“We all make mistakes,” said the journalist sententiously, and he pointed at the clock to let Szacki know their time was almost up.
He had woken up now and felt his irritation rising. Rage, that’s how Hela had put it. He liked that word—it gave his aggression a touch of grandeur and righteousness.
“Of course. But if you make a mistake, then a truck driver on his way to Augustów hears Beyoncé instead of Rihanna. If I make a mistake, if I fail to perceive a threat, or to eliminate a menace from society, someone’s life could come to an end.”
“I can see your point,” said the journalist, adjusting his trendy glasses—at last he was taking an interest—“but there’s a catch in that way of thinking. The human factor is the weakest, most accident-prone element in any system. But it’s usually indispensable. If we accepted your way of thinking, fear of making a mistake could become so crippling that nobody would ever choose to become a prosecutor, a judge, or a neurosurgeon. We can’t eliminate the errors, because we can’t eliminate the human being.”
“We can,” said Szacki. “We only have to switch off the autopilot and carefully consider every single one of the decisions we make each day. That way we can avoid mistakes.” Szacki smiled and decided to give his junior a present. “It’s the logical choice.”
The producer signaled that time was up.
“That was Prosecutor Teodor Szacki. We’re just coming up to the regional news, and before that there’s still time to hear something stirring for a change, so here on Radio Olsztyn it’s Aerosmith—this one’s for those of you who haven’t quite woken up yet: ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’!”
The little red light went out, and Szacki put his headphones on the table as the unmistakable opening chords of the evergreen hit by the guy with the monster mouth resounded.
He quickly said good-bye and ran out of the radio station.
He didn’t get far. On Wojsko Polskie Avenue he got stuck in a jam, and as he stared at the brake lights of the Nissan ahead of him, he thought what a small town Olsztyn is. And that sooner or later the paths of those responsible for organizing the traffic in this poor excuse for a provincial capital were bound to cross his. And then he, Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, would change into a terrible avenging angel.
4
Two hundred yards away, Angela Zemsta felt like taking a Xanax. She was desperate for it. She decided she would just take one without worrying about getting addicted. At her age, and with her experience, she knew perfectly well that if she was going to get hooked on anything it would have happened long ago. And although in her working environment it wasn’t popular, but was actually considered a joke, she believed in the theory promoted by some research centers that to become an addict you had to have something special about you. Maybe it was a gene, or maybe a protein, maybe an extra fraction of a drop of one particular hormone. Angela Zemsta didn’t have that special something. And so her life was under her control and hers alone. She didn’t believe in God, she was sure love is a deep friendship between two people rather than some mystical merging of souls, and she made purely recreational use of a popular mind-altering substance with the chemical formula C2H5OH.
Only once in her life had her red light come on. Only once in her life had she felt fear that an emotion and a substance could take control of her life. The emotion was calm, and the substance was alprazolam, a psychotropic benzodiazepine prescribed for anxiety disorders, better known by its brand name Xanax. She had tried various drugs in her life for academic purposes, but the first time she took Xanax she felt like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. She had a revelation, wanted to fall to her knees, burst into tears, and set out into the world to spread the good news, to teach people with the help of fancy metaphors that peace and happiness are within reach, that they come with a bitter taste in the shape of an oval pill. She could add a bit of sexism and xenophobia, without which no religion ever achieves success, and hallelujah—she could have been a prophet for the god Pfizer.
But after a brief period of fascination she had stopped taking Xanax, and in the past twenty years she had only turned to it a few times, when she was in a rare state of extreme stress. She was very proud of this achievement, because if anything was missing in the closets, drawers, and gowns here at the mental hospital, it certainly wasn’t Xanax. They handed it out to the patients like candy, took it themselves, and prescribed it for their friends—there were truckloads of it here. In this hospital, it was harder to find a bottle of water than a tab of Xanax.
Now she realized she wasn’t going to manage without one. She went to the consulting room, dug a blister pack of pills out of a drawer, swallowed a 0.25mg tablet, opened Minesweeper on her computer, and waited for the benzodiazepine to join up with her GABAA receptor, thanks to which her palms would stop sweating.
She flicked on the radio, heard Steven Tyler howling “Janie’s Got a Gun,” and instantly switched it off again. Why is it that whenever a rock musician takes up the topic of domestic violence, someone immediately grabs a six-shooter and hands out rough justice? Apparently that’s the only course of events that suits a strident guitar solo.
What a good thing that as chief resident in charge of the department, nobody could hustle her. She opened the browser and found “Baby Can I Hold You” on YouTube. For a moment she hesitated, but finally she pressed Play. Bad move—tears sprang to her eyes. She’d been through it so many times before, her therapist must have been truly sick of the subject. If anything ever went wrong, she always picked at that scab, put salt in the wound, and poked it with a needle. But there was no helping it. For the rest of her life she’d be wondering, along with Tracy Chapman, if things would have been different if she’d found the right words to say. If she’d found a way to get through to him.
The song ended. Angela wiped her eyes, listened to a few more of Tracy’s songs, and suddenly felt as if there were more room for air in her lungs. She took several deep breaths, and felt a wave of calm flow over her.
