Still Waters

Twelve

Grabianski was thinking of his father; the half-sister, Kristyna, he had never seen. The family had fled Poland in the first year of the war-and a slow, cold fleeing they’d had of it, walking, occasionally hitching a lift, hiding beneath the heavy tarpaulin of a river barge: Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland. Kristyna had drowned in the waters of Lake Neuchâtel; she had been eleven years old.

His father, a textile worker from Lodi, had flown as a navigator for both the French and British forces; parachuted out over the Channel, plummeting toward the black, unseeing water with images of Kristyna, her stiff, breastless body, trapped tight behind his eyes.

He had survived.

Jerzy Grabianski had been born in South London, his mother a nurse from St George’s, his father sewing by electric light in the basement room in Balham, where they lived. Weekends, when his mother was working, his father would walk him on Tooting Bec Common, sit with him in the Lido, dangling Grabianski’s flailing legs down into the shallow water, never letting go.

What would he think, Grabianski wondered, if he could be here now? His father, who had struggled with such tenacity, stubborn against almost overwhelming odds, each penny counted, every yard, each thread. And Grabianski, who, in contrast, had realized the profits on a stash of antique jewelry he had been saving and bought a spacious flat close to Hampstead Heath, where he was sitting pretty.

He remembered a film he had seen twenty years earlier in a down-at-heel flea-pit cinema in Uttoxeter or Nuneaton: a rancher talking to one of Jack Nicolson’s ramshackle bunch of Montana outlaws. How did it go now? Old Thomas Jefferson said he was a warrior so his son could be a farmer, so his son could be a poet.

Well, maybe that’s what this is, Grabianski thought. This careful, almost silent movement across other people’s lives, a kind of poetry.

When the waiter brought him his café au lait, he ordered eggs Florentine, poached instead of baked.

He was dabbing a piece of French bread at the last of the yolk, lifting spinach on top of that with his fork, when a shadow fell across the door. Resnick, blinking at the change of light, steadying himself before stepping in.

“Charlie.”

“Jerzy.”

Grabianski waved a hand expansively. “Have a seat.”

Resnick was wearing a gray suit with broad lapels, too warm for the changing weather. Taking off the jacket to drape it over the back of his chair, he was aware of perspiration rich beneath his arms, the cotton of his shirt sticking to his back.

“I doubt this is a coincidence,” Grabianski said. “Day trip to visit Keats’ house, the Freud Museum perhaps?”

Resnick shook his head.

“I was afraid not. A disappointment anyway. Especially Freud. Don’t like to think of him here at all. Vienna. Fast asleep on his couch after an overdose of sachertorte.”

The waiter fussed and fiddled with napkins and cutlery until Resnick asked for a large espresso and a glass of water.

“Sparkling or still, sir?”

“Tap.”

“But here.” Grabianski leaned forward, voice lowered, “This place.”

“‘If ever you’re in sunny Hampstead,’” Resnick quoted, “‘start your day at the Bar Rouge on the High Street. I do.’”

Grabianski sat back with a rueful smile.

“Postcards,” Resnick said. “Not exactly high security.”

“I didn’t think you’d have people trawling the mail.”

Resnick’s espresso arrived, not yet the water, and Grabianski ordered another coffee for himself.

“Not quite.”

Disappointment passed across the breadth of Grabianski’s face. “I didn’t know you and the good sisters were so hand-in-hand.”

“Working in the community the way they do, we’ve things in common. Shared interests, I suppose you could say.” The espresso was good, very good. Strong without a hint of being bitter. “Sister Teresa especially.”

Grabianski nodded. “A keen sense of duty. In excess.”

“She seems to have an interest in you. In saving your soul, at least.”

Grabianski couldn’t disguise the pleasure in his eyes. “And you? Is your concern for me spiritual, too?”

“I think it’s your art collection I’m more interested in saving. Before it leaves the country.”

“Ah.” Grabianski held a cube of sugar over his cup, immersing a corner and watching as the coffee rose upward, staining the sugar brown. “Once learned, never forgotten.”

