Rage

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  A few years later he had suddenly had a conversion—not a return to Catholicism, but he had come to believe in a higher power. He realized that the circumstances of some road tragedies were too far-fetched to be the result of accident alone. The reality was slightly different from the media image: bravado plus alcohol plus a speed unsuited to the driving conditions. For there were some strange, inexplicable deaths.

  The corpses at CID made far more sense. Someone had had a drink, someone had lost his cool, someone had grabbed a knife. A woman had found her lover’s wife obstructing her happiness, or a wife had found her husband’s lover obstructing hers. These incidents were typified by warped, homicidal logic, and yet you could still call it logic.

  On the roads, that logic was missing. Two cars driving in opposite directions, in the summer, on a dry road, at a reasonable speed, crash head-on. The survivors can’t explain it, nor can the witnesses. All of them were sober, well rested, and responsible. A higher power.

  Read in today’s paper: A couple is driving along in a car, it starts to skid, and ends up in a ditch. It’s OK, the car’s dented, that’s all. She gets out on the shoulder to call for help, and she’s hit by another car. Killed on the spot. A higher power.

  Read a few days ago: A driver picks up a hitchhiker, a few hundred yards farther on he drives off the road and hits a tree. Nothing happens to the driver, but the hitchhiker is killed instantly. A higher power.

  Read some time ago: A driver spots a man kneeling in the middle of the road. He stops, puts on his hazard lights, and gets out to see what’s up. Another car drives up, tries to pass them, and hits the thoughtful driver. Killed on the spot. The man on his knees goes on kneeling. A higher power.

  In Bierut’s years as a traffic cop, so many of these incidents had accumulated that finally he had come to believe in a higher power. One of the results of his conversion were his visits to the graves of children whose deaths he had dealt with on the job. He was surprised to find how many of them were buried here, in Olsztyn. As if the parents or family had rejected them after death, refusing to take them home to their family gravesite. So the little graves were only visited once a year on All Saints’ Day, in some cases not even then. They were neglected, apart from the occasional memorial candle lit out of pity. But Bierut preserved the memory of these little victims in a systematic way. He recorded the dates in his journal, and the day before each anniversary he consulted his notes to remind himself of the accident, and imagined how the child’s fortunes might have gotten better since. Only then did he go to the cemetery.

  On the sixth anniversary of her death, Olga Dymecka would have been almost eight, she’d have been in her fourth month in second grade, and would probably have been looking forward to Christmas by now, trying to guess what Santa would bring her. Do eight-year-olds still believe in Santa Claus? Bierut had no idea—he had no kids of his own, and no plans to have any. He was afraid of the higher power. He had a perfect memory of the day when he’d found the Passat wrapped around a tree, and little Olga Dymecka.

  That was why nothing ever shocked him. So there at the cemetery, when he answered his phone and was told that a high school girl had been found dead in a house outside Gietrzwałd, he didn’t bat an eye.

  He genuflected and followed his own footsteps back to the car parked at the cemetery gates, feeling pleased about the snow. It hadn’t been cleared away yet, and the roads were slippery as hell, so everyone would drive more carefully today, dragging along like tortoises. It was easy to have small crashes in those conditions, but not fatal collisions.

  At least as long as no higher power was at work.

  2

  It took him forty-five minutes to reach the exit road for Ostróda, and as he drove into the forest he slowed down to admire the view of the pine trees covered in snow. Warmia was exceptionally beautiful that afternoon.

  He double-checked over the radio how to get to the crime scene, and just before Gietrzwałd, when the tower of the Marian sanctuary came into sight, he turned off into the forest. On the way he picked up the forensics guys, who didn’t have a Nissan Patrol and had gotten stuck in the snow and mud as soon as the fairly decent road had ended.

  Yet someone had managed to drive through before him—the white expanse was bisected by black tire tracks. Probably from a four-by-four, a big one, because the snow between the tracks was untouched.

