Szacki asked him to explain.
“I think that when they broke into the flat and found the boy there, Kamil, they were surprised at first, then they quickly overpowered him and tied him up. Maybe they tortured him for fun. Though I think to start with they didn’t want to kill him. They found out that the rest of the family weren’t coming back sooner than the day after next. They had time. They may have sat there for quite a while, because they wondered what to do with the prisoner, who had got such a good look at them. During this time they looked into every drawer and took out every ring.”
“Until finally they killed him?”
“Until finally they killed him.”
“Did you consider any other possibility apart from assault and robbery?”
“No. Maybe to begin with, but we pretty quickly found out in the city that some shady character from that suburb, Gocław, was boasting that they’d tied this sucker up and cut his throat while they were doing a flat. But the trail went dead, apparently the shady guy wasn’t local, he was just staying in Gocław. It all led to nowhere, there wasn’t a splinter for us to hang the inquiry on. No tip-off, no clue, no fingerprints. In less than a month it got shelved. I remember being wildly angry. I can’t have slept for a week.”
Szacki thought the story of the investigation Mamcarz had conducted was strangely reminiscent of his own inquiry. He had had enough of these coincidences by now.
“What sort of flat was it?”
“Not large, but full of books. Quite intimidating, at least for me. I’m a simple guy, I felt awkward when I went to see them and they served me coffee in a fine elegant cup. I was afraid I’d break it if I stirred it, so I didn’t add any milk or sugar. I remember that room full of books, Sosnowski’s parents (they’d sent the daughter off to the family in the country) and the taste of bitter coffee. I had nothing to tell them except that we were ‘temporarily suspending’ the investigation, and that we were in no position to find the culprits. They looked at me as if I were one of the murderers. I left as soon as I’d drunk the coffee. I never saw them again.”
“Do you know who they were?”
“By profession? No. I must have known at the time, I must have filled in the boxes in the witness-statement forms. But it can’t have been crucial to the case, or I’d have remembered.”
“Have you ever seen them again?”
“Never.” Mamcarz got up and shambled into the corner to fetch a bottle of Golden Goblet sweet fruit wine. He filled two glasses and handed one to Szacki. The prosecutor took a sip, surprised that although he was almost thirty-six, it was the first time he’d ever drunk apple wine. He was expecting it to taste like Domestos, but in fact it was quite bearable. A bit like Russian sparkling wine without the bubbles. And sweeter. But he didn’t fancy the idea of getting drunk on it.
“That is, I thought I saw Sosnowski on television once. At our friends’ house,” he added, noticing Szacki visually sweeping the room in search of a telly.
Szacki imagined Mamcarz with his girlfriend on his arm and a bottle of apple wine in his hand, marching along the back streets of the Praga district to drop in on their “friends”. What a glamorous scene. He wondered if it was hard to overlook the moment when you turn onto the path that leads to drinking apple wine by candlelight in the company of an evil woman and a regiment of cockroaches. It probably was. It started with cheating on your wife.
“What was he doing on television?” he asked, strangely sure that once again he wouldn’t learn anything specific.
“I have no idea. I saw him a while ago. If it was him, he’s aged a lot. But I’m not sure.”
Szacki asked Mamcarz a few more questions about the details, about people who might have known the Sosnowskis, and what might have happened to the files. In vain. The retired militia captain actually remembered very little. After yet another question that got no answer Szacki glanced with hatred at the bottle of apple wine, which over the years, along with its pals, had changed his personal source of information into someone whose brain structure resembled pumice. A semblance of solidity, but essentially full of holes. Only as Szacki was leaving, thinking how he’d probably have to burn his clothes in the courtyard dustbin before entering the house, Mamcarz said something that the prosecutor should have thought of earlier.
“You should ask your colleagues who dig around in secret-police files about Sosnowski,” he said.
“Why?”
“He was a college boy from an intelligentsia home. There’s a chance they kept a file on him. Even if they didn’t gather much information, you might find some names or addresses. I know what it’s like when you haven’t a splinter to hang the inquiry on.”
