Rage

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  He walked along the fence, climbed on tiptoe, and peered into the kitchen. The fridge was wide-open and he could see the butter, pots of curd cheese, and yogurts in brightly colored tubs. He noticed that the compartment on the lower shelf had come loose, and was hanging from its clip like a broken arm.

  He felt uneasy. And although he knew it was irrational and that soon he would awkwardly have to apologize, he climbed the fence, clumsily jumped down on the other side, and ran to the door. He didn’t bother ringing or knocking, just immediately tugged at the door handle. It was unlocked. He went into a small entry, and slowly opened the door to the hall.

  He could smell something burning.

  “Hello? Ma’am, are you there? It’s me, Prosecutor Szacki . . .” He broke off at the sight of the small dried footprints on the floor. The tracks of a child, imprinted in something pink—he had no idea what it was. Yogurt? Strawberry milk?

  “We spoke yesterday,” he said loudly, opening a door. “Can you hear me, ma’am?”

  He hesitantly walked toward the kitchen and living room, with every cell of his body crying out that something was very wrong here.

  And it was.

  The corpse was lying on the floor; the pool of blood and milk had formed a two-tone halo around the victim’s head. He felt himself come unstuck from reality, and the world went spinning. He would have passed out, if not for the sight of the little pink footprints that led him to the woman lying on the floor.

  He looked around. A stream of smoke was seeping from the oven—that was why he could smell burning. A little boy in a luridly turquoise pajama top was squatting in a corner of the room, with his hunched back turned this way. He was busy with something. Szacki went up and squatted beside him. The child must have been about three years old. He joined two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, featuring a smiling figure from a fairy tale or maybe a car. Then he separated the pieces and joined them up again with the same automatic movement.

  “Hello, can you hear me?” Szacki said gently, moving around so the boy could see him. At first the child didn’t react, then he looked at Szacki with eyes devoid of emotion. The whole front of his pajama top was covered in milk and blood.

  “I’m going to pick you up, OK?” Szacki knelt down, smiled, and held out his hands.

  The boy with vacant eyes embraced his neck, nestled against his coat collar, and was still.

  Szacki slowly stood up and took the phone from his pocket.

  And then he saw the woman blink.

  11

  He was standing outside the house on Równa Street, soaked to the bone and frozen solid, watching the old Nissan in which the social welfare people had come to fetch the little boy as the car bounced along the potholes. Its brake lights shone through the fog, and then its turn signal blinked as it turned onto the road toward Olsztyn and then disappeared. An ambulance had taken the boy’s mother away fifteen minutes ago. The forensic team was gathering evidence inside.

  He had absolutely nothing to do here.

  And yet he wasn’t quite capable of getting in his car and driving off. Bah, he couldn’t even move.

  He was just standing there.

  He heard a car pull up behind him. The engine died and the door slammed.

  Edmund Falk was standing in front of him; he had to crane his neck to look Szacki in the eyes.

  “If she doesn’t survive, I’ll destroy you,” he said.

  Szacki didn’t answer. It was the logical choice.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Monday, December 2, 2013

  International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. Nelly Furtado and Britney Spears are celebrating their birthdays. Exactly twenty-two years have passed since Poland became the first country in the world to recognize Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Meanwhile, following the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius that ended in a fiasco, the protests continue nonstop in Kiev’s Independence Square, as the opposition gains strength and people call for revolution. While the Ukrainians want to join the EU, the British want to leave it. Only 26 percent of Her Majesty’s subjects rate the EU positively. Researchers announce that they have discovered the gene for alcoholism. Once their GABRB1 gene has been modified, mice—usually teetotal—take a liking to vodka. With time, these rodents will tackle some very tricky tasks just to get another fix of alcohol. The courts are doing a good job today: In Rawa Mazowiecka, a town in central Poland, a forty-nine-year-old priest is sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for pedophilia. In Strasburg a hearing into the case of some secret CIA prisoners held in Warmia continues all day. In Olsztyn it’s the first day of the trial of members of the local housing cooperative, who organized a protest against irregularities in the way it was managed; the defendants include a woman of eighty-four. At night there’s a mild frost, during the day it’s 35 degrees, overcast, and of course there’s fog and freezing drizzle.

  1

  This time the anatomy department at the Faculty of Medical Sciences didn’t resemble a Shakespearean witches’ cave. All the bubbling cauldrons had gone, and so had the distinctive smell of broth. PhD student Alicja Jagiełło had vanished too—only Professor Frankenstein was still there, and so was the victim, known until recently as Piotr Najman, entrepreneur in the tourist industry. Until recently, because since his skeleton had turned out to contain not just an endoprosthesis but somebody else’s bones as well, the question of its identity had become rather complicated.

  The bones had left the dissection table where they had been lying earlier, and were now on the floor, spread out on a large sheet. All separated, numbered, and labeled, they reminded Szacki of photographs from plane crash investigations, where all parts that are found are laid out in a hangar. Everyone in Poland would have exactly the same association—the Smolensk air disaster had educated the entire nation on the topic of aviation inquiries.

