The Day of the Lie (33 page)

‘Obviously as the wife
of a British diplomat, she was a well—placed and potentially high-value source.’
Sebastian stepped from left to right, drawing Anselm along. He picked up a
sheaf of photocopied correspondence. ‘She didn’t disappoint. This letter is
typical and shows what kind of material she was feeding to her handlers. When
Churchill went to Washington in January fifty-two to show the world that the
Brits and the Americans were ever the best of friends, JULITA had reported that
there were, in fact, strong differences over policy to the Middle and Far East,
defence strategy and the supply of US steel. I suppose Klara just listened to
table talk and repeated what she’d heard.’ Sebastian tapped an annotation at
the bottom of the page. ‘But it was important: this missive was copied to
Vyshinsky in the Foreign Affairs Department in Moscow Klara was listening for
Stalin. She’d become his ears in the British Embassy’

Sebastian shuffled
further to the right.

‘Now these are as
frustrating as they are enticing.’

Three books lay open in
a line, like new acquisitions in a public library, the pages chosen to seize
the curiosity of anyone who happened to pass by.

‘It seems Klara’s value
was domestic as well as foreign. These are entry and exit registers. They show
that Klara attended various locations, presumably to report back to her
handler or other interested parties. The addresses are revealing, as are the
names of the persons she met. Klara was talking to members of the Public
Security Commission.’ Sebastian spoke with heavy significance, but it was lost
on Anselm, so he spelled out the implication. ‘The Commission coordinated the
Terror. Presumably Klara had information on friends and contacts of the UK
government. Or the Commission was asking her to keep an ear to the ground about
certain people. Without her file, we’ll never know’

He moved a step to the
left, stopping in front of the third volume. Slowly he ran his finger across
the bottom of the page as if to underline an entry.

‘JULITA came to Mokotów
in nineteen fifty-two,’ he said, drily ‘She’d an appointment with Major Strenk.
I’d love to know what they talked about.’

‘Me, too,’ said Anselm,
managing to make a contribution at last.

They both read the sepia
script several times. Anselm wanted to lift each word off the page and squeeze
out the meaning, as if they were so many sponges soaked in blood.

‘She was in the building
at the same time as Róża,’ said Anselm.

‘Yes:

‘Pure chance, but it
makes my skin crawl.’

‘Mine, too.’

‘Is there anything in
there —’ Anselm gestured towards the neat piles thinking of bodies in a morgue
— ‘which links Klara to Brack?’

‘No. But they could
easily have met; Brack was Strenk’s immediate subordinate.’

He sure was. Father
Kaminsky had called them pupil and master, father and son. ‘Anything that links
Klara to Róża?’

‘Nothing.’ Sebastian
sighed. ‘Being under the one roof is just a coincidence. The Commission were
talking to Róża. Klara was talking to the Commission. All it shows is two
women on different sides of the fence. They’d made contrary choices. They each
paid a price … the cost, in the end, being roughly similar.’

From that perspective,
the last document on the conference table was a kind of receipt. In August 1953
a functionary in the Ministry of Public Security had circulated a letter to
Departments I, IV, V, VII and section heads at Bureaus A and B informing them (in
terms) that JULITA’s stream of intelligence had dried up, a nice enough phrase,
sufficiently wide to encompass death.

Sebastian moved along
two paces, stopping at the beginning of the second group of records. Again they
lay in a row like today’s specials in the canteen.

‘Now we come to John,’
said Sebastian, almost brightly.

Who didn’t know that
JULITA had been found hanging from a set of railings. He knew nothing of her
self-accusation. Maybe John had tracked down his proud maternal grandparents
and seen the two medals that had been slipped under the door by Strenk or
whoever.

She’d done important
work for the future, they’d have said. She’d made a difference.

‘There is a file on
John,’ began Sebastian, opening the green cover and closing it again as if it
wasn’t worth a glance. ‘Like every other journalist he was watched but nothing
of interest was picked up. His profile and conduct are just like any other
correspondent. He doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t attract any attention. The only
record of relevance is his expulsion from Warsaw for activities consistent with
espionage.’

