The Mazovia Legacy by Michael E. Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

country, when that particular war was in an especially nasty phase. He hoped that Natalia’s uncle was not long dead when she found him.
    â€œAnd someone is following me now, I think,” she said suddenly. “Since he died. I don’t think anymore that I’m imagining this. I’m getting to be a little afraid. At first I thought I was just anxious. Grieving and displacing this onto something. But now I really do think someone is following me. Or maybe I need a therapist.” She smiled a little.
    â€œLook,” Delaney said. “I really hate to stay with the obvious here, but it’s the way to start. Why would anyone want to kill your uncle? Why would anyone be following you?”
    â€œI just don’t know.”
    â€œHow long have you thought someone was following you?”
    â€œSince a short time after Stanislaw died. I started to see a couple of men regularly. I thought I started to see them in places I went. On my street, near my office. I don’t think I imagine such things.”
    â€œHave they approached you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou think they are connected with your uncle in some way?”
    â€œPossibly. I really couldn’t say at this point. I don’t know.”
    â€œDid your uncle ever say people were following him?”
    â€œNo. But he wasn’t the sort of man who would say these things even if they were true. I have no idea, really, what his thoughts were. I’ve realized that since he died.”
    â€œWell, let’s try this then,” Delaney said. “What’s the most interesting thing about your uncle? What would reporters want to write about if they met him?”
    â€œSo you are going to help me?” Natalia asked.
    â€œApparently. For now.”
    *
    She began to tell him things, much as they came into her mind. Delaney listened, as he had listened to so many hundreds of people before, and helped her along with questions and suggestions and requests for clarification. It was an interview, but she did not seem to mind being interviewed. He did not take notes, and she didn’t seem to mind that either.
    The story she told was, in some ways, not extraordinary. Young Polish man, Jesuit trained, then Polish Air Force officer, about twenty-six when the Nazis invaded. Father a professor at the University of Krakow, mother a musician. Both killed. But not until after young Stanislaw had left with the first wave of refugees to Romania. Then into France, then England and distinguished service with the Mazovia Squadron: Polish aces flying Wellingtons out of Scotland. But as always in such stories there was also an angle, the lead for a possible good feature item. Not that a feature lead was necessarily a clue to a possible murder, but Delaney knew that the unusual in a life often led to the even more unusual, often years later. He had untangled too many complicated stories by following up on the smallest of oddities to think otherwise.
    In this case, Natalia provided two elements that an alert reporter would underline in a notebook. Young Flight Lieutenant Stanislaw Janovski had been aide-de-camp, or one of several, to the Polish president after the headlong rush by citizens, soldiers, and senior officials out of Poland to Romania in September 1939. Possibly interesting. And he had been assigned by the Polish government-inexile, before being allowed to throw himself into the air war over Europe, to travel with some Polish officials to Canada to accompany the famous shipment of national treasures that were to be placed there for safekeeping. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of artworks, jewels, ancient armour and weapons, rare books, manuscripts, and tapestries hurriedly loaded into crates as the Nazis attacked and then onto trucks for the escape. All later to go by sea to Canada. Another possibly interesting angle in the old man’s life, Delaney thought.
    After the war, however, there seemed nothing out of the