A Grain of Truth (48 page)
Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
He hadn’t a clue what to say.
“I’m the one to say thank you.”
She nodded, and they stood without talking; the silence was awkward and in other circumstances they would probably have gone to bed to avoid hearing it.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I did a pregnancy test?”
“That’s not keeping me awake. It would be an honour to be the father of your child.”
“Well, well, so you do know how to behave after all. In that case…” – she stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek – “…see you. This is a small town, we’re sure to run into each other now and then.”
She waved goodbye and rapidly walked away towards the cathedral. Szacki’s thoughts went back to Dybus, to the underground, to Wilczur, to the case. And to the question nagging him like an itch: how? How the fuck did he do it? How? Even supposing he was familiar with the system of tunnels, even supposing there was an entrance into them at each gateway, how did that old man cope with the corpses? OK, so Mrs Budnik was light and her husband was scrawny too, but Szyller was a muscle-packed bull of a man. So what? Was he to believe Wilczur had anaesthetized him, then tossed him over his shoulder and crucified him underground? That he had put himself to the trouble of carting Budnik up to the first floor of the mansion on Zamkowa Street? And what about Mrs Budnik? He couldn’t possibly have known she would decide to move out to live with her lover on that day at that time. Had he been watching the property? How? Through cameras?
And there was the inscription on the painting in the cathedral. Wilczur was a Jew, several times he had shown himself to be an expert on Jewish culture, and he could quote the Gospels in Hebrew by heart. Would he have made such an obvious error? Would he have childishly reversed a letter in a simple word? That couldn’t have had any purpose in his plan. Did it mean he had an accomplice? That would also explain his silence. It would be the perfect strategy, but also a guarantee that he wouldn’t give anyone away by accident.
Szacki’s head was starting to ache, and he thought it must be from hunger; it was coming up to dinner time, and he hadn’t had a bite to eat since early morning. He made his way through the scent of blossoming apple trees in the garden by the cathedral, climbed uphill to the market square, and without thinking about it, aimed straight for the Trzydziestka restaurant. The place he always went to
when he had no desire to experiment, where no food critic would have lasted out until the dessert, and where they served the best buckwheat in the world. He refused to think how many times the nice waitress had set a piece of fresh chuck steak from the grill before him, served with prunes, a heap of buckwheat and a pint of cold beer. He refused to think about it, because he was afraid his liver might overhear.
“Our tables appear to be in different dimensions of time and space, Prosecutor,” he heard a grouchy voice from behind.
He turned round and was struck dumb. At the next table sat his former boss, head of the Warsaw City Centre District Prosecutor’s Office, whom he had always thought of as the least attractive woman on earth. Well, a single glance after several months apart confirmed his conviction that he’d always been right. Her grey face was just as grey, her brown strings of slightly wavy hair were just as brown, and rather than softening the dispiriting impression, swapping her grey office jacket for a red sweater only reinforced it. Janina Chorko looked like a woman who has sent a request to a charity that makes wishes come true for the terminally ill, and been dressed in something cheerful for her final hours. What a ghastly effect.
“It’s good to see you, Madam Prosecutor. You’re looking splendid.”
Chorko was not alone – with her was Maria “Misia” Miszczyk, her husband – a surprisingly good-looking man, the George Clooney type – and their two children, aged about fifteen or sixteen; the boy looked like trouble already, and the girl, the A-student type, had slightly muted charms, but her eyes flashed with such intelligence that Szacki would have been afraid to pit himself against her in a battle of repartee.
Despite her mother’s tendency to excess plumpness and her talent for baking cakes, all three were slender and looked fit. Szacki suddenly felt sorry that Chorko was sitting with them; it must have been painful for this worn-out, grey, lonely woman to see this lovely, happy family.
“I didn’t know you knew each other,” he said the first thing that entered his head, not wanting Chorko to notice the emotions written on his face.
“I don’t know what that says about you as an investigator, Prosecutor,” she remarked cuttingly. “You’ve failed to detect that your bosses were at college together.”
Miszczyk burst out laughing, and Chorko joined in with her. He had never heard his former boss laughing before. And she had a lovely, joyful laugh, her wrinkles smoothed out and her eyes began to glow; even if she didn’t become pretty, at least she stopped looking like a study aid for medical students.
