A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “You know bugger all about my emotions.”

  “It’s blissful ignorance.”

  Miszczyk clapped her hands and looked at them as if to say: “Children, children, you really must stop it now!” Szacki forced himself not to drop his gaze, but to resist the reproach in her gentle, doe-like, motherly eyes.

  “You can snipe at each other afterwards, my loves. Now I’m going to tell you about your professional position.”

  Sobieraj twitched and quickly started talking. How many of these neurotic birds had Szacki seen in his life? Legions.

  “I hope that—”

  “Basia,” Miszczyk stopped her mid-sentence, “I’m happy to hear your views and suggestions. I’m always happy to listen, you know that, don’t you? But right now I’m going to tell you about your professional position.”

  Sobieraj shut up on the instant, and Szacki looked closely at Miszczyk. She was still the mummy with gentle eyes, the smile of a children’s therapist and a voice that recalled the scent of vanilla and baking powder. But if the last remark she had made were stripped of its form, it would sound like a firm put-down.

  Miszczyk poured them all more tea.

  “I knew Ela Budnik, and I know Grzegorz too, just as everyone here does. We don’t have to like him or agree with him, but it’s hard to overlook him. This will be – already is a major, well-known inquiry. A situation where it’s run by a friend of the victim—”

  “And of the main suspect,” put in Szacki.

  Sobieraj snorted.

  “Please watch what you say. You don’t know the man.”

  “I don’t have to. He’s the victim’s husband. At this stage that makes him the main suspect.”

  “And that’s just what I’m talking about.” Sobieraj raised her hands in triumph. “That’s why you should keep right away from this case.”

  Miszczyk waited a moment until there was silence again.

  “That is exactly why Prosecutor Szacki will not only not keep away from this case, but will run the inquiry. Because I want to avoid a situation where the corpse, the suspects and the investigator are a gang of old friends, who only the other day were making a date for a barbecue. But you’re right, Basia, that Mr Szacki is new here. That’s why you’re going to give him advice, help and information about everything to do with the city and its residents.”

  Szacki sighed with relief as a large piece of cake squeezed past his gullet. We’re in for lots of fun, he thought. Sobieraj sat motionless on the sofa, changing into one great big sulk. Miszczyk cast a maternal eye at their cups and the cake platter, and then turned it one hundred and eighty degrees.

  “There’s more jam on this side,” she said in a theatrical whisper, taking a piece.

  Szacki waited a moment, realized that the audience was over, and got up. Miszczyk waved her hand to say that as soon as she finished her mouthful she’d have something else to say.

  “Let’s meet here at seven p.m. I want to see the first witness statements and a detailed investigation plan. Send all the media to me. If I see any personal animosity obstructing you in this case…”

  Sobieraj and Szacki fixed their gaze on the boss’s plump, crumb-coated lips in unison. She smiled at them warmly.

  “…I’ll give you such hell you’ll never forget it. And the only job open to you in any public institution will be scrubbing the floors at the nick. Is that clear?”

  Szacki nodded, bowed to both ladies and took hold of the door handle.

  “Presumably I’m to hand the rest of my cases over to someone else.”

  Miszczyk smiled softly. He realized it was a completely unnecessary question. He was actually insulting her by imagining she might not have thought of that. It must all have been arranged by now, and the secretary would be removing the documents from his office.

  “You must be out of your mind. Get back to work.”

  VIII

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was standing in his office, looking out of the window and thinking that the provinces had their plus points too. He had a large office all to himself, which in Warsaw would have been divided into three two-person rooms. He had a nice view of green fields, residential buildings and the towers of the Old Town in the distance. He had a twenty-minute walk to work. He had a safe with the files for his eight current cases in it – exactly ninety-seven fewer than in Warsaw six months earlier. He had the same salary as in the capital, and the excellent coffee in his favourite café on Sokolnicki Street cost him less than five zlotys. And finally – he was ashamed of the fact, but he couldn’t hide his satisfaction – he had a decent corpse. Suddenly this hellish, sleepy hole seemed an altogether bearable place.

