A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  The door slammed. Szacki turned round, and by some miracle he managed firstly not to make a surprised face, and secondly not to step back at all. Dressed in an anatomist’s gown, the newcomer appeared to represent some humanoid race of giants. Six foot six tall, as wide across the shoulders, with the physique of a bear, he could have piled coal into a boiler with his hands faster than with a shovel. Onto this enormous body was fixed a head with a kindly, beaming face, and the straw-coloured hair was tied in a small ponytail. A butcher from a long line of butchers, who had hacking carcasses in their genes. Could there have been a better place for him?

  Overcoming his alarm, Szacki took a step forwards and held out a hand to say hello.

  “Teodor Szacki, district prosecutor.”

  The giant smiled sympathetically and shyly, wrapping Szacki’s palm in the warm mound of meat that was attached to his forearm.

  “Paweł Ripper, pleased to meet you. Basia told me about you.”

  He didn’t know if it was a joke, so just in case he took it at face value. The giant took a pair of rubber gloves from the pocket of his gown and pulled them on with a snap as he went up to the table. The prosecutors withdrew to some small plastic chairs placed against the wall. The doctor clapped his hands, and the shock wave set the door shuddering.

  “Jeepers, she only just did a show with my kids.”

  “I’m sorry, Paweł. I’d have taken her somewhere else but I trust you. If it’s too hard… I know you knew Ela…”

  “It’s not Ela any more,” said Paweł, pressing a button on a Dictaphone. “It is the sixteenth of April 2009, external examination and dissection of the remains of Elżbieta Budnik, age forty-four, conducted by Paweł Ripper, forensic medicine expert, at the anatomical pathology department of the Health Maintenance Organizations Group in Sandomierz. Also present: prosecutors Barbara Sobieraj and Teodor Szacki. External examination…”

  Luckily Ripper’s large frame shielded most of the activities he was performing, so Szacki and Sobieraj could immerse themselves in conversation. There was no point in tormenting the giant with questions until he knew more than they did. Szacki told Sobieraj about his conversation with Budnik. Obviously, the victim had not reached Basia’s place either on Monday, or ever, and the last time the two women had been in touch was on Sunday, when they had wished each other a Happy Easter over the phone.

  “How did you know he was lying? Intuition?”

  “Experience.”

  Then he told her about his correspondence with the knife collector’s magazine called Thrust. As his tale continued, the blood drained from her face and her eyes grew larger and larger.

  “Tell me you’re joking!” she gasped at last.

  He denied it, surprised by her reaction.

  “You have no idea what that means, do you?” She had to raise her voice because of the background noise made by the saw with which Ripper was cutting through the breastbone.

  “It means that whoever planted that knife is hoping the matter will leak out to the media and that the traditional Polish-Jewish hysteria will flare up – it’ll be harder for us to work amid that hysteria, because we’ll be spending more time at press conferences than doing our jobs,” said Szacki. “But it’s all right, I’ve survived that sort of storm before. The media will get bored with it all in three days.”

  Sobieraj was listening to him, while at the same time shaking her head. She winced as she heard an unpleasant cracking sound. It was Ripper, cutting through the cadaver’s ribs.

  “It won’t be ordinary hysteria,” she said. “The journalists will hang around here for weeks. Sandomierz is at the centre of the so-called legend of blood, and the history of Polish-Jewish relations alternates between either nice, friendly cohabitation or recriminations and bloody pogroms – the last anti-Semitic killings happened here just after the war. If someone, God forbid, uses the term ‘ritual murder’, it’ll be the end.”

  “Ritual murder is a fairy tale,” replied Szacki calmly. “And everyone knows it’s a fairy tale that was told to children to make them behave, otherwise the big bad Jew would come and eat them. Let’s not get hysterical.”

  “It’s not quite a fairy tale. A Jew is not a wolf or a wicked queen, he’s a real person, whom you can make complaints about. You know what it was like. The Christian mother would fail to keep an eye on her child, then up and scream that the Jews had kidnapped and murdered it. One thing led to another, and it would turn out that very few people actually liked those Jews – someone owed them some money, and as an excuse had come up, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to set fire to a few of those child-killers’ cottages and workshops.”

  “All right, in that case it’s not a fairy tale, but ancient history. There aren’t any Jews, there aren’t any workshops, there’s no one to accuse, or to set on fire. Whoever planted that razor is certainly very keen for us to follow that trail.”

