A Grain of Truth (39 page)

“Flooded?”

“Not with water. I won’t go into detail, I’ll just summarize so you know what it’s about. Sandomierz is built on loess, and loess is a great kind of soil, because it’s hard as well as malleable, so on the one hand you can build on it virtually without foundations, and on the other you can dig tunnels in it with your fingernails without worrying about pit props and supports. That’s why, for as long as this overgrown village has been here, our ancestors dug cellars underneath it. Shallower ones for potatoes, deeper for valuables, deepest of all for shelters. They dug out the entire hill like moles, making corridors on more than a dozen levels, running for tens of kilometres. And that’s how it happened. Occasionally something has caved in, but for a city built on Swiss cheese, it’s doing pretty well. But loess is also not such a great material, because when it’s affected by damp it behaves like a lump of sand thrown into a bowl – it collapses instantly, snap bang and it’s gone. And in the 1960s Sandomierz suddenly started to crumble, as if it were built on shifting sands. Why was that? Thanks to civilization. The city had had a sewage system installed, the sewers leaked, and the leakage was dissolving the Old Town hill. Catastrophe. Got it?”

“Yes. It’s very interesting, but time—”

“Just a moment. They brought in experts from Krakow and miners from Bytom. The miners took the Old Town apart, bored shafts, made a map of the vaults and flooded the ones underneath buildings and roads with a mixture of loess and water glass, which solidifies to make something like pumice, a sort of stiff, lightweight construction material. And then they rebuilt the Old Town.”

“Except that the rehoused intelligentsia were left in flat blocks, and Commies were moved in,” wheezed Wilczur. “That’s why it looks like a slum nowadays – tramps and dirty windows.”

“Which is not entirely relevant to our considerations, but of course we thank you for that comment,” said Dybus with charm. Szacki liked this boy – he had good, lively intelligence. And to think he could
have married into such a likeable family. He thought about Klara’s honey-coloured body and felt a stab of regret. Maybe there was still some way to rebuild the relationship?

“Some of the remaining cellars were converted into the tourist route, and the rest of the underground was cut off from the city, but it has survived, and in fact no one was interested in it – everybody was convinced it was just a few damp cellars. It was only we” – there was a note of pride in his voice – “who started doing more careful research. And it turned out that even after the work to flood some of the tunnels under the Old Town, there was still a labyrinth down here. Without any exaggeration, it really is a labyrinth – we spent a year coming down into in these vaults almost every day, and we only managed to inventory about twenty per cent of the corridors. Let’s go – follow me in single file.”

They set off, and walked along another bit of vaulted corridor; beyond it there was just an unpleasant, low-ceilinged tunnel, as if drilled out of dried, brownish mud. Szacki put a finger to the wall, and it felt like sandstone to the touch. He only had to scratch a bit with his fingernail for tiny grains of yellow sand to fall off it.

They reached a fork.

“And now listen up, I must tell you a few rules. First of all, I’m in charge, and I’m not at all interested in your titles and ranks.” Szacki cast an eye at Wilczur, who seemed strangely tense; perhaps he suffered from claustrophobia. “Secondly, if by some miracle we were to be separated, then at every intersection or crossroads there’s an arrow carved at the height of a metre pointing the way to the exit by the seminary. But as the arrows are only in territory that we researched, we won’t get separated. Thirdly, run away from damp places with visibly leaking or dripping water. It means the loess there is unstable and could bury you. Got it? Right, let’s go.”

Szacki didn’t have claustrophobia, but he felt uneasy. The corridor was low and narrow, its sandy structure gave no sense of security, and he felt as if there wasn’t enough oxygen in the cold, slightly musty atmosphere to satisfy his lungs. He breathed deeply, but hardly took in any air. Though possibly his diaphragm had been knocked out of
shape by Dybus, and was having trouble getting back into place. He could still feel a pain under his ribs at every step.

For several minutes they walked on in silence. They took a few turns, but all the corridors were identical to one another. Disturbingly identical – the mere thought of the possibility of being left alone down here and losing his way was enough to make his skin creep.

“OK, we’re there,” said the young guide, and suddenly stopped at a wall made of planks. There was one missing, and they could see grey concrete behind it. “Behind this wall is the tourist route, the room with various archaeological exhibits. If there really is something going on down here, and if someone in there heard noises, we should be able to hear them even better.”

