The old man disappeared around the corner. Actually, all the old men and women were slowly disappearing, and Bartol didn’t intend to get used to the new residents who treated the blocks like stopovers – while studying, before getting a loan, before buying a house. It seemed to him as though he was the only one who didn’t have any far-reaching plans; and he wasn’t all that sure whether that was a good thing.
In the end, he opened the window to wake up faster. He sensed, straight away, that the frost had eased and saw the snow had melted.
Exactly as he hated. Everything was grey: grey air, grey remnants of snow, grey world. One more time the word ‘grey’ ran through his head and he woke up for good.
He remembered the end of the past day with distaste; rarely did he think so badly of himself. His head started to ache.
He’d been preparing a report on Antoniusz Mikulski’s postmortem and exchanging, with Olaf Polek, the information they’d gathered when the latter ended by mentioning that the mother of Bartol’s future child wasn’t feeling well. She worked with Polek’s wife. Besides, it had been Polek’s wife who’d introduced Bartol to her, seeing as they both seemed lonely.
Now there’d be three lonely people. Was that better than two?
He phoned and drove off to the girl’s new apartment in Polanka.
She did, in fact, appear very pale, although he wasn’t entirely sure if it wasn’t the effect of the background.
The walls were grey, simply grey. Who paints the walls of their apartment grey? Right then he heard the question: ‘How do you like the new colour?’
He must have taken his time replying because he then heard:
‘You chose it yourself.’
He practically choked on his – instant – coffee.
‘Don’t you remember, I preferred desert sands or sunbeams.’
He did recall something. A conversation they’d had two weeks earlier. About colours! He hadn’t been listening; he’d been thinking about something else, wanting to leave as soon as possible. Repeatedly asked whether he preferred desert sands or some sort of sunbeams, he’d answered that what he liked best was lunar dust. He later decided not to be spiteful; she didn’t really want anything from him. Too late.
There was dust – and lunar at that – on the walls. Never, never in a hundred years, would he have imagined it to be the name of a colour – as it was he already felt bad.
He improvised – it would make a wonderful undercoat for colourful wallpaper, it’d look good in the middle, he’d bring the samples himself, he’d help her.
Supporting himself with what he’d seen earlier at the architect’s office, he somehow managed to wangle his way out of it but, as it was, he knew he wouldn’t tell his mother about it that year, or the next – perhaps one day when things were different.
He stayed a while longer. The mother-to-be was only tired; other than that everything seemed in order. He asked her to rest more, and left.
Before going to bed, he drank a large vodka.
He never had much energy in the mornings, now he had even less.
Nevertheless, he decided to get to work as soon as possible, even early; there the whirl of other people’s problems needing to be solved would suck him in.
When, at a quarter to eight, he arrived in the room where they usually gathered, Lentz – first as always – was already there, Polek was just entering and right behind him – their present boss. The only one with whom they were all relatively happy. Over the last years, the bosses had changed in quick succession and some of the men didn’t even try to get used to the new one – in no time at all there’d be another election.
The boss wasn’t in a good mood. He merely informed them that they were to work on the numismatist and weren’t to forget the Byelorussian woman who used to stand on Grzybowa Street but hadn’t stood there for a month, unlike their investigation which was at a standstill. This especially annoyed Polek who rebelled saying he’d already learned several languages while questioning that ‘wild game’. The boss couldn’t care less; he simply asked whether Polek expected a pay rise for this, because if not then he’d be well advised to temper his Polish and not talk about the murdered girl in that way, if only because
– apparently - somebody had recently brought Polek’s daughter home having found her on Stary Rynek.
The comment hit the mark. Everyone was instantly serious wondering how he knew.
Polek’s fourteen-year-old daughter hadn’t, in fact, spent the night at her friend’s a month ago as she’d so nicely told her parents she would. It was a good thing that someone from the vice department had miraculously recognised her among some drunken teenagers at two in the morning in the Czarna Owca.
Polek didn’t say a word. He ground his teeth in rage and only exploded once the boss had left.
Bartol didn’t pay much attention to him. The investigation into the case of the girl was almost wound up; all they had to do was wait for the perpetrator to get bored of Byelorussia.
He liked the word ‘numismatist’ being used to describe Antoniusz Mikulski. They had, indeed, had a serious theft of old coins a couple of years ago, and for a good six months they’d all walked around amazed. They never knew who they were going to question – elegant antique dealer or unwashed trader, in turn, round and round in circles. All the numismatists knew each other and all talked about things nobody could understand. They bought and sold money for large sums of money, conned each other, enjoyed doing so and didn’t take too much offence when they were conned themselves. All that counted was who knew most, who was the first to catch on, who was cleverest. And the man whom everyone spoke of with the greatest recognition and who apparently had the largest collection and – what went hand in hand with it – real money, had half of his teeth missing and no intention of having new ones put in. Because, as he explained, sellers couldn’t care less whom they were selling to as long as it was for the highest sum possible, and buyers love to buy from someone stupider than themselves – and he was guaranteed to give just such an impression.
