Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
A Grain of Truth (50 page)
“Why didn’t we notice that? You or I, or Wilczur.”
“An illusion,” said Szacki, shrugging. “Perhaps Budnik’s most brilliant idea. Do you know what conjuring tricks usually rely on? On distracting your attention, don’t they? While one hand is shuffling two packs of cards in the air, or changing a burning piece of tissue paper into a dove, you haven’t the time or the desire to look at what the other one is doing. You see? We were the ideal spectators for his show for various reasons. You and Wilczur were local enough for everything to have too much significance for you. I was enough of a stranger to be unable to separate the important things from the unimportant ones. The whole time we were looking at the top hat and the rabbit – at pictures in churches, quotes from the Gospels, barrels, naked corpses on the site of an old Jewish cemetery. The less spectacular things escaped our attention.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the loess sand under Mrs Budnik’s fingernails. If you remove a mysterious symbol from someone’s hand, the fingernails don’t interest you. And if they had, we’d have started to think about the underground cellars sooner. Such as the second victim’s feet, with a shiny coating of blood. You see something like that, plus that barrel too, and you don’t stop to wonder why a town council official has carved-up, bruised, mangled feet.”
“The feet of a tramp…”
“Exactly. But it was sitting inside me the whole time, all those little details, reminding me of their existence the whole time. Klejnocki’s words, first of all. Your father’s words, second.”
“That everyone tells lies?”
“Those words too, but there were others that made me itch. At first I thought it was about passing on hatred from generation to generation, which in the context of Wilczur was obvious. But your father was talking about life in a very small town, where they’re all looking in each other’s windows, so if your wife is unfaithful, you’ve got to stand next to her lover in church. Bloody hell, somewhere in there I had Budnik at the back of my head the whole time, but I pushed away that solution, because it was too fantastical. Only when I started to
consider that option did it all come together. Take the reversed letter on the painting – the rabbi in Lublin said no Jew would have made a mistake like that, just as we would never write a B with the loops to the left. That doesn’t indicate Wilczur. It points at someone who had a good general idea, but had to keep looking at Wikipedia to add the details. And Budnik was pretty well clued up, he’d been interested in the painting, he had fought for the truth about it, he had a good enough grasp of the anti-Semitic obsessions to know perfectly well which strings to pluck.
“That wasn’t his only mistake either. He had pressed the badge into his wife’s hand because in that flood of bile – to quote Klejnocki again – he wanted to injure Szyller at any price, to incriminate him. It didn’t occur to him that as soon as we got to Szyller, from the story of the love affair we’d come bouncing straight back to his doorstep like a rubber ball. Or maybe he did think of it, but reckoned Szyller wouldn’t give the game away out of concern for his lover’s good name? Hell knows. Either way, if Szyller hadn’t gone to Warsaw, if I’d interviewed him a day earlier, he would be alive, and Budnik would have been in jail for a week by now.”
Sobieraj finished her cigarette; he thought she’d come back under the duvet, but she did some more rummaging in her handbag and took out her phone.
“Are you calling your husband?”
“No, the Modena, to order pizza. Two Romanticas?” she said, fluttering her eyelashes in comedy fashion.
He agreed willingly and waited for Basia to place the order, then pulled her back under the duvet. Not for sex, he just wanted to cuddle and talk it all out.
“And that business with Wilczur?” she asked. “Was that a smokescreen? What was that about? They have let him go, haven’t they?”
“Yes, of course they have. He told me he has an infinitely kind heart, so he isn’t going to report his arrest to the Anti-Defamation League, and he won’t make me into Poland’s chief anti-Semite. Only because
Fakt
is going to do it for him.”
She snorted with laughter.
“What a charming old boy. But is he really a Jew?”
“Yes, he really is. And that whole story is true, except that Wilczur didn’t know as much about it as we thought – for instance, he had no idea Elżbieta was the granddaughter of the unfortunate midwife whose daughter was scared by the barrel. Budnik knew the most. The issue of Dr Wajsbrot and what happened in the winter of 1947 was a strictly guarded family secret. Which Budnik only learnt about when he fell in love with Miss Szuszkiewicz. His father, as you remember, was the head of the secret police prison who hadn’t let Wajsbrot deliver his wife’s baby. And, terrified by the coincidence, he had revealed all to his son on his death bed. The old man was afraid of a curse, he was afraid none of it was happening purely by chance, and that Dr Wajsbrot was demanding justice from beyond the grave.”
