A Grain of Truth (26 page)

Szacki left without saying anything; he could feel his throat tightening and the muscles on the back of his neck tensing. He was having a dream about
The Truman Show
, but he couldn’t tell the difference between dreams and reality, he couldn’t wake up. He was going mad.

He marched rapidly back to the flat on Długosz Street, passing the shop where he had bought the food earlier, and bumped into a man emerging from it, who looked like a car mechanic in a suit. The man was clearly lost in his own thoughts, but when he saw Szacki, to the prosecutor’s despair, he beamed all over.

“Congratulations,” he whispered conspiratorially. “In our times it takes courage to say these things straight out. Don’t forget we’re all with you.”

“We? What we, for God’s sake?”

“We ordinary, real Poles. Good luck!” The man squeezed his arm in a familiar way and walked off towards the town hall; only now did the right cells start working in Szacki’s brain. Please, he thought, don’t let it be true. He dashed into the shop, pushed past a boy who was saying to his friend: “Hey, get this, they haven’t got any fucking ice tea – what sort of a dump is this?”, and got to the newspaper stand. The mystery was explained in an instant – he wasn’t dreaming, he wasn’t going mad, nor was he the hero of
The Truman Show
.

On the cover of a tawdry tabloid called
Fakt
he saw himself in his favourite graphite-grey suit, standing on the steps of the Sandomierz prosecutor’s office. He had both hands raised in a gesture that yesterday had meant “no more questions”, but in the picture it looked as if he was putting up a wall against some invisible threat, with a resolute
non possumus
drawn on his gaunt – now he could see that clearly – face. The headline
Mystery Jewish Murder
? and a short text left no doubt what the prosecutor was putting a stop to.

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki (40) categorically announced yesterday that he will track down the degenerate who has already murdered two people in Sandomierz. Residents can sleep in peace – in the absence of Father Mateusz he will solve the mystery of the possibly Jewish murder. The sheriff-in-a-suit yesterday gave his personal guarantee to
Fakt
’s reporter that he will catch the villain, regardless whether it is a Jew or an Arab, even if he has to ‘drag him by the side-locks from the lousiest hole on earth’. Bravo, Mr Prosecutor! On pages 4–5 we present the details of both horrific murders, statements by witnesses and a graphic reconstruction of events.

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki closed his eyes. The knowledge that he had just become the hero of small-town Poland was horrifying.

II

Actually, he wasn’t bothered about the lack of ice tea at the shop – he didn’t really want any, or anything else for that matter – he just wanted to give vent to his disappointment and use the word “fucking”. Right from the start, this excursion hadn’t gone according to plan. At dawn he had found out his mother had put his favourite Abercrombie shirt in the wash yesterday, the one Uncle Wojtek had brought him from Milan, so he’d have to go in the extremely uncool sweatshirt he only wore for skiing, and even then he did his jacket up all the way. Unfortunately, when he got to school it turned out it didn’t matter much anyway, because Ola was off sick and wasn’t coming on the trip. He called her, she cried, so he had to comfort her, and meanwhile everyone had got on the coach, so instead of sitting at the back and drinking the vodka Walter had mixed with Cola, he had ended up in the third row next to Maciek, who had borrowed his PSP and played on it for so long he had to put it away in his pack before Kratos reached the next level. Then he felt ashamed, because what did he care? He could let Maciek have the Playstation for a while; it wouldn’t do him any harm. And when he thought things couldn’t be worse, Mrs Gołąbkowa
had hovered over him, loudly praising the story he’d written about loneliness and drooling on about what a sensitive boy he was. Then she went off. Unfortunately, she didn’t take Marysia and Stefa with her, who were sitting behind him groaning, and who spent the rest of the journey giggling into the gap between seats that he was about as sensitive as a toilet seat. No but seriously, if girls really did mature faster than boys, these ones must have had something genetically wrong with them. He gave Maciek the PSP and pretended to be asleep for the rest of the journey.

