44

The humming was soft but constant. Eventually overwhelming. He lay still, first trying to ignore it, then trying to identify it. He couldn’t block it out. Whether he focused on the sound or tried to think about something else, there was only room in his head for the sound.

Humming, buzzing, broken on regular intervals by a squeak and the sound of air escaping.

It grated on his ears, rang in his head. He just wanted to go back to sleep. His arms, his legs, his whole body ached. But the sound was too much. He couldn’t take it any more.

Łukasz opened his eyes and tried to sit up in the bed. Hospital equipment surrounded him. Cables and wires stretched from digital displays, pumps and IV bags into his arms and his chest. He looked like a machine himself. He felt like he was tied down.

The room was dim, the hallway beyond his room dark and quiet. All he could hear was the constant humming. Buzzing.

He pulled at a thick cable that lay near his pillow and a remote control slid toward his hand. At least turning the TV on blocked out the maddening humming. Barely.

Łukasz kept the volume turned low. He was alone in the room and he liked it that way. No reason to alert the nurses he was awake. He needed to think.

Someone had tried to kill him. Again.

He had seen the driver of the vehicle before it hit him. He shivered as he remembered the man’s face: hard, rough, flat, uninterested. Adam had been right. This was a killer for hire. He had no interest in Łukasz, he had no anger or joy. He was simply doing a job.

The screen of the TV lit the room in shades of blue and gray, as if the whole room were underwater. Łukasz watched the shadows dancing across the foot of the bed, not paying attention to the images on the screen that were creating the shadows.

Novosad, he thought. It must be Novosad. With his connections to the Russian mafia, he would have had the opportunity to hire a former member of the Polish secret police. Or even KGB. The man had looked like KGB. Would Malak or Kapral even know how to contact such a person? Łukasz thought it unlikely.

“Kaminski.” The word cut through his thoughts, bringing him back to the present.

Łukasz heard the name and glanced around, but the room remained empty. Then his eyes turned to the TV and the news announcer who was speaking. “The police are looking for Adam Kaminski, an American visiting Poland. He is wanted for questioning in connection with this murder.”

The image behind the anchorman showed the scene earlier that afternoon along Aleje Jerozolimskie, the crowd of students, the ambulance carrying away a stretcher covered in a white sheet.

Łukasz focused on the TV now, absorbing every detail the media was sharing. Grabbing the remote, he flipped through channels, hearing other versions, other perspectives.

A man had been killed, that much was clear. Stabbed that afternoon during a parade. The man had been declared dead on arrival at the hospital. And Adam Kaminski was wanted for questioning in connection with the stabbing.

Łukasz dropped the remote. He thought he had problems. He had only been hit by a car. Adam had been hit by something much worse.

He grunted and swung his legs off the bed. Grabbing at the wires and lines that snaked across his body, he pulled. Some came away easily, tiny detectors glued to his chest, back and arms popped off. The IV line was harder. He grimaced as the line came out, like bugs crawling under his skin.

Finally free, he slapped at his arm to stop the itching as he stood cautiously, holding onto the bed. Then he waited.

Nothing happened, no one came running.

He heard another TV, distant, the sound faintly carrying down the hall. The nurses were otherwise occupied, he assumed. Not overly concerned about their patient.

Łukasz took that as a good sign. No one was expecting him to die of his injuries any time soon.

His left arm was in a cast, and with his right he could feel a thick bandage stuck to his forehead. His chest and sides hurt when he breathed, but by holding his arm tight against his body, he could move without too much pain.

He walked softly to the open door and peered down the long hallway. Flickering lights six doors down revealed the room the nurses were using as their break room. He stepped out of his room and turned in the other direction.

He was a few yards down the hall when someone came around a corner ahead, walking directly toward him. A doctor, dressed in the green scrubs and white lab coat of his profession. The man walked slowly, reading notes from a clipboard as he walked. He hadn’t even noticed Łukasz yet.

There was nowhere for Łukasz to hide, no open door to duck into. Instead, he stood up straight, pulled his hospital robe tighter around his pajamas, and picked up his pace. He walked confidently past the young doctor.

The doctor looked up as they passed in the hall. Łukasz smiled briefly and nodded, then kept walking. The doctor returned his gaze to his clipboard.

As he turned the corner, stepping out of view of the doctor, Łukasz breathed again and curled into himself. His heart was pounding and his side hurt. He was getting too old for this, he told himself. This was a young man’s work. He should be covering horse races and school concerts, not doing investigative journalism.

