by Jane Gorman
“I’m sorry, Angela.” Adam smiled at her sadly. “You are a great woman, and in another time, perhaps. But you’re right, right now I’m worried about Sylvia. I got her involved in all this and now I don’t even know where she is.”
Angela nodded, but she frowned. “We all have to make choices, Adam. And sometimes that means living with the choices someone else makes.” She finished her drink and stood. “I wish you luck, Adam Kaminski, I think you’re going to need it.”
Adam smiled and looked up at her.
“Maybe I’ll see you in the morning before we leave?”
“Maybe, but let’s say goodbye now.”
Angela smiled one more time and put her hand on his shoulder. “Goodbye, then.”
Standing that morning outside Sylvia’s apartment, Adam could still see the image in his mind of Angela walking gracefully out of the bar. She would soon be safe at home, back in Philadelphia. Now it was time to worry about Sylvia’s safety. He had dragged her into this mess. He couldn’t live with himself if she had been hurt because of him.
His attempts to get into Sylvia’s building as other tenants left were not getting him anywhere. Even if he could get into the building, he still hadn’t figured out how he’d get into her apartment anyway.
Finally giving up, he turned his collar against the chill and started the fifteen minute walk back up Ulica Miodowa to Aleje Jerozolimskie and his hotel. Hopefully, Sylvia was at work. He could call from the hotel to confirm that.
Adam worked his way around groups gathering on the sidewalk. Parents with small children, another group of university students, a cluster of middle-aged women all stopped along the sidewalk and turned to watch the street. Weaving through the crowd, Adam couldn’t at first identify the cause of the gatherings.
As he moved farther up Aleje Jerozolimskie and the crowd grew denser, he started to hear the music. A faint thread of a traditional Polish fiddle carried over the air first, followed by the sounds of the rest of the small musical group marching at the front of the parade.
It wasn’t a huge parade. As Adam watched, the quartet passed by, followed by men and women dressed in the garb of Polish górali, or mountain folk. Next up were a group of men and women in what appeared to be military gear, carrying flags of Poland, Warsaw and the regions around Warsaw.
Craning his neck to see over the crowds, Adam could just make out the banners carried by the rest of the participants. SLD. The parade was supporting the candidates of the party to the national legislature.
Parade participants walked in groups, divided by the region of Poland they were from and holding signs that identified the labor groups they supported: nurses, teachers, truck drivers. Adam watched all this with interest, surprised to see such an overtly socialist parade.
The number of university students gathering around him grew. Turning, Adam found himself surrounded by young men. One of the young men raised a hand and shouted toward the parade. Adam didn’t recognize the words. Soon other young men were shouting, and it was clear they were not calling out their support for the parade.
As the shouting grew more intense, Adam leaned over to one of the students. “Hey, do you speak English?”
The young man blinked in surprise and looked up at Adam. “Of course.”
“Good.” Adam nodded, ignoring the man’s arrogance. “What’s going on, what are you shouting?”
“They are the SLD. They want the government to pay them even when they don’t work. They want to go back to the old way of doing things, where the government took care of us, but we had no power, no control.”
“So this is a political statement?” Adam asked.
“Of course.” The man shrugged, then turned away from Adam. Cupping his hands around his mouth he shouted, “Wracaja praca!” Turning to Adam with a smile and a wink, he shouted again, “Go back to work!”
Adam moved a little way up the street.
As the number of students grew, police showed up on scene. They formed a line between the protesters and the parade participants, ready to block any attempts at aggression on the part of the students. Looking around the crowd, Adam didn’t think there was going to be trouble. The students who were shouting were smiling and laughing. They were having fun — at the marchers’ expense, perhaps, but fun all the same.
The young man Adam had questioned ran across the street, followed by a small group of friends. They entered a university building that looked out over the parade route. A few minutes later, a white T-shirt flew out of a second-story window and dangled in the air. The shirt had a crude painting on the front in red ink. “SLD,” it read.
The students who had flung the shirt out the window had taken precautions to ensure that anyone watching knew they were not supporting SLD. The shirt dangled from the window on a rope, and the rope was tied with a hangman’s noose. It was literally hung in effigy.
When the audience saw the shirt, everyone laughed. It seemed like a congenial atmosphere. One older woman walking by commented to her friend that the students were being stupid, and some of the marchers made rude gestures toward the students, but there was no threat of violence that Adam could pick up.
After a few more minutes, the marchers passed by and the police moved on with the parade.
That was when the fighting started.
A man from the audience jumped up onto the outside of the university building and tried to grab at the T-shirt, climbing precariously up the outside of the building. He lunged at the shirt but failed to catch it. Others from the crowd surrounded him, chanting, some encouraging him and others trying to stop him.
The man lunged one last time at the shirt, catching it with both hands. Losing his grip on the building itself, the man swung from the building holding onto the shirt. Holding onto the hangman’s noose.
Adam stepped forward. Someone was going to get hurt and there were no police around. As he moved, his eyes were on the young man hanging from the building and the group of students surrounding him. He didn’t notice the person coming up behind him.
