A Grain of Truth (3 page)

Szacki defensively raised his hands skywards and fled into the kitchen for a smoke. He was already at the sink when he heard her call flirtatiously: “I’m waiting.” You can wait all you like, he thought, as he put on a fleece. He lit a cigarette and switched on the kettle. Outside the dark-grey roofs stood out against the pale-grey common, separated from the pale nothingness of Sub-Carpathia by the darker ribbon of the Vistula. A car crossed the bridge, two funnels of light moving through the fog. Everything in this image was monochrome, including the white window frame coated in peeling paint, and the reflection of Szacki’s pale face, milk-white hair and black top.

What a bloody dump, thought Szacki, and took a drag on his cigarette. Its red glow added some colour to the monochrome world. What a bloody hole he’d been sitting in for several months now, and if anyone had asked him how it had come about, he’d have shrugged helplessly.

First of all, there was the case. There’s always some case or other. That particular one was a thankless pain in the arse. It had all started with the murder of a Ukrainian prostitute at a brothel on Krucza Street in central Warsaw – less than a hundred yards from Szacki’s office. Usually in that sort of situation finding the corpse was the end of the matter. All the pimps and tarts would be off in minutes, for obvious reasons no witnesses would be found, and anyone who did come forwards couldn’t remember a thing; you counted yourself lucky if you actually managed to identify the body.

This time things had turned out differently. A good friend of the dead girl had appeared, the corpse had gained the name Irina,
even the pimp had gained a handsome face on a facial-composite portrait from memory, and the connection with the Świętokrzyskie province, which centred on the city of Kielce, had appeared once the case had started to get going. Szacki had spent two weeks travelling around the Sandomierz and Tarnobrzeg areas together with Olga (who was the friend), an interpreter and a guide, to find the place where the girls were being kept after arriving in Poland from further east. Olga told them what she had seen from various windows, and sometimes from behind car windscreens, the interpreter interpreted, and the guide wondered where that could be, while at the same time spinning rustic yarns that drove Szacki up the wall. A local policeman did the driving, making it plain with every twitch of his facial muscles that his time was being wasted because, as he had stated at the very start, they had closed down the only brothel in Sandomierz that summer, and along with it they had got rid of Kasia and Beata, who made a bit of extra cash on the game after work at a shop and a nursery school. The rest were small-time slappers from the catering college. But in Tarnobrzeg or Kielce – there it was quite another matter.

Nevertheless, finally they had found a house in an out-of-the-way spot in the industrial part of Sandomierz – it was the house they were looking for. In a greenhouse converted into a bedroom, they found a petite blonde from Belarus breathing her last, wasted away by gastric flu; apart from that there was no one there. The girl kept repeating on and on that they had gone to the market, and that they’d kill her. Her fear made a great impression on the rest of the expedition – but none whatsoever on Szacki. Whereas the word “market” set him thinking. The bedroom in the greenhouse was pretty big, besides which the property included a large house, a workshop and a warehouse. Szacki imagined Sandomierz on the map of Poland. A backwater with two amateur good-time girls. Churches by the dozen, quiet and sleepy, nothing going on. Not far from Ukraine. Pretty close to Belarus. Two hundred kilometres to the capital, even less to Łódź and Krakow. Altogether not a bad spot for a trafficking hub and a wholesale outlet for live goods. The market.

It turned out there was a market, and quite a big one too – a large bazaar known to the locals as the mart, a place that sold everything and anything, situated between the Old Town and the Vistula, right on the bypass. He asked the policeman what went on there. All sorts of things, he replied, but the Russkies take care of business among themselves – if you start interfering in that, you’ll only mess up the statistics. Occasionally the police pick up a kid with knock-off CDs or grass, so it won’t look as if they’re not interested.

On the one hand it seemed pretty unlikely that any gangsters could be so stupid as to traffic in people at a bazaar. On the other, there was a reason why these people weren’t busy colliding hadrons or floating companies on the stock exchange. And, in fact, the bazaar was outside the jurisdiction of the city.

They took away the sick girl, who could hardly stand, went off and found it – two large vans among the sweet stalls, supposedly full of clothes, but in fact containing twenty girls chained up, all of whom had come here in search of a better world. It was the Sandomierz police force’s biggest success since the time they had recovered a stolen bicycle, for a month the local papers wrote about nothing else, and Szacki briefly became a small-town celebrity. The autumn had been beautiful.

