The Mazovia Legacy

by Michael E. Rose

  They rummaged through these items, both suspecting that they would not find what they sought sitting on open shelves. Delaney shone the flashlight on the wooden panels at the back. There, behind the wine rack, he found the first clear indication that they were in the right place. Someone, years before, had scrawled in what had probably been bright yellow chalk or grease pencil the word “Mazovia.” An arrow pointed to the left. It was very faded now.

  “It’s here,” Delaney said.

  “Oh please,” Natalia said. “Show me.” He moved aside and shone his light in for her to see.

  “Mazovia,” she said. “It’s here.”

  “Somewhere here,” Delaney said.

  “My uncle must have written that himself, all those years ago,” she said. “I would say so,” Delaney said.

  He looked closely in the corner of the armoire indicated by the arrow and then all around the inside again. There was nothing of interest.

  “The priest said it was inside,” Natalia said.

  “There’s nothing interesting in it. Those vestments are worthless.”

  “But that’s what the priest said. In the armoire.” Delaney went around to the left side. He looked at the outside, and peered behind it with the light. The armoire was pushed close up against the wall. He tried to pull it away, but it was too heavy. They stood pondering the problem.

  “The arrow indicates left,” Natalia said.

  “Nothing there.”

  “Perhaps we have to move it left, push it over to the left,” she said.

  “Let’s see if it moves sideways then.” They both went to the right side of the armoire and Delaney gave it a push. Even with all of his weight it would not budge. Natalia came beside him and they pushed together. With the weight of both of their bodies the massive piece moved slightly, making a loud squealing sound as the old wood scraped the uneven stone floor after decades in the same place.

  “Yes,” said Natalia.

  They put their bodies into the work and the armoire slid by inches to the left, groaning ancient wooden groans as it did. Then Natalia let out a cry. Set in the wall behind the piece was a small iron door, about half a person’s height. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  They worked harder and finally got the armoire clear of this small door’s frame. Someone had scrawled “Mazovia” on this as well. They did not bother to speak now. Delaney pulled the tubular iron latch out of its slot and pushed at the low door with his foot. It moved inward with a loud series of creaks.

  “Francis,” Natalia said. “Francis.” Delaney crouched in this secret opening and peered inside with the flashlight.

  “It looks like an old coal room,” he said. “It looks like there’s some bits of coal left in there, a small pile toward the back.”

  “We have to go in,” Natalia said.

  “Yes,” Delaney said. He took off his parka and put it on an old crate.The Browning made a thud as it hit the wooden planks.

  “You wait out here for a bit. I’ll call out to you if I find something.”

  “I want to come in too,” she said. “I’m coming in too.”

  She pulled off her bulky down overcoat and they stood together, quickly chilled in the damp air. “We’ll have to be fast,” Delaney said.

  They both squeezed through the low opening. On the other side was a filthy room clearly used in years gone by to store coal. They could both stand up, but Delaney had to lower his head when he passed under rafters. A narrow iron handcart with cracked wooden handles lay on its side near the door. A small iron ladder rose up on one wall toward what would probably have been in the past a narrow opening for coal deliveries. That opening had been securely and permanently boarded up with thick planks. A small pile of coal still lay underneath the ladder.

  But to the left, away from the coal, sat what looked to be a wooden pallet covered with a greasy tarpaulin. They approached it, both knowing that this, at last, had to be what they had been seeking. Natalia reached onto the tarpaulin and pulled off what appeared to be an old pennant. It was tattered and stained, but intact. It showed a checkerboard pattern with four large red-and-white squares. Rectangles in the same colours surrounded these along the edges.

  “It’s the Mazovia Squadron’s insignia,” Natalia said. “Zbigniew showed me something like this in his photos in Paris. They used to paint it on the side of their planes. My uncle would have had to be the one to leave this here. The only one possible.”

  “Yes,” Delaney said.

  The weight of the story, and of the years and the lives involved in this story, made them both subdued, respectful. They stood for a moment and then pulled off the cover together.

  Even after it has sat unattended for decades, even in dusty places like the one they were now in, even in the narrow beam of a flashlight, gold glows like nothing else in the world. The bars of Polish gold had been neatly arranged in a small stack on the pallet: forty-eight in all. None of the bars gave the slightest sign of having been hidden away for thirty-six years. They were all as shiny and breathtaking that afternoon as they would have been when Stanislaw Janovski had carefully stacked them there in 1959. Natalia and Delaney rubbed their hands over the bars’ buttery surfaces, as everyone who sees gold in large quantities instinctively does.

  “Unbelievable,” Delaney said at last. “Unbelievable.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Natalia said. “All this gold, for all these years. Down here.”

  “It was a good hiding place after all,” Delaney said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “This is worth a fortune,” Delaney said. “Do you realize what something like this is worth?”

  “To my uncle and his people it was worth more than money,” Natalia said.

