Rage

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  Kiwit said yes, he had.

  “Well, I’m one of them.”

  Kiwit shrugged. He looked around the living room to see if his wife was within hearing range, leaned over the table, and nodded for Szacki to lean toward him. The prosecutor moved forward, until there were only a few inches between their faces. It was the regular face of a fifty-year-old Pole who couldn’t deal with his own weight gain—pale, rather puffy, pockmarked, and shiny. Freshly shaved too. In a few spots under the nose and on the chin where the stubble is hardest, Szacki could see the dark red traces of microscopic razor cuts. He looked into Kiwit’s colorless eyes and waited.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” he said, shrouding Szacki in the smell of digested meat and minty toothpaste. “I don’t give a fuck, because there’s fuck-all you can do to me. I’d sooner take you by the hand, go into the bathroom, and slash my own wrists than tell you a single word. Is that clear?”

  Szacki was opening his mouth to respond when Kiwit’s wife interrupted him.

  “Stop tormenting my husband! He’s been through enough already. Do you want to cause him a heart attack?”

  “I’ll be happy to stop,” said Szacki, straightening up in his chair. “I’ll be happy to stop when he finally stops lying and tells the truth. I promise that as soon as he does, I’ll be out of here and you’ll never see me again.”

  Kiwit’s wife, a thin fifty-year-old with the look and hairstyle of Danuta Wałęsa, glanced at her husband. She probably wasn’t expecting him to tell the truth but to get rid of this pest instead.

  “I will be lodging an official complaint,” said Kiwit.

  “Please listen,” said Szacki, addressing both of them. “I’m sure you know this, but for you, ma’am, this information will be new. Your husband was attacked and mutilated because he heard something. The findings of this investigation imply that he must have been a witness to domestic violence. He failed to react, someone was hurt, and as a result a madman decided to punish him. Not just any old madman.” He raised a finger. “A genuine first-class madman, capable of the most monstrous crimes. Who is running around our streets because your husband is a fucking coward. Who not only failed to report that someone was being harmed, but is now obstructing the investigation and will go to jail for it. You’d better check which buses run to the penitentiary in Barczewo. The car will go toward fines and lawyers.”

  He got up and buttoned his jacket. He didn’t let it show how disappointed he was. This couldn’t be a blind alley, it just wasn’t possible.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a movement, a shadow. He looked around, and there in the reflection of the dresser, he saw a skinny teenager standing in the kitchen door, the sort of boy the teachers discuss in the staff room as bright enough but far too sensitive to have an easy life ahead of him. Taller than Szacki, thin, with very fair hair. He had a gentle look in his eyes, and Szacki wouldn’t have minded in the least if Hela had a boyfriend like him.

  He felt every muscle in his body tense the moment his mind produced an image of what might be happening to Hela. Doped senseless, lying on a stinking mattress, as the gangsters line up to fuck the new girl—he didn’t have the luxury of ignorance, he’d conducted several cases involving the white slave trade.

  He couldn’t leave here empty-handed. He would go to whatever lengths were necessary.

  “Would you please leave us a little longer? Just a minute, I promise. Then I’ll go.”

  Kiwit’s wife glared, but she left the room, and the son trotted after her. The door slammed.

  “In a way I understand you,” he said mildly. “They’ve proved what dreadful things they’re capable of doing. And I’m just an official, armed with rubber stamps and legal clauses. I can cause you trouble, but let’s face it, you’ll only have to lodge a couple of appeals and you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

  Kiwit fixed him with a confused and attentive look; he clearly had no idea where Szacki was going.

  “But apart from being an official, I’m also a very bad man. A bad man who won’t stop at anything, because he has a personal motive. If you don’t help me, I’ll take my revenge. I won’t do anything to you, or your wife either, because I’m sure you don’t give a shit about her—a wife isn’t family, is she? But I’m not going to leave your sons alone.”

  “You can’t do anything to them.”

  “I can’t. But others can.”

  “You’ll hire some kind of thugs to beat them up? You’re ridiculous.”

  “I could. But I have better methods.”

  He leaned toward Kiwit and described in detail the dreadful fate that could befall his sons.

  Kiwit stared at him in horror.

  “You’re a real shit,” he said. “But all right, so be it. I have a plant that makes tarpaulin and advertising banners, too, as I’m sure you know. In the Barczewo suburbs. On one side of it there’s a copse with little pine trees, and on the other there’s a house on a large lot. A regular single-family house with little columns at the front. A normal family.”

  It’s always the same, thought Szacki, feeling weary. They all think of themselves as unique, the only ones of their kind, but when it comes to seeing the individual qualities in others, it’s always seemingly “a normal family.”

  “And?” Szacki glanced at his watch. Unfortunately time hadn’t stopped; on the contrary, the hands seemed to be moving at high speed.

  “Six months ago there was an accident, in the spring. He went to work, and she was left with the child, a toddler. The boiler went kaput, carbon monoxide. A tragedy, they’re still writing about it in the papers, saying it’s a silent killer. Afterward, the local gossips said it wasn’t an accident and that things hadn’t been going too well there.”

  “She sought your help, didn’t she?”

  Kiwit fell silent and stared out of the window, as if the answers were hidden in the gray fog.

  “I was with my older boy.” He nodded toward the hall, indicating that he meant the teenager Szacki had seen a little earlier. “He got upset, I told him not to interfere. It was a family matter, why go to the police or the prosecutors, nothing but trouble later on. My son wouldn’t listen. He went over to their place to talk to the guy. But he just laughed at him, and then there was that accident with the boiler, such a strange coincidence.” Kiwit cleared his throat. “Ordinary people, nothing unusual about them. A slide for the kid in the yard, a trampoline, a kiddie pool, just a small one. Normal house. I talked to the man a few times over the fence, the usual stuff, about cars, or mowing the grass, I don’t remember. Totally normal guy. You get the picture?”

  Szacki didn’t want to say yes. He was still waiting for a piece of information that would help him—he didn’t give a damn about anyone else’s tragedy.

  “Who would normally believe that in a situation like that the lady wouldn’t simply take the kids and be out the door? I’m sorry, but it’s always the same with that sort of story—as I’m sure you’ll agree, she only had herself to blame. It’s not as if he had her locked up in the utility room. It’s true, I sometimes heard shouting, when I was up at night to get the bookkeeping done. But you tell me, who doesn’t fight? What husband and wife don’t fight?”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “They say he’s gonna appear in court in Suwałki—he lives there at his mother’s place now,” said Kiwit. “His mother cares for him since his accident—a drunk driver ran him down and he’s in a wheelchair. He’ll be pissing into a bag for the rest of his life.”

  He said it quite casually, Oh dear, accidents happen, too bad, but Szacki realized there was no point in asking if the driver had been caught.

  “Mr. Prosecutor,” Kiwit continued, suddenly fifteen years older. “I have no idea who it was or where they kept me. Not for long, less than a day. I didn’t talk to anyone—nobody said a word to me.”

  “Where?”

  “A house in the woods—there are millions of them in Poland. Not new, not old, just a
house. I couldn’t say if it was near here or sixty miles north or south of here. I’m sorry.”

  “Any identifying features?”

  “A TV on the wall,” he said so quietly that Szacki wasn’t sure he’d heard.

  “What on the wall?”

  “A TV. And an operating theater.”

  Automatically, Kiwit touched his right ear.

  6

  She was lying on her back, with her hands behind her head, when suddenly it occurred to her that they might be watching her through cameras, so she switched to the position of a kidnap victim. Legs drawn up to her chin, embracing her knees, head dropped. She didn’t want some maniac to see her lying on the bed and get stupid thoughts in his head. What she feared most of all was rape.

  She was so scared of being raped that she couldn’t even think about it—all such thoughts simply fell apart without leading to any mental images or sounds. Instead they just flew around her brain, crashing against her skull; whenever one of them did manage to latch on to her neurons she felt paralyzed, incapable of any action or other thought.

  She’d read the papers and watched television. She knew that rape could mean being treated as a piece of meat by a large number of people for a long time. People who would do her harm, and she’d never be the same again. She was amazed to find herself thinking it easier to imagine death. Death was like a passage into the unknown—it undoubtedly meant the end, but it could also be a surprise. Where rape was concerned, there was no surprise. She would simply have to carry on living, maybe not for long, maybe for ages and ages, and she’d go through the rest of her life as a woman who had started her adulthood as a piece of meat.

  She decided that if anything like that happened, she’d try to hold out for a while, and then provoke them into killing her.

  7

  He wasn’t really wrong. He was sure Teresa Najman would be waiting for him in the hall, but she was nervously pacing the sidewalk. He scrambled out of the patrol car, and there she was, right next to him. She waited for him to shut the door and then let loose: “You’re gonna regret this.”

  There was a cold wind blowing, but it was different from before, dry and frosty, the sort of wind that heralds the start of winter. He buttoned his coat, cast a glance at Teresa Najman and then at the gray building behind her; rather neglected, it looked just right for a social assistance center or an addiction therapy unit. And in fact it housed both, along with several other facilities whose clientele were neither healthy, wealthy, nor happy.

  He understood Mrs. Najman’s anger. He had left her no choice when he’d sent Bierut to tell her that either she would have to agree as a matter of urgency to let them question her five-year-old, or Szacki would no longer take her statement at face value. He would demand preventive measures, report the case to the family court, and then she’d have to persuade the probation officers whether, as someone under police supervision, she was fit to guarantee the child suitable living conditions. He wrote it all down for Bierut to read out to her—he was afraid the policeman would be too soft to blackmail the mother effectively by using the state to take away her child.

  So he understood the woman, but he didn’t give a damn about her. He had to act differently from usual—it was his only chance. And as he had failed to extract anything from Mrs. Najman, he’d get it out of her child. Preschoolers were usually much worse at hiding the truth than their moms.

  “You’ve had your chance. You should have told the truth,” he said.

  For a moment he looked at her in the hope that she would change her mind and tell him everything. He could tell she was thinking about it. She must have been wondering whether the child knew anything that could incriminate her. Finally she stepped aside and let Szacki enter the building.

  He walked down a dark corridor, decorated with depressing posters warning against addiction, above all to alcohol (“Moonshine causes blindness”), because the building also housed the therapy unit. It occurred to him that this was not how the route to a friendly interview room should look. Unless it was a deliberate ploy. Once the kid has seen the victims of home-brewed hooch, the interview would be like his favorite activity at preschool.

  At the end of the corridor another woman was waiting for him, no less angry.

  “If it weren’t for Żenia . . .” She wagged an accusing finger at him. “If I hadn’t spent several years at the same school with her, grinding away at anatomy . . .”

  “How lovely to see you, too, my dear Adela,” he said, feigning sincerity. It never worked.

  “Do me a favor—don’t even bother. I’m supposed to have two weeks to prepare for this kind of interview, not two hours. If it weren’t for Żenia, I’d laugh you out of here, or report you for suggesting it at all.”

  But she had clearly agreed because she had heard something in her old friend’s voice that worried her.

  “You have no idea . . .” he began to thank her, but she cut him off.

  “Give it a break. Let’s get it over with. Do you have any questions beyond what your miserable flunky passed on to me?”

  He did.

  The friendly interview room consisted of two spaces. The first, where the actual interviewing was done, was furnished like a child’s playroom. Pastel colors, child-sized furniture, soft animals, toys, and crayons. The cameras and microphones recording the interviews were hidden. There was no bed and no closet, but there was an extra, unusual item—a huge mirror that took up half the wall.

  Behind the mirror was a technical room, where the recording of the interview was monitored, and the psychologist’s conversation with the child was observed by those involved in the proceedings. In this case, Deputy Commissioner Jan Paweł Bierut, Teresa Najman, Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, and Judge Justyna Grabowska. The judge had to be present because according to the latest rules, a child could only be interviewed once, and the point was for the interview to have the force of trial evidence.

  Szacki paid scant attention to Adela’s casual chat with little Piotruś Najman (currently on the topic of cartoons). With one ear he listened to some crap about a patchwork elephant, without taking his eyes off the monitor, which showed a sequence of views from various cameras: a general view, the two in profile, a close-up on Adela, and a close-up on Piotruś. Above the monitor, a digital clock measured out the time to one-hundredth of a second, the two final figures flashing by so fast that they merged into a steady shimmer, reminding Szacki that every flicker brought Hela’s death closer.

  11:23:42—shimmer.

  Meanwhile, the patchwork elephant was visiting his auntie; it must have been a funny story, because the speakers above their heads were ringing with laughter, both Adela’s and the child’s. He wanted to go in there and calm them down. Of course, he knew the theory for interviewing children. You had to introduce narrative techniques, relax the child as much as possible and clarify the situation, explaining that it’s OK if he doesn’t know the answers to the questions, casting yourself in the role of an adult who needs the kid’s help to understand things. He knew the theory, but even so the lengthy procedure was driving him up the wall.

  “But I don’t know what your house looks like,” said Adela, spreading her hands comically, and the little boy laughed. “Will you tell me what the place where you play is like?”

  “I play in my room. I’ve got toys there and books and puzzles. And a rug that’s like the road so you can race cars on it. And I’ve got a lamp with bubbles swimming in it.”

  “Colored ones?”

  “Yes, they’re like sapphire.”

  “Bravo! What difficult words you know. Any other colors?”

  “Crimson.”

  Adela all but sighed in admiration, and the boy blushed with pride. Meanwhile, Szacki noticed that the little heir to the tourist business was more like his father than his mother, physically, as far as he could tell from Najman’s photographs. Wide face, dark eyes, dark hair, well-defined eyebrows. He couldn’t see any similarity to the mother. Maybe just the shape
of the lips. If she’d said she’d adopted him, nobody would have doubted it.

  “And do you like playing with toys at home more, or at preschool?”

  “At preschool.”

  “And why is that?”

  All the questions had to be open; you couldn’t ask questions to which the child could answer yes or no. There was no guarantee that the little witness had understood the question, and anyway, in stressful situations, kids have a tendency to say yes to adults when they don’t understand what they’re being asked. Or to say no if they’re asked about unpleasant things.

  “At preschool we can bring our own toys, but only on Monday. And then me and Igor fight ’cos we want to play with each other’s toys, and when we shout we get a rain cloud.”

  Like most small children, Piotruś Najman couldn’t keep a narrative going for more than a few sentences.

  “I see, you get a rain cloud as a punishment. And what do you get as a reward?”

  “A smiley sun.”

  “And are there punishments and rewards at home?”

  “I don’t like it when Mommy shouts at me. Then I give her a rain cloud.”

  At the back of the small dark room Mrs. Najman cleared her throat.

  “And your daddy?”

  “My daddy’s gone away, and we don’t know when he’s coming home.”

  Mrs. Najman coughed again, but this time she said, “I haven’t told him his father’s dead yet. I’m preparing him for it gradually. We have no idea when the funeral’s going to happen or when you’re going to give my husband’s body back. It’s a scandal. I will be making a complaint.”

  Nobody commented.

  “And tell me, do you often give your mom and dad rain clouds and smiley suns?”