The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (20 page)

At last, the judges and jurors filed back into the courtroom. Bala’s mother waited anxiously. She had never read “Amok,” which contains a scene of Chris fantasizing about raping his mother. “I started to read the book, but it was too hard,” she told me. “If someone else had written the book, maybe I would have read it, but I’m his mother.” Bala’s father appeared in the courtroom for the first time. He had read the novel, and though he had trouble understanding parts of it, he thought it was an important work of literature. “You can read it ten, twenty times, and each time discover something new in it,” he said. On his copy, Bala had written an inscription to both his parents. It said, “Thank you for your . . . forgiveness of all my sins.”

As Judge Hojenska read the verdict, Bala stood perfectly straight and still. Then came the one unmistakable word: “Guilty.”

  The gray cinder-block prison in Wroclaw looks like a relic of the Soviet era. After I slipped my visitor’s pass through a tiny hole in the wall, a disembodied voice ordered me to the front of the building, where a solid gate swung open and a guard emerged, blinking in the sunlight. The guard waved me inside as the gate slammed shut behind us. After being searched, I was led through several dank interlocking chambers and into a small visitors’ room with dingy wooden tables and chairs. Conditions in Polish prisons are notorious. Because of overcrowding, as many as seven people are often kept in a single cell. In 2004, prison inmates in Wroclaw staged a three-day hunger strike to protest overcrowding, poor food, and insufficient medical care. Violence is also a problem: only a few days before I arrived, I was told, a visitor had been stabbed to death by an inmate.

In the corner of the visitors’ room was a slender, handsome man with wire-rimmed glasses and a navy-blue artist’s smock over a T-shirt that said “University of Wisconsin.” He was holding a book and looked like an American student abroad, and it took me a moment to realize that I was staring at Krystian Bala. “I’m glad you could come,” he said as he shook my hand, leading me to one of the tables. “This whole thing is farce, like something out of Kafka.” He spoke clear English but with a heavy accent, so that his “s”es sounded like “z”s.

Sitting down, he leaned across the table, and I could see that his cheeks were drawn, he had dark circles around his eyes, and his curly hair was standing up in front, as if he had been anxiously running his fingers through it. “I am being sentenced to prison for twenty-five years for writing a book—a book!” he said. “It is ridiculous. It is bullshit. Excuse my language, but that is what it is. Look, I wrote a novel, a crazy novel. Is the book vulgar? Yes. Is it obscene? Yes. Is it bawdy? Yes. Is it offensive? Yes. I intended it to be. This was a work of provocation.” He paused, searching for an example, then added, “I wrote, for instance, that it would be easier for Christ to come out of a woman’s womb than for me—” He stopped, catching himself. “I mean, for the narrator to fuck her. You see, this is supposed to offend.” He went on, “What is happening to me is like what happened to Salman Rushdie.”

As he spoke, he placed the book that he was carrying on the table. It was a worn, battered copy of “Amok.” When I asked Bala about the evidence against him, such as the cell phone and the calling card, he sounded evasive and, at times, conspiratorial. “The calling card is not mine,” he said. “Someone is trying to set me up. I don’t know who yet, but someone is out to destroy me.” His hand touched mine. “Don’t you see what they are doing? They are constructing this reality and forcing me to live inside it.”

He said that he had filed an appeal, which cited logical and factual inconsistencies in the trial. For instance, one medical examiner said that Janiszewski had drowned, whereas another insisted that he had died of strangulation. The judge herself had admitted that she was not sure if Bala had carried out the crime alone or with an accomplice.

When I asked him about “Amok,” Bala became animated and gave direct and detailed answers. “The thesis of the book is not my personal thesis,” he said. “I’m not an anti-feminist. I’m not a chauvinist. I’m not heartless. Chris, in many places, is my antihero.” Several times, he pointed to my pad and said, “Put this down” or “This is important.” As he watched me taking notes, he said, with a hint of awe, “You see how crazy this is? You are here writing a story about a story I made up about a murder that never happened.” On virtually every page of his copy of “Amok,” he had underlined passages and scribbled notations in the margins. Later, he showed me several scraps of paper on which he had drawn elaborate diagrams revealing his literary influences. It was clear that, in prison, he had become even more consumed by the book. “I sometimes read pages aloud to my cellmates,” he said.

