A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  He reckoned he’d had enough of this expedition now, on top of which he had noticed a sea monster wrapped about a small round skylight. Here was Leviathan, the spirit of death and destruction, surrounding a patch of grey light as if it were the entrance to its underwater kingdom, and Roman became ill at ease. He felt a sudden need to get out of the archive, but just then, from the corner of his eye, he noticed something moving on the other side of the aperture. He shoved his head inside the monster, but he couldn’t see much through the dirty glass.

  On the far side of the room a floorboard creaked. Roman jumped, painfully banging his head against the wall. He cursed and crawled away from the skylight. There was another creak.

  “Hello, is there anyone there?”

  He shone the torch in all directions, but all he could see were registers, dust and signs of the zodiac.

  This time something creaked right next to him. Roman gasped aloud. It took him a while to calm his breathing. Fantastic, he thought, I should treat myself to even less sleep and even more coffee.

  At an energetic pace he followed the metal walkway towards the steep stairs; there was a thin railing separating him from the dark hole yawning between the staircase and the wall. As the top level of the scaffolding was also the level of the windows that admitted light into the hall, he passed some very strange contraptions used for opening and cleaning them. They looked like small drawbridges, now raised to the vertical position. To get to the windows, you had to release a thick rope and lower the bridge so that it reached across to the window alcove. Roman thought it rather a curious mechanism – after all, neither the scaffolding housing the records, nor indeed the thick walls of the synagogue were likely to be going anywhere, so they could have been kept permanently lowered. Now it made him think of a battleship with raised gangways, ready to set sail. He swept the entire structure with the beam of his torch and walked towards the stairs. He had only taken a single step when a mighty bang filled the room, a shock ran through the staircase, and he lost his balance, only failing to tumble down the stairs because he seized the railing with both hands. The torch fell from his grip, bounced off the floor twice and went out.

  As he straightened up, his heart was beating with dizzying speed. Quickly, feeling slightly hysterical, he inspected his surroundings. The drawbridge he had walked past had fallen. He gazed at it, breathing heavily. Finally he burst out laughing. He must have accidentally disturbed something. Physics – yes; metaphysics – no. All quite simple, really. Whatever, it was the last time he was going to work after dark among all these great-great-grand-corpses.

  He blindly groped his way up to the drawbridge and grabbed the rope to pull it vertical again. Of course it was jammed. Swearing like a trooper, he crawled up to the window alcove on his knees. The window looked out onto the same bushes as the aperture guarded by the sea monster.

  The world outside was now the only source of light, and it was extremely feeble light. Inside it was almost impossible to see a thing, and outside the break of day was changing into a springtime, still timid dawn; out of the darkness loomed trees, the bottom of the ravine surrounding the old town, the villas built on the opposite side of the escarpment and the wall of the old Franciscan monastery. The black mist was changing into grey mist, but the world was foggy and out of focus, as if reflected in soapy water.

  Roman stared at the spot where he had seen something moving earlier – in the bushes just below the remains of the fortifications. As he stared hard, a sterile white shape stood out of the sea of grey. He wiped the window pane with his sleeve, but despite the sophisticated drawbridge mechanism, evidently no one was too keen on cleaning it very often, so he just smeared dust across the glass.

  He opened the window and blinked as cold air swept across his face.

  Like a little china doll floating in the mist, thought Myszyński, as he gazed at the dead body lying below the synagogue. It was unnaturally, unsettlingly white, shining with lack of colour.

  Behind him, the heavy door into the old synagogue crashed shut, as if all the spirits had flown out to see what had happened.

  II

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t sleep. Dawn was breaking, and he hadn’t slept a wink all night. Worse yet, that little nymphomaniac hadn’t slept at all either. He’d have been happy to pick up a book and read, instead of which he was lying there without moving, pretending to be asleep. He felt scratching behind his ear.

  “Are you asleep?”

  He smacked his lips a few times and muttered something to fob her off.

  “Coz I’m not asleep.”

  He had to use all his will-power not to let out a loud sigh. Tense all over, he waited to see what would happen. Because something was going to happen, he was sure of it. The warm body behind him moved under the duvet, chuckling like a character in a cartoon who had just thought up a plan for world conquest. And then he felt a painful nip biting his shoulder blade. He leapt out of bed, only just holding back a very strong expletive.

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  The girl leant on her elbow and gave him a truculent look.

  “Sure, I must be crazy, because somehow I got it into my head that maybe you’d want to make me feel good again. Jeezus, I’m just impossible.”

  Szacki defensively raised his hands skywards and fled into the kitchen for a smoke. He was already at the sink when he heard her call flirtatiously: “I’m waiting.” You can wait all you like, he thought, as he put on a fleece. He lit a cigarette and switched on the kettle. Outside the dark-grey roofs stood out against the pale-grey common, separated from the pale nothingness of Sub-Carpathia by the darker ribbon of the Vistula. A car crossed the bridge, two funnels of light moving through the fog. Everything in this image was monochrome, including the white window frame coated in peeling paint, and the reflection of Szacki’s pale face, milk-white hair and black top.

