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  ALSO BY ZYGMUNT MIŁOSZEWSKI

  Rage

  Entanglement

  A Grain of Truth

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Zygmunt Miłoszewski

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Bezcenny by Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal in Poland in 2013. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941434

  ISBN-10: 1503941434

  Cover design by David Drummond

  For Marta

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE THE BLIZZARD

  Christmas Day, 1944

  May 1, 1946

  PART TWO THE YOUNG MAN

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  PART THREE THE COLLECTION

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  PART FOUR THE SECRET

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART FIVE BAD SEEDS

  The Hotel at Kalatówki

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

  THE CHESHIRE YOUNG MAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PART ONE

  THE BLIZZARD

  Christmas Day, 1944

  Snow. Nothing but snow. No enchanting snowflakes softly swirling. No spring flurries falling damp and heavy, then melting on the warm grass. It was the worst snow known to the Tatra Mountains—microscopic crystals of ice carried on a blustery wind, striking from all directions, slashing his exposed skin, getting in his clothes, blowing into his face, hindering his breathing. This snow wasn’t falling—it was just there, everywhere, warping his sense of reality and making it impossible to find his bearings. His nocturnal hike had turned into the nasty feeling of drowning in a blizzard.

  The man was sure he’d been steadily going uphill, each step taking him closer to the ridge of the Western Tatras. He kept telling himself the bad weather was his ally because it would let him slip past the German patrols across the border to the Slovak side. Then he’d slide into the valley, leaving the blizzard behind, take refuge among the spruce trees to rest awhile, and find proper shelter before dawn.

  He could feel himself getting weaker, but duty pushed him onward. Not just duty, but also fear. By dawn, at the latest, everyone would know that one of the hotel staff was missing, then link it up with the night’s events and send guards out after him. Crossing to the Slovak side and losing his pursuers was his only chance of saving his skin and completing his mission.

  “You’re our only hope,” he’d been told before setting off. The thought flooded him with such a strong wave of patriotic elation that for a moment it drove the biting cold from his bones. He could already see the photos: Churchill gazing with concern at the stump of his amputated frostbitten finger (he was ready to make that sort of sacrifice), asking quietly if that was when he had lost it; General Komorowski looking solemn and formal as he pinned the Virtuti Militari to his chest, though a smile would creep under his mustache and he’d give him a sly wink to let him know that no medal could possibly reflect what he had done for his country. If God really did exist, he must allow him to reach the Slovak forest. Right now he was too important to the fate of the world—he mustn’t fail.

  The wayfarer, who believed he was climbing uphill, was barely twenty-one years old, which might have explained his patriotic elation. His name was Roman Kłosowicz. He was originally from the city of Poznań, and five years ago the news that war had been declared had reached him during a mountaineering course on the eastern wall of Mount Kościelec. He would have gone home to Poznań, but his aunt and uncle who had raised him had sent a telegram telling him to stay put, in the belief that the mountain resort of Zakopane close to Poland’s southern border would be a safer place than central Poland, which every German soldier was bound to march across on their journey east.

  His aunt and uncle were partly right. The Germans took Zakopane at lightning speed, filled the mountain hostels with border guards, and hung a swastika on the bare face of Mount Mnich; they kept the population in an iron grip to stop anyone from getting foolish ideas. Some of the local people disliked the Nazis, while others welcomed them; Roman simply kept his head down, earning money as a waiter, though he sometimes did his bit for the resistance too.

  Poland had, in its habitual way, once again ceased to exist. The western part of the country, including Poznań, had been annexed by the Reich, the eastern borderlands had been taken by the Soviets, and the rest of occupied Poland, including Warsaw and Kraków, had been made into a strange creature called the General Government. Its governor-general was Hans Frank, doctor of law and Hitler’s darling, who liked to call himself the king of Poland; while competently carrying out his mission to apply the Final Solution to the Jewish question, he was efficiently addressing the Polish question too, turning the entire nation into a gang of mindless slaves.

  As befitted the king of Poland, Hans Frank usually ruled from the Royal Castle in Kraków, but the moment he set eyes on Zakopane, the resort at the foot of the mountains that reminded him of his beloved Bavarian Schliersee, he instantly felt at home. He soon had the grandest of the Tatra hotels—known as Kalatówki and situated on its own, three miles south of the resort—renamed Berghaus Krakau. He staffed it with SS men and had it furnished as a luxury residence where he spent almost every weekend. He would sit on the terrace, gazing at Kasprowy Peak and drinking his favorite hellishly strong tea with a dash of milk, served to him by Roman Kłosowicz.

  Roman spent Christmas Day 1944 going between the kitchen and apartment 17 on the second floor. Nobody was partying or celebrating; most unusually, there weren’t any floozies here either. The apartment’s Nazi residents could feel the Red Army soldiers closing in. Now stationed only dozens of miles from Kraków, seventy miles to the north of here, the Soviet troops were evidently gearing up for their next attack. Hans Frank and his men were too preoccupied to take notice of a nosy waiter in their midst.

