Where the Devil Can't Go (9 page)

He knew that it was common for young women to swear these days, especially the ones who’d come to England, but it still shocked him in an almost physical way to hear it. When he had been her age it would have been unthinkable to use such language in front of one’s elders.

“Is that what you feel about Poland today?” he asked.

She sipped her apple juice, eyes cast down. “I want to go back one day, I guess,” she said, choosing her words. “But not yet. What is there for me, in Katowice? I would earn maybe half of what I get here – I’d have to save for years just to buy a five-year-old Polski Fiat.”

There was no anger, only a resigned pragmatism in her voice.

“Here, once I learn English I can get a job in Marks and Spencer and earn good money, go to college part-time.”

“What will you study?”

Her eyes lit up, animating her whole face for the first time. “Physiotherapy, or maybe chiropractic, I haven’t decided yet.”

Janusz knew Katowice: a powerhouse of heavy industry under the Soviets, many of its residential districts were now half-empty, depressing places, peopled by the old, the sick, and by those who lacked either the resources or the courage to leave. The thought of living there made him shudder. Maybe his generation had been lucky, after all – at least fighting the
Kommies
gave them a sense of common purpose.

“Zamorski is a good guy,” he assured her. “If anyone can put the country back on its feet, he will.”

His words hung there, shiny and shallow sounding, as she gazed at him with dark brown eyes.

“Politicians are all the same.” Her tone was polite but decisive. “You and your friends thought that Walesa was superman, right?”

Janusz had to admit she was right about that. He had idolised Lech Walesa once, only to watch in horrified disbelief, after the
Solidarnosc
leader became Poland’s first elected president, as he elbowed out some of the revolution’s brightest thinkers and surrounded himself with yes-men.

Zamorski shared Walesa’s
Solidarnosc
credentials, but displayed none of his demagogic tendencies and had already pulled off an impressive political balancing act, drawing on Poles’ instinctive conservatism while resisting the temptations of full-blooded nationalism. But spending the night arguing politics with the self-possessed Justyna wasn’t going to help him find the lost girl, thought Janusz. He sensed he’d have to go gently – if he came out and asked where Weronika was, she might just clam up.

“Did you ever come here with Weronika?” he asked, taking a slug of beer.

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Was it here she met Pawel?” he asked.

The faintest frown creased her forehead, but she didn’t ask how he knew about Weronika’s secret boyfriend.

“No, he came into the restaurant one day and chatted her up as she served him
pierogi
.”

“Do you remember when he first came in?”

“Yes! It was February thirteenth – I remember because my Mama’s called Katarzyna and it’s her saint’s day,” she said, with a shy smile. “After that, he came back every single day, flattering her, slipping her little presents –
czekolatki
, perfume – till she finally agreed to go out with him.” Her voice became scornful as she talked about Adamski.

“You didn’t like him.”

“He was bad news,” said Justyna, nodding her head for emphasis. “Nika was only nineteen” – she used the affectionate diminutive of Weronika – “and he was
thirty
– much too old for her.”

Janusz left a silence, letting her talk. “He was always getting drunk,” she went on, after a pause, “and then he’d get crazy. One time the three of us we were in a pub and he threw a glass at the TV screen – just because they were talking about the election!” She widened her eyes at the memory. “We used to come here, mostly – until he got barred.”

“What happened?” asked Janusz.

“He said it was for arguing with a bouncer,” she shrugged, sceptical. “But he was such a liar, who knows.”

Since the girl’s animosity toward Adamski appeared to outweigh her caginess, Janusz decided to play devil’s advocate.

“Lots of Polish men like to drink,” he said with a grin. “Maybe you were a bit jealous of your friend? Perhaps you would have liked Pawel for yourself?”

“No way!” she shot back, her face flushed, warming her olive complexion and making her even prettier, he noticed. “I didn’t say one word against him at the start – I’m not her mother. But then, one night, while Nika was in the
toaleta,
he put his hand up my skirt! Can you believe the guy?”

“Did you tell her?”

“I tried to, but she just shrugged it off, said he must have been joking. She was crazy about him, and anyway, you have to understand something about Nika: she’s
bogu ducha winie
.” He smiled at the expression – innocent as a lamb – it was one his mother had often used.