Sandomierz itself didn’t have much appeal for him – he’d already been there in the autumn, when it was still warm. His father had taken him – since splitting up with his mother, his paternal role had alternated between periods of absence and periods of over-the-top toadying. Marcin wished that just for once his old man would stop trying so hard, but he didn’t know how to tell him. He wanted to come over to his place and not find a slap-up meal waiting for him, not see a rented film and a new book in his room. He wanted to come over and see him in his underwear, with a five o’clock shadow, drinking a can of beer and saying, “sorry, mate, it’s been a crap day, go and order yourself a pizza, and watch TV or something.” At last it would have been a normal situation – he’d have found out he had a father, and not some plastic dummy following the instructions from a textbook on parenting after divorce. Of course he knew others had it worse, some people’s fathers dematerialized completely, or just sent a text message once a fortnight. But so what. Even so, the whole thing was bloody awful – not them breaking up, because that hadn’t surprised him, but the way they tried so hard now. His mother was just the same – he only had to frown and she’d be reaching for her purse to comfort her poor child from a broken home, even if she didn’t have the money to pay the bills. He was ashamed that they were so feeble, that it was so easy to manipulate them, so easy that it didn’t bring any satisfaction, like getting through a game that was too simple. It was lucky he had his violin – the violin was honest, it never cheated, it never made promises or greased up to him. It could reward him, but it could also be merciless, it was entirely up to him – yes, his relationship
with the violin was the most honest deal in Marcin Ładoń’s fairly short life to date.

Lost in cheerless thoughts and deprived of the ice tea he hadn’t really wanted, he stood aside from the group, waiting to go into the Sandomierz underground vaults. Mrs Gołąbkowa was looking at him with tears in her eyes; she must have thought he was alienating himself again, sinking into solitude, poor boy, too sensitive for the modern world. In fact he liked her, but sometimes she was such an unrealistic cretin she evoked pity. What happens to them all? They’re soft and indolent, they fall apart before your eyes like tissue paper in the rain, and then it’s a big surprise their children don’t respect them. Children – all right, he could count the virgins among his female schoolmates on a single hand. Including Ryśka, too stupid to spread her legs, and Faustyna from the Catholic family, sure to have been sewn shut with consecrated thread – that girl had definitely met with misfortune. And Ola too, but Ola was different, of course.

“Want a drop, Marcin?” Walter’s eyes were already rather glazed, and Marcin reckoned there might still be a fuss about that. He drank a little “Cola”, strong and reeking of vodka, then quickly put a fresh piece of chewing gum in his mouth.

“That’s the second bottle. We had the first one on the way to Radom.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” he said, just to say anything.

Walter slugged at the bottle like an out-and-out alcoholic, so obviously that only a blind man could have failed to notice what he was using to lubricate his fifteen-year-old body. Marcin found his showing off embarrassing, and felt ashamed of taking part in this shabby performance, so he quickly moved nearer the centre of the group, which was now going down into the Sandomierz cellars. Despite their best efforts, some of his schoolmates had failed to hide their excitement at the adventure. Only the girls were impervious to such attractions; Marysia was holding onto Stefa with one hand to avoid falling over, while writing something on her phone with the other. God knows who to – they were all here.

“…in those days Sandomierz was a rich city, one of the richest in Poland, and the so-called staple right was in force, which
meant that every travelling merchant had to display his goods for sale here, and as a result Sandomierz was a gigantic, permanently open shopping centre where you could buy anything.” At the sound of the words “shopping centre” Marysia tore her jaded gaze from her phone, but soon went back to it. “The burghers of Sandomierz grew wealthy, and out of concern for their possessions and merchandise, and also for the sake of security, over several centuries they dug cellars under the city, which as the years went by developed into an enormous labyrinth. The connected rooms reached eight storeys deep inside the loess rock, with corridors running under the Vistula all the way to the castle at Baranów, and to other neighbouring villages. To this day no one knows how many of them there actually are.”

The guide had a pleasant, cheeky voice, which didn’t alter the fact that she was deadly dull, especially if you had to listen to the same story a second time over in only a few months. But even if she hadn’t been boring, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that Marcin had already found so surprising the last time – the famous Sandomierz underground vaults looked like the cellar in a prefabricated block of flats. Brick walls, concrete ceilings, terrazzo flooring, fluorescent lights. No magic, no mystery, no nothing. Extraordinary how they’d managed to screw up an attraction like that.

