Sunday, 19th April 2009Joseph Ratzinger celebrates the fourth anniversary of becoming Benedict XVI, he and other Catholics conclude festivities for the Easter Week by celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday, and at Łagiewniki Cardinal Dziwisz comments on the political situation by saying that it is a condition for public life to master the art of loving forgiveness. At the same time, MP Janusz Palikot accuses President Lech Kaczyński of alcoholism on the basis of the number of miniatures ordered by the presidential household. Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, lays a bunch of daffodils at the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto on the sixty-sixth anniversary of the start of the uprising. He has always done it at noon on the dot, but today he must wait until the official delegations have finished. Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic preparations for the Führer’s birthday continue, and as the result of a Roma house being set on fire a two-year-old girl ends up in hospital in a critical state. The police inaugurate the motorbike season, warning against bravado with the slick slogan: “Spring is here, out come the vegetables”. Just outside Sandomierz there is a road accident – a car smashes into an electricity pylon and goes up in flames, killing a seventeen-year-old boy. It is sunny, but cold as hell, the temperature does not rise above twelve degrees, and at night it falls to zero.
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t find a condom. Or an empty condom wrapper. Or an open packet of condoms. Or any evidence at all to confirm that they had used protection during last night’s ecstasies. But they always had before now – in other words she didn’t have a coil, or take pills. There are fertile days and infertile days, there is being careful, and above all there’s the bloody small-town Middle Ages of contraception, the oppressive need to put on a rubber. If there was a rubber. And that wasn’t at all certain.
Szacki swept the room, searching every corner, feeling rising panic, wanting at any cost to assure himself that no, there was no chance he could have impregnated this charming girl from Sandomierz, fifteen years his junior. Whom, to cap it all – before becoming aware of the contraceptive catastrophe – he had dumped, as a result of which she had locked herself in the bathroom and was still in there, sobbing.
The door slammed. Quick as a flash, Szacki rose from his knees and adopted an expression full of sympathy. Without a word, Klara began to gather up her clothes, and for a while he even hoped there wouldn’t be a conversation.
“I studied in Warsaw, I studied in Göttingen, I’ve done a lot of travelling, I’ve lived in three capital cities. I won’t hide the fact that I’ve had various men too. Some for longer, some for shorter. What they all had in common was that they’re great guys. Even when we came to the conclusion that we weren’t necessarily made for each other, they were still great. You’re the first real prick that has stood in my way.”
“Klara, please, why say such things?” said Szacki calmly, trying his best not to think about the double meaning of her last remark. “You know exactly who I am. A civil servant who’s fifteen years older than you, a man with a past who’s been through the mill. What could you hope to build with me?”
She came up and stood so close that their noses were almost touching. He felt a terribly strong desire for her.
“Nothing any more, but yesterday I wasn’t sure. You’ve got something about you that won me over. You’re smart, funny, a bit enigmatic, handsome in a not-so-obvious way, you’ve got a sort of masculinity that appealed to me. And those suits are really great, adorably stiff and starchy.” She smiled, but at once grew serious. “That’s what I saw in you. And as long as I thought you saw something in me, from day to day I felt keener to give you more. But you saw me as a bimbo, a bit of country crumpet, a little slag from the provinces. It’s amazing you never took me to McDonald’s. Didn’t they tell you all the village cocksuckers like going for a Big Mac best of all?”
“You don’t have to be so crude.”
“You’re the one that’s crude, Teo. In every thought you have about me you’re a vulgar, crude, boorish misogynist and sexist. A sad little pen-pusher too, I grant you, but that only comes afterwards.”
With these words she outscored him, then turned round abruptly, went over to the bed and threw off her towel. Ostentatiously she began to get dressed in front of him. It was nearing ten, the sun was high in the sky, high enough to light up her statuesque figure perfectly. She was lovely, slender, with feminine curves, breasts young enough to stick up pertly despite their size. Tousled after a night in bed, her long, thick, wavy hair that didn’t need any artifice tumbled down her neck, and in the sunlight he could see delicate down on the peachy skin of her thighs and arms. Without taking her eyes off him, she put on her underwear, and he was beside himself with desire. Had she really never made an impression on him?
“Turn round,” she commanded coldly.
He obediently turned round, comical in his four-year-old boxer shorts, faded from frequent washing, the only thing adorning his neglected white body. It was cold, he could see the goose bumps coming up on his skinny thighs, and realized that without a suit or a lawyer’s gown he was absolutely defenceless, like a tortoise removed from its shell. He felt ridiculous. There was soft sobbing coming from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, and saw Klara, sitting on the bed with her head drooping.
“And what will I tell them all?” she whispered. “I’ve talked about you so much. They said I should get a grip on myself, and I told them off, stupid girl.”
He took a couple of steps towards her, at which she got up, sniffed, threw her handbag over her shoulder and left, without giving him a second glance.
“Aha, one more thing,” she said, turning round in the doorway. “Yesterday you were charmingly insistent and delightfully careless. And to put it mildly, it was a very, very bad day to be careless.”
She smiled sadly and was gone. She looked so beautiful that Szacki was reminded of the scene from Camera Buff when the wife leaves her obsessive film-making husband, who watches her go as if it were a scene he was filming.
The Cathedral Basilica of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Sandomierz was full. All the assembled believers were of one heart and one soul, if you believe the words of the reading from the Acts of the Apostles that were echoing off the stone walls. But – as is usually the case in church – no one was listening, everyone was just staring, lost in their own thoughts.
Irena Rojska was gazing at Bishop Frankowski, sitting in his armchair, and wondering what the new bishop would be like, because this one was only here for a while, filling in since the old one had gone to Szczecin to be the archbishop there. It might even be Frankowski, but that wasn’t certain. People said he was too active on Radio Maryja, the highly conservative radio station. Maybe so, but Mrs Rojska remembered how he had defended the workers at the Stalowa Wola steelworks, how he had led the strikers along a secret tunnel into the church, and how the Commies had harassed him. No wonder he was hard on the Reds, and it hurt him to see that nowadays they were treated like good Poles, just as good as the people they’d put in prison. And where should he talk about it, if not on Radio Maryja? He could hardly do it on TVN – that was full of reality shows.
Janusz Rojski finally tore his wistful gaze from the pew where his wife was sitting. He had an awful pain in his leg from standing up, which seemed to run all the way from his spine, from his kidneys down to his heel. But what could he do? All the pregnant women and all the senile old ladies in the diocese had come to the cathedral today, and to ask his wife for her seat was idiotic. He looked up at the paintings, at some poor wretch being devoured by a dragon, and at another one who was so effectively impaled on a stake that the end of it had come out through his shoulder blade. Those fellows had to do their suffering for their faith, so I can stand up for an hour, he thought. He was feeling bored, and already wanted to go to the café for a Sunday coffee, sit down in a warm, soft place and have a chat. He breathed on his hands. Another hellishly cold day – the spring will never come.
Maria Miszczyk wasn’t a believer, and even if she had been, her local parish was twenty kilometres away. Yet this morning something had tempted her to come here. The Budnik case wasn’t giving her any peace and she had her mobile in her hand the whole time, switched to silent, so she wouldn’t miss the vibration when they called to say they’d caught him and the nightmare was over. But Budnik lived next to the cathedral, this was his parish, this was where that blasted painting hung, thanks to which every now and then her beloved city became the capital of Polish anti-Semitism. Prosecutor Miszczyk was standing in the left nave in a crowd of people, and she could feel the gaze of John Paul II fixed on her, whose portrait adorned the fabric hiding the painting. And she wondered if he could feel the gaze of the Jews fixed on him, as they drew the blood from Christian children and stuffed babies into barrels spiked with nails. And what he would have had to say on the subject.
