The Day of the Lie (35 page)

‘I don’t know how Róża
will react,’ he said, cutting short the tribute, ‘but afterwards you’ll be free
to prosecute Otto Brack.’

Chapter Forty-One

The Old Mill had stood by the Lark for four
hundred years. The original grinding mechanism, fragile and jammed, remained
visible in the large room where Anselm had made the fire. The floor was flagged
and uneven, worn down by the feet of peasant farmers who’d brought their
threshed wheat to be ground into flour. In the centre stood a waxed round
table, brought in by Anselm as a learned allusion to the groundbreaking Round
Table talks of 1989 between Solidarity, the Communists and the Church; the
negotiations that had launched a new order in social relations. There were four
mock Chippendale chairs — a nod towards English fair play — occupied by the delegates
invited by Anselm. A standing crowd of Suffolk ghosts seemed to watch
expectantly cloth caps in hand.

‘This isn’t going to be
easy’ said John, nudging his dark glasses. ‘I don’t want to make a speech. I
can’t see you … it would help if you’d ask questions, reply anything, only
don’t leave me floating in the darkness.’

Róża had come by
train with Sebastian who was now in the guesthouse eating his nails. She sat
upright, her back away from the chair. A face of shadows, thought Anselm.
Shadows that were deep with the movements of dusk. She wore a silver brooch
clipped to her white blouse. Her eyes seemed to speak a forgiving but frightened
tenderness.

‘Why don’t you start
with Klara?’ suggested Anselm, his voice dry and spare. ‘The road to this table
begins with her, doesn’t it?’

Beside Róża sat
Celina Hetman. She’d been held up by the snow drifts. Anselm had thought she
might not come after all. He’d remembered a vibrant intellect and a kitsch,
plastic belt. They’d only met two or three times. He’d once tried to imagine
her in the Royal Courts of Justice speaking on John’s behalf, the judge
intrigued, if not distracted, by the decorated headband. He needn’t have
worried. She’d fled from John’s life. When the car had finally pulled up at
Larkwood, Anselm hadn’t recognised her. On the understanding that the
outlandish don’t always wear that well, he’d expected a middle-aged
multicoloured prune but he’d met a timeless woman whose refinement made him
stammer. She was dressed in black — cashmere wools and matt leather shoes — in
contrast to the coral pink of her lips. On her little finger was a large ring:
a daisy; a spot of yellow enamel with long white petals. Her hair was jet black
and very short, like a distressed belle’s in a Chaplin film: boyish curls by
the ears and incredibly feminine. Skilled with her courtesy, she’d been
delighted to meet Róża and pleased to see John once more, but Anselm — a
man familiar with troubled voices — sensed anxiety and old wounds. She looked
at John as he ran a finger behind his roll neck collar, but then Róża
suddenly spoke, a voice soft and musical, small and knowing: ‘Perhaps you
should start with Otto Brack.’

The call came after John had been in Warsaw
a couple of months. He said, ‘Call me the Dentist.’ He said he needed help. He
said he wanted out. That’s how it all began: with a plea for help. He urged
John to trust him, to understand how dangerous it was for him to speak to a
British journalist. He didn’t trust his own organisation and he didn’t trust
any in the West: ‘I need to find someone outside the system. Do you understand?’

Anselm shifted in his
seat: this wasn’t the kind of call he’d expected Brack to make. Why would
he
want
out?
The point — Anselm had imagined — was to get
John in.

‘The Dentist wanted me
to vouch for him with a government minister, whom he’d later name, right over
the head of MI6,’ John’s hand, flat on the table made a polishing motion. ‘He
was flattering me; building up my self-importance. I was easy meat.’

John had two questions —
and he asked them with all the aplomb of an experienced handler: first, what
did the Dentist have to offer?

Second, why come to
John? Warsaw was packed with foreign journalists.

‘He said he’d bring the
entire SB battle order. He had lists of informers within Solidarity and the
Church. Copies of correspondence between Moscow and Warsaw He knew the colour of
Brezhnev’s underpants … you name it, the Dentist had pulled it from some top
drawer marked “Secret”, and it was mine to hand over. Part of the dowry that
would secure my place in the annals of Cold War history — unread by all, save
the major players on either side of the Wall.’

