In Red (7 page)

“Check,” he would call the moment he was done with the newspaper. His tips secured him polite treatment. Though he bore himself like a civilian, the desk clerk at the Hotel Angleterre clicked his heels when he saw him and called him lieutenant.

“It's only Felek Chmura,” the maids would whisper, giggling and casting glances.

“Not to you he isn't, not anymore, you silly creatures,” the desk clerk would scold them. “And don't even think of trying to be familiar.”

In short order Felek seduced every one of the maids in turn, without any promises or declarations of love. Their names vanished from his memory right away. More than anything else, awake and in his sleep, he was preoccupied with estimating the value of all the movable and immovable property his eye came to rest upon. He had abacuses brought to his hotel room. In the early morning he would go and stand outside an apartment building he'd seen the previous day, unsure whether the guttering was actually copper, or the basements occupied.

“There's a place overlooking the street on the second floor
that's available,” the concierge would inform him, coming out with a broom.

“Let me tell you the history of this building.” A beggar would call out to him, grabbing his sleeve in the gateway.

Soon Stitchings had no secrets from him: he knew exactly how much it was worth at market prices, or converted to demolished state.

“Does he still have money?” the owner of the Hotel Angleterre asked the desk clerk, leaning across the counter. “What on earth does he do all day?”

Real estate was cheap at that time. Felek bought empty lots on Factory Street, fenced them off, and ordered bricks.

“Who builds anything here?” passersby asked, and for want of a reply would answer themselves, saying that Neumann's and Strobbel's factories were probably putting up new warehouses.

Felek Chmura's people bought up imperial Russian gold coins on the black market, in any amounts. They located deposits of them unerringly, capable of sniffing them out anywhere, even if they had been underground. In the countinghouses they threw fistfuls of them on the tabletop; occasionally a lump of dried soil would crumble from them. During this time the local marketplace was dominated by empty wallets, suitcases with broken locks, and stolen clothing, among which starving ragamuffins roamed, on the lookout for a potato left behind
in a puddle, which they would pick up and eat, even raw. But there wasn't a single one, for where would it have fallen from? The stalls offered everything except foodstuffs, which seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, hiding from unreliable Polish crowns and German marks. Potatoes, if they even existed, were far away, buried in clamps by people who no longer believed in any currency whatsoever. It was only out of a habit deeper than faith that they were prepared to accept tsarist five-ruble gold coins long withdrawn from circulation.

By night, wagons heaped with potatoes would pull up in front of Felek Chmura's warehouses. The goods were unloaded in a hurry, under cover of darkness, as the star of good fortune twinkled over the town hall clock. Felek personally saw to it that nothing went missing. In the early morning still-sleepy storekeepers, anemic and transparent as air, would appear and collect their wares, three hundredweight each. Felek would not agree to any more. His right-hand man, red-haired Adaś Rączka, in outsized knickerbockers, would scrupulously measure out the potatoes.

“That's enough,” he would say. “Next.” In the afternoon, in Corelli's café Felek would fall still over his coffee cup, newspaper in hand, cigarette between his lips. Eventually he would be woken by the clatter of a falling spoon. He would set the paper aside, pay, rise from the table and, cigarette in his mouth the whole time, would cross the street to the hotel.

“He's bored,” the hotel staff would remark.

As Chmura took his room key, a cone of cigarette ash would fall and scatter on the open registration book.

“You'll find the best entertainment these days on the old parade ground, sir,” the desk clerk said to him one day as he obligingly slid an ashtray toward him. He suddenly pulled a banknote from his pocket. “Take a look.”

“A hundred Polish crowns. You're doing pretty well for yourself.”

“I'll say,” the desk clerk chortled with a wink.

