Entanglement (2 page)

The therapist shook his head.

“Please go to your rooms for half an hour to rest and calm down. At ten on the dot we’ll meet in the classroom.”

All three - Euzebiusz, Barbara and Hanna - nodded and left. Rudzki walked around the table, checked to see if there was still some coffee in the thermos and poured himself a full cup. He cursed, because he’d forgotten to leave room for the milk. Now
he had the choice between pouring some away or drinking it. He couldn’t stand the taste of black coffee. He tipped a little into the waste bin. He added some milk and stood by the window. He gazed at the cars going down the street and the Legia soccer stadium on the other side. How could those bunglers lose the league again, he thought. They won’t even be the runners-up - slaughtering Wisła and the 5-0 win two weeks ago were all for nothing. But maybe they’d at least manage to win the cup - tomorrow was the first semi-final against Groclin. Against Groclin, whom Legia had never once beaten in the past four years. It’s like another bloody curse.

He began to laugh quietly. Incredible how the human brain works - able to think about the soccer league at a time like this. He glanced at his watch. Half an hour to go.

Just before ten he left the refectory and went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. On the way he passed Barbara Jarczyk. Seeing him go in the opposite direction, away from the classroom, she gave him a questioning look.

“I’m just coming,” he said.

He hadn’t had time to put the toothpaste on his brush when he heard a scream.

Teodor Szacki was woken up by what usually woke him on a Sunday. No, it wasn’t a hangover, thirst, or the need to pee, the bright sunlight that was coming through the straw blinds, or the rain drumming on the balcony roof. It was Helka, his seven-year-old daughter, who jumped onto Szacki with such force that the Ikea sofa bed creaked beneath him.

He opened one eye, and a chestnut curl fell into it.

“Do you see? Granny put curls in my hair.”

“I see,” he said, pulling the hair from his eye. “Pity she didn’t tie you up with them.”

He kissed his daughter on the brow, pushed her off and got up to go to the toilet. He was in the doorway when something moved on the other side of the bed.

“Put the water on for my coffee,” he heard a mumble from under the duvet.

Housewives’ Choice, like every weekend. At once he felt irritated. He had slept ten hours, but he was incredibly tired. He couldn’t remember when this had started. He could lie in bed half the day, but even so he got up with a bad taste in his mouth, sand in his eyes and a pain flickering between his temples. It made no sense.

“Why don’t you just ask me to make you coffee?” he said grudgingly to his wife.

“Because I’ll do it myself,” she said, though he could hardly distinguish the words. “I don’t want to bother you.”

Szacki rolled his eyes upwards in a theatrical way. Helka laughed.

“You always say that, but I always make it for you anyway!”

“You don’t have to. I’m only asking you to put on the water.”

He peed and then made his wife some coffee, trying not to look at the pile of dirty pots in the sink. A quarter of an hour washing-up, if he wanted to make the promised breakfast. God, how tired he was. Instead of sleeping until noon and then watching television, like all the other guys in this patriarchal country, he was trying to be a super-husband and super-dad.

Weronika dragged herself out of bed and stood in the hall, examining herself critically in the mirror. He gave her a critical look too. She’d always been sexy, but she’d never looked like a model. However, it was hard to find an excuse for the double chin and the spare tyre. And that T-shirt. He didn’t insist on her sleeping in ribbons and lace every night, but bloody hell, why did she keep wearing that T-shirt with the faded message “Disco fun” that must have dated back to the days of food parcels?
He handed her a cup. She glanced at him with puffy eyes and scratched herself under her breast. She said thank you, gave him an automatic peck on the nose and went to take a shower.

Szacki sighed, passed a hand through his milk-white hair and went into the kitchen.

“So what’s really the matter with me?” he thought, as he tried to unearth a washing-up sponge from under the dirty plates. Making the coffee took a moment, the washing-up a second moment, breakfast a third. Just one stupid half-hour and everyone would be happy. He felt even more tired at the thought of all the time that went trickling through his fingers. Hours stuck in traffic jams, thousands of hours wasted in court, pointless gaps at work when the most he could do was play Patience while waiting for something, waiting for someone, waiting for waiting. Waiting as an excuse for doing nothing whatsoever. Waiting as the most tiring profession in the world. A coalface miner feels more rested than I do, he mentally pitied himself, as he tried to put a glass on the drying rack although there wasn’t any room for it. Why hadn’t he taken the dry things off at the start? Damn it all. Does everyone find life so tiresome?

