A Grain of Truth (28 page)

“One should ask oneself the question whether the people of Israel have always been nothing but the victim. Of course there is the nightmare of the Holocaust, but there is also the gory Old Testament, there’s the bombardment of Lebanon and the wall dividing Palestinian families. I’m not saying the Jews are behind the events in Sandomierz – though in that particular city, where various incidents occurred in the past, it would be horribly symbolic. What I do say is that it would be foolhardy to pretend that there is any nation in this world that is entirely incapable of aggression. For in this particular instance an assumption of that kind could lead to an escalation of the tragedy.”

Oh well, there’s nothing to be done about stupidity; he decided to cut himself off from the fuss and focus on the proof. Once again he reviewed all the statements, old and new. It didn’t look too good. The abandoned mansion on Zamkowa Street stood in a spot where no one could have seen anything, and of course no one had seen anything. Nor did any of the security cameras cover that spot. The six-digit numbers were not the numbers of old militia IDs (the militia were the police in the Communist era), and checking concentration-camp numbers and Gadu-Gadu instant messaging identification numbers had proved a blind alley, too. A small step forwards had come with Klejnocki’s hypothesis that Mrs Budnik had not actually been murdered in the same place as her husband. Her blood was found in several spots, suspiciously evenly distributed, and the situation would certainly have been different if she had been butchered there. Szacki knew this was crucial information. If the killer was so anxious for them to stop looking for the place where the first crime was committed, it must indicate his identity. Which would confirm that he definitely wasn’t a stranger to the victim. So Szacki gave orders to have the entire property carefully searched for the presence of blood. Perhaps the killer had made a mistake, spilt a little somewhere, indicating the direction from which he had come, maybe he had unwittingly left them a trail of breadcrumbs. Bread and blood – yet more twisted symbolism.

After the press conference he had another meeting with Miszczyk and Sobieraj, and they made a careful summary of everything. Almost
everything, because Szacki withheld the results of his all-night research on the Polish Underground Army – the KWP. He certainly hadn’t forgotten about it, but he hadn’t added it to the documents as an additional case hypothesis, or presented it as an important lead. Why not? Because he felt that it cast too long a shadow on this chocolate-box city for him to be able to trust anyone who’d been brought up here and was in love with the place. Apart from that, he was getting more and more caught up in the idea that they weren’t being entirely frank with him – that he was the outsider who only gets told as much as necessary, and not a word more. Perhaps that wasn’t right where Sobieraj was concerned; the friendly feeling between them was getting stronger from one conversation to the next, and Szacki was finding the principled pussy’s company a real pleasure. But she was from here, which meant he couldn’t entirely trust her.

After the meeting he went back to the case files. He had to be sure he hadn’t overlooked a single sentence, a single word, a single bit of a photograph. He had to be sure the solution to the riddle definitely wasn’t hiding in the documents.

V

The big hand on the clock above the door was nearing ten, and he was still slogging over the papers, turning every piece of the puzzle in his imagination as various hypotheses projected themselves in his mind like films. Lost in another world, he was concentrating so hard that when his mobile rang just under his nose it made him jump. County Police HQ. Is that Prosecutor Szacki? Absolutely. He had totally and utterly forgotten he was on duty today – it was easy to forget about it in Sandomierz, because usually nothing happened that required the presence of a prosecutor at the site of the incident, just the occasional accident on the bypass. He listened to the duty officer, and had the same feeling he had that morning in the shop. It couldn’t be the truth, surely someone was taking the piss.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.

In the car he took a quick look at the city map – he thought he knew where it was, but he didn’t want to risk it. It wasn’t far – how could it be? Nothing was far away here.

He passed the bus station, turned left and parked behind a police car. The darkness at the back of the student hostel for the catering college complex was illuminated by the glow of torches. As soon as he switched off the radio, the sound of singing began to invade the car.