“There’s something in that,” whispered Sobieraj. “However you look at it, there’s something eerie about the fact that those people’s fates were joined together again. Especially now that Budnik will live out his days in prison.”
Szacki shuddered. He hadn’t thought about it like that, but Sobieraj was right. It looked as if the curse doing the rounds of Sandomierz had taken control of him as well to do its work. He remembered the recording of the Jew disappearing in the fog – that was the one single aspect of the investigation that he hadn’t been able to explain. And which he intended to keep to himself – there was no need for any trace of that recording to remain in the case files.
“Yes,” he muttered. “As if some sort of providence—”
“Anti-providence more like…”
“You’re right, as if some sort of anti-providence were helping Budnik. Strange.”
For a while they were silent, hugging each other; outside the clock on the town-hall tower struck eleven p.m. He smiled at the thought of how very much he would miss those noises now if they weren’t there. To think that not so long ago they had irritated him.
“Pity about that vagrant,” she sighed sadly, and snuggled closer to Szacki. “There was no curse affecting him, as I see it.”
“No, probably not, I have no idea – we certainly don’t know anything about that so far.”
“God, I shouldn’t keep saying it or you’ll be crushed under the weight of your own ego, but you’re a real crime-solving genius, you know?”
He shrugged, although his ego was indeed lapping up this compliment with relish.
“Yeah, the next things I should have taken notice of were the laptop and the family photos.”
“What laptop?”
“The polystyrene kind they pack takeaways in at restaurants.”
“You call that a ‘laptop’?”
“Yes, and?…”
“Never mind, go on.”
“On Tuesday the camera caught Budnik coming out of the Trzydziestka restaurant with two dinners. That made no sense at all. Mrs Budnik wasn’t there any more by then, and nor was there any explanation for why he needed two dinners. It only had to be linked up with the other facts. Such as the fact that if Budnik was meant to be the murderer, someone else must have been stuck on a hook in the mansion on Zamkowa Street. Such as the fact that one of the local tramps had been stubbornly looking for his lost vagrant pal. And then the family photographs.”
“I don’t get it – what family photographs?”
“Here the whole trick relied on making himself look as much as possible like the tramp, that unfortunate Fijewski. From his explanations it turns out Budnik had been preparing for the crimes for weeks, even months on end. Of course, it sounds like utter madness, but remember that until there was bloodshed, he could treat it like a perverse game, testing himself to see how far he was capable of going. He must have neglected himself pathologically, lost weight and lightened his hair a bit from reddish-brown to ginger, and grown a beard. The dodge with the sticking plaster was a stroke of genius: yet another way of distracting attention worthy of an illusionist, but it would have been useless if someone had started having doubts about whether the corpse on Zamkowa Street was Budnik’s body. Why didn’t we have doubts, and
especially why didn’t I? I’d seen the same skinny little man with a ginger beard and a plaster at the interview. The hook through the cheek made things additionally complicated. I saw that same face in the ID card I took out of the wallet lying by the remains. But unfortunately, the fact that there was no driving licence in there didn’t set me thinking, and the ID card has been issued two weeks earlier. It didn’t set any of us thinking, because in the past few hours we’d all seen Budnik’s face on the television, from where? From a photo taken at the time of the interview. But could we have seen his face somewhere else? Of course we could, if we’d looked. But in the most obvious place, in other words his house, there weren’t any pictures of him, only of Mrs Budnik. He knew we’d search the property carefully after his disappearance. He knew that if we feasted our eyes on his actual face in there, we might have some doubts. As it was, all we had to look at was a skinny face with a plaster on the forehead.”
The doorbell interrupted Szacki’s clarifications, and soon they were eating pizza and garlic bread, which – what a coincidence – was brought in a white polystyrene “laptop”, just like the one Szacki had recently seen in the hands of the murderer on a fuzzy film recorded by a camera on the market square. The thought made him lose his appetite for this particular dish. Basia seemed to lose hers too, because not once did she reach into the container. Anyway, she didn’t seem keen on the pizza either, although it was as delicious as ever. She ate one piece, took a couple of pecks at a second one, and put it aside.
“I’m sorry, I can’t eat and think about all that at the same time – those vaults, Szyller… Now, of course, I understand more, the way he died… It confirms Klejnocki’s words. Szyller was the most cruelly tortured, the hatred for him was the greatest. That also pointed at Budnik, didn’t it?”
