The Mazovia Legacy (18 page)

“Fancy meeting you here, Ms. Janovski,” Hilferty said. “You will remember us, I assume?”

Natalia was more frightened than she suspected she yet had reason to be. It was difficult for her to calm herself when she saw them. “Yes, from the hotel,” she said.

“John Hilferty, Canadian Security Intelligence Service. And, Jean Stoufflet, from the French side.”

“Civil servants,” she said, looking past him for a taxi. The soccer players had gone home.

“That was a nice little arabesque this morning, Natalia,” Hilferty said. “May I call you Natalia? It delayed us for a few moments, I must admit. Our little Francis. Such a mischief-maker.”

Natalia said nothing.

“Visiting family, are we?” Hilferty said.

“A friend,” she said. “I really must get back to the hotel.”

“Of course you can guess why we're here, can't you?” Hilferty said, serious now. Playing stern, when charm failed. Stoufflet, for some reason, looked annoyed and impatient.

“No. I can't.”

“Delaney still inside?”

“He's gone. He hasn't been here. This was something private.”

Hilferty looked surprised that Delaney was not there.

“And what could young Francis be up to, I wonder?” he said.

“No idea,” she said. “I'm going to get a cab.”

“We'll drive you back,” Hilferty said. “Have a chat on the way.”

“No thanks,” she said.

“
Mais, oui, madame
,” Stoufflet said. “
Allez-y
.Get in, we will drive you back.”

Natalia spotted a taxi coming up rue de Belleville and hurried to the curb to hail it. Hilferty and Stoufflet came alongside her, but she got in the cab quickly and slammed the door.

“
L'hôtel Méridien, s'il vous plaît
.” she said to the driver. “
Vite.
”

The taxi pulled off quickly.The two spies walked slowly back to their car, slowly lest Natalia look back and see them in any inelegant haste. Stoufflet pulled a stylish forest-green mobile phone from his overcoat and began to dial. “Bitch,” Hilferty said.

T
he last day of Zbigniew Tomaszewski's life turned cold, with a threat of winter rain. Zbigniew did not mind the late February dampness, however, as he hurried up rue de Belleville to do his evening's shopping. He never minded anything about the winter weather in Paris because no matter how bad it got it was not as bad as winter in Warsaw, and no matter how bad it got it was still Paris and he could enjoy the streets, the people, and the shops.

He carried his old man's string shopping bag with him. He nodded to Parisians as he laboured up the hill to his
boucherie,
his
boulangerie,
his cheese shop, and his wine shop. He had planned a hearty
pot-au-feu
for this cold evening, but Natalia had stayed longer than even he had expected and now he thought he might prepare something quick:
paupiettes,
potatoes, some of the excellent French
haricots verts
. And perhaps a special Médoc to ward off the chill and to celebrate a little. Now that his burden had been shared, if not lifted. If not to celebrate, then to mark this day in some way. For he had a feeling it would be somehow very important, in ways he could not foresee.

The singsong of the women in the
boucheries
and
boulangeries
of Paris always cheered him:
Et avec ça, monsieur? Avec ça?
Like so many of the thousands of old men and women of Paris who live alone, he chose to always cook himself a full meal in the evenings. This allowed him the small pleasure of doing the shopping each afternoon,
de faire ses courses,
to smile at passersby and shop assistants, and then to have an evening's cooking task to accomplish before turning to his books and recordings, to the radio and his letters. He no longer had the money or the inclination for the cafés or bistros for his evening meals. Home was where he belonged, where he felt most at ease these days. Home, and out on his beloved rue de Belleville.

When he got back to the apartment, his telephone was ringing. He let it ring, as he unpacked his shopping in the dim warm kitchen. It rang for a long while, and then it stopped. He was not a man who ever rushed for telephones, but tonight he was even less inclined than usual to respond. Natalia had said she would not use the telephones in this matter and there was no one else who might call him or with whom he would wish to speak on this latewinter afternoon. So when the telephone sounded again as he was slicing
haricots
and scrubbing small potatoes, he only counted the rings:
onze, douze, treize.
...Someone very much wanted to speak with him, it seemed.

The telephone rang again as his dinner cooked. Zbigniew was calm, content, at peace, as he did his small jobs and even as the sense began to build that the incessant ringing was an alarm of some kind that he should perhaps not ignore. But he was a soldier, still, so he was not afraid. He merely became aware of a situation that was, if not a threat, then one to be carefully observed in case action might be required.
This would be a night for it,
he thought.
They might choose this night for it, now that Natalia has been here.