“Hold on a mo,” said Prosecutor Janina Chorko. “I usually keep my private life as far as possible from the world of crime, but now… This is Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, I told you, Mariusz, that if in spite of all you did want to study law, you must write your dissertation on his cases – some unusual stories, solved in an unusual way. This is my husband Jerzy, and some girl we’ve adopted whose name is Luiza.”
“What do you mean, adopted?” said Luiza indignantly, drawing attention to herself.
“Because I can’t possibly have produced a daughter who leans her elbows on the table like that.”
“Aha, so it’s a joke. Pity, I was just looking forward to finding my real family…”
“Please don’t take any notice, it’s her age.”
“…after an adventure-packed search, which would finally give my life a meaning.”
“Please, come and join us, let’s have a drink, Janina’s driving.” Chorko’s husband, as he had surprisingly turned out to be, smiled broadly and made room for Szacki on the wooden bench.
But Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was standing on the spot, not even trying to hide his amazement. It wasn’t possible – he had worked with this woman for twelve years, always assuming she was an embittered spinster, who made discreet, embarrassing passes at him to boot. For twelve years he had felt bad about rejecting them, for twelve years he had regularly drunk her health, thinking the world was unfair, and that somewhere there must be someone, maybe not top class, but at least with both arms and legs, who would show her some mercy, bestow on her if not love, then at least a
little sympathy, and would bring just a teeny bit of light into her grey-and-brown existence.
Evidently, he had worried in vain. Evidently, there are legends in which there isn’t a grain of truth. In which everything is a lie from start to finish.
They all tell lies, Basia Sobieraj’s dying father had said.
“Oh fuck!” he said out loud.
He didn’t see the company’s reaction to this unexpected opening remark, because suddenly, finally, one simple thought had brought the wall tumbling down, against which he had been banging his head from the very start of this investigation. Legends in which there isn’t a grain of truth, in which everything is a lie. Everything! He started running through the scenes of the investigation in his mind, from the first misty morning below the synagogue, assuming that everything was a lie. The slashed throat, the razor, the blood ritual, the place where the body was found, all of that Jewish mythology and all the Polish anti-Semitic mythology, the mansion, the barrel, the painting in the cathedral, the inscription, and all those pictures that were so readily shoved under his nose.
“Oh fuck!” he repeated, louder this time, and set off at a run across the market square.
“I don’t think I do want to study law,” he heard Chorko’s son remark behind him.
Never before had any thought process run through his head so quickly, never before had so many facts combined in such a brief flash into a single indissoluble logical sequence, which had only one possible outcome. It was an experience bordering on mania as his thoughts went leaping across his brain cells at epileptic speed, his grey matter shone like platinum from the information overload, and he was afraid something would happen to him, his brain wouldn’t be able to process it all and would stall. But there was also something like drug-induced euphoria or religious ecstasy about it, an excitement impossible to restrain, emotions impossible to control. A lie, a lie, it was all a lie, an illusion, a smokescreen. In the crush of funfair attractions, amid the stage-settings of the crimes, in the excess of facts and
their interpretation he had overlooked the most important details, and above all the most important conversation.
As he flew into the “Town Hall” bar he must have had a wild look in his eyes, because the grim waiter dropped his cool and timidly hid behind the bar. There was hardly anyone in there, just two families of lost tourists sitting by the wall; they must have been very hungry if they had decided to stay here for a meal.
“Where are those tramps who usually sit here?” he screamed at the waiter, but before the man could get the words out of his mouth, Szacki’s hormone-filled nervous system had given him the answer, and he ran out, leaving some more astonished people behind him, who just like the company at the Trzydziestka swapped glances and tapped their foreheads.
He had had the most important conversation with a man from the outside, a clever man, who had evaluated the facts not against the background of the small-town hell of Sandomierz, but simply as facts. During that conversation, he had been irritated by Klejnocki, the profiler, had cringed at his style, the annoying pipe and the clever-clogs chat – once again, stage props had obscured the truth. And the truth was that Klejnocki had solved the Sandomierz riddle a week ago, but Szacki had been too stupid, too steeped in lies, too bogged down in the details to notice it.
