The Day of the Lie

Chapter Fifty-Two

Roza was told of Brack’s death the same evening. She walked the length of her sitting room and slowly sat down, no longer quite present. Examining her face, Anselm wondered if he caught the slightest lift of that wave he’d noticed when she’d been told the contents of Brack’s file. Sadness, pity or compassion, he’d never know, but it had led to mercy And now with him dead, there was an edge to her quiet. It was almost as if she and Brack were linked by a remaining thread of understanding, that with the onslaught of terror, good and bad are swept into the one fire.

Celina seemed the most confused, battling — Anselm suspected — against the upsurge of relief which, once spent, made one feel vaguely unclean. Death did that. It demanded a moment’s thought, requiring all those remotely affected to look with honesty at the empty chair and check if the life extinguished had left anything worthwhile behind: and Brack’s hadn’t. John was indifferent, though he drew emotions vicariously from Roza and Celina, by turns reflective and furtively jubilant. Speaking to Sebastian on the phone, Anselm found him angry He’d wanted a trial. He’d wanted to see the law at work, its hands reaching back in time to reclaim lost ground, making it holy again. But it remained out of reach, unsanctified. Brack had died on a deep pile red carpet. It didn’t seem quite right. In truth, Sebastian hadn’t understood Roza’s justice: that in eschewing naked retaliation for the past she’d looked creatively forwards, where even a murderer without a defence had an open future.

Coverage by the media the next morning was spontaneously inter-connected, different commentators and presenters effectively speaking to each other in public. Brack’s death, fast upon his acquittal — peculiarly condemned and pitied by Roza Mojeska at one and the same time — ignited a debate that moved from paper to screen to radio: about the relationship between retribution and compassion. The argument became heated, even in the hotel’s corridors. The final words of the Shoemaker were discussed like never before. Roza, to the end, had been his loyal messenger.

Anselm’s reaction? The sight of the shooting itself profoundly disturbed him: the thud and the staggering backwards kept recurring before his eyes and ears… followed by the slow, comic drop to the ground. Even the death of a man like Brack stirred something in the stomach. The sense of sickness wouldn’t go away.

He also felt peculiarly responsible, asking himself if he should ever have entered the Warsaw Hall; if he should ever have taken that oyster to Frenzel; if he should ever have brought Irina Orlosky from Praga into the outskirts of Brack’s prosecution, linking his anticipated conviction with the recovery of her self-respect.

He went to see her in Mokotow, the prison built during the days of a tsar and now a remand facility. They really ought to pull it down, he thought, as Irina was brought to the visiting room on the ground floor. It stank of disinfectant — the sort of chemical used by Madam Czerny to wash her hair. The lights were glaring, the table and chairs bolted to the concrete floor. Anselm felt the past beating all around him. Roza’s shouts, Pavel’s groans — the cries of agitators and anti-Socialist elements. He listened to Irina’s quiet, controlled confession.

‘I don’t regret what I’ve done,’ she said, drawing a circle on the table with her finger. ‘Quite the opposite. I’m proud. Because now I can say that I, too, stood up to them. I hit back for all those others that were shot, and the hundreds of thousands whose lives they boxed away in a file… decent, reasonable people who’d never twist a woman’s arm or take a man’s life, even such a man as that. Like the old couple outside the court waiting for justice, holding on to that banner. Well, I gave it to them. I’ve done something good, something that was right.’ She wiped her eyes on a green McDonald’s sleeve, the tears appearing without the usual disturbance of emotion.

‘They’ll keep me in prison, but I don’t care. I’m free now, if you can imagine that.’

No, you’re not, thought Anselm, sadly Because in time you will come to regret this swift, personal justice. You will gouge at your eyes in self-hatred for having crossed this terrible line. Because you will gradually perceive that now you stand among the executioners; and you will long for the day when you’d simply been compromised by how you’d used a skill in languages.

‘I know about living in a cell,’ replied Anselm. ‘You have to face yourself like never before. Frankly it’s disagreeable… but persevere, Irina. The darker it gets, and no matter what you feel, just plough on: face the silent commotion. There’s a peace at the end, and it’s greater than the distress paid to get there.’ Anselm frowned with melancholy: she, too, deserved the Shoemaker’s strange mercy but it couldn’t stretch that far. It had reached Brack, but it couldn’t quite make those extra few inches to his typist. ‘Irina, promise me something.’

‘Yes.’

She’d stood up because their short time together had come to an end. The female guard had opened the door with a key attached to a heavy chain hanging from her belt. She’d given that c’mon-get-moving tilt with the head that all prison staff learn.

‘When you get out, don’t go back to Mr Frenzel.’

‘He’s given me notice.

Already? Would a strange retribution ever fall upon that man? A slate from a roof would do. But no, it wouldn’t happen. The only finger justice would ever place upon his sleeve was a parking ticket.

‘Thank you,’ Irina blurted out at the door, pulling back from the guard.

‘What for?’ He turned, seized by the throat.

‘The flowers. I just loved the flowers.’

The following morning, assisted by Sebastian, two police officers formally interviewed Anselm in a central Warsaw police station. They were compiling eye witness testimony to the shooting, of course, but they wanted to know about the conversation that had taken place with Otto Brack moments before the shooting and Anselm’s previous dealings with the killer, Irina Orlosky It took a while for him to realise that the absence of smiles meant they were investigating — if only to exclude it — the possibility of conspiracy: that Anselm had some shared responsibility for Irina’s actions. The matter was dealt with courteously but not before Anselm had suggested the two gentlemen might want to raid any and all premises belonging to one Marek Frenzel. A portion of the national archives would be recovered, furnishing them with enough evidence to instigate any number of prosecutions, not to mention one against Mr Frenzel himself.

‘I used to be a lawyer myself;’ said Anselm, after shaking hands with the senior officer. He used a forced, jocular tone to hide his festering aggression. ‘Trust me: Mr Frenzel’s worth a very close look indeed. Turn all the drawers out. Take up the carpet. Full body search with gardening gloves. Same with his business dealings. Check his VAT returns and his annual accounts. Call in the forensic people and pull him apart column by column. You’ll find a string of stolen pearls.’ And then the anger burst out. ‘Lock him up and give the key to Irina Orlosky’

Sebastian had translated every phrase, he and Anselm drinking in the slow nods of the two investigators. Afterwards, glad to have consigned Marek Frenzel to a great deal of personal and professional inconvenience, Anselm made a discreet afternoon visit to what would for ever remain — should an inventory be made of his actions — an undisclosed location. On returning to his bedroom, still melancholy and resigned, he waited for Sebastian’s call. They’d agreed to drown their mutual but different sorrows. When the phone rang Anselm picked up the receiver and said, with inscrutable calm:

“‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”.’

He was quoting Wittgenstein, hoping to establish a light hearted mood for the evening. But it wasn’t Sebastian. It was Roza.

‘It’s not a lion that wants to talk,’ she replied, as if mystical declarations were an ordinary form of discourse. ‘It’s the Shoemaker. He wants to meet his Friends.’