Where the Devil Can’t Go

‘And?’

‘I like to help women. I helped her. He decided to get another hobby,’ Janusz shrugged, pressing a smile from his lips. Better not to mention the woman in question was his girlfriend.

The older man sighed. It was never straightforward with this one: his methods might be unsanctionable, but his instincts were often sound.

‘Anything else to trouble your immortal soul?’ Janusz detected a trace of sarcasm.

‘Sins of the flesh, father.’ A sudden image: a rumpled bed, the rosy S of a woman’s naked back, Kasia’s, framed by an oblong of light. ‘The normal things.’

‘These “things” arenot normalne. You are a married man: that sacrament isindissoluble!’ The priest actually rapped out each syllable with his knuckles on the mesh.

The old fellow had – unusually for him – raised his voice, stirring up a little rush of whispers from outside the box, where, Janusz knew, a bevy of old dears would be waiting to confess their imagined sins. Maybe the priest was right, but what was he supposed to do? He and Marta had read the last rites over their marriage long ago, and he wasn’t cut out to be a monk.

‘Yes, father,’ Janusz bowed his head a fraction. The exchange didn’t alter much with the years. It was a pain, yes, to be lectured, but like the church’s smell – incense, spent candlewicks and ancient dust – it was strangely comforting, too.

‘I know you and Marta have been estranged for many years,’ Father Pietruski continued, his voice lower, but still firm. ‘Nonetheless, you musttry again – for the sake of the boy, at least. Build some bridges with her, hmm?’

Janusz moved his head in a gesture that he hoped might pass for assent. The priest waited for something less ambiguous – in vain.

‘Say three Hail Mary’s and the act of contrition,’ he said, blessing Janusz with his right hand, ‘And I’ll meet you at The Eagle in half an hour.’

Janusz stood and stooped to leave the box, the step loosing off a gunshot crack. The ladies outside rustled with excitement, like birds disturbed at their roost.

‘Dzien dobry, paniom,’ he bowed, recognising many of the faces. They chirped greetings back, but one, sitting in the middle of the pew, grasped his arm as he tried to pass.

There was no escape. Pani Rulewska’s upright posture and the deference of the other women marked her out as their leader, even though she was in her late fifties, a good couple of decades their junior. He paused, bowing his head a fraction.

She wore a dark red skirt suit of some rich, soft material, which even he could see was beautifully tailored. He recalled that she owned a designer clothes factory in the East End, and never let anyone forget that a gown created by her Polish seamstresses had once graced the shoulders of Princess Diana.

‘Now, panie Kiszka, I hope that we can count on your support in the forthcoming patriotic event?’ she demanded in her rather grating voice.

Patriotic event? He felt a flutter of panic, as though he was eight years old again, and unable to remember the next line of his catechism.

‘The election?’ she prompted. ‘The older people, of course, can be relied on, but the youngsters, the ones here, they are another matter. They are away from home and family, they are led astray by straszne English habits. Drinking, sex, drugs …’ Pani Rulewska shook her head. ‘This is no longer the England we once loved.’

The other women bobbed their heads, murmuring assent. He nodded, too, and not entirely out of politeness: the England he’d found a quarter of a century ago might have been duller and greyer, but hadn’t it also been gentler, and more civilised? Or am I just getting old and cantankerous? he wondered.

‘You are known, and respected – mostly …’ she qualified. ‘You can reach the young ones, tell them how the new president will rebuild the country and give them all jobs back home where they belong.’

Despite Janusz’s instinctive distrust of politicians, the Renaissance Party candidate did seem to offer Poland a way out of the predicament it found itself in after twenty years of democracy. Sure, the economy had bounced back after decades of Communist mismanagement, but there still weren’t enough well-paid jobs to prevent the exodus of a million or more young people overseas, most of them to the UK. The country’s graceful Hapsburgian squares were fast disappearing beneath a deluge of fast- food chains and gangs of stag-partying Brits, and unless Poland’s exiled generation could be lured back home soon, he feared for his country’s identity.

Janusz liked the Partia Renasans’ big idea, a massive regeneration programme to create jobs and attract the exiles home – and the way it reunited the alliance of the church, unions and intelligentsia, which in the eighties had defeated the Communist regime under the Solidarity banner. The Party had already won the Sejm and the Senate, and now its leader, Edward Zamorski – a respected veteran of Solidarnosc,a man who’d endured repeated incarceration and beatings during the fight for democracy – looked set to become president.

Which was all well and good, but knocking on people’s doors wearing a party T-shirt wasn’t really up Janusz’s street. So after murmuring a few vague words of support, hedged with protestations of masculine busyness, he gave the old dears his most gallant bow, and made a quick exit, feeling their eyes on his back all the way up the side aisle.

