The Polish Connection

by Philip Chwistek

Paulo promised to deliver me to San Salvatore. It’s a sleepy village on the western coast of Sardinia, where, at the time, Max Henderson was starring in yet another overseas motion picture production. Unlike the other spaghetti westerns he had been relegated to since the hashish laden pastry parties at L'Hôtel du Scribe that led to his informal blacklisting, this film was meant to finally buoy up the floundering career of this once American heartthrob. My editor sent me to Sardinia to write an exclusive profile.

            The first leg of my trip, on the SS Raffaello, took me from New York to Genoa. It was excessively luxurious and uninteresting. The second leg of the trip, which took place on a ferry, took me from Genoa to Porto Torres, on the north side of the Sardinian coast. It is a town less than one-hundred and fifty kilometers from Boniface, in Corsica, and on a typical day, one can stand atop a limestone cliff and look across the strait, across turquoise water and little white sailboats to the pearly beaches and craggy mountains of Napoleon’s birthplace.

My primary occupation on the ferry was masking a monstrous bout of seasickness while chatting with a smart young man who revealed himself to be a clerk at the American embassy in Rome. He was heading to Sardinia on holiday.

            Given his occupation, I asked what he thought of the recent headlines. The Guatemalan Ambassador to Belgium had just been implicated in a smuggling scheme between Marseille and Beirut, undoubtedly aided by the Corsican mafia. When I asked why nothing was done about this open secret, how Turkish poppy seemed to be shipped around the Mediterranean like pomegranates, the young man simply shrugged and explained that it was not unlikely for the ringleaders to have once been leaders of the French resistance, and that no one had the political will to drag national heroes in handcuffs through a sea of cameras.

After disembarking the ferry, the passengers quickly dispersed into cars and buses and my companion from the embassy disappeared into a red Citroën, leaving me alone at the mouth of the pier. Signor Francesco Meloni, who the magazine arranged as my fixer, was nowhere to be found. Nor could I find the business card that had the address of his bureau.

After fifteen minutes, with a sigh, I picked up my suitcase and my typewriter and stumbled through narrow sidewalks and passed dozens of eggshell-colored homes, squinting at little signs nailed to buildings. Eventually I lost hope and began asking old women on the street if they could point me towards Signor Meloni. They waved their hands and sometimes guided me in person, speaking to me in Sardinian or Italian or hell, maybe even Esperanto, and led me to a butcher, a cobbler, and twice to a wrinkly man in a newsboy cap.

Finally, I landed on a quiet street under a narrow archway. I knocked. Nothing stirred inside. I knocked again and then pounded on the door.

“Signor Kirby?”

A bald man with fat fingers and a gold chain around his neck emerged from the trattoria next door. After some curt introductions, he took my suitcase and invited me to join him for dinner.

“It’s a small town,” he explained. “I knew you’d find your way.”

  At the table was another bald man, who Meloni introduced to me as Capitano Paulo. He was a tall, broad-shouldered gent around forty, with a full red beard and sad eyes. A couple empty dishes lay on the table. I felt like I was interrupting.

“We work together sometimes,” explained Meloni. “Right now, business is very good, with all you Americans coming to make cinema. We can barely keep up.”

“I’m not a captain, just a pilot, by the way,” said Paulo in an accent clearly cultivated in Southern England. Seeing the confusion on my face, he quickly explained that he had grown up in Leeds, though he was born in Poland. As a boy, his father had been part of the Royal Air Force on behalf of the Polish government-in-exile and his family had stayed in the United Kingdom after the war. “You can call me Paul, Paulo, Paweł, whatever you’d prefer.”

“Paweł,” I exclaimed, “holy shit.” I explained that my mother was Polish and although my Polish was middling at best, I had grown up eating barszcz and uszka every Christmas. “They aren’t kidding when they say you can find a Pole anywhere. What brought you to Sardinia?”

“I learned winter was a choice.”

We clinked glasses and Meloni ordered more wine and food for the table. I think I must have been dearly dehydrated because one glass of wine hit me like a Soviet heavyweight. Suddenly, I felt quite friendly. Meloni told Paweł that I was a famous American journalist. He told him I had once interviewed Sinatra.

“Sinatra.” Paweł whistled.

“It was really only a couple questions outside a Chinese restaurant,” I admitted.

It took a while for the food to arrive. That meant that we kept on drinking, and at some point, Paweł had a guitar in his lap. I asked him if he knew any Elvis. This was a bad habit of mine that developed in college.

“Naturally.”

And there I was, on the top of my seat, belting out Devil in Disguise to much fanfare. They brought out a shy girl with an accordion, and we followed that one up with Return to Sender. By the time I was on Suspicious Minds, we had a whole street band with trumpets and trombones and percussion assembled outside and the whole place up on its feet.

***

            The three of us stood outside the closed trattoria, more than a bit wobbly. Before disappearing into his office, Meloni told me our dinner was paid for. I wasn’t sure if I ever ate.

            “I must take you to San Salvatore myself,” hiccupped Paweł.

I explained that I had tickets for the bus the next morning and that I couldn’t possibly intrude.

