Click.
She’s been fighting this battle for ages, but now she’s having her first successes. Once or twice she manages to remain conscious long enough to understand that she is in the hospital, and that something has happened. One time she comes to the terrible conclusion that she may have been living in a coma for the past thirty years and no longer recognizes anyone. But at once she drifts away—click—and when she comes back, she’s forgotten that conclusion.
Once or twice the world sharpens enough for her to see some unfamiliar faces. She tries to speak, but it’s futile.
Click.
All of a sudden she remembers that she has a child. A little boy perhaps, but she’s not sure. She can’t find his name in her memory. But he’s small. She can remember the sense of love and the sense of fear. Has something happened to him? Is he dying just as she is? Too much emotion.
Click.
For the first time, along with consciousness comes pain. She thinks it may be a good sign, and that if she can grab hold of the pain, she can remain conscious longer. She needs to do that, to extract more information from herself about her child, whom she loves so much and whom she’s so worried about.
A boy. She’s almost certain it’s a boy. Dark hair. What about his eyes? She can see the image of a child, sleeping on his back, snoring, in pajamas with a motorcycle on the top. A blue motorcycle marked “Vrrooom!” He’s asleep, so she can’t see his eyes. She tries to summon some other image, but she can’t do it.
Click.
She opens her eyes. This time instead of absorbent cotton, the opaque glass appears at once—progress. Learning from experience, she doesn’t force her senses to work but waits calmly to see if she’s going to switch off or not. Soon the image gains more focus, and she sees a man standing in front of her.
She’d like to reflect on who he is, but she has no control over her thoughts, and instead she wonders if it’s possible that as a result . . . as a result of what has happened to her, whatever it was, she has lost her color vision. Because the man is monochrome. White hair, pale face, black coat, jacket, shirt, and tie in various shades of gray. He’s standing in the doorway, then he comes up to her bed. He stands upright, with his hands dropped to either side of his body.
She has no idea who he is. She tries to identify the emotions that go with him.
Love? Friendship?
“I came to ask your forgiveness,” says the man quietly. “But I realize I may never get it. Because you won’t be able to give it to me, or more likely, you won’t want to.”
She can see that the man is saying something, but none of it gets through to her. She concentrates on the emotions—by now she knows that the easiest way to get to the facts, to the images, is through emotions.
Sorrow?
“But I’d like you to take note of my apology at least.” He looks her in the eyes. He has a cold gaze—she doesn’t like this man. “I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life, but this is the worst. I’ll never stop being ashamed of it.”
Regret?
“I promise you that the people to blame for what happened will be punished. Of course, there’s your husband. We haven’t caught him yet, but it’s a matter of days or hours.”
Hatred?
“I shall submit myself to disciplinary proceedings and leave the prosecution service. I promise nobody will ever suffer because of me again.”
Rage. Yes, that was the right emotion.
With the emotion comes an image. Her son’s back, leaning over something. A streak of smoke from somewhere. Tremendous fear. And then footsteps, the tails of a black coat flashing before her eyes. It’s this man. He leans over and picks up the child. The boy trustingly nestles against his coat collar, speckled with drizzle. They both look at her. The man’s icy gaze, and her child’s brown, tearful eyes. Brown. What a relief!
Rage. She’s decided to hold on to this emotion because so far it’s the one that has had the most to offer her.
Click.
4
The cold wind sobered him up, but he still felt weak, so he sat on a bench outside the hospital to recuperate. He’d kind of known what he’d see in the hospital room, but it was one thing to know and another to see. He couldn’t get rid of the image of the body lying in the hospital bed, more like a corpse than a living person. The face, disfigured by the slack muscles, the exposed teeth, visible behind the drooping lips. The eyes that were probably trying to show him some emotion. Had she been mentally screaming at him to get out of there? Hurling abuse? Rightly blaming him for everything that had happened?
The worst thing was the bruise under her eye. A huge black-and-purple bruise.
He’d said what he had to say, but he didn’t feel any better. Partly because he hadn’t told her the entire truth, just a few platitudes. He hadn’t said what had really caused him to arrive on his white horse—that neither concern nor even common decency lay behind his action. It was nothing but bureaucratic fear, a desperate attempt to save his own ass. Which, moreover, he’d done reluctantly, out of obligation.
He felt ashamed he hadn’t said that, and deluded himself into thinking he’d do it another time. There was no point in telling the woman, who had escaped death by a miracle, that if it weren’t for a coincidence, one overzealous junior prosecutor, and a boss who wanted to put an end to the matter right away, right now her mother would be wondering how to dress her grandson for the funeral.
But going to see her had helped him make the most important decision he had ever made in his entire life to date. He’d been thinking about it for several days, but now in the hospital hallway the thought had changed into a cast-iron conviction.
He wouldn’t be a prosecutor anymore. That stage in his life had come to an end. He’d devote a few more days or weeks, either to solving the Najman case, or passing it on to someone else. He’d make sure Falk was in charge of the case of the butcher of Równa Street. Those two inquiries would be the last he would ever deal with as a prosecutor.