  “But it was to be used eventually,” he said. “Surely they would have been planning to use it after the war for something. Or they would never have shipped it to Canada at all.”

  “They never had the chance. When the Communists took over they no longer had a country to bring it home to.”

  “But to fight the Communists then,” Delaney said.

  “They never had the chance. Remember what Zbigniew said. There were factions, disagreements, after the war. How would Stanislaw have known how best to use it? Or who would be the best to use it?”

  “But to just leave it here for all those years.”

  “He was waiting for the right moment,” Natalia said. “He was a very patient man.”

  “He never got his moment.”

  “He chose the wrong moment, Francis,” she said.

  They stood silent in the dust and gloom. The bars of gold glowed dimly.

  “Now he has his moment,” Natalia said eventually.

  “Possibly,” Delaney said. “You’re going to have to decide what to do with this now.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I’ll do what my uncle would have wanted done.”

  “That’s going to be a difficult thing to decide.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “And it’s going to be difficult to get these out of here,” Delaney said. “We can’t just toss them in my car. They’re too heavy, for one thing. We’re going to have to come back with a truck.”

  He walked around to the far side of the pallet and saw a small case pushed up alongside a row of the gold bars.

  “There’s something else here,” he said.

  “Really?”

  Natalia hurried over to where he was. They both sat on the edge of the pallet as she examined it. It was a leather-covered rectangular case about the size and shape of an automobile battery, with a handle on the lid and two latches. “Open it,” he said.

  There was no lock. The latches were corroded and stiff but they opened. Inside, something was wrapped in purple velvet. Natalia unwrapped it. Inside the bundle was more gold: a magnificent chalice with
embossed religious scenes and with pearls set around the edge. “Unbelievable,” Delaney said.

  “It’s fantastic,” Natalia said. “I should have remembered we would find something else. Stanislaw’s letters said he had taken something else to hide. Something religious.” She turned this Grail around in her hands. “I knew we would find something like this,” she said. “I dreamed it.”

  She looked up at him, flushed now.

  “Bring it with you,” Delaney said. “But we have to get out of here. We’ll have to come back for the rest after we get organized. We should get out of here.”

  They threw the tarpaulin over the gold again and squeezed out of the coal room into the main part of the cellar.They were chilled and put their coats back on immediately. For a few anxious moments it seemed that the armoire would refuse to budge back into its original position. But after they pushed and strained for several minutes it groaned back into place. Delaney reached inside and rubbed off what remained of the “Mazovia” inscription. He slid the wine rack back into place.

  “We really will have to come back here right away,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will be before someone gets to Father Lessard or to our friend Carpentier upstairs. We’ll have to come back as soon as we can.”

  “Tomorrow,” Natalia said. “No later. We can get a truck somewhere near here.”

  They were both grimy from the coal room. Natalia’s face was streaked with dust. She carried the chalice and the rolled-up Mazovia pennant under her arm.

  “Let’s see if we can leave without saying any good-byes to young Carpentier, shall we?” Delaney said. “Leave him guessing, in case someone else comes?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Natalia said. “What if he thinks the stuff is gone and sends people down here too? We should tell him to keep all of this to himself.”

  As they climbed the stairs back up to the church Delaney still wasn’t sure how to deal with the priest. But when he opened the door and saw the two burly strangers in suits talking to Father Carpentier at the front near the altar he knew that he would not have to decide. He quietly closed the door and pushed Natalia back down the stairs.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Natalia said.

  “There’s a couple of guys out there with Carpentier. God knows who they are. But we’ll have to go out another way.”

  They raced across the uneven stone floor of the cellar to the back once again and Delaney tugged at the oak beam that braced the exit door there. It opened onto a narrow flight of stairs that appeared to head up to an outside door.

  “If that door up there is not locked from the outside, we’re clear,” he said. “The car,” Natalia said.

  She was clutching her precious Grail case as if to never let it go. The pennant she had now pushed into a pocket of her overcoat. “We’ll get to it,” he said.

  The door at the top of the stairs was braced from the inside with a wooden beam, but this came away easily. The sudden grey light from the overcast sky blinded them for a moment after the door opened. It had stopped snowing.

  “Natalia, we have to watch our step now, OK?” Delaney said. “I have no idea who those guys are talking to the priest but we’ve got to assume the very worst on this now. We’ll go to the car, fast, and just leave. We can figure out later when to come back. But we have to be quick.”

  They had to pick their way through the deep snow that had gathered throughout the winter under the eaves of the church. When they turned the corner at the front, Delaney saw the other car. “Fuck,” he said. “They’ve parked us in.” A large white Ford had been parked hard against the back of the Mercedes. They would not be able to back up and drive out.

  “We’ll leave the car,” he said. “We’ll go into the village and wait it out there somewhere.”

  “Without the car?” Natalia said.

  “We have no choice. Let me get something out of the back first.”

