A Family Madness (39 page)

He stopped at the desk by the maternity ward. Still, always, because of Greg's training and his mother's, he was an orderly young man. He could not discover her by bursting through doors. He wanted their reunion to be condoned by the hospital authorities.

He asked for Danielle Kabbel. The woman at the desk tossed sheafs of paper, looking for Danielle's name. This nurse was a pretty woman in perhaps her early thirties, working for the marital mortgage, the first webbings of exhaustion in the corners of her eyes. She couldn't find a Kabbel.

Delaney made a speech about how certain he was she was here, in Penrith District. Unless there were complications. (The idea struck him harder than it did the nurse.) “But she would have been admitted here,” said Delaney. “Two days ago.”

The tired mother of two again denied there had been anyone named Kabbel.

“But she gave birth in Main Street, Penrith,” said Delaney. “It all happened very quickly.”

“Oh, but you mean the Kowolsky child.”

“No. The Kabbel child. Danielle Kabbel gave birth in Fossey's in Main Street.”

“No, not Kabbel. Kowolsky.”

“That's the Polish spelling of their name,” said Delaney with a cleverness he did not know he had. “I went to school with her and with her brothers. They grew up in Forth Street, Penrith.”

These homely details captured the nurse. “That's right. And they live in Kingswood now.”

“Yes,” said Delaney. “But I don't know the new address.”

“Well, it's that new townhouse setup, isn't it?” said the nurse. “You know the one near the Toyota dealership.”

“Oh yes,” said Delaney.

“Are you the new five-eighth?”

“That's right,” said Delaney. “I grew up with the Kabbels—I mean the Kowolskys.”

At least, along with all her fatigue and mortgage dedication, the woman knew what a good game of football was. She said, as if it were a service to a team humiliated since the late 1950s, year by year, “Well, you know the place. Those new townhouses down the highway. Turn left toward the railway line. The Gardens.” She referred to her notes of the recent obstetrical emergency. “Number seventeen. But she left within twenty-four hours, you know. A daughter—3.79 kilos. Tough girl. The brothers and the father wanted to get her home, you know. For once, I pity whoever was the father of the kid.”

“Kowolsky,” said Delaney. He could not believe that a few vowels had defeated him. He muttered his thanks and went off toward the parking lot.

The Gardens was one of those small villages of townhouses, well curbed and guttered, young trees standing along the pathways. By the time those trees were as large as the one Stanton cut down, Delaney computed, the place would be a slum. For the moment though it had a little style—brick, aluminum windows, shiplap carports. Its internal streets were in the form of a T, and anyone with a child—looking at it and remembering how fast people drove in some suburban streets—would consider it a safe place.

Having spent so long to find the house, Delaney did not now want to approach it too fast. He parked his car in the ill-curbed and guttered ordinary street which ran past the entrance to the development and walked in. Number seventeen was in the head of the T. It was quiet around the corner. Everyone seemed to be a considerate neighbor. A man of about Delaney's age was kicking a plastic football to his toddling son, who—wearing a frown—picked it up slowly with hands splayed from the wrist. At number eleven a man with slicked hair, wearing both the well-scrubbed after-work look of someone who perhaps labored in a foundry as well as the prosperous look of someone who cops plenty of overtime, was washing a new Camira. Delaney recognized Rudi Kabbel's Toyota, pride of the fleet of Uncle Security, standing in front of seventeen. He stood for a while contemplating it, then he turned in past it to the front door and knocked. By his left shoulder were the kitchen windows, but their blinds were pulled down. It was Delaney's intuition that they were down at this hour, when anyone would want them up to catch the last of the afternoon sun, for defensive reasons. The Kabbels were inside, he knew, and they
knew
he could tell it. He did not need to knock again. Someone was sure to answer. Peculiarly, he believed he would only know what to say if it was one of the boys.

It
was
one of the boys. It was Warwick. He opened the door carefully, as if there had been trouble with the hinges. He said hello in his polite, deliberate way. It reminded Delaney of the deliberateness with which the man's son, a few seconds before, had picked up the football.

