The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  ‘That was all it was. A memento.’

  ‘Thank God we didn’t have an affair at a Best Western.’

  ‘Jesus, Sarah. What is it with you?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m busy, that’s all and I don’t have time for any mawkish saunters down memory lane.’

  Ben said nothing, but hunched in his chair and pulled the kind of face that men pull when they think that women are being impossible.

  Sarah opened her briefcase and took out a sheaf of ground plans and computer-generated architectural impressions. ‘I just want to go over the completion schedules first. There may be some delay with the conference floor because of the way the ceiling’s suspended. The building regs people have raised about seven pages of technical queries.’

  ‘In Polish, I suppose.’

  ‘No, in double-Dutch. What do you think?’

  ‘Have you talked to them about it? Do they know what kind of money is involved, if they ask for any alterations?’

  ‘You might say that I’ve made it more than abundantly clear.’

  ‘Well, make it clearer. You’re good at that kind of thing.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re going to budge. Not on safety.’

  ‘What you mean is, you’ve chickened out of trying to budge them?’

  ‘Ben – we’re talking about a 400-ton concrete ceiling suspended above an area where 1,800 people are going to be congregating.’

  ‘And you don’t think that our architects have thought about that? This building is so over-engineered it’s going to last for two hundred years. Who’s in charge of building regulations?’

  ‘A man called Gawlak. But I don’t think –’

  Ben raised a hand to stop her. ‘Leave it to me, okay? I’ll show him the full structural analysis.’

  ‘I’ve already done that.’

  ‘No offence meant, but I always think that technical assessments are a whole lot more convincing when they come from a man. A guy, rather. Guys don’t worry about petty nuisances like building regulations.’

  Sarah was about to give him a scathing answer when her mobile phone rang.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded, still staring at Ben, her eyes saying what her mouth couldn’t.

  ‘It’s Jozef Brzezicki here. I have a problem. The police say we can continue with the work, but the men won’t do it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘They refuse. They say there’s a devil.’

  Sarah momentarily closed her eyes in exasperation. ‘A devil? Are you serious?’

  ‘They say that Kaminski was killed by a devil, and they won’t go near the site.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be right across. Don’t let any of your men leave.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Just a little labour relations problem. Are you coming?’

  Ben glanced across the bar at the waitress, who was bending over to pick up a fallen table mat. ‘I don’t know. Let me finish this drink first. I’ll be over in a while.’

  *

  At the demolition site, Jozef Brzezicki and his thirty-five workers were standing outside the huts, arguing with each other. Brzezicki was a huge grizzled man with a face like a dried-up swede. He wore a battered red hard hat and a pair of baggy blue overalls, with every conceivable kind of wrench, screwdriver, ruler and spanner crammed into his pockets.

  Sarah walked right into the centre of the crowd of men and looked around at them with obvious annoyance. One or two of them coughed and looked away. Only a short, weatherbeaten man in a checkered shirt and blue jeans, returned her stare.

  ‘All right, then, what’s the problem?’ she demanded.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ said the man in the check shirt. ‘We can’t carry on until somebody gets rid of it.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Sarah asked him.

  ‘Tadek will do.’

  ‘So what it is that you’re afraid of, Tadek?’

  ‘That poor bastard Kaminski had his head cut off.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But the police have searched the sewers and whoever did it has gone. You don’t seriously think that he’s still going to be hanging around here, do you? And besides, there are two dozen of you and only one of him.’

  ‘Except that it’s not a “him”,’ Tadek retorted. He spat onto the ground.

  ‘You mean it could be a “her”?’

  There was a burst of derisory laughter. Brzezicki’s men liked Sarah, but they had a very ambivalent attitude to being bossed around by a young woman. Behind her back, they called her ‘the Ayatollah’.

  ‘He means it’s an “it”,’ said an older man standing close beside Tadek. ‘He means it’s a devil.’

  ‘You really believe that?’ asked Sarah. ‘Come on, Mr Brzezicki. This is almost the 21st century.’

