A Grain of Truth (38 page)

And so the scum had started walking. Soon the bus full of revellers headed after the young people and caught up with them halfway. First they ran down the kid, and at that point it could still have looked like an accident. But not once Sojda and his son-in-law Adaś had dived out of the bus and beaten Stanisław Łukaszek to death with a wheel wrench. The pregnant girl ran off into the fields, begging her uncle – the Sojdas and the Kalitas were blood relatives – to spare her, as they’d already killed her husband. They didn’t – they beat her to death with the same wrench. There was still the twelve-year-old left, Miecio, injured but alive. They laid him in the road and ran a car over him several times to fake an accident. They did the same thing with the couple’s bodies. Then they put them all in a ditch and went back to the church to secure themselves an alibi. Before that, all the revellers had taken part in a strange ritual, and had pledged an oath to Sojda that they’d keep silent. Each of them had kissed a cross, sworn on it and shed a drop of blood onto a piece of paper.

The investigation into the apparent road accident went on for months; something smelt bad about the case, but no one suspected the stink had anything to do with premeditated murder. Instead, they thought it was that no one wanted to admit driving while drunk. It was night, it was slippery – an unfortunate accident. On this charge Adaś was arrested – for causing a fatal accident. During the investigation some new facts appeared, but other facts disappeared too – for example a witness vanished, who was the only one to claim that on Christmas Eve some murders had been committed in cold blood. He drowned in the stream that ran through Połaniec, which was only a few centimetres deep. There was one thing nobody suspected – that out of thirty
normal people who had witnessed the monstrous murders of three people, including a pregnant woman and a twelve-year-old boy, not a single one would breathe a word, in the name of village solidarity.

Nobody except Prosecutor Andrzej Szott.

“In a way it was a case similar to yours,” said Szott, as if commenting on Szacki’s thoughts. “From what Basia has told me.”

“In what way?”

“An old hatred. You have to live in the provinces to be familiar with that sort of hatred – in the big cities it doesn’t exist. Now people see each other, now they don’t – they have to make an arrangement to see each other at all. But in the country they’re all peering in each other’s windows every day of the week. So if your wife’s unfaithful, even if you sort it out between you, every day in the street and every week at church you’re going to keep seeing the guy she sucked off. The bile accumulates, the hatred grows, and even if you don’t do anything, you’ll say what schmucks the X-es are. Your son hears you. And when he has a fight with X’s son at school it’s not for himself, but for you, too. In other words it’s stronger. And so it goes on, brick by brick, until finally someone is killed, disappears, drowns. Do you think Zrębin is the only place in the world like that? I doubt it.”

“Yes, but I don’t know if there’s any comparison. That was a case of drunken slaughter, this is very intricate work.”

“Drunken slaughter? Don’t make me laugh. They got two vehicles ready, one just to cover their tracks. They got the cousin ready to lure them out of the church. They got a crucifix ready and a safety pin for the drops of blood, they got the money ready for bribes to keep silent. They made up an alibi. Sojda had spent weeks getting it all ready, maybe months even, ever since the accusation of stealing the meat at the wedding had pushed him over the edge. And I think there are villages where vendettas like that are prepared for years, where it gets passed down from generation to generation.”

Szacki felt anxious. Why? Because Szott had mentioned hatred passed down from generation to generation? That was his theory too, that was why he had told Myszyński to dig around in the archives. Yes, maybe that was it. But he felt anxious – the itching usually appeared
when he had overlooked something, not when his theories were confirmed. Did the Zrębin case really have something in common with the stylized murder of the Budniks? In the Zrębin case, what was more shocking than the actual murders was the conspiracy of silence. A terrible, incomprehensible conspiracy of silence. A conspiracy dismantled by Szott.

“Where did you get the idea of catching them out in the court room?” he asked the old prosecutor. “Why the delay?”

“Those people had already got used to endless interrogations by the militia and the prosecution, but they kept repeating their version of events like parrots – no requests or threats had brought any result. We could do that until the day of the trial, the investigation had been dragging on anyway, we had to write an indictment, all the deadlines had been shifted. It was a risky move, to go to court with a conjectural prosecution, counting on hard evidence emerging in the courtroom. The militia captain and I spent a long time wondering if it made sense to put all our money on one single card.”