“Where did he work?” If Justyna didn’t know – or wouldn’t tell him – where the pair were living, it would be his best hope of tracing the pair.

She fiddled with the straw in her drink, shrugged. “It’s a big mystery. At the beginning, Nika told me he’s a builder, one of those who stands on the side of the road and waits for an Irish boss to hire him?” Janusz nodded – in the old days he’d sometimes had to tout himself out in that humiliating way. “But then he started throwing big money around – taking her out for fancy meals, buying expensive hi-fi, flashy clothes, acting like a gangster.”

“Maybe he won some money – internet poker, betting on the football.”

“Enough to buy a new BMW?” she asked, her eyes wide. “He
said
he was dealing in
antique furniture
.” Her words dripped with derision.

“So how do you think he made the
smalz?
”

At that, a cloak of inscrutability dropped over her face again, and she looked off into the bar area, which was filling up as the night progressed.

“I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “I just hope Nika isn’t getting herself mixed up in any trouble.”

As Janusz waited at the bar to buy more drinks he let his eye roam over the klub’s clientele. In their teens and twenties, mostly Polish, but with a sprinkling of English faces, they appeared – for the most part – smartly turned-out and well-behaved. His gaze fell on a group of youngsters sitting at the table nearest the bar. Two boys and two girls, deep in animated conversation, talking and laughing just a bit too loudly. And they were constantly touching each other, he noticed – a squeeze of the arm, a stroke of the cheek. Maybe it was just the buzz and bonhomie you’d expect between good friends enjoying the first rush of
alkohol.
Maybe not. The eldest, a boy, was 18, tops, and, under their make-up the two giggling girls looked barely old enough to drink legally.

He ordered the drinks and, leaving a twenty on the bar to pay for them, strolled to the toilets. After using the urinal, he lingered at the washbasin, combing his hair in the mirror and praying nobody took him for a
pedzio.
Just as he expected, a minute or two later, a shaven-headed, rail-thin guy in a hooded jacket slid up to the sink next to him, turned on the taps, and made a pretence of washing his hands.

“Wanna buy
Mitsubishi
?” he asked in Polish, without turning his head.

Janusz had a pretty good idea he wasn’t being offered a used car. Pocketing the comb, he raised a non-committal eyebrow.

“It’s good stuff,” the guy urged, “double-stacked…” Suddenly, he found his sales pitch interrupted as his face was brought into violent and painful contact with the mirror.

“What the fu..?!” He gazed open-mouthed at his contorted reflection and scrabbled at the back of his neck where Janusz’s rocklike fist gripped his balled-up hood.

Janusz shook his head, gave him another little push for the profanity.

“A word of advice, my friend. The undercover
policja
are all over this place. Apparently, some scumbag is selling drugs to youngsters.”

The guy tried to wipe snot and blood from his nose.

“Your best move would be to take your…business up to the West End, and rethink your policy on selling to anyone under twenty-one.” Janusz bent his head down to the guy’s level, locked eyes with him in the mirror. “In fact, if I was you,” he said softly, “I’d insist on seeing a driving licence.”

Straightening up, he released the guy, who bolted, and turning on the taps, gave his hands a thorough soaping. He frowned at his reflection. Had Adamski been dealing
Ekstasa
here? It could explain a lot: his bizarre and unpredictable behaviour, the glazed look Weronika wore in the dirty photos, his sudden acquisition of enough cash to buy a BMW. It might explain that fracas with the
klub
bouncer, too.

Rejoining Justyna, he told her he’d been offered drugs in the toilets, hoping she might take the bait, confirm that Adamski was a dealer, but she just lifted a shoulder, non-committal.

“When I was a student,” he said, “the only way to get high, apart from booze, was the occasional bit of grass. A guy I knew started growing it on his bedroom windowsill – in the summer the plants would get really huge. Anyway, one day, his
Babcia
was cooking the family dinner when she ran out of herbs,” he looked up, found her smiling in anticipation.

“The old lady decided that Tomek’s plant was some kind of parsley, and chopped a whole bunch of the stuff into a bowl of potatoes. Luckily, it wasn’t all that strong. All the same, he said that after dinner, when the state news came on – you know, the old
Kommie
stuff about tractor production targets being broken yet again – the whole family started cracking up, laughing their heads off, and found they just couldn’t stop.”