No one knew about it, but the non-believing prosecutor Miszczyk had once been an ardent believer, to such an extent that before taking her law degree, she had been a student at the Catholic University of Lublin, and had wanted to find out as much as she could about her God and her religion. But the more she learnt, the less of a believer she became. Now she was listening to Psalm 118 with everybody else, listening to the words “give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever”. And she remembered how once upon a time she had loved that psalm. Until she found out that in the Catholic liturgy several verses had been left out of it. That in its entirety it is a tale about having God’s help to fight battles and get revenge, about wiping other nations from the face of the Earth in the Lord’s name. “The right hand of the Lord is exalted; the right hand of the Lord hath done mightily.” She smiled weakly. How strange it all is – here were the Catholic congregation in a church with an awful, Jew-bashing daub on the wall, praising their God to the skies in the words of a psalm that actually gives thanks for the victory of Israel over its neighbours. Yes, knowledge was the most virulent killer of faith, and at times she regretted ever having acquired it. At the end she sang the chorus with everybody else: “We thank the Lord, for He is merciful.”
Depressed by her thoughts about religion, the memory of her lost faith and of everything that had once been in her life but had left nothing but a void behind it, Maria Miszczyk was one of the first to leave the church; she got in her car and quickly drove away. That was the reason why Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was at the crime scene before her.
Janusz Rojski must have had to make up for keeping quiet for over an hour, not counting the responses, because as soon as they were in the vestibule he had started talking, and hadn’t shut up for a single moment since. It occurred to his wife that once they got to the café she would press a newspaper into his hands – maybe that would silence him.
“Do you think he really did poke about in his side?”
“Sorry? Who did what?”
“Saint Thomas, poke about in Jesus’s side. Weren’t you listening to the reading?”
“My God, Janusz, how should I know? If that’s what it says in the Gospels, then I expect it’s true.”
“Because I couldn’t help thinking it’s quite disgusting, really. Touching his hands with a finger, that’s one thing, but then he had to put his whole hand into his chest. Do you think it was empty in there, or could he feel something? His pancreas, for example, or his spleen? Do you have a pancreas after resurrection?”
“If you died at the age of thirty-three, then no, you don’t – it’s only after fifty that you find out you’ve got any organs at all. How’s your leg?”
“Better,” he lied.
“I’m sorry I didn’t let you sit down, I could see it was hurting, but I’ve got such awful palpitations…”
In reply Mr Rojski hugged his wife and kissed her on her woolly beret.
“I’m still not entirely sure what to do about it,” she continued – “maybe I should go for the operation.”
“Why get chopped up for no purpose? Doctor Fibich said it’s not life-threatening, just unpleasant. And even if they cut you up, they don’t know if it’ll pass, it might just be your nerves.”
“I know, I know, please let’s change the subject. Do you remember how we used to laugh at the fact that old folks talk about nothing but their ailments and pains? And now we’re just the same – sometimes I bore myself.”
“No, no, I don’t think I do at all.”
Mrs Rojska gave her husband a sideways look to see if he was joking, but no, the old boy had just blurted it out in all sincerity. To avoid causing him grief, she didn’t pass comment. Instead, she took his arm; she was feeling cold, and wondered if it were old age or just that the spring was so feeble this year – here they were at the end of April, but the apple trees in the cathedral garden were grey, without a single flower. If it went on like that, her lilac probably wouldn’t bloom until July. They stopped midway between the cathedral and the castle, beside the Second World War monument, which looked like an advertisement for a game of dominos. That morning they had debated going for a walk by the Vistula after mass, but now in silent agreement they had turned towards the town and started climbing up Zamkowa Street, which led to the market square; they didn’t have to discuss where they were going, as they always went to the Mała Café. It may have been a little dearer there, but somehow it was different, nicer. And they sprinkled the froth on the coffee with icing sugar. One time, Mrs Rojska had actually spent quite a while wondering whether to say in her confession that throughout the entire mass all she’d been thinking about was that when this torment was over she’d be able to go and have her sweet frothy coffee.
“Do we really talk about our ailments all the time?” Mr Rojski switched on his running commentary again. “Maybe not, it’s just that Thomas put me in the mood, somehow I had it there before my eyes, the image of him poking about in Jesus’s side. Maybe it’s because of those paintings, I don’t know, I don’t like standing next to April, that’s where the very worst tortures are, that fellow impaled on the stake always grabs my attention, and he’s got something trickling down that stake…”
“Janusz!” Irena Rojska virtually came to a stop. “Just you shut up about those monstrosities.”
As if to emphasize her indignation, right beside her head, a blue-black raven landed on the wall surrounding an abandoned, tumble-down manor house; it was a really big bird, and it tilted its head as it looked at the old couple. They stared in amazement – it was only an arm’s length away. The bird must have understood it had committed a faux pas, because it quickly hopped down on the other side of the wall. Mrs Rojska made the sign of the cross, at which her husband tapped his forehead knowingly. Without a word, they continued their walk up the hill, and then the raven came back. This time it jumped down on their side, marched past underfoot, and disappeared in the gateway of the abandoned property. It was behaving like a dog that wants to show its master something.
Mrs Rojska felt anxious and increased her pace, but her husband, whose eyes were ageing more slowly than hers, stayed on the spot, staring at the granite paving stones. The bird had left behind small, characteristic three-point tracks, as if it had deliberately dipped its claws in dark paint earlier on.
“Are you coming or not?”
“Wait a minute, I think something’s happened.”
There was a flutter of wings, and now there were several ravens sitting on the pitted wall. As if hypnotized, Mr Rojski stepped over a signboard warning that the building was in danger of collapse and went into the overgrown garden. Standing amid the bushes, the two-storey mansion was also partly covered in weeds and had been rotting away here for decades, until it had acquired the lifeless look so typical of abandoned buildings. The walls had gone green, part of the roof had caved in and the windows were like empty eye-sockets, making it look like the face of a water demon looming out of the duckweed for a moment to hunt down its next victim.
“Have you gone completely mad now? Janusz!”
Mr Rojski didn’t answer; pulling aside the grey branches of the bushes he was walking slowly towards the house. His leg hurt like hell, so he could only shuffle along torpidly. The courtyard was full of ravens, which weren’t flying, or cawing, just walking about in silence, staring expectantly. The house’s empty windows made him think of the tortured martyrs from the cathedral again, their burnt-out eyes, grimaces of pain and mouths open for a scream. Behind him, his wife was making a fuss, scaring him with her palpitations and threatening never to make another meat loaf if he didn’t come back instantly. He heard and understood, but he couldn’t stop. As he went inside the house, the rotten floorboards didn’t so much creak, as make an unpleasant squelching noise.
His eyes took a while to adapt to the semi-darkness; the windows were quite small, and partly boarded up, so, despite the sunshine, not much light could force its way inside – or at least not into the ground floor, because there was a bright glow coming from upstairs, and that was where Rojski headed. The ravens stayed outside; one, the biggest, stood on the threshold, cutting off the retreat. The old gentleman stopped at the foot of the stairs and thought this wasn’t a good idea; not many of the steps were left, and the ones that were did not inspire confidence. Even if he had been an extremely light, extremely brave cat he should have decided against it. Nevertheless, he started going up, mentally reproaching himself the whole time for being a silly old codger, telling himself that the days were long since over when after each adventure, once he had recovered, he could say: “Oh, what the heck, it always turns out well”.