“… rivers of our tears and blood were shed. How dire it is for all whose freedom Thou hast removed. At Thy altars we raise our plea…”

Szacki rested his head on the steering wheel in a gesture of resignation. Please, anything but that. Please let’s not have yet another patriotic shambles. With an undercoat of that Catholic, xenophobic drivel to boot. We’re better, you’re worse; we should be rewarded, you should be punished – he really couldn’t see much difference between the patriotic hymn
God Thou Hast Poland
and the Nazi anthem, the
Horst Wessel Song
. The Nazi hymn was at least less whining and wailing. He did up his jacket, assumed the steely mask of a prosecutor and went out into the cold evening air, which smelt of fog and damp. He hadn’t gone ten steps before the Marshal loomed out of the dark, barring his way in alarm.

“What are you doing here, Mr Prosecutor?”

“I’m out for a walk,” said Szacki, taken aback. “The duty officer called to say there was an incident.”

“Oh…” said the Marshal, waving. “Officer Nocul is a bit overzealous – there’s really nothing going on. Some youths just got a bit drunk and were making some noise, the neighbours were afraid it was trouble.”

“They got so drunk they lit flaming torches?” Szacki couldn’t understand where the alarm in the Marshal’s eyes was coming from. What was this all about? He strode past him decisively and headed for the gathering, which was now thundering out another patriotic anthem,
March, March, Polonia
. Oh yes, of course, he groaned inwardly, how could this incident possibly do without some crazy nationalists?

There was a group of about fifteen young men standing in the street, aged from roughly seventeen to twenty-five, some probably tipsy,
some with flashlights and burning torches. At first Szacki wondered what they were doing here; he had heard rumours about the local nationalists, and that for some reason their traditional meeting place was the old Soviet soldiers’ cemetery on the edge of town. Somehow the catering college complex didn’t seem a likely spot for patriotic rituals, unless it had something to do with bread, hell knows. The mystery was soon clarified – right behind the college complex there was a small Jewish cemetery, and in the light of the torches he could see a pyramid several metres high, made from pieces of broken Jewish gravestones.

“The Pole will die for his homeland, for the nation,” wailed the boys in black shirts. “He’s willing to bear wounds and battle’s devastation. March, march, Polonia…”

I wonder if they know that’s a Ukrainian tune, thought Szacki.

His first instinct was to disperse the company before the media descended and wrote that the sheriff of Sandomierz and his trusty Praetorian guard were busy hunting down the perpetrators of Jewish ritual murder. Bravo, Mr Prosecutor! Keep it up!
Sieg Heil!
Incidentally, it’s interesting that the tabloids the world over are all equally xenophobic. They know their boozy reader who knocks his wife about needs nothing more than to be shown an enemy whom he can burden with blame for his own failures. After a brief moment of hesitation, Szacki fought off his first instinct, nodded to the Marshal and told him to go and fetch Szyller as quickly as possible, and three Black Marias from Tarnobrzeg.

“But what for, Mr Prosecutor?” The Marshal almost had tears in his eyes.

“Right away,” barked Szacki, and there must have been something in his tone of voice that made the policeman jump to the police car in two bounds. But shortly after he came back.

“The young people get bored, you know, they get crap into their heads,” he started up again. “They’ve formed themselves a patriotic circle, it’s better than drugs, that is.”

“A patriotic circle, you say? They’re just a bunch of fascist queers.” From one moment to the next Szacki was getting more and more angry.

“But my lad is there, Mr Prosecutor. Why make a fuss? Let’s just break it up and leave it at that.”

Szacki gave him an icy look, and was just about to make a sharp remark, but he thought of Helka, who didn’t want to see him, who was growing increasingly remote and was even fading in his memories. Who was he to dish out parenting advice? He felt sorry for the policeman, and in any other situation he would have told them not to bother him and to disperse the gathering. But right now, first of all he needed an exemplary punishment, and secondly he had already begun his, let’s call it a legal experiment. Besides, he couldn’t stand nationalists, hobbyists with flaming torches – fuck the lot of them.

“There’s freedom of assembly!” a swarthy dark-haired boy, of very non-Aryan appearance, screamed at them. “We can stay here till the quiet hours and there’s bugger all you can do to us!”

Szacki smiled at him. He’d find the right clause in the Penal Code soon enough, but for the time being he wanted on the one hand to lull their vigilance, and on the other to provoke them with his own and the police’s presence.

