A Grain of Truth (31 page)

Basia emerged from Szyller’s kitchen and stood next to them.

“Well?” she asked. “Do you think this is the next in a series? In theory it’s the same style. The victims disappear from home without a trace, and a couple of days later they turn up drained of their blood.”

“Take that back, this one hasn’t turned up yet. Keep your fingers crossed for Szyller to be found alive, confess all, and for us to have it off our plates.”

Click. Once again something clicked into place in his mind. Was it something he had said, or Sobieraj?

“But you’re right, I thought of that. Only how can it be that Budnik evaporated in the Old Town area right under the policemen’s noses,
but here someone had to go to the trouble of knocking them out? Even though theoretically it’s easier to vanish from here, through the courtyard, and on across the park.”

“Someone didn’t want to risk it.”

“But earlier on he did? Why should abducting Budnik be less risky than abducting Szyller? Something’s wrong here.”

Sobieraj shrugged and sat down on the sofa. She looked pale.

“I feel a bit faint, but I should go and see my father in hospital,” she said quietly.

“Here in Sandomierz?” he said in surprise.

“Yes, I feel awful – lately I’ve been there to see dead bodies more often than to visit him. But it’s all because of him I ended up here,” she sighed, and reached for a bowl of crispy snacks standing on the table. Szacki’s gaze automatically followed her hand; her nail polish was a funny colour, very dark pink.

“Stop!” he bellowed.

She withdrew her hand and looked at him in horror. Without a word, Szacki pointed at the bowl, from which seconds before she had been about to help herself. There weren’t any crisps in it, or salt sticks, poppy-seed pretzels, crackers, or corn puffs. There were – what else could there be? – some broken pieces of matzo, perforated and browned on the bumps in the usual way.

“Bloody joker,” he muttered. “Strange he didn’t pour ketchup over it – he must have been in a hurry.”

They all leant over the wooden snack bowl as if were a sort of ritual vessel.

“What’s the origin of the matzo, anyway?” asked one of the policemen.

“When they fled from Egypt, they had no time to wait for the dough to rise,” explained Wilczur in his sepulchral voice, “so they had to bake some provisions quickly, and the result was matzos.”

Something clicked in Szacki’s head, and this time it was loud enough for him to understand what he should do.

“Put off your visit to your father,” he said quickly to Sobieraj, “and do a thorough search here – this time it’s not a mouldy old ruin, have
them collect trace evidence, and get the matzos to the lab as fast as possible of course. I’ve got to fly.”

“What? Where? Where are you going?” Sobieraj stood up, alarmed by his haste.

“To the church!” shouted Szacki and ran out.

Basia Sobieraj and Inspector Leon Wilczur exchanged surprised looks. Moments later she sat down, and he shrugged and tore the filter from a cigarette. He looked round for a while, trying to find a waste bin or an ashtray, and finally put the filter in his pocket.

III

These days the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Sandomierz was like a besieged fortress. There were journalists hanging around the railings, and access to the building was guarded by members of the clergy, trusted laymen and some hastily prepared signs saying “No photography”, “No recording”, “Do not disturb the peace of God’s House” and “No entrance outside the hours of mass”. Szacki went inside, taking advantage of the fact that a pensioners’ excursion group was just emerging. He was ready to explain, and had even taken his ID card from his jacket pocket, but he wasn’t bothered by anyone. Maybe they’ve recognized me as one of them, the fearless sheriff who doesn’t kowtow to Jews, he thought grumpily as he walked through the portal. He stopped in the side nave, waiting for his eyes to get used to the gloom.

He was alone. Well, almost alone. A monotonous shuffling noise told him his old friends from his last visit were still there. Indeed, from behind a column separating him from the central nave the sad man emerged, and started to wash the floor; soon a wet trail separated him from the west wall of the church, where the vestibule, the organ gallery and the fine organ were located, and underneath it the none-too-lovely paintings by that eighteenth-century dauber and horror fan, Charles de Prévôt. Including the one shamefully shielded by a dark red drape. Szacki strode decisively
in that direction. The sad man stopped shuffling and stared at him with an empty gaze.