One question that was never answered at the trial still hovered over the case: Why would someone commit a murder and then write about it in a novel that would help to get him caught? In “Crime and Punishment,” Raskolnikov speculates that even the smartest criminal makes mistakes, because he “experiences at the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which . . . are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary.” “Amok,” however, had been published three years after the murder. If Bala was guilty of murder, the cause was not a “failure of will and reason” but, rather, an excess of both.

Some observers wondered if Bala had wanted to get caught, or, at least, to unburden himself. In “Amok,” Chris speaks of having a “guilty conscience” and of his desire to remove his “white gloves of silence.” Though Bala maintained his innocence, it was possible to read the novel as a kind of confession. Wroblewski and the authorities, who believed that Bala’s greatest desire was to attain literary immortality, saw his crime and his writing as indivisible. At the trial, Janiszewski’s widow pleaded with the press to stop making Bala out to be an artist rather than a murderer. Since his arrest, “Amok” had become a sensation in Poland, selling out at virtually every bookstore.

“There’s going to be a new edition coming out with an afterword about the trial and all the events that have happened,” Bala told me excitedly. “Other countries are interested in publishing it as well.” Flipping through the pages of his own copy, he added, “There’s never been a book quite like this.”

As we spoke, he seemed far less interested in the idea of the “perfect crime” than he was in the “perfect story,” which, in his definition, pushed past the boundaries of aesthetics and reality and morality charted by his literary forebears. “You know, I’m working on a sequel to ‘Amok,’” he said, his eyes lighting up. “It’s called ‘De Liryk.’” He repeated the words several times. “It’s a pun. It means ‘lyrics,’ as in a story, or ‘delirium.’”

He explained that he had started the new book before he was arrested, but that the police had seized his computer, which contained his only copy. (He was trying to get the files back.) The authorities told me that they had found in the computer evidence that Bala was collecting information on Stasia’s new boyfriend, Harry. “Single, 34 years old, his mom died when he was 8,” Bala had written. “Apparently works at the railway company, probably as a train driver but I’m not sure.” Wroblewski and the authorities suspected that Harry might be Bala’s next target. After Bala had learned that Harry visited an Internet chat room, he had posted a message at the site, under an assumed name, saying, “Sorry to bother you but I’m looking for Harry. Does anyone know him from Chojnow?”

Bala told me that he hoped to complete his second novel after the appeals court made its ruling. In fact, several weeks after we spoke, the court, to the disbelief of many, annulled the original verdict. Although the appeals panel found an “undoubted connection” between Bala and the murder, it concluded that there were still gaps in the “logical chain of evidence,” such as the medical examiners’ conflicting testimony, which needed to be resolved. The panel refused to release Bala from prison, but ordered a new trial.

Bala insisted that, no matter what happened, he would finish “De Liryk.” He glanced at the guards, as if afraid they might hear him, then leaned forward and whispered, “This book is going to be even more shocking.”

—February, 2008

  In December of 2008, Bala received a new trial. Once more, he was found guilty. He is currently serving a twenty-five-year sentence.

Which Way Did He Run?

THE FIREMAN
WHO FORGOT 9/11

Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, constructed for the living, to process the dead. And so on September 11th, when members of Engine Company 40, Ladder Company 35, learned that every man from their house who responded to the World Trade Center attack—twelve, including a captain and a lieutenant—had disappeared, they rushed to the site, determined, at the very least, to perform the rite of carrying out their own. Eventually, they located their engine and ladder trucks, covered in soot, near Ground Zero, and tried to “visualize,” as one of them later put it, what had happened: where the men had gone, what their last movements might have been. By the rigs, the searchers recognized some of the missing firefighters’ extra shoes, a discarded shirt, and a pair of sunglasses. Slowly, in makeshift teams, the searchers fanned out into the rubble, trying to retrace their colleagues’ steps, combing through the wreckage. There was nothing to be found. It was as if the fire had consumed not just the living but the rites of the dead as well.

Then that evening, as the number of missing grew into the thousands, word spread that rescue workers had discovered someone buried under the rubble. He was identified as Kevin Shea, and he was a member of Engine 40, Ladder 35. What’s more, he was alive. He had been evacuated to a hospital in New Jersey, and his colleagues hurried there, believing that he could tell them where the rest of the men might still be trapped. “If there was one,” Steve Kelly, a veteran member of the house, later recalled, “we were hopeful he could lead us to the others.”

