The Mazovia Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

cairn. She knows that the secret of Stanislaw’s life and of his death lie under that small pile of rocks, but before she begins to dismantle it to see what is underneath, she feels a pressure building in her head, a strangely intense pressure which, she fears as she sleeps and dreams this dream, might cause her head to explode. She links her hands over her head, pressing hard against the skull and squeezing her eyes shut, and she feels the cool strands of her hair against her ungloved palms. And in the dream she thinks: I already know what this is about. I have always known what this is about.
    When she woke up she was shivering, badly chilled by the sweat cooling on her skin. Even the extra blanket she pulled over herself before going back to sleep had not taken away that chill when morning came.

Chapter 3
    I n the end, it was the beginning that was important. And the beginning for Francis Delaney came on a damp February day in Montreal in the form of an unexpected telephone call from Natalia Janovski. It would be fair to say that a call from Natalia Janovski was among the last things he was expecting at that stage of his life. Not that there had been no connection between them in the past. His unease when she called was in the forced recollection that there had been any connection between them in the first place, and that he had been the one to seek it.
    Delaney leaned back in his swivel chair after he hung up the telephone and put his feet up on the giant uncluttered desk where he had been doing far too little real work of late. He looked out through the sheet of plate glass that was all that separated him from the ice fog that had covered Montreal for the past several days. Normally, the view from the apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of the stark highrise where he made his home and his office would have been spectacular: sweeping from the slope near McGill University south to the St. Lawrence River and across flat Quebec farmland almost, it seemed, to the U.S. border. Today there was no such view to distract him.
    More than two years after he had made what for him was an astonishingly uncharacteristic move to seek Natalia Janovski’s professional services, she was for some reason now telephoning him. Delaney still felt that his decision to indulge ever so briefly in what Natalia had insisted then on calling an “exploration” of his troubled sleep and his intense, chaotic dreams was simply a bit of mid-life foolishness, best forgotten. But now, as he sat thinking about her telephone call, all of the feelings from that time came flooding back.
    The truth of the matter was that Delaney still felt embarrassed by his decision to cast aside for a time the public persona of no-nonsense investigative journalist and seek the services of a psychologist, and a Jungian at that.
    Something urgent to discuss, Natalia had said, in the ever so slight accent of a daughter of European immigrants. Nothing whatever to do with their previous professional relationship. Could they perhaps meet soon? Her reticence reminded him a little of how he had sounded when he first called her. Wondering if he might come in to see her, to talk over a few things. Aware of her reputation, highly recommended. Had always had an intellectual interest in Jung, in that sort of psychology. Could they perhaps meet soon?
    He had stopped short, at the time, of staking out the journalist’s best-loved escape route — that of making contact under the pretext of preparing an article, or seeking background information. The fact of the matter was that he had wanted to talk to her as a therapist and he didn’t try to conceal that from her in their first conversation.
    His choice of a Jungian had seemed natural, given the unlikely premise that he would seek out a psychologist at all. He had, even though he did not play this journalist’s card in his first call to Natalia, done some feature stories many years before, when he was still in