Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
A Grain of Truth (51 page)
There was probably no better place in Poland to spend a lazy spring evening over a pint of beer than in the shade of the chestnut trees on the terrace of the Kordegarda restaurant, known to regulars as the Korda. Slightly raised above the level of the market square, and as a result slightly separate, it was the ideal spot to lose yourself in watching the tourists milling around the town hall, the newly-weds taking pictures of each other, the high-school children glued to their mobiles, the kids glued to their candy floss, and the lovers glued to each other.
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was waiting for Basia to come back from the toilet, and staring insolently at the people sitting around him. As ever, he envied them all their lives, he was feeling mawkish somehow, and wistful. Right next to him by the terrace railing sat a couple of locals, in love with each other like teenagers, although they must have been well over fifty. He was the portly manager type in a scruffy shirt, and she was in a colourful top and had a bold sex appeal that had come unscathed through decades of baking cakes and bringing up offspring. They were talking non-stop about their children, of whom they seemed to have three, judging by the vividly described ups and downs of their lives – all around the age of thirty, all in Warsaw. They didn’t say a word about themselves, but just kept reeling off colourful yarns about their daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren, what they were doing, what they weren’t doing, what was going well for them, what might go well or might not. He was more positively disposed in a quiet way, she occasionally got wound up in negative scenarios, and then he would clear his throat and say: “What can you know about it, Hania?” Then she would stop for a while, to let him enjoy the feeling that of course
Witek knows better, and after that she – well quite, what could she know about it? – went back to telling her story. Watching them and eavesdropping was a treat – Szacki was smiling, and at the same time he felt sad. It took several decades nurturing love and affection to get to be that sort of couple. He had destroyed his family, he was too old for a second one now, and he wasn’t destined to grow into old age with someone with whom he had shared his entire previous life.
If only he were ten years younger. On the other side of the garden there was a couple just like that. They both looked quite young, but they must have been about thirty; in the first instance he thought “my generation”, but he soon corrected himself. That’s not your generation any more, Prosecutor – you know all Jacek Kaczmarski’s opposition protest songs by heart, but for them music starts with Kurt Cobain. You were grown up when
Gazeta Wyborcza
published its first edition, as Poland’s first independent newspaper, but to them it was just a rag their parents brought home. There aren’t many generations in the world where ten crappy years make as much of a difference as in this instance.
The couple were all touchy-feely and totally absorbed in each other; their glucose level must have fallen really low for them to have decided to get out of bed. From snippets of conversation he understood that it was the man’s birthday today. It’s great to have your birthday in May, he thought, to have a barbecue party or meet up in a pub garden – in November he never had the chance. For a while he was tempted to offer his best wishes.
But he let it rest; dragging the birthday boy out of the tent created by his girlfriend’s long chestnut hair would have been cruel. As soon as his neighbour sensed Szacki’s gaze on him, he looked vigilantly around the café and Szacki quickly turned away. Something tickled Szacki’s ear. The something was an absurdly large chestnut flower, being held by Basia. In the corner of his eye he just caught the man’s smile, a smile that said yes, he too thought Sandomierz in May was the ideal place for lovers.
“Shall we go?”
He nodded, drank up his beer, and together they went down the steps onto the cobblestones of the market square. The setting sun was shining red at the top of Oleśnicki Street, coating everything in a crimson glow, including the walls of the old synagogue.
“We can’t stay here if we want to be together,” she said.
She smiled, kissed him on the cheek, waved a slender hand in farewell, and walked off at a rapid pace towards the Opatowska Gate, her skirt swirling around her bare, pale and – as he knew – very freckly calves. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki gazed after her for a while, and then walked towards the sun to catch its final rays. He stopped below the synagogue and watched as the orange light on the wall of the building was gradually displaced by a shadow from below. He was so absorbed in watching it that there was no room inside him for any other thought. Only as the sunset came to its end did he look around him.
Eighty years earlier in all the flats and all the houses in the district, for a quarter of an hour by now the candles would have been burning, lit by the women as a sign that the Sabbath had begun, and that everyone should stop working now, recite
kiddush
and start supper. He glanced down Żydowska Street towards the castle, and remembered the recording shown him by Wilczur, of the figure dissolving into the mist.
He shrugged and started walking in the same direction.
I owe the origin of this book, like its predecessor, to my brother, who decided to tie the knot with Ola, a wonderful girl who happens to come from Sandomierz, and so I went there for the wedding, fell head over heels in love with the place and left knowing I had to write a novel set there. The fact that it is a crime novel and that the plot involves stereotypical attitudes that are still alive and painful, is due to Beata Stasińska, whom I take this opportunity to thank for all our conversations about all my books. Many thanks are due to everyone who helped during the several months I spent living in Sandomierz to research the book, above all Ola’s parents, their friends and the invaluable Renata Targowska and Jerzy Krzemiński.
I used a lot of sources for this book, but the city of Sandomierz is the most important one of all, and I would recommend anyone who wants to know more about this magical city on the river Vistula to pay it a visit. Those interested in the sinister legend about ritual murder should read Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s essay
Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesądu
(“Legends of Blood: the Anthropology of Prejudice”), published by WAB, Warsaw, in 2008. Another important source I should mention is
Sława i chwała
(“Fame and Glory”) by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the family saga I was reading while writing this book, and the careful reader will find echoes of it here. As a matter of form I should add that all the characters (well, almost
all – my respects to Jarosław and Marcin) and all the events are fictional, and I am entirely responsible for any deliberate distortions or mistakes in the facts and the topography; also, making Sandomierz into a sinister capital of murder does not, God forbid, testify to my attitude towards this city, which I regard as the most enchanting place in Poland.
Sandomierz and Warsaw, 2009–11
Zygmunt Miłoszewski
The morning after a gruelling psychotherapy session in a Warsaw monastery, Henryk Telak is found dead, a roasting spit stuck in one eye. The case lands on the desk of State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki. World-weary, suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and marital ennui, Szacki feels that life has passed him by, but this case changes everything.
He must steer his way among a gallery of colourful characters: a flirtatious young journalist, an eccentric psychiatrist, a lecherous police colleague and a paranoid historian. Szacki’s search for the killer unearths another murder that took place twenty years earlier, before the fall of Communism. The trail leads to facts that, for his own safety, he’d be better off not knowing.
“Miłoszewski takes an engaging look at modern Polish society in this stellar first in a new series starring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki. Readers will want to see more of the complex, sympathetic Szacki.”
Publishers Weekly
“
Entanglement
has everything I want from a thriller. It opens with a murder and quickly develops into a fast-moving and tightly plotted whodunit with a host of colourful characters and vivid descriptions of contemporary Cracow. But it’s the unsatisfactory personal life and emotional turmoil of its hero, State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, that steal centre stage.’
Oxford Times
“The character of Prosecutor Szacki has enough charisma and complexity to give competition to the likes of Mikael Blomkvist and Rob Ryan. Hopefully the first of many mystery novels from Miłoszewski.”
Foreward Reviews
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Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978-1904738-442
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