A Grain of Truth (37 page)

“But do you really want me to tell you about this?” He could hear the hesitation in Kuzniecow’s voice. That was painful – in the old days Oleg would never have thought of censoring himself while talking to his friend.

“Of course, what do you mean? I want everything to be best for her, if she’s doing all right, then Helka’s all right too. Besides, you know, I’m curious.”

“OK,” said Kuzniecow after a pause long enough to be noticeable. “We went round to their place, I didn’t even have to invite myself,
Weronika called to say they’d moved, Helka wanted to see us, and we must meet Tomek.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know what your place is like, if you’re living in a palace by now with a garden and a view of the Vistula, but your ex has gone up in the world a bit. It might not be a villa in Konstancin, but it’s a pretty pleasant semi in the Wawer district, tucked in behind Patriots’ Street. There’s a patch of garden with a hammock for Helka, and it’s nice inside, you know, not Ikea style, more like leather suites and sideboards, you can see the guy’s not a nouveau but from an old family.”

“So what’s he like?”

“All right, I’d say. Older than you, bigger build, less grey hair. Good looking I suppose; Natalia says he looks like the bloke in
Gladiator
, but from his later films. A bit of a bore if I’m going to be honest – I find all those legal advice stories rather tedious, but maybe we just have to go along with it.”

We just have to go along with it. Pity you haven’t found the time in half a year to come and visit me, mate.

“But Weronika seems, well, contented.”

Censored. He was going to say: happy.

“Helka too, so maybe altogether it has worked out well, eh? I was pissed off with you before, because frankly I didn’t know a better couple, but something must have been wrong, if you’ve sorted out your lives so well now. Ha, I think it gave Natalia something to think about, because she’s started wearing lace and baking cakes. Yeah, there really is some truth in it, you’ve got to keep a bird on a short leash. Apropos birds, how’s it going?”

“Bachelor life, not too dull, I had a surprise from a local lady judge the other day.”

“A judge? Wait a moment. Five years for a law degree, two years pupilage, three years as an associate… Are you trying to say you’ve changed your life just to bonk birds over thirty? Is this a joke? But do I understand you’ve got a bit of variety there?”

“More or less.” Szacki was finding this conversation tiring.

“God, it’s the most fantastic feeling in the world to remove the blouse from a new body. How I envy you.”

There’s nothing to envy, thought Szacki, who knew what purely physical sex meant and, like every man, kept the truth about it to himself. The truth about the fact that a body reduced to just a body consisted of nothing but irritating imperfections. A sour smell, shapeless breasts in an ugly bra, pimples on the upper chest, stretch marks around the navel, the sweaty edge of the knickers, pubic hairs that got in between one’s teeth, a corn on the side of the little toe and a crooked toenail.

“Bah!” he said, just to say anything.

“Yeeeah,” said Kuzniecow dreamily. “But hold on, I called about something else. Just tell me how things are with Helka – Weronika said it’s up and down.”

“Yes, it is. She’s coming to me this weekend, but actually, somehow, I understand she’s pissed off with me for everything. I dunno, maybe I’ll start coming to Warsaw more often.” Szacki couldn’t bear to listen to himself. He was getting lost, losing the plot, talking complete bullshit.

“Oh, quite, coming here more often’s a great idea. We’ll be able to go for a drink like the old days. Or maybe I’ll drop in on you, what do you say? But not in the near future – you know what it’s like.”

“Sure, I know. Listen, if—”

“No, you listen, it’s probably rubbish, but you might find it useful.”

“Go on.”

“My dearly beloved son Sasha told me he was yakking with his only mate. On Monday the mate was on a school trip to Sandomierz, and, aha, apparently the mate’s extremely musical, he’s got perfect pitch, he writes music, plays instruments and all that. That’s important. He doesn’t take drugs or drink, and that’s important too.”

As Szacki listened, he felt a slight tension in his muscles. Was it really God’s idea of a joke to have the breakthrough come from his old crime-fighting partner?

“Apparently the mate went round some vaults under the Old Town – have you got something like that there?”

“Yes, it’s a major attraction.”

“And he claims that in those vaults, in a room with archaeological bits and pieces, he heard strange noises coming from behind the wall. Barely audible, distant, but quite distinct.”

“What sort of noises?”

“Howling. Howling and barking.”