He sprinted past the post office, ran down Opatowska Street, miraculously managing not to knock over an old lady coming out of a shop selling handicrafts, flew through the passage under the Opatowska Gate and, panting, stopped at a small square. He almost whooped for joy when he saw the same tramp as yesterday sitting on a bench. He ran up and grabbed the fellow, on whose small triangular face adorned with sticking-out ears a look of terror appeared.
“What do you—”
“Mr Gąsiorowski, isn’t it?”
“Eee, and who’s asking?”
“The Polish Republic Prosecution Service, that’s who’s bloody well asking! Yes or no?”
“Darek Gąsiorowski, pleased to meet you.”
“Mr Gąsiorowski, you might not remember, but a few days ago we saw each other outside the ‘Town Hall’ bar. I was coming out with Inspector Leon Wilczur, and you accosted us.”
“Oh yes, I remember.”
“What was it about? What did you want him to do?”
“I wanted Leo to help us, because we’ve known each other for decades, and if we went to the police like normal, they’d laugh in our faces.”
“To help you with what?”
Gąsiorowski sighed and wiped his nose nervously; he clearly wasn’t eager for more mockery.
“It’s very important,” said Szacki.
“There’s this one fellow, a fine fellow, who tramps about the district. He’s my mate.”
“A vagrant?”
“Not exactly, they say he’s got a home somewhere, he just likes to roam.”
“And?”
“And he’s, I think it’s a sort of illness, he’s not all right in the head, you see, because when he roams you can set your watch by him. You always know what time he’ll be in a particular place. That’s to say, I know for example, when he’ll be here, and then we’ll meet up for a drop of wine and a chat.”
“And?”
“And lately he hasn’t come. Twice now he hasn’t come. And that’s never happened with him before. I went to the police, so maybe they’d find out, because he goes to Tarnobrzeg and Zawichost and Dwikozy and I think Opatów too. So they’d check, because, as I say, he’s not all right in the head; he might have got that illness for example, where you don’t remember nothing. Or he was walking along the roads, so maybe he’d had an accident or something – he’d want someone to come and visit him in hospital, wouldn’t he?” He fixed his gaze on Szacki’s bandage.
“Yes, he would. Do you know what he’s called?”
“Tolo.”
“Short for Anatol?”
“Yes, I think that’s right. Or it could be Antoni, they sometimes say that too.”
“And his surname?”
“Fijewski.”
“Anatol’s surname is Fijewski?”
“Yes.”
“Anatol Fijewski. Thank you.”
Szacki left Gąsiorowski and got out his mobile.
“Shouldn’t I describe him or something?” called the fellow, getting up from the bench.
“No need!” Szacki called back.
As he looked at Nazareth House, standing on the other side of the road, his gaze slid across to Saint Michael’s church, which adjoined the baroque seminary building.
Archangel Michael, vanquisher of evil, patron saint of all those who fight for justice, guardian angel of policemen and prosecutors, hear your faithful servant and let it be not too late. And just for once in this blasted country please let it be possible to get something done at a registry office after working hours.
It is World Graphic Design Day, Independence Day in Sierra Leone and Togo, and Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz reaches the age of seventy. In the news, the economic crisis is supplanted by the swine flu, which in Israel is known as the more kosher “Mexican flu”. The state of Iowa legalizes homosexual marriages, General Motors announces the end of the Pontiac and Bayern Munich the end of Jürgen Klinsmann in the job of coach. In Poland sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis claims that President Lech Kaczy
ń
ski will not stand in next year’s presidential election, Communist-era minister Czesław Kiszczak claims that introducing martial law was legal, and twenty-six per cent of Catholics claim to know priests who cohabit with common-law wives. In
Ś
wi
ę
tokrzyskie province there is a puma on the prowl. In Sandomierz a decision is made to build a modern sports pitch at High School II, and next to a different, existing pitch yet another mobile phone falls prey to audacious thieves – this time it was left on the ground in a plastic shopping bag. It’s a lovely spring day, it’s sunny and the temperature is higher than twenty degrees. It’s dry, and in the woods there is a risk of fire.