“And suddenly the Mongols surrounded the city,” said the guide in a low voice, which made her sound silly instead of adding drama to her tale. “Halina Krępianka, inconsolable in her grief after losing her entire family, went to the enemy camp. There she told the Tatar chief she would guide them into the city along secret corridors, because she wanted vengeance on the citizens for dishonouring her…” The guide suddenly became embarrassed; she must have been unsure if the children understood exactly what she meant.

“Dishonoured her? So why did she run away, was she like stupid?” muttered Marysia.

“LOL,” her best friend chimed in.

“The Tatars trusted the girl, and she led them a long way into the labyrinth of corridors, but meanwhile, the citizens walled in the
entrance to the underground. All the invaders perished, and so did the heroic girl.”

“Once they twigged, like that was when they really dishonoured her.” Marysia was priceless.

“Ha ha, big LOL.”

“…and to prove that every legend contains a small grain of truth, I can tell you that to this day you can dig up human bones near here, maybe the actual remains of the Tatars who were buried alive.”

They shuffled into the next chamber, interesting in as much as it resembled a passage in a mine, and Marcin listened to the lecture on how the city was saved from collapse after the war. That was interesting, more so than legends about dumb-ass heroines. How the miners drilled shafts in the market square, how the houses in the Old Town had to be taken apart and rebuilt again, how the empty tunnels and cellars were filled in with a special substance to reinforce the rock, which was as full of holes as a sieve. He leant back against the wall; listening didn’t prevent him from staring at the thin ribbon of a lilac thong sticking out of Marysia’s hipsters. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but it bothered him a bit that almost all the girls did their best to look like tired old tarts. Good thing Ola wasn’t like that.

The guide paused for a moment, and there was total silence.

In the quiet he heard a faint, distant howling that seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth.

“Can you hear it?”

Marysia turned round to face him and pulled up her trousers.

“What are we supposed to be hearing, perv?”

“Sort of howling from deep in the ground. Oh, shush, shush, there it is…”

The girls swapped glances.

“O-M-G. Are you crazy?”

“Just listen, you really can hear howling.”

“Howling like someone’s dishonouring someone, or howling like the Devil? Coz I’m only interested in the first kind.”

“LOL.”

“Jesus, you’re such a dumb bimbo. Just shut up for a while and listen.”

“And you go and get cured, you psycho freak – I’m gonna tell Ola.”

The girls giggled together and joined the group, which was moving into the next room. Marcin stayed put, pressed his ear to the wall in various spots, and finally found one where the howling was very clearly audible. It was a weird noise, which sent shivers down his spine − the long, modulated, almost uninterrupted howling of a tortured human being or animal. Whatever was emitting that sound must have been in a pitiful state. Though maybe he was just imagining it – maybe it was the wind, something to do with the ventilation.

The light went out, and there was only a gentle glow, combined with whispers, coming from the direction in which his class had disappeared. He lay down with his ear to the floor; something about the noise was still bothering him, something he hadn’t fully heard. As he sought the best quality, he shuffled his ear across the cold flooring and heard the howling better and better; now he was sure it was coming from more than one throat. And apart from the howling there was something else, another kind of noise, familiar, animal…

He was just about to put a name to it when he felt a painful blow in his side.

“What the fuck…” The darkness was lit by the pallid gleam of a mobile phone display. “Marcin? Are you a complete twat-head?”

Marcin got up and brushed off his clothes.

“There’s this howling…”

“Sure, pal, howling on a violin. Better have a drink, Vivaldi.”

III

Chief Commissioner Dr Jarosław Klejnocki was sitting with his legs crossed, puffing on a pipe and looking at them with a calm gaze, hidden behind thick glasses. The glasses really were thick, thick enough to show the bulging shape of the lenses, and to make the bit of the profiler’s face visible behind them seem much thinner than the rest. As well as that he had short grey hair, an equally short beard, below
it a polo-neck top, a tweed jacket, suit trousers and black sports shoes in the style of House MD.