Where the Devil Can't Go Read online

  WHERE THE DEVIL

  CAN’T GO

  Anya Lipska trained as a journalist and now works as a

  TV documentary producer. She lives with her

  husband in East London.

  Published in Great Britain by Tadeusz Books

  Copyright © Anya Lipska 2010

  www.wherethedevilcantgo.com

  The moral right of Anya Lipska to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978 0 9569994 0 5

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe (Eastbourne) Limited

  For Tomasz

  The winter is yours, but the summer will be ours.

  Solidarnosc graffiti during martial law, 1981-83

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  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.

  ONE

  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. Pan 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 blizzard 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 Olympics 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 Olympics 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-galvanized 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, Pan 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 the previous year.

  On seeing the older man, they quietened 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 breathing ragged now, Janusz hit the button for the next floor and pushed past the startled boys to the door, muttering some excuse. He took the remaining five flights down to the lobby at a run. Out in the street, he sucked in life-saving lungfuls of the chilly spring air.

  Kurwa mac! Was he constantly to be reminded of the past by this deluge of young Poles?

  ‘Bloody foreigners’, he said out loud, startling an old lady waiting at the bus stop. Suppressing a grin, he murmured an apology.

  Janusz inhaled the savoury aromas emanating from the café’s kitchen as he studied the menu, chalked up on a blackboard.

  “Panu?” asked the fair-haired, plump-cheeked girl behind the counter, pen and pad poised.

  “Your bigos. Is it homemade or out of a tin?” he asked. She made as if to cuff the side of his head. He ducked, grinning, and took his glass of lemon tea – the real thing, not some powdered rubbish – to the only empty table, beside a window made opaque by the café’s steamy fug.

  The Polska Kuchnia, or Polish Kitchen, was a good half mile from the commotion of the Olympics site, but the place was packed with groups of construction workers in cement-stained work clothes filling up on the solid, comforting food of home: pierogi, golobki, flaki. These were the men turning the architects’ blueprints into reality: the stadium, the velodrome, the athletes’ village, as well as the high-rise apartment blocks shooting up around the edge of the five hundred acre site.

  The young couple who ran the place had tried to make it more homely than the standard East End greasy spoon: there were checked tablecloths, brightly-coloured bread baskets, even a crocus in a jam-jar at every table. If it weren’t for the growl of passing lorries, thought Janusz, you could almost pretend you were in a little restaurant somewhere in the Tatra Mountains.

  Just as the girl set down his hunter’s stew – and it looked like a good one, with slivers of duck, as well as the usual pork and kielbasa, poking through the sauerkraut – the street door crashed opened and Oskar arrived.

  Short, balding and barrel-chested, Oskar scoured the café with a belligerent stare, and found his target – a group of young guys in a corner laughing and joking over the remains of their meal. Planting his legs apart, he let fly with a volley of Polish.

  “What in the name of the Virgin are you still doing here, you sisterfuckers?” he boomed. “What did I tell you yesterday? If you are late back again I’ll have the contractor on the blower cutting my balls off.”

  The lads scrambled to their feet, a couple of them falling over their chair legs in their haste to get to the door, amid a barrage of laughter from the café’s other occupants, who’d stopped eating to enjoy the show. But Oskar was merciless.

  “Don’t try to hide your ugly mush from me, Karol you cocksucker. Maybe your Mummy did name you after the fucking Pope, God rest his Soul,” he made the sign of the cross without pausing for breath, “but I still haven’t forgotten that granite worktop you wrote off and I’m gonna fuck you up the dupa on payday.”

  As the last of them scurried out, heads down, Oskar subsided, satisfied. Then, seeing Janusz, his face split in a grin. “Czesc, Janek!”

  Janusz stood to greet his friend and, without thinking, put out his hand. Oskar roared with laughter and, ignoring it, embraced his mate in a full bear hug, kissing him on alternate cheeks three times. Janusz cleared his throat: between Poles the effusive greeting was no big deal, but after two decades in England, it made him squirm.

  Oskar put a hand on one hip and mimicked an effete handshake as he sat down. “You’ve been in England too long, mate. Soon you’ll be wanting to fuck with men!” He chuckled delightedly at his joke.

  Janusz smiled wearily. He loved Oskar like a wayward kid brother – a friendship that dated back to their first day of military service in 1980 – but he could be a pain in the ass. He could picture it still. A rainy day behind the barbed wire of Camp 117 in the Kashubian Lakeland, and the line of new conscripts, heads newly-shorn and uniforms at least two sizes too big, looking more like bedraggled baby birds than soldiers. He felt a flare of anger. At seventeen, he and Oskar – all those young men – should have been full of hope. Instead, all they’d had to look forward to had been was endless months training for the threat of invasion by Western imperialist forces – and then what? Martial law, curfews and rationing... the dreary realpolitik of the socialist dream.

