Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
A Grain of Truth (20 page)
The story had its weak points: the site of the murder was a mystery, so was the means of carrying the corpse, and the murder weapon, too,
was not the sort of thing you keep in the kitchen dresser next to the dessert forks. The question of the badge found in the victim’s hand wouldn’t let Szacki rest either. Never for a moment did he think it incriminated Szyller – things like that don’t happen in reality, and Szacki was convinced the culprit must have had some reasons for wanting to destroy Szyller. But Budnik? He must have foreseen that diverting the investigation towards Szyller would instantly rebound on him.
However, despite the gaps it sounded credible, despite the physical absence of the suspect it looked miles better than only twelve hours ago, when they hadn’t known a thing and were considering the option of looking for a nutcase with a religious and nationalist obsession. There was some solid evidence, and they could tell the media they were looking for a suspect, a person with a first name and a surname. They could also expect that Budnik would get caught, any day, any hour now.
Yes, so much for theories. In practice Szacki felt torn apart. He was trying to convince himself that he was confusing two different things, that his anxiety was purely personal and that his body was making him pay the price for the move, for the break-up, for being alone, for all the changes – all for the worse moreover – of the past few months. He was trying, but inside he was virtually yelping like a bloodhound. Something wasn’t right.
He desperately didn’t want to be alone this evening. Earlier he had stood Klara up, who was going to drag him to some village disco at the town hall, but now he called her and said he would come. He’d have to tell her they weren’t going to carry on with this relationship – he needed to get a bit of order into his life.
VIII
He stopped off at home to put on a pair of jeans and a sports shirt, but even so he felt like an old codger, going out with Klara to the cellar bar at Sandomierz Town Hall, as if escorting his older daughter to a party. He knew about date-rape drugs and crystal meth from his
practical experience as a prosecutor, but he had never had anything to do with the world of clubbing from personal experience. Was there some sort of code in force here, some unwritten rules? What was he to do if some child plastered in make-up offered to suck him off? Say no thank you politely? Call the police? March it off to the parents? And what if someone wanted to press drugs on him? Instantly charge them? His head was full of questions when he found himself in the small, low-vaulted brick cellar.
The place was crowded, but picturesque, with a grate draped in chains hanging from the ceiling and part of a stone sculpture of some religious figure in the corner – hence the name of the club, Lapidarium – and there could be no doubt this was the basement of a fine old building. There were a lot of people, but not so many to stop him from pushing through to the bar; Szacki got a beer for himself and one for Klara, while also taking a look at the assembled company. Well, it was a surprising company. No plasticky little girls, no kids with shiny lip-gloss and tits on show, no gel-boys in opalescent shirts, no white G-strings glowing deathly pale in the ultraviolet stroboscopic light. There wasn’t a stroboscope anyway, or any ultraviolet light. What’s more, even Szacki’s age group was quite strongly represented – there were several couples of the roots-and-recession type who could already have children the age of the youngest partygoers.
He watched Klara, who had joined a small group of her friends. They were all the same age as her, about twenty-six or twenty-seven. One of them told a joke and the rest burst out laughing. They looked attractive: a guy with the look of a network administrator with round glasses and thinning fair hair, two girls in jeans, one flat-chested and broad-hipped, the other busty and slender – they looked funny together. And Klara. In jeans, a wine-red, low-cut V-necked top, with her hair tied in a ponytail. She was young and lovely, maybe even the prettiest girl in the room. Why did he take her for a dumb bimbo? Was it just because she was more feminine than his wrinkly ex-wife, with whom he had spent the past fifteen years? Was every display of femininity, every high-heeled shoe and painted fingernail going to seem vulgar to him from now on? Was
he quite so badly brainwashed since the era of his wife’s ghastly Ikea slippers for 4.99 that had been lying next to his bed ever since Ikea had first appeared in Poland?
He went up to the group, who looked at him with friendly curiosity during the introductions. Klara, strangely enough, seemed proud of having such an old granddad in their midst.
