Читать книгу Where the Devil Can’t Go - Anya Lipska, Anya Lipska - Страница 10

The rectangle of plastic snapped open as the last coin clinked through the slot, and Janusz stooped to his peephole. Beyond it, in the centre of a dimly lit windowless room, a slender naked girl writhed around a floor-to-ceiling pole under a shower of multicoloured lights.

Every trace of her body hair had been shaved or plucked away, making her nakedness absolute, apart from a single stud in her navel. The girl’s movements, timed to the grinding rock music, had a natural grace, but her made-up face was expressionless and her gaze focused on some distant point. Her long fingernails struck the only incongruous note – painted not the usual scarlet, but jet-black.

Janusz watched just long enough to make sure it was Kasia, then straightened and checked his watch, frowning, and tried to block out the alkaline reek of old semen in his cubicle. The music came to an end, only to be followed by another, smoochier number. Cursing softly, he glanced up at the ceiling and reached into his pocket.

He could still hear the smoke alarm wailing as he leant against the club’s rear wall enjoying his smoke – his fourth, or maybe fifth, cigar of the day. The last punter, a paunchy guy in his forties wearing a chalk-stripe suit, stumbled out of the fire exit, head bent as he finished fastening his fly. Noticing the big man in the old-fashioned trench coat, he straightened, and pulling out a pack of cigarettes, asked for a light.

Janusz sparked his lighter, although the guy had to bend forward to reach the flame. Then, blowing out a stream of smoke, the punter planted his feet apart and jabbed his chin over his shoulder. ‘Did you see the bird in there?’ he asked, with a man-to-man chuckle. ‘I’ll bet that’s a road well travelled.’

Janusz’s face remained impassive, so the guy didn’t notice his right hand clench reflexively into a fist, nor realise how close he was skating to a broken jaw.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Janusz, taking an unhurried draw on his cigar. ‘I just work here sometimes.’

The guy gave him an assessing look, trying to work out the accent – posh-sounding, but some foreign in there, too. ‘Yeah? You a bouncer then?’

Janusz shook his head.

‘Work behind the bar?’

Another shake. Then Janusz looked the guy in the face properly for the first time.

‘Look, it’s supposed to be hush-hush,’ he said, ‘but what the hell, today’s my last day in the job.’ He ground his cigar stub out on the wall and discarded it, then leaned closer. ‘I rig the hidden cameras in the peepshow booths,’ he said in a conspiratorial murmur.

The guy stared at him: ‘Cameras? I’ve never seen a camera in there.’

Janusz shrugged. ‘That’s because I’m pretty good at my job.’

The guy’s face was going red now. ‘So you’re telling me … they film the blokes watching the shows?’

Janusz dipped his head sideways in regretful assent.

‘Why the fu …?’ the guy’s voice held a mixture of anger and foreboding.

‘It’s a live feed to the internet,’ said Janusz. ‘Apparently, a lot of people will pay good money to watch guys … you know …’, and with an economical gesture he demonstrated the activity he was too polite to put into words.

Now, the guy’s mouth was opening and shutting like a Christmas carp, and Janusz wondered if he was going to have a stroke or something.

‘It’s a … It’s a … disgrace,’ he croaked. He waved a finger up at Janusz, ‘I’m going to …’ and then brandished it at the back door of the club, ‘I’ll report them to …’ Then he wheeled around and went off down the Soho alleyway, still ranting and waving his arms.

Just then, the girl emerged from the club, wrapped in a black towelling dressing gown. She peered at the retreating figure, who was shouting something about the Human Rights Act, and then up at Janusz.

‘What’s with that guy?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘London is full of crazy people.’

She shot him a suspicious look. ‘You haven’t been telling the customers stories again?’ He shook his head, avoiding her eyes, but had to suck in his cheeks to keep from grinning.

Kasia pulled the robe tighter around her – it was cold – and reached into the pocket for cigarettes. ‘You think you’re so funny, Janusz,’ she said. ‘But if the boss finds out he’ll kick your dupe.’ She raised her chin in the direction of the smoke alarm, which had now settled to a strident beeping: ‘And I suppose that’s nothing to do with you either?’

The unchivalrous daylight added ten years or more to her face, he thought, but she could still pass for thirty-five, thirty even, no problem.

‘I got bored,’ he said.

She widened her eyes in mock reproach. ‘Oh, a nice compliment. You don’t like my show?’

‘Nice body. Piekne,’ he said. ‘But then I knew that already,’ levelling his amused gaze at her. She held the look, trying to look stern, but one side of her mouth lifted, despite herself: the crooked smile that filled his daydreams.

