by Ben Pastor
Retz caught Bora’s attention. “I don’t know how we’re going to fit all the Jews in Cracow into this place. It’s true you can cram them tighter than sardines, though.” He put his gloves on, bending his head towards his colleague a little. “I’ll tell you a secret, Bora, though you probably guessed it already. I’m in love.”
Bora pretended stolidity. “With Frau Kowalska?”
“Why, no! Not Ewa. Ewa’s all right. She’s really all right in certain respects. No, much younger. Afresh little piece. God, how wonderful women are at twenty!” Retz couldn’t detect any sign of agreement or disagreement in Bora, so he said, “Satisfy a curiosity of mine, Bora: what do you do after hours? That is, other than playing Schumann or studying Russian. How do you keep yourself, you know, well-balanced?”
“I drive around, Major.”
Retz failed to understand the irony in Bora’s words. “Well, you ought to do something else other than driving around Cracow. Doesn’t it get tedious dealing with nuns day in, day out?”
“I do as I am ordered.”
The boy with the packages stopped before they came back to the Corpus Christi church, which marked the west end of the ghetto. Retz’s BMW waited north of the church, and, seeing the officers come, the driver opened the back door for them. The major tossed a coin to the boy, who put the packages in Bora’s hands and ran off with all the speed his clogs allowed.
Bora handed the packages to the driver. The visit had depressed him, though he was careful not to give that impression to Retz. Retz took his place in the BMW and said, “You should take life less seriously.”
27 November
Sister Jadwiga dried her hands with the rough cloth of her apron. She was a large nun with straggly grey hairs on her chin, something like a sparse beard coming out of prominent moles.
“Niet.” She spoke Russian fluently, but still wouldn’t talk to Bora about the abbess. Bora suddenly came to the point of losing his temper, visibly enough for Father Malecki to interject a few words of advice, which the nun took in sullenly.
“She doesn’t want to talk because she has something to hide,” Bora burst out. “She’s either seen something or heard something and doesn’t want to spill it out. I can tell her in Russian or you can tell her in Polish, Father. I will hear what the matter is!”
Malecki showed that he understood. “Siostra Jadwiga.” He began a stern homily that lasted a full five minutes. Bora didn’t understand it and didn’t care. He paced back and forth until the curt defensive replies from the nun grew longer and more tremulous. Malecki was breaking down her resistance with a steady flow of hard-sounding words, at the end of which Bora turned away from the gory crucifix and to the unexpected scene of Sister Jadwiga beginning to cry.
Eventually she led the men out of the waiting room. They went through a bare hallway, up a ramp of stairs and down an elbow-shaped corridor.
Bora remembered having been here before. He recognized the plaster statue of the Madonna with a tinsel crown of stars. Sister Jadwiga stopped in front of it to cross herself, and he was about to ungraciously urge her forwards when she lifted the statue by the elbows and without effort rested it on the floor.
“What is she doing?” Bora asked.
Malecki said he had no idea.
Sister Jadwiga dabbed her eyes and blew her nose in a napkin-sized handkerchief before removing the embroidered doily from the statue’s pedestal. Carefully she folded the doily over the window sill and lifted the hollow wooden pedestal straight up.
Bora and the priest stared at the floor. Malecki didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Bora said something in German. The tinsel stars on the Madonna’s halo tinkled when he crouched to lift by the barrel one of the hidden guns.
Minutes later, they formed a most unlikely centrepiece on the nuns’ refectory table. Bora had been careful not to touch the stocks with his bare hands. Under Malecki’s troubled scrutiny he laid the weapons in a row, five of them.
One after the other, he released the clip catches to check the magazines, and laid them - full as they were - alongside each gun. His movements appeared to Malecki intentionally slow or exacting. Whatever hung in balance here depended on how Bora would take the presence of weapons in the convent.
“Ask her where she found them.”