The case had never been entirely cleared up, nor was it known if the numismatists hadn’t somehow sorted it out between themselves. The aggrieved party had allegedly come to some agreement with the suspect, whom he himself suspected; they’d made some sort of exchange and carried on doing business with each other.
Ever since then, whenever the team was dealing with something totally removed from the reality in which they were immersed on a daily basis, somebody evoked the numismatists and everything became clear, at least where information was concerned.
Now they all put forward what they’d managed to determine the previous day and what had reached them from the lab. Not much.
Antoniusz Mikulski was seventy-eight years old and, according to the doctor, could have still lived for a long time; there was nothing seriously wrong with him, just a slight arrhythmia of the heart was recorded. His death had resulted from strangulation; he must, however, have fainted beforehand or lost consciousness. The presence of any substance that could have helped him do so was not ascertained. None of the questioned neighbours had heard or seen anything – not quite neighbours because the two villas standing on each side now housed solicitors’ offices and the people who worked there rarely looked around, so Maćkowiak stated. That – possibly – left the clients who’d arrived or left at the time; a list was established.
Mikulski, ever since the death of his wife eighteen months ago, had lived and coped alone. He’d also done his own cleaning. They had one son who’d settled somewhere abroad, the States apparently, and wasn’t married. Nothing was known about any grandchildren. The list of phone calls he’d made didn’t reveal anything either. A call to the doctor’s surgery and to an acquaintance, Edmund Wieczorek, from whom they obtained some initial information. Mikulski hadn’t used up all his phone credit. He didn’t own a computer and the television set probably wasn’t working. There was only a small radio in the kitchen. Mikulski had once been an important f
igure in the administration of regional restoration and, after retiring at the beginning of the nineties, never appeared at his old place of work, nor was he ever invited anywhere – he was not liked. Antoniusz Mikulski himself never belonged to the Party ,whereas he did have an ambitious brother who’d even rubbed shoulders at the Ministry of Culture and was not a liked figure even among his own. The brother had died childless twenty years ago.
They didn’t quite know who to inform about Mikulski’s death. There was some hope, however, that the son – or eventually some relative – would turn up seeing as there was a large estate to inherit. A solicitor had once held Mikulski’s will but Mikulski had visited him in August asking for it to be destroyed. The solicitor couldn’t remember whether Mr Mikulski had said why or whether he was going to make out another one.
Slowly, a picture of a totally lonely man was emerging; whether the world had so ordained it or whether it was of his own making remained unclear.
They could find no motive for the murder, nor was there anything they could get their teeth into. There were no traces of a break-in, struggle or robbery. The latter could not be excluded, although there was nobody at present who could have confirmed whether anything was missing or not. There was, admittedly, an empty wooden box on his desk but it could have been used for anything and had no lock.
Since they didn’t really know where to start and the technicians hadn’t yet returned a report of their findings (at present, they only had one unidentified broken fingernail), they decided to start with the possibility that something may have gone missing.
They took seriously the hypothesis that there’d been something so valuable in the house that it had been worth stealing only that one thing without needlessly running the risk of selling off other antiques. Perhaps not many people knew about the existence of that something. Perhaps nobody other than the murderer and the victim who could no longer say anything. Nobody, therefore, would look for it. Perhaps, as an art restorer, he had recognised something others hadn’t seen, and taken it home – times had been different. Perhaps not everybody was as honest as the two female art historians who had recognised an El Greco beneath a dusty painting so that now everybody could look at it in Siedlce museum.
They also had to search for something in the dead man’s past. Some old troubles perhaps.
Olaf Polek eased the helpless tension by stubbornly maintaining that the whole thing had to do with coins, that he suspected the numismatists for the whole masquerade with the red cloth; they were capable of anything. One way or another, the police officers decided they’d ask around among various antique dealers and traders. This Polek had to take care of. The dead man’s one and only acquaintance, Edmund Wieczorek, eighty years old and in a wheelchair, also had to be paid a visit
– there was no point in summoning him to the station. Seeing Lentz cough, Maćkowiak allocated the assignment to himself.
Only Maciej Bartol and Piotr Lentz, wiyh his cold, remained in the room.
Both had time on their hands; one was waiting for the female architect, the other for a lawyer who hadn’t been in the previous day.
Lentz really did have a bad cold. For the past three weeks. As usual, he’d initially been very interested in his illness, suspecting cancer of the lungs, larynx or bronchi, if there was such a cancer. He studied and held forth with excitement about the symptoms which, also as usual, were practically all manifest. An X-ray and another test had dispersed his fears. As if to spite himself, he’d then grown sadder and refused to treat what was nothing but a banal cold. It seemed absurd, but after cancer of the prostate and all its symptoms had turned out to be mere sand in the kidneys not worth bothering about, cancer of the bowel simply the effect of beetroots in his diet, and a whole spectrum of other fascinating diseases which had ended up being nothing but minor ailments, nothing surprised anyone anymore. Lentz had never been seriously ill; nobody knew how he’d react if faced with a real problem. They often wondered whether it was Lentz who worked himself up like that or whether his mother – with whom he was still living although he’d turned forty-five – aided him in this; nobody dared ask. He was easily annoyed and stayed annoyed for a long time.