The banister was slippery with damp and mould, and it was impossible to get a grip on it with his bare palm, so he wrapped his hand in his scarf. The first stair broke as soon as he set foot on it, but luckily he was ready for that. The second one was solid, so was the third and they all looked the same up to the eighth, but just in case he left out the seventh, which had a strange bulge in it. After that it was worse. The ninth stair was missing, and so were the eleventh and twelfth. As for the tenth – well, anyway he’d come too far to go back, so he stood on it and quickly pulled up his painful leg. The stair gave a warning groan and creaked, then started to tip slightly and Rojski felt himself slipping on the rotten wood. Afraid of falling, quickly for his age he jumped across the hole, and that was the moment when he should have given up, but he had the floor of the upper storey at eye level, and that was his undoing. Wanting to cross the finish line as fast as possible, he rapidly surmounted two more steps, but his bad leg let him down and he lost his balance. Afraid of tumbling down the stairs, he threw himself headlong into the stream of sunlight falling through holes in the roof and a large French window. Something cracked, but unfortunately it wasn’t a floorboard; the pain from his broken wrist flooded Rojski’s body in a hot, sickening wave. Groaning, he turned over onto his back, and the sunlight dazzled him; as a reflex he shielded his eyes with the broken hand and felt a stab of pain, a terrible sensation, as if the bones in his forearm were being ripped out with pincers. He let out a loud scream and pressed his hand to his chest, breathing fast and heavily through clenched teeth; then he felt faint, and under his tightly closed eyelids the afterglow of sunlight fought for space with scarlet spots. Nevertheless he managed to clamber to his knees and open his eyes; the first thing he saw was a family of tiny mushrooms growing from a chink in the red floor. This sight was so absurd that he had to laugh. What a silly old codger, why on earth had he climbed up here at all? And how was he going to get down now? The fire brigade would have to fetch him down, like a cat stuck up a tree.
A piece of tar-paper struck him gently on the back. Rojski started to breathe more easily and stood up, banging his head on a hanging bit of roof. He cursed and turned around to discover that unfortunately the tar-paper wasn’t tar-paper, nor was the bit of roof a bit of roof. It was a corpse hung from the ceiling on a hook like a side of meat, with the torso locked in a reinforced barrel studded with spikes. Above the barrel the body was as white as plaster, and below it was covered in a layer of congealed blood; the sunlight glinted gaily on the purple sheen. There was a raven perched on the cadaver’s shock of red hair. It had one eye fixed on Rojski, as it half-heartedly pecked at a sticking plaster dangling pitifully from the corpse’s forehead.
Rojski closed his eyes. The sight vanished, but the image remained beneath his eyelids for ever.
I wonder if they’ve found the body by now. It’s of no significance, I’m just wondering. Whether they find it today, or – doubtful – in a week is of no consequence. I switch on the TV, tune into the news channel and turn down the sound. That MP Palikot is drinking a miniature whisky and complaining about the president, and the Jewish Uprising survivor Edelman is laying flowers at the Heroes of the Ghetto monument. The same two images alternately. If they find the body, all that will be minor news.
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had run to the spot before Wilczur got there, and climbed a ladder to the upper floor of the abandoned manor house straight after the police officers. The news had spread quickly and there was already a crowd of people on Zamkowa Street, with more descending from all directions. The Marshal, the fat policeman with a bushy moustache, clambered up the ladder behind him. Before Szacki had time to issue any orders, the Marshal began to shake with nausea, battled with it for a while, and then threw up all over himself and his moustache. Incredible, thought Szacki, but actually he couldn’t blame the man. The sight was horrible, probably the worst he had seen in his career. Decomposing corpses, fire victims, drowned bodies, the victims of gang killings and fights with smashed-in skulls – it all paled in comparison with the corpse of Grzegorz Budnik hanging from a hook, until recently a wanted man with a warrant out for his arrest, the only suspect in the case of his wife’s murder.
Szacki gazed at the image, surreal in its monstrosity; under attack from an overload of stimuli, his brain tried to process the information, but with some resistance, as if running at half speed. What was the most striking feature of all?
Definitely the barrel, a ghastly stage-prop that gave the scene a theatrical, unreal quality, thanks to which a part of Szacki was waiting for the applause, and then for the corpse to open its eyes and smile at the audience.
The face was definitely a riveting sight. Szacki had learnt on a criminology training course that the human brain is programmed to recognize faces, to identify the nuances of their expression, the emotions they display, and all sorts of changes that tell us whether to smile at another person or gear up to run away from them. That’s why we sometimes see the Virgin Mary on a window pane, or a ghostly grimace on a tree trunk – it’s the brain, endlessly seeking human faces everywhere, always trying to pick them out, classify them into familiar and unfamiliar, and recognize the emotions. Szacki’s brain was agonized by the sight of Budnik’s face. The distinguishing marks of the chairman of the City Council – morbid emaciation, sunken eyes, a shock of red hair and a red beard, that unfortunate cut on his forehead – had been distorted by the hook, stuck in the chin and emerging from the cheek. The mutilated muscles gave the face a strange, unsettling expression, as if Budnik had glanced into hell for a moment and seen images there that had changed him for ever. It crossed Szacki’s mind that, depending on the killer’s degree of sadism, this metaphor might not be far from the truth.
But the worst thing was the colours, mercilessly brought out by the sunlight, which was sharp by this time of year. Budnik’s corpse was snow-white on top, drained of blood like his wife’s body a few days earlier, but the bottom half of it shone blood-red; it looked like a perverse modern art installation, an iconoclastic artist’s statement about contemporary Poland: Take a look at your national colours. Here’s a naked Polish corpse, murdered according to a legend his ancestors invented to be able to kill others with impunity.
The entire floor was covered in blood as well, mixed with dirt; there was a brownish, dried-up puddle of it, three metres in diameter, with its centre right under Budnik’s gnarled feet. In a spot near the stairs it was smudged, probably by the person who found the body.
“Should we unhook him?” asked the Marshal, once he had recovered.
Szacki shook his head.
“First the photographs, then the technicians have to gather all the evidence. This time the corpse is in the place where the crime was committed – there has to be something left.”
Cautiously, watching out for the most rotten floorboards, Szacki walked up to the middle of the room. His impression was right – around the edge of the puddle, like on the rim of a coin, there was a sort of inscription, probably written with a finger. He quickly said a mental prayer for it to be a gloveless finger, and for the lunatic who had done this to be registered. He leant over the puddle and read it. Not this, please, he thought. Please, please don’t let it be a nutcase who’s been watching lots of American films and is playing cat and mouse with us now. On the edge of the puddle there were some letters carved in the dried blood: KWP, and straight after them three six-figure numbers: 241921, 212225, and 191621. It didn’t mean much to Szacki, but just in case he took a picture with his mobile phone.
He forced himself to look up at Budnik’s face again. Changed beyond recognition, the man looked even more wretched than a couple of days ago at his office; death had deprived him of the last remnants of his predatory, athletic look. Worst of all was that plaster – pitiful enough then when it had been stuck to his forehead, but now it was dangling wistfully, revealing a barely healed cut, the cherry on the cake of posthumous humiliation.