The phone rang. Helka picked it up. He heard the conversation as he went into the sitting room, wiping his hands on a tea towel.

“Daddy’s here, but he can’t come to the phone because he’s doing the washing-up and making us scrambled eggs…”

He took the receiver from his daughter’s hand.

“Hello, Szacki here.”

“Good morning, Prosecutor. I don’t want to worry you, but you’re not going to fix scrambled eggs for anyone today. For supper maybe.” He heard the familiar voice and sing-song eastern accent of Oleg Kuzniecow from the police station on Wilcza Street.

“Oleg, please, don’t do this to me.”

“It’s not me, Prosecutor, it’s the city that’s calling you.”

The large old Citroën sailed under the central support of Świętokrzyski Bridge with a grace that many of the cars appearing there as pushy product placement in Polish romantic comedies would have envied. “Maybe that Piskorski is a scammer,” thought Szacki, remembering the scandal about the financing of this and a second new bridge that had lost the former mayor of Warsaw his job, “but the bridges are standing.” Under Mayor Kaczyński it was unthinkable that anyone would dare to make a decision about an investment on that scale. Especially before the elections. Weronika was a lawyer at the City Council, and more than once she had told him how the decisions were made nowadays - to be on the safe side, they weren’t made at all.

He drove down into the Powiśle district and, as usual, breathed a sigh of relief. He was on home ground. He had lived in the Praga district across the river for ten years now, but he still couldn’t get used to it. He had tried, but his new mini-homeland had only one virtue to his mind - it was close to central Warsaw. He passed the Ateneum Theatre, where he had once fallen in love with
Antigone in New York
, the hospital where he was born, the sports centre where he learned to play tennis, the park that stretched below the Parliament buildings, where he and his brother used to fool around on sledges, and the swimming pool where he had learned to swim and caught athlete’s foot. Here he was in the City Centre. At the centre of his city, the centre of his country, the centre of his life. The ugliest
axis mundi
imaginable.

He drove under a crumbling viaduct, turned into Łazienkowska Street and parked outside the arts centre, after a fond thought about the soccer stadium that stood two hundred yards further down, where the capital’s warriors had only just made mincemeat of Wisła, the Kraków team. He wasn’t interested in sport, but Weronika was such an ardent fan that, like it or not, he could
recite by heart the results of all the Legia matches for the past two years. Tomorrow his wife was sure to head off to the match in her tricolour scarf. The semi-final of the cup, wasn’t it?

He locked the car and glanced at the building on the other side of the street, one of the weirdest constructions in the capital, next to which the Palace of Culture and the Żelazna Brama estate seemed like examples of far less invasive architecture, quite discreet really. There used to be a parish church here, the Virgin Mary of Częstochowa, but it was destroyed during the war, when this was one of the points of resistance during the Warsaw Uprising. Left unreconstructed for decades, it had been a creepy place full of gloomy ruins, the stumps of columns and open cellars. When it was finally resurrected, it became the epitome of the city’s chaotic style. Anyone who drove down the Łazienkowska Highway got a view of this redbrick chimera, a cross between a church, a monastery, a fortress and Gargamel’s palace. And now a corpse had been found here.

Szacki adjusted the knot in his tie and crossed to the other side of the road. It began to spit with rain. A patrol car and an unmarked police car were standing by the gate. A few rubbernecks emerged from the morning mist. Oleg Kuzniecow was talking to a technician from the Warsaw Police Forensic Laboratory. He broke off the conversation and came up to Szacki. They shook hands.

“Off to Party headquarters on Rozbrat Street for cocktails afterwards, eh?” quipped the policeman, straightening the facings of his jacket for him.

