A Grain of Truth (6 page)

Town Number One was the picture-postcard Sandomierz of TV cop show
Father Mateusz
and classic writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz,
a little gem set on a high escarpment, whose panorama delighted everyone without exception, and which in his time Szacki had fallen in love with. He was still capable of taking a walk onto the bridge merely in order to see the historic houses banked up on the hillside, the dignified Collegium Gostomianum, the towers of the town hall and the cathedral, the Renaissance gable of the Opatowska Gate, and the solid mass of the castle. Depending on the season and the time of day, this view looked different every time, and every time it was just as breathtaking.

Unfortunately, as Szacki knew all too well now, it was a view which only made a very Italian, Tuscan impression from a distance. Once you were on the inside of the Old Town, everything was very Polish. Sandomierz was too far away from Krakow, and above all too far from Warsaw to become a holiday resort like Kazimierz Dolny. Which it deserved infinitely more, being a beautiful town, and not just a big village with three Renaissance houses and a few dozen hotels, so that every Polish company chairman had somewhere to roger his mistress. Its location off the beaten track meant that Sandomierz’s lovely old-town streets exuded boredom, emptiness, Polish hopelessness – it really was nothing but “a bloody museum”. In the afternoon the school tour groups disappeared, the old residents of the tenement houses shut themselves at home, not long after the few shops closed, and a little later so did the bars and cafés. As early as six p.m., Szacki had sometimes walked right across the Old Town, from the castle to the Opatowska Gate, without meeting a living soul. One of the most beautiful towns in Poland was deserted, dead and depressing.

Szacki really did feel better once he had got to the end of Sokolnicki Street, left the Old Town and started walking along Mickiewicz Street to the Modena. Cars appeared, and people; the shops were still full at this hour, there were kids glued to their mobile phones, someone eating a doughnut, someone running for the bus, someone shouting to a woman on the other side of the road to say, “Coming, coming, in a moment.” Szacki breathed deeply, and was afraid to admit it to himself, but he was badly missing the city. So badly that even the
modest substitute for it offered by this part of Sandomierz made the blood run quicker in his veins.

The Modena was a provincial dive that stank of beer, but he had to grant it to them, they served the best pizza in Sandomierz here, and thanks to their delicious “Romantica”, armed with a double helping of mozzarella, Szacki’s cholesterol level had jumped more than once. Just like a typical cop, Inspector Leon Wilczur was sitting in the blackest corner with his back against the wall. Without a jacket he looked even thinner, and Szacki was reminded of the hall of mirrors at a holiday fun fair. It was impossible for a person to be quite so skinny, like a fake head set on top of some old clothes for a joke.

Without a word he sat down opposite the old policeman, and a whole set of questions flew through his mind.

“Do you know who did it?”

Wilczur’s look acknowledged the question.

“No. Nor do I have any idea who could have done it. I don’t know anyone who would have wanted to. I don’t know anyone who could gain from this death. I’d have said no one from round here, if not for the fact that it must be someone from round here. I don’t believe in the idea of a wandering stranger putting himself to so much trouble.”

That really did answer Szacki’s key questions, even if he had been intending to answer each of them in person. Time to move on to the supporting ones.

“Beer or vodka?”

“Water.”

Szacki ordered water, as well as Cola and a Romantica. After that he sat and listened to Wilczur’s scratchy voice, while mentally drawing up a record of the divergences between the old policeman’s account and Sobieraj’s mawkish delivery. The dry facts were the same. Grzegorz Budnik had been a Sandomierz councillor “for ever”, i.e. since 1990, with unfulfilled mayoral aspirations, and his late wife Elżbieta (Ela for short), fifteen years his junior, was an English teacher at the famous “Number One” – in other words the grammar school that occupied the building of the old Jesuit college – ran an arts club for
children and was active in every possible kind of local cultural event. They lived in a small house on Katedralna Street, apparently once occupied by Iwaszkiewicz, the famous writer. Not particularly wealthy, childless, ageing philanthropists. With no political colouring. If one were forced to look for labels, he would have been a Red because of his past on the National Council, and she a Black – a conservative, traditionalist – because of her involvement in church initiatives and mildly professed Catholic faith.