By the time Basia Sobieraj and Maria Miszczyk reached the spot simultaneously, the corpse had been taken down and covered with black plastic. Wearing disposable gloves, Szacki was looking through the dead man’s wallet, while Wilczur stood leaning against an empty window frame, smoking.
Sobieraj took one look around the room and burst into tears. When Szacki went up to comfort her and put a friendly hand on her shoulder, she threw herself round his neck and hugged him tightly. He could feel her whole body shaking with sobs; over her shoulder he kept an eye on Miszczyk, hoping she wouldn’t faint, firstly because he didn’t want to catch her one-hundred-kilo body, and secondly because he was afraid she would fall through the rotten ceiling. But not a single maternal muscle twitched on his over-endowed boss’s face; she cast an eye over the crime scene and fixed her gaze on Szacki. She raised an eyebrow enquiringly.
“The autopsy will be done today, and so will the crime scene inspection and tests to see if this blood includes Mrs Budnik’s blood too,” he replied to her unspoken question. “We’ll get a new case hypothesis ready as fast as possible, and present an action plan. Unfortunately it looks like a madman – we’ll have to have a psychological profile done, and review the databases to examine crimes with a religious motive. We can have a press conference tomorrow at noon.”
“And what are we going to tell them?”
“The truth. What alternative do we have? If it’s a madman, the fuss might help us. Perhaps he’ll boast to someone, perhaps he’ll accidentally say something that betrays him.”
“Do you want to bring in the family to identify the body?”
Szacki said no; there was no point burdening others with this nightmare. He had all the necessary facts in the documents.
“Do the letters KWP mean anything to you?”
“Komenda – headquarters, Wojewódzka – regional, Policji – of police. Why?”
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t bear chaos. The feeling of being lost in events and in his own evaluation of them, the feeling of being unable to keep his thoughts on one theme, of losing the logical thread, of helplessly, ineffectually thrashing about from thought to thought. You got a result by evolving one thought from another, by meshing them together, by creating a complex, precise logical mechanism, which eventually produced a fine, aesthetic solution. This time that was out of the question – his thoughts were rampaging in his head like a flock of nursery-school children in the playground. Budnik’s death had dismantled all his previous suppositions, which he had had enough time to get used to. In a way, from the very start of the investigation, somewhere deep down he had been convinced Budnik was guilty of his wife’s death, and that had given him peace, allowed him to look for the proof. Never before had his intuition let him down so badly.
God, how furious he felt. Angrily he kicked a can lying in the street, and a beautiful pregnant woman coming in the other direction gave him a reproachful look. She would be beautiful, she would be pregnant, as if to spite him. He was tired, because every time he tried to place one thought on top of another, Klara appeared, demolished the entire structure and forced her way into his consciousness. So what if she was pregnant? Maybe that would be a good thing – after all, last night had been great, maybe that would mean he’d be settling down with a beautiful young wife at his side? But what if he had just been overcome by the mood of the moment? What if she really was a dumb, plastic dolly-bird who had never attracted him and who had once managed by some miracle to make a positive impression? And was it a good thing he had dumped her? And if she was pregnant, would she give him a second chance, or quite the opposite – would she change into a bitch out of hell making claims on him, getting maintenance out of him by the bucketload? So if she wasn’t pregnant, should he be pleased or sorry?
He reckoned the long walk from the hospital to the prosecutor’s office would sober him up, and the cool air would help him to gather his thoughts. But it just got worse. He turned from Mickiewicz Street into Koseły Street; in a moment he’d be there, he’d sit down in Miszczyk’s office and present her with the investigation plan. The investigation plan! He laughed out loud. What a joke, the investigation plan!
There was a small group of journalists standing in front of the steps into the building. Someone said something, and they all moved towards him. Since his exchange of views with that pesky monkey in green had appeared on television, he had become recognizable. He straightened up and assumed a stony expression.
“Prosecutor, a word of comment?”
“There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow, we’ll tell you everything then.”
“Is it a serial killer?”
“Tomorrow. Today I’d have nothing but hearsay for you, tomorrow we’ll have information.”
“Hearsay will do.”
“No, it won’t.”
“The man suspected of the previous murder has been killed. Does that mean the investigation is at a standstill?”
“Not in the least.”
“Should the schools be closed?”
Szacki was dumbstruck. He had been methodically pushing his way through to the entrance, but the question was so stupid that he stopped.
“Why the schools?”
“To protect the children.”
“I’m sorry, from what?”
“From the blood ritual.”
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki felt as if he had opened the door into a parallel universe, an alternate reality, which he had thought to be in the remote past, forgotten and untrue, strewn with the corpses of old demons. Wouldn’t you know, you only had to peep through a chink to find out none of the demons were dead, they had just gone to sleep, and what’s more it was an extremely light doze. And now they were wagging all their demonic tails with joy at the chance to come out through the door set ajar in Sandomierz and play with Prosecutor Szacki. Unbelievable. How deeply the stereotypes that substitute for thinking must be etched into the national consciousness, if sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sixty-three since the last pogrom and forty since most of the Jewish survivors were driven out in 1968, here we have a lunatic, born at a guess in the 1970s, who believes in blood rituals.
“I have not gone crazy and I’m not joking,” the man went on, who with his diminutive physique and curly black hair reminded Szacki of a caricature Jew. He was wearing a tank-top. “And I don’t understand why we haven’t got the courage to wonder out loud whether by chance after all these years ritual murders haven’t come back to Poland. I’m not saying that is the case. I’m just asking.”
Szacki was waiting for someone to help him out by shutting up this clown, but no one was in a hurry to; the cameras and microphones just waited to see what he would do.
“You’re out of your mind. Ritual murder is an anti-Semitic legend, that’s all.”
“In every legend there’s a grain of truth. I remember that lots of Jews were condemned in legitimate trials for kidnapping and killing children.”
“Just like lots of witches. Do you think witches have come back to the Most Serene Commonwealth too? Are they busy screwing with the Devil, squeezing the juice out of black cats and plotting how to dethrone Christ the King?”
The small group of journalists burst into servile laughter. The lunatic didn’t have a notebook or a Dictaphone, and Szacki realized that apart from journalists there were all sorts of conspiracy-mongers here too.
“Political correctness won’t change the facts, Mr Prosecutor. And the facts are: two dead bodies, killed according to the old Jewish blood ritual, practised for centuries in many places worldwide. You can swear it’s reality, but you’ve still got two corpses in the morgue. And a Jewish ritual whose existence is beyond debate. There are documents, there are statements by witnesses, and we’re not talking about medieval stories here – independent courts were still confirming the existence of this practice in the twentieth century.”
“Let’s not forget Piasecki,” put in an ageing man who was standing at the back; his coat and hat gave him the look of an American reporter from the 1950s.
“Sacred words,” the man with black hair responded excitedly. “A terrible Jewish crime, unexplained to this day. All the more deplorable since the victim was Piasecki’s innocent son. They knew that would be worse for him than his own death.”
“How do you know it was a Jewish crime if hasn’t been explained?” asked Szacki impulsively.
“Excuse me, if you gentlemen could explain…” One of the hacks was feeling lost.