  ‘This isn’t superstition. It’s true. You can ask anybody.’

  ‘I’m not asking anybody. I’m asking you. Exactly what is this devil, and where does it come from?’

  ‘On the TV, they call it the Executioner,’ said Brzezicki. ‘That’s just a name. It doesn’t really have a name. It was supposed to live in people’s cellars, places like that. They found one living in a cellar in the Old Town once, before the war, that’s what my mother told me. It would come out at night and cut off people’s heads.’

  ‘Tadek, there is no such thing.’

  ‘Oh, yes? Tell that to Jan Kaminski. You tell that to all those other people who got themselves killed.’

  Sarah turned to Brzezicki, who was standing with his arms folded, placidly smoking. ‘I’m sorry about this, but you’ll have to get them back to work. We’ve lost a day already.’

  Brzezicki shrugged. ‘They won’t do it, Ms Leonard. Don’t you think I’ve tried?’

  ‘All they have to is replace the broken sewer pipe... then it won’t matter if there are fifty devils down there, they won’t be able to get out.’

  ‘Sorry, they won’t go near it.’

  ‘In that case I’ll find somebody who will, and you and all your gang of girls can consider yourselves sacked.’

  Brzezicki shook his head. ‘That won’t do any good, Ms Leonard. You can ask as many other demolition companies as you like. They won’t do the work, either, once they find out what’s happened here. I told you: this isn’t superstition. If we refused to stick our fingers into an electric point, you wouldn’t call that superstitious, would you? And you wouldn’t call us girls.’

  ‘I don’t believe this! These are grown men and this is the middle of the most modern city in eastern Europe. And they’re afraid of a devil?’

  Brzezicki said, ‘You don’t think it’s strange that they believe in God, do you? Why should you think it’s strange that they believe in devils?’

  ‘Oh, spare me,’ said Sarah.

  At that moment, Ben came walking across the site with his hands in his pockets. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Are we having a union meeting here?’

  ‘They won’t carry on working,’ Sarah explained. ‘They think that there’s a devil down in that sewer and they won’t go near it.’

  ‘A devil? You mean, like a demon-type devil? With horns and a tail and a pitchfork?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘I threatened to sack them. But they say there’s no chance of us finding any replacement labour.’

  ‘And why is that, may I ask?’

  ‘Because, apparently, all Polish workmen believe in this devil.’

  Ben turned around, and approached Brzezicki. ‘You in charge here?’ he asked him.

  ‘Jozef Brzezicki, yes.’

  ‘And do you believe in this devil?’

  Brzezicki pulled a non-committal shrug.

  ‘What you’re saying is, Mr Brzezicki, that we wouldn’t be able to find any Polish workmen who didn’t believe in this devil?’

  Brzezicki pulled another, different, face.

  ‘In that case,’ said Ben, ‘I’ll just h
ave to find myself some Romanian workmen, won’t I? Or maybe some Albanians, or Bulgarians, or Russians?’

  ‘You’re welcome to try, sir,’ said Brzezicki, patiently. ‘But everybody knows this devil. Romanians, Russians, everybody. It’s a fact, not a story.’ He crossed himself, and all his spanners jingled. ‘Apart from that, you’ll run into some pretty big trouble with the trade union.’

  ‘You’re going to strike, is that it?’

  ‘No,’ said Brzezicki. ‘These men are not on strike. This job is a good one and they don’t want to lose it.’

  ‘In that case tell them to get their asses back to work.’

  ‘They won’t... not until they know for sure that the devil is gone.’

  Ben turned back to Sarah. ‘Well, little Ms Genghis Khan, what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Brzezicki gave you the answer himself. They won’t work until they’re certain there’s no risk. So what we have to do is show them that we’ve chased their devil away.’

  ‘Did I miss a class on this at business college?’

  ‘Probably. It’s called getting your own way by appearing to make concessions.’

  ‘That’s funny. I thought it was called surrendering your common sense to supernatural claptrap.’