  When he got to the place, he was surprised to find it was Szacki’s ancient vehicle that had coped with the winter conditions.

  “Goddamn, I don’t believe it,” said the head of the forensics team. “My off-road Kia couldn’t cope, and that pile of junk got through?”

  “Maybe because your Kia is as good off-road as my Astra is at flying,” said Lopez, the technician in charge of biological and micro evidence.

  Bierut said nothing. Luckily his reputation as a gloomy bastard meant he didn’t have to take part in socializing. He valued this state of affairs highly.

  He parked next to the Citroën. Everyone got out and slowly headed for the ruined cabin; no one was in a hurry to see the corpse. Only Bierut quickly strode after the two pairs of footprints leading into the house, thinking that whatever had occurred there in the night must have happened before the snow fell. He knew his colleagues were exchanging looks behind him.

  He opened the door. Inside, the cold was just as sharp. The house had no furnishings, the floors were warped, there was mold climbing the walls, and the ends of electric cables were sticking out in places where thieves had dismantled the sockets and light switches. Nobody had lived here for years.

  He walked through the hall and found himself in a spacious living room with a large window looking onto the forest. There was enough light coming through to examine the murder site before the technicians set up their lamps.

  There wasn’t much to examine—the contents of the room could be listed on a business card: one camping table, two camping chairs, one corpse, and two prosecutors.

  Edmund Falk was kneeling beside the body of a girl, keeping the right distance to avoid contaminating the evidence. Teodor Szacki stood facing away from them, hands folded behind his back, his gaze fixed on the blank wall as if a gripping film were playing there.

  “Which of you gentlemen is conducting the investigation?” Bierut asked.

  “Prosecutor Falk,” said Szacki. “Under my supervision, of course. Did you find the forensics men in a snowdrift on your way here, Commissioner?”

  Bierut didn’t have to answer, because just then the forensics team came in.

  “Jeez, they must have whacked the president’s wife—the whole prosecution service is here,” said Lopez, putting his bag of equipment on the floor. “Well, look who it is—the Prince of Darkness and the Lord of the Night in person.”

  Szacki and Falk turned to face him. Above their perfectly knotted ties, their stony faces expressed the same standoffish disapproval. Bierut knew that they’d have laid into anyone else, but Lopez was just too good at his job. His superiors always let him get away with it.

  He glanced at Falk inquiringly.

  “A nice change after what we’ve had to deal with lately,” said the junior prosecutor. “I mean it’s a shame about the girl, but this time there’s no mystery. Wiktoria Sendrowska, eighteen years old, a student at the Mickiewicz High School. A classic case of strangling. If there’s anything else, the autopsy will show it.”

  “I saw the girl yesterday afternoon, I visited her family at about six on Radiowa Street,” said Szacki. “I’ll be making a statement, but briefly put it was because she had won an essay competition on crime prevention, and part of her reward was to ask me questions about the work of a prosecutor.”

  “And there you are,” said Lopez, laughing as he kneeled over the corpse, “we have our first suspect.”

  “From what she told her mother, she was going to stay over with a friend named Luiza,” said Szacki, ignoring the taunt.

  “That’s the first lead,” said Falk. “Had she real
ly arranged to see Luiza, or someone else? After leaving home, did she ever get to her friend’s house, what does the friend know, and what do the parents know? Plus an examination of the site, plus an autopsy. Unfortunately the snow has deprived us of evidence outside.”

  Bierut nodded, scanning the crime scene. Something didn’t seem to fit.

  “Strange,” he said. “I’d swear I smelled coffee in here.”

  Behind him one of the technicians snorted with laughter. Bierut was nuts. He could smell coffee at a murder scene.

  They’d finished setting up the lamps, outside a small generator was purring away, and the room was flooded with garish white light. Suddenly everything became uncomfortably visible, above all, the youth and beauty of the corpse on the floor. If not for the mottled bruises on her neck, shimmering in shades of navy and magenta, she could have been the victim of an illness, not murder. Her porcelain face was at peace, her eyes were closed, and her black hair spilled across the floor as she lay there in her nice brown coat.