“Bolesław Piasecki,” the black-haired man was quick to clarify. “Please look him up, he was a great Pole, active in the nationalist movement before the war, and after it head of PAX, the Catholic organization…”
“An anti-Semite and a Jew-baiter,” grunted one of the cameramen, without taking his eye off the viewfinder.
As the black-haired man started telling the rest about Piasecki, it occurred to Szacki that after forty years of not believing in the weird and the wonderful, now he would have to start believing in genetic memory. What the hell were all these people on about? If it wasn’t the pictures in the cathedral it was ghetto benches to segregate Jewish students, if it wasn’t ghetto benches it was pogroms, if it wasn’t pogroms, it was Piasecki, if it wasn’t Piasecki, it was 1968, if not 1968, then – Szacki made a mental pause – it was sure to be Michnik and Geremek, it couldn’t be otherwise. Those two influential people – the editor of the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, and the former foreign minister, both from Jewish families – were always to blame for everything in some people’s minds. He bet himself a decent bottle of wine that before five minutes were up, these Jewish-mafia hunters would get on to Adam Michnik.
“…in 1957 the Jews from the secret police kidnapped and murdered Piasecki’s son. The prosecutor is surprised the crime has never been explained, and of course officially it hasn’t, officially no Communist crime has ever been explained. Does that mean Father Popiełuszko is alive and well, and that no one was injured at the Wujek coal mine?” Oh, so now he’s going to say the Communist secret police who killed the dissident priest and shot at the striking miners were all Jews, thought Szacki.
“The killing of young Piasecki may not have been explained,” the man went on, “but strangely enough, it just so happens that the names that surfaced in this case were secret police officers of Jewish descent. I would also point out that in Polish tradition there is no custom of murdering children to punish the parents.”
“There’s no such custom in any culture,” growled Szacki, as the familiar red curtain gradually fell before his eyes. He hated stupidity, which he regarded as the only truly harmful trait, worse than hatred. “Please don’t talk nonsense. You probably aren’t aware there are laws against that.”
“You can’t silence me,” said the black-haired man, proudly sticking out his puny chest under the tank-top. “I know the authorities like it when there’s only one right way of thinking. And nowadays the way of thinking of Messrs Szechter and the late ‘lamented’ Lewertow is the only correct one.” Ah, here it is, thought Szacki – Michnik (his father was called Szechter) and Geremek (his father was called Lewertow) are indeed the villains of the piece.
“But luckily nowadays we can tell the truth,” the lunatic continued. “If the blood ritual is back, and if Polish blood is soaking into the soil of Sandomierz, we can tell the truth. If we don’t like the fact that the Poles are being pushed into the role of a minority in their own country we can say so.”
Szacki felt tired. Very, very tired. So much so that he couldn’t even be bothered to wonder what sort of wine he had won himself. He just replied from force of habit, from years and years of fatherly reaction, which bids one explain the obvious and keep saying that no, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and no, my dear child, you cannot have your own opinion on the matter.
“Among other things, it’s thanks to Messrs Michnik and Geremek that you can say what you want nowadays. Unfortunately.”
The black-haired man went red.
“Weeell, I see Mr Prosecutor is aware of what’s going on after all.”
Mr Prosecutor felt tarnished by being in the lunatic’s favour. He could feel he was drowning. Drowning in the river of bloody Polish xenophobia, which never stopped flowing under the surface, whatever the historical moment, and was always just waiting for the opportunity to pour out on top and flood the surrounding area. It was a mental Vistula, a dangerous, unregulated sewer of bias and prejudice, just like in that drinking song about the Vistula flowing across the Polish land – “For the Polish nation has this special charm, everyone’s love for it stays forever warm.” Charm, more like harm – bugger the lot of them, on their patriotic hobby horse, the collectors of contempt.
Szacki was getting more and more wound up inside, and the tank-top-wearer was looking at him with the sympathetic smile of a man who has found his long-lost brother. The more he smiled, the more wound up Szacki became, until finally, he furiously spat out words he regretted before they had even squeezed past his larynx, but it was too late to stop them.
“Yes, right, I’m aware that Michnik and Geremek sold Poland up the river along with the rest of their Jewish gang. Listen up, because I’m not going to say this again. I am an official of the Polish Republic, and there’s only one single thing I’m interested in: finding the perpetrator of these crimes and bringing him to trial. I don’t give a damn if it’s Karol Wojtyla come back from the dead, Ahmed from the kebab stall or a skinny Jew of your type baking matzos in the cellar. Whoever it is, he’ll be seized by his lousy side-locks, dragged out of the miserable hole where he’s hiding and made to answer for what he’s done. I can guarantee you that, ladies and gentlemen.”
All the blood had drained from the black-haired man’s face, but the furious Szacki didn’t see that, because he had turned on his heel and, feeling his hands go stiff with rage, entered the prosecution building. The door slammed shut. He didn’t know that in the monitors of the cameras trained on him it looked just like the famous scene from Camera Buff which he had thought of that morning.
“How about a nice profiterole?” Maria Miszczyk offered him a silver tray with some small cream puffs arranged on it in a neat pyramid.
Szacki felt like saying bugger the profiteroles, but they looked so appetising that he reached out a hand and put one in his mouth. And then another one immediately – the pastries were obscenely, unimaginably delicious. Considering the fact that there wasn’t a single place in Sandomierz with good sweets – not counting the boxes of chocolates at the Orlen petrol station – and that for a week Szacki had been feeling like a drug addict in detox, he felt like jumping for joy and shouting: “Hallelujah!”
“Tasty,” he delivered his sparing verdict.
Miszczyk smiled warmly, as if she had no doubts the profiteroles were perfect, but understood that it wasn’t appropriate for him to go into pretentious raptures. She looked at him enquiringly.
“The good news is that we have more, much more,” Szacki began his account. “Above all, we know that Elżbieta Budnik was murdered in the same building – the place is full of her blood. We also have material to test for fingerprints and trace evidence. Things aren’t so good with the biological evidence and DNA material, the building is filthy dirty, bordering on collapse and has been inhabited by all sorts of animals for years. So that sort of test will be useless. For the same reason we can forget about odour analysis tests. The police provisionally put the prints through the database, but unfortunately nothing came up.”
“A man?”
“It won’t be possible to confirm that on the basis of the fingerprints. The trainer footprint is size 39.5, which doesn’t tell us anything either.”
“But you’d need a good deal of strength to drag someone upstairs.”
“Not necessarily.” Szacki set out the photographs taken at the crime scene in front of his boss. “Only part of the ceiling between the storeys is still there – where it’s missing they found a pulley system, and considering the tracks left in the dirt we can be fairly sure it was used to haul the victims up there. Mrs Budnik and her husband were both small in stature, so a woman could have done it. Not a puny one, true, but it’s possible.”
“What was the direct cause of Budnik’s death?” Miszczyk asked, reaching for a profiterole and biting into it too quickly; whipped cream blossomed on her lower lip in the shape of a cotton flower. Very slowly and very thoroughly she licked her lips; the gesture was so sensual that Szacki felt aroused, though he had never thought about his motherly boss in a sexual context before. Suddenly he saw the image of her riding him furiously, the folds of her ample body happily smacking together, her breasts swinging every which way, jumping and bouncing off each other like puppies at play.
“The cause of death, Prosecutor.”
“Blood loss. He’d earlier been injected with a strong sedative, Tranquiloxyl.”
“How did…” Miszczyk hesitated, “how did it look, you know, under the barrel?”
