Where the Devil Can't Go

Where the Devil Can't Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Where the Devil Can't Go Read Online Free PDF
Author: Anya Lipska
weeks earlier hadn’t just been a one-off. He pushed his hands in his pockets and gazed up at the roofline.
    “Sure, why not. And tell Ray I’ve got a delivery of Wyborowa coming in next week if he’s interested.”
    What the hell. Like his mother used to say, he always ran to meet trouble halfway.
    An hour later, Janusz made his way north-eastwards along Essex Road, head down against a biting wind. He was heading for Pani Tosik’s restaurant to follow up the runaway waitress story Father Piotr had told him about. As one of the best-connected people in London’s Polonia , Janusz had picked up more than a few missing persons jobs over the years. His near-perfect English helped, even if his language primers – British war movies he’d watched as a kid, and later, Eighties US cop shows – had spiced his vocabulary with some colourful and outlandish phrases.
    This job sounded like all the rest: parents back home fretting because their daughter hadn’t phoned home for a few weeks. It was always a young girl, invariably ‘God-fearing and steady’ – he’d never once heard a runaway described as kaprysna – and the outcome was always the same, too. He’d find her living in sin with a boyfriend in some godforsaken bedsit. She’d cry a little, grieving her lost virginity, and after a few stern words, would promise to phone home to Mama.
    It occurred to him that this was pretty much how Kasia’s life in London had unfolded when she’d come over after her film degree. She told him she’d been a Goth back then – one of those kids who dressed like zombies and put metal bars through their tongues – but a respectable, educated girl all the same, with a job in a Polish patisserie in Kensington. She’d been learning English at evening classes with the aim of getting a job as a runner in the film business – she hoped to become a director one day. But then she’d met that big mouth Cockney idiota Steve. Reading between the lines, he’d persuaded her to chuck it all in and go to live with him – they would start their own business, he’d buy her a Super 8 camera so she could make her own films, blah blah. Worse still – because her family back home disapproved of the match, she had lost touch with them.
    Naturalnie , Steve’s big plans came to nothing, and Kasia progressed from working in a pub, to serving drinks in Soho clubs, and then to her current job as – laughable euphemism – an exotic dancer. Even a decade ago it would have been unthinkable to find a decent Polish girl doing such a job, Janusz reflected, but she said it paid her three times as much as bar work and it was true that her sketchy grasp of English limited her options.
    Restaurant Polka stood on the corner of an elegant Georgian terrace a few streets north of St Stan’s, its wide front window and green and white tiled façade revealing its original incarnation as the neighbourhood greengrocers. Now the windows were hung, somewhat incongruously, with ruched, plum-coloured silk curtains.
    The doorbell sounded a grating three-chime peal. The elderly lady who answered – about seventy, he estimated, maybe seventy-five – wore a ruffled cerise silk blouse, a similar shade to the curtains, and tinkled with gold. He would bet that the artful crown of permed blond hair was the work of Hair Fantastic, the local salon that doubled as operational HQ for North London’s fearsome Polish matriarchy.
    “ Dzien dobry , Pani Tosik,” said Janusz making an old-fashioned bow. He’d made a mental note to watch his manners, uncomfortably aware that the courtesy drummed into him by his parents had become coarsened over the years, first by life on a building site, and more recently by the uncouth behaviour his current line of business sometimes demanded.
    “Come in, darling, come in!” piped Pani Tosik. “How lovely to have a man visit! I knew your father in Gdansk, after the war – God rest his Soul.”
    She reached up to put her hands on his shoulders
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