  Lopez took out something resembling a small paint gun and started to spray a substance on the cadaver’s neck. Bierut suddenly felt like a rookie. He was trying to remember what he’d learned about fingerprinting. Could you take fingerprints from a dead body? Yes, perhaps you could in some cases, with the help of a special epoxy resin. He was ashamed to ask.

  “The second lead is this house of evil,” said Lopez, leaning over the victim’s face, as if about to try reviving her. “I was here ten years ago, in the winter, too, or maybe it was late fall. Take a left turn off the hallway and you’ll find a gutted room. There’s a window with bars in there, probably installed for security. There was a fire, and a woman burned to death because of those bars, she had no way out. I’ll never forget it. We scraped her off those bars, like charred meat off the barbecue. It’s a house of evil, I tell you.”

  Nobody responded. They stood in silence, listening to the hiss of the spray gun and the rumble of the generator. They shuddered, when just outside a loud and piercing scream rang out.

  3

  Falk headed for the door, but Szacki signaled to him to stay put. Someone had to oversee the technicians and supervise the investigation. He guessed who had screamed and realized it was his duty to talk to Wiktoria’s parents.

  He glanced at the corpse, and his palms began to sweat as the memory of the previous night came back to him. He stuck his hands in his coat pockets and wiped them on the lining. A pointless gesture, as if anyone could see from a distance that his palms were sweating. He was amazed to perceive in himself the typical behavior of criminals. He’d always thought they were weak, not very intelligent, slow-witted. Hence all the hysterical, illogical moves that pushed them straight into prison cells, contributing just as much to an indictment as a confession.

  And wouldn’t you know, in the end he turned out to be no different.

  Szacki went outside and squinted. Even though the sun had not emerged from behind the clouds, the light reflecting off the snow was dazzlingly bright for eyes that had spent the past few weeks in semidarkness.

  By the gate, Agnieszka Sendrowska was kneeling in the snow, with her husband leaning forward, awkwardly embracing her, as if to help her to her feet. She stared in Szacki’s direction, not with pain, but with reproach in her eyes. He took a few steps toward her and realized that her static gaze wasn’t fixed on him, but on the ruined house behind him.

  “It’s not possible,” she said. “It couldn’t have happened here. What a curse this is. The man’s not alive, it makes no sense. It can’t be Wika, it has to be a mistake.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  Only now did she look at him, and a grimace of despair appeared on her face as she realized that if he had already been inside, there couldn’t have been a mistake.

  “Do you know what happened?” her husband asked in a hollow tone.

  Szacki could see that he was trying to give the impression of being stronger than his wife, but there was an alarming void in his eyes, the look of someone who’s ready to end it all. Seeing it made Szacki suddenly aware that Wiktoria might not be the final victim at all. It was a terrible realization; he staggered, almost falling to his knees beside Mrs. Sendrowska. He grabbed hold of a metal post, a remnant of the fence.

  It crossed his mind that the father’s bond with his adopted child could be stronger than the mother’s. Motherhood is forged from day zero, when a couple falls back on the pillows, weary from making love. And it’s a very biological relationship, as old as time, a little parasitic, written in blood, inaccessible to men, and as a result, unique and mysterious. But for the father every child is, in a way, adopted, alien to him; whether he watched his wife give birth to the creature that she promises contains some of his genes, too, or left a children’s home holding a girl by the hand, he has to make the effort to fall in love with this little stranger.

  In Sendrowski’s eyes he saw exactly the same feelings as he’d had yesterday, watching Helena Szacka die. The man had lost his little girl, and there was nothing left of him. Just a body functioning to no purpose, its cells going through the motions, though no one expects them to.

  “We have no idea,” Szacki finally said, feeling as though someone else were talking. “My colleague is conducting the inquiry. I’m sorry, I know this sounds awful, but he must talk to you as soon as possible.”