Anselm was cut loose. A
dowry? How could a mock defection by Brack lead to John betraying Róża?
Once more — and this time with complete finality — Anselm abandoned a
convincing interpretation of the evidence. John might have been CONRAD but
CONRAD was no willing spy … and Róża’s eyes were resting upon him; she
hadn’t strayed once; she held on to his voice as if it were a handle.
I’ve
got everything wrong, except for this meeting; and even now, I don’t know why
it’s right.

‘He was typical of many
people I knew back then,’ said John —he’d become swift and fluid; his memory
set in motion by the relief of letting go — ‘he was convinced that but for
martial law the Russians would have invaded. They’d marched into Budapest in
fifty-six, Prague in sixty-eight and Kabul in eighty. He thought they still
might come to Warsaw, which was why he wanted out now, and fast.’

‘But why you?’ Celina’s
tone was frail, like tearing paper. ‘Why did he pick you?’

Anselm involuntarily
abridged Bogart’s gin-joint line — of all the food queues in Warsaw, why did
you have to walk into mine? And he understood that she grieved, even now, at
ever having met him.

‘Because I was a
stranger,’ replied John, hearing — Anselm was sure — the same tone of regret. ‘Because
he’d done some research. He knew a great deal about my family Far more than me;
he’d guessed why I’d come to Warsaw.’

He knew John was the son
of a diplomat; the son of a woman who’d committed suicide; the son of a tragedy
He’d read his mother’s file. He’d calculated that John’s embarrassment went
deep into his identity; that he carried a kind of transferred guilt.

‘Suicide?’ repeated
Celina, softly.

The subject was too
large for the moment — like Anselm with Irina on the unswerving ardour of monks
— but Celina was simply reaching out to him from a new understanding. She knew
there was more to be said … that might once have been said, if things had
been simpler between them.

‘Yes,’ replied John. ‘I’ve
come to see it very differently over the years. Once it was a betrayal. Now? I
think she wanted to eternalise her regret. To say sorry for ever — to me, to my
father. Brack smelled that, too.’

He’d been deeply
sympathetic. The pressures of the time had been awful (Brack said) — ‘I was
there, I know what it was like; I felt the heat’ — with friend pitted against
friend to demonstrate their innocence. He’d only raised the matter because he
felt that John, of all people, would understand why the Dentist wanted out;
that John, of all people, might want to rectify the past — by helping him; by
purging the mistake of his mother.

‘He didn’t use those
words, but that’s what he meant.’ John’s hand had stopped moving. ‘And that was
the trick. Within minutes of listening to him, the table had slowly turned.
He
was offering to help
me.
And you might find this difficult to
believe, but I was grateful. Really grateful. Without the assistance of an
insider, I’d never know what my mother had actually done. I thought a great
chance had come my way.

The Dentist asked John to
think about it because there were dangers on both sides. A week later the phone
rang again. To prove his bona fides, he offered John copies of telegrams sent
to the KGB dealing with Solidarity’s— ‘I didn’t want them. I told him I was
prepared to take the risk.’ But the Dentist said that’s not how things worked.
That trust was a kind of deal, a bargain, an exchange of services. And, if he
was to help the Dentist, there were rules.

‘First, we were never to
meet. I could only call him on a secure number, five-five-eight-seven-six.
Second, names were dangerous, that’s why he was the Dentist, so I had to pick
one. I went for Conrad. It was a joke.
The Secret Agent
…
Heart of
Darkness.
But he didn’t get it. Third, I was to keep a journal recording
all the leads he’d send my way each of which would focus on the fight for
freedom of speech, accountability, democratic blah, blah —’ John smoothed the
table once more, moving quickly — ‘Fourth, I was to take this journal with me
to the minister he’d later name as evidence of the Dentist’s values and
commitment to political reform. This was the deal: if I prepared his passage to
the West, he’d help me understand my mother’s story. He’d bring her file.’

John couldn’t see any
problem: he wasn’t giving anything to the Dentist. All the traffic would be
coming the other way His only role was to be a messenger operating outside the
system, his task to bring a request to someone at the heart of government.

