“At this stage I reckoned there was a sort of twisted meaning to it all, and the whole therapy did indeed have a causative power. Hellinger claims that a person wishing to remain faithful to a deceased partner goes after them - into death, into illness. That would make sense, except in this case Mrs Telak was replaced by her daughter. In addition, the ABC of constellations is the principle that if a woman loved some man very much in the past, she often sees him in her son. Which in turn explained Bartek’s illness. Your son had a weak heart too, didn’t he?”
Rudzki nodded.
“I myself can’t say how it’s possible,” continued Szacki, “but I came to believe in a fantastic hypothesis: Henryk Telak was in some way - perhaps as directly as possible - mixed up in the death of his wife’s lover in the late 1980s. During the therapy he discovers that the crime he committed led to his daughter’s suicide and is connected with his son’s fatal illness. In some inexplicable way, thanks to the ‘knowing field’, his wife senses that too. Her emotions, including hatred and a desire for revenge, are so strong that her representative in the therapy, Barbara Jarczyk, picks them up, and commits the murder. It’s neat, but I didn’t even have circumstantial evidence to link Telak and Sosnowski, or Mrs Telak with the victim from the past. The police were unable to locate his family, and the files from the old inquiry are missing - end of the line. Besides, something kept bothering me, all those little cracks. The mistakes you made in your art during the constellation, the pills, the recording on the Dictaphone. Too many coincidences. And here we reach the third element - my daughter.”
Kuzniecow gave him an anxious glance. Pretending not to notice, Szacki went on.
“Of course, she has nothing to do with this case, she’s just very like me and not at all like her mother - next to her she looks adopted. It’s amazing how very dissimilar children can be from their parents. I was thinking about it one day, and I was also thinking how very different your son -” he indicated Mrs Telak again - “looks compared with you or your husband. Sometimes it’s just tiny gestures, using similar phrases, a manner of intonation, things that aren’t noticeable in a conscious way that bear witness to kinship. And suddenly it leaped out - I had both your interviews before my eyes.” He nodded towards Kwiatkowska and Jarczyk. “Two completely different people, different types of appearance, different - now I think perhaps deliberately exaggerated - ways of talking. Yet the identical sight defect - a slight astigmatism - and a one hundred-percent identical way of adjusting your spectacles. Leaning your heads to the left, frowning and blinking, straightening the frames with both hands, and ending by pressing them to your nose with your thumb.
“As we’re on the subject of my daughter,” said the prosecutor, smiling at the thought of his little princess, “fathers and daughters are linked by an exceptional, special bond. That also set me thinking, when during our one conversation you leaped on me to defend Miss Kwiatkowska. In the first instant I thought you were lovers, only later did I understand. As often happens when some things go wrong, everything does. When some things start to fall into place, everything else does too. At the same time, it turned out Henryk Telak was mixed up in Kamil Sosnowski’s murder, though he didn’t do it with his own hands - perhaps that case will be passed on for a separate hearing, and you’ll be interviewed again.” Szacki was lying through his teeth - he knew nothing would be ‘passed on for a separate hearing’, and even if it was, the matter would be hushed up within a week. The whole time he took great care not to say or let any of the others say anything that could mean he’d have to launch an inquiry into the murder case from the past.
“The police checked the civil-registry files. Barbara Jarczyk, born in 1945, and Włodzimierz Sosnowski, born in 1944, got married young, in 1964, when she was only just nineteen. A year later their son Kamil was born. The same year Euzebiusz Kaim was born too, his later friend at primary school, high school and college. The boys were five when Hanna Sosnowska was born. When Kamil died tragically in September 1987, his family went abroad - is that right?”
Rudzki shrugged.
“What else could we do in that situation?”
“They probably came back in the mid-1990s, because that’s when the next entries appear in the civil registry. Barbara and Włodzimierz Sosnowski got divorced. She went back to her maiden name. He became Cezary Rudzki - the officials had no problem acceding to his request because Mr Sosnowski had published under that pseudonym before 1989 and had also used that name in France. Hanna Sosnowska married Marcin Kwiatkowski, but her marriage didn’t last long; they divorced in 1998, but she kept her husband’s name. I don’t know if all this name-shuffling resulted from the fact that you were already planning your revenge then, or whether it was an accident that later turned out to be an unexpected gift.”
“The latter,” said Rudzki.
“As I suspected. As for Mr Kaim, in the first instant, when I read the death notice from 1987 signed ‘Zibi’, I didn’t twig at all that it could come from the name ‘Euzebiusz’ - after all, ‘Zibi’ was the nickname of Zbigniew Boniek, the football player, and sometimes it’s short for Zygmunt. Only later, when I hit upon the idea that you were all tied together, did I remember the name ‘Zibi’. The police easily checked where you were at school and college, and with whom. Your friends confirmed that you and Kamil were practically joined at the hip. Am I right?”