And he liked it here.

And then he thought: what if?

They were having a drink at the Modena pizzeria not far from the prosecutor’s office, he was already quite well oiled, and he asked in a naive way if they happened to have any vacancies. Yes, they did. It only happened once every twenty years, but just at that moment they did.

And so he was to start a wonderful new life. Pick up girls in clubs, go running along the Vistula each morning, revel in the fresh air, have some adventures, feel uplifted, and finally find the greatest love of his life and grow old with her in a house covered with vines somewhere near Piszczele Street. So it’d be a short walk to the market square, to be able to sit down at the Mała Café or the Kordegarda restaurant and have a cup of coffee. When he first moved here, this image was so vivid that he even found it hard to call it a plan or a dream. It was
a reality which had entered his life and started to take effect – simple as that. He could remember the exact moment when he had sat on a bench outside the castle, basking in the autumn sunshine, and seen his own future so clearly that the tears almost came to his eyes. Finally! Finally he knew exactly what he wanted.

Well, to put it subtly, he had been wrong. To put it unsubtly, he had thrown the life he had spent years building down the toilet in exchange for a sodding pipe dream, and now he was left with nothing, which felt so terrible that it even gave him a sense of exoneration for his own bad behaviour. Absolutely and exactly nothing.

Instead of being the star of the capital city’s prosecution service, he was an outsider who prompted mistrust in a provincial city, which was in fact dead after six p.m. – but unfortunately not because the citizens had been murdering one another. They didn’t murder each other at all. They didn’t even try to commit murder. They didn’t commit rape. They didn’t organize themselves into criminal gangs. They rarely attacked one another. Whenever Szacki mentally browsed the catalogue of cases he was working on, he got a bad taste in his mouth. It couldn’t be true.

Instead of a family, he had loneliness. Instead of love, loneliness. Instead of intimacy, loneliness. The crisis triggered by his pitiful – as well as brief and mutually unsatisfying – affair with a journalist, Monika Grzelka, had pushed his marriage into a hole from which it had no chance of digging itself out. They had carried on a bit longer, as if for the good of the child, but by then it was in its feeble, dying phase. He had always thought he was the one who deserved more, and that Weronika was dragging him down. Meanwhile, less than six months after their final parting she had started dating an up-and-coming lawyer a year younger than herself. Recently she had casually informed Szacki that they had decided to live together at the man’s house in Warsaw’s Wawer district, and that maybe he should meet and talk to Tomasz, who was now going to be bringing up his daughter.

He really had lost everything there was to lose. He had nothing and nobody, on top of which, of his own free will, he had become an exile in a place he didn’t like and that didn’t like him. Calling Klara, whom
he had picked up in a club a month ago and then sent packing three days later, when in the light of day she didn’t seem either pretty, or intelligent, or interesting, had been an act of desperation, the ultimate proof of his downfall.

He stubbed out his cigarette and went back to the monochrome world. Only briefly – some long red fingernails appeared on his fleece. He closed his eyes to hide his irritation, but he couldn’t muster the courage to be cruel to the girl, whom first of all he had seduced, and to whom now he was still giving false hopes that there might be something between them.

He went to bed like a good boy to perform some boring sex. Klara wriggled away underneath him, as if trying to make up for the lack of tenderness and fantasy. As she gazed at him, she must have noticed something in his face that made her try even harder. She squirmed and began to moan.

“Oh yes, fuck me, I’m yours, I want to feel you deep inside.”

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki tried to control himself, but he couldn’t, and burst out laughing.

III

No corpse looks good, but some look worse than others. The cadaver lying in the ravine below the medieval walls of Sandomierz belonged to the latter category. One of the policemen was mercifully covering the woman’s nakedness, when the prosecutor appeared at the scene of the murder.

“Don’t cover her up yet.”

The policeman looked up.

“For goodness’ sake, I’ve known her since nursery school – she can’t lie there like that.”

“I knew her too, Piotr. It doesn’t really mean anything now.”

