A Grain of Truth (19 page)

“What’s stopping you?”

“I can’t see the reason why you would have killed your lover. Especially in that way.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“One thing at a time. I want to hear the whole story, one thing at a time. You can start with the photograph.”

Jerzy Szyller sat without moving; the air was thick with his emotions, his hesitation, his panic as he wondered what to do.

“You don’t understand a thing. This is a small town. They’ll say for ever after that she was a whore, a loose woman.”

“The photograph. Now.”

Jerzy Szyller soon came to the conclusion that branding the love of his life as a whore was a painful thing, but not as painful as the custody
cells in Tarnobrzeg. He fetched all the things that earlier on he had painstakingly tidied away. The rug she used to wrap herself in on the sofa, her funny azure-coloured dressing gown, the album with their shared photos, and finally the photograph from the mantelpiece, in a tasteful – what else – wooden frame. Szacki understood him; if he had a photograph of himself with anyone like that one, he would have treated it like a relic. It had been taken on the Błonie meadows in Krakow, where they were sitting together on a bench, with part of the Wawel castle visible in the background. Szyller looked like Pierce Brosnan on holiday, and Ela Budnik was hanging round his neck in a crazy, playful pose, theatrically bending one leg in the style of Audrey Hepburn and pursing her lips for a kiss. He was over fifty, and she was over forty, but they looked like a couple of teenagers, with happiness radiating from every pore of their skin, brightening the picture; there was so much love in this little snap that Szacki felt sorry for Szyller. He might be the murderer, or he might not, but surely his loss was unimaginable.

The prosecutor learnt the history of the affair with all the details, and although it was clear how important these events were for Szyller, how life-changing and profound, in fact it was a banal story. A woman who thinks she is more than she actually is, and who mistakenly interprets a mid-life crisis as imprisonment in a cage in which she cannot spread her wings. A long-standing marriage, quiet stability, small-town tedium. And a guy, petty businessman and petty anti-Semite, so firmly convinced of his own unique qualities and erudition that he manages to convince her of them too, and together they get it into their heads that they and their pot-boiler romance are what great literature is made of. But it’s the usual, standard, boring stuff. With a cynicism that even Szacki himself found surprising, it occurred to him that it was only the plaster-white corpse that really gave this story grandeur.

“In the year-and-a-half of your affair, did the victim’s husband come to have any suspicions, did she tell you something?”

“No, she never said a word. But in this relationship it was easy to hide things too. He kept very unusual office hours and did a lot of
travelling. She had meetings with people from the arts at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places. Thanks to which we had some wonderful days in Bochum together on several occasions.”

“Was she planning to leave her husband?”

Silence.

“Did you talk about it? It can’t have been pleasant for you. Knowing that every night she got into bed with him, kissed him goodnight and did what married couples generally do.”

Silence.

“Mr Szyller, I realize that Sandomierz is a small town, but it’s not quite so small. People must occasionally get divorced here, while others come together and start a new life. I understand that in your situation it wouldn’t have been difficult. No children, freelance occupations. In fact she could have just sent him the papers by post.”

Szyller gestured vaguely, as if to say there were so many complicated nuances to this matter that it couldn’t be put into words. Szacki was reminded of how Budnik had made him think of Gollum, for whom nothing had any meaning but his “precious”. What would he have done if he had found out someone was taking his precious away from him? And not just anyone, but a familiar adversary, a man whose views he and Ela had probably laughed at in bed together, whose emphatic way of talking they may have mocked and imitated. Maybe to cover her tracks she had complained about having to go and see him, saying what an odd sort he was, you know, trying to be such an alpha male, but a boor under the surface, but what can you do? Thanks to him we’ll get something done for the children. And suddenly he finds out she didn’t sit it out at his place with a martyred look on her face, talking about the poor little children, but rode him in a sweat, squirmed underneath him, begged him to fuck her harder and licked his sperm off her lips.

I’m off. Goodbye. You were right, you correctly sensed throughout our relationship that you would never have me entirely. I’m too good for you – I always have been.

Is that enough for murder? Absolutely.

“On Monday I was expecting her.”

“Sorry?”

