A Grain of Truth (40 page)

“OK, can we go back now?” asked their guide and expert on the underground, whose restless eyes implied that he was on the edge of panic. “I for one am not venturing a step further into this Mordor.”

“There’s no question,” said Szacki; in fact he wanted to throw up – the bile was accumulating in his mouth in a sour wave, but once again the professionalism he had developed over the years prevailed. “I’ve got to see the place they ran out from.”

“But how?” Dybus’s voice was hysterically plaintive. “There’s no more howling now.”

“But there is a trail of crumbs,” said the prosecutor, and pointed at the floor, where the claws of the racing dogs had carved out symmetrical grooves.

They left the two carcasses behind them and headed onwards; this time Szacki was at the head of the group. He was desperate, determined at any cost to find out what lay ahead at the end of the corridor.

VIII

“Do I have to?”

Weronika knew this cross, sulky question didn’t mean that Helka wasn’t missing her father, because she was missing him, in a way that was unimaginable, inconceivable, burning through the little girl’s soul over and over again. She knew, because she was from a broken family herself. Her parents had divorced when she was already at college, but even so it was the worst memory of her life. Divorcing Teo had been painful; now and then she felt a wave of anger flood her, she wanted to lay hands on him and scratch his eyes out for betraying her and cheating her. But there was nothing to compare with the time when her father had taken her to Wedel’s chocolate shop and café on Szpitalna Street, and informed her that he and Mum weren’t going to be together any more. She had never been to Wedel’s ever since.

It wasn’t that she didn’t miss him. If in the blink of an eye Helka could have teleported herself onto her father’s knees, she certainly would have done it. This was a rebellion, a denial, a way of testing how much she could get away with. A way of stretching the emotions that tied her to her parents to the limits of endurance, testing them to
see if they would break. And also a display of loyalty to her mother, a way of saying: Look, I accept your life, I like Tomek, it’s Daddy who’s bad, Daddy left us, let’s punish him.

And of course Weronika felt like stepping into those comfortable shoes, taking her daughter in her arms to have her on her side, for the two of them to get even with that evil prick together, shoulder to shoulder. But that was a harmful, easy way out. Helka had nothing to do with it, and she shouldn’t have – let her build her life with her mum and her dad right behind her, even if her mum and dad were no longer standing side by side in an embrace.

“Yes, you have to. But anyway, you want to, and I can’t understand what you’re so het up about.”

“Coz of all those hours on the bus. I could go kayaking with Tomek. It’s warm already. He promised we’d go once it warmed up.”

She smiled, but she was getting annoyed. She found her daughter’s deference to her new partner immensely irritating, even though she should have been glad of it. The stories told her by friends who had brought children into a new relationship made her blood run cold, but in her case it seemed to be a sort of idyll. However, she felt annoyed whenever she heard this sort of response from her daughter. She hadn’t a clue why – she’d have to talk to the therapist about it. Or maybe she didn’t have to, maybe she knew that actually she still loved Teodor; she was still tied to him, she didn’t really give a shit about Tomek and knew this whole relationship was just for show, calculated to rub that white-haired bastard’s nose in it. And here, all of a sudden, in the middle of this put-on relationship, in which she hadn’t had a single decent orgasm yet, her daughter was gushing in rapture over some guy who left her cold. Bugger it all.

“I’ll tell you what, Helka. You’ll go and you’ll have a good time, and you’ll see some new places, and you’ll do your best pout for Daddy, like you did for me on Monday, so he’ll know his daughter’s growing up too. You’ll be able to distract him a bit – the poor man’s stuck in the office the whole time getting bored, so he could do with a bit of a laugh. Well?”

IX

The pain in his injured hand was unbearable, travelling up his arm in waves, as if the stupid hound were still hanging there, and Szacki was sincerely hoping that was the end of the thrills for today.