Malecki repeated the question to Sister Jadwiga, and already Bora was adding, “Tell her not to lie to me. The SS searched the convent, so I know the guns were not under the statue at that time. I want to know where and when she found them.”
In his second-floor office on Rakowicka Street, Retz laughed into the receiver. He balanced his chair on its hind legs, one knee against his metal desk. “I knew you’d like them, luby. I chose them with you in mind. Do I get to see you tonight? Yes, I know you’re rehearsing, but you can find an excuse to leave early, can’t you? Just tell her you have to go.” He set the chair down, suddenly eager. “Come on, Helenka. You have to come. You have to come see me. Tonight, yes. Why not tonight? I’m going to die if you don’t come.” A knock on the door caused him to sit up and cover the receiver with his hand. “Yes, what?”
“Major,” an orderly said as he looked in. “The shipment of bedsheets has arrived.”
Retz waved the man off. “Later, later. Close the door. Nothing, Helenka, just someone at the door. You’ve never come to see me, darling. It’s time. It’s time. Don’t you love me enough?”
In the convent’s refectory, a deadly silence accompanied Bora’s study of the cache of weapons. He was irritable, hard-eyed. Now that Sister Jadwiga had left, Malecki drew close enough to the table to come within the German’s peripheral vision.
“Don’t say anything, Father,” Bora warned him.
“Well, you do the talking, then.”
Bora did just that. Blood had drained from his face, so that the whiteness made him look alien and young. “These are Polish Army Radoms, Father Malecki. Their presence here is as damning as I can think of.”
“Do you honestly think the sisters used any of them?”
“Das macht nichts!” Bora shouted. The passage from calm to anger happened so suddenly, Malecki didn’t know how to react to it at first.
“What matters, then?”
“Their presence matters! Their being here and their being hidden here matters! Who else was here on the day of the murder, or at any other time? You are lying to me and I can see clearly that the convent will have to be handled in a different way!”
Malecki swallowed. In the face of Bora’s outburst, he had a rash lack of fear. “Is it the fact that you’re being ‘lied to’ that makes a difference? Because in that case, Captain, rest assured no one is lying to you. If Sister Jadwiga says that she found the guns on the day after the search, I believe it.”
“On the roof?”
“Why not on the roof? The workers had climbed on it to check the damage to the shingles. The roof can be reached the same way you can walk from the corridor to the cloister, on the low wall. Oh, yes, Captain Bora. I noticed that, too.”
“Are you telling me that a seventy-year-old nun climbed on a steep wooden roof in search of weapons? Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I think you’re hasty in your conclusions. The icy rain might have caused the canvas bag to slip from its hiding place behind one of the chimneys. She noticed it from her window and reached for it with a cherry-picker. Why not go and check if it can be done?”
Bora furiously returned the clips into the guns, and put these inside his briefcase. “I’m going to order a thorough investigation of this. From now on you’ll deal with the SS.”
Malecki didn’t know what came upon him but as he watched Bora begin to leave the room, he dementedly reached for him, grabbing him at the shoulders. Bora swung around, “Don’t you touch me!” but Malecki held him fast then. Bora was amazingly pale. He said, “Get your hands off me, Father, or as true as God is I’m going to hit a priest.”
Malecki didn’t even hear him. Bora broke out of the hold with effort - the pri
est was strong, heavy-muscled - and made for the door. Malecki tackled him. Bora fell on his knees and was already reacting as he did. He half-turned and struck the blow of a closed fist on the priest’s face.
Blood sprayed out of Father Malecki’s nose. For an instant he was tempted to strike Bora back - he knew he could floor him with a professional uppercut, especially as he still lay on him.
He pulled back instead, slowly, letting the red trickle find its way out of his nostrils, to soil the Roman collar and the front of his clergyman’s vestments.
Bora came to his feet also. Breathing hard, he retrieved his cap from the floor and wore it. “I warned you,” he said. “You asked for it, Father Malecki.”