  Oskar waved a pudgy hand at the table where his dawdling workers had sat. “Seriously though,” he said. “These kids don’t know how easy their life is these days. Do they have any idea what site work was like here in the Eighties? 12-hour shifts, no ‘health and safety’. Never mind an hour off for lunch, we didn’t even get a fucking tea break.”

  Janusz grunted his agreement. “And if you wanted goggles or ear defenders, you had to buy them yourself,” he said, tearing apart a piece of bread.

  Oskar used his sleeve to wipe a porthole in the condensation of the window and peered out at the traffic. “Remember that chuj,” he mused, “The Paddy foreman on the M25 job – the guy who treated us like dogs?”

  “The one whose thermos you pissed in?” asked Janusz, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” said Oskar, a beatific grin spreading across his chubby face.

  “Fuck your mother,” he said, peering at Janusz’s plate, “What is that shit you’re eating?” – then, to the girl who had just arrived to take his order – “The bigos for me, too, darling. It looks delicious.”

  After she had left, Janusz finished his last mouthful and pushed the plate away. “Too much paprika, perhaps, and the duck was a little overcooked, but not bad,” he said with a judicious nod. He pulled out his box of cigars, then, remembering the crazy no-smoking laws, reached for a toothpick instead.

  “Listen Oskar, I still want the booze, but I’ve got a problem. Any chance of you waiting a couple of weeks for the cash?”

  Oskar, mouth full of good rye bread, mumbled: “Don’t tell me – that donkey Slawek made a kutas of you?”

  He helped himself to a slurp of Janusz’s lemon tea, shaking his head. “I can stand you half a dozen cases, mate, but not much more than that. I’ve got no slack right now.” A secret smile crept along his lips, “I just sent five hundred home so Madam can buy a new living room carpet.”

  “I thought you were saving up so you could go home for good?” said Janusz. “You’ll be here forever if you let Gosia spend all your smalz on carpets.”

  Oskar belched philosophically: “Like my father used to say: ‘The woman cries before the wedding; the man after.’”

  The girl put a plate of bigos in front of Oskar, whose eyes rounded with childlike greed. “Duck!” he exclaimed indistinctly through his first mouthful.

  Ever since Janusz had known him, Oskar had worked like a navvie to support Gosia and the kids. They had slogged together through the night building motorway bridges in the Eighties – back-breaking twelve hour shifts – but come next day’s rush hour, when Janusz was still in bed, Oskar would be standing in a lay-by on the A4, flogging hothouse roses to motorists heading home. Even now, alongside his job as foreman for one of the biggest Olympic site contractors, he still found time for what he called his ‘beverage import business’.

  It amounted to half a dozen clapped-out
Transit vans that plied the cross-channel ferry routes, bringing in cases of cheap booze and cartons of cigarettes to sell on to traders like Janusz. The bottles of spirits ended up on optics in private clubs where no one questioned the ‘NOT FOR RESALE’ label, especially since the bottles carried another, reassuring promise: ‘EXPORT STRENGTH’.

  “Listen,” said Oskar, with a mischievous look, “If you’re short of cash, I could always get you a shift on the site”. Dropping his fork he grabbed Janusz’s hand, and turning it over to check the palm, chuckled. “Kurwa! All this ‘wheeling and dealing’” – he used the English phrase – “gave you hands like a schoolgirl’s! You wouldn’t last five minutes on a real job.” He scooped up another tottering forkful of bigos, “You want to come over later, watch some football?”

  “I can’t tonight,” said Janusz. “I’ve got a ticket for a lecture at the Royal Institute – one of the physicists from the CERN project.”

  Oskar frowned. “That big metal doughnut in Switzerland – the one that keeps blowing a fuse?” he asked. “Something to do with the First Bang?”

  Janusz nodded – it was easier.

  “They say the universe will collapse one day, you know,” said Oskar, adopting a scholarly air. He clapped his hands to demonstrate: “Pfouff! down to the size of a beachball.” Before he could offer any further cosmological insights, the café door rattled open to admit three lanky buzz-cut youngsters, dwarfed by their rucksacks. Their loud voices exuded confidence, but the way the trio hung close together, shoulders almost touching, told the real story. First-timers, thought Janusz, straight off the 0830 Ryanair flight from Warsaw. When the tallest one spotted Oskar his relief was palpable.

  Joining the men at their table, the boys greeted them politely. Oskar balled his checked napkin and after wiping the grease from his lips, punched out a number on his mobile.

  “Czesc, Wassily, you old hedgehog-fucker,” he bellowed. “You still looking for ground-breakers? I’ve got three beauties for you – real musclemen.” He winked at Janusz. The youngsters exchanged apprehensive glances, shrugged. “I’ll bring them over now.”