‘Any mention of Brack?’

‘None.’

‘Thought not.’

A second phone had
appeared on Brack’s desk. He’d told Irina not to breathe a word of the Dentist
to Frenzel. He’d been up to something that couldn’t make a bleep on anyone’s
radar, neither the SB’s nor the Stasi’s.

‘At this point, I
thought I’d come to a dead end,’ said Sebastian, hands deep in his pockets. The
black stubble showed he hadn’t shaved. He’d been working hard. ‘Just to be
sure, I sent off a string of emails to other archive holders throughout the
former communist bloc. Nothing came back until this afternoon —’ he began that
relentless drift again from left to right — ‘when these arrived from Bucharest.
This time Brack does make an appearance.

Though not immediately
explained Sebastian, holding up a report dated 8th August 1979. John Fielding
had been arrested by the Securitate at the airport as he was preparing to board
a plane for Prague. They’d previously tailed him to a mountain village where he’d
met a professor considered to have fallen foul of the social order.

‘I’ll spare you the
boring bits,’ said Sebastian, turning the page to a paragraph marked with a
yellow Post-it. ‘They already knew the family history from previous correspondence
with Warsaw Maybe that’s why they let him go … but not before writing up a
quite interesting character description. A wide-ranging interview had shown him
to be broadly disenchanted with western politics. A Hollywood actor had finally
made it to the Oval Office. He was “embittered” —’ Sebastian’s fingers opened
and closed the inverted commas — ‘following the election victory of Margaret
Thatcher the previous May She was, he said, “no friend of the labour movement”.
The Securitate analyst deemed John a potential “co-worker”. Someone who might
turn if approached in the right way’ Sebastian dropped the report back on the
table and picked up the next papers in line. ‘… a prospect that was brought
to Brack’s attention two years later.’

In early 1982 he’d
carried out a routine check on a journalist newly arrived in Warsaw and had
been delighted to receive a copy of the report and the recommendation. Brack —
terse and obscure — gave no hint of his intentions.

‘Did he take it up?’
asked Anselm, as if he needed to know.

‘Well, this is where it
all gets very interesting,’ said Sebastian, reaching the end of the table and
the last selection of documents. ‘You’d have thought that Brack would have put
this stuff from the Securitate in John’s file, but he didn’t. He didn’t put it
anywhere — remember, I had to get it from Bucharest — instead he seems to have
binned the lot or shredded it later, leaving behind one tantalising clue …

Sebastian opened the
cover of a large brown ring binder.

‘Now, on its own, this
is not a helpful resource,’ he said, sliding his thumb on to another yellow
Post-it. He lifted the top pages and lay the binder flat. ‘This is simply an
inventory of names comprising agents, potential agents and targets.’

‘Perpetrators and
victims?’

‘Yeah.’

‘All mixed up?’

‘Exactly and, as I say
not much use if you’ve got nothing else to go on.

‘Unlike ourselves.’

Sebastian nodded, his
lips firm and unsmiling. His finger pointed at John’s name, as he’d pointed at
Klara’s. In a parallel column was the chosen title: CONRAD.

‘Of course, it’s not
unequivocal evidence,’ said Sebastian, moving across the room towards the
coffee pot. ‘But it doesn’t get much stronger.’

‘Oh yes, it does,’ said
Anselm, taking the little jug of milk. He made a splash in two polystyrene
cups. Do you have details on special telephone lines set up during SB covert
operations in nineteen eighty-two?’

Sebastian turned slowly
appraising Anselm with guarded respect, interested to know what the monk easily
distracted by the meaning of life had been up to when he wasn’t talking to
Father Kaminsky and Bernard Kolba. ‘Yes, we do.’

‘John can’t even
remember his own birth date. He left a phone number in a Warsaw guidebook.
55876. Check it out. I think you’ll find it rang on Brack’s desk.’