  Sarah beckoned to Brzezicki and said, ‘What if I offer your men a special bonus to seal off the sewer pipe?’

  Brzezicki talked to Tadek for a moment and then came back and shook his head. ‘This isn’t about money, Ms Leonard. The men are happy with their pay. But they’re afraid that the devil will find out who sealed it in the sewer, and hunt them down in their own homes.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Ben breathed.

  ‘What will it take, then?’ asked Sarah. ‘Another search of the sewers? An exorcism?’

  ‘Somebody has to find this thing and kill it and bring its body to the surface.’

  ‘Have you lost your marbles?’ Ben shouted at him, in English. ‘You’re holding up work on a multi-million dollar project because you’re afraid of some imaginary bogey-man; and now you’re telling me that you won’t start up again until you see this imaginary bogey-man’s body! What are you... kids?’

  ‘Ben,’ said Sarah, taking hold of his sleeve. ‘Yelling won’t do any good. Especially non-Polish yelling.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Sarah said, ‘These men may be afraid of an imaginary bogey-man, but somebody killed that guy last night and that somebody wasn’t imaginary. So let’s see what we can do to help Komisarz Rej to find his man.’

  ‘Oh, yes? How?’

  ‘We have to bring in our own detective, that’s how, and give him all the facilities he needs to find this homicidal fruitcake and hand him over to Komisarz Rej.’

  ‘And meanwhile this site stands idle?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘What do you take me for?’ said Sarah, under her breath. ‘We can bring in some German labourers until this is sorted out. They may be three times more expensive, but at least we’ll keep the project on schedule.’

  ‘What about the unions?’

  ‘I think I can handle the unions, thank you. They’re only men.’

  Ben looked around him, and then nodded. ‘Okay. But let’s get right on it, shall we? If this hotel opens one day late, these guys are going to wish their devil got to them first.’

  4

  Rej and Matejko met at the Pizza Hut on Widok. They sat at a corner table next to a twittering party of Italian nuns, and ordered a large meat feast pizza to share between them. If he expected to work late, Rej usually cut a big stack of salami sandwiches and ate them at his desk, but yesterday he had forgotten to buy himself any fresh bread.

  ‘So – how did you make out at Radio Syrena?’ Rej wanted to know.

  Matejko shook his head. ‘I didn’t get much. Kaminski’s boss knew that he was following up a couple of leads about the way in which foreign businesses have been bribing Polish government ministers, but that was all. He let me look through Kaminski’s desk, but there was nothing there. Only a few magazines and a couple of chocolate bars. But I found his address book. There could be something useful in that.’

  He produced a small, worn, green vinyl book, and passed it across the table. Rej flicked through it with a nicotine-stained thumb. ‘Check these out. See if any of these people were helping Kaminski prepare his report.’

  ‘I’ve had quick look already, and there are three or four possibles. Especially this one... Antoni Dlubak. He works for Vistula Kredytowy.’

  ‘That’s worth looking into. Vistula Kredytowy are jointly financing the Senate Hotel, aren’t they? Go talk to this Dlubak first. But be subtle, you know. I don’t want any doors to start slamming shut before we can find out what’s behind them. Who’s this – Hanna Peszka? Her name’s underlined about fifty times.’

  ‘That’s Kaminski’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh, right. The one who’s under sedation. When can we get to talk to her?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning should be okay. But I don’t think she can tell us anything. Kaminski put her on the 131 bus and that was the last time she saw him. We’ve found an old woman who saw him at the bus stop, too. She says that he was making stupid jokes. In fact she said that he was acting like a kretyn. She was the last person to speak to him before young Marek Maslowski found him trying to open the door into the demolition site.’

  Rej picked up a slice of pizza and unenthusiastically bit off the point. ‘There has to be a pattern somewhere. I just can’t believe that these people are being murdered for no logical reason at all.’

