Anya Lipska - Where the Devil Can’t Go

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by The Friday Project in 2013

Copyright © Anya Lipska 2013

Anya Lipska asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007504589

Ebook Edition © February 2013 ISBN: 9780007504596

Version: 2015-02-18

For Tomasz

Our homeland is on the verge of collapse … The atmosphere of conflicts, misunderstanding, hatred causes moral degradation, surpasses the limits of toleration. Strikes , the readiness to strike, actions of protest have become a norm of life.

Citizens! … I declare, that today the Military Council of National Salvation has been formed. In accordance with the Constitution, the State Council has imposed martial law all over the country.

General Jaruzelski, Communist Leader of Poland, speaking on December 13, 1981

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

Solidarnosc graffiti during martial law,

Poland, 1981–83

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Praise

About the Publisher

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.