The Mazovia Legacy (4 page)

“I shouldn't really be bringing personal business into a professional relationship,” Natalia said finally.

“We no longer have a professional relationship,” he reminded her.

“No, of course we don't,” she said.

“Look,” Delaney said. “I'm not going to turn you over to the Canadian Psychological Association for giving me a call. How can I help you? You said you wanted to talk about something.”

“I do,” she said. “It's a family matter. It's complicated.”

He let the silence build again, knowing she would fill it.

“My uncle died a few weeks ago, about a month ago,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“He was a very old man, and the police say he drowned one night while getting into the bath.”

Delaney knew from her eyes and from the ever so slight tremor around her lips that this was hard for her. He watched how she handled it.

“The police say,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“And you don't buy that.”

“No, I don't.”

“I see. And you would like me to help you find out what really happened to your uncle. Is that it? Investigative journalist, knows his way around the police stations, that sort of thing?” Delaney was surprised at how hard that sounded. “Do you think I might get a story out of it, is that it?” he asked.

This sounded even worse. He didn't bother trying to correct the impression he must be giving.

“No, I don't think so,” Natalia said. “That would depend. But, no, I was wondering if you would perhaps just help me find out what happened.”

“Why would I do that?” he said, for some reason still wanting to appear cruel and uncaring. “Especially if there is no story in it.”

“Oh, I think there is a story in it,” she said. “But maybe not the kind you are used to. Not the kind you would use for your magazine. Or, no. Maybe not the kind I would want you to use for your magazine.”

“So why would I bother?” He wondered whether she would still want such a person to help her now.

“Because, and I know I shouldn't mix my professional knowledge of you . . .”

“Such as it is.”

“. . . mix my professional knowledge of you with my own needs, but I know that you are experienced in these things, that you've travelled a lot, and you've been in difficult and complicated situations, and that despite all your defence mechanisms and your attempts this morning to make me think the contrary, I think you still have a curiosity . . .”

“Curiosity,” Delaney repeated, smiling bitterly.

“Well, perhaps that's too silly a word. You have a desire to understand things and I think you are a kind person and, again I am being unprofessional in saying this because of what I learned about you some time ago, I think you may simply decide to help me because the opportunity presents itself and you are that sort of person and you are at that stage of your life.”

“Oh, please,” he said.“Do reasons for things have to be always complicated by all of that?”

“Well, I don't know then,” Natalia said. “I was just hoping you would be able to help me. That's really all there is to say.”

They sat quietly for a moment, considering the situation, several situations. For a moment, Delaney thought she might be about to get up and leave. But she continued to sit quietly on his couch, watching him watch her. He observed that the tremor was gone from her mouth, that her hands did not move at all as they lay in her lap. Whatever she was feeling was now not betrayed by her body movements.
She is probably thinking the same thing about me,
he thought.

“Why would anyone want to kill your uncle?” Delaney said suddenly.

“That's what the police have asked me,” she said.

“It's a natural question,” he replied. “The police ask the natural questions. Reporters may stay around to ask other ones.”

“I don't know who would want to murder him,” she said. “I have an intuition that someone did. And besides that, some things didn't seem right at his house on the night I found him.

“It was you who found him,” Delaney said.

“Yes.”

He considered this for a moment, knowing how hard that must have been for her, knowing what a drowned body looks like. He remembered watching a couple of distraught Nicaraguan mothers finding their sons floating in the river near the border with Honduras, in Contra country, when that particular war was in an especially nasty phase. He hoped that Natalia's uncle was not long dead when she found him.

“And someone is following me now, I think,” she said suddenly. “Since he died. I don't think anymore that I'm imagining this. I'm getting to be a little afraid. At first I thought I was just anxious. Grieving and displacing this onto something. But now I really do think someone is following me. Or maybe I need a therapist.” She smiled a little.

“Look,” Delaney said. “I really hate to stay with the obvious here, but it's the way to start. Why would anyone want to kill your uncle? Why would anyone be following you?”

“I just don't know.”

“How long have you thought someone was following you?”

“Since a short time after Stanislaw died. I started to see a couple of men regularly. I thought I started to see them in places I went. On my street, near my office. I don't think I imagine such things.”

“Have they approached you?”

“No.”

“You think they are connected with your uncle in some way?”

“Possibly. I really couldn't say at this point. I don't know.”

“Did your uncle ever say people were following him?”

“No. But he wasn't the sort of man who would say these things even if they were true. I have no idea, really, what his thoughts were. I've realized that since he died.”

“Well, let's try this then,” Delaney said. “What's the most interesting thing about your uncle? What would reporters want to write about if they met him?”

“So you are going to help me?” Natalia asked.

“Apparently. For now.”

*

She began to tell him things, much as they came into her mind. Delaney listened, as he had listened to so many hundreds of people before, and helped her along with questions and suggestions and requests for clarification. It was an interview, but she did not seem to mind being interviewed. He did not take notes, and she didn't seem to mind that either.