“Not on the wet,” he warned, the only effect of which was that Szacki waved a hand and stepped onto the wet floor without slowing down at all. He kept going, as defiant as the sheriff in a Western, except that he slipped, staggered, and had a hard time keeping his balance by desperately waving his arms about. He was only saved by grabbing the feet of a cherub on a column.

“I said not on the wet,” the man repeated wearily, as if he had witnessed this scene hundreds of times before.

Szacki didn’t answer, walked up to the drape, detached the portrait of John Paul II and set it against the wall.

“Hello, what are you doing? That’s not allowed!” the man yelled. “Go and fetch the canon, Żasmina, there are hooligans in here again.”

“Teodor Szacki, Sandomierz district prosecution service, I’m acting in the name of the law,” cried Szacki, showing his ID to the man running towards him. And at the same time thinking that if he’d had a thousand guesses what the mournful woman washing the cathedral floor was called, he still wouldn’t have got it right.

The man stopped, unsure how to treat the intruder. But also noticeably curious to see what would happen. Meanwhile Szacki had got a grip on the plush curtain, and yanked at it with all his might. Most of the curtain hooks gave way, the curtain breathed its last gasp in the form of a cloud of dust, and fell. Sunlight breaking through a high window landed on the storm cloud and changed it into a dazzling swirl of shining particles, through which nothing could be seen. Szacki blinked and took two steps backwards to get a better view of the enormous painting.

After all the stories, he had been expecting an impact– naturalistic slaughter, strong colours and definite shapes; sub-consciously he was waiting for the old superstition to come alive before his eyes, as if instead of an old canvas he was going to see a cinema screen, and on the screen a film, not so much about ritual murder, as about modern events. As if something would twitch, something would happen, and the solution to the whole conundrum would appear. Meanwhile there
was an old canvas – well, it just looked like an old canvas, gone black, with cracked varnish, which the sunlight was bouncing off, so it was hard to make out the individual shapes.

The mournful floor cleaner must have been standing at a better angle.

“God Almighty,” he whispered, and crossed himself vigorously.

Szacki moved in his direction, and instead of crossing himself reached for his phone and called Sobieraj.

“I’m in the cathedral. Tell Wilczur I need two officers here right away for security, the technicians as soon as they’re done at Szyller’s, and you and that wrinkled old dog as soon as possible… Never mind, it’s a waste of time talking – just get over here.”

He rang off and took a photograph of the painting with his mobile. Now that his eyes had learnt to pick the less black shapes out of the sea of darkness, he could compare the original with the reproductions. In this particular instance the size was significant. He had looked at reproductions in books or on a small laptop screen, but here the representation of ritual murder was about ten square metres, as big as a small room in a flat. At first glance it looked as if this painting had come out best for de Prévôt in terms of artistry and composition, though in narrative terms it was still true to the cartoon style of the tales about martyrdom. Szacki recognized the individual stages of the legend about the blood ritual. On the right, two Jews were busy getting supplies. One, clearly the richer, in a hat and coat, was offering to buy an infant from its mother. The other was enticing a little boy with something that might have been a sweet, or maybe a toy, while at the same time grabbing hold of him by the jaw with the gesture of a buyer at a slave market. On the other side, the Jews were busy putting to death or torturing (or both at once) a child laid on a sheet. And the central area of the composition was occupied by a barrel of course – two Jews were holding a barrel bristling with nails like teeth, resembling the open maw of a fantastical sea creature, with an infant’s chubby legs sticking out of it. The dripping blood was being collected in a bowl by the ecstatic owner of a huge beak of a nose. De Prévôt wouldn’t have been himself if in presenting this macabre scene
he had not gone a step too far. There were some babies’ corpses lying about on the ground, and the horrendous image of a small body being torn apart by a dog. There was a ripped-off leg protruding from the animal’s mouth, and a second leg, some arms and a head were lying there for afters – all in separate pieces.

