The Polish Chef

By Juan Moisés De La Serna

What I am going to write here is exactly as I remember things. The most incredible story that has happened to me, and I have spent over thirty years in the Gendarmerie Nationale (French police), mind. Some people might think that I am exaggerating, but in order not to miss out any details I have based my account on my notebook, which I always carry with me when I am participating in any official police investigation.

Although my current post at Interpol might seem important, especially after receiving two honorary decorations, the Medaille d'honneur de la Police Nationale (National Police Medal of Honour) and the Croix d'Honneur du Policier Européen (European Police Cross of Honour), despite that my beginnings were not entirely glorious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tektime
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9788835424437

Book preview

The

Polish

Chef

Juan Moisés de la Serna

Translated by Philip Walker

Editorial Tektime

2021

The Polish Chef

Written by Juan Moisés De la Serna

Translated by Philip Walker

1st Edition: May 2021

© Juan Moisés De la Serna, 2021

© Tektime Editions, 2021

All rights reserved

Distributed by Tektime

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Prologue

What I am going to write here is exactly as I remember things. The most incredible story that has happened to me, and I have spent over thirty years in the Gendarmerie Nationale (French police), mind. Some people might think that I am exaggerating, but in order not to miss out any details I have based my account on my notebook, which I always carry with me when I am participating in any official police investigation.

Although my current post at Interpol might seem important, especially after receiving two honorary decorations, the Médaille d’Honneur de la Police Nationale (National Police Medal of Honour) and the Croix d’Honneur du Policier Européen (European Police Cross of Honour), despite that my beginnings were not entirely glorious.

Dedicated to my parents

Content

Chapter 1: Memories

Chapter 2: The Flat

Chapter 3: The Hunt

Chapter 4: The Temple

Chapter 5: The Pope’s Visit

Chapter 1: Memories

Kraków

What I am going to write here is exactly as I remember things. The most incredible story that has happened to me, and I have spent over thirty years in the Gendarmerie Nationale (French police), mind. Some people might think that I am exaggerating, but in order not to miss out any details I have based my account on my notebook, which I always carry with me when I am participating in any official police investigation.

Although my current post at Interpol might seem important, especially after receiving two honorary decorations, the Médaille d’Honneur de la Police Nationale (National Police Medal of Honour) and the Croix d’Honneur du Policier Européen (European Police Cross of Honour), despite that my beginnings were not entirely glorious.

I was a student at the École Nationale de Police, one of the best, since at just eighteen years of age I had managed to pass both the physical tests and the entrance exam. Although the easiest thing for me was the foreign language exam.

When the examiner asked me in what language I wished to be assessed, I answered, You can ask me in English, Spanish or Italian. With a father who is a lecturer in medieval history at the Montaigne University of Bordeaux, passionate about Romance languages derived from Latin and especially interested in the Italo-Romanian and Iberian Romance branches, and a mother who works as an interpreter at the British Consulate in Bordeaux, you will understand that I am sufficiently prepared for a simple interview.

What about Arabic and German? asked the examiner with an obvious expression of surprise.

I know a little Arabic, but I find writing it difficult, and I have tried German, but the pronunciation is so harsh it grates my throat when I speak it.

But you know them? he asked again, surprised.

Well, only a few words, but they are not the ones I know the best, which is why I am putting myself forward in one of the other three languages.

*******

The reader will have to forgive me if sometimes I go round the houses or, as we say in France, tourner autour du pot. Well, let me continue the story, once those tests were over I entered the École Nationale de Police, where I was to be trained for a further year and carry out on-the-job training placements while I studied to be a police officer, a first step to becoming an officer of the law.

My work experience was going to be very sedate but as soon as I arrived at the little police station I had been posted to I started to stand out, so much so that in less than a month I was transferred to the Commissariat et Bureaux de Police de Bordeaux (the Bordeaux police headquarters) to make the most of my potential, as one of my superiors explained.

So highly was I thought of that soon I was assigned tasks that did not correspond to my status as a trainee, editing missives that had to be sent to police stations in other countries or being present at interrogations of foreigners, among other things.

Moreover, my ability with words meant that I quickly gained a certain level of esteem as a contact with abroad, helping with coordination whenever there was a requirement for the involvement of a foreign police force in the arrest of some member of one of the many mafias, of which without doubt the best known in France is the Marseille Mafia.

Occasionally I travelled abroad when they wanted to transfer a prisoner, acting as interpreter for the escort and ensuring there were no administrative problems with the transfer.

On one occasion, they sent me to Kraków, one of the biggest cities in Poland, very close to the borders with the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Poland, a country about which I knew little apart from the fact that it had belonged to Eastern Europe, and of course that it had entered the Second World War under the German occupation and been liberated by the Allies; but I had never thought about travelling there to get to know it since I preferred countries lapped by the Mediterranean, in which I enjoyed the summer seasons and knew their language and culture.

There I found myself, arriving at Kraków’s John Paul II airport, looking in all directions, trying to guess what the signs meant. Luckily, in that place I could still get by in English, managing to get a taxi to the hotel where I was staying.

I had been told to be discreet, that it was a top security meeting and that therefore I would receive a message on my mobile phone just one hour in advance telling me where the meeting would be held.

I thought the security measures were excessive for a meeting to plan a simple prisoner transfer. A task that anyone at the station could have done, it fell to me as I was la cinquième roue du carrosse (bottom of the pecking order); the work they assigned me was sometimes interesting and other times less so.

I stayed in a hotel in the outskirts, close to the motorway, so that it would be easier for me to make my way to anywhere in the city, wherever the appointment was. A peculiar hotel with miniscule rooms where everything seemed to be measured to the millimetre, so much so that, if I opened the bathroom door, there were scarcely a few centimetres to the foot of the bed and to the television that was suspended on a shelf near the ceiling.

It was a small room, completely carpeted, which gave it a claustrophobic air, along with the fact that its only window looked onto the rear of the hotel and a big construction site where they were putting up some buildings, the workers beginning their labour at precisely six o’clock every morning.

On top of everything else, the weather was unbearably hot, so much so that I had to leave the door and the window open at night, to allow a little bit of air to circulate so I could sleep.

This was something nobody had warned me about, not even the infallible internet search engine, which assured me that the maximum summer temperature in Poland was nineteen degrees centigrade – but when will we get to nineteen degrees? I asked myself each day at dawn, dripping with sweat.