Acts of Vanishing Read online

  ‘She’s standing by the entrance,’ said Piotrowski. ‘Don’t worry—’

  ‘If you think you can threaten me,’ William hissed. ‘If you think you’re going to get to me by threatening my family—’

  ‘Believe me,’ the Pole said calmly. ‘The last thing I want to do is threaten your daughter.’

  They stood there, eyes locked. What was going on? Extortion? An attempt to recruit him by a foreign power? That was unthinkable, ridiculous, but it was all he could guess at.

  ‘Why did you invite me here?’

  Piotrowski put his hand on William. Calm down, it meant. I’m your friend. And then he smiled a smile that was as polite as it was insincere.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let me show you around.’

  Once William started telling his story he didn’t stop for breath. He stood by the windows, watching the distant glow of Warsaw in the mist, and eight hundred kilometres away, his estranged wife was sitting in a house that smelled of woodsmoke and rugs, telling the very same thing.

  ‘You know how some people can just change beyond recognition when they face an unexpected situation?’ she said. ‘Maybe they witness an accident, or go through a crisis. You know how people say that you don’t know how anyone’s going to react until it actually happens? William’s eyes. That look. That walk. I’d never seen him like that before.’

  It was the moment that they later referred to as ‘the Thunder’, the day broiling, when William strode through the crowd, a look on his face that she’d never seen before and that terrified her. He’d grabbed her by the arm–too firmly, too desperately, his voice shaking with stress and rage–put her champagne glass down on the table and hissed that they had to find Sara now. That moment had marked the end of their summer.

  Christina allowed her eyes to meet Tetrapak’s. ‘It has to be him who sent the CD, who’s behind all of this.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said. ‘Where do I fit in? Why would he have sent a CD to me?’

  ‘You must have met at some point. You must have talked to each other.’

  He shook his head, unsure.

  ‘Around fifty,’ she said. ‘Not scruffy, but maybe a little bit rough and ready. Bushy eyebrows, greying hair. His beard too.’

  ‘It’s five years ago. How am I supposed to remember that?’

  ‘Try,’ she said. And then, almost reluctantly, she added: ‘Warm, welcoming, almost jovial.’

  He stared into space, racking his memory.

  ‘I remember a man I spoke to during one of the breaks. I know we exchanged business cards. Well, business card might be pushing it’–he signalled inverted commas with his fingers as he said it–‘I remember looking at it afterwards and noticing that it was handwritten. Name and address, in pencil. And a Hotmail address.’

  ‘That was him,’ Christina said. ‘The one William got was the same, we joked about it at the time.’ Her tone went up a notch. ‘You must have talked about something. What did you say to each other?’

  ‘As I say, it was five years ago. I know that we worried about the same things: bugging, surveillance, tracking, how we can never be sure that no one is watching. How new technologies can be used against us, on the premise that it’s the right thing to do.’

  The thought crossed her mind to ask how much truth there was in the story about coffee creamer that had given him his name, but then she thought better of it.

  ‘You must have said something that left an impression?’ she asked.

  His smile was ironic.

  ‘People often say I do. Not usually in a good way.’

  She smiled back, more out of politeness than anything else, and they were left sitting in silence, as if they’d somehow reached an understanding.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why are you so sure this is about Piotrowski?’

  ‘Because, one way or another,’ she said, then restarted the sentence. ‘One way or another we’ve been scared of this ever since then.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘Scared of him coming back.’

  46

  There were four things that Michal Piotrowski hated above all else: politics, hunger, war… and, at number four, piano concertos.

  He had grown up in an art-loving family. Anything that could possibly be observed and appreciated with a knowing hmm, whether painted or performed on stage or fashioned from some kind of stone, and as soon as he was old enough to decide for himself, he had taken to science and research in an act of pure rebellion. Tangible, concrete disciplines, just to be contrary.

  He had been studying at the Nencki Institute for four years when he was contacted for the first time. By then he had already taken part in several high-profile neuroscience projects, interdisciplinary experiments in the no-man’s-land between psychology and biology. He loved his job, and he felt like a pioneer, as though each day was spent exploring virgin territory, the only difference being that this new ground was found within ourselves.

  That was how he’d described it to the man who had sat down next to him in the dark bar on Ulica Krucza one night. He was Michal’s age, spoke with a strong accent and was a little too drunk–it would take Michal many years to realise that that was probably an act–and after a while he had steered the conversation towards politics in general and his hatred of the Soviet system in particular. Then they’d said their goodbyes and Michal had gone back to his place.

  They met on four occasions, each time completely by chance, before the man revealed his identity. His name was Dawid Ludwin, son of a farmer from northern Masovia. He flew light aircraft in his spare time and by day he worked at a company that produced communications equipment for military use. Above all though, he worked covertly for the West. At regular intervals he would photograph blueprints and prototypes and hand them over to the CIA, something he mentioned only in passing, yet impossible not to understand, and Piotrowski had cycled home through the pouring rain with his feet pedalling so fast that he could barely keep up. He’d then spent the night awake, watching the flames in the gas fire gasping for air.

