A Blind Eye: Book 1 in the Adam Kaminski Mystery Series (21 page)

T
he old woman’s
stare told Adam all he needed to know. She wasn’t going to let him into the building. He had been waiting outside Sylvia’s apartment again. She still wasn’t responding to the doorbell. At this time on a Monday morning she was most likely at work. But why hadn’t she been home last night?

His common sense told him she was probably fine, but he also knew she was still in danger. He couldn’t help worrying. If she was just working, why hadn’t she left a message for him at the hotel letting him know she was all right?

His fear for Sylvia’s safety had been with him all night. Even as he and Angela got more and more comfortable with each other at the bar last night, he couldn’t let go of it. Angela had noticed.

“You’re here, but your mind is elsewhere. Where are you? And who are you with?”

“Sorry, Angela, it’s everything going on. I just need to work through it, figure out what all the evidence is pointing to. Łukasz thinks he knows, and he was hammered with a car because of it. I just have this feeling there’s something more.”

“Uh-huh.” Angela looked sideways at him. “Once a cop, always a cop, I guess. It must be tough for the women in your life.”

Adam smiled. “Maybe that’s why there is no particular woman in my life.”

“And yet, I have the feeling you’re thinking about one right now. And it’s not me.”

“I’m sorry, Angela.” Adam smiled at her sadly. “You are a great woman, and in another time, perhaps. But you’re right, right now I’m worried about Sylvia. I got her involved in all this and now I don’t even know where she is.”

Angela nodded, but she frowned. “We all have to make choices, Adam. And sometimes that means living with the choices someone else makes.” She finished her drink and stood. “I wish you luck, Adam Kaminski, I think you’re going to need it.”

Adam smiled and looked up at her.

“Maybe I’ll see you in the morning before we leave?”

“Maybe, but let’s say goodbye now.”

Angela smiled one more time and put her hand on his shoulder. “Goodbye, then.”

Standing that morning outside Sylvia’s apartment, Adam could still see the image in his mind of Angela walking gracefully out of the bar. She would soon be safe at home, back in Philadelphia. Now it was time to worry about Sylvia’s safety. He had dragged her into this mess. He couldn’t live with himself if she had been hurt because of him.

His attempts to get into Sylvia’s building as other tenants left were not getting him anywhere. Even if he could get into the building, he still hadn’t figured out how he’d get into her apartment anyway.

Finally giving up, he turned his collar against the chill and started the fifteen minute walk back up
Ulica Miodowa
to
Aleje Jerozolimskie
and his hotel. Hopefully, Sylvia was at work. He could call from the hotel to confirm that.

Adam worked his way around groups gathering on the sidewalk. Parents with small children, another group of university students, a cluster of middle-aged women all stopped along the sidewalk and turned to watch the street. Weaving through the crowd, Adam couldn’t at first identify the cause of the gatherings.

As he moved farther up
Aleje Jerozolimskie
and the crowd grew denser, he started to hear the music. A faint thread of a traditional Polish fiddle carried over the air first, followed by the sounds of the rest of the small musical group marching at the front of the parade.

It wasn’t a huge parade. As Adam watched, the quartet passed by, followed by men and women dressed in the garb of Polish
górali
, or mountain folk. Next up were a group of men and women in what appeared to be military gear, carrying flags of Poland, Warsaw and the regions around Warsaw.

Craning his neck to see over the crowds, Adam could just make out the banners carried by the rest of the participants. SLD. The parade was supporting the candidates of the party to the national legislature.

Parade participants walked in groups, divided by the region of Poland they were from and holding signs that identified the labor groups they supported: nurses, teachers, truck drivers. Adam watched all this with interest, surprised to see such an overtly socialist parade.

The number of university students gathering around him grew. Turning, Adam found himself surrounded by young men. One of the young men raised a hand and shouted toward the parade. Adam didn’t recognize the words. Soon other young men were shouting, and it was clear they were not calling out their support for the parade.

As the shouting grew more intense, Adam leaned over to one of the students. “Hey, do you speak English?”

The young man blinked in surprise and looked up at Adam. “Of course.”

