Anya Lipska - Death Can’t Take a Joke

‘What?’

‘When you finally decide to come out of the closet.’

Janusz held the phone away from his ear as Oskar roared with laughter. ‘Actually, I’m cooking dinner for Kasia tonight, turniphead,’ he said, one side of his mouth lifting in a private smile.

‘Janek, Janek,’ said Oskar. ‘Are you still kidding yourself that she’s going to leave that dupek Steve?’

Janusz leaned against the worktop and let Oskar carry on in this vein for a while. The worst of it was, he knew in his heart of hearts that his mate was probably right. The affair with Kasia had been going on for almost two years now yet she showed no sign of ending her marriage to her lazy, worthless husband.

‘Spare me the relationship counselling, Oskar,’ growled Janusz. ‘Just tell me what you’ve got.’

‘Keep your hair on, kolego, I was getting to that,’ said Oskar. ‘I dropped in on my mate, Marek, the one who owns a Polski sklep on Hoe Street? You should go there – he sells the best wiejska in London. And his rolmopsy …’

‘Oskar!’

‘Okay, okay. Anyway, it turns out that he knows the guy in the Discovery, the one you saw with that gorgeous bird!’

‘What does he know about him?’

‘He’s Romanian, grew up there when that kutas Ceausescu ran the place. But he managed to get out and went to live in Poland after Solidarity got in – Marek says his mother was Polish.’

That made sense , thought Janusz. Poland had been the first country to throw off communist rule in 1989, making it a magnet for people escaping Soviet-backed regimes all over Eastern Europe.

‘Does Marek know how the guy makes his money?’

‘ Tak. He has business interests in Poland, Ukraine, some of the other ex-Kommi states,’ said Oskar. ‘Marek just invested some cash with him actually – he says he’s making a packet.’

‘Shady business?’ asked Janusz.

‘No! He says it’s all totally above board.’

Janusz just grunted. Some people didn’t ask too many questions so long as the rate of return was attractive.

‘Anyway, sisterfucker, listen to this,’ said Oskar. ‘Marek sees the Romanian going to some Turkish café opposite his shop in Hoe Street, twice a week, to drink coffee with the owner.’

Janusz had never had any dealings with London’s Turks, who kept themselves pretty much to themselves, but during the recent riots they’d won his grudging admiration. While the cops had stood by, helpless and outnumbered, as lowlifes looted and torched his local shops, further north in Green Lanes the Turks had lined up to defend their businesses armed with hard stares and baseball bats. When the dust had settled, theirs were the only shopfronts that didn’t require the attention of emergency glaziers.

‘And the girl? Does she go along to these meetings?’

‘Sometimes. But Marek says he’s always there – four o’clock, Thursdays and Fridays, regular as clockwork.’

Marek sounded like a nosy bastard to Janusz. He checked his watch: it was Thursday and just after three. Plenty of time to get up there and back in time to cook dinner.

Janusz still had no idea of the precise nature of the relationship between the girl Varenka and the Romanian. She certainly wouldn’t be the first girl to settle for an older, uglier lover in return for a luxurious life. But was he also her pimp? The scene Janusz had witnessed in Hoe Street, which had ended with the bastard assaulting her, suggested that was a strong possibility.

‘Did you get the name of this Romanian?’

He heard Oskar fumbling with a bit of paper. ‘Barbu Romescu.’

‘You didn’t let Marek know this was anything to do with Jim?’

‘Of course not, Janek! I just dropped into the conversation that I’d seen this seksowna blonde girl getting into a fancy black 4X4 in Hoe Street. You know, man talk.’

‘Not bad . Maybe you’re not as bat-brained as you look.’

‘I was thinking,’ Oskar’s voice became conspiratorial, tinged with suppressed excitement, ‘I could park the van near the café, like I was doing deliveries, and when the Romanian comes out, tail him to his hideaway.’

Janusz grinned at the idea of Oskar and his old crock of a van with the squealing fan belt shadowing anyone undetected. ‘I tell you what, kolego , here’s the best thing you can do. Take Marek out for a drink. Drop into the conversation that you have a mate who’s come into a pile of money and who is looking for investments paying a good return.’

Right after he’d hung up, the message waiting sign started flashing on his phone. It was a voicemail from Kasia.

‘Janek, darling. Please don’t hate me but I can’t make it tonight. We have so many late bookings for extensions, I’m going to have to stay here and help out. I’m really sorry. I’ll call again later and we can rebook? I love you, misiaczku .’

Janusz flung his phone down, sending up a dust cloud of flour, where it lay like an alien spacecraft crashed in a snowdrift. This wasn’t the first time Kasia had stood him up lately. She was always protesting that he was the love of her life, but these days her burgeoning nail bar business and inconvenient husband left barely any time for him. When she’d left her job as a pole dancer, Janusz had hoped that she might move on from Steve, too, but on the subject of her marriage her position was unwavering: as a devout Catholic, she said, she couldn’t countenance a divorce.

Staring at the sourdough, he contemplated binning it, but then resumed his kneading. It felt therapeutic, slamming the dough into the worktop. The cat, who was curled up on a kitchen chair cleaning himself, broke off from his ministrations to gaze up at Janusz.

‘You probably won’t see it this way, Copetka,’ he told him, ‘but when the vet took your nuts away, he saved you a world of trouble.’

Janusz arrived in Walthamstow ten minutes ahead of the Romanian’s scheduled meeting time. He bought a half of lager in Hoe Street’s last surviving pub and stationed himself in the window, almost directly opposite the Pasha Café, which had a sign advertising ‘ Cakes, Shakes and Shisha’ . And sure enough, even on this chilly day, there were two dark-skinned men seated at one of the pavement tables chatting and smoking shisha pipes beneath a plastic canopy. Janusz remembered reading somewhere that an hour spent smoking tobacco this way was the equivalent of getting through 100 cigarettes. Lucky bastards, he thought, cursing the smoking ban.

At two minutes to four, the black Discovery pulled up right outside the café and the bullet-headed man climbed out of the driver’s seat – no chauffeur today. He bent to retrieve something from the rear seat, a manbag, from the look of it, then turned, giving Janusz a view of short-clipped hair, a muscled back under a well-cut jacket, before heading for the café entrance. Janusz was just thinking he’d have to wait till the guy came out again for a good look at his face when, at the threshold, he turned to aim his key fob at the 4X4. It took barely a second – but long enough for Janusz to take a mental snapshot. The thing that caught his attention was a curious scar running down the side of his face. Reaching from temple to jaw, it looked too wide to have been carved by a blade, and yet unusually regular for a burn.

Janusz took a slug of lager, aware of a pulse starting to thrum in his throat. He’d seen his type before. His bearing, the way he walked and held himself, revealed more accurately than any psychiatrist’s report what kind of man he was: someone who saw other people as tools to achieve his ends – or as obstacles to be neutralised.