The dogs’ claw tracks led them to a small room, similar to the one near the seminary where they had started their expedition. There they found three amateurishly welded-together cages, some dog shit, a lot of blood and the corpse of Jerzy Szyller. The discovery prompted various reactions. Dybus was violently sick – he must have turned his digestive tract inside out. Auntie Basia switched off her headlamp to get rid of the sight. Wilczur lit a cigarette. Szacki, feeling overwhelming exhaustion brought on by the adrenalin flowing out with his blood, sat down on one of the cages and held out his hand for a cigarette. Wilczur obligingly tore off the filter and handed him a lighter. Szacki wanted to object and ask for one with a filter, but he gave it a rest and lit up. The smoke settled the nausea that had been rising in his throat, and by blowing it out through his nose he could block up his olfactory receptors for a while, giving him a breather from the charnel-house stink. He found to his surprise that an unfiltered Camel tasted better than the ordinary ones. Bah, it actually had a taste.

“Where are we?” he asked, also because he wanted to occupy Dybus’s mind with something; he had no desire to allay a panic attack, a hint of which he could see in those restless eyes.

Dybus took out a map covered in incomprehensible coloured lines and spread it next to Szacki.

“I’ve never been in this exact spot before, but somewhere here,” he said, showing a point on the map just outside the city walls, not far from the junction of Zamkowa Street and Staromiejska Street. Not far from the abandoned mansion. As far as Szacki knew, there was a meadow in that spot.

“There’s nothing there,” he said.

“Not now,” agreed Dybus. “But at one time there was a whole district. Except that most of the houses were wooden, so there’s nothing left.
This room must have been left behind by some wily merchant who realized robbers were more likely to look under the tenements than under the poor people’s houses on the ramparts.”

“We’ll have to check if there’s a way of getting from here towards the mansion on Zamkowa Street, the cathedral and Budnik’s house on Katedralna Street. I think we’ve just discovered how the corpses teleported themselves from one place to another.”

“Are you sure?” said Sobieraj, who had recovered a bit, but was still as white as chalk.

“Yes, I think so. One thing’s been bothering me since yesterday, namely Mrs Budnik’s body. There was sand under the fingernails, a sort of yellow, seaside sand. At the time of the autopsy I didn’t take much notice of it, I told myself maybe she liked digging in the earth, or it was sand from the crime scene. But this morning I checked the bushes below the synagogue, and her garden too, and in both places there’s just ordinary black earth.”

“Unlike here,” muttered Wilczur, and scraped at the wall; there was a bit of yellowish loess left under his long fingernail.

“Exactly.” Szacki went into a corner of the room, as far as possible from the corpse, to stub out his cigarette.

Only then did he do what he hadn’t had the courage to do until now, which was to look straight at Szyller’s corpse, while at the same time lighting it up with his torch. The patriotic businessman was only recognizable because he had been chained to the wall high enough to prevent the dogs from devouring his face. The rest of him, from more or less the level of the ribcage downwards, was torn to bloody shreds. Szacki didn’t even want to guess where exactly the pieces fitted, which were scattered all round the room. The experts, the experts would deal with that.

“Can we go now?” asked Sobieraj quietly.

“We’re not achieving anything here anyway.” Wilczur stood up, creaking, and glanced at his watch; there was still a sort of nervousness and impatience about him that were completely unlike the usually so phlegmatic policeman. “We’ll have to send in the experts, floodlights, evidence bags. They’ll have to examine this
room and the whole area – I think this is also the place where Mr and Mrs Budnik ended up, there’s bound to be some evidence in here.”

“Possibly even more than we imagine.” Szacki turned his head slowly, lighting up the room. “Until now we’ve been operating on the murderer’s terms, we’ve found everything cleaned up and prepared for us, but we’ve discovered this place too early.”

“How’s that?”

“That crash we heard before the dogs got to us – look, there’s a sort of timing mechanism on the cages which opened them before we arrived. Except that if it weren’t for one schoolboy gifted with perfect pitch, we wouldn’t be down here. Those dogs would have run about the underground, maybe they would have lived a bit longer, maybe they’d have eaten up the rest of Szyller, maybe they’d have got out of the labyrinth somehow and we’d have found them by the river, and had yet another riddle. But if we hadn’t found them, we’d probably have been offered a pointer. Whatever, we’re definitely here too soon, and definitely not in keeping with the killer’s plan. We must take advantage of that, and get the technicians down here as quickly as possible.”