Delaney asked him how he was. The house had what Delaney thought of as a cold breath, as if the Kabbels had switched off all lights, all radiators, refrigerators, blenders, lest light and warmth and whirring give Delaney delusions of welcome.

“Warwick,” said Delaney, “I'd like to see the baby. And I'd like to talk to Danielle too.”

“Well, that's all very well,” said Warwick, frowning. “Danielle doesn't want to talk to you though.”

“Is Rudi there?”

“Rudi's busy.”

“Look,” said Delaney. He had none of the eloquence he thought he would have when first seeing a Kabbel again. “Let me see her. And it's my daughter. Not yours. Let me see my daughter.”

“A second,” said Warwick.

He closed the door on Delaney. There would be a Kabbel conference, a busy affair, a hushed one. Delaney stood in the last of the sun and could hear nothing. When Warwick came back, he believed he would tell him, “I hope you gave Danielle a vote. I'm voting for the child.”

Warwick opened the door again. He carried a shotgun in his hands, the breech opened and pointed to Delaney so that he could see both barrels were loaded. With that workmanlike calm of his, Warwick closed the breech and pointed the barrels at Delaney's chest.

“Now listen, Terry,” said Warwick. “None of us want to see you. We want you to stay away. You know what I'm capable of, eh?”

Even threatened like this, Delaney was still straining to gauge the air of the house, the nuances of scent. Later he would tell himself it was his long experience of teams calloused by defeat which now helped him pick up one of the strains—the acrid trace of faith lost. He remembered now his source at the Newnes pub, the single, never since repeated fully loaded visit of the Kabbels to their canyon.

Without any fear, but out of a conviction that there was a balance inside the house which could easily turn on the baby, Delaney himself reached for the door handle and shut the door on the gun. If the balance was disturbed, armies couldn't save the baby girl. Delaney walked past the carport and out onto the pavement with a confidence that the thing could be done. Warwick's politeness would help do it. Social workers and child-care people could negotiate that politeness.

As he passed the man with the Camira, the well-scrubbed man of number eleven, Delaney saw him wink.

“Come to cut something off, mate?” the man asked him. Delaney did not understand. Because of vibrations in his legs, he would have liked to sit for a while at the man's feet. But a Camira owner might be appalled by that sort of behavior.

“They've got nothing left on,” said the man, nodding toward the Kabbels' place. “Telephone disconnected, electricity. I reckon someone will cut their water off pretty soon.”

Delaney went to turn back to number seventeen, to take up this matter with Warwick.

The Camira man wanted to be fair though. “Nice enough people. Dress well. You'd never know there were four people in the place. Five including the baby. And they like the baby O.K. Give it a fair bit of sun.”

“But no heat,” said Delaney.

“I suppose they bundle up,” said the man.

56

R
UDI
K
ABBEL'S
H
ISTORY OF THE
K
ABBELSKI
F
AMILY

My sister's letter continues, speaking of happenings inside Michelstadt during my abduction.

… Albert, my sergeant, had an idea of what had happened to you. Not perhaps a concise idea. But he knew it was Belorussian vengeance. All the French guards were in the same position. They knew that it was all beyond the control of Colonel Nouges, that the inmates were dominant, that they might yet have to watch the factional version of gang warfare.

Redich wanted Father to find and cough up the Soviet informer. If he could not do that, he would never see you; or perhaps he would see some savaged part of you—a limb or a head. And you still like Belorussians?

Father was of course desperate. On a visit to the family suite of rooms, I heard him tell Mother that he had more chance of finding where they had hidden you than of producing a supposed Russian agent. I have heard from old Belorussians here that sometime that night Redich and Father met, and Father put forth an argument he had rehearsed with his—believe me on this point, Radek—inconsolable wife. The argument was this. Suppose there happened to be a Soviet agent or informer but he was in fact a member of the Redich gang. He could well have denounced Gersich as a means of dividing the two factions, of rendering them impotent with mistrust.

Redich would not buy it. He imposed a time limit though. The delinquent had to be surrendered before midnight the next night. Father and his lieutenants had only some thirty hours in which to find the informer, or if they could not do that, at least deliver to Redich someone they could plausibly call the informer. And Father would have found a scapegoat: Police work had prepared him for that sort of expedient. Unhappily, he would not have to find any substitute victim. The true victim would present.