The first punch hit him hard in the kidney. He grunted and fought the urge to bend forward, instead stepping fast to his left. The second punch landed on his arm.
Adam turned to face his attacker and recognized him immediately as the man who had attacked Łukasz in the alley behind Pod Jaszczurami. Adam saw his own handiwork in the nasty cut still healing across the man’s nose. Make that men — his smaller companion was standing just behind him. Glancing quickly over the crowd, without taking his attention from the large man facing him, Adam thought he caught a glimpse of his third friend with the knife. This wasn’t going to be a fight he could win.
The shouts from the group of students got louder and angrier. The man who had been hanging from the building had finally let go, landing with a thud onto the hard pavement. Some of his friends had come to his aid; other students were coming forward with anything but aid in their minds. One was brandishing a wooden pole, taken from the signs that had been carried by the marchers.
Adam looked back at his attacker and the man grinned. His teeth were gray and uneven. He ran his tongue over them roughly as he smiled.
“Shit,” Adam thought to himself.
He turned and ran toward the group of students, intentionally knocking over the man brandishing the stick. The man stumbled, then turned toward Adam, anger plastered over his face.
“Hej, kurwa,” he spat out and stepped menacingly toward Adam.
Adam ducked and ran past him into the crowd of students. His preference was always to face anyone attacking him. Running was rarely the right idea. In this case, however, given the odds, he figured it was his only option.
The young man with the stick started to follow him, but was blocked by another group of students busy dumping out a trash can onto the street. Glancing back, Adam saw his attackers trying to move through the crowd of students. By hitting and pushing the students out of their way, they were only managing to get involved in the brawl that was st
arting on the street. For each young man they pushed out of their way, two more stepped up to confront them.
Adam turned away again and slipped down a side street, then another, and kept going.
43
Leaning back against the rough brick wall of a small grocery store, Adam looked back the way he had come. The street was empty. The sounds of the fighting a few blocks away carried over the air, and any residents or shoppers who might otherwise have been out were safely tucked away at home or behind closed doors.
Adam waited, thinking. He couldn’t just hide here. He needed to find out if Sylvia was safe. Was she simply at work, behind locked doors and armed guards? Or had something happened to her?
Rather than retracing his steps, Adam moved forward. Narrow cobblestone streets filled this old part of the city, each occasionally taking an unexpected twist or turn. As he walked, he checked doorways and gaps between the houses to make sure no one was hiding, waiting for him. He also kept an eye out for good hiding places if he needed them.
Eventually, Adam found his way back to Aleje Jerozolimskie. Stepping onto the sidewalk, Adam saw the group of people to his right.
The police had finally gotten involved in the fighting, it seemed, and had managed to calm everyone down. Now Adam could see a number of uniformed officers taking control of the crowd. He didn’t see his attackers in the crowd, but he knew they’d still be looking for him.
The hotel stood just across the street. Moving quickly, Adam skirted around a bus shelter, leaned into a parked van, staying close to any structure he could find in an attempt to stay hidden. It didn’t work. He should’ve known he was too big to hide.
A shout from the crowd to his right got his attention, and he turned to see a young man pointing directly at him. He recognized him as the man who had tried to tear down the white T-shirt. He was pointing at Adam and speaking excitedly to one of the police officers in the group. That officer starting walking toward Adam.
Knowing better than to run from the police, Adam changed directions and went to meet the officer with a slight feeling of relief. Perhaps someone had seen the attack and the police were finally ready to help him. He was tired of trying to do this on his own without any official help. He wasn’t used to working around the law.
As he approached him, the Polish officer put his hand on his nightstick. Adam saw the movement and tensed. Something was wrong.
Another officer had seen Adam as well and was talking into a radio. As that officer stepped to the side, Adam saw the body.
The small man, part of the team who had attacked him, lay in the street, blood pooling around his back. The knife still sticking up out of the wound.
Adam stopped moving. This wasn’t right. How could that man have been stabbed? He knew who had had that knife. He assumed they had been working together.
As Adam paused, uncertain, the Polish officer grabbed him by the arm and swung him around, pushing him against a car parked along the street.
Adam twisted as he fell, trying to see more of the crime scene, to figure out what had happened.
“You are an American, no?” the officer said in broken English. “You think our law does not apply to you?” He spat on the ground at Adam’s feet as he spoke.
“No, officer, there’s been a mistake. I didn’t hurt that man. I don’t even know that man.”
Even as he spoke, Adam thought about the night in the alley with Łukasz. He hadn’t hit the small man, had he? Would they find his blood on Adam’s coat? His eye fell again on the knife, and Adam understood clearly.
He had held that knife the day before. He had picked it up off the ground in the cemetery. Adam knew without any doubt that when the police tested it, they would find his fingerprints all over that knife.
“You will come with us now, Mr. American,” the officer was saying. “You will not be going back home to your America now.”
Adam was no longer listening. His eyes had focused on the small piece of metal pinned to the officer’s uniform. A tiny version of a medal. Saint Casimir. Just like the Philly cop at the funeral.