“Better than I was expecting,” Szacki replied truthfully. “Budnik bled to death through severed arteries in the groin – the barrel was just for fun and effect, a stage prop. Of course the nails had cut and scratched him in several places, but they weren’t the cause of death.”
“And the numbers scrawled in blood?”
“Basia and I are going to deal with that this evening.”
Even if Miszczyk was surprised to hear him warmly calling her “Basia”, she didn’t let it show.
“All right, now the bad news. But first a profiterole to improve the mood.”
Without needing encouragement, Szacki reached for one. The small pastry puff was perfect. The fresh, chilled, slightly tart whipped cream melted in the mouth and blended with the egg-scented pastry, flooding his taste buds with ecstasy – Miszczyk’s profiteroles were an absolute work of art, the Platonic ideal of all profiteroles.
“First of all, our suspect was bled to death in a way that made him look red and white, to the glory of the anti-Semitic legend of blood. Which means the media hysteria will soon be uncontrollable, and that fascist nutters and Jewish-conspiracy hunters will be descending on this place from all over the world, as well as fanatical defenders of political correctness. I’ve just had a taste of it downstairs.”
He ate another profiterole, and decided to break up the bad news this way.
“Secondly, he was our one and only suspect. We don’t know of anyone who would have had a motive to kill Mr and Mrs Budnik. I did consider the hypothesis that Budnik could have killed his wife, and then been murdered by her lover, Jerzy Szyller, in revenge. But that’s unlikely. Szyller wouldn’t have had any reason to replicate Budnik’s modus operandi. I’d sooner believe Szyller murdered both of them. There was something odd and nasty going on between the three of them.”
“And right now Mr Szyller…”
“Remains at liberty, but is under permanent police observation.” Szacki could feel his boss’s hard stare, and added that this time police observation meant that to disappear he would have to evaporate or squeeze through a drainpipe.
A profiterole.
“Thirdly, so far we’re not entirely sure how the victims ended up at the crime scene. We’re certain no car has driven onto the property, nor did we find any signs of anything being dragged through the bushes, no handcart or wheelbarrow tracks – there aren’t even any footprints, not counting the ones left by the old man who found Budnik’s body.”
“So where did you get the size 39.5?”
“Printed in the blood upstairs.”
And another. The profiteroles were like heroin – with each one he ate, Szacki needed the next one even sooner.
“Fourthly, the numbers scrawled in blood might indicate that we’re dealing with a madman who wants to play at riddles, American films, heavy breathing down the phone and making himself a coat out of human skin.”
“What do you think about that?”
Szacki made a face.
“I’ve studied cases of serial killings, and the murderers are only criminal geniuses in Hollywood. In reality they’re disturbed individuals addicted to killing. It excites them too much for them to play at theatrical performances or little games with the investigators, and above all they apply themselves to planning the murder and then covering up their tracks. Of course they try, but they make mistake after mistake, and the problem with catching them comes from the fact that they aren’t from criminal circles, known to the police, and it’s hard to get a fix on them.”
“In that case, what can this be about?”
“Honestly? I haven’t the faintest idea. Definitely something other than murder for the sake of murder. Mrs Budnik was a local community worker, Budnik was a well-known municipal politician, both of them had strong ties to this city. The site of the crimes is right in between three of the biggest local monuments: the castle, the cathedral and the town hall. Both bodies were found in the Old Town. If I had to bet on it, I’d put my money on us finding the solution to the riddle in these old walls rather than in the mind of some madman.”
“Would you bet a lot on it?” asked Miszczyk, reaching for one of the three remaining profiteroles.
“Not a very big sum.”
She laughed, and a puff of cream flew down onto her unappealing foot, trapped in an unappealing court shoe. Miszczyk took it out of the shoe and started wiping it with a paper tissue; the foot was large and shapeless, and the toe of her tights was damp with sweat. Unfortunately, since the vision of her large, sagging breasts bouncing off each other, something had burst inside Szacki, and now he regarded this sight as perversely attractive.
“We have to check out the Jewish lead.”
Miszczyk gave a loud sigh, but nodded with understanding.
“Whether we like it or not, we’ve got to look in that group, check up on descendants of the old Jewish community.”
“They’re going to fuck us rigid,” said Miszczyk quietly. Coming from someone with the bearing of a royal nanny, this sounded very odd. “They’re going to fuck us rigid when it comes out we’re examining the Jewish community in search of the killer. They’ll hail us as fascists, Nazis, prejudiced Poles seething with hatred who believe in the legend of blood. All the media are already jawing away about anti-Semitic provocation, and it’s still Sunday. Tomorrow they’ll really get going.”
Szacki knew that was true, but he remembered yesterday’s conversation with Sobieraj at the barbecue.
“We’ve no alternative, we can’t ignore the theory that this could in fact be the work of a Jewish nutcase – a theory that does suggest itself, in spite of all. The victims are Poles, Catholics, patriots. The murders have been staged in the style of a Jewish ritual, admittedly a mythical one, but it’s a well-known myth. This city is famous for tense relations between Catholics and Jews. And the people of Israel have come a long way from being the passive victims of history – now they’re aggressors who fight brutally for their own cause and take revenge for being ill-treated.”
Perfectly motionless, Miszczyk stared at him, and with every sentence her eyes grew wider.
“But you can relax, I’m not going to repeat this summary at the press conference,” he said.
Only now did she breathe out.
They talked for a while longer about plans for action to take in the next few days and drew up a list of matters to attend to, and factors which could verify or exclude certain assumptions relevant to the inquiry. It was an arduous process of elimination, but Szacki didn’t feel overwhelmed; at this stage there could be a breakthrough at any moment, thanks to some important new piece of information or an important turn of events. They tossed a coin to decide who would eat the last profiterole. Szacki won; as he was smearing the last bits of it against his palate and starting to think about a cup of mint tea, Miszczyk fired her final question.
“Apparently you’ve dropped Klara Dybus?”
This assault on his private life was very unexpected, and Szacki was completely tongue-tied. He wasn’t accustomed to the speed at which information circulates in a small town.
“There are rumours going around that she’s been crying and cursing all day, and her brothers are loading their muskets.”
Fucking hell, he didn’t even know she had any brothers.
“It wasn’t a promising relationship,” he said, just to say something.
She snorted with laughter.
“You didn’t find a relationship with the best match in Sandomierz promising? All the perfect knights around here have already broken their horses’ legs trying to climb her glass mountain. When she chose you, even the deaf could hear the suicidal thoughts emanating from hundreds of houses. She’s beautiful, clever, rich – as God’s my witness half the women round here would become lesbians for her. But you didn’t think it a promising relationship?”
Szacki shrugged and made an idiotic face. What else could he do?
“The town itself fills me with sadness, the poverty and crudity are pitiful, there’s nothing to drink and nowhere to eat, because all the restaurants are closed. At the People’s Tavern I had a bad start and clashed with the waiter, but luckily I buried my pride and apologized. So I’m getting something to eat there. Things are worse when it comes to having a crap. There are two cubicles that they keep locked – filthy and stinking. There’s no question of sitting. This is the side of living in this place that I find frightful, and I think in future I’ll stop coming here.”