This would be his last investigation, he decided. The last, and the most important.

Not many people roamed the halls at that time of the evening, but there were some. Some Łukasz avoided, ducking into empty rooms, stepping around corners before he was noticed. Others he confronted with confidence, as he had the first doctor.

He was just relaxing, feeling confident, when he heard soft footfalls approaching from behind.

“Sir, sir,” the young nurse called.

Łukasz stopped and turned to face her.

Her cherubic face, surrounded by dark brown curls piled into a messy knot on top of her head, was furrowed with a look of obvious concern. “Sir, are you all right? Can I help you?” She looked over him, still in his pajamas and robe, the red marks clear where he had pulled out his IV line. “You should be in bed, I think, shouldn’t you?”

Łukasz smiled kindly at the young woman, so obviously concerned and taking her job seriously. “Thank you, Pani, yes. I should be. But my back, you know…” Łukasz leaned forward slightly and put his hand on the small of his back. “If I lie in bed for too long, it pains me.”

“We have painkillers for that, you know,” she responded. “I can contact your doctor and get approval to give you one.”

“Oh no, no,” Łukasz shook his head and frowned. “I do not need anything that drastic. I just need to walk around for a few minutes. I will be fine. In fact, I’ll head back to my room right now.”

The nurse took his arm and stepped forward with him, looking as if she had every intention of walking Łukasz back to his room. He was trying to figure out how to get away from her when a loud buzzing sounded from the nurses’ station just up the hall.

“Oh, dear. Pani Małgosza. She always needs something. She can never sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time.” She looked up at Łukasz. “I do have to go to her, I’m the only one on duty on this floor. Are you sure you can make it back to your room on your own? I could call someone else to come and help.”

“That’s simply not necessary, my dear.” Łukasz smiled down at her. “I will be fine. You hurry and help Pani Małgosza, I’m sure she needs you more.”

Łukasz watched as she turned and trotted back up the hall, then stepped quickly to the stairwell to put as much distance between himself and this caring nurse as possible.

It seemed that he had wandered across the entire hospital when he finally found the room he had been looking for. The main surgical office was guarded by a nurses’ station, but only one tired-looking nurse waited there. Behind her, he saw the closed door labeled “RECORDS.” He needed access to those medical records.

He waited. His legs grew cold as drafts of air blew up his pajamas, but he waited. Eventually, that nurse would have to check on her patients, abandon her guard of the records room.

Eventually, she did. As soon as she stepped out of view, Łukasz ducked behind the desk, then through the unlocked door. He knew exactly what he was looking for.

He had been twenty-six when he covered his first murder. Łukasz remembered it like it was yesterday. The body being carried out on the stretcher, red and brown stains over so much of the room that Łukasz could see them from where he was standing, trying to get a view over the heads of the detectives gathered inside.

Murder by sword. A lethal stabbing with a shashka, the single-edged sword used by the Cossacks. Two men fighting over the love of a woman, one man grabbing an artifact that hung on the wall and using it as it had originally been intended to be used. Bringing it back to life for one vicious, bloody moment.

That story had been a big hit. It had everything Łukasz could want: violence, history, passion. He had reveled in it. His first story made the front page, so he followed it up with a second, and then a third. Each time digging deeper into the lives of the killer, and the victims.

It hadn’t bothered him, at the time. The blood. The hate. The killing. Or the exposure that hurt the victims, bringing their petty jealousies and secrets to light. He had been doing a job, and he did it well. He wrote with enthusiasm, adding a layer of thrill to a story that hardly needed it.

He used that skill again and again, moving on to other, new stories. Bringing people, crimes and passions to life on the page. So that readers would look for his byline and know they’d find a good story.

He’d covered the violent crime desk for many years, making a name for himself as the journalist willing to go to any scene, talk to any witnesses, to get his story.

The change had been gradual, subtle. He hadn’t noticed it at first. Friends would comment on the change in his writing, a new perspective he brought to his stories. Where before he had brought excitement, titillation, now he started bringing tears to the eyes of his readers. Where once editors sought him out because he would write an entertaining story, even about something as grisly as a murder, now editors sought him out because he could plumb the depths of the victims’ emotions — and the killers’.

Over the years, he had developed empathy. He no longer looked at a crime scene and saw a robbery or a beating or a stabbing. Now he saw only victims, innocent people whose lives would never be the same.