  Najman and Co. had been treated in a similar way. A human shape had been drawn on the white sheet in black marker, unnaturally large, as if inflated—it must have been eight feet long. Inside the phantom, all the bones had been arranged properly, large and small; the pensive Frankenstein looked like a teacher, standing over the remains and wondering how to grade the work of students trying to earn credits in anatomy.

  “Of course, 206 is simplifying things a bit,” he said.

  “Sorry?” Szacki didn’t understand. Surely he wasn’t suggesting the skeleton could consist of bones from 206 different victims. That would mean an investigation that dragged on all the way to retirement.

  “I told you earlier that the human skeleton contains 206 bones. That’s a bit of a simplification. A newborn baby has 270, an adult usually has 206, and a person of advanced age may have fewer, because with time the bones fuse together. You know, I’ve trained plenty of pathologists, truly excellent ones, but I myself have rarely conducted an autopsy as the basis for a legal opinion. And so I’ve never acquired the right mindset, the obsession with seeking signs of a crime everywhere.”

  Frankenstein folded his hands behind his back and straightened up.

  “What are you getting at?” asked Szacki.

  He didn’t want to hustle the professor, but he was keen to move on to specifics.

  “The fact that not a single piece of the jigsaw you sent me was missing should have set me thinking.”

  “Why’s that? We established that somebody brought the bones in a bag shortly before they were found. There wasn’t time for any rats or medical students to get to them.”

  “You’re a layman, that’s why you say that. You think of a skeleton, and you see a femur, a skull, ribs, vertebrae. But that’s just a small part of the whole structure. You have to have a good deal of knowledge to notice, in some strange spot where murders are committed . . .”

  “Now you’re talking like a layman. Murders aren’t committed under road bridges or in the cellars of abandoned houses. Quite the opposite, most of them take place in clean, well-lit interiors, in other words, the family home.”

  “Either
way, they’re not sterile spaces specially prepared for the purpose. But here someone has managed to commit a murder, dissolve the corpse, and then fish out all the bones from the remains. Some of them are very small, the phalanges for example, or the coccyx, and some are positively microscopic. Look at this.”

  Frankenstein squatted beside Najman’s skull and gestured to Szacki to join him. He took a pencil from his pocket and pressed it against some tiny bones lying on the sheet at the height of the phantom’s ear.

  “These are the auditory ossicles. They transmit vibrations in the tympanic membrane to the inner ear, thanks to which you can hear what I’m saying. The malleus, the incus, and the stapes—a very interesting structure. As you probably know, these are the only bones in the human body that never change from birth onward. They are 100-percent formed during fetal life, and it happens in an unusual way, which is one of the proofs in support of the theory of evolution, because in fish and reptiles they have an identical—”

  “Professor, please.”

  Frankenstein straightened up proudly. Even if he had a reply ready, he kept it to himself.

  “This is the stapes. You see? It’s the Latin word for a stirrup.”

  Szacki nodded. He knew that, and he’d always thought the name was symbolic, but in fact the tiny bone did look like a miniature stirrup, part of an elf’s riding kit.

  “This bone is less than an eighth of an inch long, and its limbs are only about a hundredth of an inch thick. Firstly, it’s extremely unlikely that such a tiny structure could survive being treated with lye. Secondly, I don’t believe it would be possible to pick out something of this size from the magma that would result from dissolving a corpse in sodium hydroxide.”

  Szacki listened carefully. He didn’t like what he was hearing, thanks to his stapes, unchanged since birth. He didn’t like it, because the professor’s argument was tending toward confirmation of the theory that a crazy serial killer was at work.

  “Professor, I understand what you’re saying, but are these just theoretical digressions, or are we talking about this specific case?”

  “Prosecutor,” said Frankenstein, peering at him over his glasses, “neither I nor my team have slept for the past few days while analyzing and cross-analyzing the genetic data from all 206 bones on your instructions, but the only appreciation we’re getting is your rising irritation. Would it be too much to ask for a few seconds of patience?”

  Szacki should have shut up and smiled politely—after all, what difference would a two-minute lecture make? Unfortunately he always found it hard to be patient.

  “Please understand that there are professions where time has meaning, and the aim is something other than publication in a scholarly periodical read by a handful of colleagues.”

  Frankenstein smiled subtly.

  “Of course, justice, I almost forgot. Misstraut allen Denen, die viel von ihrer Gerechtigkeit reden.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m from Poland.”

  “As the philosopher said, ‘Mistrust all who talk much of their justice.’”

  “I haven’t said a word about justice.”

  The professor removed his glasses, took a cloth from his pocket, and wiped them carefully. Evidently the pause was his favorite rhetorical device.

  “Somebody has gone to a lot of trouble to complete the perfect skeleton,” he said. “To make sure nothing is missing. You’ll be getting a detailed report from me, but the main findings are as follows: Most of the bones are Najman’s. But not all. Some of the bones in both hands had another owner, a man.”

  “Can you establish the gender on the basis of DNA? What about the age? Or other data?”

  “Eye color, hair color. Age only very, very approximately, I’m sorry to say, and only after complex tests. I can go on, or would you prefer some theoretical digression?”

  This time Szacki shut up.

