She stared at Anselm, begging him to ask no questions, to simply understand why she needed Marek Frenzel’s backhanders.
‘Irina,’ said Anselm, nodding understanding and pity, ‘I’m not here to embarrass Brack. I’m here in an attempt to bring him before a court.’
‘Oh really?’ She regarded him with polite but mocking disbelief. ‘For what? For crushing someone’s will to live?.’
‘No, for murder,’ supplied Anselm.
Irina’s glasses flashed.
‘Yes, Irina. Maybe you got paid. Maybe you didn’t have much of a choice. But you’ve helped to bring Otto Brack closer to justice. You’ve made a step towards finding your name.
She smiled reluctantly, as if Anselm had produced more flowers.
‘It goes right back to the beginning.” explained Anselm, ‘to the building of the system and the institutions that you’re now ashamed of
… which you wish you’d never served: He leaned over the table slightly, giving emphasis to the trust he was about to impart: the confidence one only shares with upright, decent people. ‘Roza Mojeska witnessed the execution of her husband and another man in nineteen fifty-one. Otto Brack pulled the trigger. Roza.’ like you, has been trapped — but not by shame or regret. Polana wasn’t all about finding the Shoemaker. Brack wanted to confront Roza… to tell her the name of the man who’d betrayed her from the outset; to tell her that she couldn’t condemn Brack in the future without exposing someone at the centre of the Shoemaker’s organisation and intimately connected with his reputation, not to mention that of the Church. Out of esteem for them both Roza kept a long, long silence. But now she’s changed her mind.’
‘Why?’
‘The time is right. The fact is, whatever your motives, whatever your past, she’ll be grateful to you.
Irina had asked the question in a disconnected way, as if her curiosity was a yard behind her memory and understanding. In a searching, faraway voice, she said, ‘ Polana, Roza… it all makes sense.’ I suppose. No other operation meant more to him; no other woman so unsettled him.’ She glanced at a wall clock as if it was time for work. ‘My son asked for a pizza. Will you stay for something to eat? We have a speciality here.’ pierogi… they’re difficult to describe, but I’ve got some in the fridge.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Irina took some persuading, but Anselm insisted that pizzas all round was by the far the simplest option. He didn’t want to say that the national dish now reminded him of Frenzel. The son ate in the sitting room, presumably still hiding from the mujahedeen behind that plumped up cushion. During the break in offensive operations, a homely quiet occupied the small and tidy flat. Stray, dying sunlight stole through the kitchen window. The large plastic clock ticked like a soft pulse. Irina had laid the table precisely, with gleaming cutlery and well-pressed napkins.
‘You said Roza had unsettled Brack,’ said Anselm, inviting more. The phrase had snagged his interest.
‘I’d always thought it strange.” said Irina.’ elbow on the table, her face resting against her hand. She was relaxed. Anselm wondered if he was the first guest; first because he’d come uninvited. ‘At one point he ran over six hundred operations aimed at specific publications in Warsaw, but the one that mattered most was Freedom and Independence, even though there were other papers with a far wider circulation. Polana is the only file that stands out in my memory… even though I knew nothing about what was happening on the ground. And that’s because right at the beginning he called her Roza… just once, by accident, but it was enough to tell me this was no ordinary case; and she wasn’t just another woman.’
On her first day of work in 1982 Colonel Brack had sent Irina to the main SB archive to obtain a file on one Roza Mojeska. A meeting had been planned for the afternoon with the Stasi and they’d asked to see any existing intelligence. All he brought along to the conference room were her interrogation papers from 1951.
The reports of FELIKS — which ran from ‘52 until ‘69 — were left on his desk. He was only going to show them the bare minimum, with nothing up to date, and nothing that might put them on to her present whereabouts.
‘The point of the meeting was to discuss how to track down the Shoemaker,’ said Irina. ‘Colonel Brack and Mr Frenzel represented the SB and there were two officers from the Stasi… I can’t remember their names. Anyway, Colonel Brack explained that Freedom and Independence first appeared at the dawn of time and so on, but that the paper wasn’t that important and hardly worth the effort of a joint operation. He said the only known link to the Shoemaker was a woman who’d vanished into thin air. There was a lot of back and forth, and then the name just came out… he said, “Even if we catch her, Roza won’t tell us anything.” There was a pause and then Mr Frenzel looked up, all innocence and light, and asked.’ “Would that be Mojeska, Sir?” Colonel Brack was beside himself… he went red in the face with embarrassment and rage. He never forgave Mr Frenzel for that.’
But Mr Frenzel had stumbled on to something. Throughout the following months, this so-called unimportant paper showed itself as Colonel Brack’s obsession. It was the only operation he cared about. And Mr Frenzel.’ sniggering and suspicious, knowing it had to be personal, made the case his own priority He had right of access to all the intelligence… and he went off and interviewed FELIKS before Colonel Brack could think of stopping him. In the end, the Colonel had no choice but to work with him.
‘Even so, he found a way of side-stepping Mr Frenzel,’ said Irina, serving Anselm some salad. It was crisp and fresh. ‘I only found out by chance and he asked me not to say anything… and I never have done, until now’
A second phone appeared on Colonel Brack’s desk: one day it wasn’t there; the next it was. She was never to answer it. He’d obviously installed a secure line — evidently part of some covert operation. In itself that wasn’t out of the ordinary, so Irina didn’t give it a second thought, not until the day she dropped an earring. Irina’s office was part of Colonel Brack’s, a small area separated by an arch without a door. She was on her knees behind her desk patting the carpet when she heard Colonel Brack enter his side of the room. Moments later a phone rang…
‘He let it ring for a long time and for some reason I couldn’t move.” said Irina. ‘I just knew he was looking into my corner, checking if I was there… and then he finally picked up the receiver and said, “This is the Dentist.”‘
‘The Dentist?’ repeated Anselm, with a light cough.
‘Yes,’ replied Irina. ‘He said, “I’ll come immediately” And that’s when I stood up. He swung round and looked at me as if I had a gun in my hand. I’d never seen him look so smart. Normally he wore his uniform or a limp suit, but this time he was well turned out, as if he was off to a wedding.’
‘When was this, Irina?’
‘Towards the end of the Polana operation, November nineteen eighty-two. The whole thing was wound up the same week. The phone vanished overnight.’
‘How do you know he was side-stepping Frenzel?’
‘Because he asked me not to tell him about the Dentist. He said it was an operation unrelated to the joint SB/Stasi mandate… then he was off… presumably to meet whoever it was that had just been on the line.’
Anselm couldn’t order his thoughts properly. The caller had almost certainly been John; Brack had been John’s legitimate contact, a voice on the end of a telephone line. Anselm couldn’t get the measure of the surprise because Irina had returned to something they’d touched on earlier: Frenzel’s intuition that Brack had met Roza in the past.
‘Mr Frenzel is not a nice man,’ she said, without apparent understatement, ‘but he’s clever. He has a nose for things. And he’d sniffed something out of Brack’s past. After that slip where he’d used her first name, Mr Frenzel was always making smutty allusions, insinuating that there’d been some lost love in Brack’s life before he’d joined the service. I won’t repeat the kind of disgusting things he used to say.
‘You don’t need to. I can well imagine.’
‘Maybe that’s why I stopped him shooting himself,’ said Irina, as if finding a new angle on to her own behaviour. ‘I suppose I felt sorry for him. Don’t misunderstand me, but he was like a monk — early to work, ascetic, dedicated, diligent, one thing on his mind…’
Anselm didn’t quite nod in recognition, but he coughed again, trying to wave on the epithets, wondering