They fell silent. There must have been a group going along the tourist route, because they could hear footsteps, muffled talking and laughter, then the high-pitched voice of the tourist guide, who was talking about somebody’s extraordinary heroism. After a while all the noises moved away and they were left in unpleasant, dense silence. Szacki shuddered as he felt something move across his fingers – it was Sobieraj’s hand. He looked at her in surprise, but she just smiled apologetically. She didn’t let go of his hand, and it was rather nice. But only for a short time – then all other feelings were abruptly displaced by a pang of fear, as from the maze of black corridors they heard a distant, but distinct, bestial howling.

“Holy fuck,” said Dybus.

Sobieraj sighed out loud, and squeezed his hand tightly.

“Can you tell where it is?” Szacki asked, pleased there was no tremor audible in his voice.

“The echo could be misleading, but I’d bet on the west, towards the synagogue and Saint Joseph’s church. I’ve got it all mapped out as far as the ramparts, we’ll see afterwards.”

Now they were walking much more slowly and cautiously. First Dybus, then Szacki and Sobieraj, still clinging to his hand. The taciturn Wilczur brought up the rear. It crossed Szacki’s mind that they should get the old policeman out of there. If he really did have claustrophobia
and had a heart attack in these vaults it would somewhat complicate their outing.

“Where are we now?” he asked. They had gone about a hundred metres and the tunnel was going downwards in a gentle arc; until now they had passed one intersection and one side branch, filled in with loess rubble.

“Under the walls – to the left we’ve got the Old Town and to the right Podwale, the ramparts. Do you hear that?”

The howling sound came again; if it really was louder, then it was only by a little. Sobieraj glanced at her watch.

“What’s the time?”

“Almost three.”

They slowly went on, and the faint, unearthly howling was audible every time they stopped. At one point they heard a distinct metallic noise, as if someone had dropped a spanner onto a concrete workshop floor. Dybus stopped.

“Did you hear that?”

“Let’s go,” Szacki urged, dragging Sobieraj after him, but her hand slipped out of his sweaty palm.

“Oh my God,” she drawled in a hollow tone that made everyone look at her. Slowly she raised her hand, and in the white light of the torches they could see it was all red with blood. The woman crumpled, and was clearly about to be sick.

“Basia, hey, calm down,” said Szacki, gently pulling his colleague upright. “Nothing’s happened – I cut myself at the office, I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to put a plaster on it. I couldn’t feel it bleeding – I’m sorry.”

She gave him a look of hostility, but also relief. Without a word she took a thin silk scarf from her pocket and provisionally bandaged his hand.

“I don’t know if we shouldn’t send someone better qualified down here,” she muttered. “Strange vaults, strange howling, we don’t know what we’re looking for, and now that blood, it’s a bad sign.”

“We’re looking for Szyller,” said Szacki. “So far in this case every time someone has disappeared, they’ve been found later on trussed like a piglet.”

“You mean a lamb,” Wilczur corrected him. “Pork’s
treif
.”

“
Treif
?”

“Not kosher.”

“In any case, this time we’ve got a chance of finding someone sooner than that.”

“How on earth do you know this has anything to do with it?”

“Howling, barking, it all fits.”

“Have you gone mad?” Sobieraj made her surprised-and-outraged gesture, which suited her very well. “Where does barking fit into it?”

“Well, what have you got in that painting in the cathedral? Children being kidnapped and murdered, rolled in a barrel of blood, and the remains thrown to dogs to devour. What haven’t we seen yet?”

“Oh God,” groaned Sobieraj, but not because this information had shocked her. This time the howling was more distinct, and they could also hear furious barking. Distorted by the winding corridors, the noise sounded hellish and made their flesh crawl, their hair stand on end and their muscles tense, as if waiting for the signal to run.

“We haven’t gone all that far,” cried Dybus. “Maybe we’d better get the hell out of here.”

“Quiet,” commanded Szacki coldly. “What are you expecting? The Hound of the Baskervilles? A beast from hell breathing fire? A dog is a dog. Have you got a gun, Inspector?”

Wilczur opened the flap of his jacket; next to his sunken ribcage there was something swinging in a holster that looked like a classic police Walther.

“Let’s go. Quickly.”