“My God, a real prosecutor, we won’t be able to smoke any grass now,” joked the flat-chested, broad-hipped girl, Justyna.
Szacki’s face changed into a mask of stone.
“You won’t be able to smoke grass because you can’t possess grass. The law on the prevention of drug addiction, paragraph sixty-two, point one, stipulates a penalty of loss of liberty for up to three years for the possession of narcotics or psychotropic substances.”
The company fell silent and looked hesitant as Szacki took a large slug of beer. Piss, as it always is on tap.
“But don’t worry, I know a few good lawyers, they might even manage to get you a cell of your own for the second half of the sentence.”
They burst out laughing, and a relaxed conversation began. Klara started telling them something about starting the procedure for her doctorate – he was stunned, he didn’t even know she had a degree – but she was interrupted in mid-sentence by the noisy entrance of the support band. Szacki almost dropped his beer in amazement, and the feeling stayed with him to the very end of the concert, the best he’d been to for ages. They turned out to listen to and play some shit-hot music out here in the sticks. The support band started off sounding very punk rock, then came down towards the melodic style of Iron Maiden. The next two bands – as far as he understood, both had their roots in a well-known group called Corruption, who turned out to be from Sandomierz – also played hard rock without any frills, rap-style interludes or moaning about me and you baby, yeah, yeah, yeah.
With every track there seemed to be more people, everyone was bawling louder and jumping higher; as more and more endorphins accumulated in the cellar and the sweat began to condense on the
metal grate, there was something of the tribal experience about it, which reminded him of the old Warsaw clubs he used to go to for rock concerts centuries ago. The first band was definitely better musically – here and there it came close to Soundgarden, and here and there it was like Megadeth, but flatter, without the surprises. The second one appealed to Szacki’s taste, pounding out fast, fresh energy in the style of Metallica’s
Load
and
ReLoad
albums. They sang in Polish, they had great lyrics, everything about them was a million times more interesting and a trillion times more genuine than the plasticky stars that filled Radio ZET’s airwaves.
Somewhere up above, the world keeps turning. The traffic cops on the bridge are checking the cars leaving the city, and there are patrols carefully trawling the side streets with their roof lights off, on the look-out for a small figure with red hair. Jerzy Szyller is standing in the dark kitchen, watching the men on guard in a navy-blue Opel Vectra outside his gate. He is wearing the same shirt with the rolled-up sleeves and doesn’t feel like going to bed at all. Leon Wilczur is watching
Alien 3
on Polsat and not smoking; the inspector never smokes at home. Barbara Sobieraj and her husband are having the tired conversation of a veteran married couple, and although it is about the emotional topic of adoption, even so it is stale with routine and the conviction that as ever it will lead to nothing. Judge Maria Tatarska is reading
The Secret Garden
in the original, telling herself she is practising her English, but in fact she just wants to read it again, and be moved to tears again. Maria “Misia” Miszczyk is eating a smoked sausage – by now she’s sick of all those cakes, which she has made her trademark – and looking at a picture of Budnik on Polsat News. The picture was taken by the police during his recent interview and Miszczyk thinks a politician’s job must be bloody awful, as Budnik looks so gaunt, half the man she remembers from the past. And that sticking plaster too. Mr and Mrs Rojski are sleeping peacefully, unaware how few couples there are who still sleep together under the same quilt after forty years of marriage. Two hundred and twenty kilometres away, in the Warsaw district of Grochów, Marcin Ładoń – at the same time as millions of
other fourteen-year-old boys – is frantically masturbating, thinking about everything except the trip to Sandomierz awaiting him in the week ahead. And Roman Myszyński is having yet another dream about a china-white corpse coming after him inside the synagogue, walking stiffly like a dummy, but he cannot escape, because he trips over some stacks of documents written in Cyrillic.
Somewhere down below, Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was whirling frantically to the tribal beat of metal rock ’n’ roll. With their arms locked, he and Klara spun round together until they lost their balance, drunk on beer and endorphins; her chestnut hair was stuck to her perspiring brow, her face was shining and her top was damp with sweat under the arms. Puffing and panting, they found enough breath to bellow out the chorus.
