Forest Ghost (7 page)

‘Tomasz tells me the new
gol
ą
bki
recipe is going down well,’ Jack told him.

Mikhail flipped over a veal cutlet in his skillet, with a burst of flame. ‘So … must all be Slovaks in tonight,’ he said, violently shaking a pan of sauerkraut with his other hand.

Jack gave him a reassuring pat on his fat, sweaty shoulder. ‘So long as they like the food and they pay for it, I don’t care what they are.’

‘No Russian though,’ said Mikhail. ‘All I feed to Russian is cyanide.’

Jack went upstairs to the landing, unlocked his apartment door and went inside. He could still hear the clatter and the hubbub from the restaurant downstairs, with an occasional burst of laughter, but up here it was very muted.

Sparky’s bedroom door was ajar and his bedside lamp was still on, but Sparky was fast asleep, wearing his Star Trek pajamas. His hair was tousled and he was breathing through his mouth. Jack stood over him for a while, watching him, feeling even more sorry for him than he did for himself. Jack had lost his wife, and his lover, and his best friend, but Sparky had lost his mother.

He went over to the window and tugged the drapes closer together. Outside, on the brick wall facing him, the yellow-eyed face of Capricorn grinned at him maliciously.
Saw death today, did you, Jack
?
Saw it again, in all its ghastly glory
?

He looked around the room, at all the star maps that Sparky had pinned on the wall, and on the photograph of Agnieszka that he had stuck over the head of his bed. Agnieszka, smiling under a summer tree, in her orange dress. That picture had been taken less than three years ago.

If only we knew what was coming
, thought Jack. He was sure that Sparky’s interest in astrology had been inspired by Agnieszka’s death.
I don’t want anything like that to happen to me again, not without my knowing in advance. Not without my doing everything I can to stop it.

He switched off Sparky’s lamp and closed his bedroom door, and then he went into the kitchen and took another bottle of
Ź
ywiec out of the icebox. The living room was silent and stuffy. He switched on the wide-screen TV but he kept it on mute because he wanted to think about what had happened today at the scout reservation, and what he had seen there. He couldn’t begin to imagine how that woman had been buried up to her knees in the bottom of that pool, or had her head cut off. God – in his mind’s eye he could still see those maggots writhing. Had the man decapitated her, and then drowned himself, or had somebody else killed both of them? And if so, why?

Two and a Half Men
flickered on the screen in front of him. It must have been a repeat because it still had Charlie Sheen in it. On the side table next to the couch there was another photograph of Agnieszka, in a silver frame, looking at him almost coyly. He remembered the day he had taken that picture, and he wished now that he could have said,
Don’t look at me like that, Aggie; one day that look is going to make me miss you more than you can know
.

He took the visiting card that Tomasz had given him out of his pocket. He didn’t recognize the name and he couldn’t think what anybody could have to tell him that was so important. Then, however, he turned it over, and saw that a name was handwritten on the back.
Grzegorz Walach
.

Now, that
did
mean something. Grzegorz Walach had been his great-grandfather. His grandfather had always been telling him colorful stories about him. He had been a famous violinist in Poland before World War Two, and played for the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. The great conductor Leopold Stokowski had heard him playing and been so impressed that he had invited him to join the Chicago Philharmonic, and that was why in 1937 the family had emigrated to America.

When Germany had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, however, Grzegorz Walach had been playing for a season in Warsaw, and he had sent a telegram saying that he had decided to stay and fight in the defense of his country. The family had never heard from him again.

Jack turned the card over and over. For some reason he couldn’t understand, it unsettled him, a message from a past that may be better if it stayed forgotten. He looked at the clock on the table next to Agnieszka’s picture. It was nearly ten-thirty now, and he wondered if it was too late to give this mysterious Maria Wiktoria Koczerska a call.