Kaim smiled and made a gesture as if removing the hat from his head.
“I hang my hat up to you,” he said.
“The phrase is ‘take my hat off to you’, birdbrain,” muttered Kwiatkowska.
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki didn’t feel like saying more. He knew one of the people present would leave the gloomy room in handcuffs. He’d have to press charges on the others too, but for the mental harassment of Telak and for obstructing the inquiry rather than for collaborating in murder. After all, only one of them had run into Telak that night, only one of them had killed him. The rest, even if they had desired his death and wanted to cause it, did not take a direct part in it. But there was another reason why Szacki didn’t feel like saying more - yet again, his human conscience had clashed painfully with his civil servant’s conscience. He thought of Kamil Sosnowski’s corpse - the bloody body in the bathtub, with his hands and feet tied from behind. He thought of the body of Kasia Telak, stuffed full of pills. He thought of Bartek Telak, rapidly heading towards the end of his life. He believed the girl would not have died or the boy fallen ill if it weren’t for the terrible deed their father had once let happen, cynically and with calculation, in order to win their mother. How had it happened? Then, in the 1980s? He couldn’t ask about that. Not now. He wasn’t even free to mention it.
“Can we sit down now?” asked Kaim.
“No,” replied Szacki. “Because we still don’t know the answer to the most important question. And Mr Rudzki hasn’t finished his statement.” At the last moment he bit his tongue because he almost said “his story”.
“I’d prefer to do it sitting down,” said the therapist, and looked at Szacki in a way that made the prosecutor frown. Something wasn’t right. Something definitely wasn’t right. He felt he might be losing his grip on it all, that Rudzki was planning a dodge he couldn’t control, but it would be preserved on tape and he’d never be able to hush any of it up. Concentrate, Teodor, he kept telling himself. He agreed to let them sit down, in order to gain time. Soon they were sitting in a semicircle, so that the camera could see all of them. But Szacki was imperceptibly starting to tremble, because he still didn’t know what was wrong.
“The whole idea was mine,” Rudzki began. “It was I, through a totally incredible accident, who found out why my son had been killed and by whom. At first I tried to come to terms with it, to rationalize it - after all, I am a trained psychologist, the time I’ve spent supervising patients adds up to years by now. But I couldn’t - I couldn’t. Then I simply wanted to kill him - go and shoot him and forget about it. But that would have been too simple. My son was t
ortured for two days, and that bastard was going to die in a split second? Impossible.
“I thought about it at length, at great length. How to do it to make him suffer. Suffer so much that he’d finally decide on his own death, being unable to take the pain any more. So I thought up the therapy. I knew it might not work, that Telak wouldn’t commit suicide, and would go home as if nothing had happened. And I agreed to that. I agreed, because I knew that after the therapy he would go on suffering like that for ever.
“That night I couldn’t get to sleep. I walked up and down my room and wondered: has he done it? Has he swallowed the pills yet? Has he gone to sleep yet? Is he dead yet? Finally I went out into the corridor and crept up to his door. It was quiet. I was revelling in that silence, when I heard a rush of running water, and Telak came out of the bathroom at the far end of the corridor. He was pale, but unarguably alive. He frowned when he saw me, and asked what I was doing at his door. I lied, saying I was worried about him. He didn’t comment, but just said he was breaking off the therapy and getting as far as bloody well possible from this whole fucking shambles - I’m sorry, but I’m quoting him.
“And he went into the room for his suitcase. I didn’t know what to do. Not only was he still alive, he didn’t even look like someone dying of pain and guilt. It had all flowed off that bastard like water off a duck’s back. I went into the kitchen to have a drink of water and calm down, and I saw that skewer… beyond that I can hardly remember a thing, my brain refuses to admit those images. I went to the classroom, and he was there. I think I tried to explain to him why I was doing this and who I really am, but when I saw that hateful face, that cynical glint in his eye, that mocking sneer… I just struck out. Oh God, forgive me for doing it. Forgive me for not feeling guilty. Forgive me, Jadwiga, for murdering the father of your children, regardless of who he was.”
With a dramatic gesture, Cezary Rudzki - or rather Włodzimierz Sosnowski - hid his face in his hands. Now the room should have been filled with a silence thick enough to cut and impale on a skewer, but it was the middle of the city. An old Fiat 126 was rattling its way down Łazienkowska Street, a clapped-out Ikarus bus came to a noisy halt at the bus stop near the church, the Vistula Highway roared monotonously, someone’s heels clattered, and a child cried as its mother told it off - but even so Teodor Szacki could hear everything clicking into place in his head. The human conscience and the prosecutor’s conscience, he thought, then hesitated, but only for a millisecond, before nodding to Kuzniecow, who stood up and switched off the camera. Then he went out and soon returned with two policemen in uniform, who led Rudzki away.