“But it worked?”

“Yes, the court was a new experience for them, so we and the judge started to put pressure on them in there; the hearings were behind closed doors, so the families couldn’t listen in and work out matching stories. It started badly. The defendants dug their heels in, so did the witnesses, and some of them started revoking statements they’d made in the course of the investigation.”

“And?”

“What works best on simple people? An example. We knew which of the witnesses was the stupidest, who got lost the most and made mistakes. And in doing so he made an appallingly bad impression and prompted natural antipathy. We put pressure on him in court, and he got so muddled in his testimony that the judge lost his rag and had him locked up as a punishment. When people saw their fellow villager being led out in handcuffs, they softened up. They were afraid of Sojda, but no one wanted to go to prison for him. Then another one in handcuffs. And another. And then one started to talk, followed by a second.”

“They got quite high sentences, as far as I recall?”

“Eighteen people served several years each for bearing false witness.”

Homicide. The death of a pregnant woman. Perjury.

Szacki felt his mouth go dry. By no coincidence it kept coming back like a refrain – homicide, the death of a pregnant woman, perjury. But for God’s sake, what connection could a case from thirty years ago have with the present murders? The same premeditation. The same family of investigators. Church themes – in that case Midnight Mass, here the picture in the cathedral. Perhaps the same theme of hatred building up for years. Maybe a conspiracy of silence? He didn’t know that, he hadn’t a scrap of proof for it, but intuition had told him to get Myszyński without telling anyone else and ask him to investigate the people who in theory were on his side, with whom he was working.

But maybe it was a coincidence, maybe the crimes just had some similarities? Maybe it was a sign that he should follow in Szott’s footsteps in his reasoning? What did Szott have that he didn’t? What had enabled him to discover the truth about the Połaniec crime? He knew it, somewhere inside he knew it, it was on the tip of his tongue, the answer was hiding from him in a cluster of brain cells, playing at hide and seek – but it was there.

“Jesus, Dad, are you on about those Sojdas again? What’s the limit?” Sobieraj had materialized in the room, automatically adjusted her father’s pillow and pulled him upright. “If you understood what those numbers mean,” she said, pointing at the monitor, “you wouldn’t gas on so much.”

She glanced at Szacki.

“Let’s go. I’ve found a young man who knows all about our underground vaults. He did a doctorate on it at the University of Science and Technology in Krakow, but luckily he’s at home in Sandomierz right now. We’re to meet him near the seminary – apparently there’s a way in there. Off with you now.” She started shooing him out of the room like a naughty child, but Szacki avoided her and went up to old Szott.

“Thank you,” he said, and pressed the prosecutor’s hand. It didn’t even tremble; his gaze had become mistier and more absent, and the keen smile had left his face. Szacki said goodbye to the man who was
one of very few people in Poland to have seen the death sentence carried out. He must come back here one day to ask what that was like. Did he believe in the death penalty? Did he believe some crimes were unpardonable?

On his way out he brushed a hand against the old prosecutor’s uniform.

“You’re going to inherit a fine gown,” he said to Sobieraj.

“She won’t get it,” whispered the old man so quietly that Szacki guessed the words rather than heard them.

“Why not?” he asked, returning to the bed.

Sobieraj was standing impatiently in the doorway, and rolled her eyes tellingly.

“Because she doesn’t understand.”

“What doesn’t she understand?”

The old prosecutor beckoned, and Szacki leant low over him, with his ear almost touching the dying man’s lips.

“She’s too good. She doesn’t understand that they all tell lies.”

VII

They parked by the Opatowska Gate; the Sandomierz Senior Clerical Seminary was situated bang opposite, in a fine set of baroque monastery buildings once occupied by the Benedictines. Unfortunately that was the extent of Szacki’s knowledge about this place, which he had never visited, though Saint Michael’s church had often been recommended to him as a must-see for tourists. Maybe because he didn’t like the baroque, or maybe because it was located on a busy road outside the Old Town walls, the church had seemed to him less inviting than others.