V

The howling and barking really is unbearable. Even with ear plugs the air is quivering with unpleasant noises, I can feel it through my skin, I can feel it as I watch the drops of saliva whirling in the lamplight, I can smell it in the bitter, animal odour. It’s one of those moments when I’ve already had enough, I want it to be over and done with so I can start all over again. I feel irritation and I feel fear, and I know each of these feelings is a very bad counsellor. I must make a call. Pointlessly I reach for the mobile and silently curse – of course there’s no question of getting a signal in this place. I know I must go out, and I know I desperately don’t want to come back down here. Maybe I don’t have to? I know the way, I only have to set the machinery in motion and leave. If it all works out as it should, there won’t be any traces left. I’ll guide them here later, so they’ll find it all, once I’m in a safe place.

VI

Szacki ran down the corridor at the provincial prosecutor’s office beside himself with rage. Normally in this bloody hole everyone was always bumping into each other on the same three streets, but as soon as someone was needed, they all vanished as if it was New York, damn and blast it. Wilczur’s number was constantly engaged, Sobieraj, whom he needed to reach the most urgently, had her mobile switched off, and Miszczyk had gone somewhere; he had managed to get Sobieraj’s husband’s number, but that was picked up by an answering machine
too. Bloody provinces, a little bit of technology and they’re lost – they haven’t emerged from the age of smoke signals yet.

He noticed he was still running around with the stupid football mug, so he went into the kitchen and washed it, just to have something to keep his hands busy, and put it down on the draining board so violently that he broke a prehistoric office glass. He cursed out loud. And did it again when he cut himself picking up the pieces. The cut was quite nasty – he had blood flowing down his thumb into the palm of his hand. Bloody hell, where had he seen a medicine cabinet? In the front office perhaps.

But Szacki didn’t get as far as the front office, because on the way there something sparked in his brain. He had made a mental jump from the medicine cabinet to a dressing, from a dressing to first aid, from first aid to ambulances, from ambulances to hospitals, and now he knew where to find Basia Sobieraj – at the hospital, visiting her sick father.

He was running out of the building with his cut finger in his mouth, but instead of getting in the car, he went back upstairs. Not because the cut seemed serious and he knew he’d better devote a couple of minutes to bandaging it. He went back guided by an irrational, sudden presentiment of danger. He went back to do something that in his long career as a prosecutor he’d only done once before now.

He went back for a gun.

With no time to put on a holster, he took a small Glock pistol from the safe, checked the safety catch and tossed it in his jacket pocket.

At the hospital he soon located the right ward – of course, all he had to say was that he was looking for Basia Sobieraj’s father and the nurse pointed him in the right direction. He stood in the doorway and hesitated; the intimacy of the scene he found there made him feel awkward.

In the four-person room only one bed was occupied; there was an old man lying in it. On one side of the bed he had a monitor with coloured lines streaming across it and a stand with two IV drips, and on the other, at a slight distance, a clothes rail. There was a lawyer’s
gown hanging on it. A prosecutor’s gown, beautifully ironed, with a carefully folded collar. It must have been pretty old, perhaps from several decades ago. The red trim was a little faded and the black of the worsted fabric had lost its intensity.

Basia Sobieraj and her father had their backs turned towards him. The father was lying on his side, presenting his back, buttocks and thighs to the world with the visible blue-and-purple marks of pressure sores. She was wiping his skin with a sponge wetted in a bowl full of some sort of solution, which was standing on a hospital stool.

“Don’t cry, Dad, it’s just your body,” she whispered; her whisper was tired and resigned.

Her father mumbled something in reply which Szacki didn’t catch.

He coughed quietly. Basia Sobieraj turned round, and for the second time that day she blushed a little. He was expecting to be told off, but she smiled warmly. She beckoned him inside, quickly turned her father over and carefully covered him with the bedding. She apologized for switching off her mobile, but she had simply had to be on her own with her father for a while, and hadn’t wanted anyone to disturb her. Szacki told her about the howling and barking; luckily he didn’t have to explain what it meant and what they needed. She took her phone from her handbag, which was hanging over the back of a chair, and ran outside, leaving Szacki with her father.

