A Grain of Truth (49 page)

I

Coming here was immensely, incredibly stupid – I feel fear, but above all anger. Anger that a stupid accident could end the whole thing now. It’s true there’s always a crowd of people at the registry office, a big crowd of applicants from all over the province, a random collection of people who have never seen each other before and will never see each other again. A crowd like this is on the one hand, safe; on the other, risky, very risky. I can feel waves of panic flowing through my body, and the numbered receipt I’m holding in my clenched hand is turning into a soggy scrap, so I’m sticking it in my wallet.

Ping, two more people ahead of me. Two more people! I can feel the panic battling with my sense of euphoria. Two more people, then just a short stop at the window, then I leave the place and… it’s the end, the end at last!

The panic is winning. I’m trying to occupy my thoughts with something, anything to kill the time; I try reading the regulations on the wall again, and the official announcements; I try reading the instructions for working the fire extinguisher, but it just makes things worse, I can’t understand the simplest words, my thoughts are racing, the hysteria’s rising so I can’t possibly do it. I feel sick, my hands are tingling, there are black spots starting to dance before my eyes. If I faint it’ll be the end, the end! That thought starts drumming in my head, louder and louder, faster and faster; the more I refuse to give in to it, the harder it drums, the greater my fear, the bigger the black snowflakes falling thicker and thicker before my eyes. I’m struggling to squeeze air into my lungs, I’m afraid I won’t be able to gasp out a word, I’m scared there’ll be a commotion, and that will be the end! The end! The end! All for nothing, the rest of my life in prison, pain, incarceration, solitude. The end!!!

Ping, just one more person.

No, I can’t do it, I’ll just leave slowly and forget about this stupid idea. I turn around and take two steps towards the door, but my body isn’t really obeying me, and a new wave of panic floods it, the nausea returns with increased strength, the fear pushes bile into my throat. Slowly, little by little, very slowly, I calm down, taking very small steps.

Ping, it’s my turn right away – impossible, someone else has given up! It’s a sign! I go up to the window on legs of jelly, I feel as if I’m glowing all sorts of colours, as if my panic is bright red, glaring out of the security screens. Tough, there’s no turning back now. I hand in my ID card, answer a few casually posed questions, and wait for the lady behind the window to finish. I sign a receipt form, the clerk hands me a new passport, and its dark-red cover shines in the sunlight that’s pushing in through the vertical blinds. I say a polite thank you and leave.

Soon he’s standing outside the large, hospital-like Świętokrzyski County Registry Office in Kielce. And he thinks the perfect murder does exist after all – all it takes is a bit of work and some savvy. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll tell someone about it, maybe he’ll write a book, we’ll see. Now he just wants to enjoy his freedom. He puts the passport in his pocket, wipes his sweaty hands on his fleece and smiles broadly as he saunters off towards Warszawska Street. It’s a beautiful, sunny day, on a day like this even Kielce looks nice. Now he’s calming down, relaxing, smiling at people heading at a rapid pace towards the registry office entrance, a pace that’s right for the provincial capital. The policemen standing at the bottom of the steps make no impression on him at all – after all, they’re in the right place, keeping order at the seat of power.

As his euphoria grows, he smiles more and more openly at the people he passes, and when Prosecutor Teodor Szacki answers with a smile, he doesn’t immediately sense that something isn’t right – it’s just a nice, middle-aged guy, gone prematurely grey perhaps. That lasts a fraction of a second. In the next fraction of a second he thinks it’s someone very similar, and that his hounded mind is playing tricks on him. And in the next fraction of a second he knows the perfect crime does not exist after all.

“Yes, can I help you, sir?” he says in an act of desperation, still trying to play dumb.

“I’m the one who can help you, Anatol,” replies the prosecutor.

II

Later on, back in Sandomierz, during an interview that lasted for many hours, once the murderer had confessed everything, Szacki had to contend with a strange feeling. He had sometimes felt empathy towards the people he interrogated, sometimes compassion, and he had sometimes even respected people who had transgressed and had the courage to face up to it. But it was probably the first time in his career that he felt maybe not admiration for the criminal, but a feeling close to it, worryingly close. He was trying very hard not to show it, and yet, as he learnt more and more details of the crime, now and then it occurred to him that never before had he been so close to the perfect crime.