Anselm’s investigation had run its term. In
a way he’d come full circle, beginning with John and ending with John. For the
moment — lying in bed, hands behind his neck — he simply couldn’t grasp the
distance between the person he thought he knew and the person whose secret life
he’d uncovered. He was stunned and couldn’t reflect with the necessary
detachment. Quite apart from any personal considerations, he couldn’t imagine
how John might occupy the central plank in Brack’s scheme — and how that scheme
could silence Róża for so long. But he did and it had. The Dentist’s
private operation had been a ringing success. For some reason, Róża would
never contemplate John’s exposure …

But she’d changed her
mind. She’d come to London. She’d come to John’s door. She’d come with a
statement to help him walk through fire: an account of her life that only
showed her
understanding
of his circumstances; that held out no
blame
for what he’d done to her in return. And John had stood there, blind,
playing the dumb waiter. She’d left him, devastated, as when he’d last seen
her; when he’d gone to her Warsaw flat protesting his innocence, offering to
find the informer. She’d left him to his blindness. She’d thrown her statement
in a bin. Once again, she’d taken pity on someone who deserved to suffer.

But why on earth should Róża
want to protect John? As the Prior said, she’d only known him a matter of
months.

The following morning —
Anselm’s last in Warsaw — he took a listless breakfast. Even the personal hurt
seemed far off, shrinking from his nerves. In a daze he packed his bag; he
tidied the room; and, coat on, he rang Bernard Kolba to apologise for his crass
accusation the day before. The lurch to make reparation yielded an unexpected
dividend: the conversation rolled on to the next steps and the mystery of Róża’s
present location. She’s still in London, said Bernard. Staying with Magda
Samovitz in Stockwell Green. Róża had taken her first holiday in living
memory. Was there any better diversion, thought Anselm, entering the lift, than
to shatter everyone’s illusions, including your own?

Sebastian was waiting
for Anselm in the hotel foyer. He took his bag and drove him to the airport
with the solicitude of an undertaker holding up the traffic, his mood similar
to that of the quiet monk at his side. He’d come dark-suited with a mumbling
apology of his own, for how things had turned out. He’d have preferred it if Róża’s
informer had been someone at arm’s length.

‘But, then, the point of
informers is that they get close. It’s a pity you got burned, too.’

Yes, that was the right
word — Anselm woke as the aircraft tilted into dense cloud over England — it
was a pity all round.

A pity for Róża. A
pity for Klara and for Irina, blunted tools thrown aside. A pity for the fat
young man with the plastic Kalashnikov. A pity for Edward, who knew more than
he could ever say A pity for Bernard and Aniela who knew nothing. A pity for
George Fielding whose love turned sour and Melanie who came on as substitute to
play Misery. And John, too. There was pity for John somewhere.

The scale of these dark
reflections obscured all thought of Anselm’s one remaining task: the
confrontation of his old school friend, the person who’d sent him to Warsaw to
find out why Róża had come to London. Instead his mind went elsewhere,
seeking a diversion of its own. And it went somewhere altogether interesting.

Mooching round his cell
before Compline, warmed to the point of injury by that first sound of bells, he
recalled that Róża Mojeska and Father Kaminsky had something in common.
Unknown to the other, they’d each shared a friend: Mr Lasky the caretaker at
Saint Justyn’s Orphanage for Girls. The name had cropped up in Róża’s
statement as it had fallen from the mouth of Father Kaminsky In one of those
flashes of certainty-without-good-cause — sudden perceptions that Anselm no
longer presumed to question — he was sure that the relationship between the
three people — an orphan, a caretaker and a priest — lay at the centre of the greater
picture, the canvas upon which John had made a late and troubled entry.

‘Maybe Mr Lasky is part
of the pity of it all,’ said Anselm, heading down to Compline. ‘A man whom Róża
had known as a child, long before she faced the terrors of the night.’

Part Six

The Mind of Otto Brack

Chapter Forty

The woodshed at Larkwood remained standing
by some mystery of physics not yet known to modern science. Two of three central
beams were cracked. Most of the dark rafters seemed to be unattached at either
end. All the main uprights, already bent, were gravely aslant. The caramel
wattle and daub was crazed with deep fissures. Chunks were missing, leaving
ancient silver twigs peeping out like the stems of dried flowers, their heads
long gone.

‘You were right,’ said
Anselm to the Prior.

‘In what way?’