He heard more laughter from the restaurant, and the band striking up with ‘Hej Sokoły’ – ‘Hey, Falcons’ – which was still popular in Poland not only today, but had been sung by Home Army guerrillas during the war. That decided him. He reached over and picked up the phone.

As he did so, however, the living-room door opened wider and Sparky came in, his hair sticking up at the back and his eyes bleary.

‘Hey, Sparks, what’s wrong?’

Sparky came over and sat down close to him.

‘I’m going to bed myself in a minute,’ said Jack. ‘Come on, it’s been a very long day.’

‘I had a nightmare,’ said Sparky, his eyes roaming around the room as if he were worried that something out of his nightmare might have followed him in here.

‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ said Jack. ‘But it’s only your brain trying to make sense of things. Losing Malcolm like that – that’s really so tragic. And nobody even knows why.’

‘I didn’t have a nightmare about Malcolm. I had a nightmare about the woods.’

Jack put his arm around him and gave him a reassuring squeeze. ‘That doesn’t surprise me, either. They were pretty scary those woods, weren’t they? And what we saw there – even if it was a cougar, which it probably was – they can attack people, too. Like, not very often, I don’t think. But they do. Especially young kids.’

‘It wasn’t
those
woods. It was some different woods.’

‘In your nightmare, you mean? What woods were they, then?’

‘I don’t know. But they were different. They had different trees and they smelled different.’

‘You can
smell
things, in your nightmares?’

Sparky nodded. ‘I smelled a campfire, too. And there were some men, talking.’

‘Oh, yes? What were they saying?’

‘
Był bialy. Wgl
ą
dał jak duch
.’

‘It was white and it looked like a ghost?’

‘Yes. Over and over.’

Jack gave Sparky another squeeze. ‘Listen, Sparks, you’re overtired and all stressed out, that’s all. How about some warm milk to help you sleep?’

‘But it wasn’t a nightmare like I usually get.’

‘Well, all nightmares aren’t the same. It depends what things have been worrying you during the day. Today it was obviously woods, and spooky-looking white things. I don’t blame you for having nightmares about that. I was pretty freaked out myself.’

‘But it was
real
.’

Jack sat up and looked at him. He had said it with such conviction that Jack almost believed him.

‘What do you mean, it was real? A nightmare is just a dream, Sparks. That’s the definition of a nightmare.’

‘But this really happened.’

‘Men in the woods saying “it was white and it looked like a ghost”, in Polish?’

‘Yes.’

Jack stood up. ‘Come on, Sparks. I think you need to go back to bed, I really do. Just try and think of something else. Count sheep or something. It won’t be even half as scary in the morning. Look – I’ll leave the light on for you, OK? And you can leave your door open, too.’

Sparky reluctantly went back to his bedroom. Jack stood in the middle of the living room for a few moments, not quite sure what to do. He knew that he should go to bed, too, but the visiting card was lying on the table and the phone was lying next to it, and somehow Sparky’s nightmare had made him feel that he needed to call this Maria Wiktoria Koczerska, whoever she was.

He punched out the number and waited. The phone rang and rang with an old-fashioned burring noise. He was about to hang up when a woman’s voice said, querulously, ‘
Halo
?
S
ucham
.
Tak
?’

‘
Dobry wieczór
. Is this Ms Koczerska?’

‘Mrs Koczerska, yes. Who is calling?’

‘Jack Wallace, from the Nostalgia Restaurant on North Clark Street. My manager tells me you came around earlier when I was away.’

‘Ah yes, Mr Wallace, I did. But thank you anyhow for calling. There is something I very much wanted to show you.’

‘You wrote the name of my great-grandfather on the back of your card. Grzegorz Walach.’

‘
Tak.
I did. Your great-grandfather is disappearing in the war, is that right?’

‘That’s right, yes. He volunteered to help fight the German invasion in 1939, but his family never heard from him again.’

‘Of course. There were many tens of thousands like that, Mr Wallace, who disappeared without trace, and who do not even have a grave marker that their relatives can visit to lay a few flowers. My own great-uncles, the same happened to them.’