SUSPECT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT. Grzegorz Budnik, born 4th December 1950, resident at 27 Katedralna Street, Sandomierz, higher education in chemistry, chairman of the Sandomierz City Council. Relationship to parties: husband of Elżbieta Budnik (victim). No previous convictions, advised of the duties and rights of a suspect, his statement is as follows
:

I hereby confess to the murders of my wife Elżbieta Budnik and of Jerzy Szyller, and to the abduction and murder of Anatol Fijewski. I committed the first murder, of Elżbieta Budnik, in Sandomierz on Easter Monday, 13th April 2009, and the motive for my conduct was hatred towards my wife; I had been aware for a long time that she was having an affair with Jerzy Szyller, whom I knew, and that day she had announced that as a result of this she wanted to end our marriage, which had lasted since 1995. That same day I put a plan into action which was designed to lead to the death of Jerzy Szyller and to my evading justice. I had this plan prepared for many weeks, but up to a certain point I did not take it seriously, it was a sort of intellectual entertainment…

Budnik talked, Szacki listened, and the figures jumped on the digital Dictaphone. The chairman of the City Council, and until recently cold corpse, described events rather unemotionally, but there were
moments when he couldn’t hide his pride, and Szacki realized that this intrigue, this one and only flash of genius that had happened in his office-bound life was this man’s greatest ever success. Or rather, second greatest – the first was leading Elżbieta Szuszkiewicz to the altar. Budnik related his activities exhaustively with all the details, while Szacki thought about their former conversation when – as it turned out, rightly – he had been convinced of Budnik’s guilt. And how he had reminded him of Gollum from
Lord of the Rings
, a character totally obsessed with possessing his “precious”, for whom nothing else counts, not even the precious object as such, but just possessing it. Without possessing his precious, Budnik was nobody and nothing, he became an empty shell, deprived of all natural and social restraints, capable of planning and committing murder in cold blood. The scale of the crimes was terrible, but even more shocking was the scale of Budnik’s obsession with his wife. Szacki heard about the underground, he heard about the preparations, about the starving dogs, and the weeks spent making himself look like the poor tramp in order to steal his identity, he heard explanations of the lesser and greater mysteries, the solution to which was obvious in any case, ever since he had hit upon the idea that Budnik had to be the murderer. But somewhere deep down in there he couldn’t stop wondering: Is this real love? So obsessive, so destructive, capable of the greatest sacrifices and the greatest crimes? Can you really speak of love at all, until you come to experience emotions as strong as these? Until you realize that in comparison with it, nothing else matters at all?

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was not able to expel these thoughts from his mind. And he was afraid, because there was something prophetic about them, something which meant he couldn’t just regard them as theoretical. As if Providence were preparing the biggest test of all for him, and with his sixth sense he could tell that one day he would have to weigh up love on the one hand, and someone’s life on the other.

As Budnik droned on, successive elements jumped into place, and the jigsaw started looking like a picture ready for framing. Usually at such moments Prosecutor Teodor Szacki felt calm, but now he was
filled with a strange, irrational alarm. Grzegorz Budnik hadn’t planned to become a murderer. He hadn’t been born with that thought, and it had never been part of his existence. Quite simply, one day he had realized it was the only alternative.

Why was Szacki so strangely convinced that a day like that would come for him too?

III

Arresting Grzegorz Budnik was a bombshell, and on the news bulletins even the swine flu was put on the back burner; in Sandomierz no one was talking about anything else. The general commotion allowed Basia Sobieraj to keep her husband in the dark by saying she didn’t know how late they’d have to work at the office, and so they ended up at Szacki’s flat, so the married woman with a bad heart and a fifteen-year training period could discover her erogenous zones with the commitment of an A-grade student.

They had wonderful fun together, and at a certain point Szacki fell in love with Basia Sobieraj. Quite simply and frankly, and it was a very nice feeling.

