Entanglement

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Daddy, Daddy, why can’t I have my birthday at Mc-Donald’s?”

  “Why haven’t you gone to bed yet?” he replied smartly.

  “Because Mum didn’t tell me to.”

  “Seriously?”

  An armchair creaked in the sitting room.

  “That brat is as big a liar as you are,” shouted Weronika from inside the flat.

  Szacki looked at his daughter, who was standing in the hall with an angelic expression on her face.

  “I never tell lies,” he whispered.

  “Neither do I,” whispered Helka.

  Weronika came up to them and looked helplessly at the little girl with chestnut-coloured hair.

  “Do something, you’re her father after all. Tell her she’s got to brush her teeth and go to bed, and that she’s not having her birthday at McDonald’s. Over my dead body.”

  “Everyone has their birthday at McDonald’s,” said Helka.

  “I don’t care what everyone does,” muttered Weronika. “And I’m not interested in you two either. Where have you been all this time?” she asked Szacki, kissing him on the nose by way of greeting. “Have you been drinking?” she added, frowning.

  “I had to meet up with Oleg and I drank tea and apple juice,” he lied glibly - he suffered from the usual prosecutor’s aberration; he thought everyone told lies, and he did his best to recognize exactly when they were doing it, but he also knew that, unless you tell them straight out they’re being deceived, or unless you’re spouting horrendous, improbable nonsense, normal people take everything at face value.

  “You should have invited them over, we haven’t met up for ages. I wonder how Natalia’s doing?”

  Szacki hung up his coat and jacket. It was a relief to take off his tie and shoes. Maybe I should learn how to go to work in a T-shirt and sandals after all, he thought - it’d be much more comfortable. The whole time Helka went on standing in the hall with her head drooping and her arms crossed. He picked her up and cuddled her.

  “And what if we find a really fabulous place?” he said. “A hundred times better than McDonald’s, with a huge playground? Where you can run about and all that?”

  “There aren’t any places like that,” replied Helka.

  “But what if we find one?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “In that case will you go and brush your teeth now and give us some time to look?”

  She nodded in silence, let him put her down and ran to the bathroom. He wondered where they were going to find a playground where they could hold her birthday party for a reasonable price.

  He went into the kitchen, took a can of beer out of the fridge, opened it and stood beside Weronika. She cuddled up to him and began to purr.

  “I’m hardly alive.”

  “Just like me,” he said.

  They stood without talking, until the silence was broken by a bleep announcing a text message.

  “That’s yours,” muttered Weronika.

  Szacki went into the hall and took the phone out of his jacket. “Thank you for a wonderful evening. You’re a very rude prosecutor, but a very nice one too. MG.”

  “What is it?” asked Weronika.

  “Just an advert. Send a hundred texts and you might win a mug. Something like that, I deleted it.”

  The final remark was actually true.

  4

  Wednesday, 8th June 2005

  Argentina beat Brazil 3-1 in the World Cup qualifying stages. The first child is born whose mother had part of an ovary transplanted from another woman. Archbishop Stanisław Dziwisz visits Kraków and announces that he will not burn any of John Paul II′s notebooks. In Popowo, the suburban site of the women’s prison, a conference is held on “women in prison”. Up to a third of those convicted are murderesses, usually victims of domestic violence. From today anyone who identifies those guilty of killing cormorants at the bird sanctuary on Lake Jeziorak will be rewarded with a home cinema and 10,000 zlotys. An advertising code of conduct is established for Polish breweries: they will not be allowed to use the images of people or characters who have a particular influence on minors. In Warsaw a big gala is held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Palace of Youth, within the Palace of Culture; a twenty-foot-high monument is erected on Ujazdowskie Avenue in memory of General Stefan “Grot” Rowecki; and at Pawiak, the Second World War prison, the bronze sculpture of an elm tree is unveiled, which was a symbol of freedom for the prisoners. The police broke up a gang of criminals making alcohol out of windscreen washing fluid. Ten thousand litres of the drink were seized and two people were taken into custody. Maximum temperature in the city - thirteen degrees; no sun and a little rain.

  I

  Teodor Szacki had always been surprised by the number of corpses they crammed into the Forensic Medicine Unit on Oczko Street. Besides Telak, there were three more bodies on the other dissection tables, and four more waiting by the window on hospital stretchers. There was a smell of steak tartare in the air, seasoned with a faint odour of faeces and vomit - the result of examining the intestines and stomach. The “necrophiliacs” who were going to deal with Telak were quite young. The older one was about forty, the younger looked as if he’d only just graduated. Szacki stood by the wall. He’d never been fascinated by autopsies, though he knew a good pathologist could tell more from a corpse than the entire Forensics Laboratory (of which the City Police Headquarters were so proud) could from evidence secured at the incident site. All the same, he wanted it to be over as soon as possible.

  The older doctor gave him a derisive look as he pulled on his latex gloves.

  “Was it you who asked us to check if the deceased had stuck the skewer in his own eye?”

  For pity’s sake, thought Szacki, spare me a wisecracking pathologist. That’s too much so early in the day.

  “We have to know,” he replied calmly.

