Entanglement (21 page)

Jeremiasz Wróbel stopped talking, and Szacki was unable to think of any reasonable question to ask. His mind was a blank. Every day he got new information about this case and every day he failed to move forwards. It made no sense.

“And now perhaps you can tell me why you stopped the tape at that point?” he finally asked.

“Absolutely,” replied the psychiatrist, smiling in a way that Szacki found quite obscene. “What do you think - why didn’t Telak look at his wife or children once during the constellation, although there was so much going on between them?”

Szacki felt as if he’d been called up to the blackboard.

“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. Is he afraid to? Does he feel guilty towards them? Is he ashamed?”

“None of those things,” said Wróbel, shaking his head. “He simply can’t take his eyes off the person who’s standing right opposite him and who is probably the most important of all in this constellation. I don’t know who it is, but that tie is terribly strong. Please note that he doesn’t even blink - he’s looking at that person the whole time.”

“But there’s no one there!” Szacki suddenly felt furious. He’d frittered away so many hours with this lunatic. He got up. Wróbel rose to his feet too.

“Of course there is,” he replied calmly, moving his nose in a feline way. “There stands the person who’s missing from the constellation. Do you want to make progress in your inquiry? Then go and find that missing person. Just find out who Telak is staring at with such panic and fear in his eyes.”

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki nodded his head in silence, gazing at the fuzzy image of Telak’s pained face, quivering slightly on the television screen. That look had worried him earlier on, but he had ignored his instinct, knowing Telak was drained by the therapy. Now he understood that his face wasn’t pained. It had worried him, because he’d seen that look before, in the eyes of people he’d interrogated - a mixture of fear and hatred.

He switched off the machine and removed the tape.

“Wouldn’t you like to take part in a constellation?” the therapist asked Szacki as they walked towards the main exit together. “See what it’s like from the inside?”

Szacki opened his mouth to answer that he’d be very willing, but in the short while it took for the air to get from his lungs to his vocal cords, the mental image arose of himself arranging his parents, Weronika and Helka, and the therapist asking how they were feeling.

“No, thank you. That’s probably not necessary.”

Wróbel smiled in a feline way, but didn’t pass comment. Only at the door, when he’d already said goodbye to Szacki, did he say:

“If someone in the constellation seems to be good and someone else bad, it’s almost always the other way around. Please remember that.”

Not many bits of this metropolis look like a genuine city, rather than a large area cluttered with streets and buildings. However, even in this dump there are some beautiful bits, thought Szacki, as he drove down Belwederska Street towards the city centre. This section of the Royal Way, from Gagarin Street to Triple Cross Square was one of the few that bore witness to what this city had once been and what it could be. First the modern mass of the Hyatt hotel, then the Russian embassy,
the Belweder Palace, Łazienki Park, the government buildings, then Ujazdowski Park and the embassies on Ujazdowskie Avenue (with the exception of the breeze block the Americans had built themselves), and finally the big-city Triple Cross Square. Szacki didn’t like Nowy Świat, and couldn’t understand all the fuss about that street where the buildings looked as if they’d been transferred from Kielce. Ugly, low little tenements, one not at all suited to another. Szacki couldn’t believe Nowy Świat and the squalid Chmielna Street fancied themselves as the prettiest part of town. Maybe only so visitors from the provinces could feel at home here.

But now Nowy Świat made him think of the Cava café and Miss Grzelka - that is, Monika - and it was hard for him to foster any ill feeling for the place. He wished she was waiting there, and that instead of going to work on Krucza Street he could have a cup of coffee with her, sit and chat like friends. Or like potential lovers. Was that really his intention? An affair? How could he possibly do it? To have a lover, you had to have a bachelor flat or the money for a hotel, or at least work non-standard hours that could justify your absence from home. He, meanwhile, was a poor civil servant who came home from work every day at eight at the latest.

What am I actually doing, he thought, as he went round the Prosecution Service building for the second time looking for a parking place - the only official one was taken. And what do I really imagine? Am I truly so starved of sex and love that it’s enough for me to meet with a woman a couple of times and no longer be capable of thinking about anything else?