His stories had changed, and he had changed. And the empathy that at first gave his stories depth and meaning eventually took his stories away from him all together.

After ten years of covering the violent crime desk, Łukasz had lost the stomach for it. Not because of the gore, or even because of the tears, but because he could see both sides of the story.

By then, his career had taken off. He was no longer the rookie reporter, fresh out of university. He had made a name for himself and he built on that. His articles on politics and corruption were hard-hitting and accurate. Łukasz would spend more time investigating each story than the criminal he was investigating had probably spent thinking about the crime.

He never forgot where he had come from. He would stop and chat with the young men and women who now covered stories of violent crime. He would compare notes with them on how best to avoid the smell of blood at a crime scene or how to describe an attack so the reader could practically feel the hits himself. And he read the newspapers. All of them. He knew every story about every crime that had taken place in Warsaw for the past twenty years.

So it was no surprise that, as he read the description of the wounds received by the victim of that day’s stabbing, he recognized the technique.

The records had been easy to find. Once he knew the victim had been brought to that hospital, where he was declared dead, Łukasz knew the medical report would be stored in the surgery records room. He had spent enough time buttering up the nurses in the emergency room, back when he was on the crime beat, to know that all ER records were stored temporarily with Surgery, before being filed permanently in the hospital’s main records archive.

When he entered the room that evening, the boxes of ER files were clearly labeled, waiting on a rolling cart tucked under the window. Łukasz threw the lid off the box, not caring where it landed, then rifled through the files. He didn’t know the name of the victim, but each file was clearly marked by date and time.

The news reports had not been detailed enough in their reporting of the time of the attack, and Łukasz had to wade through ten other reports before he found it. The fatal stabbing.

The victim had died of internal bleeding, the report read. The wound was small, the blade used was narrow, and death had occurred within five to seven minutes after stabbing. The victim would have been immediately incapacitated and would have bled out quickly. There would have been no struggle.

Only one clue stood out as to who might have committed this violent act. One detail included in the medical report that immediately caught Łukasz’s eye. The victim had been stabbed in the back, the knife angling in to the right. Until the very end. The killer had twisted the knife slightly just as he hit the deepest point, turning almost imperceptibly to the right. The ER doctor who had noted this had good eyes, and a mind for details. The twist itself wouldn’t have caused any additional damage, it was too insignificant. There was no clear reason why the killer would have done it, and the doctor was confused by it.

For Łukasz, it made everything clearer.

The cast on his arm was itching, but that bothered him less than the fact that it prevented him from working more quickly. Getting back to his room in the hospital had been the easy part. Finding that the doctors had cut his clothes off him made it more difficult, but he found a pair of scrubs in the closet near his room and felt no qualms about stealing them.

Sneaking out of the hospital in the scrubs took time, precious time. It would have been obvious to anyone who saw him that the old man in a cast and multiple bandages didn’t belong in scrubs and didn’t belong out of the hospital. He was an adult, he could check himself out if he wanted to, he reminded himself as he stuck his head out into the hospital’s main entrance area one more time to see if the guards had looked away yet.

He just didn’t have time to wait until the morning, then deal with all the paperwork he knew would be required of him to leave. The hospital bureaucrats could chase him down tomorrow for his paperwork. Tonight, he had more important things to do.

As soon as the guard headed back up the hallway, Łukasz dashed across the lobby — as much as he could dash while holding his bruised ribs with his broken arm, shuffling slightly to keep from tearing the stitches in his right thigh.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself to move. Just until he was outside. Just until he had flagged down a taxi. Just until he was sitting, painfully, in the lobby of the newspaper building.

Then he breathed. Then he cried a little.

Eventually, the pain subsided, as physical pain always did. He was onto something, though, he had a story in his grasp, and his familiar drive kicked in, lifting him up off the bench, dragging him to the elevator and down, back to the newspaper archives.

He breathed a light sigh of relief, knowing the articles he was looking for were all from within the past five years and available on the computer. He didn’t have to lift any boxes this time. He sat at the closest machine, waiting for it to come to life, then started reading.

About murder. About shootings. About stabbings. About brutal robberies and accidental deaths. He skipped over all the emotions, all the pain, all the blood, looking for the detail that mattered to him now.

