Entanglement (16 page)

Writing out the statement of facts, his hypotheses and the inquiry plan took him less time than he had expected. Less than ninety minutes. Considering he’d spent at least half that time thinking about Monika Grzelka - not a bad result. What should he do now? The last woman he’d seduced was Weronika, and that had happened more than ten years ago. And actually it wasn’t so much he that had seduced her, as she him. Memory was limited to a vague “somehow it just happened of its own accord”. He liked her, they’d talked a bit, suddenly they’d started kissing - correction: suddenly she’d started kissing him - and a week later they’d ended up in bed. Two weeks later he could no longer imagine life without her.

That’s all I have to give in evidence on the case, he thought. Not counting his high school and early student adventures. And two short affairs from early in his marriage that he tried to forget about. And one - unfortunately - non-consummated acquaintance with a lady prosecutor from Piaseczno. Until now he’d always consoled himself that it had worked out for the best, because he did have a wife and child, and he ought to be good, but the truth was different - he was bloody sorry. How does that saying go? Better to sin and be sorry than be sorry you
didn’t sin. Another stupid bit of folk wisdom that only looks good on paper. They’d met on a case involving the murder of a developer. The body was in the City Centre, but the family, friends, company and everything else was in the nearby town of Piaseczno. They had worked together. At length and intensively. They had worked and talked, talked and worked, talked and talked. One night he’d driven her home and kissed her in the car. He’d been amazed a kiss could taste so different. That it could all be so new. That lips could have such a different shape, a tongue such a different texture, breath such a different flavour.

“We can’t go on kissing like this for ever,” she’d said, and he knew it wasn’t a simple statement of fact but a proposition. She’d done everything, she’d merely required confirmation from him. But even so he’d chickened out. He’d trembled with fear.

“We can’t take this any further,” he’d gasped eventually. She had just smiled, kissed him one more time and got out. She’d waved from the stairwell. Then he’d seen a light shining on the second floor. He’d sat in the car for another hour, battling with himself. Finally he’d driven away. He’d sped down Puławska Street back to Weronika, feeling glad he’d done the right thing. But at the heart of it he knew it wasn’t loyalty that had stopped him - however you understood it - or love - however you understood that. He’d been held back by fear. The humiliating memory of his nervous trembling had stayed with him for a long time after he’d lain down beside his wife, feeling relief as he cuddled up to the familiar curves of her body.

That was then. What about now? He was thirty-five, soon to be thirty-six. How much longer did he have to wait to experience what it’s like when every square inch of someone’s body is a surprise? It’s now or never, he thought.

He dialled the number.

“Good day, this is Szacki.”

“Oh, hi… I mean, good day, Prosecutor.”

He took a deep breath.

“Please call me Teo.”

“Monika. Pity you didn’t suggest it yesterday - we could have kissed to celebrate.”

The familiar trembling was back. He was glad they were talking by phone.

“I hope we’ll make up for it,” said a strange voice, which to Szacki’s mind wasn’t his own at all.

“Hmm, that’s just what I was thinking,” she said. “So when?”

He thought frantically. Christ Almighty, he had to have an excuse, otherwise his intentions would be obvious.

“Maybe Friday?” he suggested. “I’ll have that indictment for you.” The final remark was so stupid that if embarrassment had a temperature Szacki would have burst into flames. What other good ideas have you got, Teodor? he asked himself. A date at the forensics lab?

“Oh, yes, the indictment.” Now he could no longer be in any doubt what she thought of it. “Six p.m. at Szpilka? It’s not far from your office.” The way she said the word “office” it sounded as if he were a clerk of the lowliest rank at a provincial post office.

“Wonderful idea,” he said, thinking at the same time he must call the bank and check his account. Did Weronika read the statements? He couldn’t remember.

“Well, goodbye until Friday,” she said.

“Bye,” he replied, immediately feeling sure that of all the nonsense in this conversation his final “bye” deserved a gold medal.

He put down the receiver and took off his jacket. He was trembling, and sweating like a Swede on holiday in Tunisia. He drank two glasses of mineral water in two goes and thought thank God he’d written the sodding inquiry plan earlier, because now without a doubt he wouldn’t be able to sit still any longer.
He got up, planning to go for a walk to the minimart next to the bookshop on the Avenue for a cola, when the phone rang. He froze at the thought that it might be Monika, and only picked it up on the third ring.