All of Adam’s muscles tensed and his vision started going black, heat rising in his face with his anger. He had to keep control. He couldn’t let himself go back to that cemetery. Back to the guilt.
His thoughts flashed to Łukasz, still in the hospital. Was he alive? Was he safe? He thought of Sylvia. God only knew where she was, who was with her.
He couldn’t let himself get arrested. There was too much at stake. Too much out of control. No way he could trust this cop.
Adam took a deep breath then let himself relax. He leaned forward into the car. To his right, he saw another officer approaching, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. Adam nodded to himself, braced himself, and kicked out backwards.
He caught the officer by surprise and the man stepped back. He didn’t release his hold on Adam, but he gave Adam enough space to twist to the left. Adam grabbed the officer’s arm as he twisted and, with a sharp movement, threw the officer back against the car. It had only taken a few seconds. The second officer started running toward them and Adam took off, back up the alley he had come from.
44
The humming was soft but constant. Eventually overwhelming. He lay still, first trying to ignore it, then trying to identify it. He couldn’t block it out. Whether he focused on the sound or tried to think about something else, there was only room in his head for the sound.
Humming, buzzing, broken on regular intervals by a squeak and the sound of air escaping.
It grated on his ears, rang in his head. He just wanted to go back to sleep. His arms, his legs, his whole body ached. But the sound was too much. He couldn’t take it any more.
Łukasz opened his eyes and tried to sit up in the bed. Hospital equipment surrounded him. Cables and wires stretched from digital displays, pumps and IV bags into his arms and his chest. He looked like a machine himself. He felt like he was tied down.
The room was dim, the hallway beyond his room dark and quiet. All he could hear was the constant humming. Buzzing.
He pulled at a thick cable that lay near his pillow and a remote control slid toward his hand. At least turning the TV on blocked out the maddening humming. Barely.
Łukasz kept the volume turned low. He was alone in the room and he liked it that way. No reason to alert the nurses he was awake. He needed to think.
Someone had tried to kill him. Again.
He had seen the driver of the vehicle before it hit him. He shivered as he remembered the man’s face: hard, rough, flat, uninterested. Adam had been right. This was a killer for hire. He had no interest in Łukasz, he had no anger or joy. He was simply doing a job.
The screen of the TV lit the room in shades of blue and gray, as if the whole room were underwater. Łukasz watched the shadows dancing across the foot of the bed, not paying attention to the images on the screen that were creating the shadows.
Novosad, he thought. It must be Novosad. With his connections to the Russian mafia, he would have had the opportunity to hire a former member of the Polish secret police. Or even KGB. The man had looked like KGB. Would Malak or Kapral even know how to contact such a person? Łukasz thought it unlikely.
“Kaminski.” The word cut through his thoughts, bringing him back to the present.
Łukasz heard the name and glanced around, but the room remained empty. Then his eyes turned to the TV and the news announcer who was speaking. “The police are looking for Adam Kaminski, an American visiting Poland. He is wanted for questioning in connection with this murder.”
The image behind the anchorman showed the scene earlier that afternoon along Aleje Jerozolimskie, the crowd of students, the ambulance carrying away a stretcher covered in a white sheet.
Łukasz focused on the TV now, absorbing every detail the media was sharing. Grabbing the remote, he flipped through channels, hearing other versions, other perspectives.
A man had been killed, that much was clear. Stabbed that afternoon d
uring a parade. The man had been declared dead on arrival at the hospital. And Adam Kaminski was wanted for questioning in connection with the stabbing.
Łukasz dropped the remote. He thought he had problems. He had only been hit by a car. Adam had been hit by something much worse.
He grunted and swung his legs off the bed. Grabbing at the wires and lines that snaked across his body, he pulled. Some came away easily, tiny detectors glued to his chest, back and arms popped off. The IV line was harder. He grimaced as the line came out, like bugs crawling under his skin.
Finally free, he slapped at his arm to stop the itching as he stood cautiously, holding onto the bed. Then he waited.
Nothing happened, no one came running.
He heard another TV, distant, the sound faintly carrying down the hall. The nurses were otherwise occupied, he assumed. Not overly concerned about their patient.
Łukasz took that as a good sign. No one was expecting him to die of his injuries any time soon.
His left arm was in a cast, and with his right he could feel a thick bandage stuck to his forehead. His chest and sides hurt when he breathed, but by holding his arm tight against his body, he could move without too much pain.
He walked softly to the open door and peered down the long hallway. Flickering lights six doors down revealed the room the nurses were using as their break room. He stepped out of his room and turned in the other direction.
He was a few yards down the hall when someone came around a corner ahead, walking directly toward him. A doctor, dressed in the green scrubs and white lab coat of his profession. The man walked slowly, reading notes from a clipboard as he walked. He hadn’t even noticed Łukasz yet.
There was nowhere for Łukasz to hide, no open door to duck into. Instead, he stood up straight, pulled his hospital robe tighter around his pajamas, and picked up his pace. He walked confidently past the young doctor.
The doctor looked up as they passed in the hall. Łukasz smiled briefly and nodded, then kept walking. The doctor returned his gaze to his clipboard.