  “Curiously, there are twelve more bones in the skeleton that don’t belong to Najman, and not one of them has been treated with lye. Apart from gathering DNA, I had them do some chemical tests.”

  Szacki gave him an inquiring look.

  “Six of them are the auditory ossicles. Two sets of three bones. One set belonged to a man, the other to a woman.”

  “To the owner of the hand?”

  “No, they’re three different people.”

  “And the remaining six?”

  “It looks as if they’re just stage props.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re several tiny bones from various places.” Frankenstein put away his pencil and took out a telescopic pointer. “The coccyx, or the tailbone, at the very end of the spine. The xiphoid process, right here, at the very end of the breastbone. And the four smallest phalanges from various toes of both feet. All these bones are, first of all, genuinely old, secondly, have not been subjected to the effect of lye, and thirdly, they belonged to a woman.”

  Szacki analyzed this information for a while.

  “In other words, after the murder, somebody put together a skeleton jigsaw, checked what was missing, and dug out the missing pieces from some old coffin.”

  “That’s the hypothesis that suggests itself.”

  “Why?”

  “Luckily, I don’t have to look for the answer to that question.”

  Unluckily, Szacki did. Several theories ran through his head, each worse than the last. And each one featured a miserable psycho, lurking in the cellar of one of those Warmian Disney castles, surrounded by little heaps of bones sorted by type, and ticking off the missing items needed to complete his work. Screw that.

  “So these are the bones of five different people?” he asked, to confirm it. “Our victim in the starring role, the bit players being the man who owned the hand, the man who owned one ear, the woman who owned the other, and in a walk-on role, the lady who kindly donated the missing parts.”

  Frankenstein gently nodded.

  “Where’s the neurosurgery department here?”

  “In the new building, way over there, on the left, third floor.”

  Szacki offered the professor his hand in farewell and left the dissection room. Only in the hallways did it occur to him that somehow he should have said thank you. He almost turned back, but realized he didn’t have time. Besides, assisting the judiciary was a civic duty—all they needed to do was send everyone flowers.

  2

  He left the anatomy department and looked around. “Way over there” must mean farther from the street, and there indeed was a new building, looming from behind a German block. Szacki headed toward it across the hospital yard. In summer it had been a pretty garden, but now it was a few small squares of mud and patchy grass, with paths crossing them and thick black tree trunks shooting out of them.

  When he got to the new part of the development, he was pleased to find that the designers of this hospital were not just the first in the postwar history of the city to succeed in achieving more than just throwing up in a public space. They were also the first to succeed in coherently combining a typical redbrick German edifice with contemporary architecture. As a result the new development looked attractive, as well as modern and professional—the sort of hospital where you’d want to be a patient, if you had to be one.

  He went through some sliding doors and an admissions ward, and took the elevator to the third floor. As in every hospital, the ground floor was noisy and chaotic, but upstairs in the wards there was peace and quiet; the halls were deserted, there was a smell of coffee and disinfectant, and a sound of whispers mixed with the murmur of medical equipment.

  There was no one behind the reception desk. Szacki stood and waited. In reality he was trying to find an excuse to disappear, so he didn’t seek eye contact with the female doctor who emerged from one of the rooms holding a file, walking at a rapid pace. He was sure she’d go straight past him, but she glanced at him, frowned, and stopped.

  “Are you looking for someone?” she asked.

  He took a look at her. A few years over f
orty, petite build, dark hair, glasses, bangs. The A-student type. She was holding her file protectively like a shield.

  He gave the first and last names.

  Instead of answering, the doctor tilted her head, as if thinking very hard about something. This characteristic gesture seemed familiar. Who did that? Żenia? His boss?

  “And what relation are you to the patient?”

  “I’m the prosecutor. Teodor Szacki.”

  The coolly professional doctor beamed.

  “Well, I never. Prosecutor Szacki in person! I was wondering where I’d seen you before. I’m extremely pleased to have the chance to meet you. Do excuse me, I’d love to have a proper talk, but I’m already late for my meeting. Maybe next time?” She smiled.

  He nodded, wondering what on earth had won him fame on the neurosurgical ward.

  “Last door on the right!” she said, before getting on the elevator.

  He thanked her, waited for the door to close, stood there a while longer, and finally realized he had to get this confrontation over with as soon as possible. He set off at a fast pace, passed several empty bays, or almost empty, and finally found himself in a room where a young woman lay on the only bed.

  She looked quite ordinary.

  3

  Her consciousness keeps coming and going quite suddenly, as if someone were compulsively playing with her main switch, like repeatedly clicking a pen.

  Click.

  And the darkness is replaced with white absorbent cotton, which then changes into opaque glass, with various foggy blobs moving around behind it, gradually starting to gain focus. She tries hard to concentrate on them.

  Click.

  Darkness.

  Click.

  And as the darkness is replaced by white absorbent cotton again, a thought appears, fleeting, feeble, only sufficient to confirm that she is who she is, and to let her define herself as a conscious being. She focuses on this thought and builds more of them around it. Now that she knows who she is, she tries to remember where she is, and why. It feels as if she has to catch up with each thought. It’s very tiring.