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 appraisals written by Major Strenk. She stared, expressionless, at the NKVD memo from Moscow, the blunt tool (said Sebastian) that would, if used, stun Brack like an animal in an abattoir.
‘Yes, I’m sure it would,’ she replied, pushing the closed file towards Sebastian.
‘I’ll organise a meeting for tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘But not with Brack,’ clarified Roza, with a quick wag from her finger. ‘There will be no meeting with Brack. It won’t be necessary.
‘Who, then?’
‘My Friends. Everyone who’s come this far with me, but leave out Madam Czerny I don’t think she’d appreciate what I’m planning to do, even though it’s a kind of justice.’
Stray filtered light patterned the walls of Anselm’s hotel bedroom. Shards with soft edges, like the design in the carpet downstairs. They came like echoes from the city on the other side of the windows. What was Roza going to do? Why had she changed so dramatically? These were the main questions but, ever ill-disciplined, Anselm’s curiosity strayed along a couple of byways. He was trying to work out if they led back to the main road.
First, Roza had evidently known Brack long before she’d been interrogated in Mokotow They’d known each other during the war, at Saint Justyn’s. Would it be stretching probability to infer that they’d been more than friends? Anselm thought not. Frenzel had sniffed something personal in Brack’s obsession with catching Roza. A lost or failed love, that’s the fruit he’d detected, drawn in through those flaring nostrils. The connoisseur of old mistakes had smelled a hidden blunder. Was Brack simply Brack — at least in part — because, through some wrong turning, he’d lost his hold on Roza? A hold which he’d tried to reinstate through murder and a perverted scheme that left him as the father of her child — even as he convinced himself that he’d pulled the trigger for the sake of a better set of ideas?
The second byway intrigued Anselm even more, because it represented a short step back in time: Brack must have met Mr Lasky He was there in the orphanage, guiding Roza with his homespun maxims. Brack had told Strenk about Roza, but there’d been no mention of the caretaker. Why? Because — Anselm concluded — he’d been grateful. In the epoch where naming names was a means to salvation, he’d shown a hidden, redundant loyalty — even to a dead man, executed by the Nazis. But why grateful? Presumably for saving his life. This byway extremely narrow and now overgrown, led to the person whom Roza had met as a girl… Otto, a youth separated from his family because of his father’s political convictions, someone capable of gratitude and love. And who, tomorrow, would meet Roza’s kind of justice.
What was she planning? How did the all the roads come together? How would she take account of who he was, set against who he’d become and what he’d done?
Chapter Forty-Eight
The first Anselm knew of the hullabaloo was when he saw armed police running past the room where he was waiting for the meeting with Roza. Celina, John and Sebastian followed him out into the corridor. Shouts came echoing from round a corner, court officials walked into view with strained urgency Sebastian intercepted one of them with a pull to the elbow He listened and his mouth fell open.
‘Roza’s been arrested,’ he gasped, swinging around. ‘She’s come with a bullet in her handbag. A live round, for God’s sake:
After further frantic enquiries it transpired she’d been taken to a holding cell two floors down. Strenuous representations from Sebastian, Celina and John, with a brisk appearance from Madam Czerny eventually secured her release after forty-five minutes. Yes, criminal charges might be pressed. No, you can’t have it back when you leave the building. Yes, the court will be informed of Roza’s conduct.
‘Why did you bring it?’ exclaimed Sebastian when they were settled in the conference room. ‘What was going through your mind?’
‘I just wanted to return it,’ she said, completely unflustered. ‘I never managed to find a use for it:
‘Return it? Who to?’
Roza didn’t answer. She looked different… younger than the night before. Just as striking was her appearance: the Jaeger dress had been left in a wardrobe, along with the accessories. She’d put on rough and ready clothes, as if she were off to the market: black woollen trousers that had lost their front pleats; a loose grey woollen jumper, darned at the elbows; a white blouse. On the floor by her feet was a plastic bag bulging with old newspapers. One of the more enthusiastic policemen had raised the possibility of poisoned ink. She was lucky they’d returned it without insisting on forensic examination.
‘I was only thinking the other day — when that professor from Krakow was describing the old days — I was saying to myself, this isn’t really working.’
‘What isn’t?’ asked Sebastian.
‘The trial. It’s just not what I’d expected and hoped for. It’s narrow, somehow I can’t find myself in what’s happening in the courtroom. It’s as though something’s missing. You see, unless you were there, you can’t imagine what it was like. It was so much worse than any list of wrongs. It was a climate. And I don’t want justice simply for what happened to Pavel. It has to reach wider than his or my experience.’
The walls were white, the lighting harsh. They were seated at a round conference table, Roza somehow at its head, though she sat to one side as if she’d just dropped in and might well leave at any moment. She was leading the meeting, but in a way foreign to any professional lawyer.