  What a bloody dump, thought Szacki, and took a drag on his cigarette. Its red glow added some colour to the monochrome world. What a bloody hole he’d been sitting in for several months now, and if anyone had asked him how it had come about, he’d have shrugged helplessly.

  First of all, there was the case. There’s always some case or other. That particular one was a thankless pain in the arse. It had all started with the murder of a Ukrainian prostitute at a brothel on Krucza Street in central Warsaw – less than a hundred yards from Szacki’s office. Usually in that sort of situation finding the corpse was the end of the matter. All the pimps and tarts would be off in minutes, for obvious reasons no witnesses would be found, and anyone who did come forwards couldn’t remember a thing; you counted yourself lucky if you actually managed to identify the body.

  This time things had turned out differently. A good friend of the dead girl had appeared, the corpse had gained the name Irina, even the pimp had gained a handsome face on a facial-composite portrait from memory, and the connection with the Świętokrzyskie province, which centred on the city of Kielce, had appeared once the case had started to get going. Szacki had spent two weeks travelling around the Sandomierz and Tarnobrzeg areas together with Olga (who was the friend), an interpreter and a guide, to find the place where the girls were being kept after arriving in Poland from further east. Olga told them what she had seen from various windows, and sometimes from behind car windscreens, the interpreter interpreted, and the guide wondered where that could be, while at the same time spinning rustic yarns that drove Szacki up the wall. A local policeman did the driving, making it plain with every twitch of his facial muscles that his time was being wasted because, as he had stated at the very start, they had closed down the only brothel in Sandomierz that summer, and along with it they had got rid of Kasia and Beata, who made a bit of extra cash on the game after work at a shop and a nursery school. The rest were small-time slappers from the catering college. But in Tarnobrzeg or Kielce – there it was quite another matter.

  Nevertheless, finally they had found a house in an out-of-the-way spot in the industria
l part of Sandomierz – it was the house they were looking for. In a greenhouse converted into a bedroom, they found a petite blonde from Belarus breathing her last, wasted away by gastric flu; apart from that there was no one there. The girl kept repeating on and on that they had gone to the market, and that they’d kill her. Her fear made a great impression on the rest of the expedition – but none whatsoever on Szacki. Whereas the word “market” set him thinking. The bedroom in the greenhouse was pretty big, besides which the property included a large house, a workshop and a warehouse. Szacki imagined Sandomierz on the map of Poland. A backwater with two amateur good-time girls. Churches by the dozen, quiet and sleepy, nothing going on. Not far from Ukraine. Pretty close to Belarus. Two hundred kilometres to the capital, even less to Łódź and Krakow. Altogether not a bad spot for a trafficking hub and a wholesale outlet for live goods. The market.

  It turned out there was a market, and quite a big one too – a large bazaar known to the locals as the mart, a place that sold everything and anything, situated between the Old Town and the Vistula, right on the bypass. He asked the policeman what went on there. All sorts of things, he replied, but the Russkies take care of business among themselves – if you start interfering in that, you’ll only mess up the statistics. Occasionally the police pick up a kid with knock-off CDs or grass, so it won’t look as if they’re not interested.

  On the one hand it seemed pretty unlikely that any gangsters could be so stupid as to traffic in people at a bazaar. On the other, there was a reason why these people weren’t busy colliding hadrons or floating companies on the stock exchange. And, in fact, the bazaar was outside the jurisdiction of the city.

  They took away the sick girl, who could hardly stand, went off and found it – two large vans among the sweet stalls, supposedly full of clothes, but in fact containing twenty girls chained up, all of whom had come here in search of a better world. It was the Sandomierz police force’s biggest success since the time they had recovered a stolen bicycle, for a month the local papers wrote about nothing else, and Szacki briefly became a small-town celebrity. The autumn had been beautiful.

  And he liked it here.

  And then he thought: what if?

  They were having a drink at the Modena pizzeria not far from the prosecutor’s office, he was already quite well oiled, and he asked in a naive way if they happened to have any vacancies. Yes, they did. It only happened once every twenty years, but just at that moment they did.

  And so he was to start a wonderful new life. Pick up girls in clubs, go running along the Vistula each morning, revel in the fresh air, have some adventures, feel uplifted, and finally find the greatest love of his life and grow old with her in a house covered with vines somewhere near Piszczele Street. So it’d be a short walk to the market square, to be able to sit down at the Mała Café or the Kordegarda restaurant and have a cup of coffee. When he first moved here, this image was so vivid that he even found it hard to call it a plan or a dream. It was a reality which had entered his life and started to take effect – simple as that. He could remember the exact moment when he had sat on a bench outside the castle, basking in the autumn sunshine, and seen his own future so clearly that the tears almost came to his eyes. Finally! Finally he knew exactly what he wanted.

  Well, to put it subtly, he had been wrong. To put it unsubtly, he had thrown the life he had spent years building down the toilet in exchange for a sodding pipe dream, and now he was left with nothing, which felt so terrible that it even gave him a sense of exoneration for his own bad behaviour. Absolutely and exactly nothing.

