Entanglement (37 page)

Feeling embarrassed, he picked up his glass and went into the sitting room to poke around in the bookshelf. This whole situation seemed comical. What was he doing? He’d agreed to meet a pretty girl for coffee a few days ago, and instead of just screwing her, forgetting her and seeing to his wife, as everyone else did, he was gazing into her eyes and dreaming of breakfast together. Unbelievable.

At the thought of Weronika and Helka he felt a stab of regret. A sense of guilt? Not necessarily. More like sadness. Everything in his life had already happened. He would never be young again, he would never fall in love with the feelings of a twenty-year-old, he’d never be so deeply in love that nothing else mattered. So many emotions were always going to be repeats now. Whatever happened, he’d always be a guy - just a middle-aged one for now, then an older and older man - who’s been through a lot, with an ex-wife and a daughter, with a flaw that’s obvious to any woman. Maybe some woman would want him for shallow reasons, because he still looked quite good, because he was slim, had a permanent job, and you could talk to him. Maybe he’d accept someone, because in the end it was easier to live in a twosome than on your own. But would anyone ever go crazy with love for him? He doubted it. Would he? He just smiled bitterly and felt like crying. His age, his wife, his daughter - at once it all felt like a sentence, an incurable illness. A diabetic can’t eat pastries; someone with high blood pressure can’t run up mountains; Teodor Szacki couldn’t fall in love.

She put her hands over his eyes.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she whispered.

He just shook his head.

She snuggled against his back.

“It’s so unfair,” he said at last.

“Hey, don’t go over the top,” she said with artificial cheerfulness. “A little is more than nothing.”

“A little doesn’t interest me.”

“More isn’t always possible.”

“Maybe never.”

“Did you come here to tell me that?”

He hesitated for a moment. He felt like lying as usual. Since when had it come to him so easily?

“Yes. And it’s not just to do with…” he broke off.

“Your family?”

“Yes. Something else has happened, I can’t tell you the details, I’ve got tangled up in a murky affair, I don’t want to drag you into it.”

She stiffened, but didn’t let go of him.

“Do you take me for a fool? Why don’t you tell the truth, that you got me to fall in love with you for fun, that it was a mistake and now you’ve got to get back to your wife? Why all the fibbing? Next you’ll be telling me you’re a government agent.”

“In a way that’s true,” he said, smiling. “And I swear I’m not lying. I’m afraid they might use you to get at me. And as for making you fall in love - believe me, it’s completely different.”

She snuggled up to him even closer.

“But will you stay today? You owe me that at least.”

 

He had imagined this scene earlier in every possible way, but he hadn’t envisaged this scenario. He followed her through the hall into the bedroom, and suddenly he had a terrible urge to laugh. You’re waddling, he thought. You’re waddling like a satyr with bandy hairy legs. You’re waddling like a constantly horny bonobo chimp with a red behind. You’re waddling like an old dog on the scent of a bitch. You’re waddling like a middle-aged fool. Right now there’s nothing human about you.

When she opened the bedroom door ahead of him and smiled flirtatiously, he had to bite the inside of his cheek hard to stop himself from bursting out laughing.

They were very gentle, exploring each other like school-children, not like mature people who had decided to go to bed together. Unbuttoning her shorts, watching her lying on the bed as she raised her buttocks to pull them off and then pulled her T-shirt with the Hopper reproduction over her head - all he felt was cold curiosity. And soon after, as he lay naked beside her and stroked her body, he ceased to feel anything.

He was horrified. He knew she was very lovely. Young. Attractive. Different. Above all, different. He had seen how men looked round at her. He had imagined every part of her body a hundred times. But now, when this body was lying in front of him, hoping for sex, he had become totally indifferent to it. He was horrified, because he had suddenly realized he wouldn’t be able to perform as a man. His body didn’t want her body, and was utterly indifferent to all the efforts his brain was making. His body refused to be unfaithful. And if it weren’t for the thought that nothing was going to come of it, maybe it all would have gone differently. But that very worst of all the thoughts that can occur to a man was making him go stiff - unfortunately not in the key areas. He was half filled with panic, half with embarrassment. There was no room left for desire.

