On reaching the door, Anselm turned around — not to say anything but just to have one last look at the man who’d never be brought to court. By the time the European Cup kicked off in Praga, he’d be a very rich man. There’d be a wine bar called Frenzel’s or a boutique selling silk ties and brightly coloured cotton socks. He flicked open a pocket knife and began prising open the oyster.
‘I’m having this one,’ he said, smirking. ‘Even if it kills me.’
The phone in Anselm’s room rang at 8.39 p.m. Krystyna said his visitor had arrived. She was waiting in the foyer.
‘I’m on my way down.’
It was a stab in the dark, but while listening to the evidence Anselm had tuned into the voices of other witnesses, other experts on the Terror. Irina had said Frenzel used people’s mistakes; Father Nicodem had said Brack trapped people with their past. And Anselm had wondered if there might just be some handle on to Roza’s persecutor, some mistake, some element of his past that might be used to avert what he was planning.
‘Here it is,’ said Irina, holding out the brown cardboard box as if it were Christmas. ‘I don’t know what’s inside. Mr Frenzel told me it was for your eyes only’
The jokes didn’t end. He even played at spies.
‘Thank you.
She was standing marooned on the red carpet, a short distance from the entrance, exposed, it seemed, by the bright lights. She wasn’t comfortable with the opulence. She didn’t belong with decent, well dressed people. Her shapeless coat was wet again with rain. The hood was up, as at their first meeting. She’d come from work in her green McDonald’s trousers and black sensible shoes. She spoke in a rushed, sore voice.
‘Is this for the trial? Is this going to bring him down? Am I part of it again?’
‘I hope so, Irina. Do you want a hot drink? A cold one?’
‘Nothing. Will it help?’ She pointed at the box in Anselm’s hands. ‘I don’t know I want to understand him, that’s all. If we understand someone, we can reach them… far into them, even if it’s something they don’t want; often without them knowing.’
‘Why do you want to reach him? No one can reach him. I should know’
‘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.’