On the parade ground on Guards Street people were crowding into a large white tent. Horses with feather headdresses and ribbons in their tails galloped around a sand-covered ring. A featherlight female rider danced on their backs, while Orlando the lion tamer cracked his whip, the lion jumped through a burning hoop, two monkeys in gleaming opera hats shuffled cards and tossed wads of almost certainly counterfeit banknotes from hand to hand. Applause rang out, the band played a flourish, the horses paraded to the beat of the shrill music, and lion tamer and horseback performer gave a low bow as the monkeys ran round and round, applauding themselves.

During the day curious passersby would peer into the circus wagon through a dusty window.

“There's nothing in there,” they'd say.

The monkeys would be grooming one another. Orlando the
lion tamer would be asleep on a wooden bunk, wrapped in his overcoat and snoring. The horseback performer would be darning her stockings.

Felek had them show him one of the circus banknotes again. It was no different from any other hundred-crown bill, perhaps just a little paler, but the watermark was in the right place, if not quite as distinct. He bought it, overpaying without batting an eye, and from that moment he always carried it with him for good luck in a side compartment of his wallet, so it wouldn't get mixed in with the thick bundles of bills with which he did business.

Potatoes flowed onto the Stitchings market in an even stream, and their mass, once it had passed the critical point, opened the floodgates to an under-the-counter trade in gold.

“It worked!” shouted Felek Chmura, running down the middle of the street with his hands raised in a gesture of triumph. From that time on his people stood on every corner of Salt Street, turning wedding rings into cash, which was immediately taken to the little stores to pay overdue debts and renew credit. The legs of the women standing in line swelled up, while at home a throng of hungry children waited, along with a pile of torn stockings to be darned. The work never ended, tubs of soapy water stood perpetually in the kitchens.

Sea winds blew down Salt Street. Dealers took deep drags on cigarettes to catch their breath, and dried their throats with a mouthful of contraband spirit. Salt Street was glutted with cigarettes;
they were peddled from cardboard boxes slung around the necks of children shuffling along in oversized shoes, who also had liquor in their inside pockets and sold it on the side. They would start their business with a few small coins taken from their mother's purse. The next day, having increased their reserves of cash, they would return to Felek Chmura's warehouse for more goods. While the mothers were still looking for their missing pennies, their children were already sitting on the dirty steps of apartment buildings on Factory Street counting thick bundles of banknotes. They would jump up at the sound of footsteps and flee to the attic, hiding among the sheets hung out to dry on washing lines.

In stormy weather the channels of commerce would seethe, swelling with dirty foam, and deals would fall through. Traders, soaking wet and exhausted, would spend their last money on alcohol and cigarettes. Their losses would rankle in them like a festering wound. The children would move among them cautiously, fearful for their wares and their money. Robbed and beaten, they would whimper in corners and stay out of the way of their overworked mothers, who bent over their never-ending tubs of laundry.

“Why should I care about that? This isn't a shelter,” Felek would say as he bought jewelry in any amount from the traders, paying cash. Through his hands flowed a torrent of watches, wedding bands engraved on the inside with unnecessary initials, and diamond rings, the multiplicity of which rendered
them commonplace. One day the nameless river of mementos taken from their hiding places and hurriedly converted into ready money tossed up on its banks Kazimierz Krasnowolski's engagement ring, in a velvet-lined box to which shreds of prewar tobacco stuck like algae.

Felek Chmura's firm offered its clients complete discretion. His business never had any slow moments; he was always willing to conduct some profitable transaction, even at half past four in the morning, woken from the deepest sleep, and it never happened at any time that he was short of Polish crowns. It was for this reason Ludwig Neumann did not hesitate to send for him when it came time to sell the gold clock from his drawing room. Felek entered through the kitchen door, as he used to before the war.

“Nice clock, it's a pity to destroy it,” he declared. “But to weigh it the workings will have to be taken out.”

“He only knows the value of scrap metal,” put in Stefania. She stood abruptly from her armchair; her father's unstitched frock coat fell from her lap to the floor. “I beg you, father, don't listen to him. Send him away.”

“The collar's all worn,” remarked Felek as he picked up the frock coat. “Are you really going to repair it yourself, Mrs. Stefania?”

