Entanglement (17 page)

Hard-boiled egg in tartare sauce, beefed up with a large portion of green peas. No lawyer in Warsaw was unfamiliar with this particular delicacy, a cult item on the menu at the Warsaw Regional Court canteen.

Teodor Szacki took two helpings, for himself and Weronika, put them on a plastic tray next to two instant coffees and took it over to their table. He missed the old court canteen - a large hall that stank of fried food and cheap cigarettes, its walls gone yellow with age, filth and grease, thirty feet high, full of small metal tables, reminiscent of a provincial station waiting room. A magical place - going up the high steps leading into the canteen had been like looking through a microscope at a section of the main artery of the judiciary. The judges - usually up in the little gallery, having a two-course lunch, on their own. The lawyers - usually having coffee together, sitting with their legs crossed, greeting each other sincerely and at the same time casually, blithely, as if they’d dropped in at the club for a cigar and a glass of whisky. Witnesses from the underworld, big shots and emaciated women in evening make-up - probably feeling just the same here as anywhere. Guys bowed over a piece of meat, women sipping mineral water from the bottle. The victims’ families - grey, sad, by some miracle always finding the most wretched little tables, staring suspiciously at everyone around them. The prosecutors - eating alone, whatever and however, just to get it over and done with. Knowing they couldn’t get anything done on time, that whatever they did it’d be too little,
there’d always be something left for next day, which was already planned out from start to finish; infuriated by every recess the judge ordered, too short to do anything and too long to bear in peace. The court reporters - too many people at one small table, with no room for all the coffee cups, cigarette packets, ashtrays and plates of tongue. Too noisy, swapping jokes and anecdotes, now and then jumping up to greet a familiar lawyer, draw him aside and whisper questions to him. The rest would cast glances in his direction, curious whether he knew something they didn’t. “Any news?” they’d ask when their colleague returned, knowing he’d reply with the invariable joke: “Oh, nothing special, you’ll read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

There was none of that atmosphere in the new canteen, where everything seemed kind of ordinary. Weronika had crushed him recently by claiming it felt good in here because the atmosphere was like at the City Council buffet - what could be good about that?

He sat down next to his wife and put the coffee and egg in front of her. She was looking pretty. Suit, make-up, sheer wine-red blouse with a low neckline. When they met in the evening, she’d be wearing a T-shirt, slippers from Ikea and a mask of all-day tiredness.

“Christ, what a dreadful case,” she said, adding cream to her coffee from a plastic container.

“Bierut again?” he asked. Most of the cases Weronika conducted concerned property that people had been deprived of after the war by force of a decree issued by the Communist president, Bolesław Bierut. Now they were reclaiming their tenement houses, but if in the meantime several of the communal flats had been sold to the tenants, the owner de facto regained only part of the building. So then he sued the city for compensation. Each case of this kind was a boring lottery; sometimes by using legal loopholes you could shift the obligation to the state’s cost,
rather than the city’s, sometimes you could postpone it, but you could hardly ever win.

“No, unfortunately not.” She took off her jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Her blouse had very short sleeves, he could see the scar from her TB inoculation, and suddenly he felt a massive urge for sex. “The city awards special grants to hundreds of organizations of various kinds, which they have to account for later on. A year ago we awarded a small sum to a youth club in the Praga district that takes care of children with ADHD and various other conditions. Mainly children from Praga families, as you can imagine. So we got their report, where it says as plain as day that they used the money to pay the electricity bill, or else they’d have been cut off, although they got the funding for therapeutic activities.”

“It’s hard to conduct therapeutic activities without electricity,” he commented.

“Jesus, Teo, you don’t have to explain that to me. But rules are rules. As they used the grant wrongly, I have to write and tell them to return the money…”

“Which of course they won’t, because they haven’t got any.”

“So then we have to sue them. Obviously, we’ll win, we’ll send round a bailiff, the bailiff won’t get anywhere; it’s all a complete sham. Of course the teachers from the place have already been to see me, they begged and pleaded, and soon I’ll be doing the same in the courtroom. But I really can’t do a thing.” She buried her face in her hands. “Rules are rules.”