Malecki fished a plaid handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his nose and chin. “Hitting a Catholic priest, Captain: how will you explain it to the archbishop?”
“Don’t try to pull that, Father, I’m not in the mood for it.”
Malecki shrugged. “Actually, if being punched in the nose convinced you that we ought to trust Sister Jadwiga on this one, it was worth it. Must you contact the SS right away?”
Retz was in a vile mood that night. It was obvious that he’d waited until ten o’clock for someone to come, and that someone hadn’t shown up.
He strode to the door of the apartment’s library, where Bora was studying Russian verbs.
“Bora, how many times must I tell you not to leave the blade inside the safety razor after shaving? It dulls it and makes it rust.”
“I didn’t even think about it, Major. We use different razors, so there’s no need for the major to worry.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. Weren’t you taught basics in army school?”
Bora said he’d pay attention in the future. Retz lingered for a red-faced moment on the threshold and then was gone. Soon he was opening the front door. “I’m going out, Bora. Take any phone messages for me.”
His car had just roared away from the kerb below when the phone rang.
It was a young woman’s voice, speaking German with a Polish accent. Bora said that Major Retz was not in.
“Kindly tell him that Helenka called. We’re still rehearsing and I couldn’t get away, because I was given the lead part.”
“Is there a last name?” Bora asked.
“Yes, Kowalska. Helenka Kowalska.”
28 November
The meagre frame of Colonel Schenck held up the uniform like a coat hanger, but all the same he had a look of great energy, and right now of sarcastic relish as well.
“You hit the priest in the face?” A light of geniality fleeted across his leathery features. “I hope you were well-justified.”
Bora explained. The colonel found the episode hilarious. He’d already gone through the evidence of weapons, freely handling them and remarking on their obsolescence compared to German handguns.
“Well!” He disparagingly held one of the pistols by its long barrel. “Vis Model 35, the famous Polack version of the Colt Browning - was one of these used to kill the abbess?”
“I doubt it. The magazines are loaded, but the barrels are still packed with grease.”
“Then we needn’t make a big issue out of them. Caches are turning up all over the place, and the SS are after them like dogs in heat. We don’t need to give them another lamp post to smell.”
“But even if the cache was an aberration, and somehow unknown to the sisters, we must assume that others had access to the convent. What if they were the same who committed the murder?”
“The murder isn’t a matter the SS are investigating: you are.” Schenck snickered. “Keep it in the family, Bora. This is no bait you wish to throw out to outsiders, especially after a Wehrmacht officer smacks a priest from a non-belligerent country over it.”
“I’m very sorry about embarrassing my command, Colonel.”
“Sorry? In your place, I’d have knocked the American’s teeth in!”
Black-edged posters with Mother Kazimierza’s name were posted in nearly every street. The first Bora noticed covered older notices on the side of a church portal, where a wooden bulletin board had room for several of them.
The fact that no complaints had come from the Curia led him to believe that Father Malecki had decided not to report the scuffle to the archbishop, or hadn’t yet done so. Actually, Bora felt little guilt over it. Walking back from the SS command, he rather congratulated himself on having finally extracted from Salle-Weber the location of Father Rozek, the priest who’d secured the work crew for the nuns. He was detained in a camp to the north-west, towards Czestochowa.
Schenck had told him to go see Rozek after work tonight, and meanwhile to take an hour off for lunch. Bora knew Schenck was priming him with a mind to take him east to contact occupying Russian forces at Lvov. He’d mentioned it in passing, asking him how his Russian was coming along. Bora couldn’t wait, and looked forward to the change.
The restaurant was called Pod Latarnie, and bore a telltale gilded iron sign in the shape of an oil lamp. It was frequented by German officers but not interdicted to Poles. Bora had come to it with Retz once and liked it.
“I’m by myself,” he told the waiter. “I’d like a table by the window.”
A few blocks away from the restaurant, at the Curia the archbishop’s frown seemed chiselled on his forehead for ever.
