Читать книгу A Devil Under the Skin - Anya Lipska, Anya Lipska - Страница 11

On Monday morning, as Janusz climbed the long up-escalator at Wanstead tube – a station so far east on the Central line it could make your ears bleed – he reflected that the new contract with the insurance company couldn’t have come at a better time.

His work as a private investigator, which largely involved chasing bad debts and missing persons for clients from East London’s Polish community, tended to follow the feast-or-famine model. Most years, it produced more than enough for a single man to live on, but with Kasia moving in he needed something more solidne – even if she was a successful businesswoman in her own right. Or perhaps because she was, he allowed, with a wry grin. An old-fashioned outlook perhaps, but that was how he’d been brought up – and at his age he wasn’t likely to suddenly come over all metrosexual.

Then there was Bobek, his son back in Poland, to think about. The boy might have been fathered in a single misjudged night of reunion with ex-wife Marta, but from the moment Janusz had laid eyes on the shockingly vulnerable scrap of humanity in the maternity ward crib, he’d loved him beyond reason. He made it a point of principle never to miss a single month’s maintenance cheque, even when times had been tough. And now Bobek was fifteen, would be sixteen in a couple of months – Mother of God! Incredible to think he was almost a man – there would be new expenses, university fees for one, to think about.

Five minutes’ walk from the tube, Janusz found the place he was looking for – the St Francis of Assisi Residential Home. Even with half the facade obscured by a lattice of builders’ scaffolding, the place was an imposing chunk of nineteenth-century Gothic, its pillared entrance so reminiscent of a church that Janusz had to check an impulse to make the sign of the cross as he stepped over the threshold. Having braced himself for the familiar undernote of old piss and Dettol he’d encountered in old people’s homes, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the only smell was the lavender whiff of furniture polish. Sure, the faded floral carpet and striped wallpaper hadn’t been in fashion since the eighties, but the double height lobby bisected by an old oak staircase made the place feel pleasingly airy and bright.

‘I have an appointment to see Mr Raczynski,’ Janusz told the apricot-cheeked girl on reception. ‘On behalf of Haven Insurance.’ She was no more than twenty, and clearly Polish, judging by her accent – not to mention a level of grooming rarely seen among English girls of that age. She started dialling a number but before she’d even finished, Janusz heard a gravelly voice close by his ear.

‘I just saw Wojtek going into the conservatory, Beata – why don’t I take our guest through?’

Janusz turned to see the beaky profile of an elderly man, tall in spite of his advanced age, if somewhat stooped.

Beata nodded, smiling. ‘Dziekuje bardzo, Panie Kasparek.’

‘English, please, Beata, English.’ As the old guy wagged a skinny finger at her, the tableau formed by the pair of them put Janusz in mind of some medieval engraving – Death warning Youth of the brevity of Life, perhaps.

He turned his gaze on Janusz – eyes dark as a sparrow’s and alive with intelligence – and in a sibilant whisper that could have been heard fifty metres away told him, ‘Integration. That’s the way to get on. No point coming to London and behaving like you’re still in fucking Poznan.’

Janusz grinned. ‘I agree.’ He put out his hand. ‘Janusz Kiszka. Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

‘I’m forgetting my manners. Stefan Kasparek. Enchanté.’ The old man’s hand felt bony but his grip was a match for Janusz’s meaty fist, nonetheless. ‘You’ll need a guide – I’m afraid the place is an absolute rabbit warren.’ His English sounded unmistakably upper class, with only the trace of a Polish accent, and he was well turned out in a tweed jacket and tie, although Janusz couldn’t help noticing the worn elbows of the jacket, the shirt collar fraying at the edges.

‘Onward,’ said Kasparek. He grasped the younger man’s arm with the unembarrassed pragmatism of the old and they set out, Janusz adjusting his step to his companion’s determined – if somewhat lurching – gait. ‘Lost the kneecap, to a Boche sniper, in ’44,’ said Stefan, succinctly. ‘The son of a whore.’

Along the way, they encountered several residents making their dogged way to and fro, Stefan handing out greetings and advice like some cheerful early pontiff dispensing indulgences. ‘Bohuslaw!’ he cried, spying a shuffling bald man with a pronounced pot belly. ‘I’m going to the bookmakers later, if you’d like me to place a wager for you?’ Bohuslaw raised a shaky thumbs-up. ‘Used to shag anything that moved,’ Stefan confided, in his penetrating sotto voce, once he’d passed. ‘But now he’s down to one testicle, he sticks to the four-legged fillies.’

‘Is everyone here Polish?’ Janusz asked.

‘No, no,’ Stefan shook his head, ‘there’s a good few Irish and English here, too. Some Catholic do-gooder started the place back in the eighties, so there tend to be a lot of left-footers, but I’m reliably informed that a belief in the Virgin Birth isn’t compulsory.’