  At two a.m. Roman was nervously dithering in his little attic room, unable to decide whether to go and see Aniela.

  At two fifteen he made a decision. The country was occupied, nobody knew what fate would bring next, so he’d go and surprise her, and that was how he’d explain himself—he’d say the country was occupied, and so on. Just then the door opened, and there stood a handsome SS man he knew only by sight, one of Hans Frank’s chief Praetorians.

  It crossed his mind that even if he’d gone to Aniela’s room earlier, they’d have been sure to find him anyway, but at least he wouldn’t have had to die a virgin.

  “Listen carefully. I’m not going to say this twice,” said the SS man in fluent Polish, handing him a metal object. “You’re to leave immediately and escape across the border to Slovakia with this—the local people can’t be trusted. Find a place to hide—the war’ll be over in a couple of months. I’ve no idea what’ll happen then, but as soon as it’s over,
you must deliver this to Karol Estreicher, who’s with the Polish government-in-exile in London. Repeat.”

  “Karol Esterhazy.”

  “Estreicher. Repeat.”

  “Estreicher.”

  “Good. Now get out of here. Dress warmly—the weather’s turning bad.”

  “But . . .”

  “Get going!”

  Roman was examining the object, which looked like an ordinary metal thermos flask, when the SS man stuck his head around the door again.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re holding the greatest secret of the entire war. So don’t let me down, boy. You’re our only hope. Now get the hell out of here.”

  He dressed and went out into the night, feeling like a hero.

  By three a.m. there was a terrific wind, but the snow had only just started; for a while he could still see the light of the intermediate stop on the cableway to the top of Kasprowy. Its peak was already in the grip of the blizzard, which was sweeping down into the valley with the force of an avalanche.

  At four the snowstorm hit the valley. The first blast of snow knocked him off his feet, and from then on he felt like a piece of meat thrown into a blender with a handful of snow and ice.

  At five he had his first thought of death: not as inevitable, but as the cruel irony of fate—what a joke, to be finished off by the Tatra weather at a time like this. He began thinking about Aniela, to stop himself from wondering how many of his fingers they’d have to amputate. And he regretted being such a goddamn city boy from a good home, hopeless at making out with a girl. Any highlander would have had her long ago, but for a year he’d been ingratiating himself, talking to her, paying her compliments and stroking her braids. And now he still might end up dying a virgin. Great.

  At five thirty he decided to determine his position with the help of simple mathematics. In summer the journey from Kalatówki to the border took about two hours, if the going was good. In winter it depended on the snow, but without ski skins, even in good weather you had to assume three or four. He wasn’t sure if he was going in the right direction—all he knew was that he seemed to be going uphill. The hike was bound to take him six or seven hours—which meant he wasn’t even halfway there yet. So maybe he could allow himself a few minutes’ rest.

  No decision had brought Roman such relief for a long time. He took another three arduous steps in the powdery, knee-high snow and stopped, breathing heavily. He bent over, resting his hands on his knees, and pulled the scarf from his face to spit and take in a breath. That was a mistake. The blizzard struck him in the face, filling his mouth with ice crystals, and soon he started to choke as if drowning. Once the fit was over, he burst into hysterical laughter. It was crazy to think he might drown in a snowstorm. He covered his face again as he tried to calm his breathing and slow his pulse. Then he panicked.

  While he’d been walking, he’d puffed and panted unbearably, shivering with cold and exhaustion, but the effort had kept his body warm. Within a minute of stopping, he felt naked. The first gust of wind was enough to blow out all the heat from under his fur jacket and flannel shirt; the second changed the layer of sweat into a painful, ice-cold compress. Roman began to tremble as if having an epileptic fit, partly from cold, partly from fear. He didn’t know where he was, nor where he was going. He didn’t have the strength to keep walking, but stopping meant certain death.

  He moved onward.

  At six he stopped caring if he was going uphill or not. He was only moving to stop himself from dying of cold—nothing else mattered. The will to survive had stifled all other emotions, especially patriotic elation. Besides, he thought, what does it matter which nation we’re from or what language we speak? Either I’ll live, hug my future wife, and rock my future child on a tree swing in the backyard—or I won’t.

  Then he burst into tears, because he had lost all hope of ever having a wife, children, or a tree swing. Bent forward, he dragged himself along, wading through the snow like a boat pushing its way through broken ice floes. Over and over, he played back the scene from two days ago, when he and Aniela had been sitting in the silent, empty café. They had chatted the night away and there was no longer any point in going to bed, as they’d have to show up in the kitchen to start preparing for breakfast in an hour. Earlier that night, he’d blown out the candle so they could admire the sky, densely sprinkled with stars and the black silhouette of the mountains. Finally the sky had cleared a bit, revealing a very thin border between it and the mountains, a shining red line. As they watched this light show, she touched his hand—all he had to do was take hold of it, lead her upstairs, and make love to her, allowing the glow of dawn to pick their bodies out of the darkness. But instead he had pulled his nervous, trembling hand away in embarrassment. His body was quivering, radiating his deep fear of intimacy.