She bent her dark blonde head to his lighter, steadying his hand a beat longer than she needed to, making his stomach trip. It was funny, but he could never quite connect the woman in front of him with the one he’d seen pole-dancing minutes earlier. That girl was hot stuff, no question, but she didn’t make his insides polka like Kasia did. His jaw tensed as he noticed the yellow tidemark of an old bruise that her make-up couldn’t quite conceal along her cheekbone.

‘Listen, Kasia. I paid that chuj Steve a visit this morning.’

Kasia’s hand jumped to her face.

‘Kurwa!’ the curse slipped out before her lips could catch it, ‘… and?’

He looked amused: she hardly ever swore, and was probably making a mental note to take her misdemeanor to confession.

‘I made the case to him that a man does not strike a woman, not even his own wife.’ The words were old-fashioned and his deep voice was reasonable – but his eyes had suddenly gone cold.

She pulled the lapels of her gown closer. ‘What did he say?’

‘My impression was I left him a reformed character,’ he said. ‘But he knows that I am happy to continue our … discussions if necessary.’

She said nothing, but reached out and briefly touched her cold hands to the sides of his face.

He pulled back a fraction: he didn’t know why, but the gesture made him angrier than her pig of a husband and his wife-beating habits. Why did a woman like her stay with such a man? Kasia came from a good family and was as smart as a fox – she had a degree from the film school where Polanski and Kieslowski had studied, for Christ’s sake! But he’d already heard her answer to that: ‘love can die but marriage lives for ever.’ And this sleazy job of hers was the couple’s only income. Half a million Poles managed to carve out a living here, but born and bred Londoner Steve could never find work. It was too easy to get by on benefit in this country, he reflected, not for the first time.

No point telling her to leave him, anyway. Like all Polish women she was obstinate as hell, and would tell him to go fuck himself. To cover his expression he dropped his cigar stub and ground it underfoot.

As Kasia turned away to blow a stream of smoke down the street, he let his eyes rest for a moment on her half-averted profile, her long, beautiful nose. It was what he’d first noticed about her that day, when he’d been lugging boxes of booze from the van to this same door.

‘I could come to your place tomorrow?’ she said, still turned away, a trace of uncertainty in the upward inflection.

His anger slid away at that, replaced by more complicated emotions. Maybe that night they’d spent together two weeks earlier hadn’t just been a one-off. He pushed his hands in his pockets and gazed up at the roofline.

‘Sure, why not. And tell Ray I’ve got a delivery of Wyborowa coming in next week if he’s interested.’

What the hell. Like his mother used to say, he always ran to meet trouble halfway.

An hour later, Janusz made his way north eastwards along Essex Road, head down against a biting wind. He was heading for pani Tosik’s restaurant to follow up the runaway waitress story Father Pietruski had told him about. As one of the best-connected people in London’s Polonia, Janusz had picked up more than a few missing persons jobs over the years. His near-perfect English helped, even if his language primers – British war movies he’d watched as a kid, and later, eighties US cop shows – had spiced his vocabulary with some colourful and outmoded phrases.

This job sounded like all the rest: parents back home fretting because their daughter hadn’t phoned home for a few weeks. It was always a young girl, invariably ‘God-fearing and steady’ – he’d never once heard a runaway described as kaprysna – and the outcome was always the same, too. He’d find her living in sin with a boyfriend in some godforsaken bedsit. She’d cry a little, grieving her lost virginity, and after a few stern words, would promise to phone home to Mama.

It occurred to him that this was pretty much how Kasia’s life in London had unfolded when she’d come over after her film degree. She told him she’d been a Goth back then – one of those kids who dressed like zombies and put metal bars through their tongues – but a respectable, educated girl all the same, with a job in a Polish patisserie in Kensington. She’d been learning English at evening classes with the aim of getting a job as a runner in the film business – her goal was to become a director one day. But then she’d met that big mouth Cockney idiota Steve. Reading between the lines, he’d persuaded her to chuck it all in and go live with him – they would start their own business, he’d buy her a Super 8 camera so she could make her own films, blah blah. Worse still – because her family back home disapproved of the match, she had lost touch with them.

Naturalnie, Steve’s big plans came to nothing, and Kasia progressed from working in a pub, to serving drinks in Soho clubs, and then to her current job as – laughable euphemism – an exotic dancer. Even a decade ago it would have been unthinkable to find a decent Polish girl doing such a job, Janusz reflected, but she said it paid her three times as much as bar work, and it was undeniable that her sketchy grasp of English limited her options.