He pulled open the drawer of his desk and rummaged inside for an object wrapped in velvet cloth. It was the revolver he had kept from the war days; old, but carefully, lovingly, maintained.
Stanislaw had one precisely like this,
Zbigniew thought.
Stanislaw my old comrade
. He went briefly into the garden to check something in his tool locker, and then back into the kitchen to check on his dinner.

Zbigniew enjoyed his last meal, sitting alone at his long table in the early Paris evening. The
Appellation Haute Médoc Controlée
that he had selected was excellent. He needed no one around him to tell him how fortunate he had been to be able to spend so many evenings like this since the war: in private, at peace, enjoying the wines of France and simple, well-cooked meals in his warm and comfortable kitchen. He was never truly lonely, although he enjoyed the company of others, as well.

He had enjoyed Natalia's company this afternoon, for example. He felt confident she would be a trustworthy new custodian of Stanislaw's secret. He thought, as he wiped his mouth with an aging linen napkin and began to clear up, that he, and she, had done the proper thing. Later, when he heard the ever so slight commotion outside his double entrance doors, he was not surprised. He was simply too old and too experienced to be surprised. But he knew immediately when he heard the noises that he must act quickly. He stood only for a moment beside the stout oak boards, listening to the muffled conversation on the other side, seeing the door heave slightly as a shoulder was pressed against it, seeing the handle move as it was tested, pressed, prodded, picked.

Old Paris apartments rarely have doorbells on the street, perhaps because Parisians in the days when the apartments were being built had never expected or wanted unplanned visits. But Zbigniew knew it was too easy now for unwanted callers to wait until someone entered or left these buildings and then slip through exterior doors to deserted warrens of hallways inside. And his apartment, the only one on the ground floor, was down a particularly long and silent corridor, far from any other doors.

They could have come in here while I was out this afternoon,
Zbigniew thought.
And so they wish to speak to me directly.
He knew, therefore, this was danger calling at his door and he knew that he must act quickly.

Zbigniew had never imagined he would call the police if it ever came to something like this. The police could never, in the end, fully settle such matters. So he hurried to the sideboard in the living room, as he had imagined so many times he would do. He pulled out his old briefcase full of letters and hurried through the French doors into the garden, where it was now dark and cold. His cardigan did not ward off the chill, but he would not be there long. He stood listening intently, in his slippers, until he was sure his entrance door in that deserted corner of the silent building would yield to the intruders.Then he got an old can from the tool shed and sloshed kerosene from it onto Stanislaw's precious papers. He lit them with a wooden match.

His heart ached and pounded in his chest as the fire shot up with a muted roar. A plume of acrid black smoke wafted from the tips of the orange flames. His heart ached and pounded not just because he knew he was in danger, but also because this was the end of his friend's papers, of the recorded history of their friendship and their shared secrets. He felt that somehow there should be a better end to all this than a sudden splash of kerosene and a match.

He sat down in a straight-backed chair in the living room, positioned so he could watch through the glass doors as the smoky flames ate away at paper and leather in the garden. He could also see the entrance door to the apartment finally give way to the pressure and proddings from those in the hallway who wanted so urgently to get in. He simply waited quietly and held his old revolver in his lap. He suspected, however, that he would not be using his revolver that night or ever again. He had never killed anyone with it before. He had killed with bombs, yes, many times. But not with revolvers.

He did not recognize the two men when they finally crashed through his door, cursing in peasant's Polish, but they were not at all unfamiliar. He had seen their type too many times in the past. He knew that they would be rough, angry, unreflective men; stinking of wine or vodka or the cheeses they had had for lunch. He knew that when they saw the flames in his garden and their bovine minds understood that what they were seeking was quickly being turned to black ash, they would be angry and they would beat him and hurt him and then, more than likely, they would kill him. He thought, as he waited:
The war is never over.

Zbigniew Tomaszewski watches as if in a dream the two burly men race through his living room to the garden. He does not lift his revolver to shoot, because he knows that they are two, and to kill only one before being killed himself makes no sense. The taller of the two takes the time as they pass to deliver a mighty blow with his pistol to the side of Zbigniew's old head. Then he falls as if in a dream to his familiar carpet. He watches them from where he lies on the floor, a hot suspicion of blood emerging from his wound and oozing into his eyebrows, eyes, and mouth.