  “A very cunning theory,” said the doctor, smiling mischievously, and began to give the body a thorough examination.

  The assistant took notes.

  “There are no signs of bruising, cuts, stab wounds or lacerations or bullet holes on the limbs and trunk,” dictated the pathologist. He carefully lifted the sunken eyelid under which Telak’s eye had once been. “Right eye missing, fragments of vitreous body and cornea visible on the cheek.” He put a finger in the eye socket and dug out the remains of something grey; Szacki squinted to lose focus. “Skull bone behind right eye socket crushed, pushed inwards, in all likelihood by a sharp instrument.” He lifted the head and examined it closely, parting the hair. “Otherwise the head shows no evidence of other injuries.”

  “I’m shuddering at the thought of the next instruction,” the surgeon said to Szacki, as with a confident movement he made a Y-shaped incision in Telak’s ribcage and belly, folded back the skin and hooked it on the chin; meanwhile his assistant “scalped” the skull. “Now let’s think, maybe this’ll be it: ‘We want you to establish if the deceased, found with his head cut off under a tramcar, could possibly have cut it off himself with a pair of scissors, then lain down on the tracks and waited for an approaching vehicle’.”

  “People do all sorts of things,” said Szacki, raising his voice to shout over the noise of the electric saw the younger pathologist was using to cut the skull. As usual at this moment he wanted to leave - he couldn’t bear the wet squelch that went with opening the head. He belched biliously when he heard the loathsome sound. Just like the noise when you try to clear a blocked sink.

  Szacki was expecting more jokes, but the surgeons concentrated on their work. The younger one was tying something up deep inside the trunk, while with expert movements the older one was using an instrument deceptively similar to a bread knife to remove Telak’s internal organs and put them on a spare table top at the corpse’s feet. Then he went up to the open skull.

  “Good, cutting up the offal can wait - there’s nothing there anyway. Let’s take a look at this head.” He moved a small aluminium table up to
the open skull, gently removed Telak’s grey-and-red brain and put it on a tray. He peered inside the skull. Suddenly he frowned.

  “He must have found it intolerable - maybe he really did kill himself,” he said seriously. Szacki took two paces closer.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The doctor rummaged inside Telak’s head, clearly trying to pull something out that was putting up resistance. A scene from Alien appeared before Szacki’s eyes. The pathologist twisted his hand, as if trying to turn a key in a lock, and slowly withdrew it. There between his fingers was a rolled-up condom.

  “I think he had an obsession but he couldn’t live with it. Poor guy…” The doctor lowered his head pensively, while his assistant shook with suppressed laughter, and Szacki bit his lip.

  “You must be aware there’s a paragraph in the penal code about desecrating corpses,” he said coldly.

  The pathologist threw the condom in the bin and gave Szacki the sort of look children in class give the teacher’s pet.

  “How do you people manage to be such boring bureaucrats?” he asked. “Do you get special training?”

  “We have psychological tests during our studies,” replied Szacki. “Will you carry on, or do I have to call the office and ask for two days’ leave?”

  The doctor didn’t answer. In silence he examined the inside of the skull and, very carefully, the brain, then cut the internal organs into slices. Szacki recognized the heart, lungs and stomach. He belched again. He should have drunk tea that morning, not coffee, he thought. Finally the surgeon looked inside the stomach; the air was filled with a sour odour.

  “Your client was sick shortly before he died,” the doctor told the prosecutor. “Pretty thoroughly.”

  Szacki immediately thought of the empty bottle of sleeping pills found in his room.

  “Can we tell what did it?” he asked

  “You mean was it the carrot or the chops?” said the pathologist, unable to resist a little irony.

  “I mean toxicology.”

  “Of course we can, we just need instructions. Should we check everything, or for the presence of a particular substance?”

  “A particular one.”

  “You know what? We could write out a toxicology form on the spot. It’ll be quicker.”

  Szacki replied that he’d find out the name of the substance while they were sewing him up.

  “OK,” said the pathologist. “The victim was healthy, there were no pathological changes in the internal organs. Heart fine, lungs of a non-smoker, no cancer, no ulcers. I’d like to be in that sort of condition when I’m fifty. Cause of death obvious, in other words damage to the brain caused by a sharp instrument. The skewer pierced the substantia nigra and medulla oblongata, the oldest parts of the brain responsible for the basic life processes. The perfect thrust. He died instantly. Compared with this, a bullet in the temple is a long and painful death. The skewer went through the brain and stopped at the occipital bone - you can see the mark from the inside. In other words the blow was pretty hard, but not powerful enough to make a hole in the skull.”

  “Could a woman have delivered a blow like that?” asked Szacki.

  “Easily. The skull bone in the eye socket is thin, it doesn’t take much force to pierce it, and after that it’s just jelly. It’s hard for me to tell the height of the attacker, to forestall your next question, but I think he can’t have been either very small or very tall. There’s a seventy per cent chance he was the same height as the victim, but that’s just for your information, I can’t write that in the report.”

  “Could he have done it himself?”

