Where the Devil Can’t Go. Anya LipskaЧитать онлайн книгу.
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