Entanglement (34 page)

Karol Wenzel opened the door, at once surprising him in two ways: behind the door solid bars had been fitted, providing another barrier between the flat and the corridor, and Wenzel himself looked like the last person you would suspect of being employed at the Institute for National Remembrance. He looked more like a manager at a thriving advertising agency. He was quite small, probably not much taller, if at all, than Tom Cruise, but there was nothing else to fault him. Barefoot, dressed in shorts and a white polo shirt, he looked as if he consisted only and exclusively of muscles. Not in an exaggerated way, like a bodybuilder, but like someone who spends every spare moment doing sports. He was tanned and clean-shaven, with thick black hair cut short. He must have been Szacki’s age, but alongside the historian the prosecutor looked like his uncle.

“Aren’t you going to ask if anyone followed me?” asked Szacki more cuttingly than he’d intended, thinking at the same time that if he stood on his toes, Wenzel could pass under his arm.

“They know where I live,” replied Wenzel curtly.

Every detail of the interior seemed to shout: here lives a bachelor. The whole flat couldn’t have been more than a hundred square feet, and must once have consisted of a main room and a kitchen. Now the rooms were joined into one. Two windows looked onto the same western side. Between them another one
had been painted on the wall, with mountains beyond it. Szacki wasn’t sure, but it may have been the ridge of the High Tatra Mountains with the peaks of Kozi Wierch and Zamarła Turnia, seen from the direction of Gąsienicowy Tarn. He hadn’t admired that view for ages. Life was passing by, and all he ever knew was work, wife, work, child, wife, work. But that was going to change. It was already changing.

One entire wall of the flat was taken up by shelves full of books and files - this alone bore witness to the resident’s profession. The rest of it - a desk combined with a folding sofa, a TV, computer, hi-fi, speakers in each corner, posters from all the
Star Wars
films on the walls and a designer espresso machine in pride of place in the kitchen - were toys for a big boy who lives alone.

“Want a coffee, Teo?” asked Wenzel, pointing at the espresso machine.

Szacki said yes. He thought his host could at least for the sake of formality ask before calling him by his first name, even though they were more or less contemporaries working in the same profession. As Wenzel was fussing over the espresso machine, Szacki wondered if he should start by telling the case history, or by saying that they’d already found him. He chose the first option.

 

He gave a precise account of the therapy, described the potential killers: Rudzki, Jarczyk, Kaim and Kwiatkowska, and summarized his conversation with Wróbel, who had told him to look for the person missing. He talked about Telak’s lucky numbers, about the newspapers and the strange murder of Kamil Sosnowski, all trace of which had vanished in the police archives. About his conversation with Captain Mamcarz and the file cleaned out by Department “D”, which Podolski didn’t want to talk about.

Wenzel was quiet for a while, then burst into noisy laughter.

“As far as I can see you already know the whole story,” he said. “You just have to put the facts together.”

“Please, leave out the riddles.”

“This Sosnowski, in the bath with his throat cut and his hands and legs tied together. You must know who else was tied up like that in the 1980s, only a few years earlier. Everyone knows.”

“Oh God.”

“Close.”

“Father Jerzy Popiełuszko.”

“Exactly.” The shocking murder of the priest by the secret police was world famous.

“Are you trying to say Sosnowski was murdered by the secret police? Why?”

Wenzel shrugged.

“Either to subdue his parents, or they made a mistake. Things like that did happen. I’ll tell you briefly whose corns you’ve trodden on, so you know what we’re talking about. I’m sure you’ve got a rough idea of their operational chart - Department III for the opposition, Department IV for the Church, subject surveillance, moulding personal sources of information, central card index, filing system and so on?”

Szacki said he did.

“People think it was a sort of militia bureaucracy, and that all those SB-men, like the lieutenant played by Kowalewski in
Monitored Conversations
were just dim-witted functionaries who gathered non-essential information. Incidentally, I can’t stand Bareja. And I don’t like Chęciński for
Conversations
either,” he said, referring to the film-makers who had sent up the Communist era.

“Because?”