“And freedom of speech!” added another, who looked more like the “
Lebensborn
” type. “We can say what we want, you can’t close the mouths of Poles!”

Once again, it wasn’t entirely true, but Szacki smiled at that too.

“All right, the waltz?” shouted the non-Aryan to his mates, and they all started singing to the tune of crooner Jerzy Połomski’s megahit, popular at weddings.

“There was a goy, a cunning goy, who kept falling foul of the Yids… Then the Yids said ‘oy’, we’re gonna have to deal with this kid…”

Szacki stifled a burst of laughter. This entire situation was surreal, no question, and the wedding hit converted into an anti-Semitic ditty gave it all some cabaret chic. The high-spirited gang reached the chorus.

“…the who-ole room fires with us, and hundreds of kikes bite the dust! We’re gonna crack down on the scuzz, Arafat’s troops are with us…”

On the one hand he felt satisfied, because they had just broken a paragraph of the Penal Code, on the other he felt soiled. He believed that every action starts with words, and that words of hatred lead to hatred, words of violence to violence, and words of death to death. Every massacre known to mankind has started with talk.

“…the blacks and the queers we’ll fence in with wires. Commie trash, we’ll send them to the gas, Nazi waltz on the Sabbath!”

Just as the last exclamation resounded, a police car pulled up and Szyller got out of it. In jeans and a black polo neck he looked like an old sea dog. He didn’t even glance at the patriotic youth choir, but immediately came up to Szacki.

“What sort of a farce is this?” he barked.

“Sorry to bother you, but I need your help. I thought it would be better if you silenced your little rent boys before the pilgrims come flocking to this town as if it’s the world’s biggest museum of anti-Semitism. We’ve got enough problems already.”

“What sort of nonsense is that? The fact that I am a patriot does not mean I know every berk in bovver boots.”

Szacki went closer, the old trick of invading personal space.

“Why don’t you stop screwing around, if you’ll pardon the expression?” he whispered. “Do you think an investigation relies on nothing but polite chit-chat? We’ve gone through your finances and your philanthropic activities with a fine-tooth comb, and we know exactly what sort of organizations get money from you. Of course you’ll deny everything for the statement, it’ll turn out some accountant did it behind your back, and the only patriotic organizations you know about are rosary groups. That’s for later. But for now why don’t you go and tell your lads to go home before the drunken fascists get us all into trouble?”

The men glared at each other. Szacki had no idea what Szyller was thinking, and only had one concern – not to let it show that the whole story about the finances was a bluff. After a long pause the businessman turned away and went up to the “non-Aryan”. They talked in low voices.

And that would have been enough, as far as the legal experiment went.

“Oh God, thank you, Mr Prosecutor,” said the Marshal with relief. “I was afraid you were going to… but they’re just kids. You have to understand it’s different in our town, people know each other, they’re friends, here it’s about the whole community, we’ve got to stick together, haven’t we? Even when they get stupid ideas into their heads, like celebrating that madman’s birthday. Luckily they grow out of it.”

Szacki had no idea whose birthday the policeman was on about, but he felt sorry that he’d have to cause him grief. The Tarnobrzeg Black Marias drove up from the direction of town, with their roof lights flashing but no sirens. They pulled up just as Szyller returned from his mission.

“Sorted,” he reported coldly.

“I’ll tell them to go home,” said the Marshal, but Szacki gestured to stop him.

“Nick the lot of them,” he said calmly.

“What?” screamed the Marshal and Szyller simultaneously.

“Nick the lot of them and lock them up for forty-eight hours. I can see fourteen people here – in the morning I want to see fourteen arrest sheets on my desk, not a single one less. The charges will be brought this evening.”

“But Mr Prosecutor…”

“You son of a bitch…”

“We’re not on quite such intimate terms yet, Szyller,” Szacki drawled coldly. “And as you’ve just got yourself tied up with some ultra-right-wing nationalist organizations, I’d advise you to be courteous to the forces of law and order. Please take Mr Szyller home again – the preventive measures are still in force.”

“But Mr Prosecutor…”

“Screw the cops! Screw the cops!” the patriotic song group began to chant.