He wanted to vanish.

Finally she forced him to look at her. Amazingly, she smiled.

“Hey, silly boy,” she said. “You know I could just lie here next to you for weeks on end and I’d be the happiest woman in the world?”

“I’m sick,” he moaned in despair. “Fetch me a razor blade. I don’t want to go on living.”

She laughed.

“You’re silly and tense as a schoolboy. Cuddle up to me and we’ll sleep a few hours. I’ve been dreaming for days of waking up beside you. I’ll never understand it.”

He didn’t get it. He wanted to die. She made him lie on his side, nestled her back against him and fell asleep almost instantly. Amazing, but, as he was wondering if she were already fast enough asleep for him to make his getaway, he too soon drifted off.

He woke up a few hours later, sweaty because of the sultry night. In the first instant he didn’t know where he was. He felt alarmed. But only in the first instant.

It had been - well - maybe not fantastic, but decent. At the key moment he remembered the story of a school friend who, when he finally got the girl he’d been fantasizing about for years, came to school next day and, still wistful, admitted over a cigarette: “You know what? I had more fun with her when I was whacking off in the bog.”

He had to bite his lip again.

 

The car clock showed a few minutes past five, and the sun was already quite high as he parked outside his house on the other side of the city. He quietly went inside, got undressed in the hall and shoved his underwear to the bottom of the linen basket so Weronika wouldn’t smell the scent of another woman. In their sitting room cum bedroom there was a computer game lying on the table, tied with a thin ribbon - the latest part of
Splinter Cell
. And a note saying: “For my sheriff. W”. He smiled bitterly.

 

The health-protection agencies in all the European Union countries are planning to withdraw food products that contain paprika, turmeric and palm oil. Carcinogenic food colourings have been banned. Research shows that Russians do not notice severe censorship in the state media. Doctors at a conference in Toruń conclude that Polish women are less sexually active than German or French women. Thirty per cent of women suffer from frigidity. The Institute for National Remembrance’s team triumph in a shooting contest for security-firm employees. Extreme nationalist politician Andrzej Lepper is suggesting that Prime Minister Marek Belka, head of the National Bank Leszek Balcerowicz and Marshal of the Sejm Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz all collaborated with the SB. Meanwhile, the last mentioned is having fun with President Kwaśniewski and his wife at Lech Wałęsa’s name-day party. The incumbent president gave his predecessor a bottle of red wine. In Warsaw the standard-bearers of “normality” - League of Polish Families party leader Roman Giertych, All-Polish Youth and the skinheads from the National Radical Camp - march in their parade. They shout: “Paedophiles and pederasts are Union enthusiasts.” Citizens can visit the capital’s museums and galleries at night, and in the metro they can hear the children of refugees announcing the names of the stations in garbled Polish. Maximum temperature - eighteen degrees; cloudy, a little rain

How Szacki managed to get through Thursday was a mystery to him. He had woken up - or rather been woken - with a headache and a temperature of almost thirty-nine degrees. When he had dragged himself out of bed to be sick, he had almost fainted on the way to the toilet, and had had to sit down on the floor in the hall until the black spots before his eyes had gone. He had called work to say he’d be late, taken two aspirins and gone back to bed where - he was sure of it - he hadn’t fallen asleep but passed out.

He had woken up at two p.m., taken a shower and gone to the prosecutor’s office. On the way up to the second floor he had had to stop every few steps to catch his breath. He told himself nothing was wrong with him, it was just his body’s reaction to a concentrated dose of the emotions he usually experienced over the course of several years, not a single day. But it didn’t make him feel any better.

Once at his desk, he finally switched on his mobile phone. He ignored the text messages from Monika and listened to the voicemails from Oleg, who had left several, each more furious than the last, screaming that if Szacki didn’t call him back immediately he’d put out a warrant for him.