He leaned forward, took her hand and kissed her on the palm.

“But you do look very sexy,” he said.

“What a perv you are. Give me a rest,” she said, laughing, and wound her legs round his. “Best time for sex, isn’t it?” she murmured. “This evening we won’t feel like it any more.”

“We’ll make ourselves some coffee and we’ll see. Maybe it’ll work.”

“I’ll make a big jug of it,” she said, running a finger along the edge of her blouse, revealing more cleavage.

“Just stay in that blouse.”

“Don’t you like my teddy-bear T-shirt?”

He couldn’t help laughing. She was the person closest to him, and he was sorry he couldn’t tell her about all his dilemmas, fears and hopes to do with Monika. He’d like to open a bottle of Carmenère or Primitivo, sit down next to her in bed and tell her some funny stories, how he’d been afraid to order a meringue so he wouldn’t have to battle with it in front of the girl. Funny? Funny. Would she have laughed? Absolutely. They did almost everything together, but he could only cheat on her separately.

They bantered for a while, then Weronika quickly ran upstairs, while he stayed put for a bit longer to look at the paper. For once there was something interesting: an interview with the female head of a prison in Puławy. She talked about the women convicts, mostly victims of domestic violence who one fine day had finally taken a swing at their husbands - often with a decisive result. This was exactly the case with Mariola Nidziecka. He had to charge her. And he didn’t know what with. That is, he knew, but he also knew his classification would cause the officious old bag in charge to have palpitations. Providing Chorko would accept it at all.

Apart from that it was the usual stuff: an interview with Cimoszewicz, who “in the face of such great pressure” was having to give serious consideration to changing his mind and running for President. Szacki hoped that Communist-Party wonderboy would read the entire paper today, because several pages further on there was an article about some American research which proved irrefutably that voters are guided at the ballot box by the candidate’s looks, not his abilities. Or maybe I’m wrong? thought Szacki, stuffing the newspaper into his briefcase. Maybe his foxy face will win him the election?

He left the court catacombs and went out into the atrium, which was big enough to house several railway depots. The sun was shining in through the enormous windows, carving corridors in the dust, like in a Gothic church. At one time you could smoke in here, but now Szacki had to go outside for the first of his three cigarettes.

“Good morning, Prosecutor, would you like a cigarette?” he heard as soon as he passed through the heavy revolving doors.

Bogdan Nebb from
Gazeta Wyborcza
newspaper. The only journalist he could talk to without feeling sick. Not counting Monika. He glanced at the packet of RI Lights being held out towards him.

“No, thank you, I prefer my own,” he replied and reached into his jacket pocket for the silver packet of Benson & Hedges, which had finally become available in Poland recently. He thought they tasted worse than when he used to buy them abroad. They lit up.

“The Gliński trial’s starting next week. Are you prosecuting?” the journalist asked.

“I’ve just come to look through the files before the trial.”

“Curious case. Not very obvious.”

“To whom?” replied Szacki laconically, unable to admit that Nebb was right. But he was. The body of evidence was so-so and a good lawyer should win it. He would have known how to undermine the circumstantial evidence he himself had gathered. The question was whether Gliński’s lawyer would know too.

“Are you going to insist on that classification?”

Szacki smiled.

“You’ll discover all in the courtroom.”

“Mr Prosecutor, after all these years…”

“Mr Nebb, after all these years you’re trying to get something out of me.”

The journalist tapped ash into the brimfull ashtray.

“I heard you’re conducting the inquiry into the murder on Łazienkowska Street.”

“I was on duty that day. I thought you weren’t working on the current crime columns any more.”

“My friends told me it’s an interesting case.”

“I thought you were taking a cautious approach to your police sources these days,” said Szacki, alluding to the recent well-publicized affair when on Monday
Gazeta Wyborcza
had written about a criminal gang at National Police Headquarters, on Tuesday and Wednesday had insisted on their story despite a series of denials, and on Friday had grassed on their informers, claiming they’d deliberately misled them. For Szacki it proved the rightness of the basic principle that he followed in his contacts with the media: never say anything they wouldn’t know anyway.