  He opened his worn-out briefcase and took out a folded map of the centre of the city. ‘I’ve been trying to work out if there’s any kind of geographical pattern. The furthest north, that was the taxi driver, he was killed at the junction of Wislostrada and Solidarnosei Avenue. The furthest south was the music student, found at Zelazna and Jerozolimskie Avenue. The doctor was the furthest west and the shop assistant was the furthest east. Just out of interest I drew intersecting lines between them and I ended up with one central location: the parking lot just beside the Central Station. It could be that our killer doesn’t actually live in the centre of Warsaw, but always arrives by train from one of the suburbs... or even from another town. But that would give him the problem of going home in the middle of the night with his clothing heavily stained in blood.’

  ‘He could have brought a suitcase with a change of clothes,’ Matejko suggested.

  ‘I don’t know... shit, it’s possible, but it doesn’t seem likely. Is anybody really going to go hunting for murder victims, carrying a suitcase? And where’s he going to change and wash, without ever being seen?’

  Rej swallowed more beer, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Next I tried to see if there was any kind of pattern to the time of night that these people were killed. Apart from the fact that they were all killed during the hours of darkness, there isn’t – well, none that I can see, anyhow. I’ve tried to draw connections between their ages, their professions, their school backgrounds, their places of work, their leisure interests, their part-time work activities, their religion, their banks, their medical history, their family trees... everything. So far, it still looks as if they were killed totally at random.’

  ‘You mean we’re looking for a psycho?’ asked Matejko.

  Rej continued to stare down at his map, his finger tracing lines between the seven red crosses which marked the place where each body had been found.

  ‘Even if he’s a psycho, he’ll still have a motive. You remember that headcase who murdered his wife and children in Zoliborz last year. He seriously believed that his real family had been taken away in a flying saucer and replaced by Martians? But I don’t think the Executioner is a psycho. I really have such a strong instinct about this one. There has to be a logical reason why these particular people were killed, even if we can’t see it. Even if it’s just some kind of disgusting ritual, you know?’

  ‘Maybe we should talk to a psychiatrist,’ Matejko sugges
ted.

  Rej finished off his beer and lit another cigarette. ‘Maybe we should wonder what he was doing in the sewer pipe when Kaminski went down there.’

  ‘Well, Kaminski was supposed to be looking for a crying child, wasn’t he? Maybe he was doing something to the child.’

  ‘But we searched that section of the sewers and we didn’t find any child.’

  ‘You found a doll.’

  ‘Oh, sure. But that could have come from anywhere. Some kid might have flushed it down the toilet. You know, sending it off on a big adventure. They do things like that, kids.’

  ‘Maybe he killed Kaminski and then took the child away with him.’

  ‘That’s conceivable. But we haven’t had any reports of a child going missing in that area, and it really doesn’t answer the main question, does it? What the hell was he doing down in the sewer in the first place?’

  ‘Hiding, I suppose.’ Matejko shrugged. ‘The same way the Resistance used to hide from the Nazis. You can go all the way across town without ever coming to the surface.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘Maybe he’s always in the sewers.’

  Rej looked down at his map again, his finger tapping thoughtfully on the table. ‘That’s a very interesting idea, Matejko. I mean, nobody has ever witnessed this man murdering anybody, have they? And more to the point, we’ve had seven murders, seven beheadings with litres of blood pumping out everywhere, right in the city centre, and yet nobody has ever reported seeing a man in heavily blood-stained clothing anywhere near any of the crime scenes. He wouldn’t need to carry a change of clothing, would he, if he simply escaped down the sewers?’

  Matejko said, ‘I’ll see if I can get hold of somebody from the sewage department. We’re going to need a map, aren’t we, to see if there’s access to the main sewers at each of the crime scenes.’

  ‘That’s right. And then we’re going to have to do some extremely disgusting searching.’

  They looked down at the remains of their meat feast pizza. Usually, they would have eaten all of it, even if they weren’t particularly hungry, because it cost so much. But they both pushed their plates away, and Rej raised his hand to the waitress and said, ‘Check, please, miss.’