  The door slammed. Szacki turned round, adding the thought that he also had a partner who had made PMT into a way of life. He automatically adopted his cold, professional prosecutor’s mask as he watched the principled pussy, Basia Sobieraj, approach him with a folder in her hand.

  “This has just arrived. We should look at it.”

  He pointed to the sofa (that’s right, he had a sofa in his office) and they sat down next to each other. He glanced at her bust, but couldn’t see anything interesting there because it was shrouded in a completely asexual black polo neck. He opened the folder. The first picture showed a close-up of the victim’s slashed-open throat. Sobieraj audibly took a gulp of air and looked away, and Szacki was about to pass comment, but he felt sorry and kept his spiteful remarks to himself. It wasn’t their fault or their shortcoming that all the people here added together had seen as many corpses in their entire lives as he had in a single year.

  He put aside the pictures of the corpse.

  “Anyway, we have to wait for the examination. Will you be coming to Oczko Street?”

  She stared without understanding; he had automatically referred to the forensic unit in Warsaw.

  “Sorry – to the hospital. For the autopsy.”

  There was a flash of fear in her eyes, but she quickly took control of herself.

  “I think we should both be there.”

  Szacki agreed, and laid out on the table about a dozen pictures of the razor, carefully photographed from all angles. According to the ruler underneath it, the razor was more than forty centimetres long, with the rectangular blade alone accounting for about thirty of them. The handle was covered in dark wood, and there was something engraved on the brass fittings. Szacki looked for a close-up. The faded inscription said: C.RUNEWALD. On one of the close-ups he noticed the photographer’s hand reflected in the polished, mirror-smooth blade. A lady photographer, married, judging by the wedding ring. The silvery blade was entirely free of stains, scratches or chips. Undoubtedly a masterpiece of the art of metallurgy. An antique masterpiece.

  “Do you think it’s the murder weapon, Mrs Sobieraj?”

  Szacki was already finding all these politenesses tiresome, and in the course of the investigation they were bound to become intolerable.

  “I think it’s all very odd and theatrical. A naked corpse with a slashed throat, an antique razor-machete dropped nearby, no sign of a fight or a struggle,” he said.

  “And no blood on the blade.”

  “Let’s see what the guys at the lab can find. I think there’ll be blood, some trace evidence, DNA. The knife will tell us more than the person who planted it there would like.”

  “Planted?”

  “So neat, clean, and untouched? Someone did that on purpose. Even with squalid crimes of passion every drunken thug remembers to take the murder weapon with him. I don’t believe it was left in those bushes by accident.”

  Sobieraj took a pair of reading glasses out of her handbag and started closely examining the pictures. The thick brown frames suited her. It occurred to Szacki that if the razor-machete was a message, they’d have to find someone who could interpret it. Bloody hell, what sort of specialist could deal with that? An expert on cold steel? Or on militaria? Metallurgy? Or works of art?

  Sobieraj handed him the photo with the close-up of t
he wood-encased handle and took off her glasses.

  “We’ll have to look for an expert on cold steel, best of all a museum curator. They might have heard of this firm.”

  “C. Runewald?” asked Szacki.

  Sobieraj snorted with laughter.

  “Grünewald. Maybe it’s high time for a pair of specs, Mr Szacki.”

  Szacki opted for peace. No smirk, no nervous reaction, no retort.

  “It’s high time you told me all about the victim and her family.”

  Sobieraj was put out.