He does not move his aching head from the floor as he watches through the glass their frantic kicking and stamping at the briefcase as it flares in the night.There is not much left for them, but they pick angrily at scraps of paper in the flames and ash.

They curse and bark commands to each other as they rush for sticks and rakes to beat the flames into submission. Zbigniew is wavering close to sleep, in a dream, when the tall man comes back into the room to deliver two, three, four mighty kicks of frustration to the body of the old man lying there in the carpet. His colleague is flicking bits of scorched paper into a bucket he has found on the grass.

Zbigniew is in a dream when his hair is pulled roughly, when his old head is pulled roughly back, when Polish curses are hissed into his face. He barely hears the far-off sirens of the fire trucks as they labour up rue de Belleville. He does not hear the horns and commotion of the traffic as trucks and police cars block the narrow Paris street corner where he has lived until this day.

He does not feel the final blows from pistol and rake, does not feel the heavy shoes of his murderers stomp into his ribs and back and head. He does not hear the pops of silenced pistols as bullets tear into his old man's body. He does not, cannot, see the two intruders race through apartment hallways, firing at chrome-helmeted firemen as they go. He does not see them force their way through startled shouting crowds of police,
pompiers,
passersby to disappear in the rain-slick Paris night. Because he is dead.

*

Delaney had been playing reporter, or spy, depending on one's point of view. Delaney himself couldn't quite make up his mind. There hadn't been a great deal of difference between the two vocations for him lately, nor, he realized, had there been in the last few years of his life. The information he had been seeking in his professional life for his articles and his books had often been information in which intelligence services would also take a keen interest. Some along the way, in fact, had made their interest in his professional activities discreetly known.

Zbigniew's decision to consult with Natalia alone had left Delaney at a loose end. He went out of the apartment building on rue Julien Lacroix and looked carefully around to see if anyone appeared to be watching the building. He could see no one, but knew that meant nothing. He decided that before making another move he would do what he often did on difficult assignments, ones in which the angle was buried in a mass of events, facts, and suppositions. He would simply sit for a while and quietly examine scenes, scenarios.

He hailed a taxi and surprised the driver by asking to be taken on only a short circular trip around several of the narrow streets in the neighbourhood and let off about three hundred metres down the slope of rue de Belleville. He then walked slowly back up the street, pausing to look in windows and to buy a copy of
Libération
before going into a café that would allow him a good view of rue Julien Lacroix.

From inside the smoky café, crowded even at midmorning with tradesmen in Paris-issue blue overalls and caps, he nursed an espresso and waited. He had found in his years as a reporter that simply staring at a scene sometimes brings interesting details into focus. So while his mind moved pieces of his current journalist's puzzle around, his eyes took in the scene on the street outside Zbigniew's faded building. His mental observations yielded no new insights. But his observation of the street bore fruit after half an hour.

Far down rue Julien Lacroix, he saw a burly man climb out of a small car parked somehow in one of the absurdly tiny spaces that occasionally present themselves on the crammed streets of Paris. The man was too far away for Delaney to see his face, but he very clearly stretched himself and looked around with the air of someone who is waiting for a long time. The man then leaned down to speak to someone through the window of the car. The many other parked vehicles did not allow Delaney any view of the other figure. After lighting and smoking a cigarette, the first man then climbed back into the car. But the car did not pull off and was still there when Delaney caught the attention of the waiter to bring his bill. He thought for a moment that he would walk down rue Julien Lacroix to see them more closely, but then decided that this would be unwise.

He wished he could call Zbigniew's house to warn Natalia that the building was being watched, but they had agreed to avoid telephones and he had not written down the exterior door code to go back inside. He worried for a moment that these watchers, if they were indeed watchers, might be wanting to go inside as well. His indecision about whether to leave or to stay ended, however, as he was paying the café's cashier at her small booth near the entrance.

He saw Hilferty and Stoufflet sweep up very conspicuously in a silver-grey car. Stoufflet was driving. He pulled two wheels up onto the curb at the corner as only the French know how to do. He was not blocking traffic, but what passed for a pedestrian crossing was blocked and a series of aging Parisians took turns glaring inside the car as they tried to reach the sidewalk from it.