“The rumours about the politicization of the Public Prosecution Service are just as exaggerated as the gossip about extra sources of funding for Warsaw’s police,” retorted Szacki. He didn’t like people making fun of his clothes. Whatever the weather, he always wore a suit and tie, because he was a public prosecutor, not a greengrocer.

“What have we got?” he asked, taking out a cigarette - the first of the three he allowed himself daily.

“One body, four suspects.”

“Christ, not more alcohol-induced slaughter. Even in this bloody city, I didn’t think you could find a drinking den in a church. And to cap it all they’ve done it on a Sunday - there’s no respect.” Szacki was genuinely disgusted, and still furious that his family Sunday had fallen victim to the killing too.

“You’re not entirely right, Teo,” muttered Kuzniecow, turning in every direction to try and find a spot where the wind wouldn’t blow out his lighter flame. “As well as the church there are all sorts of businesses in this building. They’ve sub-let space to a school, a health centre, various Catholic organizations, and there’s also a place for religious retreats. Different groups of people come here for the weekend to pray, talk, listen to sermons and so on. Right now a psychotherapist has hired the rooms for three days with four of his patients. They worked on Friday, worked on Saturday and parted ways after supper. This morning the doctor and three of the patients came to breakfast. They found the fourth one a little later. You’ll see what state he’s in. The rooms are in a separate wing; it’s impossible to get there without going past the porter’s lodge. There are bars on the windows. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. And so far no one’s confessed either. One body, four suspects - all sober and well-to-do. What do you say to that?”

Szacki stubbed out his cigarette and took a few steps over to a dustbin in order to dispose of it. Kuzniecow flicked his own dog-end into the road, straight under the wheels of a number 171 bus.

“I don’t believe in stories like that, Oleg. It’ll soon turn out the porter slept half the night, some yob went in to steal some money for booze, bumped into the poor neurotic on the way, got even more scared than he was and stuck a knife into him.
He’ll crow about it to one of your narks, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Kuzniecow shrugged.

Szacki believed in what he’d said to Oleg, but he felt rising curiosity as they entered through the main door and headed down a narrow corridor to the small classroom where the corpse was lying. He took a deep breath to control his nervous excitement and also his fear of coming into contact with a body. By the time he saw it, his face was the picture of professional indifference. Teodor Szacki could hide behind the mask of an official, a guardian of law and order in the Polish Republic.

A man in a pale-grey suit, aged about fifty, a bit stout, with lots of grey hair but no bald patch, was lying on his back on the floor, which was covered in a greenish lino that didn’t go with the low cross-vaulting at all. Next to him stood a grey old-fashioned suitcase that didn’t have a zip to close it, but two metal locks, and was also secured by some short straps done up with buckles.

There wasn’t much blood, almost none at all, but Szacki didn’t feel any the better for that. It cost him a lot to take a firm step towards the victim and squat down next to his head. He let out a bilious belch and swallowed his saliva.

“Fingerprints?” he asked nonchalantly.

“None on the murder weapon, Sir,” replied the chief technician, kneeling on the other side of the body. “We collected some in other places, and some trace evidence too. Should we take some odour samples?”

Szacki shook his head. If the deceased had spent the past two days with one of the people who had killed him, his odour wouldn’t help at all. They’d refuted that sort of circumstantial
evidence so many times when he’d tried it in court that it wasn’t worth bothering the technicians for nothing.

“What exactly is this?” he said, addressing Kuzniecow and pointing at the spike with a black-plastic handle that was sticking out of the victim’s right eye. It was a relief that thanks to the question he could turn his gaze on the policeman, instead of looking at the dark-red-and-grey matter that must once have been the man’s eye, but now had congealed on his cheek in a shape that stubbornly made Szacki think of a Formula One racing car.

“A meat skewer,” said Oleg. “Or something of the kind. There’s a whole set in the same style in the dining room. Knives, a cleaver, forks and spoons.”

Szacki nodded. The murder weapon came from in here. So what were the chances that the murderer came from the outside? Practically none; theoretically the court might think there was as big a crowd in here as on busy Marszałkowska Street, which no one had noticed. But all possible doubts… etc.