A Grain of Truth (10 page)

“Heart. Two attacks. I probably wouldn’t be able to give birth anyway.”

IV

“Artur Żmijewski should come and live here,” said Szacki, as he looked around the tidy hospital admissions area, referring to the famous actor, popular for his TV roles as a priest-cum-detective in a show filmed here in Sandomierz, and as a doctor in a serial that had run since 1999. “He could ride his bike from his parish straight to his medical practice.”

“He has been here anyway,” replied Sobieraj, leading the way downstairs into the basement. “Rumour has it that when they were filming
Father Mateusz
he fell off his bike and had to be treated in hospital. It’s a well-known story – have you really not heard about it?”

He waved his hand in an indeterminate way. What should he say? That no, he hadn’t, because he hadn’t been socializing, but had been going through a depression in solitude? He steered the conversation onto the hospital. He really was surprised – he had been expecting a dismal building stinking of mould, some sort of old army huts in the
city centre, but although admittedly it had the feel of the 1980s, this one was almost attractively done up inside. It was modest and nice, the doctors were smiling and the nurses were young, as if they were making an advert for the National Health Fund. Even the autopsy room wasn’t disgusting – compared with the Warsaw morgue inundated with corpses it was like a charming B&B alongside a barrack at a labour camp. On the one and only dissecting table lay the alabaster remains of Elżbieta Budnik.

Szacki tried to think of her as Budnik’s wife, but he couldn’t do it. He had never admitted it to anyone, but in the presence of corpses he was incapable of thinking about them as people who were recently alive; treating them like pieces of meat was the only thing that prevented him from going insane, even though he had had such a lot to do with death. He knew the same thing went on in the pathologists’ heads.

As he stared at the unsettlingly white corpse, naturally he noticed some particular features. Dark blonde hair, a slightly turned-up nose, narrow hips with prominent pelvic bones, small breasts. She certainly would have looked different if she had had children. Was she pretty? He had no idea. Corpses are always just corpses.

His gaze kept constantly returning to the throat, slashed open repeatedly, almost right down to the spine – in the view of the Jews, and probably the Arabs too, it was the most humane way of inflicting death. Did that mean she hadn’t suffered? He sincerely doubted it; nor was he convinced by the humanity of kosher abattoirs.

The door slammed. Szacki turned round, and by some miracle he managed firstly not to make a surprised face, and secondly not to step back at all. Dressed in an anatomist’s gown, the newcomer appeared to represent some humanoid race of giants. Six foot six tall, as wide across the shoulders, with the physique of a bear, he could have piled coal into a boiler with his hands faster than with a shovel. Onto this enormous body was fixed a head with a kindly, beaming face, and the straw-coloured hair was tied in a small ponytail. A butcher from a long line of butchers, who had hacking carcasses in their genes. Could there have been a better place for him?

Overcoming his alarm, Szacki took a step forwards and held out a hand to say hello.

“Teodor Szacki, district prosecutor.”

The giant smiled sympathetically and shyly, wrapping Szacki’s palm in the warm mound of meat that was attached to his forearm.

“Paweł Ripper, pleased to meet you. Basia told me about you.”

He didn’t know if it was a joke, so just in case he took it at face value. The giant took a pair of rubber gloves from the pocket of his gown and pulled them on with a snap as he went up to the table. The prosecutors withdrew to some small plastic chairs placed against the wall. The doctor clapped his hands, and the shock wave set the door shuddering.

“Jeepers, she only just did a show with my kids.”

“I’m sorry, Paweł. I’d have taken her somewhere else but I trust you. If it’s too hard… I know you knew Ela…”

“It’s not Ela any more,” said Paweł, pressing a button on a Dictaphone. “It is the sixteenth of April 2009, external examination and dissection of the remains of Elżbieta Budnik, age forty-four, conducted by Paweł Ripper, forensic medicine expert, at the anatomical pathology department of the Health Maintenance Organizations Group in Sandomierz. Also present: prosecutors Barbara Sobieraj and Teodor Szacki. External examination…”

Luckily Ripper’s large frame shielded most of the activities he was performing, so Szacki and Sobieraj could immerse themselves in conversation. There was no point in tormenting the giant with questions until he knew more than they did. Szacki told Sobieraj about his conversation with Budnik. Obviously, the victim had not reached Basia’s place either on Monday, or ever, and the last time the two women had been in touch was on Sunday, when they had wished each other a Happy Easter over the phone.

“How did you know he was lying? Intuition?”

“Experience.”

Then he told her about his correspondence with the knife collector’s magazine called
Thrust
. As his tale continued, the blood drained from her face and her eyes grew larger and larger.

“Tell me you’re joking!” she gasped at last.

He denied it, surprised by her reaction.

“You have no idea what that means, do you?” She had to raise her voice because of the background noise made by the saw with which Ripper was cutting through the breastbone.

“It means that whoever planted that knife is hoping the matter will leak out to the media and that the traditional Polish-Jewish hysteria will flare up – it’ll be harder for us to work amid that hysteria, because we’ll be spending more time at press conferences than doing our jobs,” said Szacki. “But it’s all right, I’ve survived that sort of storm before. The media will get bored with it all in three days.”

Sobieraj was listening to him, while at the same time shaking her head. She winced as she heard an unpleasant cracking sound. It was Ripper, cutting through the cadaver’s ribs.

“It won’t be ordinary hysteria,” she said. “The journalists will hang around here for weeks. Sandomierz is at the centre of the so-called legend of blood, and the history of Polish-Jewish relations alternates between either nice, friendly cohabitation or recriminations and bloody pogroms – the last anti-Semitic killings happened here just after the war. If someone, God forbid, uses the term ‘ritual murder’, it’ll be the end.”