At a set of French doors, he paused to kiss the hand of an etiolated woman, who must have been a great beauty in her youth. Now, her well-cut frock seemed to mock her flat chest and wasted flanks. She smiled vaguely, in another world, until Stefan stooped to whisper something in her ear, making her laugh and returning the ghost of a blush to her once-pretty cheeks.

‘You should see pictures of her as a girl,’ sighed Stefan. ‘She’d have given Maureen O’Hara a run for her money.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Janusz. ‘You seem to know everyone. Have you been here long?’

‘Oh for ever,’ said Stefan with a dismissive wave. ‘As billets go, it’s not bad – but there’s no time off for good behaviour and when you do leave, it’s a one-way voyage to the boneyard.’ He pronounced ‘voyage’ in the French way.

In the conservatory, Stefan steered him to a rattan sofa overlooking the garden where a chubby man in his eighties sat eating biscuits, a mug of tea in his hand. ‘Ah, here he is,’ said Stefan. ‘Wojtek! You have a visitor, you lucky dog.’

After Stefan’s acerbic intelligence, Janusz found the interview uphill work. Wojtek Raczynski was a jolly soul, a little like a clean-shaven Father Christmas, but all too easily sidetracked onto the subject of his great-grandchildren, who he believed were learning okropne habits – swearing and cheeking their elders – from their comprehensive school in Leyton.

According to Tomek Morski, Janusz’s contact at Haven Insurance, the firm paid Wojtek a £25,000 annual pension, funded by an annuity he’d bought some twelve years earlier, and since they’d be shelling out till he dropped off the twig, they wanted to make sure he hadn’t done so already. Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon for family members to ‘forget’ to tell the insurance company to halt payments after their loved one had departed this life.

Janusz had been hired to run spot checks on a random selection of their Polish-speaking annuitants: with getting on for a million Poles in the UK, there was a growing demand for investigators who spoke the language and had a nose for anything fishy. As much as it grieved him to admit it, the scale of the recent influx of his compatriots had inevitably brought with it a number of scam artists and criminals. According to Tomek, if Janusz did a good job on this first round of work for them, he’d be up for a slice of the insurance fraud pie – fake whiplash claims, staged car accidents, and the like – cases whose complexity could make them highly lucrative.

Wojtek’s case promised to be child’s play by comparison. He was demonstrably alive and – judging by the number of biscuits he demolished during their half-hour interview – in robust health for a man of eighty-eight. The only hitch was that Janusz needed to see photographic ID to confirm beyond doubt that Wojtek was who he said he was – but he didn’t have anything to hand. Janusz arranged to return to check the old boy’s passport, which his daughter looked after for him, in a few days’ time.

Half an hour later, Janusz emerged between the Corinthian columns that framed the front porch into a surprisingly spring-like March day, with a powerfully positive impression of life at St Francis. He’d always thought he’d rather die than go into an old people’s home, but he had to admit that seeing out your final days at a place like this one mightn’t be the ordeal he’d feared, after all.

He’d just reached the street and was about to light a cigar when he heard a voice behind him calling his name. It was Stefan, one skinny arm raised as though hailing a taxi, the other leaning on a walking stick.

‘What a splendid day!’ he said, on reaching Janusz. ‘Walk with me to the High Street,’ he added, brandishing his stick like a battle standard. Suppressing a smile at the old boy’s imperious manner, Janusz fell into step alongside him.

At the corner of the High Street, he turned to bid Stefan farewell, but the old guy said, ‘Let me buy you a cup of tea. It isn’t often I get the opportunity to converse with someone still in possession of a full set of marbles.’

Janusz barely paused before bowing his head in acceptance: he wasn’t in a rush, and anyway, he enjoyed the company of old people. It wasn’t far to what was clearly Stefan’s regular café, judging by the effusive welcome he received from the Turkish guys behind the counter.

‘When I first came to London, in ’45, all the greasy spoons were run by Eyeties,’ said Stefan, in a whisper loud enough to turn heads as they made for a window table. ‘Now, it’s Turks. Next year, who knows!’ His chuckle sounded like a rusted iron door being wrenched open.

Sitting opposite each other, Janusz got his first proper look at his companion. Age had sculpted what remained of the flesh on Stefan’s face into dramatic folds and fissures, but he still had a luxuriant head of white hair, swept back from a pronounced widow’s peak in a style that had last enjoyed popularity in the fifties or early sixties. And yet there was something about his darting gaze and ever-changing expression that gave him an air of irrepressible youth, making it hard for Janusz to guess his age. Late seventies, perhaps?

The bird-like eyes caught Janusz’s gaze. ‘You’re wondering how old I am’ – an age-spotted hand waved away his polite murmur of protest – ‘Don’t worry. I’m used to it. Paradoxically, I find it’s always the young who are the most obsessed with age.’