That must have been his favourite phrase.
Just as he expected, Mamcarz’s concubine was waiting for him outside the door, smiling insincerely. He was upset by the thought that this woman was going back to the Captain, who had ultimately seemed to be a sympathetic, despondent man. But “if someone in the constellation seems to be good and someone else bad, it’s almost always the other way around”. Was it she who had planted the flowers and painted the railings?
Of course she asked him for a small favour. She was ready to spend a long time explaining her needs to him, but he waved a hand to stop her and reached into his pocket for some change. He gave her a ten-zloty note. She thanked him effusively, as the door - behind which the siblings he had met downstairs had disappeared - opened, and out came a young couple. Their neighbour fled back into her den as fast as possible. The horrible thought crossed Szacki’s mind that in Mamcarz’s flat the cockroaches must run across the people’s faces while they slept. He shuddered.
“The midget’s to have her light out at ten, and you’re not to spend the whole time playing games. We’ll be late - if there’s any need, I’ve got my mobile,” a young man holding the handle of the open door was instructing the shaggy teenager.
The three of them got into the lift together. The couple gave Szacki the same sort of pitying look he himself would have bestowed on any visitor to Captain Mamcarz. He replied with an acid smile. They both looked about twenty-something, and Szacki thought they couldn’t possibly have such big children. Or maybe they looked young because they were happy? Because they loved each other? Had sex often and kissed each other on the mouth a lot? Maybe he’d look younger too if it weren’t for Weronika’s worn-out Tatra Highlander slippers and pyjamas that had gone yellow under the arms. It was quite another matter that he wore just the same slippers. And to think he’d once said Tatra Highlander slippers were death for a man. He’d liked that joke a lot. One day he’d got them some of those peasant-style slippers from a souvenir shop on Krupówki Street in Zakopane - just for a laugh. And now they wore them every day. They were even comfortable.
Szacki averted his gaze from his fellow passengers. Reluctantly. The woman was very sexy, exactly his type. Not too skinny, but not fat, with nice womanly curves and full lips, wearing a red dress with small black flowers on it, with a low-cut neck that was enough to arouse the imagination without being vulgar. She looked like someone who laughed a lot.
The lift stopped, and Szacki felt like telling them they had fabulous kids, but he held back. Ever since the incriminating photographs had been found in the paedophile therapist’s dustbin, such remarks were no longer considered innocent.
As he walked home he thought about the bantering siblings. He often wondered if they hadn’t done Helka a wrong by not trying for another child. But perhaps it wasn’t too late yet? There must have been six or seven years’ difference between the teenager with the speech defect and his sister with ADHD. If he and Weronika were to decide on it now, there’d be eight years between Helka and her brother or sister.
And maybe then everything would become easy. Maybe then he wouldn’t need change. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
All it took was to make a decision. For Teodor Szacki, a man who preferred everything to just happen to him rather than to be the result of his own decisions, that thought was on a par
with deciding to climb Mount Aconcagua at the weekend.
He reached his block and glanced up at the illuminated kitchen window on the second floor. He didn’t feel like going home, so he sat on a bench in the courtyard to enjoy the June evening. It was already after nine, but it was still warm and light, and there was a smell of the city cooling down. At moments like these he felt like the nightingale in Julian Tuwim’s poem, who upsets his wife by coming home late for supper.
“My golden one, forgive me do, the night’s so fine, I came on foot,” he repeated the nightingale’s excuse aloud and laughed.
He thought about what he’d heard from Captain Mamcarz. Once again all he had gained was information that didn’t move him forwards. But the itching in his head was getting more and more irritating. He was sure by now he should have twigged what it was all about. He felt as if he had heard everything, but instead of joining the information together in a logical whole, he was twisting it all into nonsense, like a chimpanzee playing with a Rubik’s cube.
A strange visit, slightly surreal because of the family with whom he’d shared the lift on his way in and out. He thought about the young couple - or at least young-looking - and sprang to his feet. The itching feeling had stopped, and in its place a thought had appeared, so clear and sharp it was painful.