But Szacki hadn’t taken the photo in order to have this moving work of art about his person forever. He took it because scrawled in red paint across the painting there was a Hebrew inscription:

The rusty letters shone in the sunlight like crimson neon, making a ghoulish impression; Szacki wasn’t surprised by the mournful cleaner’s reaction, but it also occurred to him that it was the typical reflex of a Catholic at the sight of Hebrew letters – to treat them as if they were going to come down from the painting, stride across the nave and put Our Lord Jesus Christ to death all over again, amen.

Moments later Sobieraj and Wilczur appeared, at the same time as the canon and the curate, whom Żasmina had gone to fetch. They were an astonishing couple. On hearing about the canon and the curate, Szacki had been expecting comedy characters, a tubby fellow and a young chap with sticking-out red ears. But here before him stood the spitting images of Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert, as if they had just stepped off the set of
Highlander
– both devilishly handsome.

After a brief fuss, all those present made it clear to each other that it was in everybody’s interests to keep their mouths shut, and that was the only way to keep the situation calm. The investigators got on with the investigation, and the priests charged themselves with the duty of protecting the house of God, which allowed them to assume the role of spectators with impunity. They were not entirely placated, but they were less worried about the presence of the police and the prosecutors than about the prospect of a visit from the bishop, who was rushing to his cathedral from Kielce at breakneck speed, and was apparently
very, very unhappy. And as he had a well-earned reputation as a hothead, they might find today’s tribulations were still ahead of them.

“If it’s not paint, but blood, we must check if it’s human, do some DNA tests, compare it with the victims’ blood and with Szyller’s. Apart from that, every centimetre of the area around the picture will have to be screened. The inscription is high up, so whoever did it must have had to put up a ladder, get under the curtain, lean against it and hang up a bucket. That would give dozens of opportunities to leave evidence, and I must have that evidence. Even if it seems worth bugger all to us now, later on in court it might be worth its weight in gold as a small link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. So if any technician starts whining that it’s pointless, tell him to get on with it.”

Sobieraj gave him an acid look.

“Excuse me, but do you take me for a junior?”

“I’m just warning you that if some Kasia or whatever comes along who was at primary school with you, and starts insisting she’s got to take her child to the doctor and isn’t needed any more, because it’s just a detail, then you’ll tell her she’s got to stay here until late and photograph everything, even if she’s never going to speak to you again. Got it?”

“Don’t teach me…”

“Thirty-nine.”

“My age has nothing to do…”

“I’ve conducted thirty-nine murder cases, and twenty-five of them ended with a conviction. And I’m not asking you now, Basia. I’m giving orders. The prosecution service is a hierarchical institution, not a shining example of democracy.”

Her eyes darkened, but she didn’t say anything, she just nodded. Behind her Wilczur stood motionless, leaning against a confessional. The curate watched the scene with delight; evidently he knew Dan Brown not just from theory as Satan in a writer’s skin, but had also devoted several evenings to a thorough study of his enemy. He cleared his throat.

“The first and third words are exactly the same. It must be some sort of code,” he said quietly.

“I even know what sort,” barked Szacki. “It’s called an alphabet. Do you know Hebrew, Father?” he asked the canon without much hope, convinced that in reply the priest would cross himself and start performing an exorcism.

“I can read it. The first and third word is ‘
ein
’, and the middle one is ‘
tehet
’ or ‘
tahat
’. Unfortunately I don’t know what they mean. ‘
Ein
’ might be one, like the German, but then it would be Yiddish, not Hebrew.” He must have noticed Szacki’s look of amazement, because he added cuttingly: “Yes, we had Bible studies with elements of Hebrew at the seminary. But I didn’t always pay attention – it was the first class of the day and we were usually tired in the mornings after the pogroms.”