  IX

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was dissatisfied. Sobieraj’s account of the Budniks had provided a lot of information, but also a lot of feelings. In his mind the victim had ceased to be just the result of an illegal act for which someone must be held responsible and bear the penalty. The victim’s husband had ceased to be prime suspect. Thanks to Sobieraj’s colourful, emotional account they had become too much like real people of flesh and blood; the border between information and interpretation had been crossed. In spite of himself, as he thought about the victim, Szacki could see a smiling teacher, giving ecology lessons on bike rides. Her husband was not just a candidate for a stretch in the nick, but also a social campaigner capable of fighting to the bitter end over every, even the most minor affair, as long as it was for the good of the town. Szacki doubted whether there was any independent councillor anywhere else in Poland who was quite so good at persuading the entire council to vote unanimously – for Sandomierz. Enough, enough, enough – he didn’t want to think about the Budniks until he had talked to the old policeman, who had already made it clear that he wasn’t entirely sold on these secular saints.

  He tried to occupy his thoughts by looking for information about the mysterious razor-machete, and that was the second reason for his dissatisfaction. Teodor Szacki mistrusted people in general, and people with hobbies in particular. He regarded passion and devotion to a passion, especially one for collecting things, as a disorder, and people inclined towards that sort of fixation on a single subject as potentially dangerous. He had seen suicides caused by the loss of a coin collection, and he had also seen two wives whose misdeeds were to rip up a priceless stamp and to burn a first edition of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s pre-war short stories. Neither was still alive. The husbands who had murdered them had sat over their corpses in tears, saying over and over again that they simply didn’t understand.

  Meanwhile, the world of knives turned out to be full of enthusiasts and collectors, and there was even a periodical called Thrust, the mission of which – as the authors claimed – was “to provide you, dear Reader, with reliable information on top-quality knives and related topics. There are also plenty of curiosities, for example in our next issue ‘The Whip’, which may seem an exotic topic in the context of knife-collecting, but is about an item that has been made here in Poland since ancient times. A series of articles on cold steel will speak for itself.”

  Whips, sabres and butcher’s knives – what a charming hobby, thought Szacki, cringing, as he immersed himself in chat-rooms full of debate about blades, handles, sharpening methods, chiselling, carving and stabbing. He read the outpourings of a writer who made samurai swords by hand, he read about the “Father of the Modern Damast Knife” who had mastered the technique of reproducing Damascus steel, he looked at pictures of army daggers, hunting knives for dressing game animals, foils, bayonets, rapiers and broadswords. He had never imagined humanity produced so many different kinds of sharp object.

  But he couldn’t find the razor-machete.

  Finally, in an act of desperation he took a few photos of the probable murder weapon with his mobile phone and sent them to the editors of Thrust by e-mail, asking whether they meant anything to them.

  X

  The spring had come and gone, and that evening Teodor Szacki was feeling the cold as he walked along Mickiewicz Street towards the Modena pizzeria, where he had arranged to meet Wilczur. The old policeman had refused to be persuaded to meet in the market square, claiming that he couldn’t stand “that bloody museum”, and Szacki had lived in Sandomierz long enough by now to know what he meant.

  Sandomierz really consisted of two, or even three towns. The third was the so-called works on the other side of the river, a memento of the days when the Reds had tried to change the bourgeois, churchy, historical town into an industrial city and had erected an enormous glassworks there. This dismal, ugly district looked intimidating, with a closed-down railway station, a hideous church and a vast factory chimney, which every minute of the day and night destroyed the panorama of Sub-Carpathia visible from the high left bank of the Vistula.

  Town Number Two was the Sandomierz where life actually happened. Here there was a smallish housing estate of fortunately not too invasive blocks, here there were residential districts with one-family houses, schools, parks, a cemetery, an army unit, the police, a bus station, smaller and larger shops, and a library. It was the typical Polish provincial town, maybe a bit less neglected, and its hillside location made it more attractive than others. Yet it wouldn’t have stood out from countless Polish holes, were it not for Town Number One.

  Town Number One was the picture-postcard Sandomierz of TV cop show Father Mateusz and classic writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, a little gem set on a high escarpment, whose panorama delighted everyone without exception, and which in his time Szacki had fallen in love with. He was still capable of taking a walk onto the bridge merely in order to see the historic houses banked up on the hillside, the dignified Collegium Gostomianum, the towers of the town hall and the cathedral, the Renaissance gable of the Opatowska Gate, and the solid mass of the castle. Depending on the season and the time of day, this view looked different every time, and every time it was just as breathtaking.