The Dentist was true to
his word. He gave John all manner of information, placing him one step ahead of
every other Western journalist in Warsaw He placed John’s ear at the door of
the Junta. Only John didn’t notice that all the ‘stuff sent his way’ would have
made it into the public domain eventually; that he only received advanced
notice; that he was only given two scoops of substance. The first was on
underground printing.

‘He told me the
publication most feared by the government was
Freedom and Independence.’
He
looked towards Róża, as if their eyes might meet. ‘It’s run by someone
called the Shoemaker, he said; only turns up when times get really bad, and he’s
turned up now This is the voice you should hear. It had last been heard during
the Terror. Get his words into the
Times,
the
Guardian,
the
Telegraph
—’ he threw imagined copies on the table — ‘get his message out of Warsaw’

The only known point of
contact was a woman called Róża Mojeska, and he was trying to find her.

‘I got there first, Róża,’
he said, heavily He faltered, like a man stepping suddenly off the pavement. ‘In
all that we spoke of, Róża, I never once lied. I just didn’t tell the
truth of how I came to find you.

Róża nodded but
didn’t speak. Her eyes were boring into him out of those mauve shadows. John
seemed to fall, knowing there was no hand that could reach him. ‘He called
again, said he’d loved the “Lives Lived in Secret” piece, it was wonderful,
marvellous, this was our win, our first strike back, he was halfway to London,
and now he had someone else. A documentary film-maker. She’d spent her life
winding up the authorities. She was a wild cat. Wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t go.
They’d been offering her a passport for years and she wouldn’t take it. They
put people like her in prison and threw away the key Not six months, ten years,
so get on to her, she’s another life lived in secret.’

‘And you put all this
down in your journal?’ asked Celina, her voice transparent like India paper.
Anselm couldn’t quite see through it; something was on the other side; he wasn’t
sure she’d even asked a question. Her lips moved slowly beautifully.

‘I kept the rules,’ said
John. ‘My journal was the contemporaneous account of his bona fides. It was the
means to get him out. It was the way to open my mother’s file … I wanted to
see with my own eyes what she’d done to my father.’ He turned to Róża,
reaching out again with blind eyes. ‘I didn’t tell him about the plan to meet
the Shoemaker. I turned up and saw you walk to a man that I’d never seen
before. Then I got my head kicked in. I didn’t know the Dentist was the guy in
the graveyard until he walked into the cell. I was thrown out of Warsaw before
the end of the week. He’d used me to find you, Róża. He’d used my pride
and self-importance. He’d used my mother’s mistake. He’d used my longing to
change what she’d done.’

Róża showed no
emotion. A hand moved to the brooch, a silver triangle, a complex of tiny
sculpted flowers. The dusk round her eyes had grown dark. A kind of night
settled on her face. Silence pounded from her closed mouth. The fire snapped, a
log rolled into flame.

‘I didn’t tell you about
her because I didn’t know what to say’ John had turned to Anselm. ‘There’s
nothing worse, you know Shame without knowing why My father never spoke about
her when I was a child. At ten I’d seen her name on my birth certificate. But
he wouldn’t tell me anything about her life, except that she’d ended it. He’d
razed her life to the ground. He’d built a golf course on top and a club house
with bourbon on tap. I only learned about her past when they picked me up in
Bucharest. They made a call to the SB in Warsaw and the next thing I know a
sort of Eton Old Boy walks in, the real thing, genteel English with the vaguest
Russian accent. “A cigarette? A cup of Earl Grey? No scones, I’m afraid.” What
did I think of Reagan? And what about Thatcher? Then I was free, a favour to
the memory of my mother, he said. Because of the price she’d paid for socialist
values. That’s why I took the job with the BBC. I wanted to learn about her
values. Her country, her history, her roots. My country, my history, my roots.
I wanted to find her. And then the Dentist called. If only I’d known of his
place in your life, Róża; if only I’d known that he’d picked me with you
in mind.’

John threw his head
back. He was almost done. Coming forward, he planted his face in his hands,
slipping his fingers behind his glasses. He appeared at once the tragic
buffoon: hands covering his eyes, with spectacles on top; hiding behind lenses
that wouldn’t let him see even if someone pulled his arms away.