  He had said no, but even so, he couldn’t sleep. Why did this have to happen to him? Why did he have to be put in such a difficult position, forced to take sides in a conflict that didn’t concern him? He hated politics. But he hated war and hunger more, and the farmer’s boy had articulated opinions that Michal hadn’t even known he had.

  By the time Gabriela came in as the dawn was breaking, he’d long since fallen asleep on a worn-out armchair. She was a mathematician; they’d met at university and they hated each other from the off, right up until the point where they realised they didn’t any more, and now she covered him with a blanket she’d brought from her childhood home, waited by his side until he woke up. When he did, he took hold of her hand, pulled her towards him and explained that he was about to make a decision that would change their lives for ever.

  He didn’t know what the information was being used for, but in the years that followed he would meet them at least once a month. The methods were simple, always the same: they would meet at concerts, he would sit at the very back, and under cover of darkness he would slip a flat envelope full of negatives into the programme, accompanied by the same plinking and plonking music that his parents had exposed him to throughout his childhood. It was unbearable, but it was the price he had to pay: it was the perfect way of doing it, no dark alleys or invisible meetings, but in the thick of things, around people, in clear view. They might meet in the gents or at the bar during the interval, and when he put down his programme to pay for a glass of wine or to respond to the call of nature, no one could see that he’d happened to swap his copy with the one that the man in the hat had placed next to it.

  And with time, it all became routine. The drama of it disappeared. They were just photos after all.

  In return, he got lucky. Via a combination of various inexplicable coincidences which he suspected were orchestrated way above his head, he and Gabriela had moved into a light, spacious apartment in
central Warsaw, in a block that had just been renovated and with views over a neat and well-kept little park. The car he drove around ought to have had a waiting list several years long. They ate well, were never cold, had clothes and friends and they went on holiday.

  Now and then he would visit his friend Dawid Ludwin, and they would look down on the country that they both loved and betrayed from high in the air.

  Michal Piotrowski was enjoying life. The only thing that never left him was his pathological hatred of piano concertos.

  When the Wall came down, the contact grew more sporadic. The world stopped being dangerous, the sun seemed to shine a little brighter, the shops filled with goods and the people around him with ideas and hope in the future, and against that backdrop East and West didn’t seem so relevant any more.

  Maybe he was the one who stopped being careful. All he knew was that one day they had decided that Michal Piotrowski was going to die. And that he would come to wish, time and time again, that they had succeeded.

  Piotrowski told William all of that, on that warm summer’s day in Warsaw in the echoing marble room in the building they called a palace. They’d gone off into an empty side lobby, and when he’d finished his story he’d looked William straight in the eye with a sorrowful, envious look.

  ‘I will never forget that sound.’

  His eyes darted around, from the empty turnstiles to the closed café, refusing to cry, as if it was still shameful to do so, fifteen years after it had all taken place.

  ‘Watching films teaches you funny things,’ he said. ‘You learn what a car blowing up is supposed to sound like–or you think you do–big and full of flames and a thundering bass. And then you expect it to be like that in real life as well.’ A pause. ‘All you hear is a muffled, contained bang. Hardly anything. Then the sound of glass hitting the ground.’ He cleared his throat. And then: ‘With that noise, I lost my wife.’

  ‘I don’t want to sound disrespectful,’ William said eventually. ‘I really am very sorry to hear about everything you’ve been through. But where do I come into this?’

  Piotrowski didn’t move, almost as though he hadn’t heard the question, and just kept talking from where he’d left off.

  ‘It was one of those things that aren’t supposed to happen. No one had any reason to think that it wouldn’t be me sitting there. The car was mine. Gabriela never touched it–she walked to work, walked home, walked everywhere. Rain, snow, storms, nothing stopped her.’ He paused again. ‘But the doctors had told her she wasn’t ready for that yet.’

  He lifted his face towards William again, and for a second, he was struck by the sensation that Piotrowski had orchestrated the whole conversation before it had even started.

  ‘Ready after what?’ he said.

  That was the right line.

  ‘After the caesarean.’

  There were two long seconds of silence while Piotrowski waited for William to understand the implication of what he’d just said. And when they had passed, and the blow arrived, Piotrowski didn’t even fall. Two steps backwards to absorb the kinetic energy, and he was left standing there, his jaw aching and his eyes glowing with hurt, and all the time William contemplating whether to hit him one more time.

  ‘You don’t touch my daughter,’ he said in a bottomless, infinite voice, full of hate and fear and guilt all at once. ‘And you don’t contact me, or my family, again.’

  With those words, William Sandberg turned up the stairs and left the conference.

  ‘I didn’t know they had a child,’ said Rebecca. Her eyes glittered, reflecting the light of the screens around them. ‘What I did know was that Gabriela was left in a coma. She was like that for two years, and throughout that time, Michal was at her side, convinced that she was still alive in there. And time after time, he promised her that he wouldn’t give up until he’d found a way to hear her thoughts.’

  She made a gesture towards the room around them. In the end he’d succeeded, but almost twenty years too late.