“That's none of your business, Felek,” said Stefania. The door slammed behind her, and that was the last he saw of her
that afternoon. Little golden angels bore the face of the clock beneath its bell glass; the pendulum swung, tick tock.

“Very well, Mr. Neumann,” Felek murmured. “How much did you want for it?”

And he paid cash, without haggling. Carrying the unwieldy clock with its angels and pendulum under his arm, he left by the kitchen stairs and came out onto the courtyard. There his head spun from the rainbow of gleaming pink, gold, and pale blue, and his precious new acquisition almost slipped from his grip.

“Dawn,” he whispered. He was so astounded he had a coughing fit. He never looked at the sky, and so he had no idea the sunrise could be so beautiful. Given wings by the sight of luminous satins beneath lace and English embroidery light as clouds, he had a yen for something more – but what? His heart suddenly ached from pink-and-gold-and-blue longing, before he realized it was the servants airing out the masters' bedding. At that point he raised his eyes high up toward the third-floor windows where the curtains were drawn. Concealed somewhere behind them was a silk-wrapped item of furniture with a soft mattress upon which at that very moment Stefania lay sobbing in desperation.

“Ha!” said Felek. “You won't get away from me now.”

He had a huge mirror put in his hotel room. He was thinking about ordering a new suit; his attention distracted over the accounts, he took fabric samples from Loom's warehouse out of his pocket. Now the warehouse belonged to him; he kept the
old signboards but sent the former suppliers packing with their prewar materials, for which they charged through the nose.

“Too thick and too stiff,” he would complain, crushing in his fingers the samples from new consignments. “None of this will do.”

He was also disappointed with the potatoes: whereas before they had brought him nothing but gain, now they rotted in the warehouses before he could turn them into rightful profit.

“Serves him right,” the women in line whispered vindictively. “Potatoes like that! At those prices! He got so greedy he must have forgotten that rot's infectious.”

In this way the potatoes still owed him something, till finally he realized they'd never quite pay for themselves. Biting his lip in powerless anger, Chmura summoned Adaś.

“You call these shoes clean?” he shouted, hitting him on his ruddy head with a rolled-up newspaper.

But even then he never doubted his star. How could he, since it hung right over the town hall tower. The cause of his setbacks soon emerged: the circus banknote, bought for good luck, had in a moment of inattention gotten mixed in with his other hundred-crown bills. Once he realized this he laid them all out on the table like cards for solitaire and studied each one in turn by the light of a lamp, searching for one that was paler than the rest. He found four such notes. He picked them up and put them down again helplessly, continually comparing them one more
time and moving them around, till ash from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth fell on them.

“How do you like that, goddammit! Look!” he exclaimed, summoning Adaś Rączka with a wave of the hand. “Is there something wrong with my eyes? Now there are eight of them!”

He got rid of them any chance he had, cursing the circus, which by now had vanished without a trace from the parade ground. Felek's people, still standing indefatigably at every corner of Salt Street, used the notes to pay for gold wedding bands. When it was needed, they lent them to con men at loan-shark rates and for a tragically short time, taking their throats as security. They used the notes to give change in the larger transactions that occurred when sailors borne by towering waves down the middle of Salt Street crashed into them as if they were rocks. The sailors had a broad step, swaying as if they were walking the deck of a ship, not the firm ground of the town, which they swept with their broad-bottomed pants. Each sailor's every wish could be granted in a second, even if it involved the heavyset blonde in a black garter belt who they'd dreamed of the whole voyage, or the petite Japanese woman hiding behind her fan on a matchbox label. Any object a sailor could possibly desire, Felek's people had it at hand, and the sailors couldn't stop themselves till they had tried everything. They woke in the early morning in fog, a blank patch in their memory, a dull pain in their forehead, and one faded banknote in their pocket. Black-eyed and blinking,
they read the name of their ship, which they had forgotten, from the rim of their cap.