Finally he found a place on Żurawia Street, not far the Szpilka café. It was one o’clock. In five hours he’d be sitting there with Monika, having supper, stretching his budget. He wondered how she’d be dressed. He locked the car when finally it dawned on him.

Monika, Szpilka, six p.m.

Nawrocki, police headquarters, six p.m.

Fuck.

 

Pinned to the door of his room he found a message to come and see the boss IMMEDIATELY. Of course it was about Nidziecka. He ignored it, went inside and called Nawrocki, but the policeman had already summoned Boniczka’s father to police HQ, and it was impossible to cancel. Szacki thought he could persuade Nawrocki to apply a sort of harassment - summon him, keep him in the corridor, then let him go and invite him to come back the next day (the secret police had done it to his grandfather in the 1950s) - but he dropped the idea. He preferred to get it over and done with. He called Monika.

“Hi, has something come up?” she asked before he’d had time to speak.

“I have to be at police HQ at six - I’ve no idea how long it’ll take. Sorry.”

“So maybe call me if it doesn’t take long. And don’t say sorry for no reason. What’ll you say when you do something really naughty?”

Szacki gulped. He was sure she heard him do it. Should he tell the truth, that after the interrogation he’d have to go home? And did he really have to? Was he the father of a family, or a little kid who has to ask his mummy’s permission to come home late from the playground? And in fact why couldn’t he say that? After all, if she wanted to flirt with a married man, she must know what she was choosing to do. But what if she was some sort of madwoman who’d start calling Weronika and screaming “He’s mine, all mine”? He panicked.

“I don’t want to promise anything, because I really don’t think I’ll make it today,” he said, trying to buy time. Why the fuck hadn’t he made a plan before calling her?

“Hmm, that’s a pity.”

“Maybe tomorrow during the day - I’ll be hanging about in town, could we make a lunch?” he stammered ungrammatically, when he finally remembered that tomorrow he’d have to be at Telak’s funeral. He could always tell Weronika he had to drop in at work after the funeral. Should he take a change of clothes? Maybe he should - he couldn’t go to the pub in a suit that was good for family ceremonies like weddings and funerals. Bugger it.

They agreed that he’d send a text once he knew at what time they could meet, and she’d just have a light breakfast (mango, coffee, maybe a small sandwich) and wait to hear from him. Instantly he imagined her lying in bed in the morning, with tousled hair, reading the paper and licking mango juice off her fingers. Would he ever see that for real?

 

Oleg Kuzniecow was not happy about having to question the people from Telak’s circle again, this time about his lovers, former partners and girlfriends at school.

“Are you crazy?” he moaned. “How do you think I’m supposed to check that? His parents are dead, his wife can’t possibly know a thing, and I’ve already asked his work colleagues about it.”

Szacki was unyielding.

“Find out what high school he went to, what and where he studied, find his male and female friends, and question them. That’s what the police do anyway, for fuck’s sake - look for people and interview them. I just fill in forms and number the pages in files.”

Oleg sent him a torrent of abuse down the phone.

“I’d understand if it would still do any good,” he grumbled. “But the whole time we’ve just been chasing shadows, nothing solid. Say we find some bit of fluff of his who was killed in a car crash when he was driving. Say he felt terribly guilty about it
and that’s why his daughter killed herself. So what? Can you tell me how that moves the inquiry forwards?”

Szacki could not. He knew it would probably be just another bit of non-essential information that would take a lot of work to obtain. A solid chunk of hard work of no use to anyone. But did they have any alternative?

So he told the policeman, who growled that he was behaving like some grand company director.

“You’re pissed off because we haven’t got anything, and you’re making some panic-stricken moves to give the impression that you’re doing something. I know you - it’s just that you don’t want to get on with some other job. Can’t you at least wait until next week for the results of the voiceprint analysis? Then you’ll know for sure if it was Kwiatkowska pretending to be Telak’s daughter. You know Jarczyk’s fingerprints are on the bottle of pills. That’s enough to search their places and check they haven’t got something else to connect them with Telak. I’d give Kaim and Rudzki the once-over too. If only to stop them from feeling too secure. And as for Rudzki, can’t you have a chat with him about Telak’s past? He ought to know something - the guy confided in him once a week, didn’t he?”