  ‘He never stopped thinking it was his fault. That’s why we couldn’t be seen together, so that what had happened to her couldn’t happen to me.’ She made eye contact with William again. ‘I still don’t understand why you hate him so much,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t hate him. I just want never to see him again.’

  She stared at him. And why would that be?

  ‘He invited me for one simple reason,’ he said. ‘So that he could meet his daughter.’

  It took a second for her to understand.

  ‘His daughter…?’

  ‘All we were told by the adoption agency was that Sara’s biological mother had died.’

  They sat in silence for a long time.

  ‘He’s done this to me,’ William said. ‘For some reason, he’s put me through all of this.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Because I didn’t let him meet her?’ William shrugged.

  ‘Michal didn’t believe in revenge.’

  ‘He didn’t believe in politics either,’ William said coldly. ‘That didn’t stop him devoting twenty years of his life to it.’

  Rebecca gave him a long, blank look. ‘Maybe I made a mistake trying to help you,’ she said, and then stood up and turned around, walked past all the flickering screens, and continued out through the glass door, gradually disappearing beyond the frosted panes.

  ‘I was the one who insisted that we should tell her,’ Christina said, without looking up. Tetrapak was sitting on the other side of the room, in silence, not knowing what to say. ‘Not who her biological father was, we never dared to do that, just that we weren’t her birth parents. That she was adopted and that her biological parents were from Poland. And we thought that would be that.’

  It sounded like a good idea at the time, she thought to herself.

  ‘We didn’t do it for her sake. It was for ours. To avoid constantly worrying about him turning up again, telling her before we’d had the chance, without us having any control.’ She paused. ‘And she was fifteen. She was old enough to know.’

  The last part came in a thin voice, almost like a plea, as though Tetrapak was in a position to change things by giving his approval.

  ‘What is it on there?’ she asked him after some time.

  It took a couple of seconds for him to work out what she was talking about.

  ‘The CD?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  He stood up, walked over to the bookcase that ran along one of the walls, took down his piles of newspapers and documents and placed them tenderly to one side. Under the piles was a stereo system made up of separates, black boxes stacked on top of each other, with rows of worn, touch-sensitive buttons that had once been cutting-edge design. When the CD tray squealed out it was like a desperate plea from a piece of kit that had long since discharged its duties and just wanted a dignified death.

  Strandell put his hand out towards Christina, took her CD, put it in the tray and pressed play.

  Piano.

  First, a single quiet triad, a pause, then another. From there, it gradually grew into a piece of music. It started falteringly, slowly, then grew lighter, almost as though new fingers were awakening one by one, reaching out from a lonely hand. It seemed to Christina as if the concert was taking place there and then, right in the room, as though the music had forced its way in from an alternate reality, like an overlaid audio track that had inadvertently leaked into her life and made her realise that everything around her was no more than fiction.

  Eventually Strandell turned towards the stereo and switched it off. The silence was shattering.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked.

  ‘Chopin.’

  ‘There must be something else?’

  He shook his head with a calm so absolute that she knew that her next question had actually already been answered.

  ‘And what was on yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Exactly the same thing. Almost an hour of piano music
. Frederic Chopin. That was it.’

  Out of nowhere, she felt exhaustion washing over her. She had been so convinced that the CD was going to give them something new–maybe not an answer but a nudge in the right direction–and now there she was, at a dead end. It didn’t make sense. It had to mean something more.

  ‘Why would Michal Piotrowski send it to you?’ she said. ‘And to Professor Eriksen, and to my husband? What do you have in common?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ was his response.

  ‘He must have said something at the conference, talked to you about something specific? There must have been a reason he chose you all?’

  ‘Just to complicate things,’ said Strandell, ‘we have no way of knowing whether we were the only ones he chose. There might be other discs out there.’

  Christina stared at him. That was a door she didn’t even want to open. ‘There must be something more,’ she said. ‘Something hidden, you haven’t found, something we don’t hear when it’s playing, something… that can cause a power cut just by being put in a computer.’

  She could hear the pleading in her own voice again. How could her daughter have made all this happen, just with a single CD of piano music? And why was it her CD that had made the power go, and not Tetrapak’s, not Eriksen’s?

  Strandell listened to her questions.

  ‘I’ve only got the one theory,’ he said. ‘And I’m afraid it doesn’t hold up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You found the CD in Eriksen’s car. Is that right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And I used this. I call it my cup-bearer.’ A self-deprecating smile as he put his hand on a desktop computer, hidden away in one corner of the room, light grey and heavy and covered by as much paper as everything else. ‘I know. Call me paranoid. But I would never open a completely unknown CD on a computer that hasn’t been suitably protected.’

  The cup-bearer, he explained, was a retired PC with a single task. It had the first taste of all the material he came across, everything from thumb drives to CDs to files he downloaded from the internet. Everything was tested in a closed environment, with no links whatsoever to other computers, and if it turned out that the material did contain viruses or some other kind of malicious code, then it would stay there and not spread to other machines.