The Mazovia Legacy (19 page)

Delaney decided that the combined forces of these two intrepid spies from two intelligence agencies would be enough to dissuade their competitors, if that is what they were, far down the street from doing anything untoward. He was also reassured by signs that Hilferty and Stoufflet were settling in for a long stay. The Canadian was reading what looked like the
International Herald Tribune
and the Frenchman was coming back to the car carrying two newly purchased packets of
Disque Bleu
.

They did not see Delaney leave the café and walk quickly up the hill to Métro Pyrénées. He had decided that the Métro was a safe bet today and would in fact be faster for where he wanted to go. The Maison de la Radio, headquarters of Radio France, was in the 16th arrondissement, a long way away, and traffic was at a crawl. He took one last look around him and walked down the grimy stairs to the subway.

The station was dirtier than he remembered the Paris Métro ever to be, with bits of litter and discarded yellow tickets strewn everywhere. Already a small group of
clochards
had gathered on the moulded seats of the station, waiting not for the next train but the next plastic bottle of cheap
vin rouge
. One of them was asleep on a bed of cardboard behind the row of seats. The others grumbled and debated in low, rough bursts of French. A couple of policemen on the opposite platform were demanding identity papers from a bewildered African in a long threadbare coat.

Delaney transferred at République station to another line and then it was a direct run to Ranelagh station.Then there was a ten-minute walk down rue du Ranelagh through a much more salubrious
quartier
to Radio France. Delaney didn't mind the walk. He liked this part of Paris too, despite its
bourgeois
airs. He was in no hurry now, because he suspected Natalia would stay a long time with Zbigniew, and because Lawrence Keating, the Irish journalist he was on his way to see, had said on the phone that he would be free anytime that day.

Keating was an old acquaintance, if not an old friend, and well briefed on the European story. He was gay, a refugee from Ireland's institutionalized distaste for homosexuals. He had no more desire to be in London or among the British than any other of the thousands of expatriate Irish who chose Paris instead of London for their lives in exile.

Keating was splicing bits of audiotape on an aging console when Delaney arrived at the English Service on the fifth floor of the giant glass-and-steel fortress that dominated the bank of the Seine where it had been so incongruously placed. He was smoking an American cigarette, powdering the tape machine with fine grey ash. The console had been due for replacement a decade earlier. So, too, if the truth were known, had Keating. He had been at this job far too long, had become far too comfortable with something too unchallenging for a journalist of his skills and experience. But it was Paris, he was forty-four years old, in exile, and the options for him were limited.

“As I live and breathe, it is Francis Delaney,” Keating said, coughing briefly as he stubbed out his cigarette in the sardine tin he used for an ashtray.

The No Smoking sign in the newsroom was there for appearances only, apparently. The newsroom generally was in a much more disreputable state than Delaney remembered it. Scripts and carbon paper were scattered everywhere. Small reels of quarter-inch tape had been hurled onto tables and into cardboard boxes. There were far too many desks, chairs, and journalists for the space available. Only a few of the reporters there actually seemed to be working, however. Most smoked cigarettes and chatted to each other, or read French and British newspapers at their desks.

“Hello, Lawrence,” Delaney said. “Got time for a coffee?”

“Always. There is always time for coffee and a cigarette,” Keating said.

He called over to a haggard young man hammering away at a grubby typewriter nearby.

“Denton, my lad, I'm off for a fag with my old mate Delaney here,” he said. “Not off with a fag, mind. For a fag. You've twelve minutes to news time, boyo, so no rush whatsoever. Look after things for me, would you?”

Keating always affected a thick Irish brogue, overladen with the standard ironic tone of a certain kind of homosexual. He did not wait for an answer from his colleague, but simply picked up his cigarettes and matches and led Delaney out.

“Young Denton is yet another fucking Brit waiting for his turn at the BBC,” Keating said as they waited for the elevator to the staff canteen on the top floor. “Straight as an arrow, the poor dear. He's still pretending that rewriting the Agence-FrancePresse wire and beaming it out across the world to the impoverished millions is his own and only sacred short-wave calling and God's gift to French foreign policy.”

They ordered small strong coffees when they got to the canteen. Delaney listened while Keating explained who among the current staff of English Service was gay, who was not, and who could not truly say.

Delaney was prepared for the tart mix of gossip, vitriol, and information Keating would, as always, provide. But he knew that on arcane matters of European Union business, Keating was a force to be reckoned with. Delaney also knew that he was an old East Europe hand who had been many times to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, before and after their Communist regimes fell. Delaney needed an informed, dispassionate, journalist's view of what was going on in Warsaw, and Keating could provide it. And so he did, without asking Delaney why such a briefing might be required.

“That little prick Walesa's ruining the whole damned country, you know,” Keating said as he smoked. “No democrat he. Solidarity be damned. Continual war at the top, that's me boyo's motto.”

Keating's skin was a bad colour and his face around the eyes was deeply lined. Delaney wondered how long before he would be brought down by AIDS.

“If they don't sew up a new constitution for that place quick smart, Walesa's going to take over everything for himself,” Keating said. “He's now just about finished pushing out another prime minister, Pawlak this time, from the Peasant Party, and it looks like it'll be Oleksy to replace him. A bald little moon-faced prick who's been Speaker for a while. One of the old-line Communists who got into Parliament in that wave in '93. SLD Party, he is, Democratic Left, or so they call themselves now.”

“He any improvement?” Delaney asked.

“Over who? Pawlak or Walesa?”

“Either.”

“Oleksy has a bunch of bad friends, dear Francis. Or so they say. Likes to go hunting and drinking with highly suspect Russians. At lodges in the deep dark woods.”