“Ritual murder is a fairy tale,” replied Szacki calmly. “And everyone knows it’s a fairy tale that was told to children to make them behave, otherwise the big bad Jew would come and eat them. Let’s not get hysterical.”

“It’s not quite a fairy tale. A Jew is not a wolf or a wicked queen, he’s a real person, whom you can make complaints about. You know what it was like. The Christian mother would fail to keep an eye on her child, then up and scream that the Jews had kidnapped and murdered it. One thing led to another, and it would turn out that very few people actually liked those Jews – someone owed them some money, and as an excuse had come up, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to set fire to a few of those child-killers’ cottages and workshops.”

“All right, in that case it’s not a fairy tale, but ancient history. There aren’t any Jews, there aren’t any workshops, there’s no one to accuse,
or to set on fire. Whoever planted that razor is certainly very keen for us to follow that trail.”

Sobieraj let out a loud sigh. In the background Ripper was monotonously dictating for the record that each successive organ bore no signs of injury or pathological change.

“Wake up, Teodor. Sandomierz is the capital of the universe for the idea of ritual murder. The place where accusations of kidnapping children and the resulting pogroms were once as regular as the seasons of the year. The place where the Church endorsed that sort of bestial attitude, virtually institutionalized it. The place where to this day there’s a painting hanging in the cathedral showing Jews murdering Catholic children. As part of a series about Christian martyrdom. The place where everything possible has been done to sweep that bit of history under the carpet. Now, as I think about it, my God, that is about as revolting as it gets…”

Szacki gazed at the dissecting table now revealed by Ripper, who was at a small table next to it, cutting up Elżbieta Budnik’s internal organs. He would not have used the word “revolting”; the image before his eyes – an open corpse with the skin hanging to either side and the white tips of the ribs sticking out of the rib cage – was horrid, but not revolting. Death in its finality was characterized by physiological elegance. Peace.

“It’s revolting that someone is trying to connect that with Ela and Grzegorz.”

He gave her an enquiring look.

“All his life Grzegorz has fought against that superstition, fought to have it talked about the right way, as a black page in our history, and not some sort of eccentric tradition practised by our ancestors. For years on end he has tried to have the painting removed, or at least get it provided with an appropriate sign, saying it was still here as a memento of Polish anti-Semitism, a reminder of what hatred can lead to.”

“And?”

“The Church has its own way of dealing with things like that. They haven’t taken it down or put up a sign. When there was too much fuss about it, they hid it behind a screen, and hung a portrait of the pope on
the screen, and they pretend it doesn’t matter. If it was a mosaic on the floor rather than a painting, they’d probably have covered it with a rug.”

“Very interesting, but none of that is of any significance. Whoever planted the ritual knife wants us to get involved in all that – paintings, history, legends, so we’ll start traipsing around churches, sitting in libraries and talking to academics. It’s a smokescreen, I have no doubt. I’m just worried it’s a well-prepared smokescreen, and that if someone’s putting himself to so much effort to send us up that track, he might be too clever for this case to be solved at all.”

Ripper came up to them, holding in his gigantic paw a small plastic bag with a little metal object in it. His gown was surprisingly clean, almost without any trace of blood.

“My assistant will sew her up. Let’s go and have a chat.”

They drank coffee out of plastic cups. It was so disgusting that all the patients here must have ended up on the gastroenterology ward sooner or later, Szacki was sure of it. “Jack” – it turned out that really was his nickname, what a surprise – had changed, and in a grey polo neck he looked like a large boulder with a little pink ball on top.

“I’ll tell you the whole story, but it’s fairly self-evident. Someone cut her throat with a very sharp surgical instrument. But it wasn’t a scalpel or a razor blade, because the cuts are too deep. The large cut-throat razor you showed me in the photos would fit perfectly. All that happened while she was still alive, but she must have been unconscious, otherwise she’d have defended herself, and it wouldn’t look as if it were done with such…” – for a moment he sought the right word – “…precision. But she was undoubtedly still alive, because there is no blood in her. Forgive me for the details, but that means that at the moment when the jugular vein was cut there was still pressure in the circulatory system, capable of pumping blood from the body. She also has congealed blood in her ears, which probably means that at the moment of death she was hanging upside down – like, if you’ll pardon the expression, a cow in an abattoir. What a screwed-up degenerate must have done that. He also took the trouble to wash her – she must have been covered in blood.”

“We must look for the blood,” Szacki thought aloud.

“You must also find out what this is,” said Ripper, handing them the small plastic evidence bag. Szacki examined it carefully and gulped; the little bag gave off the faint meaty aroma of the anatomy lab. Inside there was a metal badge about a centimetre across the diagonal, the kind worn in a shirt or jacket lapel. Not with a safety pin, but a fat spike to which you have to attach a clasp from the other side. It looked old. As Sobieraj leant forwards to inspect the piece of evidence, her ginger hair tickled Szacki’s cheek. It smelt of camomile. The prosecutor glanced at her brow, furrowed in concentration, and her dense freckles which were managing to break free from under a layer of foundation. There was something in this sight that he found touching. A little ginger-haired girl who had grown up and become a woman, but still wanted to hide the freckles on her nose.

“I’ve seen that somewhere before,” she said. “I don’t know where, but I’m sure I have.”

The badge was red and rectangular, with no lettering, just a white, geometric symbol. It looked like an elongated letter S, except that it was more geometrical than that, with the two shorter legs at more of an angle to the longer one, and it looked very like half a swastika. From the lower shorter piece there was also a small tail sticking upwards.

“She had this in her clenched fist. I had to break her fingers to get it out,” said Ripper as if to himself, as the mild gaze of his light-blue eyes hung on some point outside the window, perhaps on one of the old historical towers of Sandomierz.