lights on their big rented Ford, flashed them and flashed them and motioned for Hilferty to pull over. He shook his head at them in the rear-view mirror, but they flashed their lights again and honked the horn. Surely they weren’t desperate for coffee too.

  He pulled over. It was very quiet, and cold.

  “Qu’est-ce qui ce passe?” Stoufflet asked.

  “I don’t fucking know,” Hilferty said. “They want us to pull over.”

  “Mais, merde. Il y a rien ici. Rien. Why do they stop here?”

  Things became clearer as Hilferty rolled down his window, letting in a great gasp of freezing air. Ferramo and Tremonti were walking toward his car.

  They both had their guns out. Glocks. Wickedlooking guns, Glocks were. Hilferty had never liked them. But by the time he had fully understood why they had their guns out it was too late, far too late. The operation was as far off the rails for Hilferty as it was ever going to be.

  Ferramo came around to the passenger door, and fired three fast shots into Stoufflet through the window. Shards of glass exploded over everything. The Frenchman’s body shuddered and he was suddenly very bloody and very dead. Hilferty let out a yell and tried to get out of the car on his side. Tremonti kicked the door shut again, and killed him with two shots to the head. The noise died away quickly. There was nowhere for it to go.

  *

  It had started to snow gently when Delaney pulled up to the church. There was already a white dusting on surfaces previously cleared. The sun was a bright grey circle through leaden clouds. There were no other cars in the parking lot and the church was on a quiet curved wooded road a long way outside the village they had driven through. A small frozen lake lay smooth and white behind the churchyard. There was no one to be seen or heard.

  Delaney wanted to leave the car on the road somewhere away from the church so they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. But he suspected they would need the car close by to load things into if they were lucky enough to find whatever it was that had driven them this far. Or perhaps to get away quickly if necessary. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Natalia stood quietly beside him while he chose a few items from the trunk. He knew her well enough by now to understand that the more anxious and frightened she became, the deeper and longer were her silences. Snow began to gather steadily on her hair and shoulders.

  He resisted the urge to bring in the shotgun.The Browning was already in his parka, had been there all day. But he did take the shotgun out of its case and lean down to load three shells into the chamber. This appeared to have no effect on Natalia: she apparently expected this behaviour now from the people around her. He put O’Keefe’s flashlight in his parka as well. The Bushmills and the Gideon Bible he left where they were, for emergencies of another kind. As he walked with Natalia up to the front doors of yet another Quebec Catholic church, his coat pockets felt suitably laden down with equipment for this last, possibly dangerous excursion.

  This afternoon’s priest was not at all cut from the same cloth as Father Lessard. Father Carpentier was young, perhaps the same age as Lessard would have been when he was marrying Polish expatriates back in the 1950s. And Father Carpentier was an exceedingly frail, nervous young man. He seemed to shiver in his black priest’s suit — no clerical robes for this generation of priests, at least not on a weekday afternoon — and he peered at them through a tiny pair of round spectacles. His head was already balding badly, and the entire effect was of some underfed and highly strung domestic animal. Still, he did not turn them away.

  “Father Lessard told me you would be coming,”

  Father Carpentier said as he closed the church doors behind them. His was a much smaller church than the one in Saint-Sauveur. And it had little of the carved decoration and dramatic lighting of Father Lessard’s. But it was nonetheless a substantial stone structure with a high vaulted ceiling and the requisite images of saints lining the side walls.

  “And you know why we are here, Father?” Delaney asked.

  “As much as Father Lessard thought he should tell me,” the priest said.

  “Will you help us?” Natalia asked.

  “I will not hinder you, madame,” he said. “That is as much as I can do.”

  “Thank-you,” said Natalia.

  “You know there has been something hidden in this church for many years?” Delaney said. “Something we now have to get?”

  Delaney realized as he spoke that probably this young priest was not even born until after Premier Duplessis had prevailed on priests and nuns to hide Polish treasures around the province.

  “I was startled to learn of this today for the first time, monsieur.”

  “Are you angry about this?” Natalia asked. A psychologist’s question. Father Carpentier looked at her sharply.

  “I am not happy about it, madame,” he said.

  “Well, after today it will be over and we won’t interfere with your church again,” she said. “That would be best, madame. If it is possible.”

  They stood uncomfortably together in the underheated church for a moment. Delaney was unsure how much to tell this young man, how much needed to be told before they would be allowed to begin rummaging around in his church. But Father Carpentier was eager enough to end this thing that he decided for them.

  “Father Lessard tells me that what you need to find is in the cellar, monsieur,” the young priest said. “He said you must look carefully at the nave end of the cellar, in the large armoire that is there. He said you would be able to find what you’re looking for there.”

  “In an armoire?” Delaney said.

  He felt that this was a very weak hiding place for something as valuable as what they expected to find. Or perhaps a hiding place for something very small.

  “That is what he said.”

  “All right,” Delaney said. “Maybe it would be best if we looked for these things without you.”

  Father Carpentier had clearly not intended involving himself any further than his priestly allegiances required.

  “That is what I would prefer, too, monsieur,”he said.

  “We may be some time,” Delaney said.

  “I have work that must be done in here, monsieur. And in the presbytère also, if you take a very long time.”

  “Fine,” Delaney said.

  Father Carpentier led them to a door just to the right of the front entrance. He opened it and turned on a light switch. A set of aging wooden stairs disappeared into the musty gloom.

  “Voilà,” Carpentier said. “Down that way. Walk directly to the back.”

  The priest said nothing else and hurried away. Delaney l
ooked at Natalia. He had expected much more resistance, more suspicion, than this. “He’s frightened,” she said.

  “He has reason to be,” Delaney said. “Let’s hurry up.”

  They went carefully down the worn steps. They found they needed no flashlight. A row of light bulbs had been set in the rafters of the old stone cellar and the weak yellow glow was enough for them to see. An occasional high small window also let in some pale winter light. Dust swam in shafts wherever light penetrated. Bits and pieces of furniture and some old pews lay around near the stairs. There were some trunks and crates further in, but for the most part the cellar was empty. It ran the length of the church and from where they stood the back wall where they were headed was in deep shadow. They walked that way.

  At the back, past a smaller enclosed furnace room that smelled sharply of heating oil, was a stout wooden door secured with a piece of timber fitted into two iron brackets. Delaney was certain this would lead up some stairs to the back of the church or to the outside. And there was a giant old armoire against the back wall just as Father Carpentier had said there would be. It stood almost eight feet tall and very wide, clearly designed for such spaces and not for the small farmhouses in the region. It appeared to be made of hard Quebec maple. There was carved lattice in the door panels.

  Natalia opened one of the doors. There were some folded pieces of aging vestments on a shelf inside; dusty, neglected, ruined. A small rack held some equally dusty bottles of wine, for Communions that had never been celebrated. In a battered cardboard box were some bits and pieces of ecclesiastical paraphernalia, apparently out of fashion: brass candlesticks, red glass lanterns, and bits of candle end. A very large stack of mouldy prayer books took up another section. But there was little else.