When the men entered the hospital room, Shea was lying in bed, awake. He had fractured his neck in three places and severed a thumb, but he seemed alert and happy to see them. After the men embraced Shea, they began to question him. Do you remember where you were? one of them asked.

“No,” he said.

Do you know where the others were before the towers came down?

Shea looked at them, perplexed, and said, “The towers came down?”

  The story of the survivor who was unable to remember what no one else could forget sounded like an urban legend. But two weeks after the attack I visited Shea, who had just been discharged from the hospital, at his firehouse on Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street, and he told me that he was indeed suffering from some kind of amnesia. “Technically, I’m not supposed to be working,” he said. “But I can still answer phones, and I thought it might help to be near the guys.”

Part Italian and part Irish, he is handsome, with intense brown eyes, but he wore a neck brace that pressed against his chin and the doctors had shaved his head, making his features seem disconcertingly stark. As he bent down to answer the phone, I could see curving along his scalp a long gash flecked with dried blood. “I fractured the fifth vertebra in my neck,” he said.

Outside the firehouse, people were gathering to light candles in memory of the dead, and upon learning that Shea was inside they stopped by to see him. He had become, in a strange way, a shrine for the living—the one who made it out. A little girl walked in with her mother and handed him a donation for the company. “Thank you so much for what you did,” she said. He smiled and extended his good hand to take the check, but as more people approached him he grew increasingly uncomfortable. “This isn’t about me,” he told a man who praised his courage. After the last person had departed, he turned to me and said, “Please don’t make me out to be a hero.”

He glanced around the room at the photos of the missing men and a notice for a memorial. He said, “Maybe I panicked and . . . ” His thoughts trailed off, and he closed his eyes as if trying to conjure something out of the blankness. He seemed haunted not just by the gaps in his past but also by a single question that they prevented him from answering: What had he done in those crucial last moments that allowed him alone to survive? “I like to think I was the type of person who was trying to push someone out of the way to save them and not the type who ran in fear,” he said. “But I can’t remember anything, no matter how hard I try. It’s like my memory collapsed with the building, and now I have to piece the whole thing back together again.”

  There are some things he does remember. He remembers Mike D’Auria, a twenty-five-year-old rookie with a Mayan tattoo on his leg. He remembers Frank Callahan, his captain, and Mike Lynch, another firefighter, who was about to get married. He remembers what they carried: a Halligan, a maul, an axe, a Rabbit Tool, eight-penny nails, utility ropes, wire cutters, chucks, and a screwdriver. He remembers waking on September 11th and the alarm sounding at the firehouse at 9:13
A.M.
He remembers the men getting on the rigs. He remembers the rigs. He remembers asking the lieutenant if he thought it was a terrorist attack and the lieutenant saying yes and their riding in silence.

There are other things he remembers, too: his nickname, Ric-o-Shea; his age, thirty-four; and his favorite color, yellow. He remembers meeting his girlfriend, Stacy Hope Herman. He remembers growing up on Long Island and his parents fighting and his mother moving out when he was thirteen. He remembers some things even if he doesn’t want to—things that refuse to dissolve, along with all the insignificant memories, with the passage of time.

Memory is a code to who we are, a collection not simply of dates and facts but also of emotional struggles, epiphanies, and transformations. And in the wake of tragedy it is vital to recovery. After a traumatic event, people tend to store a series of memories and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. They remember exactly where they were and to whom they were talking. But what does one do when the narrative is shattered, when some—or most—of the pieces of the puzzle are missing?

In the last week of September, I went with Shea to the St. Charles Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Long Island. The doctors were uncertain if he was blocking out what had happened as a result of physical or psychological blows, or both. Mark Sandberg, a neuropsychologist, greeted Shea in the lobby and led him into a cramped office. After Sandberg closed the door, they sat down, facing each other. “I know very little about you,” Sandberg said. “So what do you remember?”

“I can tell you what I remember and what I was told,” Shea said. “I remember responding to the scene. I’m in Ladder 35, but they have an engine in there as well, and they had a free seat. I wasn’t working that day, and I said, ‘Can I jump on?’”

The doctor seemed surprised. “You were off duty that day?”

Shea explained that he was “buffing,” or volunteering, which was “the right thing to do.” He continued, “So the officer gave me permission, and I . . . went down the West Side Highway. . . . We noticed car fires and debris falling everywhere—like big falling carpets. There were pieces of metal and glass. And people were falling—”

“Do you recall that or did someone tell you that?”