Justyna met his gaze, a grin dimpling her cheeks.

“Anyway, Tomek said that the night went down in family history,” Janusz went on. “And whenever his parents told the story, they always said the same thing.
‘That batch of elderberry wine was the best that Babcia ever made’
!”

They laughed together, any remaining ice between them fully broken. He seized the moment to ask: “But in London, you can get anything, of course.
Kokaina, Ekstasa,
so on…”

“Sure,” she agreed. “If you are a fucking
idiota
.” She sucked some juice up through her straw. “One of my friends died, back home, from sniffing glue. He was fifteen.” She shook her head. “If I’d taken drugs I’d probably be dead like him, or even worse – still stuck in Katowice.” They shared a wry grin: the joke crossed the generational divide.

Seizing the moment, he asked: “You think Pawel messes about with drugs, don’t you?”

She hesitated, then met his eyes: “I think so, yes. How else does someone like him make such money?”

Janusz made his move.

“You know that Pani Tosik has hired me to find Weronika,” he said. Justyna gave a barely perceptible nod. “I can see it’s difficult for you – you are loyal to your friend. But I think you are right to be worried that this ‘boyfriend’ of hers might put her in danger.”

She played with the straw in her glass, a frown creasing her forehead.

“I’m not asking you to betray her trust – just to give me a few pointers,” he went on. “It would help if I knew how Adamski talked her into going off like that.”

The girl took a big breath, let it out slowly. Then, speaking in a low voice, she told him that two weeks earlier, while Pani Tosik was out getting her hair done, Weronika had locked herself away in her bedroom above the restaurant. Suspecting that something was going on, Justyna kept knocking and calling her name through the door.

“In the end, she let me in,” she said. “She was bouncing off the walls with excitement. Then I saw the half-packed suitcase on the bed. At first, she wouldn’t tell me what was going on, said Pawel had sworn her to secrecy.” A line appeared between Justyna’s dark eyebrows. “But Nika couldn’t keep a secret to save her own life. In the end she showed me the ring she was wearing on a chain round her neck.”

“They were
engaged
?” asked Janusz, incredulous. An image of Weronika in a G-string posing for the camera, her eyes unfocussed, swam before him and he tensed his jaw. Some fiancée, he thought.

Justyna nodded. “She was as excited as a little child on Christmas Eve,” she said, unable to suppress a smile at the memory.

“Did she say where she was going, where they would be living?”

She shook her head – but judging by the way her gaze slid away from his, he suspected she was lying.

“She said they’d be leaving London soon. Pawel had some business to finish up, and then they were going back home to get married.” She popped her eyes. “All this, after she’d known him a few weeks!”

Janusz was touched by Justyna’s concern. She couldn’t be more than five or six years older than Weronika, but it was clear the younger girl brought out the mother hen in her.

“I tried to talk her out of it,” she went on. “I said, imagine how upset your Mama will be when she hears her little girl has run off with some man she barely knows.”

“But it did no good?”

“She went a bit quiet,” recalled Justyna. “But then she said Mama would be fine so long as no-one cut off her supply of
cytrynowka
,” she shot him a look. The sickly lemon
wodka
was a notorious tipple of street drunks – and alcoholic housewives. “Nika told me she would often come home from school and find her lying unconscious on the kitchen floor.”

Apparently, Mama had been little more than a child herself when she’d fallen pregnant with Weronika. The little girl had grown up without a father and the only family apart from her chaotic drunk of a mother had been a distant uncle who visited once in a blue moon.

Poor kid, thought Janusz. It was hardly surprising that after leaving home, she should fall head over heels in love with the first person who showed her any affection – like a baby bird imprinting on whoever feeds it, however ill-advised the love object.

By now, there was standing room only in the bar area, and the crowd was encroaching on the small table where Janusz and Justyna sat. The
thump thump
of the music, the shouted conversations and the bodies pressing in all around set up a fluttering in Janusz’s stomach. So when the girl said she ought to go, she had an early start at the restaurant the next day, he felt a surge of relief.