At the monastery gate he saw Wilczur, next to whom stood a handsome blond boy, like a young Paul Newman, with a backpack slung over his shoulder. Szacki shuddered – the blond boy reminded him of someone. Not just the actor – there was something else familiar about his face, a hint of someone he knew well.

“Prosecutor Teodor Szacki,” Wilczur presented him, as soon as they had run across the road.

The blond boy smiled broadly and punched Szacki right in the diaphragm. The blow was like a battering ram – Szacki doubled up and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Kneeling, with his nose to the pavement, he urgently tried to catch his breath, but the air seemed to stop at his teeth and refuse to come through a millimetre further. Red and black spots began to dance before his eyes, he was afraid he was going to faint, and at the same time he wished he would – then he’d stop feeling the sickening pain that was flooding his entire body.

The blond boy squatted next to him.

“Remember, pal,” he said in a barely audible whisper straight into Szacki’s ear, “I’ve got another hand too, and my old man and my big brother have two more each, and we really hate to see our kid sister cry. Got it?”

Szacki managed to inhale the minimum amount of air necessary, just enough not to lose consciousness. He glanced at the boy, managed to raise one hand from the pavement and stuck up his middle finger right under his nose. The boy laughed, grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet.

“Marek Dybus, very nice to meet you,” he said with effusive sincerity. “Sorry about that – I tripped unfortunately.”

The prosecutor nodded. Wilczur and Sobieraj stood side by side with stony expressions on their faces, which surely meant they were having trouble suppressing their laughter. Without a word they followed Dybus as he led them into a building standing slightly to one side, right next to the stone wall surrounding the grounds of the seminary on Zawichojska Street, which ran downhill towards the marketplace and the Vistula. The three-storey tenement was topped with gables in the baroque style, but apart from that it looked like a contemporary building. He asked Dybus about it.

“Yes, it was put up between the wars as the Junior Clerical Seminary, in the late 1920s I think – it’s called Nazareth House. Though so far, laypersons have been in charge of it for longer than clergymen. During the war it was where the Gestapo tortured their prisoners, and after the
war it housed the secret police, then the militia and the prosecution service. Sojda was interrogated here – have you heard of that case?”

“Yes.”

“The building was only handed over to the diocese in the 1990s, so now it’s a hostel, or whatever they call it, for clerical students, with accommodation for the lecturers too.”

“Why are we going in here?” asked Szacki, following Dybus inside the building and then down some stairs into a narrow basement.

“Because this holy building full of clerical students also contains the gates of hell. When they built it, they accidentally came upon the medieval tunnels, and luckily, instead of just filling them in with concrete, some clever inter-war Pole installed a door.” He took some headlamps from his backpack and handed one to each person.

The torches were small, but they gave out surprisingly bright, white light. Dybus looked like a seasoned potholer in his, Wilczur like a ghost and Sobieraj like a nursery-school Christmas decoration. From the faces they made as they looked at him, Szacki could guess that unfortunately he did not look like a seasoned potholer either.

“Button up,” said the young man, as he unlocked the door, which looked no different from all the others. “It’s pretty cold down there, never above about twelve degrees.”

In single file, they went inside an underground corridor made of red bricks; it didn’t look old, and there were some sort of dusty jars on the ground. They walked a few metres, turned once, then again, then went a short way down some wooden steps, which also didn’t look as if they remembered the days of the Tatars. There Dybus opened another door and they went through it, into a small vaulted room the height of a flat in a housing block and about ten, maybe twelve square metres in size.

“Good, now a few words of explanation,” their guide began, twisting the band of his headlamp to one side to avoid dazzling them. “We’re seven metres underground, almost exactly underneath Żeromski Street. In this direction there’s the Opatowska Gate and the Old Town, and that way goes to the Vistula. Auntie Basia said someone heard strange noises in the tourist area, except that section is completely
cut off from the rest of the underground. That means you can hear something there, but without a pickaxe it’s impossible to go any further in from there – all of it is either filled in or walled up, or flooded.”