She picked up a file from the desk, hung a magnetic key card around her neck, and decided to start with the new patient, to get it over with as soon as possible. She knocked at the nurses’ door.
“Marek,” she said, “just in case, OK?”
Without a word, Marek put aside his breakfast and followed Angela. He was the antithesis of the typical image of a psychiatric nurse—not a tall, burly guy with a dumb grin whose mom makes him corned beef sandwiches to take to work, and who’s only just on this side of the divide between patients and staff. Marek was intelligent and full of empathy, his personal life was in order, and he was fit. As an Israeli martial arts instructor, he didn’t need the advantage of size to cope with the violent patients. Angela figured he’d make an excellent therapist or maybe even a doctor. But he came from such meager beginnings deep in the Warmian countryside that, despite major effort, he had only managed to clamber up to the post of staff nurse. Marek’s career was conclusive proof for Angela that not everyone can forge their own destiny. And even if you can, a lot depends on whether you’ve got a good set of tools from the start or have to steal your first hammer.
They walked in silence down a long corridor; the isolation room was at the far end of the ward. Psychiatric observation of criminals was usually done in special wards at the custody jails. This was an exceptional situation, as the young prosecutor who looked like Peter Sellers had explained to her. It wasn’t about the suspect’s sanity. The point was to confirm whether or not the suspect had any idea of his own identity, his situation, and the charges against him.
“He seems to be functioning,” said the prosecutor. “He drinks and goes to the toilet. He brushes his teeth and gets undressed at bedtime. But everything else is switched off.”
That was the first time she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She asked for more details.
“He doesn’t communicate at all. And when I say ‘at all,’ I mean it quite literally. It’s as if he were in a space of his own. He hasn’t said a word s
ince he was detained. Not a peep.”
Angela put a lot of effort into not letting it show how much this conversation cost her. She asked if they thought the man was faking.
“I hope so. Only then will we be able to isolate him from society.”
She asked what he’d done.
“Wife-beater. He’d been harassing her, and when she made up her mind to leave, he almost killed her. He left her unconscious on the kitchen floor, alone with a three-year-old child. No one knows if she’ll survive.”
Angela felt weak at the knees. To keep up the appearance of a professional conversation, she said it was unheard of—perpetrators of domestic violence are usually proud of what they’ve done. She’d never heard of one having pangs of conscience, not to mention going mute.
The prosecutor had agreed. Despite his youth, he seemed well qualified.
She stopped at the door separating the last stretch of corridor from the rest of the ward.
“Doctor,” said Marek, “would it be OK for me to bring in my daughter during your shift tomorrow evening?”
“Tonsils again?” she asked.
“It looks like it, but we want to see if her ears are all right. So we won’t have the same problem as in the spring.”
“Of course.” She smiled. She didn’t mind that plenty of people on the ward, including some of the patients’ families, “exploited” her other specialty as a laryngologist. When she had her breakdown and dropped psychiatry, she’d taken a feel-good job at a family clinic, where she’d gained a fine reputation as an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Then she’d gone back to psychiatry because it really was her passion and vocation, but she still gave laryngological advice now and then, and enjoyed it too. Everyday infections that could be cured with a single antibiotic made a nice change from her usual occupation.
She pressed the key card against the reader.
5
Edmund Falk had not withdrawn his application for Szacki to be reprimanded. Moreover, rather than trying to make him change his mind, Szacki was backing him up. It was driving their boss crazy—she took it as a personal affront, and that day she had already had two pally conversations with “Edmund darling” and “dear Misterteo.” Smiling warmly, appealing to professional solidarity, friendship, camaraderie, and empathy, she urged them to sort it out between them. Her speech was peppered with proverbs, Buddhist digressions about karma, and a Christian plea for mercy.
It all bounced off them. Falk believed he was doing the right thing, and Szacki thought so too. Paradoxically, though nobody else could understand it, their agreement on a matter that ought to be making them argue was causing a thread of sympathy to form between the two men.
“I must admit I find your decision a little disappointing,” said Falk, stirring a cup of instant coffee.
They were sitting in Szacki’s office, waiting for Chief Commissioner Jarosław Klejnocki to appear. The police psychologist who created psychological profiles of criminals had already arrived from Kraków, but apparently he absolutely had to go see Copernicus’s medical incunabula at the castle museum first. Szacki didn’t protest, he had come across innumerable eccentrics in his career, and in fact Klejnocki was a fairly ordinary example, compared with Dr. Frankenstein, for instance, or the junior prosecutor sitting in front of him.
“I’m sorry I’ve failed to live up to your high standards yet again. Anyway, I thought you’d be delighted. After all, it’s your FBI gurus who came up with the whole idea of profiling and behavioral analysis.”
Falk sipped his coffee and scowled—it was hard to tell whether it was because of the coffee or Szacki’s words.
“Profiling seemed to me suspect from the start,” said Falk. “Too good to be true. A guy reads the files, analyzes them, and then says, ‘You’ll find him in a bar, he’ll be eating a hamburger with extra cheese, and reading the sports page, and he’ll have a gift for his mother in his briefcase.’ If something’s so contrived that it sounds like it’s out of a crime novel, it has to be suspicious. But I decided that rather than let myself be led by my emotions, I’d look into the matter.”