He poured a stream of sugar into his black tea – Janusz noting, approvingly, that his commitment to integration stopped short of polluting the brew with milk – and stirred it briskly. ‘I was born in Lwow, which I believe the Ukrainians now call Lviv – in 1923.’

Kurwa! Janusz did the sums: the old boy must be ninety. He appeared in astonishingly good shape for his age – as well as being sharp as a tack. ‘You don’t look it,’ he said; the automatic response to learning the age of anyone over thirty, although this time, sincerely meant.

Stefan straightened his back. ‘My father lived to 101, God Rest his Soul. Never missed a day in his vegetable garden, and dropped dead hoeing the asparagus bed.’

‘So … were you in Lwow when the Russians invaded?’

‘Indeed I was. The tanks arrived the day after my seventeenth birthday. As a boy scout, I naturally took part in the defence of the city – until the generals kapitulowali.’ It was the first time he’d slipped into Polish, as if such a shameful event could only properly be named in their mother tongue.

The waiter delivered Stefan’s bacon sandwich but instead of starting to eat, he lifted off the top layer of bread and set it aside.

‘I ended up in Kolyma, in the camps, mining gold for Stalin.’ As Stefan talked, he retrieved a plastic bag from his breast pocket, and produced a pair of nail scissors, before starting to snip the fatty rind from a rasher, apparently oblivious to Janusz’s mystified look. ‘Mining!’ he chuckled. ‘That’s a fancy word for hacking lumps out of permafrost with a fucking pickaxe.’

After dropping the spiral of bacon rind into his plastic bag, he was just starting surgery on a second rasher when he noticed Janusz’s expression. ‘I have to watch my figure, you know,’ he said, patting his trim midriff. ‘The birdies are the beneficiaries. Waste not, want not – Kolyma taught me that.’

Once the bacon had been denuded of all its fat, Stefan cleaned his scissors on a paper napkin, continuing in a matter of fact tone, ‘It was minus 50 the first winter. Men died like snowflakes on a hot stove. I was young. I survived.’ Bracing his shoulders, he took a surprisingly large bite of his sandwich.

‘How long were you there?’

Stefan took his time finishing his mouthful, before dabbing his lips with a napkin. ‘They let me out in ’42 to join Anders’ Army – the Allies were desperate for young men by that time. So I exchanged Siberia for la bella Italia.’

‘You fought in Italy?’ Janusz was impressed: General Anders’ Second Polish Corps had played a decisive role in the Allied push through Italy, earning renown for their bravery at the Battle of Monte Cassino. ‘Yes. That was where I mislaid my kneecap, just outside Ancona.’

Janusz struggled to think of something to say that wouldn’t be a platitude: he always felt overawed to hear of the bravery and sacrifice made by the wartime generation of his fellow Poles. Stefan would have grown up under the Second Republic, when Poland had been one of the great European powers – until its invasion by the Nazis from one side, and the Red Army from the other. Then, to have survived Kolyma – the most brutal place in the entire gulag, graveyard to hundreds of thousands of Poles and countless other ‘enemies of socialism’ – to fight as an Allied soldier … and for what? To see America and Britain deliver his country into the arms of Stalin and decades of Soviet rule.

Stefan was frowning down at his stick-like wrists as if they belonged to someone else. ‘I was built like a bull, then, though you wouldn’t believe it now.’ Suddenly he flapped his free hand. ‘Anyway, that’s all ancient history, old men’s war stories. What about you? I take it you’re some kind of insurance investigator?’

Janusz paused. Put like that, he wasn’t at all sure he liked the sound of his new role. Private investigator was one thing, ‘insurance investigator’ summoned up something more corporate and somehow less … honorowy – especially when measured alongside Stefan’s life. He realised he felt something close to envy for the old man’s generation. He would never experience an existential fight, never be part of a band of brothers. He remembered something someone had once said on the subject that had always stuck in his mind: ‘War exists so that men can experience unconditional love.’

He laid out the bare bones of what he was doing for Haven – avoiding any confidential details – while making it plain that most of his work as a private investigator was carried out not for corporations but on behalf of fellow Poles.

The opening bars of a Chopin polka sounded from Stefan’s pocket. Setting down his sandwich, he pulled out an iPhone – Janusz was amused to see it was the latest model – and using a stylus device, tapped in his passcode.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, squinting at the screen, ‘I’m playing chess with someone in Kiev and the bastard has just threatened my queen.’

While Stefan decided his next move, Janusz took the opportunity to check his own phone. He wanted to find out what time Kasia would be arriving at the flat with her stuff that evening, but the two texts he’d sent since they parted on Saturday had so far gone unanswered.

Still nothing. There was, however, a missed call from Barbara, her partner in the nail bar.

‘Janek,’ she said, her voice strung as tight as piano wire. ‘Please call me the minute you get this. It’s urgent.’