“In a way that is a symbol of this town,” Sobieraj had said. “People of very different views, with different past histories, in theory from opposite sides of the barricade, but always able to see eye to eye when it came to the good of Sandomierz.”

“In a way, that is a symbol of this dump,” said Wilczur. “First the Reds and the Blacks each had something to prove by turns, and finally they realized they could see eye to eye for the good of business. Not for nothing is the city council in an old Dominican monastery with a view of the synagogue and the Jewish district. So they’d never forget what’s good for
gesheft
,” he said, dropping in a Yiddish word. “I’m not going to give you a history lecture, but to put it briefly, under the Reds the town was yuk. Tarnobrzeg was fine and dandy with its sulphur deposits, and eventually there was the glassworks across the river, but here it was educated types up to their tricks, dubious intellectuals, and priests, to make matters worse. In Warsaw, Sandomierz wasn’t even mentioned on the road signs, only Tarnobrzeg. This place was nothing but misery, indigence and a bloody open-air museum. The new era came along, people rejoiced, but not for long, because suddenly it turned out this wasn’t a town, just a secular growth on the healthy tissue of the Church. They changed the cinema into a Catholic Centre. They started holding masses in the market square. They set up a statue of John Paul the size of a lighthouse on the common to have an excuse from then on why no event should ever be held there, and now it’s just a place where the dogs shit. And so it became a bloody open-air museum again, more churches than pubs. And then the Reds came back to power, and after a moment’s consternation it turned out that if there’s good
gesheft
, then oy vey, oy vey, everyone can benefit.
If a shop or a petrol station can be put up on recovered church land, everyone gets a cut, everyone will be happy.”

“Did Budnik take part in that?”

Wilczur hesitated, and ordered another bottle of mineral water with a gesture worthy of single-malt whisky.

“In those days I was working in Tarnobrzeg, but people used to talk.”

“This is Poland, they always talk. I have heard that he was never mixed up in anything.”

“Not officially. But the Church doesn’t have to be public about these things – it can sell whatever it wants for as much as it wants and to whomever it wants. It was quite strange that first of all the town was happy to hand over plots of land to the Church, as part of the recompense for Communist injustices, and then the Church immediately sold them as sites for a petrol station or a supermarket. No one knows who bought them or for what price. And Budnik was a great advocate of the idea of rendering unto God the things that are God’s, and rendering unto the Jew the things that are the Jew’s.”

Szacki shrugged. He was bored, he was tired of the fact that all Wilczur’s statements had a negative tone, permeated with Polish poison, as sticky as the tables at the Modena.

“There are deals like that the length and breadth of the country – what’s the significance of that? Did it earn Budnik enemies? Was there someone he didn’t take care of? Or didn’t take care of the right way? Did he do deals with the Mafia? So far it sounds to me like village scams, a scoop for the local school magazine. But nothing you slash someone’s wife’s throat for.”

Wilczur raised a skinny, wrinkled finger.

“Maybe land isn’t worth as much here as in central Warsaw, but no one gives it away for nothing.”

He stopped talking and became pensive. Szacki waited, watching the policeman. He was trying to think of him as an experienced local cop, but there was something about the inspector that he found repulsive. He looked like a tramp, and this quality was so integral to him that however he dressed and whatever he drank he’d always resemble a vodka-soaked tramp. There were no rational reasons for it, but Szacki’s
trust was melting away by the minute. He missed Kuzniecow. He missed him very much.

“You can see what this town is like,” Wilczur continued. “It may still be sleepy, but it’s a gem of a kind that’s very rare in Poland, with the makings of a new Kazimierz Dolny or even better. They’ll build a marina, set up a couple of spas, the motorway will run past from Warsaw to Rzeszów and on to Ukraine. A stretch of motorway from Warsaw to Krakow in the other direction, and in five years there’ll be a queue of BMWs here every Friday from both directions. What’ll the profit on a plot of land be like then? Tenfold? Twentyfold? A hundredfold? It doesn’t take a genius to see it coming. And now please think. You know Sandomierz, it has lots of money and big plans. Hotels, restaurants, residential areas, tourist attractions. There are absolutely billions in this land. And you know that, but at most you can put up a dog kennel in the garden of your villa, because all the city’s land for investment goes back to the Church in a hail of glory, after which it quietly ends up in the hands of the most trusted types who know the right people. Where do you live?”