‘So what’s this about my great-grandfather?’

‘It is better if I show you, Mr Wallace. Maybe you can come to my apartment?’

‘I’m a very busy man, Mrs Koczerska. I have a restaurant to run, as you know.’

‘
Tak
, yes, of course. But if I can explain to you the fate that befell Grzegorz Walach – if I can
prove
to you what happened to him—’

‘You can do that?’

‘Why would I lie to you?
Dlaczego miałabym ci
ę
okłamywa
ć
?
What would be the point of it?’

‘OK. I guess I could come tomorrow, around eleven in the morning, if that’s convenient.’

‘That would suit me very well, Mr Wallace. I look forward to it.
Dobranoc
.’

‘Goodnight, Mrs Koczerska.’

Jack put down the phone. He thought he ought to feel excited but instead he felt strangely apprehensive. Maybe he was just exhausted, and upset by the day’s events. There was something else that unsettled him, though. Something that Sparky had said. ‘
There’s a connection between what happened to Malcolm, and our family. That’s why we have to go to Owasippe
.’

Jack didn’t know why this should make him feel disturbed, but it was the earnest way that Sparky had said it, and the fact that Mrs Koczerska had turned up at the restaurant on the same day they had gone to the scout reservation to see Malcolm lying dead in that makeshift morgue. He had never believed in fate, and coincidence. He believed that life was what you made of it yourself. It made him feel distinctly uncomfortable to think that Sparky might be right, and that the stars and the planets determine our destiny, whether we like it or not.

W
hen he drew up outside 4125 West Wellington Avenue in Belmont Gardens it was hammering down with rain. He sat in his car for a short while, to see if it would ease off, but if anything it began to pour down even more heavily. A young woman in a red hooded raincoat scuttled across the road pushing a baby buggy, with a wet, bedraggled spaniel trying to keep up with her.

Jack looked at the detached house in which Mrs Koczerska lived. It was one of several brown brick houses along Wellington Avenue, all with crenellated facades like castles. The windows were covered with ivory lace drapes, although he could see a red-and-green table lamp alight in the second-floor window, and he guessed that was Mrs Koczerska’s living room.

At last, when the rain showed no signs of relenting, he climbed out of his car and hurried up the concrete pathway to Mrs Koczerska’s front porch. He pressed the bell marked Apt #2 and waited. Eventually, Mrs Koczerska’s voice said, ‘Mr Wallace? Is that you?’

‘It’s me all right.’

She pressed the buzzer and he stepped into a gloomy, marble-floored hallway that smelled of disinfectant and burned cheese. On the left-hand side stood a tall mahogany coat and umbrella stand with a small dark mirror in it. He saw his own face in the mirror as he passed it, and he thought he looked like a sepia photograph of somebody from the 1930s.

‘Up here, Mr Wallace!’ called Mrs Koczerska, leaning over the banister at the top of the stairs. ‘Is it still raining? I wanted to hang out my sheets!’

‘Yes, still raining, and I don’t think it’s going to be stopping any time soon.’

Jack reached the landing and Mrs Koczerska held out her hands to him, as if he were an old friend she hadn’t seen in years. He gave her three pecks on the cheek, and said, ‘Pleasure to meet you.’

His manager Tomasz had been right. Once upon a time Mrs Koczerska must have been very pretty. He would have guessed her age around mid- to late-seventies, with steel-gray hair cut into a sharp five-point bob. She had high cheekbones, with a short, straight nose, and a clearly defined chin. She was very small, not much more than five feet two, and her shoulders stooped slightly, but she was immaculately dressed in a long gray cardigan and a white blouse and a pleated gray skirt. Around her neck she wore a triple-stranded necklace of Polish amber beads.

Jack recognized her perfume at once: the distinctive jasmine and orange-blossom fragrance of Chanel No. 5.

‘Come in,’ she said, and Jack followed her into her apartment.