“Misia said you were behaving like a lunatic.”

“It could have looked like that, I admit.”

“Was that when the penny dropped?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know it excites me?”

“What does?”

“The fact that you’re a crime-solving genius.”

“Ha ha.”

“Don’t laugh. Really, after all, the case was already solved, so how did it enter your head?”

“Because of a grain of truth.”

“I don’t get it.”

“They say that in every legend there’s a grain of truth.”

“There is.”

“But there are legends, such as that blasted anti-Semitic legend of blood, in which there isn’t a single drop of truth, which are one hundred per cent lies and superstition. I’d been thinking about it just then in the market square, never mind why. And I remembered what your father had said. That everyone tells lies, and you mustn’t forget they’re all lying. And suddenly I thought about the case as one big lie. What it would mean, if you were to suppose there wasn’t anything true in it, suppose it was all a creation. What would be left if you threw out all the stuff from seventy years ago, the ritual murders, ritual slaughter, Hebrew inscriptions, biblical quotations, rabid dogs, gloomy underground tunnels and barrels studded with nails. What would happen if I realized all the evidence and clues which had been driving our investigation from the start were lies. What would be left?”

“Three dead bodies.”

“Actually no. The three dead bodies were a creation, a lie, the three dead bodies were to make us think about three dead bodies.”

“Well then, three times one dead body.”

“Exactly. I could tell that was the right way to think. But I wasn’t quite there yet. I already knew there weren’t three dead bodies but three times one dead body. I knew that to see something, I had to strip those bodies of all the theatrical scenery. I knew I should latch on to what came from outside, the objective things which weren’t imposed on us, and hadn’t been specially prepared, as had the badge in the victim’s hand, for example.”

“Ela’s hand,” muttered Basia quietly.

“Yes, I know, all right, Ela, I’m sorry,” said Szacki, surprising himself with his tender manner, hugged his lover’s slender body to him and kissed her hair that smelt of almond shampoo.

“And so what came from the outside?”

“You mean who.”

“The profiler?”

“Bravo! Do you remember how the four of us sat together? You and I, Klejnocki and Wilczur. Under a huge picture of your friend’s corpse projected on a screen. Once again the staging overwhelmed us. That picture, Klejnocki’s irritating manner, his pipe, his boring twaddle.
There was a great deal happening at that point, we wanted a lot and quickly, and he said things that might have seemed obvious, his ideas seemed a bit thin, because he didn’t know as much as you do, for example, about Sandomierz, about the Budniks, about the relationships between the people. But he said the most important thing for our investigation: that the key to the riddle is the first killing and the motives behind it. That the first murder was committed under the influence of the greatest emotions, and the ones that follow are just the fulfilment of a plan. The anger was vented on the first victim, the hatred and bile, whereas the second was simply, if you can say that, murdered. And I started thinking. If we don’t treat the three killings as a whole, if we focus on the first, most important one, and forget the stage setting for the moment, the case is obvious. The murderer has to be Budnik. He had a motive in the form of his wife’s betrayal, he had the means, and absolutely no alibi whatsoever, he fibbed in his statements and he deceived us.”

“But who would have suspected a dead person?” Basia Sobieraj got up, put on Szacki’s shirt and fetched some girly cigarettes from her handbag.

“Do you smoke?”

“One pack every two weeks. More of a hobby than a habit. May I smoke in here, or should I go into the kitchen?”

Szacki waved a hand, dragged himself out of bed too and reached for his own cigarettes. He lit up, the warm smoke filled his lungs, and goosebumps appeared on his skin; maybe the spring had arrived at last, but the nights were still cold. He wrapped himself in a blanket and started walking about the flat to warm up.

“Nobody suspects a dead person, of course,” he continued. “Still, if it hadn’t been for Budnik’s corpse, the whole thing would have been obvious, because in Szyller’s case, too, he was the most natural suspect. All that was left was to apply Sherlock Holmes’s old principle that if we eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, has to be true.”

Sobieraj dragged on her cigarette; the cold was making her breasts, visible in the open shirt, look extremely enticing.