Finally, after going through more than three years’ worth of violence and gore, he found it. A stabbing. The killer had been found to be left handed. And a very bright doctor had identified a clue as to the killer’s identity: when he stabbed, he shifted his hand just a fraction as the knife hit the deepest point, causing the blade to twist. Ever so slightly.

Another doctor might have missed it, but not this one. Not only did he see it, he knew what caused it. An injury to the wrist, he had explained to the police. The killer did not have full motion in his left wrist. Look for a killer with an injured wrist.

Not the perfect identification the police might have hoped for, but it was something. The article Łukasz was reading went no further. The killer had not been found, nor any suspects identified. Now Łukasz was on the trail, he knew there was more. He kept reading.

A year later, another stabbing. Another left-handed killer, another slight twist in the stab. This time, the doctor hadn’t identified the cause of the twist, and apparently the police hadn’t made the connection with the stabbing the year before. Łukasz did. And this time there was a suspect — Stefan Wilenek. He had known the victim slightly, the friend of a neighbor.

Or perhaps the enemy of a neighbor.

Wilenek had not been charged. Not enough evidence pointed to his guilt, no motive, no trace evidence found at the scene. He had only been questioned because someone had seen him in the area at the time. The police had questioned a few more people, some as witnesses, some as suspects, but no arrests were made.

Łukasz kept reading. Two more years’ worth of murder and violence. Then another stabbing. Then another. In each case, no arrest had been made. In each case, someone was suspected, someone found to have a motive, but no evidence existed to place that person at the scene of the crime. Sometimes the suspect had an unbreakable alibi. Sometimes there was simply no proof he or she had been in the area at all.

A hired killer, Łukasz knew. That’s how they could kill from a distance. Why there was no evidence putting them at the scene. Łukasz smiled wryly. A left-handed hired killer with a bad wrist. Stefan Wilenek’s name came up only once more, but once was enough for Łukasz. He knew what he was looking for, and Wilenek fit the bill.

Łukasz changed tracks. Leaving the archives behind him, he took the elevator back up to his office. Once there, he went straight to his desk and pulled out a pill bottle. It was half-empty. Grimacing, he shook two out into his hand and swallowed them. He limped down the hall to wash them down at the water cooler.

Back in his office, wearing the change of clothes he kept handy for those occasions he needed to work through the night, Łukasz stood in front of his bookshelf. Histories of Poland, writing style guides, biographies of American presidents next to psychoanalyses of serial killers, his books were in no order and seemed to fit no pattern. Łukasz read widely, based on whatever story he was working on at the time.

This time, he was looking for a book on recent Polish history.

“Aha,” he said aloud as he pulled the thick volume from the shelf. Miller’s History. The book was bound in cloth, published in someone’s basement, not a publishing house. It was a story that would never make it in a commercial sale, but it served as a bible of sorts for Łukasz. It was a first-hand account of life under the Polish secret police during the communist regime.

Łukasz had known Thaddeus Miller for only a few years, when Łukasz was at the height of his profession and Miller was just starting out, a young student eager to find a big story. Łukasz had helped him; he was happy to nurture such talent and enthusiasm. And in return, Miller had helped him. Miller had given him the book.

Compiled over a period of ten years, the book had many authors. Individuals who had written down for Miller what they knew, whether it was long, flowing details or just a few short sentences.

Miller had fit the pieces together. Descriptions cobbled together from different sources eventually yielded clear pictures. Pictures of corruption among the communist leadership in Poland. Pictures of men and women who were willing to share information, to sell out their colleagues just to save themselves. And pictures of the men and women who paid for that information.

Stefan Wilenek was one of those men. There was no photograph available, but as Łukasz read the description Miller had compiled, he once again saw those hard black eyes staring at him through the windshield, aiming not to hurt but to kill.

Wilenek had worked for the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, the Polish secret police. He had followed people, lied to people, tricked them into giving him information, sometimes paid them to give him information. Łukasz knew no informant ever really benefited.

The information they provided was used to arrest, torture, even kill the ones they knew, the ones they loved. Half the suicides in Poland in the late 1980s were the end result, people who couldn’t handle it when the reality of what they had done sank in, when they saw the true cost.

Wilenek was one of those men. And he was back in Poland now, a killer for hire.

Łukasz looked at the clock. This wasn’t proof that Adam was innocent, but it was certainly enough to make the police look closely at Wilenek and ask some hard questions. Łukasz knew better than to run to the police with this. There was a more powerful way to get this information to them. The power of the pen.