Without handcuffs, in spite of everything.
12
Monday, 18th July 2005
International Courts and Prosecution Day. Abroad, a court in Belgrade sentences the notorious Milorad “Legija” Ulemek to forty years in prison for assassinating the Prime Minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjić, in 2003. Saddam Hussein is formally charged at last, for the time being with the extermination of a Shi’ite village in 1982. Roman Polanski testifies from Paris to a London court in a case against Vanity Fair, which wrote that straight after the tragic death of his wife, Sharon Tate, he had tried to seduce a Swedish beauty queen. In Poland a court in Wrocław bans a publishing company from printing Mein Kampf, and the Prosecution Service in Białystok charges left-wing politician Aleksandra Jakubowska with falsifying a draft media law. In Warsaw the prosecutor demands a life sentence for a former shop assistant accused of a mysterious murder at a shop called “Ultimo”. Her lawyer calls for an acquittal. Apart from that, on Stawki Street a plaque is unveiled in honour of the Home Army soldiers who liberated nearly fifty Jews during the first few hours of the Warsaw Uprising, and the Zachęta Gallery decides to advertise itself via sweets that will be sold in grocery shops. The Palace of Culture and Science is getting ready for a big fête on 22nd July, when it will be fifty years old. Twenty-five degrees, no rain and actually cloudless.
I
It was a few minutes after three p.m. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was sitting in his office, revelling in the silence, which had fallen the moment his colleague had rushed off to take her child to an allergy expert. He had made no comment. Her departure meant he didn’t have to go on listening to Katie Melua oozing out of her computer (“I hope it won’t disturb you if it’s just on very quietly?”) and the conversations she had with her mother on the phone (“So tell them that for eight hundred zlotys you can carve the letters on Daddy’s stone yourself. Tell them that. Crooks, bodysnatchers, grave robbers”).
Exactly a month ago Cezary Rudzki had been taken away by the police from the monastery on Łazienkowska Street. A few days later Szacki had interrogated him in the “inquiry against Cezary Rudzki”. The therapist had repeated word for word what he had said in front of the camera in the classroom, and the prosecutor had written it all down precisely, pretending to accept it all as the honest truth. However, he did have to ask why Rudzki was so convinced of Telak’s guilt. What did he know about the background to his son’s murder?
“As I said earlier, it was an accident, one of the thousands of inexplicable coincidences that we run into every day,” said Rudzki, dressed in beige prison uniform in the interview room at the remand centre on Rakowiecka Street. He looked a hundred years old, and not even a hint of his proud posture and piercing gaze was left. “I was giving therapy to a man suffering from bone cancer, in the terminal stage, and three months later he died. The man was poor, from the lower social orders, and I took him on for free as a favour for a friend at the Oncology Institute. He wanted to confess to someone. He was a criminal, a petty one really, petty and careful enough never to have ended up behind bars. He really only had one sin on his conscience - he had taken part in the murder of my son. He may not have laid hands on him directly, but he and the murderer had broken into our flat together, he had witnessed the torture and the killing. He shook with fear, he claimed they’d only been paid to frighten him and rough him up, but in the end his ‘boss’ had decided they had to rub Kamil out ‘just in case’. It was a shock. I came completely unstuck before this bandit, and told him who I was - we cried together for hours. He promised to help me find his ‘contractor’. He gave me an exact description of him, and all the circumstances of their meetings, all their conversations. He said it might have been about a woman, because one time the contractor had let it escape that ‘now he’d be able to get her’. At once I thought of Jadwiga - Kamil was madly in love with her, though she was a few years older than him. I found her and also took Telak’s photo. The man recognized him one hundred and twenty per cent.”
Teodor Szacki wrote down the suspect’s lies word for word, without so much as batting an eyelid. Rudzki signed the statement, also without the slightest wince. They both knew the danger to their families if the truth were revealed - and above all if an inquiry were initiated. However, when it was all over Szacki told the old therapist what he knew about Henryk Telak’s work in the Communist security services, about the “department of death” and about the still-operative SB organization. And asked for the truth.
The patient with bone cancer was real, so was his guilt and his confession. The accidentally overheard remark about how “now he’d be able to get her” was also true. But the instruction was different. They were supposed to terrify and rough up the boy “as firmly as possible” - which was tantamount to an order to kill - so that his father would desist from activities that could damage state security. They were persuaded that it was a matter of the highest importance, that they’d be heroes, that perhaps they’d be secretly decorated. They didn’t give a shit about being decorated. For carrying out the job they got a pile of cash and a guarantee of impunity, and could also plunder from the flat anything that took their fancy. At the start, when no specifics were mentioned, they had met with three officers, including Telak. Then Telak had seen them twice more on his own. He had given them all the details, the exact date and time, and instructed them how they were to
tie him up and hurt him.
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