Entanglement (5 page)

Szacki nodded. Unable to decide on the legal classification, he had put it off from last week.

“As we’re having a chat, there are two other things. Firstly, please don’t exploit female colleagues who fancy you - go to your own trials. Secondly, I’d like you to help Jurek and Tadeusz with narcotics.”

Szacki failed to hide a scowl.

“Yes, Prosecutor? Got a problem? Surely you don’t want me to think you’re incapable of teamwork? Especially in cases that demand lots of laborious, boring and unsatisfying tasks?”

Too true, thought Szacki.

“Please give me a week so I can concentrate on this murder. We’ll be carrying on with narcotics for months; I’ll have time to get involved in it,” he said.

“A week. I’ll tell Tadeusz that from Monday you’re working together.”

This time Szacki remained stony-faced, though it cost him a lot. The grim hope occurred to him that some more corpses would turn up during the week, which would save him from some boring work with boring colleagues.

The audience came to an end. He had his hand on the doorknob when he heard Chorko say:

“Please don’t think I’m paying you a compliment, but you look great in that suit. Like a real star of the bar association.”

Szacki turned and smiled. He adjusted his shirt cuffs, fastened with fashionable wooden cufflinks.

“That wasn’t a compliment, Prosecutor, as you very well know.”

The abrupt end to the trip to Zakopane meant the atmosphere in the luxury Audi A8, in which they were rapidly returning to Warsaw, was as cold as the stream of air pouring from the vents. His wife had packed up in silence, and then spent the whole night in silence, lying as far from him as possible on the spacious bed in the apartment; that morning she had got into the car in silence and travelled home in silence. Nothing helped - neither her favourite Glenn Miller, nor lunch at a fabulous Greek restaurant which by some strange twist of fate was situated in Kroczyce, less than twenty miles from the Katowice highway. He had made a detour specially, knowing how much she loved Greek food. Naturally, she had eaten it, but she hadn’t said a word.

When he stopped near their villa at Leśna Polana near Magdalenka to drop her off, and watched her silently walking to the garden gate, something inside him snapped. He switched off Glenn Miller’s bloody racket and opened the window.

“Just think what a squalid dump you’d be coming home to if it weren’t for what I do,” he screamed.

Half an hour later he was in the garage underneath the Intraco building, where his company’s modest office was located. The company could have afforded rooms in the Metropolitan or one of the skyscrapers near the ONZ roundabout, but he liked this spot. It had its own style, and he could endlessly admire the panorama from the windows on the thirty-second floor. He got out of the lift, nodded to a secretary as lovely as the sunrise over a ridge in the Tatras and without knocking went into the Chairman’s office. His office. Igor was already waiting for him. At the sight of the boss he got up.

“Sit down. Do you know how many times a woman goes through menopause? I must be witnessing it for the third time by now. And I was warned off taking a young wife. To hell with that.”

Instead of answering, Igor poured a drink - Cutty Sark with two lumps of ice and a dash of soda. He handed it to the Chairman, who had meanwhile fetched a laptop out of the safe. They sat down on either side of the desk.

“Now tell me what happened.”

“Henryk was murdered on Saturday night in the church buildings on Łazienkowska Street.”

“What the bloody hell was he doing there?”

“He was taking part in group therapy. It may be that one of the other participants killed him, or maybe someone else who knew he’d be in the place and that suspicion would fall on someone there. Or maybe a burglar, so the police claim.”

“A bastard, not a burglar. They always say that to get the press off their backs. Who’s in charge of the investigation?”

“Kuzniecow on Wilcza Street, and Szacki on Krucza.”

“Excellent,” said the Chairman, laughing out loud. “To think they had to go and rub him out right in the City Centre. Couldn’t they do it in Ochota? Or the Praga district? It wouldn’t be any problem there.”

Igor shrugged. The Chairman put down his empty glass on the desk, logged onto the system, put a special key in the USB port that enabled access to a coded folder and found the right file. Any attempt at opening the folder without the key would have ended in irreversible deletion of the data. He quickly ran through the contents, which were more or less familiar to him. He paused for thought.

“What shall we do?” asked Igor. “The first procedure is already in motion.”

“We’ll stick with it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I don’t think the person who killed Henryk wanted to go any further - if that’s what it’s about. I think we can feel safe.”

“What about Szacki and Kuzniecow?”

“Let’s wait and see how things develop.”

Igor nodded. Without being asked he picked up the elegant, heavy-bottomed glass, in which the ice lumps were still rattling, and reached for the bottle.

Teodor Szacki signed his name on the “Prosecution Reference File”, made a note that an inquiry was being conducted “in the case of the taking of the life of Henryk Telak in the church building rooms at 14 Łazienkowska Street, Warsaw, on the night of 4th-5th June 2005, i.e. an offence covered by Article 148, paragraph 1 of the Penal Code”, and stopped writing at the box marked “versus”. Unfortunately he would have to leave it blank. Experience had taught him that investigations conducted “in the case of” were definitely more than likely to finish many months later with a document being sent to the Regional Prosecutor’s office asking them to approve a decision “to dismiss by reason of failure to identify the offender, in accordance with Article 322, paragraph 1 of the Penal Procedure Code”. There in the record you entered the words “perpetrator unknown”, and took it back to the archive with a bad taste in your mouth. Better to have a suspect from the start, then you didn’t have to wander about in the dark.