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was pleased that this particular comment from Iwaszkiewicz’s Diaries no longer applied. He scooped up a teaspoonful of the milky froth gracing his coffee and slurped it down, as specks of icing sugar tickled his palate. Either some anonymous Sandomierz genius had had the bright idea of sprinkling coffee with icing sugar instead of cocoa powder, or the café owners had seen it done somewhere, it didn’t really matter which – the upshot was that the first sip of coffee at the Mała Café was always so delicious that Szacki had no desire to go anywhere else. This café was one of his favourites anyway – it was the epitome of the middle-class dream of “an unpretentious little café downstairs”. The short menu offered toast and crêpes, coffee, tea and homemade cakes. There was a sofa, a few chairs, and just four small tables. The locals complained that the prices were as bad as in Warsaw, which always amused Szacki as he handed over just seven zlotys for a first-class latte here, actually far less than in the capital. He’d paid even less recently, since for some reason he had gained the status of a regular customer, which was as nice as it was surprising – he had never exchanged a single word with anyone here apart from placing his order; he just sat quietly in the corner, drinking his coffee and reading Iwaszkiewicz – sheer Sandomierz-style snobbery.
Iwaszkiewicz, or something else dug out of the little bookshop opposite. Which in its turn was the dream-come-true of those yearning for an “unpretentious little bookshop downstairs” – an antidote for shops in the Empik chain, which always made Szacki think of an overcrowded high-security prison. As if the books in there were serving a sort of sentence, not just living there while they quietly waited for a reader. This local bookshop may have been a little shabby, but at least in here he didn’t feel like the victim of a prison gang rape, about to be beset by special offers and bestsellers, even though not all the new books have finished with him yet.
Right now he didn’t have a book with him, but was sitting there with his eyes closed, warming his hands on his coffee cup. It was already dark outside – it was almost nine, and they’d be closing soon. Time to blow the whistle for the end of break and go back to squinting at a computer screen. Basia Sobieraj was sitting next to him on the sofa, cross-legged, flipping through a popular children’s comic she had extracted from a pile of newspapers.
They had spent two hours sitting in his flat, trying through unofficial means to find any sort of connection between the numbers left at the crime scene: 241921, 212225 and 191621. All good things come in threes, and all three numbers appeared at once on exactly three Internet sites. One was in Arabic, serving – as far as they could work out from the Roman-alphabet names scattered among the squiggles – for the illicit sale of drugs to increase sexual potency. One was Icelandic, and consisted of dozens of pages of figures published for IT purposes. And the third was in German, a bibliographical list where the figures appeared within index numbers. And that was all. In view of this total failure, they started studying the numbers individually, swapping jokes and observations as they did so. They tried to find phone numbers, and converted the figures into dates – thanks to which Szacki discovered that on 2nd April 1921 the first Poznan Fair had opened and Albert Einstein gave a lecture in New York on the theory of relativity, and on 4th February 1921 the Indian politician Kocheril Raman Narayanan was born, who lived eighty-four years – however, they couldn’t find any point of contact. Anyway, the whole idea was pretty desperate, because only the first number could be converted into a fairly modern date.
Sobieraj folded the comic and put it back on the pile.
“I must have got older – it hardly makes me laugh any more,” she said, and took a folded piece of paper from her fleece pocket. “Well, back to work, eh?”
“I thought we were having a break,” he groaned, but he picked up the piece of paper, on which Sobieraj had written out the interpretations of the numbers that seemed the most reasonable. Just the pick of the bunch, after rejecting numerology, identity numbers on dating services and Internet auction numbers. On the page there were:
241921 – the symbol for “economic promoter for technological development” in the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy’s classification of professions; the number under which Goldenline, a company that runs a community business service, is registered with the National Cooperative Council.
212225 – the patent number for some trendy Gucci slip-on shoes.
191621 – the number of the Polish patent for a tube for fibre-optic cables; and of an asteroid in the asteroid belt stretching between the inner and outer planets of the Solar System.
What a disaster. Szacki glanced at it and immediately closed his eyes again.
“We’re not thinking the right way,” he said.
“Hmm?” mumbled Sobieraj; Szacki had learnt by now that a polite “hmm” was her way of actively listening.
“We’re just pretending to be doing something – let’s drop this Google nonsense, as if we really believed the whole world was on the Internet by now. We’re not after someone who murders IT guys by hanging them with network cables. It all has something to do with old traditions, superstitions, historic things. Google won’t help us. We must think. Three six-digit numbers, relatively close to each other, but not arranged in order. We’ve established that local phone numbers used to have six digits, so let’s check them in the old regional phone books. What else?”
“Police ID cards!”
Szacki opened his eyes. That was it. That had to be it. K-W-P, the Polish abbreviation for the regional police headquarters (as Miszczyk had reminded him at the crime scene), and three six-digit numbers. He set aside his coffee and immediately called Wilczur, who luckily was still at the police station. He told him to put the three numbers into the system and call back. Sobieraj listened with flushed cheeks as he gave the official orders in a cold tone of voice – she looked to him like a little girl with red hair on the trail of a mystery in a children’s adventure story.
“What else?” asked Szacki. “What else is denoted by six-digit numbers? Tell me everything that comes into your head, the remotest associations, things that are right off the point.”
Sobieraj glanced at him. If she wanted to ask a question, she thought better of it, and chewed her lower lip pensively.
“Concentration camp numbers. Germans, Jews, anti-Semitism. ‘KWP’ could be the symbol denoting a particular category.”
“Good. To be checked. What else?”
“I think the numbers for the Gadu-Gadu instant-messaging service have six digits, but I’m not sure.”
“To be checked. What else?”
Sobieraj bit her lip harder, frowned and leant towards him.
“Got it! The number of grey cells.”
“The what?”
“The number of grey cells that die every time you give an order instead of doing the thinking.”
“Somebody’s got to organize the work.”
“Well, I’m listening.” Sobieraj laced her hands together, leant against the back of the sofa and began to twiddle her thumbs. She looked sweet, and Szacki felt he was getting to like her more and more. She was a bit like the girl who’s your friend in the scouts, the kind with whom you can stay up all night on watch, and chat away with right through camp, but when it finally gets through to you that it was more than just a friendship, it’s too late and she’s been someone else’s wife for ages. He closed his eyes and started imagining the figures. He saw a record book at a registry or an archive, but pushed the image away from himself – all the catalogue numbers in the world always include the year, so that couldn’t be it. For the same reason, prisoners and detainees were out of the picture, and besides, their numbers weren’t six-digit ones. He cursed himself for thinking in too normal a way. He had to give it a twist, he had to think the other way around. Break them up, maybe? Not six-digit numbers, but three-digit groups? 241 921 – 212 225 – 191 621. A bit like parts of national insurance numbers. A bit like mobile phone numbers without the operator’s prefix. And what about two-digit groups? 24 19 21 – 21 22 25 – 19 16 21. He projected them in his mind, turning them every which way.
“There’s a strange regularity…” he said quietly.
“Hmm?”
“There’s a strange regularity,” he repeated. “If we break the numbers up into two-digit ones, none of them is higher than twenty-five. Look.”
He took a pen from his inside jacket pocket and wrote out the numbers on a paper napkin in the following way:
21 22 25
19 16 21
Sobieraj turned the napkin to face her.
“A magic square? A mathematical rebus? A sort of code? The Roman alphabet has twenty-six letters.”