He nodded in agreement.
“Did he keep the tramp in the vaults too? And how? Did he go down into them from his cellar? I didn’t even know there was anything except for that wretched tourist route, and soon it’ll turn out you can get in there from every tenement.”
“You can’t. Budnik knew a little more than others by accident – he was interested in the history of the city, it was thanks to him that Dybus and his pals could do their research. The matter ceased to concern the other politicians when it turned out they weren’t going to make a new tourist attraction out of it, but for Budnik it was pastime. A pastime which at a key moment turned out to be very handy. Of course it’s not true that you can go down into the underground at any point. You know the entrance inside Nazareth House, and as Budnik explains it, and as we’ll have to check, there’s another entrance near the castle, by that meadow at the bottom, where there’s a ruined building. That would make sense – with a bit of luck you could get from there to the synagogue through the bushes without being noticed, and you could also go through the bushes to the mansion on Zamkowa Street, and if you slip through the cathedral garden, you end up on the terrace at the Budniks’ house. Hence his need to blow up the part of the underground tunnel that leads to that entrance. It would have pointed to Budnik, and then we could have started to look for him. In fact, he planned to be far away by now thanks to Fijewski’s passport, but as we know: you can never be careful enough…”
“Admit it, the passport was a shot in the dark.”
“Yes, but on target. Once I was just about certain whose identity he had stolen, it wasn’t all that hard to make sure. But to convince several registry offices to check on a Sunday evening whether it was true, and when he’d call to collect it… I don’t think I’ve ever run into a greater challenge in my career. Do you know what’s interesting? That his biggest regret is Dybus.”
“What a bloody nutcase. To think I knew him for all those years. How long will he get for it?”
“Life.”
“And why? For what? I don’t get it.”
Szacki didn’t get it either, not entirely. But he could still hear Budnik’s words in his ears: “I wanted to kill Ela and Szyller, I really did, it gave me pleasure. After all those months imagining what they were doing together, after hearing those lies, the stories about business meetings with theatre people in Krakow, Kielce and Warsaw… You
don’t know what it’s like, how that hatred grows day after day, floods you like bile; I was capable of anything by then, anything not to feel that acid consuming me, every minute, every second, all the time. I’d always known she wasn’t really mine, but when she finally told me to my face, it was terrible. I decided that if I couldn’t have her, nobody was going to have her.”
Maybe it’s better that you don’t understand that, Basia, thought Szacki. And that I don’t either, and few people do in general. And although Budnik’s explanation had got through to him, although he did understand his motives, there was something in all this – dammit, he could only bring it up aloud in jokes; after all, he didn’t believe in curses, nor did he believe that some sort of energy sometimes has to even out the scores for the order of the universe. And yet there was something unsettling about it. As if the old Polish city had seen too much, as if the crime committed seventy years ago was too much for these stone walls, and instead of soaking into the red bricks as usual it had started to ricochet off them, until finally it hit Grzegorz Budnik.
The clock on the town-hall tower struck midnight.
“It’s the time for ghosts,” said Basia Sobieraj, and slipped into bed.
It occurred to Prosecutor Teodor Szacki that ghosts certainly don’t appear at midnight.
In the Jewish calendar it is Pesach Sheni, or Second Passover, a holiday decreed by the Torah to take place on the fourteenth day of the month
Iyar
, for those who could not celebrate it at the right time, and a symbol of a second chance granted by God. Benedict XVI visits Jordan, where on Mount Nebo, from which Moses saw the Promised Land, he talks about the unbreakable tie that binds the Church and the Jewish nation. In Spain some lucky devil wins 126 million euros on the lottery, in California the world’s smallest light bulb is produced, and British Sikh policemen want bulletproof turbans to be invented. It is only a month until the European elections, and according to the polls in Poland the Civic Platform party is winning against the Law and Justice party by forty-seven to twenty-two per cent. Sandomierz is excited by a TVN helicopter flying over the city, by the story of a former secret policeman who persecuted the opposition, and whose security firm now protects church buildings, and – like the entire region – by the discovery in Tarnobrzeg of Poland’s first case of swine flu. The police catch two sixteen-year-olds smoking “stupefying dried plant material”; but meanwhile, Bishop Edward Frankowski ordains seventeen new deacons, so the balance is maintained. Spring is in full bloom; in the morning it rained, but the evening is lovely, warm and sunny, and it’s impossible to find an empty café table in the market square.