  Sobieraj let out a loud sigh. In the background Ripper was monotonously dictating for the record that each successive organ bore no signs of injury or pathological change.

  “Wake up, Teodor. Sandomierz is the capital of the universe for the idea of ritual murder. The place where accusations of kidnapping children and the resulting pogroms were once as regular as the seasons of the year. The place where the Church endorsed that sort of bestial attitude, virtually institutionalized it. The place where to this day there’s a painting hanging in the cathedral showing Jews murdering Catholic children. As part of a series about Christian martyrdom. The place where everything possible has been done to sweep that bit of history under the carpet. Now, as I think about it, my God, that is about as revolting as it gets…”

  Szacki gazed at the dissecting table now revealed by Ripper, who was at a small table next to it, cutting up Elżbieta Budnik’s internal organs. He would not have used the word “revolting”; the image before his eyes – an open corpse with the skin hanging to either side and the white tips of the ribs sticking out of the rib cage – was horrid, but not revolting. Death in its finality was characterized by physiological elegance. Peace.

  “It’s revolting that someone is trying to connect that with Ela and Grzegorz.”

  He gave her an enquiring look.

  “All his life Grzegorz has fought against that superstition, fought to have it talked about the right way, as a black page in our history, and not some sort of eccentric tradition practised by our ancestors. For years on end he has tried to have the painting removed, or at least get it provided with an appropriate sign, saying it was still here as a memento of Polish anti-Semitism, a reminder of what hatred can lead to.”

  “And?”

  “The Church has its own way of dealing with things like that. They haven’t taken it down or put up a sign. When there was too much fuss about it, they hid it behind a screen, and hung a portrait of the pope on the screen, and they pretend it doesn’t matter. If it was a mosaic on the floor rather than a painting, they’d probably have covered it with a rug.”

  “Very interesting, but none of that is of any significance. Whoever planted the ritual knife wants us to get involved in all that – paintings, history, legends, so we’ll start traipsing around churches, sitting in libraries and talking to academics. It’s a smokescreen, I have no doubt. I’m just worried it’s a well-prepared smokescreen, and that if someone’s putting himself to so much effort to send us up that track, he might be too clever for this case to be solved at all.”

  Ripper came up to them, holding in his gigantic paw a small plastic bag with a little metal object in it. His gown was surprisingly clean, almost without any trace of blood.

  “My assistant will sew her up. Let’s go and have a chat.”

  They drank coffee out of plastic cups. It was so disgusting that all the patients here must have ended up on the gastroenterology ward sooner or later, Szacki was sure of it. “Jack” – it turned out that really was his nickname, what a surprise – had changed, and in a grey polo neck he looked like a large boulder with a litt
le pink ball on top.

  “I’ll tell you the whole story, but it’s fairly self-evident. Someone cut her throat with a very sharp surgical instrument. But it wasn’t a scalpel or a razor blade, because the cuts are too deep. The large cut-throat razor you showed me in the photos would fit perfectly. All that happened while she was still alive, but she must have been unconscious, otherwise she’d have defended herself, and it wouldn’t look as if it were done with such…” – for a moment he sought the right word – “…precision. But she was undoubtedly still alive, because there is no blood in her. Forgive me for the details, but that means that at the moment when the jugular vein was cut there was still pressure in the circulatory system, capable of pumping blood from the body. She also has congealed blood in her ears, which probably means that at the moment of death she was hanging upside down – like, if you’ll pardon the expression, a cow in an abattoir. What a screwed-up degenerate must have done that. He also took the trouble to wash her – she must have been covered in blood.”

  “We must look for the blood,” Szacki thought aloud.

  “You must also find out what this is,” said Ripper, handing them the small plastic evidence bag. Szacki examined it carefully and gulped; the little bag gave off the faint meaty aroma of the anatomy lab. Inside there was a metal badge about a centimetre across the diagonal, the kind worn in a shirt or jacket lapel. Not with a safety pin, but a fat spike to which you have to attach a clasp from the other side. It looked old. As Sobieraj leant forwards to inspect the piece of evidence, her ginger hair tickled Szacki’s cheek. It smelt of camomile. The prosecutor glanced at her brow, furrowed in concentration, and her dense freckles which were managing to break free from under a layer of foundation. There was something in this sight that he found touching. A little ginger-haired girl who had grown up and become a woman, but still wanted to hide the freckles on her nose.