At the last alcove, he paused under the gentle gaze of a blue-gowned plaster Mary, lit by a shimmering forest of red perspex tea lights, and, asking forgiveness for his white lie, crossed himself.

With an hour or more to go before the evening rush, the only sound in The Eagle and Child opposite Islington Green was the clink of glasses being washed and stacked.

Janusz ordered a bottle of Tyskie for himself and a bisongrass wodka for the priest. When he’d first arrived in London these drinks were exotic, practically unheard of outside the Polish community, but the mass influx of young Poles that followed EU membership changed all that. It still made him chuckle to hear English voices struggling to orderWyborowa, Okocim,Zubrowka.

He took the drinks out to the ‘beer garden’, a stretch of grey decking pocked with cigarette burns, ringed by a few wind-battered clumps of pampas grass. He chose a table under a gas heater: it was a bitter day, but a drink without a smoke, well, wasn’t a drink.

‘More sins of the flesh?’ asked Father Pietruski, clapping Janusz on the shoulder just as he was lighting his cigar. The old man’s manner was friendly, mischievous even, now he was off duty.

‘To your health,’ said the priest, taking a warming sip of wodka. ‘So how is … “business”?’ – the sardonic quotation marks were audible.

‘Not so good. A few cash-flow problems – till I collect from a couple of bastards who owe me.’

The priest locked eyes with Janusz over the lip of his glass.

‘Using no more than my persuasive skills, father.’ A conciliatory grin creased his slab-like face.

‘To think you were once the top student in your year. And not just at any university: at Jagiellonski!’ mused the priest, for perhaps the hundredth time.

Janusz permitted himself a brief glance skywards.

‘Such a fine brain, you had – Professor Zygurski told me,’ said the priest, shaking his head. ‘Of course, theology would have been more fitting than science, but, still, what a waste of God-given talent.’

‘It wasn’t a time for writing essays,’ shot back Janusz. ‘How could I sit on my backside in a cosy lecture theatre talking about Schrodinger’s cat while people were getting beaten to pulp in the streets?’ Pushing his free hand through his hair he added in a brooding undertone, ‘Although maybe I should just have carried on fucking about with Bunsen burners.’

The priest pulled at his earlobe, decided to let the profanity go. The early eighties had been a disruptive and dangerous era for everyone, he reflected – especially the young. The protests organised by Solidarity adhered largely to the principle of peaceful protest but were met, inevitably, by the batons and bullets of the Communist regime. In more normal times, Janusz might have gone on to match, or even outshine, the achievements of his father, a highly regarded professor of physics at Gdansk University, but soon after General Jaruzelski declared martial law, the boy had abandoned his studies to join the thrilling battle for democracy on the streets. Then, just as suddenly, he had left for England – abandoning the young wife he’d married just weeks before. When Janusz had turned up at St Stanislaus, he was clearly a soul in torment, and although Father Pietruski had never discovered the root of the trouble, one thing was certain – whatever happened back then cast a shadow over him still.

He studied the big man with the troubled eyes opposite him. This child of God would never be a particularly observant Catholic, perhaps, but the priest was sure of one thing: he was possessed of a Christian soul, and when the new government was elected – by God’s grace – it was to be hoped that men such as he would return home to rebuild the country.

He leaned across and tapped Janusz on the back of the hand.

‘I may have a small job for you,’ he said. ‘Something honorowego – to keep you out of trouble – and use that brain of yours. A matter that pani Tosik brought to me in confession.’

Janusz raised an eyebrow.

‘And expresslypermittedme to take beyond the sacred confines of the confessional. One of the girls, a waitress in the restaurant, has gone missing.’

‘With the takings?’

‘No, no, a God-fearing girl,’ said the priest. ‘She always attended mass. She’d only been here a few weeks, waiting tables, plus a little modelling work.’ Janusz raised an eyebrow and grinned through his cloud of smoke.

‘Yes, a very beautiful young woman, but a good girl and a hard worker. She disappeared two weeks ago without a word, and pani Tosik is worried out of her skin. She doesn’t want to call the police, naturalnie.’

Janusz inclined his head in understanding. Maybe Poles were insubordinate by nature, or maybe it was a reaction to forty years of brutal foreign rule – either way, they didn’t roll out the welcome mat for the cops.

‘So? She’s found a boyfriend who’s getting rich doing loft conversions,’ he said, flicking a fat inch of ash off his cigar.

‘Maybe so, but the girl’s mother back home hasn’t heard from her and pani Tosik feels terribly guilty. She wants her tracked down,’ he met Janusz’s eyes, ‘And she’ll pay good money.’ Janusz couldn’t help smiling at the old man’s transparent look of guile as he delivered his trump card.

Finding a missing person was hard work and involved lots of schlepping round on the tube, which he loathed – but it was common knowledge that pani Tosik was loaded, and he could certainly do with the cash.

Father Pietruski drained the last of his drink and stood to go to the bar.