  Sendrowski nodded, and then fixed his lifeless gaze on Szacki. The prosecutor put all his willpower into not retreating from that stare.

  “You know what? She shone,” he said. “It’s hard to put it any other way. I know every parent always says his children are special and different, but let’s face it, few of them ever are. But she really was extraordinary, everyone will tell you. What sort of person do you have to be, what sort of devil, to put out that light? How can it be possible for so much evil to have accumulated in a single person?”

  Szacki didn’t answer.

  “Just you catch him, all right? Not for justice—in this situation, ‘justice’ is an empty word. But so that I can look him in the eyes, and find out for myself what the face of evil is like.”

  Szacki only nodded.

  4

  He’d gotten as far as the main road, where he hesitated for a while; finally, instead of turning left toward Olsztyn he turned right, toward Gietrzwałd. He drove a few hundred yards and, taking advantage of the lack of traffic, broke the rules by crossing the double line and drove into the gas station on the other side of the highway.

  He parked next to a sign advertising new Bavarian hot dogs, got himself an extra-large cup of coffee from the self-service espresso machine, paid, and went outside. Behind the building were two wooden tables with benches; he swept aside the snow with a sleeve and sat down. When he put the paper cup down on the snow-coated tabletop, the snow around it melted so fast that it was like watching an animation.

  Szacki was more aware of everything than usual, every little detail, as if wanting to get his fill before he said good-bye to the world of small, comical things that we don’t usually notice because we’re too preoccupied, too infuriated, or too busy procrastinating.

  He had to admit it was beyond doubt. The graceful, obvious solution that released him from all dilemmas. He’d built his life on respecting the law, and that meant he must confess his guilt. Simple things are simple.

  He sighed. Not because he would lose his liberty. Punishment for the crime he had committed seemed to him the most natural thing in the world. He sighed, because after conducting hundreds of investigations in his working life, now he’d have to end his career just as the one and only investigation had appeared for which he would have sacrificed everything: a case involving a screwed-up sect that had succeeded in forcing Teodor Szacki to commit murder.

  He had never felt any romantic respect or admiration for exceptionally clever criminals, but this time he couldn’t restrain a sort of recognition for those responsible for yesterday’s events. It had all required preparation, it must hav
e been planned to the highest degree, it must have meant taking care that the details didn’t give away the theatrical set. A thousand things could have gone wrong, yet it had worked.

  Result? Whoever they were, they had achieved everything they wanted.

  He’d worked out his conclusions in the night, after hearing Hela’s story. As he’d foreseen, her kidnapping was aimed at him. She’d been treated like a prisoner and shown a film of Najman being dissolved, so that at the critical moment, her terror of dying horribly would look convincing. But she said the fear had only lasted seconds. When the first granules fell into her mouth and she started to spit them out, she almost died of shock, but immediately she realized that—for want of a better word—it was a joke. The beads were very light, and they smelled and sounded like polystyrene.

  “Suddenly I began to laugh like mad. Like I was hysterical. I just couldn’t stop laughing, it went on for about ten minutes. I was afraid I’d hurt myself laughing,” Hela had told him on the ride home.

  Which meant that if he had held out a few seconds longer, if he hadn’t instantly grabbed Wiktoria Sendrowska by the throat, their entire daring plan would have failed.

  But it hadn’t.

  A little later the kidnappers had put a bag over his daughter’s head and seated her in a car. As far as she could tell, she had spent about two hours there, which meant Szacki hadn’t been watching a live broadcast, just a recording especially prepared for him. The car had been in motion the whole time, but it wasn’t clear whether that meant the place where Hela was kept and Najman was murdered was two hours’ drive away, or the kidnappers had simply driven around in circles to confuse her. Finally they’d pushed her out of the car, cut her bonds, and driven away. When she took off the bag she’d found herself alone on a road in the forest, in the middle of the night. For lack of a better plan, she’d started walking.

  And soon after that she’d found her father.