The Mazovia Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

police, when she contacted them later to ask about such matters, had convenient and, on one level, perfectly sensible answers to such questions. They were even willing after the funeral to send two detectives out to her apartment to discuss her concerns — Detective Mario Tremblay and Detective Jean-François Létourneau of the Montreal Urban Community Police Department Homicide Unit. They wore identical clothes, bought, apparently, from identical suppliers of detectives’ suits, overcoats, and scarves. They were a team, their clothes and demeanour said, and this team had seen, madame, some very distressing things in this city over the years.
    Ah oui, c’est vrai, madame, la ville n’est pas comme autrefois, c’est maintenant exactement comme une ville américaine . But madame, they insisted, you must not jump to conclusions about your uncle’s unfortunate death. He was a good man, he lived a long and blameless life, and he slipped and fell one night while getting into his bath.
    Why, then, the blood? she wondered. The two detectives looked at each other sagely as they reassured her. Well, madame, it is something most people never see, blood. But we have seen many such cases and when people fall in the bathtub they often hit their heads as they fall and it is this blood that you saw in the water that night. And, they added, as they folded their notebooks and adjusted their splendid silk scarves, the coroner’s report and the autopsy report said that there was nothing at all louche, nothing unusual, nothing that was inconsistent with an unfortunate household accident. The old gentleman had indeed had some cuts and bruises on his head, but consistent with such a fall. And besides, madame, who would have wanted to kill Monsieur Janovski in any case?
    She watched them through the window as they carefully made their way down her slippery staircase and got into a shiny, oversized, unmarked car that even to her untrained eye was a ludicrously obvious police vehicle. They had looked expectantly around as they got into their car in the snowy street, perhaps behaviour learned from too many years of hoping to be photographed for the Montreal crime tabloids. But this case, they knew, would not be one to attract les journalistes.
    Natalia knew, however, as she watched them drive away that they were wrong. How can they ever know what happened to him that night? she thought. How can they know what madness may have resulted in a murderer entering his house?
    Other intuitions came to her as the days progressed. Nothing has been stolen, madame, you are quite sure? the police had asked. But then one night she sat bolt upright in bed, not long after the funeral, and thought: his address book. It was not beside the telephone where he always kept it. She had dressed and taken a taxi back to the dark, chilly, and too-empty house and searched madly through his papers and his clothes drawers, everywhere, until she was satisfied that it was gone.
    Perdu perhaps, madame, the police had said. Lost. Perhaps Monsieur Janovski was getting forgetful at his age.
    And then there was the phone message, which she listened to over and over again, so many times that she began to worry in the psychologist’s part of her brain that she was displaying compulsive behaviour, that the grief and anxiety were manifesting themselves as obsessional symptoms. But still she listened to it, again and again, even going to the trouble of buying another blank tape for her machine to avoid the risk of this one being erased by mistake.
    â€œAh, Natalia. Your famous answering machine,” Stanislaw’s voice said. “You know how much I despise these machines. But this time I will leave you a message. At last you will be happy.”
    How could I be happy, she thought as she listened yet again. How could I ever be happy now?
    â€œI am sorry you are still away.There is something very important I need to speak to you about when you