Kuzniecow.

The policeman told him the results of the interviews at Polgrafex, Telak’s firm. Or rather the lack of results. A pleasant man - calm, unaggressive, ran the firm pretty well. No one had any complaints, no one said anything bad about him. In fact one of the managers let slip that now they might succeed in pushing the firm onto new tracks, but it was just the usual careerist talk.

“And you should definitely interview his secretary,” said Kuzniecow.

“Why? Did they have an affair?” Szacki was sceptical.

“No, but she’s really hot stuff, I could interview her any day of the week. Ideally in uniform, in the interview room at Mostowski Palace. You know, the one downstairs…”

“Oleg, for pity’s sake, your fantasies make me feel sick. I’m afraid you’ll start showing me pictures of Alsatian dogs in handcuffs next.”

“What’s your problem?” said the policeman, taking offence. “You call her in, take a look, write some crap in a report. Fifteen minutes and you’re done - it’ll take you more time to go and get a porn mag from the Empik shop.”

“Fuck you. Did she say anything?”

“That Telak never parted with his digital Dictaphone, on which he recorded everything. Business meetings, ideas, notes, conversations, deadlines. Some people simply remember, some write things down, some make notes on their mobile. But he recorded them. I called his wife to confirm the Dictaphone is nowhere in the house.”

“In other words something’s gone missing,” said Szacki.

“Looks like it. Strange, but it’s a fact.”

“Yes, it rather destroys the convenient theory about the burglar in a panic, doesn’t it? Leaves behind a wallet full of credit cards but takes a Dictaphone - pretty odd.”

“Do you think we should search all their flats?” asked Kuzniecow.

“I have no idea. I’m just thinking about it,” replied Szacki, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb. He needed that cola. “No, not yet. Let’s hold off until Monday. There’s something I have to check.”

Kuzniecow didn’t insist, but Szacki knew he had a different view. And who knows, maybe he was right. Szacki didn’t want to decide right now to raid the flats of all the suspects. He felt it wouldn’t be right.

Finally he gave up on the cola and devoted the next three hours to finding an expert witness who was a specialist on Family Constellation Therapy. While he was about it he noticed that the name of Cezary Rudzki featured on the list of experts. In fact he was the first person to be suggested to him. Only after a few calls to acquaintances at the psychiatry institute on Sobieski Street did he get a different name.

“A pretty eccentric guy, but once you accept that he’s incredibly interesting,” a familiar psychiatrist told him. Pressed by Szacki, he refused to disclose what this “eccentricity” involved, but just kept repeating that Szacki would have to see for himself.

“I’d just like to see the transcript of that meeting,” he said at the end of the conversation, and started to snigger like a madman.

Doctor, heal thyself, thought Szacki. As he usually did whenever he had to deal with psychologists and psychiatrists.

The therapist was called Jeremiasz Wróbel. Szacki called, briefly described the case and made an appointment for Friday. The conversation was short, but he didn’t get the impression that he was talking to a particularly nutty person.

His study at home was predominantly in the office style of the 1970s, but it didn’t bother him, quite the contrary. Sometimes he even sought out some gadget or other from that era on the Internet as a new exhibit for his museum. Lately he’d bought the
Great Universal Encyclopedia
published by PWN in the 1960s - thirteen volumes of it - and he was considering the original Soviet edition of
The History of the Second World War
in twelve volumes. Editions like these looked good in his glass-fronted bookcase.

As well as the bookcase, there was a large French-polished desk, a lamp with a green shade, an ebonized telephone and a black leather armchair with a chrome frame. There was oak parquet, a thick wine-red rug and dark panelling on the walls. He hadn’t been able to resist hanging a rack of antlers above the door. Dreadful kitsch, but it suited this interior to perfection.

Only he was allowed in the study. He did the cleaning in here himself, dusted and washed the windows. The door was secured by one mighty lock, for which there were only two keys. One he always had on him, the other was kept in a safe at the office on Stawki Street. And the point of it all was not that he kept valuable objects or secret documents in his study, though undoubtedly a search conducted in this room would have revealed facts capable of damaging the careers of several people in the public eye. What he was concerned about was privacy; about having his own place, where no one - not his wife, or his lover, or his children, who came to visit less and less - would have access.