Kuzniecow was right. And at the same time he wasn’t. Rudzki was a potential suspect, and as such he was hardly a reliable source of information. His revelations would have to be verified in any case.

So he didn’t give in to Kuzniecow. Yet straight after finishing the conversation with the policeman, he called Cezary Rudzki and asked him to come in on Monday. In the process he discovered that the therapist would be at tomorrow’s funeral too.

 

Janina Chorko had put on make-up. It was terrible. Without make-up she was just ugly; with it she looked like a corpse that the undertaker’s children have made up with mummy’s cosmetics
just for fun, and that as a result of these efforts has come back to life and gone to work. She was wearing a thin polo-neck top and maybe nothing underneath. And to think only a short time ago he was sure nothing could excite him like a woman’s breasts. That was the distant past, prehistory, the Silurian era, the Devonian, the Cambrian. He was afraid to look at her, which was easy because she immediately started to give him a dressing-down, so he could lower his gaze in relief and play the ticked-off prosecutor.

Murder is murder, it’s not up to the prosecutor to help the defendant out, surely he hadn’t forgotten what they’d talked about the other day, he could always change the classification in the courtroom without pissing off all his superiors in the process, and so on.

“No,” he replied curtly, once she had finished, raising his head and looking her in the eyes. Just in the eyes. He took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lit the first one that day. And it was long past noon - not bad at all.

“There’s no smoking in this building,” she said coldly, lighting up herself. He knew he should have offered her a light, but he was afraid she’d get the wrong idea. She took an ashtray full of dog-ends out of a drawer and put it on the desk between them.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean I’m not going to charge Mariola Nidziecka with murder,” he said very slowly and very calmly. “To tell the truth, I’m surprised I wrote an indictment at all in a case of such obvious use of self-defence. I’m ashamed I yielded to imaginary pressure. Evidently, my intuition was right. But even so there’s no worse censorship than self-censorship. Please excuse me, as my boss and the person responsible for my decisions too.”

Chorko blew smoke at the ceiling and leaned towards him. She sighed heavily, straight into the ashtray, raising a cloud of ash. Szacki pretended not to notice.

“Are you screwing me around, Mr Szacki?” she whispered.

“I’m saying,” he replied, unable to use a verb that he associated with sex, “I’ve had enough of predicting what someone’s going to like and what they’re not. I’m saying we should work the way we regard as correct, and only start worrying when someone gives us a hard time about it. I’m saying I start worrying when I hear you telling me I should read my superiors’ minds, because I’ve always thought you were different. I’m saying that I’m extremely sorry about it. And I’m asking: do you think that legal classification is wrong?”

The head of the City Centre District Prosecutor’s Office stubbed out her dog-end with the firm gesture of an inveterate smoker and offered Szacki the ashtray. She sank back in her fake-leather armchair, and suddenly Szacki saw the old, tired woman in her.

“Prosecutor Szacki,” she said resignedly. “I’m an old, tired woman, who has seen more of these stories than I should have. And I’d be the first to sign a decision to dismiss this case under the rules for self-defence. What’s more, I think that son of a bitch should be dug up, resurrected and put away for years on end. And you’re right that the longer I sit in a leather armchair instead of interviewing witnesses, the more I think about ‘what they’ll say’. It’s not good, dammit. And I thought about what I told you yesterday: that sometimes you have to give way in order to survive. A lesser evil. Do you agree?”

“Partly yes, partly no,” he replied diplomatically. That was a question no prosecutor in Poland could have categorically answered with a clean conscience.

“Yes, they should write that underneath the eagle above the door as our heraldic motto. Partly yes, partly no. But more of a no?”

“More of a no.”

“You’re right.” She sighed again. “I’ll sign your indictment, we’ll send it to Krakowskie Przedmieście and we’ll see what
happens. And if things become unbearable, we’ll have to think again. One of my friends from Wola qualified as a legal adviser and got a job in the legal department at a mineral water factory in Beskidy. She’s got a holiday home in the mountains, works eight hours a day and earns twelve thousand a month. And no one throws acid in her face or scratches her car out of spite because she’s ‘that bitch from the prosecution’.”