Any small intelligence I could extract from Albert and the soldiers, and which I then tried to pass to him later in the night, was spurned. It did not matter anyhow. Amazingly, neither the French nor most of the Belorussians knew about the latrines in the old camp. Even if I had known and had tried to pass him the news, he would have looked upon that as an unwelcome distraction. He had room only for his vanished son. He couldn't deal at the same time with his floozy daughter.

Most of the searches that night were therefore carried on discreetly and within the camp. Father's intelligence setup told him that none of the Redich lieutenants was outside the wire. That indicated that you also were not outside the wire, but were perhaps trussed and hidden in some ceiling. Although Redich had counseled Father not to bother, somehow these little quests were achieved. Or perhaps Redich tolerated them. In any case, you were sought that night not only in ceilings but in broom closets, in the lockers where the UNRRA sporting equipment was kept, in the freezers which were America's gift to Michelstadt, in the tool shop and the generator house. The camp doctor had to sedate Tokina, whose recitation of the Rosary for your deliverance had become more and more hysteric.

This woman, my truest friend, had allied herself with Father in the idea that somehow my wickedness had brought it all on. Needless to say, if they wanted to drive me into Sergeant Pointeaux's arms they couldn't have done a better job. But I am philosophic about all that now. It's the way families generally operate. It is true though that during those two days I itched not only with panic for you but with a sort of panic for myself, that my blame would be demonstrated somehow by a court of inquiry run by the French or the Belorussians or both, that everyone from Tokina to Major Knowles would be summoned as witnesses.

You remember there was a young policeman named Kalusich. He was often attached to the guard at our house in Staroviche. You would certainly remember his childlike face—the cupid-bow lips and the bland eyes, combined with a relentless blue shadow of beard. Other members of the guard teased him about it, sometimes making jokes that weren't proper and which therefore went through me like an electric shock, both pleasant and intolerable. I bet you remember him, because you used to hang around the kitchen too, being lionized, if you will pardon me for saying so, after the Onkel Willi affair.

Well, by the noon of the day of grace Father had from Redich, this young naif was being groomed as the “informer.” One of Father's sergeants of police, who had served with the Belarus Brigade and survived the rout at Biscenson, and who now lives in Paris, told me when I visited him in an old people's home here. For I went through that phase too—a desire to find out everything that had happened during those few days, an uneasiness about the accepted version. The old man told me that it was proposed both to lie to Kalusich about the other faction's intentions, to minimize what could happen to him, and at the same time to threaten him with worse things if he did not allow himself to be served up to the papal gang. They were going to force-feed him his lines. The old man told me that at the time he didn't think it would fool Redich. But Father was desperate. His judgment had gone.

As for the rest of the incident, and as for what happened with Mother—Pointeaux has always known what occurred. As I remarked earlier, he is the sort who always knows what's going on even though intuitions of survival generally tell him not to put his hand into the machinery. It was as a result of my inquiry among old Belorussians of both factions here in Paris—the Abramtchik crowd are very strong here and some of them work for French intelligence—that Pointeaux decided he had better be the one to inform me. He said that he used to wonder if I discovered the true story from some old duffer in a hospital how I would manage to drive home. I have known the facts now for nearly ten years.

You remember how that partisan officer put his head under Onkel Willi's table and said, “It's the Kabbelski brat,” and didn't do any more. I think Father was troubled by that, though not in the same way as if he had lost you. Remember another incident—you may not, in fact. But there was a very fashionable young clerk in Mayor Kuzich's office. Her name was Drusova. She was an agent of the partisans. In the end she vanished in the cellar of the Natural History Museum—remember Bienecke? Hauptsturmführer Bienecke. He was sentenced to eight years by the West Germans—that was in the late '60s. In any case, back to Drusova. She had not been betrayed by anyone—Kuzich had found her stealing documents. The reason you came out of the shambles at Onkel Willi's had much to do with Drusova being caught through her own folly rather than through the work of an informer.