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

ordinary in Stanislaw Janovski’s story. Reasonably predictable émigré experience. Never returned to Poland after the Communists took over. Montreal to resettle. A bit of bush pilot work right after the war, and then a stab at running a small bookstore. Then a sort of career at Radio Canada International. Marriage, no children, life in a solid little house in a solid little neighbourhood. Then retirement and an even quieter life. He probably had enough excitement as a young man to last him a while, Delaney thought.
    The apartment was warm now, as the latemorning sun beat through the glass in the windows that were everywhere. Natalia did not seem tired out by her storytelling, nor by the long sit. Sessions like this would be her stock-in-trade.
    â€œHow did he get chosen to be one of the president’s aides-de-camp?” Delaney asked her.
    â€œI never really thought to ask him. A family connection, I suppose. His father, my grandfather, was a prominent academic. Stanislaw was in the Air Force as an officer. I suppose someone in the president’s entourage was given his name. They needed someone who could fly, I think my uncle said, in case they could get a plane in Romania.”
    â€œThe same would go, I guess, for his being chosen to travel to Canada with the art treasures. His connections.”
    â€œProbably,” she said.
    Delaney, as a reporter, knew more about the Polish art treasures story than Natalia was able to tell him that morning, except for the points where the story touched her uncle’s. He had heard nothing about it for years, of course, and he was still a boy when it all came to a head in the late 1950s. But it was the sort of story that the older editors at the Montreal Tribune would know and love, and they had talked about it occasionally when Delaney was a young newspaperman. They loved the cloak-anddagger elements in particular.
    Treasures being moved out of Ottawa in the dead of night, after the Communists took over in Poland and demanded that Canada send them back. Hiding places in convents and monasteries. Secret passwords. Disputes among custodians. Then the fiercely anti-Communist premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, sending his provincial police force to help agents of the government-in-exile hide the treasures somewhere else in the province. And Duplessis refusing for years to send them back. The Warsaw regime outraged and the Canadian government no longer willing, or no longer able, to step in against Quebec.
    Delaney himself had later been in the thick of Quebec political reporting in the seventies and eighties, and had had to learn all too much about the Duplessis era and the battles for constitutional turf that the man they called “ le chef ” had waged with the federal government. It would be natural for Duplessis to seize on the art treasures issue to make a stand against Ottawa when the federal government formally recognized the new Polish government after the war, and to vent his spleen at the Communists at the same time. Some of the details were hazy in Delaney’s mind, but he knew the outlines and they still intrigued him.
    â€œDid your uncle talk a lot about the art treasures story to you? Was he involved in the negotiations at the end to send them back?” Delaney asked.
    â€œHe would sometimes mention bits of that business, but never really in detail,” Natalia said. “I was just a baby when the things were eventually sent back, in 1959, or 1960, I think it was. And later I suppose I didn’t take enough of an interest. They were just war stories to me, really.”
    â€œBut war stories that had a chapter in Quebec with your uncle as a player,” Delaney said.
    â€œYes,” she said. “He was a man who would say a little bit once in a while about something like that, and then smile and stop, as if to tease people or maybe because he didn’t want to say more. Maybe both. He would always hint that he knew a