The Warsaw Protocol: A Novel(33)

They passed through the gatehouse and entered a grassy courtyard with no trees or adornments. A concrete path led to the main doors of a huge church. At least a couple of hundred feet stretched to the top of its copper spire, the pristine limestone walls bright in the midday sun. Another white-robed monk waited at the doors. Cotton’s two escorts stopped and gestured that he should continue alone.

He entered the church and the monk left, closing the door behind him. The interior was a spacious single nave with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. A true Catholic sanctuary, rich in style, both sides lined with impressive Baroque chapels. The main altar at the far end was spectacular. Bright sun broke through the windows in fine streams of dusty light. No one was inside, save for one man, kneeling in the first pew, facing the altar. An eerie figure, backlit by candles, the whole scenario, he supposed, an attempt to deepen the hush and tighten the nerves. The man crossed himself, then stood and calmly walked down the center aisle. He was tall, heavy-chested, and handsome, in his fifties, a thin mat of brown hair brushed straight back from a wide forehead. He was clean-shaven, with a jawline tight as a clamp, dressed in a finely cut blue-gray suit.

“Mr. Malone. I’m Janusz Czajkowski.”

A hand was extended, which he shook.

“I thought it best we speak in person,” the president of Poland said in perfect English. “And this place offers us absolute privacy. You can’t say that about many spots in this world. By the way, you don’t speak Polish, do you?”

He shook his head. “That’s one language I never mastered. Italian, Danish, Spanish, Latin, German. I can handle those.”

“I was told you have a perfect memory.”

“I don’t know about that, but details do stick with me. Eidetic is the term used to describe it. Are you friends with the monks?”

“I like to think so. They are a most impressive people,” Czajkowski said, staying with English. “They follow a severe code of self-imposed principles, all governed by Ora et labora and Memento mori.”

He translated the Latin. “Pray and work. Remember you must die. How practical. And depressing.”

“It works for them. They only talk to one another three times a week, and interact with the world beyond this monastery just five days a year.”

“Except when the president of the country comes for a visit.”

Czajkowski smiled. “That title does open doors. The prior and I are old friends.”

“That helps, too.”

“Life here is simple. Between prayer and work, they consume only vegetarian meals eaten in the solitude of their own small hermitage, where the only piece of décor is the skull of the previous prior. Can you imagine that? But I know for a fact that it is true.”

This man was clearly leading to something, so he let him stay at the head of the parade.

“We don’t know each other, Mr. Malone. But I’m told you’re a reasonable man. I want you to take a message back to the people in Washington.”

There it was again. Errand boy. But an interesting choice of words. Not to the president. Or the White House.

To the people in Washington.

“When I was a child,” Czajkowski said, “one day my mother received a phone call. It lasted only a few seconds, but after she hung up she told me and my brother to get our coats. While we did, she grabbed some rope and a few cloth bags, then we headed into town. She took us to a local store where we found a big stack of toilet paper. Rolls and rolls of it on the floor. We had not seen so much toilet paper in a long time. She grabbed as many rolls as she could, threading the rope through the center, tying the ends, and draping them around my and my brother’s necks. She was hurrying as fast as she could, before others arrived. Once that happened, it would not be long before all that toilet paper was gone. We called it hunting. Not shopping. Hunting. Because you never knew exactly what you’d bring home. Toilet paper was rare, Mr. Malone. A precious commodity. When it became available you had to secure all you could. We had a small bidet in our bathroom and, when we were fortunate enough to have running water, we could clean ourselves. If not?” The president paused. “I’ll leave that to your imagination. That was life under the communists, where even toilet paper was rationed. That was Poland before 1990.”

He could see the pain in the man’s eyes as he remembered.

“Shortages were a way of life. Sometimes they were real, just a scarcity of goods. But most times, and this is important, most times they were engineered by the government as a means of control. You could not buy anything without ration cards. And you could only get ration cards if you registered your identity with the government. Later on, the shortages were blamed on Solidarity and their strikes, as a way to turn the people against the movement. But by then, we all knew the truth.”

Which all had to have been horrible, and he sympathized. Still, “Why am I here?”

“An excellent question. Why are you here, in Kraków?”

“You know the answer.”

“That’s right, I do. You’ve come to gain your way into an auction, where you want to buy damaging information about me.”

As sleazy as that sounded, the man was right. But there was a little more to it. “I’m here to help a friend.”

Czajkowski appeared puzzled. “Who?”

“An old friend who’s in a tight situation.”