Lumen (14 page)

“
Matka
Kazimierza suggested it. She’d warned us that we shouldn’t leave them there too long, but we could hardly
show up after German officers had taken to visiting her. Damn, if we’d only - we did try to get the guns back on the day she died.”

“Ha. I understand now. And why didn’t you?”

“Our man was new, young. He screwed around and just lost his pluck. He took a wrong turn and ended up crawling up the wrong wall. He had to rush back and close the window before the sisters found him missing from the sacristy.”

Malecki interrupted. “Your bungler wouldn’t by any chance have fired the shot that killed the abbess?”

“Why would he want to do such a thing,
Ojciec?
He’d tagged along with the workers to get our stuff back, that’s all. Even his toolbox was empty. The guns were supposed to go into it.” The man groaned, shaking his head. “Damn. Damn, we didn’t need this one.”

“Watch your tongue, and count your blessings if nothing disastrous comes of the finding. Fools that you are, there’s a German Intelligence officer who visits daily! What about your man, where is he now?”

“I wish I knew. I told you he lost his pluck. He’s been gone since late October, maybe hiding in the country.”

Malecki’s tenseness was such that he was startled by the squeaking of hinges one floor up. It was probably
Pana
Klara keeping anxious watch on the door of her apartment. “You can’t stay,” he spoke under his breath. “Quickly, do any of the other sisters know about you?”

“I don’t think so, unless she told them.”

The light went out again, and this time Malecki didn’t bother to turn it back on. They stood in the dark for the time necessary for the priest to discourage further visits and for the man to ask for the return of the letter from Mother Kazimierza.

“Sorry, the letter stays with me.”

When Malecki opened the front door, a tempest of small hard flakes was whirling in front of the street light like an immense swarm of moths. Touching his temple, the man sullenly said “
Dobra noc
,” slipped out and was gone.

 

A few streets away, next door to the Jagellonian Library, Colonel Schenck didn’t have the heart to tell Bora to avoid temptation and leave the officers’ club. It wasn’t late, and after all Bora had done no more than sit down at a table with a stack of notes.

But he couldn’t resist the temptation to lecture, so he joined him eventually, sitting across from him. Bora stood at attention.

“Sit down, sit down. I didn’t realize your stepfather is
Generaloberst
Sickingen, Bora. What happened to your father?”

Bora remembered from previous conversations that Schenck disapproved of divorce, so he was quick to explain that his father had died.

“I see. Did you know the general is coming to Poland?”

Bora didn’t, and said so.

“Well, you ought to be glad to see him. What have you there?”

Bora showed him Malecki’s notes on the abbess.

“I speak little English,” Schenck removed his attention from the papers. “I understand on the other hand that your mother is British-born. She’s racially pure, I hope.”

Bora felt himself blush a little. “She’s quite racially pure, Colonel.”

“Well, and how is it that her maiden name was the same as your father’s?”

“They were first cousins.”

“It’s not the best choice in marriage. In that sense, your half-brother is probably a better specimen than you are. Did you at least marry a pure German?”

“My wife is entirely German.”

“Let’s see a photograph of her?…”

Bora took a snapshot of Dikta out of his wallet. Schenck observed it closely. “You should produce fair-haired offspring, providing that as a child you were lighter than you are now. Is your body hair dark or light?”

Bora stared at the colonel. “Lighter than the hair on my head.”

“These are important questions, you know.”

“I realize that.”

“You’ll fully comprehend how vital these questions are as the war goes on. This is no time to be romantic about reproduction. Love, sentimentalism - those bourgeois luxuries are not for the German man of today.” Schenck stretched his lean body on the chair. “I have no difficulty telling you that I fertilized my wife before marriage, inasmuch as I would never consider tying myself to a woman who couldn’t produce children. In two weeks I had her pregnant, and the third week I married her. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a daughter, but she did better ten months later.” He lightly tapped the floor with his foot, surveying the sparse population of the officers’ club. “I hope you have a high sperm count. A high sperm count is essential in these matters.”