“Because it’s all lies. Lies that are nice and convenient for those sons of bitches. And that will continue to be for all time. Lies
that make people believe Communist Poland was this wacky country, where life may not have been easy, but at least it was funny and we all had a jolly good time.”

“Wasn’t it a bit like that?” Personally Szacki adored Bareja’s films.

The historian sighed and looked at him as if planning to throw him out.

“Ask Kamil Sosnowski. Do you really think he was the only victim? Why doesn’t anyone bloody well want to understand what the People’s Republic of Poland was really like? It was a totalitarian system relying on the repression and persecution of its citizens, using all sorts of means, where those with the most to say - however pathetic it sounded - belonged to the apparatus of terror, in other words the omnipresent services, keeping an eye on almost everybody and ready to react at any moment. Fuck it all,” - Wenzel was plainly furious - “can’t you see that they want you to keep believing in films like
Teddy Bear
and
Brunet Will Call
? It’s not surprising. There’s nothing there about prisons, accidents and disappearances. There’s no Division III, no blackmail or traitors. There’s no Department ‘D’.”

“I’m sorry,” said Szacki humbly. “I was seventeen in 1989.”

“And I was eighteen. So what? Does that let you off knowing history? Allow you to reduce your childhood and your parents’ lives to a silly satire full of jokes about sausages? Congratulations. Go and buy a pound of frankfurters and put them on Jacek Kuroń’s grave. Let him have a laugh.” The late Solidarity leader had spent plenty of time in prison for his brave stance against the Communist regime.

“I’m extremely sorry,” muttered Szacki, “but I don’t work at the Institute for National Remembrance. I don’t find out about secret-police crimes every day. And if I come to find out, instead of receiving information I get fucked. If you want me to leave,
just tell me. If you don’t, then explain what you know. But leave the rest of it out.”

Wenzel frowned and ruffled his hair.

“‘D’, or disinformation and disintegration. It was the most well-camouflaged structure within the Ministry of Internal Affairs - they called themselves ‘a conspiracy within a conspiracy’. It existed both centrally and regionally, as section ‘D’. Those were the guys who did the dirty work. Their activities involved spreading rumours, setting the opposition against each other and slander. Blackmail, kidnapping, beating people up, also murder. I know you’ve never heard of it, but their existence is logical. Can you believe in an apparatus of terror that stops at just gathering reports and statements from its collaborators? Well, quite.”

Teodor Szacki had never thought about it. Bah, he’d never heard of anyone who would consider it. But he had to admit it all sounded credible. He asked what the SB hitmen - who in spite of everything must surely have come into play as a last resort - could want of a young student.

“As I’ve already said: his parents or a mistake. What did his parents do?”

“That’s strange too,” muttered Szacki. “I have no idea. It was an intelligentsia family, they may have been lawyers or doctors. I haven’t managed to find them yet, they’ve vanished. I do have some fanciful suspicions, but most probably they took the younger daughter and went abroad with her. That’s the best thing they could have done in the circumstances.”

“Surely. In any case you have to know that the people working for the Reds weren’t cretins. An open attack, as in the case of Father Popiełuszko, meant a scandal, a trial, a storm in the West. But if someone’s mother were suddenly murdered during a robbery - that’s how Aniela Piesiewicz died, the mother of the Solidarity lawyer - well, accidents can happen. If someone’s child
went missing or had an unfortunate accident, someone’s wife got killed in a fire at their flat - what bad luck. But the people who were meant to interpret the message certainly understood it. Do you know when Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s mother was murdered?”

“Well?”

“On the twenty-second of July, the anniversary of the official founding of the Polish People’s Republic. Do you think that’s a coincidence? Some aspects of these murders - such as the way someone was tied up, or an important date - were like the Red killers’ signature. When did they kill this Sosnowski of yours?”

“The seventeenth of September.”

“Well, exactly - the Soviet invasion. Any more questions?”

Szacki felt his mouth go dry. He asked for a glass of water.

“Twice you’ve repeated that it couldn’t be a coincidence. Did that really used to happen?”