Szacki quickly wrote out:
X S U
U V Y
S P U
He and Sobieraj glanced at each other. It didn’t look as if it made sense. But Szacki felt uneasy. Some idea had escaped him. Something had flashed past at the back of his head. When he changed the figures into letters? No, before that. When he was looking at the figures written out in a square, and Sobieraj said something about a rebus? No, first she had mentioned a magic square. Goodness knows why, but the idea of a magic square made him think of paper, mystery, a book read under the duvet by torchlight. What was it? Something for children, about a Jewish alchemist resurrecting the Golem in Prague by putting a piece of paper with a magic square into his mouth. My God, was the Kabbalah really coming into his investigation? It was a sort of lead, but that still wasn’t it – some other thought had flown by when he was looking at those numbers, some remote association. Pairs of numbers. A magic square. The Kabbalah. Superstitions. Old wives’ tales. The esoteric. Faith. He seized Sobieraj by the arm and pointed a finger to say don’t speak – the idea that had surfaced was getting nearer and he didn’t want to lose it. Numbers. The Kabbalah. Faith. Just a bit more. He held his breath, closed his eyes, and saw the answer looming out of the fog in his brain.
And just then his phone rang. Wilczur. The idea vanished, Szacki answered and listened to what the old policeman had to say. Sobieraj looked at him expectantly, placing her hand on his; Szacki found the sight of two prosecutors gripping each other’s hand somewhat surreal, but he didn’t pull his away.
“Well?” she asked as soon as he had finished the conversation.
“Well nothing,” replied Szacki. “A lady chief commissioner from CID in Brzeg, a traffic police officer from Barczewo and a beat cop from Gorzów. Different places of birth, different names, no points of contact either with each other or with our case. And Wilczur promised his pal in Tarnobrzeg is also going to check the archive of militia IDs. There might be something there.”
He felt like crying. His lost thought could have contained the solution to the riddle.
“Hmm,” mumbled Sobieraj. “Yes, I hear you, Brzeg, Barczewo, Gorzów, places on the map. Do you think they could be geographical coordinates? You know, degrees, minutes and seconds?”
Szacki quickly downed the rest of his coffee and they almost ran back to his bachelor pad, where he could still smell Klara’s perfume. Klara – the best match in Sandomierz.
By trying various combinations, on this quarter of the globe (latitude north, longitude east), they managed to mark several spots in the desert in Libya and Chad. Other experiments took them to the Namibian wilderness and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Let’s try fixing a spot in Poland,” said Sobieraj, leaning over his arm. Her ginger hair tickled his ear.
“Libya in Poland?”
“I mean let’s see where these longitude lines cross Poland. You know, like In Search of the Castaways.”
In Jules Verne’s book it was actually about a parallel, but Szacki soon saw the point. Indeed, if all three numbers did denote geographical latitude, they would cross this part of the world. 19°16′21″ ran from Bielsko-Biała in the south, through the western suburbs of Łódź in the middle of the country, to the Vistula Spit on the Baltic coast. Then 21°22′25″ started further to the east, quite near Krynica Zdrój, ran right through the middle of Ostrowiec – here they exchanged knowing glances as this city was nearby – crossed the eastern districts of Warsaw and ran via Mrągowo to the Russian border. 24°19′21″ was entirely outside Poland, but still within its pre-war borders, passing slightly east of Lviv, Grodno and Kaunas.
“Ostrowiec is something,” Sobieraj muttered into his ear, trying at any cost to prove that for a true optimist even a broken glass can be half full.
“And I know what that something is,” said Szacki, standing up suddenly.
“Hmm?”
“It’s a load of shit. A smokescreen. Lies. A great big load of shit the size of Australia, a vast pile of crap!”
Sobieraj tucked her hair behind her ears and watched him patiently, waiting for him to calm down. Szacki paced the room from wall to wall.
“In the American films some genius always shows up who tries to think like the murderer, right? He frowns, walks about the crime scene and in abrupt, black-and-white flashbacks we see how his mind attunes itself, how he works out exactly what happened.” Something flashed between the wardrobe and the wall, something that looked like a silver wrapper, and Szacki had to fight the temptation to check if it was a condom wrapper, or an empty condom wrapper.
“Hmm?” This time Sobieraj supplemented her mumbling with an encouraging gesture. With one hand she tapped something out on the keyboard.
“Except that films follow a different logic from real life. They have a logic which has to reach a solution, a denouement so the killer is caught in an hour and a half. But now let’s feel our way into the logic of a real case and of our murderer. He certainly doesn’t want us to catch him in an hour and a half, so if he isn’t completely and utterly fucked up he’s not going to leave riddles we only have to solve in order to find him.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning either he’ll leave a riddle that sends us off on a completely false trail. Or – which from his, or her, point of view has to be a more amusing solution – he or she will leave a riddle that makes no sense. The kind that has no solution and leads nowhere, but just makes us waste time looking at satellite pictures of the Libyan desert. And with every minute he or she is sure to be further and further away, safer and safer.”
“OK,” said Sobieraj slowly, rocking on a chair, with her hands entwined under her chin. “And what do you suggest?”
“Let’s go to bed.”
Sobieraj slowly raised one eyebrow.
“I haven’t brought my lacy underwear, so if you’d be willing to postpone until another day…”
Szacki snorted with laughter. He really was getting to like her more and more.
“You people are terribly randy in this province.”
“Long winters, long nights, there’s no cinema and just boring stuff on TV. What can you do?”
“Sleep. Let’s go to sleep, get a rest. Tomorrow we’ve got the profiler, the data will come through from the lab, recordings from the urban security cameras, maybe we’ll get something extra.”
Sobieraj turned her laptop towards him.
“First look at this.”
He went over to her; the comment about the underwear meant that first he looked at her, differently, but he saw the same thing as usual. Jeans, thick hiking socks, a black fleece, no make-up. A textbook example of the one-hundred-per-cent Catholic girl guide. The only lace he could imagine in her context would have to be on the Virgin Mary’s veil. But she smelt nice, he thought, as he leant over her – more of shampoo than perfume, but it was nice.
In the browser window the words Konspiracyjne Wojsko Polskie were entered – meaning the Polish Underground Army. Yes, of course, the KWP. Some scraps of superficial historical knowledge sprang to mind – the “cursed soldiers”, post-war partisans fighting against the Communists, underground tribunals passing sentences, and anti-Semitic goings-on. Szyller?
“I’ll leave you with the problem of whether this might be a smokescreen or not, and I am indeed off to bed now. I’ll let you know when I’ve changed into something sexier. Kiss kiss.”
She kissed him on the cheek in a friendly way and left. He waved to her, without tearing his eyes from the computer.
A few hours later, when he lit his first cigarette of the day at the open kitchen window, and the smoke mixed painfully with the sleep in his eyes, he already knew far more about the KWP. Enough to stick one more theory in the file, an ominous one, which assumed more than any other that the whole case involved bloodthirsty Jewish revenge. And which unfortunately provided for the possibility that it didn’t have to stop at two corpses – quite the opposite.
Dawn announced its arrival as the first vague shapes appeared in the pitch-black courtyard, dark patches against very dark patches. Szacki was reminded of a few nights ago, when he’d been smoking in this very same spot, and to his vexation Klara’s red fingernails had appeared on his fleece. He thought about that night, he thought about her, and how she had told him to turn around that morning as she clothed her statuesque body. The moisture forced from his eyes by tiredness and smoke was joined by a few tears of sorrow. Once again Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had fucked something up; once again he was all alone, with no one and nothing.
But maybe that was for the best.