  Unfortunately, as Szacki knew all too well now, it was a view which only made a very Italian, Tuscan impression from a distance. Once you were on the inside of the Old Town, everything was very Polish. Sandomierz was too far away from Krakow, and above all too far from Warsaw to become a holiday resort like Kazimierz Dolny. Which it deserved infinitely more, being a beautiful town, and not just a big village with three Renaissance houses and a few dozen hotels, so that every Polish company chairman had somewhere to roger his mistress. Its location off the beaten track meant that Sandomierz’s lovely old-town streets exuded boredom, emptiness, Polish hopelessness – it really was nothing but “a bloody museum”. In the afternoon the school tour groups disappeared, the old residents of the tenement houses shut themselves at home, not long after the few shops closed, and a little later so did the bars and cafés. As early as six p.m., Szacki had sometimes walked right across the Old Town, from the castle to the Opatowska Gate, without meeting a living soul. One of the most beautiful towns in Poland was deserted, dead and depressing.

  Szacki really did feel better once he had got to the end of Sokolnicki Street, left the Old Town and started walking along Mickiewicz Street to the Modena. Cars appeared, and people; the shops were still full at this hour, there were kids glued to their mobile phones, someone eating a doughnut, someone running for the bus, someone shouting to a woman on the other side of the road to say, “Coming, coming, in a moment.” Szacki breathed deeply, and was afraid to admit it to himself, but he was badly missing the city. So badly that even the modest substitute for it offered by this part of Sandomierz made the blood run quicker in his veins.

  The Modena was a provincial dive that stank of beer, but he had to grant it to them, they served the best pizza in Sandomierz here, and thanks to their delicious “Romantica”, armed with a double helping of mozzarella, Szacki’s cholesterol level had jumped more than once. Just like a typical cop, Inspector Leon Wilczur was sitting in the blackest corner with his back against the wall. Without a jacket he looked even thinner, and Szacki was reminded of the hall of mirrors at a holiday fun fair. It was impossible for a person to be quite so skinny, like a fake head set on top of some old clothes for a joke.

  Without a
word he sat down opposite the old policeman, and a whole set of questions flew through his mind.

  “Do you know who did it?”

  Wilczur’s look acknowledged the question.

  “No. Nor do I have any idea who could have done it. I don’t know anyone who would have wanted to. I don’t know anyone who could gain from this death. I’d have said no one from round here, if not for the fact that it must be someone from round here. I don’t believe in the idea of a wandering stranger putting himself to so much trouble.”

  That really did answer Szacki’s key questions, even if he had been intending to answer each of them in person. Time to move on to the supporting ones.

  “Beer or vodka?”

  “Water.”

  Szacki ordered water, as well as Cola and a Romantica. After that he sat and listened to Wilczur’s scratchy voice, while mentally drawing up a record of the divergences between the old policeman’s account and Sobieraj’s mawkish delivery. The dry facts were the same. Grzegorz Budnik had been a Sandomierz councillor “for ever”, i.e. since 1990, with unfulfilled mayoral aspirations, and his late wife Elżbieta (Ela for short), fifteen years his junior, was an English teacher at the famous “Number One” – in other words the grammar school that occupied the building of the old Jesuit college – ran an arts club for children and was active in every possible kind of local cultural event. They lived in a small house on Katedralna Street, apparently once occupied by Iwaszkiewicz, the famous writer. Not particularly wealthy, childless, ageing philanthropists. With no political colouring. If one were forced to look for labels, he would have been a Red because of his past on the National Council, and she a Black – a conservative, traditionalist – because of her involvement in church initiatives and mildly professed Catholic faith.

  “In a way that is a symbol of this town,” Sobieraj had said. “People of very different views, with different past histories, in theory from opposite sides of the barricade, but always able to see eye to eye when it came to the good of Sandomierz.”