“On Easter Monday she was supposed to be coming to me and staying for good, and on Tuesday we were going to leave and never return.”

“Does that mean she was going to tell her husband about you?”

“I don’t know.”

Holy fuck! Szacki got out his phone and called Wilczur; the old policeman answered at once.

“Go and arrest Budnik on the double, and I need someone for security on Słoneczna Street, for Jerzy Szyller. We’re going to do a search at Szyller’s and then confront Budnik. Chop chop.”

Wilczur was a pro. He just said “Got it” and hung up. The businessman stared in amazement.

“What do you mean, ‘a search’? I’ve told you everything, I’ve shown you everything already.”

“Don’t be naive – people show and tell me things every day of the week. At least half of it is a smokescreen, half-truths and plain old lies. Considering your degree of intimacy with the victim…”

“Elżbieta.”

“…as well as a search I should have the garden dug up and you locked up until all the issues are explained. Which I might do anyway.”

“My lawyer…”

“Your lawyer will be able to write a complaint,” snapped Szacki; there was anger rising in him that he couldn’t restrain. “Do you have any idea what crucial information you have been concealing? Your lover has been murdered, and you, who know facts that could be vital, sit quiet, because someone’s going to say nasty things about her? What sort of a citizen and patriot are you if you don’t give a shit about justice – which I’ll remind you, is defined as ‘the mainstay of the power and stability of the Republic’! Nothing but a common small-town anti-Semite – it’s enough to make you throw up!”

Jerzy Szyller leapt to his feet, and red blotches appeared on his handsome face. He moved rapidly towards Szacki, and just as the prosecutor was sure they were about to come to blows, his phone rang. Wilczur, no doubt to say it was all arranged, good.

“Yes?”

Szacki listened for a while.

“I’ll be right there.”

He ran out, colliding at the garden gate with a policeman in uniform, and told him to guard Szyller.

VI

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki sat down on the sofa in the Budniks’ sitting room, because he had genuinely started to feel weak. The blood was throbbing in his temples, he couldn’t fix his eyes on a single point, he had a strange tingling in his fingers and a nasty, metallic taste in his mouth. He took a deep breath, but it didn’t bring him relief, quite the opposite, he felt a stabbing in his lungs, as if the air were full of tiny needles.

Or maybe it wasn’t his lungs, but his heart? He closed his eyes, counted to ten and back again.

“Is everything all right?” asked Basia Sobieraj.

Everyone had been suddenly uprooted from home. Sobieraj was wearing jeans and a black fleece, Wilczur was in strange brown trousers that looked as if there were no legs inside them and a thick polo neck, and the two policemen were sporting anoraks from the bazaar, so ugly that anyone could have guessed they were policemen. Once again that day Szacki felt like a cretin in his suit. And that was just one of the reasons.

“No, Basia,” he replied calmly. “Nothing is all right, because a vital witness, and since recently the main suspect in the case of a highly conspicuous, shocking murder, despite being guarded round the clock by two policemen, has vanished. And although of course it is of no practical significance now, please, I implore you, satisfy my curiosity and tell me: how the fuck is that possible?”

The policemen shrugged in unison.

“Mr Prosecutor, we never moved a step, we swear. When we were hungry earlier on, we called the lads to bring us something, they can vouch for us. We’ve been sitting outside this place non-stop.”

“Did he go outside?”

“About noon he went into the garden a few times. Did some trimming, put on the sprinkler, tightened a screw in the letter box. It was all noted down.”

“And then?”

“He hung about the house, and when it got darker we saw some lights come on and go off.”

“Was someone watching the house from the escarpment side?”

“But there’s a two-metre-high wall there, Mr Prosecutor.”

Szacki looked at Wilczur. The inspector tapped ash into a pot holding a rubber plant and cleared his throat.

“We’ve got all the exit routes covered, we’re checking cars and buses. But if he took off on foot through the bushes, it looks pretty black.”

Oh well, there was absolutely no way of doing it on the quiet.

“Inform the regional police stations in the surrounding area, I’ll issue an arrest warrant, you draft a wanted notice and arrange via Kielce to get it to all the media as fast as possible. It’s a fresh trail, the guy’s not a pro, just an ageing town councillor, we’ll get a dressing-down from everyone of course, but it should work. At least we’ve got a suspect, that’s something solid, and we’ll try to present it as a success for the forces of law and order.”