Restaurant Polka stood on the corner of an elegant Georgian terrace a few streets north of St Stan’s, its wide front window and green and white tiled facade revealing its original incarnation as the neighbourhood greengrocers. Now the windows were hung, somewhat incongruously, with ruched, plum-coloured silk curtains.

The doorbell sounded a grating three-chime peal. The elderly lady who answered – aged about seventy, he estimated, maybe seventy-five – wore a ruffled cerise silk blouse, a similar shade to the curtains, and tinkled with gold. He would bet that the artful crown of permed blonde hair was the work of Hair Fantastic, the local salon that doubled as operational HQ for North London’s fearsome Polish matriarchy.

‘Dzien dobry, pani Tosik,’ said Janusz making an old-fashioned bow. He’d made a mental note to watch his manners, uncomfortably aware that the courtesy drummed into him by his parents had become coarsened over the years, first by life on a building site, and more recently by the uncouth behaviour his current line of business sometimes demanded.

‘Come in, darling, come in!’ piped pani Tosik. ‘How lovely to have a man visit! I knew your father in Gdansk, after the war – God rest his soul.’

She reached up to put her hands on his shoulders and examine him, then gave a single decisive nod.

‘Tak. You have his good looks – and his character, too, I think.’

She waved him inside: ‘You will have coffee? And tort. Of course! Who doesn’t like cake?’

Janusz followed pani Tosik, her heels ticking on the lino, to the dimly lit, cinnamon-smelling interior.

The old lady settled Janusz on a velvet-covered banquette in the plushly decorated restaurant, its walls hung with oil paintings of Polish rural scenes. While she made coffee, Janusz retrieved a copy of Gazeta Warszawa from a nearby table. The front-page headline read: ‘“Forget the past and move on”’, Zamorski tells voters’. Beneath it was a photo of a middle-aged man with a thoughtful yet purposeful expression: Edward Zamorski, presidential-hopeful and head of the Renaissance Party.

As pani Tosik returned, Janusz stood to take the tray of coffee and pastries from her. She nodded to the picture: ‘What do you think of our next president?’ she asked, pouring coffee into a hand-painted Opole porcelain cup and saucer.

‘I saw him speak once, at a rally in Gdansk – it was before martial law, so I must have been about seventeen,’ said Janusz, raising the coffee cup to his lips. His fingers felt gigantic, cumbersome, around its fragile handle. ‘I remember at one point he spoke over our heads, directly to the ZOMO. He said, ‘“When you raise a baton to a fellow Pole, the blow lands on your own soul.”’

He remembered something else, too. Zamorski had told the crowd that once they won their freedom, reconciliation and forgiveness – even of the hated riot police – would be more important than revenge if the country were to move forward. As a fiery teenager, Janusz had found himself bewildered, angered even, by these words, but after what happened a couple of years later he found himself revisiting them again and again.

Pani Tosik sighed, waving a hand in a gesture that combined regret and resignation. ‘You young people got rid of the Komunistow,’ she said, ‘And got a country ruled by American multinationals instead. My friend’s daughter is a teacher in Warsaw and what do you think she earns in a year?’

Janusz shook his head.

‘9000 euros!’ hissed pani Tosik. ‘This is why young people have to come to London, although it is not a good place for a young girl.’

This was her cue to embark on the story of the missing waitress, interrupted only by the whines of the tiny Yorkshire terrier sitting beside her on the banquette begging for food.

‘Weronika came to me six months ago, in November. No! Not November, darling, October’ – as though he’d been the one to get it wrong – ‘Such a pretty girl. Beautiful, even,’ she widened her tiny blue eyes for emphasis. ‘Like … Grace Kelly, but with modern outfits, you know. Yes, Tinka, you may have a little bit of Napoleonka because your mama loves you.’

She broke off a piece of the pink-iced millefeuille pastry and gave it to the dog, who wolfed it down, licking every scrap from her fingers. Then, using her still-moist hand, she picked up another slice and put it on Janusz’s plate, appearing not to notice as the big man flinched.

‘Proper Polish pastry,’ she said, ‘Not those things the English call cakes – “Mr Kipper” etcetera.’ Reaching for a pink Sobranie cigarette she leaned forward to Janusz’s lighter flame.

‘Anyway, she was a good Catholic girl, very hard-working, very respectable – not like some of the English girls. With them, always a problem! One is a drunk, always arrives late, another gets a baby.’