He got up from the bench and decided to walk to the prosecution building across the Old Town. But halfway there he chickened out at the thought of an encounter with Falk and Szarejna. On impulse he turned off beside the Old Town Hall and went into SiSi, the café that lately had become his favorite. The style of the place gave it a very Warsaw feel, and Szacki felt at home there. Besides, they had excellent cakes—best of all were the meringues. Another reason he liked the place was that ever since he’d flashed his ID and meanly asked if they paid royalties, they’d switched off the music the moment he crossed the threshold. Freeing him from the horror of popular music, especially rap.
Fifteen minutes later, stimulated by sugar and caffeine, he was slogging over his notebook, trying to put his racing thoughts in order. Finding the little boy playing beside his battered mother had shaken him badly. The appalling, overwhelming sense of guilt had crushed him and wouldn’t let him get back to his usual routine. And yet he had to pull himself together because Frankenstein’s revelations meant that the case had ceased to be just a curious murder. It had become a priority investigation of national importance.
He wrote in the notebook, Równa—Falk 100%, poss. consultancy, apart from that, THE END.
OK, onward and upward. On the next page, he wrote Minor league. Underneath, he made a list of all his cases, checked his journal for the deadlines for arrests, the official dates when the investigations were due to end, and the days he had to be in court. It didn’t look too bad—he had no court appearances until January, nor did he have to finish anything urgently. It would be easy to reallocate his duties when he announced his departure from the service. Right now he would ask Szarejna to reassign the three investigations in which several activities needed to be commissioned quickly. Nothing major, just expert witnesses and one visit to a crime scene. Under this short list he added THE END, then turned the page.
He hesitated for a while, wondering whether to write Ton of shit or Pain in the ass. Finally he neatly wrote the word S
pokesman, recognizing that there was no point in surrendering to his emotions. Totally lying his way out of it was impossible until he announced his decision to leave. If they wanted him to put on a show in the course of his investigation, then naturally he’d do it. He could. If they wanted something else, he’d try to be nice about it. And he’d promise to give it his full attention in just a short while, but for now—I’m sure you understand, ladies and gentlemen, such an important investigation, a serial murderer—I’m terribly sorry.
Yes, quite—a serial murderer. He turned the page, folded the notebook back to keep it open, and wrote in block letters NAJMAN across both pages.
“Close your eyes, dude, do it right away!” a man’s voice roared in distorted English just overhead. Szacki jumped, and a bit of meringue fell off his fork. “Don’t even think about the level of your fear.”
The sound of atrocious rap music vanished. The silence was filled by rapid footsteps, and there stood the manager, with a terrified look on his face.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Prosecutor, the barista’s new. I promise it won’t happen again. Coffee on the house, perhaps?”
He said no thank you. He was still working on a cup of fiendishly strong black coffee. It was pretty good, but he was afraid that if he drank all of it, he’d have palpitations.
On the left-hand page he jotted down what he knew. Not much, considering almost a week had gone by since the corpse was identified. Thanks to recordings from various security cameras and witness statements, they’d managed to confirm that on Monday morning Piotr Najman had driven his Mazda to work. He’d left it at a repair shop on Sikorski Avenue for servicing. Logical, if he was due to be away for several days. Except that nothing else confirmed he was planning to go away for several days. According to the repair shop staff, he had no luggage. The tour operator in Warsaw knew nothing about a trip to the Balkans or about any briefing. None of the Olsztyn cab companies had had a booking to pick him up from the agency in Jaroty on Monday. He hadn’t bought a ticket in his own name for the bus to Warsaw; he may have boarded it at the stop, but the bus company staff hadn’t been able to confirm that.
Only his wife and his business partner had testified that he was supposed to be going away. And now there were two possibilities: one, they were both lying, or two, Najman had lied to both of them. The first supposition would mean the two women were involved in a conspiracy to commit murder, which seemed unlikely. Especially as the phone bills confirmed Teresa Najman’s story. During the week of her husband’s absence, she had tried to call him twice and had sent three text messages to say everything was fine at home. OK, maybe she wasn’t the most caring wife, but that wasn’t a crime. Or maybe she’d gotten used to her husband’s constant trips, some of them exotic, and to the fact that she couldn’t contact him.
In other words, the second version of events was more likely. The guy takes advantage of his job involving frequent travel to deceive his wife, deceive his partner, and spend a week with his lover in some Warmian hotel for adulterers. On the right-hand page, he wrote lover. He underlined it. If such a woman existed, then even if she had nothing to do with the murder, the guy had gone missing on his way to join her, or on his way back, or during a break in their lovemaking when he’d stepped out for a bottle of wine—either way, this could be their most important witness. They’d have to check Najman’s computers and phone bills, interview his friends, and find the girl. Check his trips abroad—maybe they’d met on some exotic briefing trip.
He wrote down lye. He drew two arrows leading from it, and then two more words: motive? and psycho? Baldheaded Piotr Najman from Stawiguda had not been murdered, like most of his compatriots, with a metal bar while drunk. He had been deprived of his life in a sophisticated way. Why? Perhaps he’d given someone reasons to hate him. Maybe he’d run someone over in the past on his way home from a party. Maybe he’d screwed someone else’s wife (Szacki drew an arrow to the word lover). Maybe, as Falk had claimed, he’d rubbed someone the wrong way by giving them a room without a view. That meant the madman who’d dissolved Najman had had previous contact with him. Under motive he wrote the word past and realized that soon he and Bierut would have to set a limit for the scope of their research.