Shea closed his eyes. “I recall that.”

Sandberg made several notes on a pad, and then asked Shea to continue. On the way to the scene, Shea said, he pulled out the video camera that he sometimes used to document fire scenes for training. “I remember putting it in the plastic bag and putting it back in my coat,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t be filming that long.” He then prepared to go into the chaos. “I don’t remember anything after that, except waking up in the hospital.”

“Are your memories back after that?”

“Yes, they started to come back. They were in and out. They were drugging me at the time, with morphine, I think. They said I was conscious, but I don’t know.”

“You can be conscious and have no memory. It’s called post-traumatic amnesia.”

“That’s what this is?”

“That’s what I’m trying to understand.”

Shea fidgeted with his bandages. “Some say it’s better not to remember. Maybe the fact that I don’t know if I was trying to save someone, maybe that’s helping me deal with the post-stress . . . or whatever you call it.”

Sandberg asked how many men from his house who had gone down with him were lost. For the first time, Shea looked up from his bandages. “All of them,” he said. “All of them but me.”

  He had never intended to become a fireman. Though he came from a long line of firefighters—which included his grandfather, his uncle, his father, and his older brother—he didn’t fit the stereotype. He wasn’t, as he put it, “a typical macho.” He was smaller and more bookish than many of the other men; he disliked sports and didn’t drink. Initially, he embarked on a career in computer software, at which he excelled, but by 1998 he felt compelled to follow in the family tradition.

When he was first assigned to Engine 40, Ladder 35, in the summer of 2001, he showed up at three in the morning. The men were going out on a call, and when they returned he greeted them with platters of eggs and French toast and chocolate-covered strawberries. “They were looking at me, like, ‘Who is this freakin’ guy?’” Shea recalled.

“A lot of the guys didn’t know what to make of Kev,” Steve Kelly says.

But he displayed an almost monkish devotion to the job, until he gradually found his place as the one who was always willing to lend a hand, speaking in frenetic bursts, saying, “Yes, sir,” and “Negative K, sir,” and answering the phone with the refrain “Firefighter Kevin Shea. How can I help you?” Although many in the house assumed that Shea would retire, given the severity of his injuries, he vowed that he would return to active duty by Christmas. “I have my family,” he said, “but this is my family, too.”

As he tried to heal, strengthening his muscles and maintaining a strict protein diet, he could not forget, as some amnesiacs can, that he had forgotten. He was reminded of the gaps in his memory when he flipped on the television or saw the relatives of the missing men.

One of the firefighters mentioned offhandedly to Shea that he had seen a news clip of a lone rescue worker who, instead of carrying out victims, was standing in front of the towers paralyzed with fear. “I hope I wasn’t that kind of person,” Shea said.

His brother Brian told me, “He needs to figure it out. I don’t want him thirty years from now walking around angry at the world and not knowing why. I don’t want him to be like one of these guys who comes back from Vietnam and loses his mind.”

Shea agreed that he had to recover his past—“no matter what I discover.” And so, still in bandages, he set out like a detective, sifting through clues.

He started with only a note from the hospital. It said, “Patient is a thirty-four-year-old white male firefighter . . . who was knocked unconscious by falling debris just outside the Trade Center.”

Shea soon tracked down the neurosurgeon who treated him on September 11th and beseeched him for more details. The doctor said all he knew was that Shea was brought in on a stretcher and that the injuries to his neck were consistent with being hit by something from the front. “Is there anything else?” Shea asked. “Anything at all?”

The doctor thought for a moment. “Well, I remember one thing,” he offered. “You said you crawled two hundred feet toward light.”

Shea didn’t remember crawling or even saying that he had done so. “How the hell could I have crawled two hundred feet with a broken neck?” Shea asked.

As he intensified his search, he tried to be methodical. He interviewed his family members and closest friends for any details that he might have mentioned in the hospital, and since forgotten. One of them told him that he had mentioned grabbing a Purple K extinguisher, which is used to put out airplane fires.

More people learned of his search, and he was inundated with tips. One morning, he flipped on his computer and showed me a list of dozens of individuals who claimed to have information. “People keep calling, saying, ‘Yeah, I was there. I pulled you out.’ It’s hard to know what to believe.”

Joe Patriciello, a lieutenant whom Shea had known for years, called and told him he had seen Shea moments before the first tower came down. “You embraced me in the command center,” Patriciello said. “Don’t you remember?”