“Yes. Unfortunately. Don’t forget, the officers didn’t go ‘on the job’. Sometimes common criminals were hired through various intermediaries so they wouldn’t dirty their own hands. And a thug’s a thug. He could have read the address wrong, or got the flats mixed up, or the officers identified the case wrongly and sent him where they shouldn’t. We have documented examples of such cases. Shocking. All the more shocking considering the fact that the people fighting, and their families too, knew they were taking a risk. And the others had nothing to do with it - they just led nice, peaceful lives. But it also means that in the totalitarian era no one could live in peace. And that abandoning the fight, sticking your head in the sand did not justify or protect you.”

Teodor Szacki was mentally arranging the information he had gained. He could suppose Sosnowski had been murdered by the SB. Maybe because of his parents’ activities, which he had no idea about. The date of his murder was lucky for Telak. Why? Was he somehow mixed up in the murder? Or maybe he had profited from that death? The prosecutor asked Wenzel about that.

“Where did this Telak work?”

“He was the director of a printing firm with the musical name of Polgrafex. Quite a prosperous company - we found out he put aside a large sum and was insured for not much less.”

Wenzel started to laugh.

“Do you know who owns Polgrafex?”

Szacki said no.

“Polish Gambling Enterprises. They may be known to you for having a virtual monopoly on running casinos in Poland. Or for the fact that no prosecutor or tax inspector is capable of getting at their arses. Or for the fact that they’re riddled with former functionaries. If you’ve been wondering whether Telak was mixed up in the Communist secret services, you can stop. He must have been. The question is, was he also mixed up in the boy’s murder. And if that’s why he’s now been murdered. But I can’t help you there. I can try to check if he was an SB agent in the 1980s, but if he worked in ‘D’ I’m sure it’ll all have been beautifully cleaned up.”

“Destroyed?”

“You’re joking - things like that are never destroyed. They’re lying in a safe in some villa in Konstancin.” The smart suburb had a reputation as home to the richest profiteers from the old regime.

Szacki asked if he could smoke. He could, but outside. He went onto a narrow balcony. It was muggy and there was absolutely no wind, so everything seemed sticky. The sky was filling with inky clouds, and he hoped there would be a proper storm at last. Everyone was longing for it. He felt calm now. With every thought, the next piece jumped into place, and two colours were already complete in his Rubik’s cube. Truth to tell, lots of the joined-together pieces were his assumptions, not circumstantial evidence, not to mention hard proof and facts, but even so he felt as if this case wasn’t going to be shelved, marked “perpetrator unknown”. There was something else he had to ask Wenzel.

“They’ve been asking about me already,” he said when he returned to the sofa.

Wenzel smacked his lips.

“That was foreseeable. I think they’ll have had their eye on you ever since they found out you’d be conducting the inquiry. Now they want to get close, so they can strike like lightning if anything happens.”

“How much do they know?”

“Best to suppose they know everything. Even if you’re wrong, it’s insignificant.”

Szacki nodded. Christ Almighty, he still couldn’t believe it was really happening.

“Who are ‘they’?” he asked.

“Good question. I know a lot about them, but it’s still not much. Have you read
The Odessa File
by Frederick Forsyth?”

He said yes.

“So you know that ‘Odessa’ was a society of former SS officers, who after the war set up a secret organization in support of their former comrades-in-arms. Money, jobs, business, help with hiding, laying false trails, new identities, sometimes rubbing out people who guessed too much. Or people who were too keen on exposing the truth. And although I know many people might find this analogy dramatic, we’ve got our own, let’s call it ‘OdeSB’ too. Maybe even far better functioning than ‘Odessa’. Our officers didn’t have to run away to Argentina, they’ve never really been hunted, and various timid inquiries have been nipped in the bud. We didn’t even manage to lock up the people who gave the orders for Popiełuszko’s murder, not to mention the hundreds - who knows, if not thousands - of lesser cases. Just think: a superbly organized network, lots of information including dirt on almost everyone, files pulled out at the right moment, big money - both from the pre-war past and from the jump to state ownership when the Communists took over, as well as sixteen
years of successfully run business activity since 1989. You know what word is used to define that sort of organization.”