  Instead of being the star of the capital city’s prosecution service, he was an outsider who prompted mistrust in a provincial city, which was in fact dead after six p.m. – but unfortunately not because the citizens had been murdering one another. They didn’t murder each other at all. They didn’t even try to commit murder. They didn’t commit rape. They didn’t organize themselves into criminal gangs. They rarely attacked one another. Whenever Szacki mentally browsed the catalogue of cases he was working on, he got a bad taste in his mouth. It couldn’t be true.

  Instead of a family, he had loneliness. Instead of love, loneliness. Instead of intimacy, loneliness. The crisis triggered by his pitiful – as well as brief and mutually unsatisfying – affair with a journalist, Monika Grzelka, had pushed his marriage into a hole from which it had no chance of digging itself out. They had carried on a bit longer, as if for the good of the child, but by then it was in its feeble, dying phase. He had always thought he was the one who deserved more, and that Weronika was dragging him down. Meanwhile, less than six months after their final parting she had started dating an up-and-coming lawyer a year younger than herself. Recently she had casually informed Szacki that they had decided to live together at the man’s house in Warsaw’s Wawer district, and that maybe he should meet and talk to Tomasz, who was now going to be bringing up his daughter.

  He really had lost everything there was to lose. He had nothing and nobody, on top of which, of his own free will, he had become an exile in a place he didn’t like and that didn’t like him. Calling Klara, whom he had picked up in a club a month ago and then sent packing three days later, when in the light of day she didn’t seem either pretty, or intelligent, or interesting, had been an act of desperation, the ultimate proof of his downfall.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and went back to the monochrome world. Only briefly – some long red fingernails appeared on his fleece. He closed his eyes to hide his irritation, but he couldn’t muster the courage to be cruel to the girl, whom first of all he had seduced, and to whom now he was still giving false hopes that there might be something between them.

  He went to bed like a good boy to perform some boring sex. Klara wriggled away underneath him, as if trying to make up for the lack of tenderness and fantasy. As she gazed at him, she must have noticed something in his face that made her try even harder. She squirmed and began to moan.

  “Oh yes, fuck me, I’m yours, I want to feel you deep inside.”

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki tried to control himself, but he couldn’t, and burst out laughing.

  III

  No corpse looks good, but some look worse than others. The cadaver lying in the ravine below the medieval walls of Sandomierz belonged to the latter category. One of the policemen was mercifully covering the woman’s nakedness, when the prosecutor appeared at the scene of the murder.

  “Don’t cover her up yet.”

  The policeman looked up.

  “For goodness’ sake, I’ve known her since nursery school – she can’t lie there like that.”

  “I knew her too, Piotr. It doesn’t really mean anything now.”

  Prosecutor Barbara Sobieraj gently raked aside some leafless twigs and kneeled beside the corpse. Tears blurred her view of it. She had often seen dead bodies, usually dragged out of car wrecks on the bypass, sometimes even the corpses of people whom she knew by sight. But never anyone she knew personally. And certainly not an old friend. She knew, surely better than others, that people commit crimes and that you can fall victim to them. But this – this couldn’t be true.

  She coughed to clear her throat.

  “Does Grzegorz know yet?”

  “I thought you’d tell him. After all, you know…”

  Barbara glanced at him, and was just about to erupt, but she realized the Marshal – as this policeman was known in Sandomierz – was right. For many years she had been a close friend of the happy couple, Elżbieta and Grzegorz Budnik. At one time there had even been a rumour that if Elżbieta hadn’t come back from Krakow when she did, then who knows – some people had already heard hints that Barbara and he were an item. Gossip and ancient history, but actually, if anyone was going to tell Grzegorz, it should be her. Unfortunately.

  She sighed. This wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a mugging or an assault or a rape committed by drunken thugs. Someone must have put himself to a lot of trouble to kill her, then carefully to undress her and la
y her in these bushes. And that too… Barbara was trying not to look, but every now and then her gaze went back to the victim’s mutilated neck. Slashed repeatedly from side to side, her throat looked like a gill, thin flakes of skin, with bits of the veins, larynx and oesophagus visible between them. Meanwhile the face above this macabre wound was strangely calm, even smiling a little, which, combined with the unusual plaster whiteness of the skin, gave it an unreal, statue-like quality. It occurred to Barbara that maybe someone had murdered Elżbieta in her sleep, or while she was unconscious. She seized onto this thought and tried hard to believe it.

  The Marshal came up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Basia.”

  She gave him the nod to cover up the corpse.

  IV

  Holes like this one do have their good side: nothing’s ever far away. As soon as he got the call from the boss, with a sigh of relief Szacki abandoned Klara and left his rented bachelor pad in the apartment block on Długosz Street. Small, ugly and neglected, it had one advantage – its location, in the Old Town, overlooking the Vistula and the historic secondary school founded by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. He emerged from the building, and walked to the market square at a rapid pace, slipping on the wet cobblestones. The air was still bracing, as in winter, but one could sense this was already the tail end of it. As the fog grew thinner with every step, Szacki hoped today would be the first of the beautiful spring days. He really did need some positive emotion in his life. Some sunshine and warmth.