Teodor Szacki started energetically pacing up and down outside his block, going round and round the green bench and the concrete bin, asking himself the same question a thousand times over, sometimes out loud and sometimes adding the word “fucking”: is it possible? Is it really possible?
9
Tuesday, 14th June 2005
A new world record is set for the 100 metres. In Athens, Jamaican Asafa Powell runs this distance, equal to the length of Konstytucja Square, in 9.77 seconds. In Poland, as in twelve other European countries, the grand finale takes place of a police operation called “Ice-breaker”, aimed against paedophiles, which began with surveillance of Internet chat rooms. One hundred and fifty houses and flats are searched and twenty people are arrested. The papers do not report whether anyone charged with the crime of paedophilia was on the Łowicz prison team that played a match against clerical students from the local seminary. Initially leading the game, the future priests ultimately lost to the crooks 1-2. Apart from that, members of a marksmen’s society in Rawicz, including the mayor who has the backing of the Democratic Left Alliance party, held a competition to fire at a target bearing a portrait of John Paul II. They say they did it as a tribute to the Pope, but the opposition wants the mayor’s head to roll. To keep the political balance, in Białystok a lecturer at the Higher School of Economics has lost his job for forcing the students to sign a letter in support of ultra-conservative politician Maciej Giertych to launch him as a candidate in the presidential elections. In Warsaw city guards appear patrolling the parks in the Powiśle district on roller skates. Maximum temperature in the city - twenty-seven degrees; no rain, no clouds. A perfect June day.
I
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was furious when he finally ran out of the court building on Leszno Street. It was ages since he’d had a day like this, when everything went against his plans. That morning he’d quarrelled with Weronika, making her cry and incidentally Helka too, who witnessed the scene. Worst of all, he couldn’t now remember what it was about. Moreover, he was sure that even as they were shouting at each other he couldn’t remember what it had been about to begin with. He had got up quite early after a fitful night’s sleep, planning to go to the swimming pool. He felt he should tire himself out properly and get all thought of the Telak case out of his head for a while. He’d woken his wife with a kiss and made coffee, but then he hadn’t been able to find his swimming goggles, though he was sure last time he’d put them away in the underwear drawer. He’d rummaged in all the drawers, growling, while Weronika drank her coffee in bed and teased him, saying maybe he just hadn’t been to the pool for such a long time that his goggles had dried up for lack of water and crumbled to dust. He’d retorted that as for keeping fit, he didn’t have much reason to reproach himself. Then it had gone downhill. Who does what, who doesn’t do what, who gives up what because of whom, who makes the sacrifices, who has the more important job, who takes more care of the child. The final remark hurt him, and he’d screamed back that didn’t recall a father’s main obligation being to take care of little girls, and that unfortunately he couldn’t do everything for her, which she surely regretted. And left. It was too late to go to the pool, and in any case he had lost the urge to swim, plus he didn’t have any goggles, and without them the chlorinated water made his eyes sting. The only good thing was that during the quarrel he hadn’t thought about Telak.
At the office, he called a friend from college. He knew Marek had worked for some time at one of the suburban prosecutor’s offices - it may have been in Nowy Dwór, Mazowiecki County - and then been transferred at his own request to the investigative department at the Institute of National Remembrance, where Communist-era collaboration was investigated. Unfortunately, not only was Marek on holiday at a lake near Nidzica, he responded quite coldly, suggesting Szacki should stick to official channels.
“Sorry, old man, but since the Wildstein affair everything’s changed,” he said, with no hint of regret, referring to the famous leak to the press of an Institute file. “We’re afraid to check anything on the side, because it could result in problems. They watch us like hawks, we daren’t ask to check anything in the archives. Write an application, then call, and I’ll do my best to make sure you don’t have to wait too long for an answer.”
It turned out “not too long” meant no less than a week. Szacki thanked him coldly and suggested at the end of the conversation that Marek shouldn’t hesitate to call him next time he needed help with something. Fuck you, I’ll get revenge on you, he thought as he heard the traditional assurances that one day they’d meet for a beer and talk about old times.