Afterwards, Bora drove out of the club with a headache, and no desire to go back to his address. He stopped at the first hotel on the way, took a room and proceeded to stay awake until the time came for him to get up.

It was very early in the morning, and Doctor Nowotny knew that Bora had to have a good reason to want to see him before going to work. When he heard it, a ripple of
hilarity threatened to come up his throat, but he sent it back down with a gulp of hot coffee.

“How long have you been married?”

“Four months.”

Nowotny raised his eyebrows. “A-ha. And how much time did you actually spend with her?”

“Less than two weeks.”

This time Nowotny laughed. “And after ‘less than two weeks’ you worry about not having yet generated a child for the New Germany? He, he, he. Give time to time, as my father used to say. Tell me this, have you been screwing standing up?”

Bora knew he should have not come, and should have not brought up any of this. “A few times,” he mumbled.

“In a hurry, eh? Just couldn’t wait. Well, haste and fertility don’t necessarily go together. You ought to take your time. The missionary position, of course, is reputed to be the best for the purpose, though I’m a great supporter of
more ferarum
myself. You’re a horseman - the next furlough, spend it on top of her.” Nowotny drummed the desk with his fingers. “Myself, I’m not married. I have no children. I have no patience with relationships, and give me the army any day. It doesn’t mean I don’t like to see a young woman popping at the seams with a baby, but it doesn’t have to be my own to make me happy or proud to be a German. Sure, when it comes right down to it, we’ll need the replenishment. We lost over sixteen thousand in this campaign alone, and we’re only at the start.” He kept smiling, because Bora had a frown. “Russia’s turn isn’t so far away, mark my words.”

Nowotny felt a sting of regret, or pity, which was as much a part of his nature as the hardness he showed others. The man before him was in so many ways untried, unaware, just beginning to be hurt. He still wore the beautiful
uniform of testiness and idealism and blessed arrogance. Nowotny had an odd premonition of grief for him, as if not so far in the future the clean hard looks would be tried, and pain burst his courage. It was an ever so brief sensation, unwarranted in that he hardly knew Bora. He should hardly care.

So he said, gruffly, “What country do you think is going to get it next?”

“It is not my place to speculate.”

“But I bet you think we can take it all.”

 

During his lunch break, on a hunch, Bora travelled down the extension of Karmelicka to Salle-Weber’s office on
Reichsstrasse.
After some prompting, Salle-Weber admitted a file on Mother Kazimierza existed, but was not sympathetic enough to share it with Bora. All he said was, “She was an aristocrat, from an old, politically involved family. Even had she not been a big-mouthed nun, we’d have had a file on her. There’s nothing in it that would help your investigation, so don’t ask to see it.”

“May I at least see the folder?”

The folder was slim, only a few pages in Bora’s reckoning, and on the tab the label read
Lumen.
His heartbeat accelerated.

“Why the title?” he asked.

Salle-Weber put the folder away, and locked the cabinet. “It was a codename we came up with. You’re the college man here, you should know what it means.”

“It’s Latin for ‘light’.”

“There you go.”

“And it’s the first word in her
L.C.A.N
motto:
Lumen Christi, Adiuva Nos
.”

“Clever, eh? Now go about your business, Captain. I haven’t the time to chat over dead nuns. The file is closed.”

Bora didn’t want to insist with Salle-Weber right now, all the more since he’d put in a request for permission to interrogate the partisans flushed out from the houses around the convent. He left the office with a sense of euphoria. Mother Kazimierza had predicted she would die “through her name”. Could the codename be what she referred to? He was anxious to read Malecki’s notes once more.

It was again beginning to snow when he came out of the building. Silvery flecks fell in slow spirals here and there, and the air was already below freezing. Beyond the Vistula, low on the horizon, a pale gold ribbon of sky linked the layered clouds. A shaft of light came from it and went to illuminate some distant hillside elsewhere. Bora was bound for those hills in the morning.

In the car, he flipped through Malecki’s notes until he found what he wanted.

“
The abbess often referred to Christ as ‘her Light’. Her favourite quotation was from Matthew 6:22.
”

The quotation was not reported, so Bora had to wait until the next time he’d see Malecki to ask.