“O Lord, my life can’t ever get no worse!” yelled Szacki, truthfully. “O Lord, my life is under the Devil’s curse!”
Without waiting for the encores, he threw Klara her jacket and dragged her home to the flat on Długosz like a caveman with his prey. She smelt of sweat, beer and cigarettes, every cranny of her body was hot, damp and salty, and for the first time Szacki didn’t find her moans and screams at all vulgar.
It had been a wonderful evening; even if he didn’t fall asleep happy, at least he fell asleep calm, and his final thought was that he’d break up with the kid in the morning – why spoil such a great evening for himself and for her?
Joseph Ratzinger celebrates the fourth anniversary of becoming Benedict XVI, he and other Catholics conclude festivities for the Easter Week by celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday, and at Łagiewniki Cardinal Dziwisz comments on the political situation by saying that it is a condition for public life to master the art of loving forgiveness. At the same time, MP Janusz Palikot accuses President Lech Kaczy
ń
ski of alcoholism on the basis of the number of miniatures ordered by the presidential household. Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, lays a bunch of daffodils at the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto on the sixty-sixth anniversary of the start of the uprising. He has always done it at noon on the dot, but today he must wait until the official delegations have finished. Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic preparations for the Führer’s birthday continue, and as the result of a Roma house being set on fire a two-year-old girl ends up in hospital in a critical state. The police inaugurate the motorbike season, warning against bravado with the slick slogan: “Spring is here, out come the vegetables”. Just outside Sandomierz there is a road accident – a car smashes into an electricity pylon and goes up in flames, killing a seventeen-year-old boy. It is sunny, but cold as hell, the temperature does not rise above twelve degrees, and at night it falls to zero.
I
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t find a condom. Or an empty condom wrapper. Or an open packet of condoms. Or any evidence at all to confirm that they had used protection during last night’s ecstasies. But they always had before now – in other words she didn’t have a coil, or take pills. There are fertile days and infertile days, there is being careful, and above all there’s the bloody small-town Middle Ages of contraception, the oppressive need to put on a rubber. If there was a rubber. And that wasn’t at all certain.
Szacki swept the room, searching every corner, feeling rising panic, wanting at any cost to assure himself that no, there was no chance he could have impregnated this charming girl from Sandomierz, fifteen years his junior. Whom, to cap it all – before becoming aware of the contraceptive catastrophe – he had dumped, as a result of which she had locked herself in the bathroom and was still in there, sobbing.
The door slammed. Quick as a flash, Szacki rose from his knees and adopted an expression full of sympathy. Without a word, Klara began to gather up her clothes, and for a while he even hoped there wouldn’t be a conversation.
“I studied in Warsaw, I studied in Göttingen, I’ve done a lot of travelling, I’ve lived in three capital cities. I won’t hide the fact that I’ve had various men too. Some for longer, some for shorter. What they all had in common was that they’re great guys. Even when we came to the conclusion that we weren’t necessarily made for each other, they were still great. You’re the first real prick that has stood in my way.”
“Klara, please, why say such things?” said Szacki calmly, trying his best not to think about the double meaning of her last remark. “You know exactly who I am. A civil servant who’s fifteen years older than
you, a man with a past who’s been through the mill. What could you hope to build with me?”
She came up and stood so close that their noses were almost touching. He felt a terribly strong desire for her.
“Nothing any more, but yesterday I wasn’t sure. You’ve got something about you that won me over. You’re smart, funny, a bit enigmatic, handsome in a not-so-obvious way, you’ve got a sort of masculinity that appealed to me. And those suits are really great, adorably stiff and starchy.” She smiled, but at once grew serious. “That’s what I saw in you. And as long as I thought you saw something in me, from day to day I felt keener to give you more. But you saw me as a bimbo, a bit of country crumpet, a little slag from the provinces. It’s amazing you never took me to McDonald’s. Didn’t they tell you all the village cocksuckers like going for a Big Mac best of all?”
“You don’t have to be so crude.”