“I’m renting a place on Długosz Street.”

“And have you checked how much a flat costs here? Or a house? Or a plot of land?”

“Sure. A sixty-square-metre flat costs about two hundred thousand, and a house is three times as much.”

“In Kazimierz Dolny a flat that size costs from half a million to a million, and for a house there’s actually no upper limit, but the conversation starts at a million in the case of a hovel on the edge of town.”

Szacki imagined taking out the biggest possible loan and buying three flats here in order to become a happy rentier in a few years’ time. Nice, very nice.

“OK,” he said slowly. “Next question: who’s the most pissed-off builder of a dog kennel in the garden of his villa?”

In response Wilczur tore the filter off a cigarette and lit it.

“You have to understand one thing,” he said. “No one here likes Budnik.”

Szacki started to fidget; he had been expecting the shrewd local policeman, but he was dealing with a paranoiac.

“I’ve only just been painted a picture of Mr and Mrs Budnik in nothing but pastel tones, beloved by all, secular saints. Is it true he brought the
Father Mateusz
TV series here?”

“It’s true. They were going to film it in Nidzica, but Budnik knew someone at the TVP channel and persuaded them to choose Sandomierz.”

“Is it true that thanks to him the scrubland on Piłsudski Boulevard is becoming a park and a marina?”

“True as true can be.”

“Is it true he had Piszczele Street refurbished?”

“Absolutely true. That even impressed me – I was sure there was no hope for that murderer’s and rapist’s alley.”

It occurred to Szacki that he had never heard of any rapes or murders occurring in Sandomierz, not counting in the local eateries, where flavours were murdered and palates were brutally assaulted. He kept that comment to himself.

“So what’s it about?” he asked.

Inspector Wilczur made a vague gesture, designed to imply that he was trying to convey something that couldn’t be conveyed in words.

“Are you familiar with the noisy social campaigner type of person who can’t bear opposition because he’s always in the middle of some crusade?”

Szacki said he was.

“He was that type. Never mind if he was right or not, he was always bloody infuriating. I know people who voted for his ideas just so he’d shut up. So he wouldn’t keep hanging around, pestering them on the phone at night and rushing off to the newspapers.”

“Small beer,” remarked Szacki. “It’s all small beer. An irritating social campaigner, doing his small-time provincial deals; it’s all small beer. They didn’t slash his tyres, or smash his windows, or kill his dog. They cruelly and deliberately butchered his wife.”

Sobieraj’s judgment of the victim had been unambiguous. She was wonderful, good, with no faults at all, open-hearted, even if
her husband was sometimes over-aggressive in his crusades and annoyed people, in her presence everybody melted. She helped, she advised, she took care of things. She was goodness incarnate, full of all that was best from head to toe. Prosecutor Sobieraj had delivered a totally non-objective paean in her honour, and then burst into tears. It was embarrassing. But nevertheless credible. Meanwhile, Szacki had a problem with Wilczur’s account. Something didn’t match up. He didn’t yet know what, but something wasn’t right.

“Mother Elżbieta of the Angels, that’s what they called her,” said Wilczur.

“After the character in Iwaszkiewicz’s story, ‘Mother Joanna of the Angels’? She was a madwoman.”

“Mrs Budnik wasn’t,” said Wilczur, shaking his head. “Not in the least. Goodness personified.”

“The woman in the story was insane.”

“You know that, and so do I, and she knew it too, and she hated that nickname. But that’s what they called her – they thought it was a compliment. And I’ll be frank with you – she wasn’t my cup of tea, but she deserved every compliment. She really was a good person. I won’t keep repeating myself, but I’m sure everything you’ve heard about her and have yet to hear about her is true.”

“Perhaps she was irritating too? Too much social conscience? Too Catholic? I don’t know, maybe she bought too little at the local bazaar? This is Poland – they must have hated her for something, bad-mouthed her behind her back, envied her something.”

Wilczur shrugged.

“No.”

“No, and that’s all? End of brilliant analysis?”