Janusz sipped his coffee and nodded.

‘So, now – only Polish girls. And with this girl, I know her mama, and I say to her, your Weronika is safe with me. And then one day: pfouff! She is gone.’

The old lady’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I feel terrible, panie Kiszka. I cannot sleep at night, I can barely eat …’ A sharp glance down. ‘You do not like your Napoleonka?’

Janusz broke off a piece with his fork, but only took another sip of coffee.

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

Pani Tosik’s gripped Janusz’s forearm with surprisingly strong fingers. ‘No! I promised her Mama, no boyfriends. She is too young – only nineteen. She always sleeps here, upstairs, where I can keep her under my eyes. And I make sure she goes to confession every single week.

‘Let me find a photograph for you.’ As pani Tosik jingled off to the rear of the salon, Janusz took the chance to offload his toxic cake on Tinka. The dog took the Napoleonka in one messy gulp, then bit the hand that fed her. He stifled a cry – pani Tosik was returning.

‘Here she is, my beautiful Weronika. She was making a portfolio – her dream was to be a model.’

Janusz examined the professional-looking black and white photograph, which pictured a striking girl with ice-blonde hair wearing a long fur coat, against a white backdrop. She struck a self-consciously model-like pose: legs planted apart, hands on hips, shoulder-length hair blown backwards by a wind machine. Her face was all sharply angled planes – cheekbones that could cut coal – but there was uncertainty in the eyes, and her lips were rounded, almost childlike … like Iza’s – the thought surfaced before he could stop it.

‘Nice coat,’ he said, to cover his expression, waving at the pricey-looking fur. Pani Tosik laughed. ‘Oh, darling! It’s not real! The girls buy these “fun furs” from TK Maxx for pocket money!’

‘Speaking of money, pani …’

‘I cannot afford much,’ she said, pressing a hand to her chest. ‘I am not a wealthy woman. Maybe you want to help this poor girl as a Christian duty?’ She gave him a hopeful smile.

He had to admire the old girl: everyone knew her restaurant was coining it in. London’s Poles were desperate for a taste of home and these days Eastern European food was even getting a following among the English.

‘We all have cash flow problems,’ he said, opening his hands in apology.

The old lady’s smile waned as her sharp little eyes sized him up.

‘Okay. I give you £500 now, you report back in one week. If you have some information, maybe I pay more.’

‘£1000 now.’

She puckered her mouth. ‘£800. This is a good price.’

He cocked his head in agreement, dropping his gaze to hide his surprise at how quickly she had caved in.

A key turned in the front door, admitting a girl with long dark hair, twenty-five or twenty-six, at a guess. Not as hot as Weronika, maybe, but still pretty, in an olive-skinned way. His mother – God rest her soul – would have said she had a touch of the Tartar. She wore a tan leather jacket and the ultra-tight jeans Polish girls liked, and carried bulging Lidl bags. On her way past their table, she greeted pani Tosik, nodded to Janusz, and took in the photograph of Weronika lying on the table, all in a couple of seconds.

Clever eyes, he thought. He would bet a truckful of Wyborowa that she knew the real story with Weronika – who she’d been sleeping with, whether she’d got herself knocked up, maybe even where she’d disappeared to.

When he asked to see Weronika’s room, pani Tosik agreed readily enough and led the way up the narrow staircase. The small room with its single bed struck him as almost spookily spotless. The dressing table was empty, the bed made up and topped with a pink satin pierzyna: a traditional eiderdown he hadn’t seen since his childhood. Standing on the bedside cabinet was the sole trace of its previous occupant: an empty photo frame.

When he asked about it, pani Tosik shrugged. ‘I don’t remember, maybe a family photo?’

He could tell from the way the old dear hovered at his shoulder that there was no way she’d let him check inside the chest of drawers: a man rooting around in a girl’s underwear was probably an occasion of sin.

Before leaving, he asked to use the toilet, and on his way back to the restaurant, took the opportunity to slip into the kitchen. He could always say he took a wrong turn.

He found the dark-haired girl standing just inside the doorway of a walk-in fridge, nodding her head to some discordant Polish rap on the radio. She was reaching up to stack vegetables onto a shelf, her shirt riding up to reveal the curve of her waist. Sensing someone behind her, she whipped around, hand flying to her throat. He grinned an apology and held out his card. She took it without speaking, a guarded look in her brown eyes.

‘Call me,’ he said over his shoulder, leaving her gazing after him, fingering the gold cross she wore around her neck.