 

At the Old Theatre, Retz talked to Kasia when Ewa didn’t seem disposed to listen to him.

“What’s the matter with her? I called her three times today, I sent her a pound of butter. I shouldn’t even be out of my office right now.”

Since Kasia spoke no German, the words were obviously aimed at Ewa, who sat smoking in front of her mirror, one leg dangling nervously over the crossed knee.

Through the mirror, though she didn’t look directly at it, she discerned Retz leaning towards her friend with an anxious posture of shoulders and face. Kasia turned to her. “Ewa, whatever he’s saying, will you listen to him?”

Her silence did not discourage Retz, although he came dangerously close to self-exposure to cause a reaction.

“Does Ewa think I’m seeing somebody else? I’m not seeing anybody else! Tell her she just has to come. My room-mate is going to be away for two days. We’ll have the house to ourselves for two days. I’m not seeing anybody else, and she just has to come!”

“Ewusia, I think he needs you.” Kasia simpered. “I wouldn’t be so tough on him.”

Ewa sucked on the short butt of her cigarette, squeezed tight between thumb and forefinger. “He can call me again after work, if he wants to.”

The hefty tines of the pitchfork showed a viscous coating of darkish red, and straw had been used to absorb the blood from the barn floor.

Bora scribbled on his clipboard. No noise came from the outside except a bellow now and then from the disconsolate cow tied to the barnyard fence.

“She needs to be milked,” Hannes mumbled as he was going out of the barn.

Bora ignored him. Trailing his eyes on the snow-patched distance between the hut and the barn, he noticed signs of raking across the yard. “He dragged himself here from the house,” he told the unkempt, angry-faced soldiers beside him. “The dirt is mixed with blood here and there.”

“Sepp wasn’t found in the barn,” one of the soldiers spoke back. “We found him behind there in the slop, Herr Hauptmann, with the hogs trying to grub into his belly.”

Bora scraped the bloody edge of his sole against the door jamb.

“So. You all came together, the four of you. Was there anyone else but women here?”

“No, sir, there wasn’t.”

Having cleaned the edge of his boot, Bora stared at it. “And what were the three of you doing while Sepp got himself impaled in the house?”

The soldiers stayed stiff at attention. When Bora looked up, he saw on them the mien of wary dogs. The man who had been doing the talking said, “We’d been out on patrol all night, Captain, we were dog-tired. We took a breather of an hour or so. Sepp went inside to ask for something to drink.”

“‘Something to drink’? Wasn’t there water in the well?”

“It’s cold for well water, sir. These people keep ale sometimes. He went asking for some, and they killed him.”

It required no effort for Bora to sound harsh. “I have three Polish nationals with bullets through their heads out there. Who killed them?”

“Sir, we had to do something about Sepp! They were nothing but—”

“I don’t give a bloody damn what they were, Private. There are three dead women out there and I want to know who killed them.”

“We just had to, sir.”

“‘Just had to.’” Bora placed the clipboard under his arm and capped his pen. “It still doesn’t answer my other question. Where were the three of you while your comrade went into the house? You weren’t around or you’d have heard the scuffle. Did you hear the scuffle?”

Just then Hannes called from the barnyard fence. “The medical examiner has arrived, Herr Hauptmann
.
”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

When Bora joined him in the yard, the physician was kneeling by the three dead women, with one hand lowering the skirts of the youngest one.

“Get me the men out here, Captain. Tell them to drop their pants.”

 

In his room on Karmelicka Street, Father Malecki debated whether he should show the archbishop the compromising letter from the abbess. It only said that he, Malecki, could be trusted if the need arose. It had no date and was addressed to no one in particular, but still he decided to keep it to himself for the time being.

He should have thought that underground agents might have been among those visiting the abbess in weeks past. Bora had made no mention of German suspicions in regard to that, but then Bora wouldn’t. Malecki regretted not asking his night visitor to put him in touch with the men who’d worked at the chapel roof on the day of the crime.