‘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