“Kurwa,” said Paweł, “just accept the offer and let’s call it a night. I really need to piss.”

It was hard to argue with that and frankly, the thought of some unscripted adventure had me as giddy as a schoolboy. We agreed that Paweł would come pick me up from my hotel the next morning. I went to sleep looking forward to the third leg of my journey to San Salvatore, a private spontaneous flight.

***

“You told me you were a pilot.”

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and rather than leading me to a small tucked away airstrip, where we might have taken off in a stylish two-door plane with a bottle of wine, Paweł had taken me to the marina where it smelled like dead fish.

“A maritime pilot,” Paweł said apologetically. “I help the cargo ships get through the strait.” He slapped the hull of a boat, nearly sixty feet long. The word “PILOTA” was painted on the hull. It looked suitable enough.

“Oh no, not this one,” he said. “That’s the company’s.” Paweł hopped onto the boat docked next to it. It was half the size, entirely wooden, and looked like it had barely survived Dunkirk.

  “This is my private one. She’s not much but she’ll get us there.”

The wheelhouse of Paweł’s boat was split into two halves by a wooden divider. The front half contained the wheel and various nautical instruments. I tucked my luggage under the small table that filled the back half of the wheelhouse and took a seat. Nick knacks, postcards from around the Mediterranean, various currencies lay pinned up on the walls. Above Paweł’s head was a small Polish flag, with the eagle, mounted near the ceiling next to a metal cross. A photo of his wife and daughter was stuck with a piece of tape on the window.

We had made a good distance from the coast when Paweł pointed out a book on the table.

            “I’ve been studying,” he said; “quiz me.”

            The book was titled World Book of Facts. I begin to work through the earmarked pages, presenting questions about various world capitals, famous pirates, inventors. Finally, I got tired of it, and began to nibble on some cheese I had purchased on the island before our departure. Paweł declined to have some.

            “Why the sea?” I asked him. “Didn’t you take after your father?”

“Joseph Conrad was a bigger influence,” he answered. “My father died over the English channel.” He didn’t give me a chance to dig further. “Who are you going to interview on the set?”

“Max Henderson,” I said. “He’s been a bit of a loser these days, though years ago Vanity Fair crowned him the spiritual successor to James Dean.”

“I haven’t seen him in anything since Midnight Riviera.”

“He hasn’t been in anything worth watching.”

For another fifteen minutes we bobbed in this manner, making idle chat while the diesel engine chugged us forward.

“Look,” said Paweł.

The morning fog had cleared. A lighthouse jetted up from one of the promontories, capping a cliff of granite and limestone. Coves extended along the water as gulls swooped under sea arches.

I felt a light salty breeze brush my face, the same wind that, for centuries, had rustled the sails of Romans, Greeks, and Phoenicians sailing for commerce or for war. Paweł cut the engine and we stepped out onto the deck.

            “It’s sights like these that draw me to the water,” he said. “One day, once I’ve scrounged up enough, I want to sail around Africa with my daughter.”

            A voice emerged from the radio static in the wheelhouse and Paweł excused himself. He was in there for a good while, at first sounding angry, then interested, and finally relieved. He came out with a smirk on his face.

            “I’m being pulled in to help The Josephine,” he said. “A job from Francesco. I can take you to San Salvatore now, but if you’re willing, it’ll be a scenic route.”

            I told him I’d love to see a pilot in action.

            “In this case, I’m more of a postal service,” he said. “Just picking up a package.”

I was in no rush to get to San Salvatore. The interview was to take place the next day and I was on the open water, enjoying the Mediterranean sun and good company. A little thrill was good for a journalist.

            We went back inside the wheelhouse after Paweł restarted the engine. He consulted some maps, and within minutes, had us moving again. We anchored somewhere west of where we had spotted the lighthouse.

            We played a few hands of rummy.

            “Why can’t Meloni just pick it up at the harbor?” I asked. “Seems like a lot of trouble to come out here.”

            “The tariffs in Italy are usurious,” replied Paweł.

            “Oh, come on,” I said. “Meloni isn’t paying any tariffs, unless that means bribes.”

            “How do you know?”

            “I can sniff out the type.”

            “Maybe you’re right. Either way, it’s not our problem. But what is our problem is that they’re an hour late. I’m going to radio in again.”

***

The sun began to set. My watch read seven thirty. I began to get worried that I perhaps might have been kidnapped. An American journalist of my stature could probably make a good ransom. I wondered if Meloni or his colleagues on The Josephine would take a toe or a finger, and what my editor’s face would look like when he opened the envelope that inevitably contained my severed appendage.

            “It’s taking quite long,” I ventured at last. “Maybe it’d be best for me to get to San Salvatore, and you can follow up with them after.”

            “Please,” said Paweł. His foot was tapping nervously against the floor. “Just, just be quiet. We’re too far out anyway. They said they were stuck in customs.”

After another hour, off in the distance, I could see a strobing light. Paweł picked up two flashlights and waved them in some kind of signal. The ship inched closer to us. He gave me a look over and then handed me one.