  And now he was going to croak in a snowdrift as a virgin. Great.

  Although Roman believed he was wandering in the blizzard somewhere high in the mountains, in fact he was going around in circles quite near Kalatówki; he was only a few hundred yards from the place where he had served Hans Frank his tea, strong as sin with a dash of milk, and where he had been entrusted with the key to the Second World War’s greatest secret. He thought he was going uphill, because plowing his way through the deep snow during a blizzard was as tough and exhausting as climbing a vertical wall. But in reality he was going along the flat valley floor, sometimes even downhill. His personal tragedy of a warrior dying of exhaustion in the fight for his country’s liberty was being played out on the small stage in a patch of forest between Kalatówki and Kondratowa Vale.

  At seven, somewhere above the black-and-gray clouds, the dawn began to break, though it was still half an hour to sunrise. Only two days earlier at this time, Roman had been as close to love as he now was to death.

  He let out a scream as his right leg broke through a cornice of snow and sank into a void, dragging his body after it. He rolled down a short, steep slope and came to a stop in a snowdrift. The fall, the surge of fear, and the ensuing shot of adrenaline caused his exhaustion to recede, and, for the first time in hours, he was able to think clearly—enough to know that he couldn’t remain in the snowdrift. He got up, brushed himself off, leaned against a tree to keep his nausea in check, and waited for his heart to calm a bit and for the roaring noise in his ears to stop. He knew if he lost consciousness, that would be the end.

  Although his pulse slowed, the roaring sound wouldn’t stop. He felt a stab of panic before realizing that the noise wasn’t coming from inside his head at all; it was coming from somewhere outside, loud enough to be heard over his pounding heart and the howling of the wind. He moved in the direction he thought the sound was coming from, leaning against the trees that grew densely here to keep his balance. A few paces on, he emerged into a small clearing.

  He recognized the spot. It was the source of the Bystra brook, where an underground stream gushes out of the earth and flows down the Bystra Valley to Zakopane. In summer it was an idyllic spot, always cool, with a subtle mist that rays of sunlight filtering through the spruce trees changed into a rainbow. Now the source was just a black hole surrounded by snow and great lobes of ice. But somewhere under the ice and stones, the water was still roaring.

  That was when Roman realized that he was no more than half a mile from Kalatówki. His hours of hiking had all been in vain.

  He had no idea what to do next. Returning to Hans Frank’s residence meant certain death. And so did trying to get through to the town. Hiking into the mountains was even more treacherous.

  He glanced at the pitch-black mouth of the cave and thought, Why not? He had never explored the caves, but he remembered that they were safer in winter, because it was dry in there. Corridors. Chambers. Tight squeezes. Submerged passages. A constant temperature. He had nothing to lose.

  He entered the cave on all fours, sliding over the tongues of ice, as if voluntarily sacrificing himself to a mythical monster. At one point his hand slipped
and he hit his mouth against the ice, felt the pain of his front tooth breaking and recognized the metallic taste of blood. He spat and moved onward into total darkness. A few yards ahead, the ice came to an end, and he had to drop flat to crawl over limestone rocks. The whole time he was breathing heavily, his heart thumping like mad, his body shivering. He suddenly panicked and pushed forward in search of that elusive constant temperature. He crawled rapidly, tearing his gloves and pants, hurting his body against the rocks. He waded deep inside the cave, as he sniveled and repeated, “No, please, no.” He tried to light his way with a gasoline lighter, but the water pouring from all directions doused the flame.

  Then in his panic he decided there was no such thing as a constant temperature and resolved to turn back. He made a few quick, desperate movements, cutting his head in the process, knocking out his chipped tooth. All he could think was that anything was better than this icy blackness, and that he must go back to Kalatówki, that the working day hadn’t started yet—he could simply turn up in the kitchen as if nothing had happened.

  He just needed to hide the package.

  He brought the thermos flask out from under his jacket. He hadn’t even looked inside it—he was the honest sort of conspirator who didn’t ask questions.

  He gave the flask a shake. Something rattled inside.

  His struggle between curiosity and sense of duty didn’t last long. With trembling hands he unscrewed the flask and removed what felt like a smooth, sculpted piece of marble.

  He took out his lighter and flicked it a dozen times before striking a feeble spark. The damp wick glowed and finally flared up. Roman brought the stone close to the small flame; it turned out to be a piece of polished amber, carved in the shape of a spindle. In the flickering flame, the pine resin petrified millions of years ago glowed red and orange. When a familiar shape flashed in the stone, he shuddered, sure he was seeing things. But no—in the clear amber, some darker red-and-brown patches really did form a swastika.