Bad News

Vania began again on Wednesday. Bronco was also returning Wednesday morning. So on Monday and on Tuesday I had time to relax. The first of the free days before noon I drove for a second breakfast to my mother’s, who just happened to be free that day also. 

I feasted on the delicious pate made by my mother, smearing atop also a layer of revelational, as always, very spicy horseradish sauce, prepared with lemon juice, powdered sugar, a dash of salt and distributed crème, and also a specially prepared for meats cranberry sauce with an insignificant addition of quince. 

When I finished and was getting ready to add to my plate one of my favorite pastries that my mother made, a kind of quite soft ginger cake, layered always with two kinds of masses of two tastes, this time an almond mass and a coffee mass, my mother began her next blood-curdling story. She told of one Wojtek Dunin-Mirski. 

His family had a bit of land and my father before the war had with them some interests and relatively close contacts. As a child even a couple of times I went there. They had two sons. I remember that one was a lot older than me, and the second, in fact Wojtek, only older by five years. 

Towards the end of the war he even managed to catch on with the AK, and even with some partisan group, of which I was very jealous. 

So Wojtek had recently tried to escape to the West and now the poor guy sat somewhere in the northwestern part of the country and it was unknown for how many years he would be sentenced to prison. 

After hearing this information I lost my entire appetite. 

This way or that, I decided to meet and discuss this matter as quickly as possible with Leo. 

I knew that like every day, from five to seven he would hold court at the café. Until five there was a lot of time, so I also went to visit the Nowobogacky establishment. 

Anita was not there, the boss was alone. While talking to him I sadly felt that he no longer had that enthusiasm which he had at the beginning of our so fruitful for me endeavor. If in this matter something still really interested him, then it was only this, to prevent anyone else from acquiring this precious resource, because he already definitely had it in surplus. 

Of course, he pretended he wanted more, but I knew well that collaboration with him would not last longer than some two, three days, so I could count still on ninety nine, a hundred thirty five tops, thousand—and that was it. 

Simply followed a characteristic moment in capitalistic economics, when the supply exceeded the demand. This problem was very often discussed during Marxist political economics study, the compulsory and most important subject at all institutions of higher education. 

The exploitation however, without regard to anything, I decided to follow to the end, to the last piece, and give the unsold supply to Bronco, for him to try to liquidate himself. I owed to him all this money, a wildly excessive sum, which in the beginning I needed. 

Unfortunately, my horrible greed and gluttony made themselves known. 

Fifteen after five I was at the café with Leo. As an intelligent guy he oriented himself immediately as to why I was there and the topic of our meeting, so he said that this was not the time or the place for this kind of discussion and tomorrow at nine in the morning to be at his house.