Now he was sitting by the window in a deep armchair upholstered in dark-green corduroy, drinking tea as he read Norman Davies’s book about Wrocław and waited for the phone to ring. He was feeling calm, and yet he couldn’t concentrate on his reading. For the third time he started the same paragraph,
but his thoughts kept drifting away to Henryk and the man conducting the inquiry. He was keen to know what Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had come up with.

Finally the phone rang.

“It’s Igor. I know everything. Shall I fax you the lot?”

“Don’t go over the top, I’ve got more interesting things to read,” he said, marking his place in Davies’s book with a postcard he got from his daughter living in Santa Fe, and put it down on a coffee table next to his chair. “You can summarize.”

“The statement of facts is the statement of facts. Nothing we don’t know about. Henryk plus the therapist plus the three patients. The patients had never met before; the therapist had been giving Henryk individual treatment for six months. They got to the place on Friday…”

“Don’t witter on. Hypotheses?”

“First one: Henryk was murdered accidentally by someone committing theft by breaking and entering.”

“That doesn’t concern us. Next?”

“The murderer is one of the people taking part in the therapy or the therapist. Each of them had the opportunity, but none of them - or so it appears from the evidence gathered so far - had a motive that could justify committing murder. At least not a direct one. Some of the circumstantial evidence implies that the therapy was a very painful process. Under the influence of these emotions, one of the patients could have taken Henryk’s life.”

“What sort of bullshit is that?” he bristled. “People kill because they’re drunk or for money. And they said this Szacki wasn’t bad. Oh well, yet another disappointment. So what’s our white-haired prosecutor planning to do?”

He had to wait while Igor found the relevant bit.

“He’s planning to ask the opinion of an expert on the therapy techniques applied in the case of the deceased and to investigate his professional and social environment, to confirm or exclude
any previous contact with the witnesses. Apart from that, routine activities, blah blah blah.”

He sucked in air noisily.

“Yes, that’s worse.”

“I wouldn’t get too upset about it,” said Igor.

“Why not?”

“Henryk wasn’t particularly sociable or professionally active, and he only met up with us from time to time by chance. They’ll question a few of his friends, maybe some of Polgrafex’s clients. I don’t think it can be a danger for us. We’ll keep a finger on the pulse and keep getting up-to-date information from the police and the prosecutor’s. Apart from anything, we’ve got more important, much more complicated matters to see to.”

He agreed with Igor. They couldn’t devote a lot of strength and resources to the Telak affair. And as it all implied that the case would fall apart at the seams and the only result would be another “perpetrator unknown” in the Ministry of Justice statistics, there was nothing to worry about.

 

In Japan, Triumph presents the ecological bra - not only can you join the cups together to make a model of the world, but it’s totally biodegradable. After a few years the shoulder straps change into compost. Research shows that thirty-seven per cent of Poles prefer plain ice cream, twenty-five per cent vanilla, and twenty-two per cent chocolate. Meanwhile in Africa 25,000 people are dying of hunger and lack of water every day, Bono tells the head of the European Commission. Polish State Railways are under threat of strikes. The unions agree to restructuring with a human face, not the kind that causes “terror and poverty”. Cimoszewicz is “considering a change of mind”, Kaczyński I (leader of the “Law & Justice” Party) is seeking to correct a report that said he called MP Zygmunt Wrzodak a “tramp”, and now Kaczyński II (the Mayor of Warsaw) is banning the equality rallies; homosexuals are calling for civic disobedience. In the penultimate round of the First League, Legia beat GKS Katowice, who are being relegated to the Second League, and Dariusz Dziekanowski makes it into the club’s Gallery of Fame for playing 101 matches and scoring forty-five goals. The city guard start patrolling the Old Town in Melex electric vehicles, prompting even more ridicule than usual, and the police catch the murderer of a twenty-eight-year-old woman. The couple met on the Internet, and after killing her the man stole a computer, which the police found at the home where he lived with his pregnant wife.
For lack of funds the hospital on Banach Street has started sending away patients with cancer untreated. Maximum temperature: sixteen degrees; cold and cloudy, but no rain.