They set off. As the unearthly animal noises got rapidly closer, Szacki couldn’t shake off the sensation that he was standing in the middle of a road, caught in the headlights of a speeding car, and that instead of jumping aside he was starting to charge towards it. It’s a dog, it’s just a terrified dog and the acoustics of a small space, that’s all, just a dog, he kept repeating to himself. Walking ahead of him, Dybus suddenly stopped, Szacki’s momentum meant he fell on top of him, and after that everything happened quickly – too quickly, unfortunately, and too chaotically.

Dybus had stopped because around a bend in the corridor some steps began, cut out of the loess, leading in a steep spiral downwards, into inky darkness, from which the furious barking was coming, not just loud, but deafening by now. Perhaps he wanted to warn the others, perhaps he wanted to establish what to do next; his intentions ceased to be relevant as soon as Szacki pushed him and he fell headlong with a short cry. Szacki wobbled and fell to his knees, but by some miracle he managed to keep his balance and froze in a bizarre position: his feet and knees remained at the level of the corridor, but he was leaning his hands against the wall of the staircase – for want of a better word. Someone behind him, maybe Sobieraj or maybe Wilczur, grabbed him by the tail of his jacket, and he was just about to sigh with relief when right in front of his face the muzzle of a furious dog appeared – black and shaggy, with mad eyes, it was covered in dust, drool and caked blood. I wanted the Hound of the Baskervilles? Well, I’ve got it, thought Szacki.

The dog, a mongrel the size of an Alsatian, didn’t go straight for his throat, but froze a few centimetres from his face, barking deafeningly; it couldn’t get its balance on the narrow steps and was just scratching at them with its claws, sending up a stifling cloud of dust. Shocked and stunned, Szacki took one hand off the wall to shield himself from the startled animal’s teeth, and that was his second biggest blunder of the day – the biggest of all was still ahead of him. The moment he waved his injured hand, wrapped in the blood-soaked scarf, in front of the dog’s nose, the animal went crazy. And just as only a split second earlier Szacki had been propped up and had the chance to keep his balance, as soon as the dog violently bit him, he lost it entirely. He howled in pain as he and the dog rolled down the stairs, finally landing on something soft, which must have been Marek Dybus. Of course, his headlamp had fallen off, and now it was lighting up his fight with the monstrous, frenzied mongrel from a strange angle. The whole time he had one hand trapped between the animal’s jaws, while he tried in vain to push away its head with the other. He kept yanking at its wet coat, bellowing and screaming, but the dog was not going to let go, it just bit down harder and harder – he could clearly feel the layers of
tissue tearing under the pressure of its jaws. Acting more on instinct than reason, he let go of its head and reached into his jacket pocket for the Glock. Writhing violently as he tried to yank his body from under the dog’s paws, which were now clawing at his belly instead of the loess, miraculously he released the safety catch, stuck the pistol in the animal’s mouth right next to his own hand and fired.

His roar of pain merged with the deafening, ear-splitting bang of the gun; a cloud of tissue, which the shot blew out of the dog’s skull, fell on Szacki’s face in wet, sticky drops. At the same moment, the white light of a headlamp appeared at the foot of the stairs, illuminating something that Szacki couldn’t see, but which kept on barking like mad. Under the headlamp a flash of fire appeared. One, two, three.

The barking changed into the quiet whimpering of a dying animal.

Inspector Leon Wilczur approached Szacki and helped him to get up; a little further off Dybus was scrambling to his feet, and at the top of the stairs he could see the light of Sobieraj’s headlamp. It looked as if everyone was all right. Well, almost.

“Bloody hell, I think I’ve shot off part of my finger.”

“Show me, Teo,” said Wilczur matter-of-factly, addressing him by name for the first time ever, and pulled Szacki’s hand roughly, making him hiss with pain. “Got any water?” he asked Dybus.

Dybus took a bottle from his backpack. Wilczur bathed the prosecutor’s hand; it looked nasty. The glass cut on his thumb was still bleeding, on the back of his hand there were deep marks left by the blasted mongrel’s fangs (Szacki had never liked dogs), and the torn flesh between his thumb and index finger showed unmistakably which way the bullet had gone before penetrating the dog’s brain. The old policeman examined the wounds with expertise, then told Dybus, who was still in shock, to take off his shirt; he tore it into strips and carefully bandaged Szacki’s hand. The prosecutor was impressed by the policeman’s sangfroid.