“It won’t be easy,” muttered Sobieraj. “The media will jump on it.”

“All the better. They’ll trumpet it far and wide, and every shop assistant will know who Budnik is before he gets hungry enough to go and buy himself a bun.”

Szacki stood up suddenly and his head began to spin. He automatically grabbed Sobieraj’s arm, and the woman looked at him suspiciously.

“Relax, there’s nothing wrong with me. Let’s get to work – we’ll fill out the forms at the prosecutor’s office, you get the press release ready, we’ll touch base in half an hour, and in an hour I want to see it on the TV news ticker.”

Before leaving he cast an eye over the Budniks’ bourgeois sitting room. Once again a little alarm bell jangled in his mind. He felt like someone staring at two pictures with ten tiny differences to spot.
He was certain something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what. He stepped back into the middle of the room, the policemen went past him and left, and Sobieraj stopped in the doorway.

“Is it a long time since you were here?” he asked.

“I don’t know, about a month ago, just briefly, for coffee.”

“Has anything changed?”

“Something’s always changing here, or rather it used to. Ela used to move the furniture around every few months, change the lighting, add flowers and fabrics, and created an entirely new flat out of the same basic elements. She claimed she preferred making controlled changes than waiting until her soul rebelled and started looking for changes without involving her.”

He gave her a protracted stare.

“Yes, I know how that sounds now.”

“But apart from the fact that the room looks different, or has a different decor, is there anything missing? Something that was always here?”

Basia Sobieraj took a careful look around.

“There used to be a bar for doing pull-ups in the kitchen door frame – Grzegorz did exercises on it. But it was always falling off – they must have thrown it away at last.”

“Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so. Why?”

He waved to say it didn’t matter, and together they left the small house on Katedralna Street, right in the shadow of the church, which was huge from this angle; its severe Gothic lines stood out sharply against the starry sky. There was a photo of Ela Budnik hanging in the hall from ten or fifteen years ago. She was very beautiful, very girlish, brimming with life, as they say. And very photogenic, Szacki told himself, as he thought about the photo on Szyller’s mantelpiece.

VII

It was coming up to nine in the evening. Basia Sobieraj had finally gone home, the boss had left them earlier, and Prosecutor Teodor Szacki
was sitting despondently in the office, listening to the din of young people and the muffled sounds of disco music; the entertainment had started at a club across the street. He felt ill at ease, and for a couple of hours had been feeling physical anxiety, physiological fear, which did not originate from any actual threat but was just there, flooding his entire body – his arms were afraid, his neck was afraid, and so were his internal organs. It would have been quite funny, if it hadn’t also been tiring and protracted, as if a short stab of terror of the kind that everyone knows had been going on for hours. The more he thought about it, the worse he felt.

He started walking about the office.

Written out in brief, presented to Misia – who had come from home with sandwiches and a thermos of tea laced with raspberry juice – and stuck in the file, the case hypothesis seemed almost one hundred per cent certain. Grzegorz Budnik has been left, or has found out about his wife’s affair with Jerzy Szyller. The jilted man’s fury, regret and pain, and on top of that his awareness that this could be the ruin of the political career he has spent years building, is bound to lead to a row. During the row he squeezes her neck a bit too hard and Elżbieta Budnik loses consciousness. Budnik panics – he’s killed his wife. He watches
CSI
, he knows his prints are on her neck, so he decides to stage the throat slashing, and decides while he’s about it to stir up hysteria based on Catholic-Jewish relations – he’s from Sandomierz, he knows the subject. He may even be surprised when litres of blood pour out of his wife, and perhaps when it’s too late he realizes she was still alive. He knows the town, he knows every passage through the courtyards and he knows where every camera is located. He takes advantage of this knowledge to plant the corpse outside the old synagogue without being noticed. But when Szyller gets back to Sandomierz, he cracks. He knows that if the investigator finds out about the affair, he will become the main suspect. Once again he puts his knowledge of the town to use, this time to escape from it under the very noses of the policemen guarding him.