The story she told was, in some ways, not extraordinary. Young Polish man, Jesuit trained, then Polish Air Force officer, about twenty-six when the Nazis invaded. Father a professor at the University of Krakow, mother a musician. Both killed. But not until after young Stanislaw had left with the first wave of refugees to Romania. Then into France, then England and distinguished service with the Mazovia Squadron: Polish aces flying Wellingtons out of Scotland. But as always in such stories there was also an angle, the lead for a possible good feature item. Not that a feature lead was necessarily a clue to a possible murder, but Delaney knew that the unusual in a life often led to the even more unusual, often years later. He had untangled too many complicated stories by following up on the smallest of oddities to think otherwise.

In this case, Natalia provided two elements that an alert reporter would underline in a notebook. Young Flight Lieutenant Stanislaw Janovski had been aide-de-camp, or one of several, to the Polish president after the headlong rush by citizens, soldiers, and senior officials out of Poland to Romania in September 1939. Possibly interesting. And he had been assigned by the Polish government-inexile, before being allowed to throw himself into the air war over Europe, to travel with some Polish officials to Canada to accompany the famous shipment of national treasures that were to be placed there for safekeeping. Tens of millions of dollars' worth of artworks, jewels, ancient armour and weapons, rare books, manuscripts, and tapestries hurriedly loaded into crates as the Nazis attacked and then onto trucks for the escape. All later to go by sea to Canada. Another possibly interesting angle in the old man's life, Delaney thought.

After the war, however, there seemed nothing out of the ordinary in Stanislaw Janovski's story. Reasonably predictable émigré experience. Never returned to Poland after the Communists took over. Montreal to resettle. A bit of bush pilot work right after the war, and then a stab at running a small bookstore. Then a sort of career at Radio Canada International. Marriage, no children, life in a solid little house in a solid little neighbourhood. Then retirement and an even quieter life.
He probably had enough excitement as a young man to last him a while,
Delaney thought.

The apartment was warm now, as the latemorning sun beat through the glass in the windows that were everywhere. Natalia did not seem tired out by her storytelling, nor by the long sit. Sessions like this would be her stock-in-trade.

“How did he get chosen to be one of the president's aides-de-camp?” Delaney asked her.

“I never really thought to ask him. A family connection, I suppose. His father, my grandfather, was a prominent academic. Stanislaw was in the Air Force as an officer. I suppose someone in the president's entourage was given his name. They needed someone who could fly, I think my uncle said, in case they could get a plane in Romania.”

“The same would go, I guess, for his being chosen to travel to Canada with the art treasures. His connections.”

“Probably,” she said.

Delaney, as a reporter, knew more about the Polish art treasures story than Natalia was able to tell him that morning, except for the points where the story touched her uncle's. He had heard nothing about it for years, of course, and he was still a boy when it all came to a head in the late 1950s. But it was the sort of story that the older editors at the
Montreal Tribune
would know and love, and they had talked about it occasionally when Delaney was a young newspaperman. They loved the cloak-anddagger elements in particular.

Treasures being moved out of Ottawa in the dead of night, after the Communists took over in Poland and demanded that Canada send them back. Hiding places in convents and monasteries. Secret passwords. Disputes among custodians. Then the fiercely anti-Communist premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, sending his provincial police force to help agents of the government-in-exile hide the treasures somewhere else in the province. And Duplessis refusing for years to send them back. The Warsaw regime outraged and the Canadian government no longer willing, or no longer able, to step in against Quebec.

Delaney himself had later been in the thick of Quebec political reporting in the seventies and eighties, and had had to learn all too much about the Duplessis era and the battles for constitutional turf that the man they called “
le chef
” had waged with the federal government. It would be natural for Duplessis to seize on the art treasures issue to make a stand against Ottawa when the federal government formally recognized the new Polish government after the war, and to vent his spleen at the Communists at the same time. Some of the details were hazy in Delaney's mind, but he knew the outlines and they still intrigued him.

“Did your uncle talk a lot about the art treasures story to you? Was he involved in the negotiations at the end to send them back?” Delaney asked.

“He would sometimes mention bits of that business, but never really in detail,” Natalia said. “I was just a baby when the things were eventually sent back, in 1959, or 1960, I think it was. And later I suppose I didn't take enough of an interest. They were just war stories to me, really.”

“But war stories that had a chapter in Quebec with your uncle as a player,” Delaney said.

“Yes,” she said. “He was a man who would say a little bit once in a while about something like that, and then smile and stop, as if to tease people or maybe because he didn't want to say more. Maybe both. He would always hint that he knew a lot about the government-in-exile and the secret diplomatic things they did in London during the war, and the secrets he was entrusted with in Romania, and I guess in coming here too with the treasures. But I suppose my father had heard all this too many times and probably thought Stanislaw was just exaggerating. And I was just a child. My uncle liked to tickle me and say, ‘Ah, Natalia, there are secrets within secrets. Secrets within secrets.' But that's the sort of nonsense things old uncles and grandfathers say to children.”

“I don't know,” Delaney said. “Would your parents remember more about this?”

“They're both dead. For many years now.”

“I see.”

Delaney thought he had said he was sorry enough for one morning so he went straight to the next question.

“Did he keep in touch with any of the art treasures people?”

“Which people do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, the people who came over here with them. Or the ones who argued about where they should go. Or the London Poles. Anyone really. Did he want to see the treasures go back or stay here?”