‘I once bought a puppy, you know,’ he began unexpectedly, wiping his nose with his hand. ‘A little white Bolognese.’ Bartol hadn’t known, nor could he imagine it, but he didn’t laugh, didn’t comment – besides, he wouldn’t have known what to say; he just listened, staring at Lentz with some amazement.
‘The dog had some sort of convulsions several times a day,’ continued Lentz after a while. ‘I did the rounds of several private vets and every vet made a different diagnosis: epilepsy, a dodgy heart and such like. They told me to give the dog back since it was going to die anyway. I couldn’t. It was only in a state-run clinic that a wise vet told me the dog’s nervous system was being poisoned by worm toxin. The dog had been treated for worms but those particular worms had proved resistant. A banal explanation but he was right: he saved the dog’s life. But what I’m thinking about is what he said at the end – a wise doctor, as I say: you always have to start with the simplest diagnosis and only then start to look for something interesting. Interesting cases are tempting but truth is often more banal. I remembered that very well and often recall his words.’
Bartol had an entirely different opinion on this particular point, unless Lentz was thinking exclusively about work. In which case it could, to a certain degree, be true. He remembered how Lentz had once insisted that the wife had been the murderer, because she’d the most to gain by getting rid of her husband yet nearly everybody else had thought it had been the case of an unfortunate accident with a fatal ending. Lentz had been right.
‘And you know something? I think nothing’s going to be that obvious this time. We have to make sure it wasn’t burglary, then find the person who inherits the house. Maybe he or she couldn’t wait. But it all looks odd, very odd. Have you studied the photos yet?’
‘Cursorily.’
‘Then take a good look at these. Precisely these.’ He passed him two photographs.
One of them showed the whole of Mikulski’s body on the floor, the other was a close-up of the so-called towel around his waist. The tiny letters running down the length of the entire piece of material were clearly visible. They couldn’t have been taller than half a centimetre. One sentence repeated over and over: Dum Spiro Spero.
‘I checked what it means at home yesterday. Which is, more or less: ‘as long as – to breathe – to expect’. Don’t laugh, I don’t know any Latin, I don’t even know how I came to have a small medical dictionary at home.’ Lentz coughed. ‘Anyway, they don’t look like words usually found on a towel or whatever you want to call the thing, because it doesn’t look like a towel to me, especially on a corpse. There’s nothing there about washing but there is about potential loss of breath. We’ve still got to find some other maxims in that house. I don’t like it.’
Bartol didn’t like it either. He was surprised, however, that Lentz was only telling him now. Lentz anticipated his question.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t want to fire away with infinitives. If it sounds like nonsense then let’s check out what’s most likely before we learn Latin. Mull it over a bit, you’re good at that. So long – I’m off to interrogate my parrot. I can already hear her squawking.’
Somebody was, in fact, kicking up a fuss in the corridor saying her time was precious, was being wasted.
Bartol, left alone, began mulling it over. He stared dispassionately at the photographs. Out of plain curiosity. He wondered why he didn’t feel anything.
Perhaps because everything seemed so unreal, inauthentic; as a rule, these things looked all too real, too true. As a rule they looked very human, including what dwelt within the human being – and was not necessarily dormant.
But here… Even without the Latin on the piece of red cloth, this was beyond the norm.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to think long about wher
e to start. There was a call from downstairs. The female architect was already waiting for him.
He went down to fetch her. Noted that she appeared different from the previous day. She probably hadn’t slept; there were shadows under her eyes. He caught sight of her before she saw him. She was dressed in black from head to toe. The black poloneck, as if made for two necks, almost reached her mouth; her long fingers barely poked out of the sleeves. Her black jeans were partially concealed in a pair of high boots.
She couldn’t have wrapped herself up more tightly. Overalls or armour? She looked quite sexy but he immediately associated her outfit with the large, grey-brown jumper on her photograph. Room to hide there, too.
She looked shorter. He studied her for a while before she noticed him.
‘Good morning, let’s go upstairs.’
‘Good morning. Maybe it is, but you don’t look so good either.’
He was taken aback. Her directness took him a little by surprise; people were usually tense before being interrogated.
‘I see you haven’t slept well either. Isn’t it a daily occurrence in your profession – corpses, bad, evil people?’ she continued once she’d sat down.
‘A daily occurrence, no. Day-to-day business is the same as yours, different people, various pieces of paper. Thankfully, not everyone murders other people as often as they’d like. Something to drink?’
‘Some coffee, please. Instant will be fine, lots of milk.’
She’d forestalled him again.
‘I’m sorry we don’t have a proper espresso machine. Can’t see us getting one either. You visit this station often?’ He smiled.
‘No, but I can guess by the handle on a door what I’m going to be treated to. Part of the job.’
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