He called back and found out what he had suspected ever since his visit to Captain Mamcarz. So in theory he shouldn’t have been surprised, but even so a shiver ran down his spine. Always, whenever the truth about a crime came to light, it wasn’t satisfaction that he felt, just sickening sorrow. Once again it turned out a human being had not died by accident; that someone’s memories and hopes had been extinguished in the brief moment it took for the sharp end of a skewer to pierce his eye and penetrate the thin layer of skull in that spot. Does the person feel anything at a moment like that? Does the consciousness last for much longer? The doctors say he died
instantly. But who can really know that? What would he have felt if that SB bastard had pulled the trigger the other day?

He drove away the thought, which made his breathing go shallow again, quickly wrote out a to-do list and called Kuzniecow to prepare the necessary site for the trial experiment. Then in turn he contacted Cezary Rudzki, Euzebiusz Kaim, Hanna Kwiatkowska, Barbara Jarczyk and Jadwiga Telak. This time it went smoothly. They all answered the phone. Curious how when things aren’t going well, nothing works, but when they start to fall into place, suddenly everything goes the right way. “If only that were the truth,” he said aloud, nervously tapping his fingers. “If only.”

He gave his boss a laconic account of what he was planning to do, without mentioning the previous day’s events and without waiting for her surprise to turn into fury, then left for the appointment he had made with Jeremiasz Wróbel. He still had a few questions for the feline doctor.

He was playing for the highest stakes. If he succeeded, the inquiry would be closed by Tuesday. If not, they’d have to put it on the shelf. Of course, another way would be to track down “OdeSB”, but that, unfortunately, he couldn’t do.

He felt sick again.

But that was yesterday. Now it was coming up to eleven on Friday. He was sitting in the Citroën, parked outside the arts centre on Łazienkowska Street, trying to understand why the pump regulating the hydraulic fluid pressure in his French monster’s bloodstream kept turning itself on. Whenever he switched off the radio there was a regular hiss, recurring at several-second intervals - it was truly irritating. He turned off the engine to stop hearing the nerve-jangling noise.

It was one of those wet summer days when, instead of falling from the sky, the moisture rises in the air and clings to everything. The world outside the car windows was misty and fuzzy, as raindrops ran down the glass now and then, blurring its contours even more. Teodor Szacki sighed, reached for his umbrella and very cautiously got out of the car, trying not to dirty his pale-grey trousers against the bottom edge of the door. Dodging puddles, he crossed the street, stopped outside the brick chimera of a church and - to his own surprise - crossed himself. Once upon a time, as a child, he’d had the custom acquired in the family home of making the sign of the cross every time he went past a church. In adolescence he’d started feeling ashamed of what seemed to him a blatant show of religious feeling, and he only occasionally thought of this childhood habit when he passed a Catholic shrine. Why couldn’t he stop himself from doing it now? He had no idea.

He examined the ugly gloomy building from under his umbrella. Damn this bloody church, damn Henryk Telak and the murder that meant his life would never be the same again. He wanted to have the case off his hands as soon as possible, whatever the outcome. I’m getting like the others, he thought sourly. Just a little longer and I’ll be sitting at my desk, staring longingly at the clock and wondering if anyone will notice if I nip off at a quarter to four.

“Documents, please,” boomed Kuzniecow’s voice close to his ear.

“Get lost,” he growled in reply. He wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

Together they went into the church annex, via the same entrance as almost two weeks earlier, when in the small religious education classroom Henryk Telak’s body had been lying on the floor, and the cherry-and-grey stain on his cheek had made Szacki think of a Formula One racing car. This time the room
was empty, not counting a few chairs and Father Mieczysław Paczek, whose face in the livid light of the fluorescent lamps seemed even softer than before.

Szacki chatted to the priest. Meanwhile, Kuzniecow and a technician from Wilcza Street set up a camera on a tripod and arranged some extra spotlights in the dark room, so they could record the trial experiment.

At a quarter to twelve everything was ready, and only the main characters in the drama were missing, who were due to appear at noon precisely. Father Paczek reluctantly went back to his room, and the technician reluctantly left his toys behind, not encouraged by Kuzniecow’s assurances that he was better at handling electronic equipment than women.