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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 living memory. Was there any better diversion, thought Anselm, entering the lift, than to shatter everyone’s illusions, including your own?

Sebastian was waiting for Anselm in the hotel foyer. He took his bag and drove him to the airport with the solicitude of an undertaker holding up the traffic, his mood similar to that of the quiet monk at his side. He’d come dark-suited with a mumbling apology of his own, for how things had turned out. He’d have preferred it if Roza’s informer had been someone at arm’s length.

‘But, then, the point of informers is that they get close. It’s a pity you got burned, too.’

Yes, that was the right word — Anselm woke as the aircraft tilted into dense cloud over England — it was a pity all round.

A pity for Roza. A pity for Klara and for Irina, blunted tools thrown aside. A pity for the fat young man with the plastic Kalashnikov. A pity for Edward, who knew more than he could ever say A pity for Bernard and Aniela who knew nothing. A pity for George Fielding whose love turned sour and Melanie who came on as substitute to play Misery. And John, too. There was pity for John somewhere.

The scale of these dark reflections obscured all thought of Anselm’s one remaining task: the confrontation of his old school friend, the person who’d sent him to Warsaw to find out why Roza had come to London. Instead his mind went elsewhere, seeking a diversion of its own. And it went somewhere altogether interesting.

Mooching round his cell before Compline, warmed to the point of injury by that first sound of bells, he recalled that Roza Mojeska and Father Kaminsky had something in common. Unknown to the other, they’d each shared a friend: Mr Lasky the caretaker at Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. The name had cropped up in Roza’s statement as it had fallen from the mouth of Father Kaminsky In one of those flashes of certainty-without-good-cause — sudden perceptions that Anselm no longer presumed to question — he was sure that the relationship between the three people — an orphan, a caretaker and a priest — lay at the centre of the greater picture, the canvas upon which John had made a late and troubled entry.

‘Maybe Mr Lasky is part of the pity of it all,’ said Anselm, heading down to Compline. ‘A man whom Roza had known as a child, long before she faced the terrors of the night.’

Part Six

The Mind of Otto Brack

Chapter Forty

The woodshed at Larkwood remained standing by some mystery of physics not yet known to modern science. Two of three central beams were cracked. Most of the dark rafters seemed to be unattached at either end. All the main uprights, already bent, were gravely aslant. The caramel wattle and daub was crazed with deep fissures. Chunks were missing, leaving ancient silver twigs peeping out like the stems of dried flowers, their heads long gone.