“I think it’d be best if you were out of view. I’m supposed to be alone.”

“Where should I go, in that case, captain?”

Paweł fished for some keys in his pocket, “you can go into the storage closet.”

            I went outside with the key, fiddled with the lock in the dark, and opened the closet. It smelled of damp and rotten wood. Inside were a couple of lifejackets, a blue and white lifebuoy, and a half-finished bottle of vodka. I squatted down to next the liquor. I thought of opening it, but the cake of dust around it made it rather unappealing. Although it sounds quite ridiculous, I was comforted to be put into a closet like an old mop. It killed the ransom narrative in my mind.

            Outside, I heard Paweł restart the diesel engine. We slithered forward. The engine cut off again. An anchor dropped. Shouts, something in French or Italian. A rope ladder unfurled. And then grunts as I imagined Paweł tying some kind of tether to The Josephine.

            “This will take five minutes,” I heard Paweł whisper, just outside the door. And then I felt the ship bob as his weight shifted off the deck.

A faint echo of laughter.

            It began to feel very hot in the closet. I heard a faint buzzing, which I imagined to be the idling of The Joesphine. I imagined heat from it radiating off the vessel’s hull, as if we had tucked ourselves against the belly of some mythological monster. I unbuttoned my shirt. My skin grew itchy. Then the whole boat jolted. I managed to calm myself when I realized it had simply bounced off the larger vessel.

            I needed a drink. My hands fumbled in the dark. They only found the slickness of the lifebuoy. I turned on the flashlight and nearly screamed when I noticed a six-legged creature crawling over my arm. The flashlight fell into my lap and pointed upwards and blinking to adjust to the light I noticed a whole nest molded into the upper corner of the storage closet.

            A gunshot and then a clutter. I immediately turned off the flashlight. Feverish heat closed in on my chest. The buzzing grew louder.

Two more gunshots. These were closer than the first. A heavy crash into the water. My breathes grew ragged, and my hands covered my mouth as I realized I was whimpering.

I must have stayed in the closet for hours. I only came out once I saw light begin to creep under the door. Like a cat jolting out from a behind a closed cabinet, I exploded onto my feet and began to pull and strip my sweat soaked shirt, jacket, pants, and even my underwear, shaking them out in the wind, clearing them of any wasps that might have crawled into my clothing. Miraculously, there were none.

            The Josephine was gone. And so was Paweł. The only sign that anything had happened was a piece of rope that hung off the edge of the deck. I pulled it from the water only to discover frayed edges. The line must have been cut before The Josephine resumed it’s path.

I stood naked on the boat, steadying myself against the rail that ran around the perimeter. The sun rose above the water in a palette of rose, gold, and lavender. I squinted and discovered I was not far from the coast. The markings of a town were visible. Had they heard the gunshots as well?

I replaced my clothes with clean ones from my suitcase. The only thought in my mind was to get my feet on still soil. I turned on the diesel engine in the way that I had observed Paweł do so, and steered the boat towards land. I beached the boat in a cove and jumped into the water with my suitcase above my head. The water lapped up to my belly button.

A shepherd in an old truck picked me up alongside the road and dropped me off at the nearest town. There I managed to get ahold of the bus to take me San Salvatore.

Once I had checked into the one hotel in town and bathed it occurred to me that perhaps I should go to the police. What was I supposed to say? I, an American journalist, went onto a boat with another foreigner, and I was the only one to come back? Had I even seen Paweł’s body?

            There was a knock at the door and the lady who ran the hotel informed me there was a Signor Meloni on the phone. “Urgente.”

            “Signor Kirby, when did you hear last from Paulo?” I could hear the noise of the trattoria in the background. “I’m afraid he’s done something stupid.”

The events of the night before cemented in my brain.

“Hello?”

            I told him that Paweł had dropped me off in San Salvatore the night before and then went off to complete some task.

“The coastguard found his boat this morning,” said Meloni. “You wouldn’t know anything about it?”

            “Nothing at all,” I said.

            “If the polizia come by, Signor Kirby, you’re the first to call me, okay?”

            “Roger that.”

            “Ciao.”

San Salvatore was nothing more but a small village. A little beyond the town was the movie set, which looked like any other Western town you’d see in a Clint Eastwood or John Wayne movie, except you could see the cameras. Everyone stood around idly, fanning themselves or chatting and generally not working. One man, with thick frames and a pair of headphones around his neck, marched along the deck of the saloon, talking to himself.

I walked up to one of the pretty blonde production assistants in jeans and told her I was with the Hollywood Intelligencer to interview Max Henderson for his profile.

            “Oh,” she said, “he’s not feeling very well. You might have to wait a bit.” She shot a glance at the man, who I now recognized as Oscar Peters, the director. He was in the midst of some kind of tantric breathing exercise. Then he screamed and kicked the saloon doors off their hinges.

            “These fucking Hollywood junkies!”

“Actually, we’re all waiting for him. You might have a better shot of catching him tomorrow, after he’s had his medicine.” She leaned in closer, “it was supposed to come yesterday, but it wasn’t delivered.”