On the glass coffee table between us I discovered a stack of
‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you speak wonderful Polish for a German,’ Mrs Sawicki told me.
‘My family moved to Warsaw when I was thirteen,’ I replied.
‘How nice for you. Where did your family live?’
She was probably testing for the ghetto. ‘Tamka Street,’ I answered – it was where my uncle Franz had lived. ‘So my father could walk to his classes. He was a professor at the university.’
‘I see. Honec – that sounds Czech.’
‘My father was from Prague and my mother from Vienna – which was where I was born.’
‘An interesting upbringing, no doubt,’ she observed generously, and yet she smoked with abrupt, irritated gestures.
Having repulsed her first attack, I grew bolder. By the entranceway to the bedrooms I’d spotted a Japanese watercolour of a yellow finch sitting on a tip of bamboo. Behind the exuberant little bird was a mist-covered mountain. I asked Mrs Sawicki if I could take a closer look.
‘By all means,’ she replied, energized by my interest.
As I stepped up to the watercolour, I brushed my hand against the wall, which proved to be completely dry – as it would be if Anna had been killed here on 24 January.
‘It’s by Sakai Hōitsu,’ Mrs Sawicki told me. ‘Japanese, late eighteenth century – Rinpa school.’
She was happy to show off her knowledge of Eastern art. I watched her smoke. She watched me watching. She adored the small spotlight I focused on her.
‘The finch and the mountain seem to be made of the same substance,’ I observed.
‘And I believe that substance is called paint,’ replied Mrs Sawicki, grinning.
A genuinely witty comment, and to please her I laughed.
All the artwork on her walls seemed to be from the Orient – and to be intended to tell guests that she was a cultured woman who had travelled far beyond the borders of Poland. So I ventured a guess: ‘Was your father in the diplomatic corps?’
‘I’m impressed, Mr Honec!’ she replied, making a small, deferential bow. ‘But it was Grandfather who was the ambassador in the family.’ In perfect German – proving my earlier conclusion about her language skills to be wrong – she added, ‘After finishing his career, he settled in Vienna. Whenever I visited him, he loved to take me out to dinner at the Imperial Hotel, on the Opera Ring. They had the best Sachertorte in all Austria – despite what the owners of the Sacher Hotel would like you to believe. Did you ever dine there, by any chance?’
Mrs Sawicki was trying to catch me out. Was I not acting my part cleverly enough?
‘If you’ll excuse a small correction,’ I told her, emphasizing my Austrian accent, ‘the Imperial is on the Kaerntner Ring. And I’m afraid it was beyond my father’s means.’
‘So it is, Mr Honec, so it is.’ Her lips were pursed with amusement again; she was aware that I knew she’d been testing me. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ she told me in Polish, ‘I’ll get dressed so we can talk properly.’
Mrs Sawicki still didn’t seem to regard me as a worthy opponent. As though to prove her wrong, I stubbed out my cigarette as soon as she had swept out of the room and started searching her furniture for anything related to Anna or Adam. In the cabinet below the Victrola, classical symphonies predominated, but I found a record by Hanka Ordonówna with Paweł’s signature on the centre label. Wouldn’t he have taken a favourite recording with him to boarding school?
In the secretary in the foyer were envelopes printed with Mrs Sawicki’s name in gold lettering, along with a dry inkwell and a puckered old apple that must have been hidden and forgotten, possibly by a younger sibling of Paweł’s. On a sudden whim, I took three envelopes and stuffed them in my coat pocket. In the dresser were linens and a set of Jugendstil silverware in a wooden case. Easing it open, I lifted out six demitasse spoons. When I placed them beside the envelopes, the rest of my visit with Mrs. Sawicki was destined to beat with the damning evidence of thievery concealed in my pocket.
I’d needed to take something of value from her. I didn’t know or care why. My belly was aching with hunger and anxiety, and that seemed far more important.
I sat back down when I heard Mrs Sawicki’s footsteps approaching and lit another cigarette. She entered in a tightly fitted long blue dress. Her high heels were black and her lipstick blood red. Her eyes were thickly shaded with dark brown mascara, so that they looked bruised. She’d become the dramatic heroine of an Erich Maria Remarque novel.