There was also an increasingly likely chance that Najman wasn’t the most important element, and that the key person was the murderer—a serial killer who murdered and dissolved his victims for fun. The choice of victim was either secondary, or insignificant. Unfortunately there was more and more evidence in favor of this idea. Planting the skeleton in a weird place. Next to the word psycho, he wrote Mariańska Street. Completing it with other bones. He added additional victims, and next to that missing persons/DNA.
He thought for a while, sighed, added the name Klejnocki, and circled it several times. He didn’t believe in psychological shamanism, and he wasn’t wild about the freaky profiler from Kraków, but he had to bring Klejnocki in before they gave him some local expert who knew how many lakes there were in Olsztyn.
He decided to go see Bierut at the police station and immediately called a cab.
5
Bierut came back with two bottles of sparkling water and put one down in front of Szacki with a look on his face as if it were a chalice of cyanide. It occurred to Szacki that he had no luck when it came to colleagues—hadn’t the boggy Warmian soil borne any sons full of joy and optimism? Falk was stiff enough to put a porn star to shame, while Bierut’s gloomy nature was a fine advertisement for the Warmian climate, as if he were determined to make the atmosphere on this side of the window just as bleak.
The deputy commissioner sighed heavily, like a doctor before imparting bad news.
“I’ll summarize,” Bierut began. “Let’s start with the fact that none of the doctors from the city hospital has disappeared or had a day off or gone on a business trip. One of the midwives has gone on vacation, but she’d had it planned for six months.”
“Where did she purchase the trip?”
“Downtown. I called her in Egypt, and she’d been on package tours before, but never through Najman’s or Parulska’s agency. Not with anyone in Olsztyn, in fact, because she only moved here recently from Elbląg. Everyone moves out of Elbląg,” he added in a tone that seemed to imply this migration was the effect of plague.
“Either way, let’s not give up on the hospital idea,” said Szacki. “Especially since it turned out that our lakeland vampire constructed Najman from several corpses. That takes medical knowledge. What’s come of the DNA from the other bones? Have you put them through the database yet?”
“Nothing leaped out.”
“That’s bad. We need to check unexplained disappearances for the past—I don’t know, the past two years, for a start. Collect samples from the families who haven’t given any yet, and compare them.”
Bierut raised an eyebrow.
“From the whole city?”
“From the whole region. This isn’t New York, where every serial murderer can have his fill and still leave something for others. I’m actually wondering whether to expand it to cover the neighboring provinces, but let’s start with the marshlands, and then we’ll see. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Even if Bierut wanted to defend his homeland, he restrained himself.
“Please also send a question to national police headquarters to ask if there’s an ongoing investigation anywhere in Poland into the case of a corpse without hands. It’s crucial to identify the owners of the remaining bones, above all, the hands.”
Szacki was thinking about it as a mathematical problem. He imagined each piece of circumstantial evidence and each bit of hard proof as a circle of a defined radius. These circles overlapped, and the murderer was standing in the common area: the logic was merciless. For the time being they were staring at a single circle, marked Piotr Najman. A large set, not infinite, but large. If they could identify the remaining bones, they could place other circles on top of Najman’s and look for the common areas. That would considerably re
duce the range of their search.
“And now I want to hear the Personal History, Adventures, and Experience of Piotr Najman,” he said, drank the sparkling water, crossed his legs, adjusted the crease in his pants, and added, “The Elder, of Stawiguda, Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account.”
He glanced at Bierut. Even if the policeman was fond of Dickens and recognized the quote, he didn’t let it show. He just twitched his outdated mustache.
“Unfortunately, for a fifty-year-old he hasn’t got much history. His parents are dead, the father long ago, the mother for several years. No siblings, he was an only child. We found an uncle at the other end of the country, but all he knows about his nephew is that he exists. Wife, five-year-old kid.”
“We didn’t learn much from the wife.”
“Unfortunately. Do you think she’s hiding something?”
“Possibly. But it’s equally possible that something was being hidden from her. I’ll tell you about that in a while. Any close friends?”
“The partner is just as reticent as the wife. Our colleagues in Warsaw questioned his business contacts from the tourist companies, but they didn’t learn anything new. We’ve talked to the neighbors at his residence and his workplace. Nothing interesting. I spoke in person with two of his rivals. You know what it’s like, some are inclined to denounce their competitors to the tax office to clean up the market, and they’re often willing to spread gossip and slander. Not this time. What’s more, they praised Najman, especially for his expertise on what they call ‘the exotic.’”
Bierut scoured his notes.
“I also followed the medical lead. I thought since he’d had the operation on his toe in Warsaw, he may have sought help here first. And indeed he did have some consultations at the provincial hospital—I spoke to the orthopedic surgeon, who had nothing to say apart from medical details. Besides, he’s seventy, so he seems unlikely to have committed a sophisticated crime involving packing an adult male into a cast-iron coffin.”
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