He carefully read through the material provided by Kuzniecow, but didn’t conclude much more from it beyond what the policeman had told him. Nothing had been found during the searches; the only deviation from the norm was an empty bottle of sleeping pills left by Telak in the bathroom. Strange, thought Szacki, someone taking that sort of pills shouldn’t really be getting up at night, dressing and leaving. He wrote on a sheet of paper: “medicine - prescription, fingerprints, wife”. All they had found in Telak’s suitcase were some clothes, toiletries and a
book, a crime novel called
Headland of Pseuds
. Szacki had heard of it - apparently it was largely set in Warsaw. He was ready to bet a hundred hard-earned zlotys that the word “prosecutor” didn’t appear in it once, and that meanwhile a brave lone cop did it all by himself, including establishing the time of death. In Telak’s wallet there were some documents, a little cash, a video library card, some family photos and some lottery tickets.

He wrote: “wallet - examine”.

Nothing to latch on to. Nothing.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” said Szacki, looking at his watch in surprise. Kwiatkowska was not supposed to be there for half an hour.

In came a girl he didn’t know. She was about twenty-five, neither pretty nor ugly, a brunette with curly hair cut short and rectangular glasses with opalescent frames. Quite slender; not particularly his type.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call in advance, but I was just passing and I thought—”

“Yes? What brings you here?” Szacki interrupted her, praying to himself that she wasn’t a lunatic coming to complain about electricity being put through her keyhole.

“My name’s Monika Grzelka, I’m a journalist—”

“Oh no, Madam,” he interrupted her again. “The Prosecution Press Spokesman has his office on Krakowskie Przedmieście - he’s a nice fellow, I’m sure he’ll be happy to answer all your questions.”

That was all he needed. A young thing, only good-looking enough to work in radio, to whom he’d have to explain the difference between suspect and accused, and even so she’d screw it up in her article. Undaunted by his manner, the girl sat down and smiled radiantly. She had a nice, intelligent, impish smile. Infectious. Szacki clenched his teeth to stop himself from smiling back at her.

She reached into her handbag and gave him a business card. Monika Grzelka, journalist,
Rzeczpospolita
- one of the serious dailies.

He reached into a drawer, took out the Press Spokesman’s card and handed it to her without saying a word. She stopped smiling, and he felt mean.

“I don’t think your name is familiar,” he said, to erase the bad impression.

She blushed, and he thought he’d done pretty well.

“I used to do local council issues, but from today I’m writing about crime.”

“Is that a promotion?”

“Yes, sort of.”

“It won’t be easy to write a crime column in a boring enough way for it to appear in
Rzeczpospolita
,” he noted.

“I actually came here to make your acquaintance and to ask you for an in-depth interview, but I can see nothing will come of it.”

“I’m not a lawyer, I’m a civil servant,” he said. “I don’t need advertising.”

She nodded and glanced around his shabby little room. He was sure she was stifling a nasty comment, such as: “Right, you can tell it’s public sector in here”, or “And there’s no hiding it”.

“If you don’t wish to talk about general matters, let’s talk about one in particular. I’m writing about the murder on Łazienkowska Street. You can of course tell me a lot of official lies, but then you won’t have any influence on what appears in the paper. Or you can tell me the truth, but I doubt you will. Or you can at least tell me the half-truth, then I won’t have to print all the rumours from police headquarters.”

He cursed mentally. Sometimes he felt as if asking the police for discretion was about as effective as printing out the secrets of an inquiry on posters and sticking them up on advertising pillars.

“Surely you don’t expect me to have any truths, half-truths or even quarter-truths about what happened the day after a murder?”

“So what did happen?”

“A man was murdered.”

She burst out laughing.

“You’re a very rude prosecutor,” she said, leaning towards him.

Again, it cost him an effort not to smile, but he managed it.

“Two sentences and I’ll be off.”

He thought about it - it was a decent offer.

“One: a man, Henryk T., forty-six years old, was murdered on Saturday night in the church buildings on Łazienkowska Street with the use of a sharp instrument.”

“What sort of instrument?”

“A very sharp one.”

“A skewer?”

“Perhaps.”

“And the second sentence?”

“Secondly: the police and the prosecutor are assuming that Henryk T. was the victim of a burglar whom he ran into by accident, but they are not excluding the possibility that it was a premeditated murder. Intensive operations are under way to identify the offender. For the time being no one has been charged.”

She finished taking notes.

“A good-looking man, dresses beautifully, has a nice voice and talks like a fax from the neighbourhood policeman.”

He allowed himself a faint smile.

“Please don’t write more than that about the case. It might cause us harm.”

“Now it’s please, is it?” She stood up and zipped her handbag shut. She was wearing a cream skirt above the knee and
black flat-heeled shoes that showed off her feet. He noticed a red mark on her leg; while they were talking she had kept this leg casually folded on her knee. “And what will I get for that?”

“You might find out a bit more, when others will get nothing but a fax from the city police.”

“And might it be possible to invite you for coffee? And will you talk to me in a language generally regarded as Polish?”

“No.”

She hung her bag on her shoulder and strode briskly to the door. Before closing it, she looked at him and said:

“I don’t remember the last time a man treated me as badly as you have, Prosecutor. I’m sorry to have taken up your time.”

And she was gone. Szacki was sorry too. Irritated, he got up from his chair to hang up his jacket, and walked into a cloud of perfume left behind by the journalist. Romance by Ralph Lauren - Weronika used to wear it. He loved that fragrance.

 

Cautioned
re
criminal responsibility under Article 233 of the Penal Code, her statement is as follows: