A broad stream of small white granules began to flow into the pipe. They looked like polystyrene beads. Hela arched her eyebrows in amazement. Strange, very strange.
The granules were soon up to the man’s knees.
“You’re going to bury me in Styrofoam? For real?”
He sniffed, as if smelling a nasty odor. He stared at the little grains burying his body at a rapid pace. His eyes said something was wrong. He frowned, and twitched like someone bitten by a mosquito, or who’s got an itch in a place where it’s impossible to scratch.
He glanced at the camera, and for the first time the aggression on his face was replaced, first by anxiety, then fear.
The white granules were up to his waist.
“Hey, but we loved each other, didn’t we?” he said gently. “We still can. Seriously, the world is made for love. We’ve only got one life, why waste it on hatred?”
“You haven’t got one anymore,” replied a female voice softly. So softly that Hela could hardly hear it; perhaps the microphone was picking up the sound badly. The gush of plastic beads was also drowning out almost everything except for the man’s deep voice.
“What do you mean?” he asked, scowling and twitching violently.
“You haven’t got a life,” said the voice. Softly, calmly, without hatred, and without sorrow. Hela shuddered. The voice seemed familiar.
The granules had buried the man up to his neck.
“OK, I get it,” he said with difficulty. “It hurts, it stings, I’ve had my lesson in suffering. What’s the point?”
His face had gone red, and drops of sweat were gathering on his nose, dripping onto the granules. Hela noticed that they were behaving as if they’d been dropped into a hot frying pan, and from the spot where the sweat fell, faint smoke was rising.
Hela froze. She realized that whatever fate had been prepared for the man in the pipe, it must be terrible. In theory she knew that it wasn’t going to leap out of the television, but terror was getting the better of her. The man let out his first scream—not of fury but pain, the scream of a wounded animal. Hela covered her ears to block out the sound, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen.
Then something unexpected happened. The prisoner started to thrash about in all directions, shaking his head desperately—it looked as if, contrary to logic, he was trying to crawl out of the pipe. In the course of all the struggling, panting, and screaming, he made a big mistake: he immersed his face in the mysterious granules. He must have breathed some of them in, because suddenly he started to choke, spit, and yell at the top of his lungs. In paroxysms of pain he threw his head back, banging it against the metal pipe, and Hela saw that the inside of his mouth was a bleeding cavity—the white granules were smoking and foaming in there. Clearly some chemical reaction made them change into a corrosive substance.
Suddenly the screaming stopped. She thought the sound had been switched off, but it hadn’t. She heard the hiss of the chemical reaction, the rustle of the granules as the man wriggled about in them, and the dull thuds as he banged his head against the pipe. As she stared at his gaping mouth, she realized that he was still screaming. Except that the acid, or whatever it was, must have eaten through his vocal cords.
His scream had become silent.
It was the most horrifying thing she had ever seen. Worse than his bleeding mouth. Worse than the collar of blood that had appeared around his neck, at the top of the white granules, where they were slowly dissolving his flesh. Worse than the eye into which a granule must have fallen, and which was now going cloudy, bleeding and starting to cave in, as if sinking inside his skull.
The image changed, and she saw the pipe and the room from another angle. On the platform of the ladder stood the woman. She was bending low, almost with her head in the pipe, as if she didn’t want to miss a single second of his suffering.
Long black hair shielded her face from view.
9
The clock in the patrol car showed almost one p.m. as the driver parked outside the bakery on Mickiewicz Street.
“Is it here?” Szacki asked Bierut.
“Opposite,” he said, pointing at a tenement house on the corner across the street.
The building must have once been the pride of Olsztyn. Half a century of Polish administration had reduced this beautiful Secession-style mansion to a council slum. The plaster was flaking off the building, and for some strange reason the drainpipes ran crosswise, disfiguring the front. Three recessed balconies on the left-hand side were each painted a different garish color. The three on the right were each enclosed in a different way. The picture of misery and despair, an advertisement for Polish aesthetics.
“I used to go to the children’s library here,” said Bierut as they were crossing the street.
“Where?”
“In here—it’s the local member of parliament’s office now.” He pointed to a sign hanging on the building.
“O tempora, o mores,” said Szacki, at which Bierut nodded with his characteristic sorrow.
“It’s a fine house, isn’t it?” The policeman sighed as he stopped at the door and gazed up at the grand, ornate facade.
“It used to be,” muttered Szacki, and pushed open the front door—the old, original one, decorated with soft Secession details, obvious despite the peeling layers of paint. He stepped inside, into damp, cellar-like mustiness, the unmistakable smell of rotting wood. He flicked on the light and couldn’t restrain a heavy sigh.
There was an old joke in which the devil catches a Pole, a Russki, and a German. He gives each of them two metal balls and a week to learn to do tricks with them. Whoever does the best tricks will be let go. After a week the German’s balancing both balls on his nose, and the Russki’s juggling, but the Pole has ruined one ball and lost the other.
The same thing had happened to this building. The Pole had ruined the facade and lost the inside. To call the stairwell “neglected” would fail to reflect the scale of devastation, all the more acute because, from under the effects of Polish housekeeping, from under the grime, filth, chipped plaster, and layer upon layer of paint in the most hideous browns and yellows, its former beauty still came through: the joinery of the banister and doors, the decorative ceiling, the plaster moldings, and ornate windowpanes with soft art deco lines. Halfway down the hallway, above a lightly vaulted doorway, the wall was decorated with a subtle, shallow relief, depicting the face of a boy in a frame of botanical elements. Szacki shuddered; not only did the pale stucco face look ghostly in this interior, but the subtly smiling boy looked frighteningly like Piotruś Najman. The same chubby, square face, the same thick, slightly wavy hair.
“Which floor?” he asked hoarsely, to get away from his own thoughts.
“Fourth, I’m afraid,” said Bierut.
A few dozen creaking wooden steps later, the two men were standing at a brown wooden door, in the hope that someone would open it. Szacki was wondering what the locks were like in the home of a man with no hands. Was there some sort of special equipment for sliding bolts with your mouth?
“Who’s there?” asked a woman’s voice.
“Police,” answered Bierut in a sepulchral tone, holding his badge up to the peephole. “It’s nothing serious, we just want to ask you some questions.”
Szacki knew they said that even when they were going to throw tear gas inside, and several commandos from a special unit were close behind.
A bolt rattled. The door opened, and there stood a woman of about fifty, who waved them in. Neat, thin, and subdued, she had graying shoulder-length hair, a gray turtleneck, and black pants. She looked like a college professor. And more like one from the Sorbonne than the University of Warmia and Masuria (or “wormier and misery” as it was meanly called).
Szacki hesitated because everything seemed wrong. He’d been expecting a guy with no hands, hanging out in a filthy dive in a dirty undershirt. But here was a classy-looking woman with a complete set of limbs, an educated homeowner. From th
e hallway he could already see that if anything was missing in this home, it was room for all the books.
“Prosecutor Teodor Szacki,” he introduced himself. “This is Deputy Commissioner Jan Paweł Bierut. We’re looking for Artur Ganderski.”
“In other words, my former husband,” said the woman.
“Do you know where he’s residing at present?”
“Of course. Nine B Poprzeczna Street, apartment twenty-one.”
“Thank you.” Szacki bowed and turned to run down the stairs, when Bierut grabbed him by the arm.
“That’s the address of the local cemetery,” he said.
The woman smiled and curtsied girlishly.
“I hope you can forgive me. My husband’s not here, and, luckily, he won’t be back. But if I can help you in any way, please come in and have a cup of tea. Especially if you’re looking for him in connection with an unexpected inheritance or something of the kind. I’d be more than happy to oblige.”
They disabused her of this mistake and accepted her invitation.
10
The tea was delicious, prepared in the oriental style, brewed with sugar and fresh mint in a brass pot. Probably the best tea Szacki had ever drunk. First, Jadwiga Korfel told them the story of how her husband had lost his hands eighteen months ago in a hunting accident, and had been so distressed by the fact that he would never again wipe his own ass or pull a trigger without help that he had decided to end his own life. For obvious reasons he hadn’t been able to shoot himself, so he’d drowned in the river while drunk.
Szacki had little time and asked her point-blank whether she had been the victim of domestic violence. Without hesitation she answered yes; the hands that were lost out hunting had beaten her up so many times that after fifteen years of marriage, she’d lost count. Asked for the details, she told a classic textbook story. The cycle was always the same. First, the tension rose. From day to day there’d be rising fear in her, and rising aggression, malice, and irritation in him. Finally the first fuse would blow, and she would be subjected to verbal aggression, insults, and threats. Then the second fuse would blow, and she’d get a beating. A first-rate thrashing, she said in admiration, claiming that even if her late husband wasn’t the national champion, he was certainly the provincial number one in this particular discipline. Sometimes he got drunk, sometimes he abused her when he was hammered. But whenever he avoided alcohol, even liqueur chocolates, for a few days, she knew the day was approaching. He always beat her when he was sober and well rested, as if he were taking part in a competition to cause her as much pain as he could while leaving as few marks as possible. Then he would vanish for two days and come back with a bunch of flowers, gold jewelry, tickets for a trip abroad, and promises never to do it again. She would believe him, accept the flowers, go on the trip, and enjoy her new happiness, until one day she’d come home and sense that the atmosphere was more strained than usual.
“How did he lose his hands hunting?” asked Szacki.
“An accident. He tripped and fell in such an unfortunate way that he hit his hands against a trap set by poachers. It was summer, he was only wearing a light shirt. He was thin, skinny in fact. Trip, trap, snap! No more hands.”
Bierut and Szacki exchanged looks.
“And how come they couldn’t sew his hands back on?” asked Szacki, out of curiosity.
“Animals took them. The Warmian forest can be a wild place, you know.”
She sipped her tea.
Szacki looked around the room. Books everywhere. Plenty of fiction, but above all, academic books. History, archaeology, art. Most of them in German, the rest in Polish and English. On the only wall without any bookshelves, there was an old political map of the Middle East.
“Are you an archaeologist?” he asked.
“When I was young and beautiful. I studied under Professor Michałowski, and I used to go to the digs with him. Now I teach history and art history.”
“Where?”
“Mainly at the university, but I moonlight at high schools, too.”
Szacki felt hungry. He scarfed down a few of the chocolate chip cookies lying on a small plate.
“We’re conducting an investigation under great time pressure, and so I’m going to be frank with you. We all know the hunting story is garbage. And we’re all aware that your husband was punished for wife-beating. But only we know that the perpetrator’s insanity has gotten out of control. First, from a phase of mutilation, he smoothly shifted into a phase of killings, and then from the stage of murdering wife-beaters to a higher level, murdering anyone who falls into his hands. We’ve got to find him.”
Jadwiga Korfel sipped her tea, ate a cookie, and ran her eyes around the room, as if for the first time.
“I understand. And please believe me, I’d be more than willing to help. But I have no idea who my benefactor is. And I’ll tell you right away that you don’t have to play good cop, bad cop with me. Regardless of the fact that I’m pleased about what happened to my husband, I’m a normal person and a normal citizen. I know it’s wrong to take the law into your own hands—it’s the road to perdition. I’d tell you everything—eventually I’d say a few warm words about the perpetrator in court to reduce his sentence a little, but that’s as far as I’d go. Am I making myself clear?”
Szacki said yes.
“Did you tell anyone about your troubles before the accident? Did anyone question you? Or come to see you?”
She thought for a while. Finally she said no.
“Please think very carefully. Did you go to the doctor at the time? A male or female doctor who might have guessed you were the victim of abuse? Maybe somebody gave you first aid. Especially at the city hospital?”
This time she was even quicker to deny it.
“Artur was a pro. It hurt like hell, but never enough for the wounds to need dressing or to have any bones set. I rarely had any bruises. He’d beat me on the heels, for instance. I’d cry with pain as I walked for a week, but it wouldn’t even go red. A punch in the stomach—no marks. A piece of elastic behind the knees, ditto. But it hurt as badly as if I’d torn a ligament skiing. You wouldn’t believe what miracles can be performed by hitting someone on the head through a pillow, or by whacking them anywhere through a pillow. Sometimes he knocked me around so badly that I had to take time off because I couldn’t tell which way was up. But I looked like I’d been to the beauty parlor. Glowing with health. Pardon my French, but he really did fuck me up, there’s no other way of saying it.”
She must have noticed their astonished looks, because she added, “Please don’t think I’m crazy. My therapist has taught me to unburden myself. Talking about it has become pretty natural for me. So natural that suddenly I lost all my friends.”
“A good doctor must have noticed something,” said Szacki, who chose not to respond to her last comment. “Please think. Maybe a regular checkup, or a routine consultation.”
She sighed.
“I’ll get my journal from last year and check.”
She got up and went over to a writing desk, a very fine piece of furniture, ideally suited to this bourgeois interior. She was refined, tranquil, self-confident, not hiding her age, attractive in her own way. If there was anything Szacki couldn’t imagine, it was her lying on the couch, covering her head with a pillow, and letting some troglodyte hit her with a stool.
“Three months,” she said, clearing her throat, “before the hunting accident I went to the dentist. And I’ll preempt your question now—I go to the dentist in another town, because a very old friend sees me there, and it was during one of our honeymoon periods. I wanted to have a nagging cavity filled before a long weekend in Prague.”
The clock in the hall struck two. Szacki closed his eyes and slowly turned his head in an attempt to relieve the stiffness in his neck, which was tense to a point of pain. It crossed his mind that fate had it in for him. Every time he thought he was getting somewhere, just as he was gathering speed to move into the final stret
ch, he’d turn the corner. But instead of a nice smooth run ahead of him, he’d smash into a concrete wall.
“Do you know a woman with long black hair and strikingly blue eyes?” he asked.
“Prosecutor, I work at a college. Half of my students look like that. They’re the ones who used to be blonde but dyed their hair. The other half are the ones God punished with dark hair, and as a result they’ve dyed it blonde. And these days, colored contacts are so trendy that almost every one of them has eyes like a Japanese cartoon character.”
“But is one of your students closer to you than the rest? More talented, perhaps? Maybe you’ve become friends? Maybe she’s been here for tea?”
She spread her hands helplessly. She really did want to help.
“Of course, some of them are more talented, I rate them more highly, and I like talking to them. But I do my best not to let those relationships gain any social footing.”
Suddenly a shadow crossed her face, and she paused in midflow, as if a thought had leaped into her mind.
“Yes?” Szacki correctly picked up on it.
“There was a strange thing that happened.” She paused for a moment. “I picked up the landline, and a woman asked me if I needed help. I said no, I didn’t need a new phone or anything new at all. I was sure it was one of those dumb sales calls. She said she wasn’t selling anything, she was just worried about me and wanted to know if I needed help. To which I replied that she must have called the wrong number. And she said I should say no, if I didn’t need or want help.”
Jadwiga Korfel broke off. Szacki thought it was a pause and didn’t press her. But the woman just sat in silence.
“And what did you do?”
“I hung up,” she said.
“Right away?”
She chewed her lip and gazed at Szacki with the look of an intelligent, experienced woman.
“No. A little later.”
“Did the voice remind you of anything? Was the woman old? Young? Any speech impediment? Did she sound upset? Or use any unusual phrases?”
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