Chapter Thirty
If I can just crawl to the bottom step, I might be able to reach the stair rail, pull myself up with my good arm. My legs are useless – the fall must have broken something in my back.
I knew the risk. I knew when I told the boy who I was that he might kill me, but I had to do it – how else could I bring up the matter of our mutual friend? At first, he didn’t believe me, didn’t remember my face. I had to raise my voice then, remind him what had happened to him – incredible that he should need reminding!
That did the trick. Something in his eyes changed.
I told him I regretted his sacrifice, tried to explain what a dangerous time it had been for the country – if we had lost our nerve, well, there would have been tanks on the streets again – and not our own ones this time.
He didn’t see it that way. So I ended up in a puddle of my own piss on the cellar floor.
It was worth it. The boy read the document. He wants revenge – I saw it in his eyes – and that means I’ll get mine.
If I can just make it to the bottom step.
Janusz slammed the younger man so hard against the flat’s freshly painted plasterboard that he heard the fixings pop, and twisted the neck of the guy’s sweatshirt around his throat.
‘Honest to God, Janusz!’ Another shove. ‘Sorry. Panie Kiszka. The contractor didn’t pay me yet, but in two days I’m getting a thousand, I swear on the wounds of Christ.’
As Janusz paused for breath, his free hand propped against the wall, he caught his reflection in the triple-glazed window next to Slawek’s shoulder. It showed a big man in early middle age, wide-shouldered and lean, and with a strong jaw, yes – but with the unmistakable beginnings of a stoop, and a scatter of grey in the thick dark hair. Naprawde, he was getting too old for this kind of thing.
Straightening his spine with caution, but keeping a grip on Slawek’s collar, he scanned the room, a newly fitted ‘luxury’ studio apartment in a tower block overlooking the moonscape of the Olympic construction site. Floor to ceiling windows framed the black skeleton of the half-built main stadium, which sat like a giant teacup, ringed by attending cranes, seventeen floors below. When the block was finished, the view would put an extra forty, maybe fifty thousand, on the fat price tag.
Unbelievable. From what he’d seen of Stratford – and he saw far too much of it for his liking, now so many Poles were working around the Olympic site – the place was a dump. After the Luftwaffe had flattened it, along with most of the East End, the town planners had decided to recreate the town centre as a poured concrete shopping mall on a giant three-lane roundabout. It reminded him of the stuff the Communists had crapped out all over Poland in the fifties and sixties.
Slawek was two weeks late with payment and as full of bullshit as ever. The power hammer Janusz had supplied over a month ago, still labelled ‘Property of the Department of Transport’ stood propped against the cream-coloured bulk of an American-style Smeg. Janusz knew that the fancy fridge – along with the rest of the gleaming kitchen appliances – was missing the manufacturer’s serial number, because he had removed it himself with an angle grinder before delivery.
‘The quicker I finish this job, the quicker I get paid – and you get paid,’ said the young man, taking advantage of the pause in hostilities.
Janusz had spent enough of his youth on building sites to see past the superficial gloss to the flat’s shoddy finish. He’d have got a bollocking for the slapdash plastering, and for using non-galvanised screws in the cooker hood, which would rust solid at the first blast of kitchen steam. All the same, it did look almost finished. He sighed. As much as he needed the cash, he had to admit Slawek had a point.
He thumped him once more, half-heartedly, against the wall. ‘Slawek, you are a pointless fucking hand-job.’ But Slawek caught the change of tone, and sure enough, the big man suddenly dropped him with a gesture of disgust.
‘One more week – and you screw me around next time, they’ll have to pull that jackhammer out of your arse.’
‘Tak, tak. I really appreciate it, panie Kiszka.’ Slawek practically skipped as he followed Janusz to the door. ‘Maybe I can do some small job for you, to say thanks?’
That brought an explosion of laughter from Janusz. ‘I wouldn’t let you build me a cat flap!’ he said over his shoulder. Slawek’s renovation of a three-storey Georgian townhouse in Notting Hill was infamous in the Polish community: he’d knocked down a supporting wall and created W11’s first Georgian bungalow. The local council – not to mention the client, an unhappy Russian billionaire – was still looking for him. Slawek’s face crumpled in protest.
‘One mistake doesn’t make me a bad builder,’ he shouted down the corridor after Janusz as the lift doors closed behind him.
Three floors down, a laughing group of young men piled in, carrying tools and paint kettles. Janusz saw that they all wore number one crew cuts – the ultra-short cut that had once been the badge of a recently completed stint in the military. Many young Poles apparently still favoured it, even though compulsory national service had been abandoned a year or more back.
On seeing the older man, they quieted and bobbed their heads: ‘Dzien dobry, panu,’ using the respectful form of address. Good lads, thought Janusz. But within seconds, their chatter, the closeness of their bodies, and the press of the lift wall at his back started to stir the old feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. His breathing grew shallow and the vaporous tang of solvent seemed to suck the air from his lungs.
As the lift plunged, the tallest one met his eye, grinned, and with an unpleasant jolt, Janusz saw his younger self reflected back at him, the unfinished features and gangly limbs, the absurd optimism. Then, without warning, another image, pin-sharp and even less welcome: Iza’s face, freckled, laughing as she clattered down the stairs of the university. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing away the other memories.
The helmeted ranks of ZOMO advancing through blizzarding snow, the obscene thump thump of lead-filled truncheons striking human flesh.
His