“The press makes mistakes too, Mr Prosecutor. Like any authority.”

“The difference is we don’t choose the press in general elections,” Szacki retorted. “History teaches us that self-proclaimed authority makes the most mistakes. And is the best at covering them up.”

The journalist smiled weakly and stubbed out his cigarette.

“But somehow it works, doesn’t it? See you in court, Mr Prosecutor.”

Szacki nodded to him, went back inside and glanced up at the historic clock hanging in the atrium above the cloakrooms. It was late. And he still had so much to do. Once again he felt tired.

Teodor Szacki sat on the bed where Henryk Telak had spent almost two nights. He took the site inspection report out of his briefcase, and looked through it again, although he had already
done that earlier. There was nothing in it, just the obvious. Yet again. Discouraged, he put down the report and looked around the dark room. A bed, a small table next to it, a lamp, an Ikea rug, a shallow wardrobe, a mirror on the wall, a cross above the door. There wasn’t even a chair. There was one small window with two handles; the paint was coming off the frame, and the glass was begging to be cleaned from both sides.

Earlier on Szacki had looked around the other bedrooms - they all looked the same. On the way to Łazienkowska Street he thought maybe something would inspire him, he’d see some detail, or his instinct would tell him who the murderer was. None of it. From the courtyard - theoretically locked at night, but Szacki didn’t believe anyone kept an eye on it - you entered via an ugly brown door into a vestibule. From the vestibule you could go through to the refectory, or to the classroom where the body was found, or go on down a narrow corridor leading to the bedrooms (there were seven of them in all) and the bathroom. Further on there was another vestibule and a passage to another part of the monastery. Though Szacki wasn’t sure the word “monastery” was apt. When he looked at the building from the outside it was. But inside it was more like a neglected office that hadn’t been done up for years, dark and gloomy. The passage was blocked off by pinewood double doors that were never opened.

Hopeless, thought Szacki. When the police searched these rooms, and all the witnesses’ personal belongings, just after the body was found, they found absolutely nothing at all that might be connected with the case. Nothing they could treat as circumstantial evidence or even a hint of it. Hopeless. If nothing came of his visit to the expert tomorrow, from Monday he’d have to go and join the narcotics squad.

He jumped up when the door opened abruptly and there stood Father Mieczysław Paczek. Kuzniecow wasn’t entirely
wrong in saying they all looked like fanatical wankers. The priests Szacki had met in his career always seemed a bit dull, with a misty gaze and a sort of softness, just as if they’d spent too long sitting in a bath of hot water. With his benevolently concerned smile Father Paczek was no different from the rest. Well, almost. He spoke quickly, without priestly solemnity, and as he talked he gave the impression of being bright and down-to-earth. Szacki realized the priest had nothing to say that could help. Yet another disappointment.

“Have you found anything?” asked the priest.

“Unfortunately not, Father,” replied Szacki, standing up. “It looks as if only a miracle can push this inquiry forwards. If there’s anything you can do about it,” he pointed upwards meaningfully, “I’d be grateful.”

“You’re on the right side, Prosecutor,” said the priest, knotting his fingers as if eager to fall to his knees at once and say prayers for the inquiry. “And that means you have some powerful allies.”

“Maybe they’re so powerful they don’t even know that somewhere out there in the trenches a handful of soldiers from the allied army are trying to stand up to superior enemy forces. Maybe they think this bit of the front is lost already anyway, so they’d rather send their reinforcements somewhere else?”

“You’re not just one of a few soldiers, Prosecutor, you’re a lieutenant in a great big army - the enemy forces aren’t so numerous at all, and your bit of the front will always be one of the most important.”

“Could I at least have a rifle that doesn’t jam?”

Father Paczek laughed.

“You’ll have to ask for that yourself. But I can give you something else. I don’t know if it’ll be useful - we found it yesterday in the chapel. I would have called the police, but I thought that as you were going to be here, I could pass it on to you. I think it belonged to the unfortunate victim, because it has
the name Henryk Telak inscribed on the back, and I recall from the papers that the poor man was called Henryk T.”