‘Because I’m concerned he might try to escape the grip of the court.’
‘How? No. It’s not possible.’
‘I’m just being cautious.’ He smiled an assurance into her darkness and glimpsed the hygienic hair net. ‘You’ve helped me again, Irina. You reminded me of a truth beloved by Mr Frenzel. A man’s mistakes, his past? They can work like a key to his future. I want to make sure Roza can turn the lock.’
She sniffed and reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief. A sneeze followed. ‘This is my trial, too, you know I’m there, watching every day Working nights. I don’t need the sleep.’ Woodenly she held out a cold hand. ‘I’ve got to go.
Abruptly she turned and hurried away out of the light and off the carpet, heading back to the queues of people wanting a Big Mac. Anselm almost ran outside after her. But he didn’t because he had nothing to offer; he wanted to give her something — so much more than a hot or cold drink — but all he had was thanks for the tip about mistakes, and he’d furnished that already.
Back at his desk overlooking the glittering skyline, he rang Sebastian. Of course, there might be nothing of interest in the brown box. But if there was… well, time was on the short side. Roza was due to give evidence at 10.30 a.m. the next morning.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Anselm and Sebastian reached Roza’s flat shortly before 11 p.m. The room shocked Anselm by its simplicity: a table, some chairs, scraps of furniture, a mirror, a standing lamp with a yellow shade. He looked again… a bullet on a shelf beneath a mirror. She made tea, not speaking, her soft footfalls pattering around the kitchen. The place was tidy and clean: the surroundings of an ordered mind; the ambience of someone who’d tamed restlessness.
‘We have to do to him what he has done to others,’ said Sebastian. ‘We have to use his past against him.’
‘Have to?’ The question displayed a certain moral revulsion in Roza which unsettled Anselm. He’d had no such sensibility.
‘It’s the only way’ said Sebastian. ‘Otherwise I’m sure he’s going to take something out of Pavel’s file — something made up, something planted before you left Mokotow We have to think like that now; we have to act like it, too, just for tomorrow Afterwards-’
‘No other tomorrow will ever be the same again,’ said Roza.
She sat at her dining table, her black pullover drawing her into the shadows. The light from the lamp was weak. Her face caught a faint glamour.
It was, of course, incongruous to rely on any file as a guide to the truth. Despite appearances, Father Nicodem’s was dramatically incomplete and utterly misleading. Even when the papers gave a full picture, like that of Edward, the image was distorted. But the rub was this: truths were in there. They might need stripping down and cleaning up, but the files contained information. And information, as Brack knew, was power.
‘Roza, we have to get to him first,’ continued Sebastian. He was still wearing his suit. The tie was loose, the top button open. ‘You should meet him. Before you give evidence. I’m convinced that-’
‘Tell me what’s in the file,’ said Roza, in a voice of strained patience.
‘Then we’ll talk about tomorrow’
Sebastian had ploughed through every document generated by the secret police machinery between 1948 and 1989. He’d read Brack’s application form, a memo from Moscow, appraisals by Major Strenk and a string of increasingly critical internal reports from 1965 onwards. It seemed that the further Brack got away from the Stalinist culture of his early manhood, the more out of step he became with the system he served. Promotions ground to a halt. By 1982 they weren’t allowed to beat Politicals any more. He’d been out of his depth, no doubt. But that was all by-the-by Sebastian had distilled the facts into two broad areas. The first was small and important, if only to explain Brack’s obsessions. It was all set out in his application form.
‘He was born in Polana,’ said Sebastian. ‘He mentions the place several times. It’s as though, looking back, Polana was the safe place, as if the family should have stayed there and everything would have been different. But Leon, his father, brought them all to Warsaw He left behind the safe and conventional because he was a man with a mission greater than any individual’s pursuit of happiness. Leon’s life had been given to the oppressed workers. By the late thirties he was a leading light in the Communist Party. A man with ideas and ambition. The Party was dissolved in thirty-eight by the Comintern but Leon appears to have reinvented himself, surviving the purges of the time — purges his son appears to have known nothing about. Leon, above all, was a man who-’
‘-made toys out of old bits of wood and plumbing.’ Roza spoke quietly.
‘Sorry?’ Sebastian glanced at Anselm.
‘Toys. He once made a musket out of a wooden spindle and… I forget.’
‘Who did?’
‘Leon.’
Sebastian nodded sympathetically Anselm watched Roza, sensing, like a hesitant mariner, the approach of something immense beneath the surface of rising waves. It wasn’t dangerous, but it had power. Whatever it was slipped away and Sebastian was talking again.
‘The Germans invaded in-’
‘September nineteen thirty-nine,’ supplied Roza, archly.
‘Sorry, absolutely You know better than me.’ Sebastian took the rebuke but he didn’t slow down. ‘And they immediately began tracking down their ideological enemies, prominent amongst whom, of course, stood Leon Brack.’
Leon and his family went into hiding. What happened next was not entirely clear. Brack’s application form was silent on the matter, but at some point he was hidden in an orphanage where he remained for the duration of the war. Roza’s orphanage. He never saw his parents again. Shortly after Brack had been spirited away they’d been denounced and deported.
‘She cooked fish in lemonade,’ added Roza, and again Anselm sensed that swell of power deep beneath the water. ‘It makes the fish sweet.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Sebastian, uncertainly ‘I’ll give that a try.’
‘How does all this affect the trial?’
Sebastian joined his hands into a sort of wedge, pointing forwards. ‘Directly it doesn’t… but it gives the background to your only chance to silence him.’
‘Tell me how this affects the trial,’ repeated Roza, her voice lowered ever so slightly.
‘Brack joined the secret police believing that his parents had died in Mauthausen. He served the cause year on year, motivated, I am sure, by genuine socialist convictions. For some reason the focus of his drive and grief came to centre upon the Shoemaker, almost certainly because his ideas were the complete antithesis of his own. The Shoemaker was exactly what he set himself up to be: the challenger to Communist ideology. And Brack was looking for him in nineteen forty-eight and he didn’t stop until nineteen eighty-nine. Between times he-’
‘Shot my husband and Stefan Binkowski. How is all this related to tomorrow morning?’
‘Everything he did — his entire life — rests upon a tragic misunderstanding and a profound deceit.’ Sebastian was leaning forward over his wedged hands. ‘If you tell him the truth, the naked truth laid out in his file, I think he’ll lose heart. I don’t think he’ll want to go on. I think it will break him.’
Roza stood up and walked aimlessly into the middle of the room, lost in thought. She turned her eyes on to the mirror… or the bullet. Curiously the earlier impression of old age and round shouldered weariness — evident only a matter of moments ago — had suddenly vanished, as if dropped on the carpet, sloughed off when no one was looking. She returned to the table focused and erect.
‘Do you have the file?’
‘Yes.’ Sebastian tapped the shoulder bag, heaped at his feet.
‘Let me see it.’
For the next hour or so Roza sat absorbed in her reading, slowly turning the pages, while Sebastian made quiet remarks, like a librarian, pointing up key passages and documents of special interest. She pored over the early