  The doctor thought for a while. Behind him the other surgeon was unceremoniously packing the organs into the dissected Telak, filling the empty spots with crumpled-up newspaper.

  “I doubt it. Firstly, it’d be the first time I ever heard of someone committing suicide this way. And I don’t mean the skewer, just the very idea of sticking something into one’s own brain through the eye. Can you imagine anyone doing that? I can’t. Secondly, it would be technically difficult. The skewer is long, it’s hard to get hold of, and hard to apply force. But of course it is doable. I can’t rule it out one hundred per cent.”

  Szacki thanked him and went outside to call Oleg and find out the name of the drug.

  “Tranquiloxyl, active ingredient alphazolam, two milligram tablets,” the policeman read out from his notes. “By the way, we’ve done the fingerprints.”

  “And?” asked Szacki.

  “Telak’s and Jarczyk’s are on the bottle. No others.”

  II

  WITNESS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT. Jadwiga Telak, born 20th November 1962, resident at Karłowicz Street in Warsaw, has higher education, unemployed. Relationship to parties: wife of Henryk Telak (victim), no previous convictions for bearing false witness.

  Cautioned re criminal responsibility under Article 233 of the Penal Code, her statement is as follows:

  “I have been married to Henryk Telak since 1988, and two children were born of this union: Katarzyna (known as Kasia), in 1988, and Bartosz (known as Bartek), in 1991. My daughter committed suicide in September 2003. Until then my relationship with my husband was good, though of course there were better and worse times. However, after our daughter’s death we became very distant from each other. We tried hard to pretend everything was all right, we thought that would be better for Bartek, who was twelve at the time. But it was just a pretence. We had started talking about how to part ways in a civilized manner, and that was when Bartek fell ill. That is, he was already ill earlier, but that was when he collapsed, and after some tests it turned out he had a fatal heart defect. Unless a miracle occurs or we get an organ for transplant, he will die within two years, that’s what they told us. It was terrible news, which paradoxically brought us very close to each other. Together we fought to get the best doctors and hospitals. It cost us a fortune, but my husband ran a printing firm and we were well off. Thanks to our son’s illness we didn’t even have time to brood about our daughter’s death, and that was a good thing. But Henryk felt crushed by it all. He couldn’t sleep, he’d jolt awake with a scream, and he sometimes took a tranquillizer. He drank, but not to get drunk. In autumn last year he met Cezary Rudzki and started going to see him for therapy. I can’t remember how they met, Mr Rudzki had some business at Polgrafex, as far as I remember. At first the therapy didn’t lead to any improvement, but after some time, roughly three months, my husband had calmed down a bit. He was still sad, but he was no longer having panic attacks. At the same time, thanks to a stay at a hospital in Germany, my son’s condition improved a bit and we were hoping he could wait longer for a new heart. That was in February. My husband was still going to therapy, so I wasn’t surprised when he said he wanted to take part in a two-day group session. I was even quite pleased I’d have a couple of days on my own. I’m not sure, but on the Sunday before the therapy I think my husband had a meeting with Mr Rudzki. On Thursday he didn’t have his weekly session, but on Friday he went straight from work to Łazienkowska Street. He called in the evening to say he had to switch off his phone and wouldn’t be able to call me, but that we’d see each other on Sunday. I said I was keeping my fingers crossed. On Sunday morning the police called. On Saturday evening my son and I stayed at home. Bartek was going to go out to see some friends, but he had a headache and stayed in. I watched a thriller on television until late, about midnight, and Bartek played a racing-car game on the computer.”

  Teodor Szacki was sorry there weren’t two more boxes to fill in on the interview form. The information they would contain could not constitute proof or circumstantial evidence in the case, but for those conducting or resuming an inquiry they’d be priceless. The first would be a description of the person being interviewed, and second a subjective appraisal by the interviewer.

  Opposite Szacki sat a woman of forty-three, well-groomed, tall and slender, a classic beauty. And yet she gave the impression of being old and troubled. Was it becau
se of death, which had so violently invaded her home? First her daughter, then her husband, soon her son as well, probably. How long would she hang on until she went too? She spoke about her tragedies in a tone entirely devoid of emotion, as if she were describing an episode from a television series, not her own life. Where was the hatred he had seen on the tape at Rudzki’s? That the participants in the therapy had told him about? Hatred that had the magical force to push a stranger into committing murder? Could it be that pain had brought her to such a state? And could she really be feeling any pain at all, if she hated her husband so much and desired his death so strongly?

  “Do you personally know Cezary Rudzki?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Please reply in complete sentences.”

  “No, I don’t know Mr Rudzki. I’ve never set eyes on him. Not counting the photo on the jacket of the psychology manual I have at home.”

  “And do you know Barbara Jarczyk, Hanna Kwiatkowska or Euzebiusz Kaim?”

  “The names mean nothing to me,” she replied.

  He showed her some photos, but she didn’t recognize anyone in them. A blank look, no emotion at all. Szacki tried to find a way to shake her out of it. If she were playing games it wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Why did your daughter commit suicide?”

  “Is this necessary?”

  “Forgive me, but this isn’t a friendly chat, it’s a witness interview in a murder case.”