“And tell them to be careful,” added Sobieraj.

“Aha, I knew that pervert wasn’t sitting here by candlelight!” they heard from a side corridor, down which Dybus had disappeared unnoticed. “Over here, I’ve found an accumulator battery!”

Szacki’s brain cells heated to red-hot in the thousandth of a second needed to add two and two, but even so Wilczur was quicker than him.

“Leave it!” the policeman yelled horrendously – Szacki had never heard such a shout. But it came too late.

First Szacki saw a white flash, then he heard thunder, and then a shock wave hurled him against the wall like a rag doll. With his last vestiges of consciousness he was aware of a surprising sense of relief, a feeling of floating off into the darkness that meant it would stop hurting. Maybe for a while, maybe for ever – but it would stop.

X

It looked as if he had found out everything he could find out at the Sandomierz archive. Time to move on – luckily everything implied that he wouldn’t have to leave the province to get all the information the prosecutor needed. Who knows, with a bit of luck the work might be finished tomorrow. How funny – a job for the legal authorities on a difficult case had proved simpler than the traditional hunt for crest-bearing aristocracy.

He could have left all the registers in the reading room and gone – that was the usual procedure – but this time he tucked them under his arm and went back to the prayer hall. Why? By now he must have been infected with the mood of a criminal investigation, which in laymen always prompts heightened suspicion, caution and paranoia. He didn’t want to leave documents that were crucial to the prosecutor just lying there for anyone to look at them. Anyone – meaning presumably the killer himself, his associate or someone close to him. Apart from which, he was bothered that the main room at the archive still inspired some fear in him, which made him incapable of thinking about it calmly. Was he really quite so soft? One weird incident, one corpse seen through the fog from a distance and here he was, whining like an old woman.

So, at a brisk pace Roman Myszyński crossed the threshold of the heavy, steel door and went into the synagogue’s main room. In the light of the afternoon sun, falling through the window, it didn’t look scary – above all it looked dusty. The signs of the zodiac painted on the ceiling didn’t seem grim or sinister, but just awkward, betraying the unskilled hand of their eighteenth-century artist. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel entirely secure as he ascended the jolting staircase of the metal scaffolding – because the mortgage registers were kept right at the top, of course, next to the blasted drawbridges and the blasted windows from which you could see dead bodies.

He put the archive records down in the right place and stood next to “his” window, thinking of it as therapy. Oh, look – here I
am, and there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just a place, like any other, no sweat.

And just at that very moment a strange vibration ran through the scaffolding, every rivet, joint and weld of the entire structure seemed to creak, and the drawbridge broke free of its catch, fell and landed with a metallic crash against the window sill, as if inviting him to find a new corpse.

Roman Myszyński leapt and screamed with horror.

“Sir, have you gone mad, sir, or what?” Below him stood the archive manager, staring at him in disapproval.

“I never… I never… It’s not my fault you’ve got tectonic movement here.”

The disapproval vanished from the manager’s face, and was replaced with a look of mild indulgence for a lunatic.

“Quite so, tectonic movement. Is there anything else I can help you with? Because if not,” he said, smiling mischievously, “I’d like to lock up our local seismic research centre now.”

XI

He knew it was bad. In his life he had seen enough documentaries about war to know it was very bad. Now his body was working in a different gear, there were more hormones in his veins than blood, biology was trying to give him the greatest chance of survival. But in actual fact his limbs had been torn off, his guts were gathering in puddles, he couldn’t open his eyes, and when he saw this he’d be sure to have hysterics like at the front, he’d crawl along with the torn-off leg in his hand or try to shove his intestines back inside. Rather a pity that was how it would all end, but on the other hand, maybe there was an afterlife, or life began over again, who knows.

“Get up, Teo! We can’t stay here!” White light dazzled him even through his eyelids, and he shielded his face with a hand, thinking that meant he had a hand – a good sign.

“What about my legs?” he asked senselessly.

“What about them? Get up onto them, we’ve got to get Marek out of here, there might still be a chance to save him. Quickly, Teo, please!” Tearful, hysterical notes rang out in Sobieraj’s voice.