“Good.” Adam nodded, ignoring the man’s arrogance. “What’s going on, what are you shouting?”

“They are the SLD. They want the government to pay them even when they don’t work. They want to go back to the old way of doing things, where the government took care of us, but we had no power, no control.”

“So this is a political statement?” Adam asked.

“Of course.” The man shrugged, then turned away from Adam. Cupping his hands around his mouth he shouted, “
Wracaja praca!
” Turning to Adam with a smile and a wink, he shouted again, “Go back to work!”

Adam moved a little way up the street.

As the number of students grew, police showed up on scene. They formed a line between the protesters and the parade participants, ready to block any attempts at aggression on the part of the students. Looking around the crowd, Adam didn’t think there was going to be trouble. The students who were shouting were smiling and laughing. They were having fun — at the marchers’ expense, perhaps, but fun all the same.

The young man Adam had questioned ran across the street, followed by a small group of friends. They entered a university building that looked out over the parade route. A few minutes later, a white T-shirt flew out of a second-story window and dangled in the air. The shirt had a crude painting on the front in red ink. “SLD,” it read.

The students who had flung the shirt out the window had taken precautions to ensure that anyone watching knew they were not supporting SLD. The shirt dangled from the window on a rope, and the rope was tied with a hangman’s noose. It was literally hung in effigy.

When the audience saw the shirt, everyone laughed. It seemed like a congenial atmosphere. One older woman walking by commented to her friend that the students were being stupid, and some of the marchers made rude gestures toward the students, but there was no threat of violence that Adam could pick up.

After a few more minutes, the marchers passed by and the police moved on with the parade.

That was when the fighting started.

A man from the audience jumped up onto the outside of the university building and tried to grab at the T-shirt, climbing precariously up the outside of the building. He lunged at the shirt but failed to catch it. Others from the crowd surrounded him, chanting, some encouraging him and others trying to stop him.

The man lunged one last time at the shirt, catching it with both hands. Losing his grip on the building itself, the man swung from the building holding onto the shirt. Holding onto the hangman’s noose.

Adam stepped forward. Someone was going to get hurt and there were no police around. As he moved, his eyes were on the young man hanging from the building and the group of students surrounding him. He didn’t notice the person coming up behind him.

The first punch hit him hard in the kidney. He grunted and fought the urge to bend forward, instead stepping fast to his left. The second punch landed on his arm.

Adam turned to face his attacker and recognized him immediately as the man who had attacked Łukasz in the alley behind
Pod Jaszczurami
. Adam saw his own handiwork in the nasty cut still healing across the man’s nose. Make that men — his smaller companion was standing just behind him. Glancing quickly over the crowd, without taking his attention from the large man facing him, Adam thought he caught a glimpse of his third friend with the knife. This wasn’t going to be a fight he could win.

The shouts from the group of students got louder and angrier. The man who had been hanging from the building had finally let go, landing with a thud onto the hard pavement. Some of his friends had come to his aid; other students were coming forward with anything but aid in their minds. One was brandishing a wooden pole, taken from the signs that had been carried by the marchers.

Adam looked back at his attacker and the man grinned. His teeth were gray and uneven. He ran his tongue over them roughly as he smiled.

“Shit,” Adam thought to himself.

He turned and ran toward the group of students, intentionally knocking over the man brandishing the stick. The man stumbled, then turned toward Adam, anger plastered over his face.

“
Hej, kurwa
,” he spat out and stepped menacingly toward Adam.

Adam ducked and ran past him into the crowd of students. His preference was always to face anyone attacking him. Running was rarely the right idea. In this case, however, given the odds, he figured it was his only option.

The young man with the stick started to follow him, but was blocked by another group of students busy dumping out a trash can onto the street. Glancing back, Adam saw his attackers trying to move through the crowd of students. By hitting and pushing the students out of their way, they were only managing to get involved in the brawl that was starting on the street. For each young man they pushed out of their way, two more stepped up to confront them.

Adam turned away again and slipped down a side street, then another, and kept going.

