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