“What’s that?”

“Osmosis. Third-year biology.”

“General science myself.”

“When we’ve finished this,” Grabianski said, “what do you say we take a stroll? That is, if you’ve got the time.”

They walked a while without talking, entering the Heath across East Heath Road, then dropping down from the main path through a haze of shrubbery until they reached the viaduct. Half a dozen men and a couple of boys sat fishing at the water’s edge beneath. Nobody seemed to be catching anything.

“You know,” Grabianski said, “I heard a rumor about you.”

Leaning on the parapet, head angled sideways, Resnick waited.

“Seems you’ve got yourself a woman. Serious. Is it true?”

“Probably.”

Grabianski skipped a pebble down into the pond and watched the ripples spread. “I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks,” Resnick said. And then: “You heard this when you were in the city?”

“Was I in the city?”

“The Dalzeil paintings …”

“Ah.”

“You know they’re missing?”

“I might have heard.”

“Another rumor?”

“Something of the kind.”

“And this rumor, does it tell you whether the paintings have passed on into other hands?”

Grabianski smiled, lines crisscrossing around his eyes. “Nothing so exact.”

“And I don’t suppose a search warrant would help to clarify …?”

“A warrant? For where?”

“I’d have to fill in the details of your address.”

“I’m surprised you think you’d have grounds, especially so far from home.”

“We know you’re interested in the paintings, why else the Polaroids? We know you broke into the house once before. Given your professional reputation, I’d say we had probable cause.”

Grabianski grinned. “If there’s anything to that reputation at all, I shouldn’t think you’d find what you’re looking for wrapped in brown paper underneath the bed.”

“Maybe not.”

A woman went by, running, a black baseball cap reversed on her head, black and white T-shirt, skin-tight black shorts; there was a small water bottle attached to her belt at the small of her back, a Walkman clipped to her side. Sweat shone on her perfect thighs.

Watching, neither Resnick nor Grabianski said a word.

“There’s nothing you can do to help me then?” Resnick said, the runner now out of sight.

“Afraid not,” said Grabianski, smiling. “You know I would if I could.”

They walked on southwards, climbing between a scattered grouping of beeches and down through thickish grass until another path led them past a group of youngsters playing frisbee and up toward the hill where kites flew high and wild and the city could be seen clearly, stretched out beneath them. The Post Office Tower, King’s Cross, the dome of St. Paul’s; the pale columns of Battersea Power Station away to the right, the transmitter blinking from the top of the Crystal Palace mast, the crest of Canary Wharf reflecting back the light in the east.

“Some view, eh, Charlie? Worth traveling a distance to see.”

“Maybe.”

“Didn’t want it to have been altogether a wasted day.”

“No fear of that,” Resnick said. “Old friend of mine to see later …”

“Another?”

“Down there somewhere, Scotland Yard. Transferred into another section recently. Arts and Antiques.”

Back in his flat, Grabianski made a quick and careful inventory of those few items he had still to dispose of and which it might be embarrassing to have found in his possession. Not that he really imagined Resnick and a cohort from the local nick were about to come barging in mob-handed, but there was nothing wrong with taking a little precautionary action. The paintings, of course, were not there and never had been; they were safely bubble-wrapped in the security vault of his bank.

Thumbing through the telephone directory, Grabianski wondered if Resnick had been bluffing about his contact at the Yard. Arts and Antiques-a growing area of expertise.

Eddie Snow, he could see, had not been lying: there was his number, highlighted in bold. More than half-expecting the answer-phone, Grabianski was surprised when Snow himself picked up.

“Eddie,” Grabianski said, “sooner rather than later. We ought to talk.”

“You know the Market Bar?” Snow sounded as if he had been interrupted in the midst of something else.

“Portobello, isn’t it?”

“I’ll see you there. Eight o’clock.”

Before Grabianski could acknowledge this, the connection was cut. He wondered if eight o’clock meant dinner; he’d heard the first-floor restaurant was expensive but very good.