They both read the sepia script several times. Anselm wanted to lift each word off the page and squeeze out the meaning, as if they were so many sponges soaked in blood.
‘She was in the building at the same time as Roza,’ said Anselm.
‘Yes:
‘Pure chance, but it makes my skin crawl.’
‘Mine, too.’
‘Is there anything in there — ’ Anselm gestured towards the neat piles thinking of bodies in a morgue — ‘which links Klara to Brack?’
‘No. But they could easily have met; Brack was Strenk’s immediate subordinate.’
He sure was. Father Kaminsky had called them pupil and master, father and son. ‘Anything that links Klara to Roza?’
‘Nothing.’ Sebastian sighed. ‘Being under the one roof is just a coincidence. The Commission were talking to Roza. Klara was talking to the Commission. All it shows is two women on different sides of the fence. They’d made contrary choices. They each paid a price… the cost, in the end, being roughly similar.’
From that perspective, the last document on the conference table was a kind of receipt. In August 1953 a functionary in the Ministry of Public Security had circulated a letter to Departments I, IV, V, VII and section heads at Bureaus A and B informing them (in terms) that JULITA’s stream of intelligence had dried up, a nice enough phrase, sufficiently wide to encompass death.
Sebastian moved along two paces, stopping at the beginning of the second group of records. Again they lay in a row like today’s specials in the canteen.
‘Now we come to John,’ said Sebastian, almost brightly.
Who didn’t know that JULITA had been found hanging from a set of railings. He knew nothing of her self- accusation. Maybe John had tracked down his proud maternal grandparents and seen the two medals that had been slipped under the door by Strenk or whoever.
She’d done important work for the future, they’d have said. She’d made a difference.
‘There is a file on John,’ began Sebastian, opening the green cover and closing it again as if it wasn’t worth a glance. ‘Like every other journalist he was watched but nothing of interest was picked up. His profile and conduct are just like any other correspondent. He doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t attract any attention. The only record of relevance is his expulsion from Warsaw for activities consistent with espionage.’
‘Any mention of Brack?’
‘None.’
‘Thought not.’
A second phone had appeared on Brack’s desk. He’d told Irina not to breathe a word of the Dentist to Frenzel. He’d been up to something that couldn’t make a bleep on anyone’s radar, neither the SB’s nor the Stasi’s.
‘At this point, I thought I’d come to a dead end,’ said Sebastian, hands deep in his pockets. The black stubble showed he hadn’t shaved. He’d been working hard. ‘Just to be sure, I sent off a string of emails to other archive holders throughout the former communist bloc. Nothing came back until this afternoon — ’ he began that relentless drift again from left to right — ‘when these arrived from Bucharest. This time Brack does make an appearance.
Though not immediately explained Sebastian, holding up a report dated 8th August 1979. John Fielding had been arrested by the Securitate at the airport as he was preparing to board a plane for Prague. They’d previously tailed him to a mountain village where he’d met a professor considered to have fallen foul of the social order.
‘I’ll spare you the boring bits,’ said Sebastian, turning the page to a paragraph marked with a yellow Post-it. ‘They already knew the family history from previous correspondence with Warsaw Maybe that’s why they let him go… but not before writing up a quite interesting character description. A wide-ranging interview had shown him to be broadly disenchanted with western politics. A Hollywood actor had finally made it to the Oval Office. He was “embittered” — ’ Sebastian’s fingers opened and closed the inverted commas — ‘following the election victory of Margaret Thatcher the previous May She was, he said, “no friend of the labour movement”. The Securitate analyst deemed John a potential “co-worker”. Someone who might turn if approached in the right way’ Sebastian dropped the report back on the table and picked up the next papers in line. ‘… a prospect that was brought to Brack’s attention two years later.’
In early 1982 he’d carried out a routine check on a journalist newly arrived in Warsaw and had been delighted to receive a copy of the report and the recommendation. Brack — terse and obscure — gave no hint of his intentions.
‘Did he take it up?’ asked Anselm, as if he needed to know.
‘Well, this is where it all gets very interesting,’ said Sebastian, reaching the end of the table and the last selection of documents. ‘You’d have thought that Brack would have put this stuff from the Securitate in John’s file, but he didn’t. He didn’t put it anywhere — remember, I had to get it from Bucharest — instead he seems to have binned the lot or shredded it later, leaving behind one tantalising clue…
Sebastian opened the cover of a large brown ring binder.
‘Now, on its own, this is not a helpful resource,’ he said, sliding his thumb on to another yellow Post-it. He lifted the top pages and lay the binder flat. ‘This is simply an inventory of names comprising agents, potential agents and targets.’
‘Perpetrators and victims?’
‘Yeah.’
‘All mixed up?’
‘Exactly and, as I say not much use if you’ve got nothing else to go on.
‘Unlike ourselves.’
Sebastian nodded, his lips firm and unsmiling. His finger pointed at John’s name, as he’d pointed at Klara’s. In a parallel column was the chosen title: CONRAD.
‘Of course, it’s not unequivocal evidence,’ said Sebastian, moving across the room towards the coffee pot. ‘But it doesn’t get much stronger.’
‘Oh yes, it does,’ said Anselm, taking the little jug of milk. He made a splash in two polystyrene cups. Do you have details on special telephone lines set up during SB covert operations in nineteen eighty-two?’
Sebastian turned slowly appraising Anselm with guarded respect, interested to know what the monk easily distracted by the meaning of life had been up to when he wasn’t talking to Father Kaminsky and Bernard Kolba. ‘Yes, we do.’
‘John can’t even remember his own birth date. He left a phone number in a Warsaw guidebook. 55876. Check it out. I think you’ll find it rang on Brack’s desk.’
Anselm’s investigation had run its term. In a way he’d come full circle, beginning with John and ending with John. For the moment — lying in bed, hands behind his neck — he simply couldn’t grasp the distance between the person he thought he knew and the person whose secret life he’d uncovered. He was stunned and couldn’t reflect with the necessary detachment. Quite apart from any personal considerations, he couldn’t imagine how John might occupy the central plank in Brack’s scheme — and how that scheme could silence Roza for so long. But he did and it had. The Dentist’s private operation had been a ringing success. For some reason, Roza would never contemplate John’s exposure…
But she’d changed her mind. She’d come to London. She’d come to John’s door. She’d come with a statement to help him walk through fire: an account of her life that only showed her understanding of his circumstances; that held out no blame for what he’d done to her in return. And John had stood there, blind, playing the dumb waiter. She’d left him, devastated, as when he’d last seen her; when he’d gone to her Warsaw flat protesting his innocence, offering to find the informer. She’d left him to his blindness. She’d thrown her statement in a bin. Once again, she’d taken pity on someone who deserved to suffer.
But why on earth should Roza want to protect John? As the Prior said, she’d only known him a matter of months.
The following morning — Anselm’s last in Warsaw — he took a listless breakfast. Even the personal hurt seemed far off, shrinking from his nerves. In a daze he packed his bag; he tidied the room; and, coat on, he rang Bernard Kolba to apologise for his crass accusation the day before. The lurch to make reparation yielded an unexpected dividend: the conversation rolled on to the next steps and the mystery of Roza’s present location. She’s still in London, said Bernard. Staying with Magda Samovitz in Stockwell Green. Roza had taken her first holiday in