“This American way of doing things!” he chastized, facing Malecki. “We’re not in the Wild West, Father!”
“The lawlessness of the times is much like it, if Your Eminence allows.”
“But assaulting an officer of the occupation army, Father Malecki! Did you not think that if it doesn’t reflect on you as an American, it still does as a member of the clergy? Whatever happened to turning the other cheek?”
“Had I turned the other cheek, the captain would have broken my jaw.” Malecki tried to ignore his swollen nose, while the archbishop seemed to find it a focus of engrossed interest. It was best not to mention the time he’d surprised a thief with the church money box and sent him to Passavant Hospital after knocking him down. “I didn’t actually strike him, so—”
“Enough, enough. We’re not in a gymnasium, enough talk of striking. The matter of the hidden weapons is what anguishes me above all. What will you say if you’re brought in to testify?”
Malecki didn’t answer, thinking it was best to look away.
At the Pod Latarnie Bora was also looking away. By stretching only the fraction of an inch further, he could have caught full sight of the generous cleavage revealed by Ewa Kowalska’s dress. He already saw plenty from where he sat, while she bent down to put her gloves in the spacious leather bag at her feet. He turned his eyes to the centre of the restaurant, so as to appear less than interested when Ewa sat up.
“Thanks for letting me sit at your table,” she said. “I didn’t realize how many people ate lunch out, and I didn’t expect the place to be full.”
“Well, you can see there are more Germans than your fellow countrymen here.”
Ewa did not look around. “I’m actually not Polish at all.” She smiled. “I was only born here. My father and mother were ethnic Germans, theatre artists in Warsaw. The name ‘Kowalska’ is something I chose because it is so typically Polish. My real name is Olbrycht.” It was not lost on her that Bora kept his hands clasped on the table so that the wedding band showed on his ring finger. She obliged him by looking at it. “You look quite young for one who’s married.”
Bora swallowed. “I’m not young, really. I just turned twenty-six.”
“What’s young, then?”
“I don’t know. Twenty, I expect.”
Ewa, who wore no rings on her hands, spread her fingers in front of her. She said, quickly admiring her painted nails, “Am I mistaken, or do you mind my sitting here?”
“Not at all. I hope Major Retz doesn’t mind.”
“Richard is out of town today.” She smiled, realizing that Bora wondered how she knew. “Truthfully, I’m not attracted
to younger men.”
“Yes. The major told me.”
“He told you?”
Bora shrugged. “I understand. You’re probably used to more seasoned men.”
“I believe the word is ‘experienced’.”
“One can be experienced at twenty-six.”
Ewa found Bora’s stare very direct. She was sitting in the light, and knew that even the smallest wrinkle showed this way. Too bad the German had already been sitting with his back to the window when she’d come in. It was the seat she preferred.
Bora caught her insecurity without perceiving the cause. True, he noticed thin lines under Ewa’s eyes, where the skin was thin and brittle. Make-up covered her skin well elsewhere, but under her eyes it only made it look more brittle if she smiled. A little sag of the chin stayed visible, even though she kept her neck straight and shoulders thrown back.
Retz had told him how old she was. She was his mother’s age exactly. Had a daughter and a son about his age. Bora doubted Ewa had planned to meet him here, although she might have seen him through the window and decided to walk in. There was something she wanted to find out, and he suspected what it was. The waiter came by, and Bora told him to ask the lady first.
“Major Retz and you don’t seem to have much in common,” she remarked, pointing at her choice on the menu.
“That’s true.” Bora poured wine in her glass. He shook his head when the waiter offered him the menu. All of a sudden he wasn’t hungry. But he drank the wine.
“You’re not going to eat?” Ewa asked.
“Not right now. I don’t have much time.”
“Should I, then?”
“You should.”
Soon the steaming plate of “pigeons” - ground meat in cabbage leaves - drew a waving partition of vapour between them. Ewa cut through one of them with her fork.
“Does the major confide much in you?”
“No.”