“You sure? He's KGB?” Delaney asked.

“FSB now actually. They've changed their name now, as a man such as yourself must certainly know. We realize that KGB is a name from the bad old days, don't we Francis? Of course we do. Well, everybody may be reinventing themselves at the moment over there, but it's the same old shitfight. Oleksy does run with KGB people or FSB people, or used to, that's sure no matter what name you call them. Now of course you yourself run with faggots, don't you now, and that doesn't mean you're queer. But this one stinks, Francis. Oleksy stinks, the whole fucking lot of them stink over in Warsaw at the moment, I'm sorry to say.”

“Walesa's people too, of course.”

“Of course. The whole lot. Everyone after the main chance at present. Walesa, can you believe this one, now being pursued by what passes for a tax office over there for non-payment of tax on the sum of one million dollars, one million U.S. he got in advance from some Hollywood producer with shit for brains who wants to make a movie about his life. A million dollars, my friend. For the little electrician from Gdansk. Spent most of it already, probably.”

“What on? What's for sale in Warsaw these days?”

“God only knows. Everything's for sale. But he's told the tax office he's broke, our Lechie has. Maybe he spent it all on altar boys, or altar girls in his case, as he doesn't seem to be gay. Or some nice new fax machines or ping-pong tables or tanks maybe, or maybe some dirty tricks to get re-elected. God only knows what he might spend his money on. But he's going to go down in November no matter what he spends.”

“No chance at all?”

“Oh, a small one maybe. If they keep digging up dirt on the Communists. There's a couple of groups formed over there now to embarrass the other side when they can — the Three Quarter Initiative, socalled, can't remember three-quarters of what. And the Committee of One Hundred. Right wing, centre rights, Christ knows what. A couple of others. God knows where their funding comes from. Vatican probably. Or CIA. Keeping Poland out of the hands of the Communists and safe for Lech and his band of pals.”

Keating paused to watch a thin young man in a ribbed pullover sweater walk by them with a tray of food. Smiles were exchanged.

“He's cute,” Keating said. “A technician. I must seduce him at his earliest possible convenience.”

Delaney waited for the briefing to continue at Keating's idiosyncratic pace.

“The Vatican is upset, by the way, Francis, very seriously upset these days that the Commies would like to soften up the abortion laws again over there,” Keating said. “And that the Commie Parliament won't pass a new Concordat for them, if you can imagine that. What a medieval notion that is. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, a Concordat, so-called, to spell out relations between Church and State. We are talking here about the fucking Dark Ages all over again, Francis.”

Keating's face reddened and he coughed and spat into a tissue before lighting yet another cigarette.

“Before you know it, they'll have it all shipshape again over there, Lech and the Pope will, just like fucking Ireland,” he said. “Burn queers at the stake. After Communists, abortionists, and Canadians.”

Keating didn't mind if Delaney sat for a while afterward at a terminal in the newsroom to scan the news agency wires for the latest out of Warsaw and Canada. Nor did he did mind letting Delaney send a fax to O'Keefe in Montreal and make some transatlantic calls for his messages. Keating didn't care anymore, if he had ever cared, what anyone did in that cramped airless newsroom.

Delaney then called the Méridien to see if Natalia was back. She wasn't, but he felt a small secret pleasure, after so long, at calling somewhere, anywhere, to see if a woman might have left him a message. Keating's eyes twinkled from across his desk as Delaney hung up.

“Getting any, Francis?” he asked.

“Your mind is in the gutter, Keating.”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

Delaney was about to order his third Heineken at the Méridien's little ground-floor bar when he finally saw Natalia rush in. The hotel lobby was crammed with new arrivals, departures, doormen, bellboys, and concierges. He stepped out into the milling throng and pulled her into the bar. She looked flushed and worried. Delaney did not tell her he, too, had been worried: about her, about the growing complexity of the situation, about what she might have discovered that afternoon. “You all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “The traffic is just unbelievable. It's taken me forever to get back here.” She sat down at the bar with him.

“I've had quite a session with Zbigniew, Francis,” she said. “It was exhausting. Fascinating, but really exhausting. But I'm mostly worried right now about your friend from Canada, this civil servant. He was waiting outside the apartment when I left. With that Frenchman who was with him yesterday. But today he was a little more forthcoming about his job, Francis. He said he was with the Canadian Security Service or whatever it's called.”

“Security Intelligence Service. He told you that?” Delaney knew this meant the rules of the game were changing, that Hilferty was in a hurry now to move things along, or was angry, or both.

“Yes. But you knew that all along, didn't you?” Natalia looked intently at him, psychologist with client, looking for deceptions.

“Yes. I suppose I did,” Delaney said, leaving it at that.

“He wanted me to ride back here with him,” Natalia said. “I told him no.”

“Well, he won't be far behind you. Let's go somewhere else and talk things over.”

They went quickly to the mezzanine level, then down stairs and through the kitchen to the back street as they had that morning. There was a small bistro just at the corner, jammed with after-work drinkers of coffee and coloured liqueurs. They lost themselves at a small copper-covered table near the back. Coffees came, and their conversation was drowned by the Gallic hubbub all around them.

Natalia told Delaney what he needed to know. It took her a long time, but he was impressed at her reporting skills, her attention to detail. He couldn't help thinking, as he listened, about what a superb story this all was, what it could become in the hands of a sharp feature writer. But today he did not have the luxury of journalistic interest. He was a participant in a story breaking fast.

“And you think you know where this stuff is hidden?” he asked her again.

They had ordered some plates of food and were picking at it as they talked. Natalia was now on to her second glass of Côtes du Rhône.