  “Francis, no. Let’s just go.”

  “No. Just give me a second. Then we’ll cut across the lake to the village.”

  He darted out into the small parking lot while Natalia waited under the eaves at the side of the church. There was nothing about the Ford that told him anything about who the men were inside. Probably a rental car. It did not look at all like an unmarked police vehicle. The engine still ticked steadily as it cooled down: it had not been there for long. He opened the trunk of the Mercedes and got out the shotgun. He put some extra shells in his parka, and then quietly closed the trunk again.

  It was hard-going through the heavy snow to the lakeshore, but the ice on the small lake itself had been swept reasonably clear by the winds. Only a thin layer of new snow from the afternoon’s light fall lay on it. The walking would be easier there. They set out in silence, single file, for the dense grove of maple and birch and pines on the other side. The village was some distance beyond that.

  Close to the shore near the church someone had cleared space for a small skating rink The skate blades of local children had left complex designs on the ice inside the rink’s snowbank boundaries. No one was skating today, however. Delaney watched Natalia walking purposefully in front of him. In the failing light he felt a strong intuition building that at some point in all of this he had made a grave and fundamental error in judgment. The shotgun he carried gave him no comfort.

  Chapter 18

  They were almost at the opposite shore of the lake when Delaney looked back and saw in the distance the small figure of a man standing at the back door of the church. He was clearly straining to see who was walking across the ice. Delaney did not feel any fear — just the certainty that now things would move very quickly. Or simply end. From across the ice he heard a brief shout and saw the man disappear back inside the church. Natalia heard the shout too, and looked back.

  “They’ve seen us,” Delaney said. “One of them anyway.”

  “Who is it, do you think?”

  “Not police, Natalia,” he said.

  They ran now, and then had to scramble over a high snowbank to get off the ice. It was deeply silent in the woods. It gave them the illusion of safety. They quickly made their plan.

  It had taken them about five minutes to get into the cover of the trees from the time their unknown foe had seen them in the distance. Delaney knew their biggest threat would come if the men in the church decided to take their car around the lake toward the village, to be there as he and Natalia came out of the woods. He very much doubted they would set out across the lake. Surely, Delaney reasoned, such men would not risk exposing themselves on the open lake, or to ambush in the trees, or to getting lost or bogged in snow.

  But for him and Natalia to now risk going back out in the open on the lake themselves and head toward the church on the assumption that the men, both of them, had driven away in their car was a gamble he knew they could not take.The only thing to do was carry on through the woods to the village and hope that the possibility of witnesses there would stop their pursuers from any overt aggression.

  Natalia was breathless from their run. Her face was flushed from the exertion and the cold. Delaney very much wanted to simply get her out of all this and into some place warm and secure. She did not say anything as she stood trying to catch her breath. Delaney’s heart began to ache with the intense connection he felt to this young woman standing with him amongst the snow-laden trees. He supposed some would call that feeling love. He saw no need to name it.

  “We’ll just have to make it to the village, that’s all,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said.

  “Let’s go.”

  Delaney pulled at the action on O’Keefe’s shotgun and pumped a shell into the chamber. The hard mechanical sound was wrong for the peaceful setting. It intruded, warned.

  They found a path of sorts, with the snow packed by locals cruising the woods on snow
mobiles. The walking was difficult but not impossible and Delaney knew such a path would eventually have to come out on a road or in the village itself. They walked for a while in silence. There was nothing they could say.

  It was hard, slow going. Natalia was behind him now. Delaney watched the path ahead of him intently, listened intently for any sound not muffled by the snow.

  When they suddenly saw the man they did not know was named Ferramo coming around a turn in the path ahead, all three of them stopped for a millisecond in their tracks. In that millisecond before the man fired, Delaney was able to push Natalia roughly off the path and down into the deep snow beside it. She fell heavily, and cried out as she was hit. Delaney fell too, but managed to flounder around in the snow to a sitting position and clumsily fire off a blast from the shotgun. He pulled the action and fired again, and then again, at the firing figure approaching.

  The noise was deafening. Delaney’s ears rang and his shoulder ached from where the gunstock had slammed into it. Melting snow streamed from his face. His three shots were gone. The gunman, if he was still alive, would have a clear run now. But there was silence.

  Delaney got up on his knees and saw the man lying on his back in a circle of crimson snow. He looked over to where Natalia lay wounded. She was not dead. She was simply lying prone, as an animal does when hopelessly cornered. A small circle of red also stained the snow near her. “Natalia,” he called out.

  “I’m all right,” she said, but still not moving. Her face was in the snow as if she was unwilling to leave this chill blanket. “He’s hurt my side.”

  Delaney moved to where Natalia lay. She was limp and didn’t seem aware that she was lying in deep snow instead of on a bed. Her eyes stared at him, dark and wide.

  “Natalia, are you OK?” he asked.

  “Yes, Francis. I think so.”