Free Death Can’t Take a Joke by Anya Lipska Page B

ability to make him feel like a wayward teenager.
    ‘You know that Marta and I got divorced,’ he said reasonably. The priest started to speak, but Janusz broke in. ‘Yes, Father, I know the Church doesn’t recognise divorce, but that’s the reality in our hearts.’
    Janusz had been just nineteen when he and Marta had wed. The ceremony took place in a fog of grief and
wodka,
just weeks after the death of his girlfriend Iza, and the marriage had proved to be a cataclysmic mistake. It had, however, produced one outcome for which he felt not a trace of regret. Years after they’d split up, during a single, ill-advised, night of reunion, they had created a child together.
    Things had improved between Janusz and his ex-wife over the last year or so, and although he liked to think the thaw in their relations was due to his efforts to be a better father to their fourteen-year-old son Bobek, he half suspected that it had more to do with Marta’s new boyfriend, six or seven years her junior, who she’d met at art evening classes. On the phone to Lublin, where she and the boy now lived, he had heard her laugh in a way she hadn’t done for years – and was glad of her newfound happiness.
    ‘As for Bobek, I’m a passably good father these days,’ he continued. ‘I flew over to see him only last month and we speak on the phone several times a week.’
    ‘I see,’ said the priest. ‘So, aside from your personal decision to ignore the
unbreakable sacrament
of your marriage, are there any other sins you wish to report?’
    Janusz thought for a moment. ‘Coveting another man’s wife,’ he said, visualising Kasia, blonde hair tumbling over naked shoulders.
    ‘Only coveting?’
    ‘It’s all I’ve had to make do with in the last few weeks.’
    ‘Anything else?’ Pietruski’s tone had become even more acid.
    Janusz hesitated. ‘Murderous impulses,’ he said, his voice a low rumble.
    ‘Against whom?’
    ‘Against the
skurwiele
who killed a friend of mine, Jim Fulford.’
    That made Father Pietruski pause and squint through the grille. ‘What a dreadful thing. I will pray for you – and your friend, God rest his soul.’
    Both men crossed themselves. ‘But you must leave it to the authorities to pursue the wrongdoers,’ said the priest. ‘You are not God: it is not given to you to look into a man’s soul, to decide how to punish the guilty.’
    Janusz’s grunt was non-committal.
    ‘We’ve spoken before about this anger of yours, my son. And how in the end these negative emotions can hurt only yourself.’
    ‘Yes, Father,’ said Janusz. But he was irritated by his confessor’s recent tendency to couch things this way. He came here for the implacable wisdom of a 2000-year-old Church, not a serving of New Age psychobabble.
    ‘Is that everything?’ asked Pietruski.
    Janusz opened his mouth, on the verge of admitting his plans to get inside Scarface’s apartment later that day, before remembering that it wasn’t the done thing to confess sins in advance. A wise man had once said:
Better to
beg for forgiveness than ask for permission
.
    ‘Yes, Father, that’s it.’
    Janusz lingered in St Stanislaus longer than was strictly necessary even to perform the elaborate menu of penances Father Pietruski had seen fit to give him. Wrapped in its cavernous quiet amid the smell of snuffed candles and incense, he allowed himself a few moments to grieve for Jim, but resisted the urge to pray for him. That might undermine his resolve.
Vengeance first, prayers later,
he told himself.
    Finding out Barbu Romescu’s address from Wiktor, his DVLA contact, had been a hundred quid well spent, but the next step – investigating his possible connection to Jim’s murder – would be harder to pull off. Janusz had spent several hours on his laptop and printer the previous night in preparation for the afternoon’s work, which he’d planned to coincide with the Romanian’s second weekly meeting at the Turkish shisha café.
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