“And?”
“I found out they’d done a series of tests designed to confirm the effectiveness of profiling. They gave the files from cases that had already been solved to some profilers, and at the same time they also gave them to students from various disciplines, regular police detectives, and psychologists. Each of them was asked to create a profile of the criminal on the basis of the files, which were then compared with the real culprit, who was well known to them, because as I’ve said, all the cases they used as examples had been solved long ago and the criminals convicted. So what was the result? None of the profiles produced by the professionals were any more accurate than the ones the others came up with, including the amateur criminologists. While significantly, the chemistry and biology students did extremely well.”
“Significantly, but not surprisingly,” said Szacki. “In the world of science there’s a place for logic, common sense, drawing conclusions on the basis of hard evidence, and verifying those conclusions.”
“Whereas profiling is a fraud. That’s the conclusion I reached, and then I was sure I don’t believe in it. It was the logical choice.”
Falk stopped talking, and for a while they sat in silence.
“I refuse to believe that you believe in it.”
“Of course I don’t,” said Szacki. “I regard psychology as a pseudo science, and psychological profiling of criminals is just a nice name for what a clairvoyant does. If someone repeats ten times that he can see a body in the woods, he must be right three times out of ten—after all, one-third of this country is forest, and it’s easier to bury a corpse there than along the highway.”
“In that case, why are we meeting with the profiler?”
“He’s a smart guy. Weird, but really smart. And he’s read more files than you’ll ever set your eyes on. He talks about irrelevant bullshit, as they all do, but sometimes he says a thing or two that make sense.”
“A thing or two?” Falk was unable to hide his contempt.
Szacki didn’t comment. Falk was right, in his way, but there were some things he’d only understand after fifteen years on the job. For example, that an investigation is like a jigsaw puzzle, a really tricky one, a seascape of ocean waves at night, with ten thousand pieces. At some point you have all those pieces lying on the table, but they’re damned hard to connect. And that’s when you need someone who can take a look at them and say, “Hey, that’s not the moon, just its reflection in the waves.”
6
Thanks to the Xanax, she could actually enter the isolation room instead of quivering in fear outside it. But it couldn’t switch off her emotions. The sorrow caused by her memories of the past competed with the physical repulsion she felt at the sight of the pale man sitting on the bed. She knew this sense of disgust was highly unprofessional, but she couldn’t help it.
The man was making no effort to communicate. She soon realized it wasn’t for lack of ability, but lack of desire. It wasn’t that his brain had decided to log out of the world of its own accord, as in the case of most patients on this ward. It looked like a fully conscious decision. Observation would confirm that, and then it would be up to the prosecutors to decide what to do with him. She wasn’t going to do the observation herself, but she would personally ensure that no court was in any doubt about the suspect’s sanity.
She wondered what the cause of his lack of communication might be. In her view his cast-iron consistency indicated that there must be more to it than just ordinary fakery, a calculated tactic to avoid punishment. Pangs of conscience? It would be the first time she’d ever heard of some punch-drunk wife-beater acquiring a conscience. You could write an entire doctorate on that. Shock? More likely. Trauma? But what kind? Like all wife-beaters, he must have been a victim of violence during his childhood. Maybe the suppressed memory of some monstrous experience had surfaced.
Maybe they’d manage t
o find out, if they could get through to him.
As that last thought occurred, she was flooded by a wave of grief. She gathered all her willpower and thirty years’ professional experience to stop herself from bursting into tears in front of the patient. She’d sat on a stool in just the same way then, she’d thought things through in just the same way, and tried to find a way to open up the patient.
She got a grip on herself.
“Please remember that we don’t work for the police or the prosecution service,” she said. “We’re doctors, and regardless of why you’ve ended up in here, we want to help you. You’re surrounded by people who care. We’re going to come and ask questions, and we’re not going to stop trying to communicate. But if you were to decide for yourself that you want to talk, we’re here for you at any time of day or night. We’re here to listen, with kindness and understanding, and we’re here to help, in whatever way you wish. Whatever brings you relief and makes you feel better. We’re your friends. Do you understand that?”
She was counting on the trick working. Combined with a positive message, her gentle, velvety voice of an experienced therapist would make him forget himself and nod his head. It would be a nice step toward total sanity, and a long stretch in a penal facility.
But he didn’t move a muscle. She noticed that he was morbidly pale, as if he were suffering from anemia or had lost a lot of blood. She made a note to do a blood test.
She glanced toward the corridor. Marek was leaning against the wall, watching what was happening inside. Vigilantly, but patiently. She understood that he probably had something more urgent to do than just stare at a conversation with a man who didn’t respond. She nodded to indicate that she’d be done in a moment.
“I’ll be off now. I’ll come back after my evening rounds, all right? Maybe you’ll feel like a chat then. And not just food.” She forced herself to smile and pointed at his breakfast tray. He’d drunk the hot chocolate, but the cheese sandwich was still there, untouched. “Please eat something, all right? You’re a big guy, you won’t get far on nothing but hot chocolate.”
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