L
eaning back
against the rough brick wall
of a small grocery store, Adam looked back the way he had come. The street was empty. The sounds of the fighting a few blocks away carried over the air, and any residents or shoppers who might otherwise have been out were safely tucked away at home or behind closed doors.

Adam waited, thinking. He couldn’t just hide here. He needed to find out if Sylvia was safe. Was she simply at work, behind locked doors and armed guards? Or had something happened to her?

Rather than retracing his steps, Adam moved forward. Narrow cobblestone streets filled this old part of the city, each occasionally taking an unexpected twist or turn. As he walked, he checked doorways and gaps between the houses to make sure no one was hiding, waiting for him. He also kept an eye out for good hiding places if he needed them.

Eventually, Adam found his way back to
Aleje Jerozolimskie
. Stepping onto the sidewalk, Adam saw the group of people to his right.

The police had finally gotten involved in the fighting, it seemed, and had managed to calm everyone down. Now Adam could see a number of uniformed officers taking control of the crowd. He didn’t see his attackers in the crowd, but he knew they’d still be looking for him.

The hotel stood just across the street. Moving quickly, Adam skirted around a bus shelter, leaned into a parked van, staying close to any structure he could find in an attempt to stay hidden. It didn’t work. He should’ve known he was too big to hide.

A shout from the crowd to his right got his attention, and he turned to see a young man pointing directly at him. He recognized him as the man who had tried to tear down the white T-shirt. He was pointing at Adam and speaking excitedly to one of the police officers in the group. That officer starting walking toward Adam.

Knowing better than to run from the police, Adam changed directions and went to meet the officer with a slight feeling of relief. Perhaps someone had seen the attack and the police were finally ready to help him. He was tired of trying to do this on his own without any official help. He wasn’t used to working around the law.

As he approached him, the Polish officer put his hand on his nightstick. Adam saw the movement and tensed. Something was wrong.

Another officer had seen Adam as well and was talking into a radio. As that officer stepped to the side, Adam saw the body.

The small man, part of the team who had attacked him, lay in the street, blood pooling around his back. The knife still sticking up out of the wound.

Adam stopped moving. This wasn’t right. How could that man have been stabbed? He knew who had had that knife. He assumed they had been working together.

As Adam paused, uncertain, the Polish officer grabbed him by the arm and swung him around, pushing him against a car parked along the street.

Adam twisted as he fell, trying to see more of the crime scene, to figure out what had happened.

“You are an American, no?” the officer said in broken English. “You think our law does not apply to you?” He spat on the ground at Adam’s feet as he spoke.

“No, officer, there’s been a mistake. I didn’t hurt that man. I don’t even know that man.”

Even as he spoke, Adam thought about the night in the alley with Łukasz. He hadn’t hit the small man, had he? Would they find his blood on Adam’s coat? His eye fell again on the knife, and Adam understood clearly.

He had held that knife the day before. He had picked it up off the ground in the cemetery. Adam knew without any doubt that when the police tested it, they would find his fingerprints all over that knife.

“You will come with us now, Mr. American,” the officer was saying. “You will not be going back home to your America now.”

Adam was no longer listening. His eyes had focused on the small piece of metal pinned to the officer’s uniform. A tiny version of a medal. Saint Casimir. Just like the Philly cop at the funeral.

All of Adam’s muscles tensed and his vision started going black, heat rising in his face with his anger. He had to keep control. He couldn’t let himself go back to that cemetery. Back to the guilt.

His thoughts flashed to Łukasz, still in the hospital. Was he alive? Was he safe? He thought of Sylvia. God only knew where she was, who was with her.

He couldn’t let himself get arrested. There was too much at stake. Too much out of control. No way he could trust this cop.

Adam took a deep breath then let himself relax. He leaned forward into the car. To his right, he saw another officer approaching, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. Adam nodded to himself, braced himself, and kicked out backwards.

He caught the officer by surprise and the man stepped back. He didn’t release his hold on Adam, but he gave Adam enough space to twist to the left. Adam grabbed the officer’s arm as he twisted and, with a sharp movement, threw the officer back against the car. It had only taken a few seconds. The second officer started running toward them and Adam took off, back up the alley he had come from.