He tried calling Oleg, but he didn’t answer his mobile, and all they could tell him at the police station was that he’d been held up by important family matters and would only be in after twelve.
He lit his first cigarette, though it wasn’t yet nine.
On impulse he called Monika. She was ecstatic, and ardently assured him she’d been up for hours, though he could tell he’d woken her. He was so preoccupied with the Telak murder that he didn’t even try to flirt. In a rather official tone - as she told him later - he asked her if she had any friends or press contacts at the Institute for National Remembrance archives. Incredible, but she did. Her ex-boyfriend from high-school days had graduated in history and then ended up among miles of files at the secret-police archive. Szacki couldn’t believe his own luck, until she said that last time she’d seen the man he’d just had a child with Down’s syndrome and he might have changed his job for something better paid. But she promised to call him. He had to leave to get to court on time for the start of the Gliński trial, at nine thirty, so he regretfully ended the conversation.
He was in the courtroom at nine fifteen. At ten the court clerk arrived and announced that the prison van bringing the defendant had broken down on Modlińska Street, so there was a recess until noon. He ate an egg in tartare sauce, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a second cigarette and read the newspaper, including the business news. Boring, boring and more boring - the only interesting thing was a debate about the pearls of Communist-era architecture. In the architects’ views, they should be treated like monuments and put under conservation orders. The owners of the Central Committee building and the Palace of Culture were in a panic - if they had to fight for permission for every hole in the wall, no one would rent so much as a studio flat from them, and the buildings would turn into empty shells. Szacki thought sourly that if the Palace of Culture had been blown up straight after 1989, there’d be no problem, and Warsaw might have had a central landmark worth its salt by now. Fuck knows, in this Third World city you couldn’t be sure of anything.
At noon a r
ecess until one was announced. Oleg turned up at work, but Szacki didn’t want to talk to him about the conclusions he had reached on the phone. He just asked him not to intrude upon Rudzki and Co., and to dig further into Telak’s past, because that was sure to be the key to the whole case. Kuzniecow had no desire to talk about the inquiry, but did confess that he was late for work because every other Tuesday in the month he and Natalia had a traditional “morning romp”.
At one the case almost began, the defendant was finally brought in, but there was no barrister, who had “nipped out to the office for a moment” and got stuck in a traffic jam, for which he was deeply sorry. With stoical calm the judge declared a recess until two. Almost shaking with rage, Szacki invested in a copy of Newsweek to keep him occupied. He flicked through the weekly and felt like phoning the publisher to ask for the four and a half zlotys back that he’d spent on A Portrait of the Modern Polish Prostitute - attractive, educated and hard-working.
At two he finally read out the indictment. Gliński pleaded not guilty. Nothing more happened in the trial, because for a Warsaw court it was quite late now, and the defence counsel threw up half a ton of formal motions that Szacki forgot as soon as they’d been put forward, but which were enough to postpone the trial for six weeks. He stood up and left without waiting for “Your Honour” to leave the courtroom. He only just stopped himself from slamming the door.
When he found a parking ticket under his windscreen wiper he just shrugged. He lit his third cigarette and thought: frankly, to hell with his rules - he was a free man and he’d smoke as much as he liked.
He was incapable of concentrating on his work. He kept thinking about the Telak murder, or, more often, about Monika. He had trouble restraining himself from calling her just in order to hear her voice. He used Google to try and find information about her, but there was nothing but articles from Rzeczpospolita and an old site where her name appeared as a member of the student’s union in the Polish department. No pictures, unfortunately. Would it be rude of him to ask her to send him her photo by email? He felt as if even considering that idea was embarrassing, but he couldn’t stop himself. A moment of shame seemed to him a small price to pay for a photograph of Monika, especially in the dress she’d been wearing the other day. He could make it the wallpaper on his computer - after all, no one used the computer except him, and Weronika never came by his office.
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