Prosecutor Barbara Sobieraj gently raked aside some leafless twigs and kneeled beside the corpse. Tears blurred her view of it. She had often seen dead bodies, usually dragged out of car wrecks on the
bypass, sometimes even the corpses of people whom she knew by sight. But never anyone she knew personally. And certainly not an old friend. She knew, surely better than others, that people commit crimes and that you can fall victim to them. But this – this couldn’t be true.

She coughed to clear her throat.

“Does Grzegorz know yet?”

“I thought you’d tell him. After all, you know…”

Barbara glanced at him, and was just about to erupt, but she realized the Marshal – as this policeman was known in Sandomierz – was right. For many years she had been a close friend of the happy couple, Elżbieta and Grzegorz Budnik. At one time there had even been a rumour that if Elżbieta hadn’t come back from Krakow when she did, then who knows – some people had already heard hints that Barbara and he were an item. Gossip and ancient history, but actually, if anyone was going to tell Grzegorz, it should be her. Unfortunately.

She sighed. This wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a mugging or an assault or a rape committed by drunken thugs. Someone must have put himself to a lot of trouble to kill her, then carefully to undress her and lay her in these bushes. And that too… Barbara was trying not to look, but every now and then her gaze went back to the victim’s mutilated neck. Slashed repeatedly from side to side, her throat looked like a gill, thin flakes of skin, with bits of the veins, larynx and oesophagus visible between them. Meanwhile the face above this macabre wound was strangely calm, even smiling a little, which, combined with the unusual plaster whiteness of the skin, gave it an unreal, statue-like quality. It occurred to Barbara that maybe someone had murdered Elżbieta in her sleep, or while she was unconscious. She seized onto this thought and tried hard to believe it.

The Marshal came up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m awfully sorry, Basia.”

She gave him the nod to cover up the corpse.

IV

Holes like this one do have their good side: nothing’s ever far away. As soon as he got the call from the boss, with a sigh of relief Szacki abandoned Klara and left his rented bachelor pad in the apartment block on Długosz Street. Small, ugly and neglected, it had one advantage – its location, in the Old Town, overlooking the Vistula and the historic secondary school founded by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. He emerged from the building, and walked to the market square at a rapid pace, slipping on the wet cobblestones. The air was still bracing, as in winter, but one could sense this was already the tail end of it. As the fog grew thinner with every step, Szacki hoped today would be the first of the beautiful spring days. He really did need some positive emotion in his life. Some sunshine and warmth.

He walked across the entirely deserted market square, passed the post-office building located in a fine tenement house with arcades, and reached Żydowska Street, with the glow of the flashing blue lights already visible from afar. It struck a sensitive chord in him – the sight of police light-bars in the mist was part of a ritual. The early morning call, extracting himself from Weronika’s warm embrace, getting dressed in the hallway in the dark, and planting a kiss on the sleeping child’s forehead before leaving. Then a drive across the capital as it came to life, the street lamps going off, the night buses driving down to the depot. On site, Kuzniecow’s sceptical smirk, then the corpse, and coffee at Three Crosses Square. And a clash with his grouchy lady boss at the prosecution service. “Our offices appear to be in different dimensions of time and space, Prosecutor Szacki.”

He was feeling nostalgic as he passed the synagogue building and, holding on to some branches, made his way down the escarpment. He immediately recognized the “principled pussy” by her shock of ginger hair. She was standing with her head drooping, as if she had come to say a prayer for the dead rather than conduct an inquiry. An obese cop had his hand on her shoulder, joining her in her pain. Just as Szacki had supposed – a city where there were more churches than bars was bound to leave a painful mark on its citizens. Barbara
Sobieraj turned towards Szacki, and was too surprised by the sight of him to hide the scowl of dislike that crept over her face.

He nodded to everyone in greeting, went up to the corpse and unceremoniously lifted the plastic sheet that was covering it. A woman. Between forty and fifty. Hideously slashed throat, no sign of other injuries. It didn’t look like an assault, more like a bizarre crime of passion. Well, finally a decent corpse. He was just about to cover the body again, but something was bothering him. He examined it again from head to foot, and visually scanned the crime scene. Something wasn’t right, something definitely wasn’t right, but he had no idea what, and it was a very unsettling feeling. He tossed aside the plastic sheet, and some of the policemen turned their gaze in shame. Amateurs.