The old man was dying. It didn’t take a medical degree to see that. The sallow skin clung tight to his skull, but hung loose on his neck and arms, and his faded eyes, as if coated in jelly, laboured to follow Szacki. Only his thick grey moustache was defying the laws of nature, shining healthily and embellishing the sick man’s face. Szacki thought Sobieraj must have been a late child – she herself was under forty, but her father must have been about eighty.

“Mr Szacki,” the old man stated, rather than asked.

Szacki started in surprise, but he went up to the bed and gently shook the man’s hand.

“Teodor Szacki, pleased to meet you,” he said too loud, feeling embarrassed that his voice sounded so forceful and resonant. It seemed to him out of place.

“Ah, at last someone who doesn’t whisper as if they’re in a mortuary,” said the old man, smiling. “Andrzej Szott. Basia has told me a lot about you.”

“I hope it was all good,” replied Szacki with the most hackneyed remark in the book. At the same time he felt an itching in his head. Andrzej Szott. That name ought to tell him something. But he couldn’t remember what.

“On the contrary. Though lately she’s less abusive about you.”

The prosecutor smiled and pointed at the gown.

“Yours?”

“Yes, it’s mine. I keep it here because sometimes my mind rebels, and, how can I put it, floats off. The gown helps me to remember various things. Who I am, for example. You’ll agree that sort of information can sometimes be quite useful.”

He agreed with a polite nod, at the same time wondering why the old prosecutor had chosen his gown rather than a picture of his wife or his daughter. But he didn’t wonder for long. If he could have chosen the one object that best defined him, wouldn’t it actually be his gown with the red trim?

“You’re asking yourself if you’d hang up your gown too,” said Szott, reading his mind.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He went up to the gown and ran a finger over the striped woollen cloth.

“This one,” said Szott, pointing with a flick of his finger, “is unique. It saw the last double death sentence to be carried out in Poland.”

“Krakow, 1982.”

“That’s right. Do you know who was hanged?”

Click. And now he knew what the old man’s name should be telling him. He turned round and went up to the bed.

“My God, Prosecutor Andrzej Szott. This is an honour, a great honour, please forgive me for not realizing at once, I really am very sorry.”

The old man smiled gently.

“I’m glad someone remembers.”

Incidentally, thought Szacki, Sobieraj really is pretty good not to have spilled the beans that her old man put away Sojda and Adaś. Either she’s not accustomed to anyone here not knowing, or – which is also possible – Mr Szott was the perfect prosecutor, but not the perfect father, not eagerly mentioned by his own children.

Now he took a different view of the small wrinkled face, the weak smile under the moustache and the pale eyes under dark brows. So that’s what Prosecutor Andrzej Szott looked like, who had prosecuted one of the most famous and most shocking criminal cases in the history of Poland.

“What year was it?” he asked.

“1976. A harsh winter.”

“Is Połaniec in Sandomierz county?”

“Staszów county, right next to it. But in those days it was all the same administrative area, Tarnobrzeg province. I worked here, and the trial was here too. The Tarnobrzeg provincial court based in Sandomierz, that’s what it was called then. They had the provincial administration and the sulphur mining in Tarnobrzeg, but nothing else, it was all here in Sandomierz.”

Yes, Połaniec, and that village just outside Połaniec was called Zrębin; with each successive name Szacki remembered the books he had read about that case. Facts came back to mind and images appeared. It was Christmas Eve, Sojda…

“What was Sojda’s first name?”

“Jan.”

…Jan Sojda, known as “the King of Zrębin” – there’s one like that in every village – had taken the whole village by coach to Midnight Mass at the church in Połaniec, but instead of going into the church they’d all got drunk together on the bus, it was a sort of Zrębin Christmas tradition. There were thirty people on that bus, but none of them knew at the time they were part of a bigger plan. In keeping with this plan, a friend lured a couple called Krystyna Kalita and Stanisław Łukaszek out of the church on the pretext of a family incident. The young people had just got married, she was eighteen and she was
pregnant. Krystyna’s brother was with them, a boy of twelve. For ages the “King” had had a grudge against the Kalita family, all the more so since Krystyna and Stanisław’s wedding, when someone had accused Sojda’s sister of stealing some meat – a valuable commodity in those days. So when the couple learnt that they were needed at home quickly, they asked if they could get a lift back on the bus, but Sojda refused – those scum could walk five kilometres back to Zrębin in the snow.