  “I’ve seen that somewhere before,” she said. “I don’t know where, but I’m sure I have.”

  The badge was red and rectangular, with no lettering, just a white, geometric symbol. It looked like an elongated letter S, except that it was more geometrical than that, with the two shorter legs at more of an angle to the longer one, and it looked very like half a swastika. From the lower shorter piece there was also a small tail sticking upwards.

  “She had this in her clenched fist. I had to break her fingers to get it out,” said Ripper as if to himself, as the mild gaze of his light-blue eyes hung on some point outside the window, perhaps on one of the old historical towers of Sandomierz.

  Szacki meanwhile was looking at Basia the principled pussy’s attractive profile, at the crow’s feet next to her eyes and the laughter lines in the corners of her mouth, which told him she smiled a lot and had a good life. And he wondered why Budnik hadn’t wanted Basia Sobieraj to question him. Because he didn’t want it to be tough for her? Rubbish. He didn’t want her to notice something. But what?

  V

  As Jack the Ripper’s assistant was busy stuffing crumpled newspaper into the white corpse of the town’s most beloved citizen by the light of the fluorescent strips at the Sandomierz morgue, prosecutors Teodor Szacki and Barbara Sobieraj were sitting on a sofa in their boss’s office, each eating their third piece of chocolate cake, though they hadn’t really felt like a second one.

  They had told her about Budnik’s interrogation, about the autopsy, about the badge with the strange symbol, and about the knife, which – perhaps – was a tool for ritual slaughter. Misia had listened to them with a maternal smile on her face, without interrupting, but occasionally putting in a fact to help them with their account, like the model graduate of an active listening course. Now they were done, and she lit a scented candle; the aroma of vanilla floated about the office, and together with the dusk falling outside and the amber light of the desk lamp it produced a nice, festive atmosphere.

  Szacki felt like some raspberry tea, but he thought he might be going too far by asking for it.

  “Time of death?” asked Miszczyk, extracting crumbs from her large, flaccid bosom, probably worn out by several children. Szacki gave her a hard stare.

  “There’s a problem with that, the range is quite large,” he replied. “Definitely more than five or six hours, taking rigor mortis into account, in other words she was murdered at the latest on Tuesday at about midnight. And at the earliest? The pathologist claims she could even have been dead since Easter Monday. The blood was drained out of the body, which means it’s impossible to draw any conclusions on the basis of livor mortis. It was as cold as hell, so the putrefaction hadn’t started. We’ll know more if it turns out someone saw her. For now, the period from when she left the house on Monday until midnight the next day comes into play. Of course that’s supposing Budnik is telling the truth. She may just as well have been dead since Sunday.”

  “Is he?”

  “No. I don’t know exactly when he isn’t telling the truth, but I’m sure he isn’t. He’s under round-the-clock surveillance. Let’s see what comes of searching the house and grounds. For the time being he’s the chief suspect. He lied to us and he hasn’t got an alibi. Maybe she was a saint, but apparently things weren’t going well between them.”

  “People always gossip like that when someone else is doing all right,” protested Sobieraj.

  “Every bit of gossip contains a grain of truth,” retorted Szacki.

  “What about other scenarios?” asked Miszczyk.

  Sobieraj reached for her papers.

  “We’re provisionally ruling out homicide related to robbery or a sexual motive. There’s no evidence of rape, and it’s too elaborate for a mugging. I’m checking up on everyone she ran her campaigns with, her family, and friends from the theatrical world. Especially the latter. Ela had connections with the theatre, and you’ll admit this has something of a performance about it.”

  “Fakery,” commented Szacki. “But for the time being that’s of secondary importance. Above all we’re looking for the blood. We have to find evidence of the several litres of it that drained out of her. The police are going to search public places in the city and the suburbs, and all private premises that feature in the inquiry will be checked from this angle too.”

  “As we’re on the subject of blood,” said Miszczyk, then paused and sighed, finding it hard to broach the subject, “what about the ritual murder theme?”

  “Naturally we’re rounding up all the Jews in the area,” said Szacki with a stony look on his face.

  “Teodor’s joking,” Sobieraj quickly put in, before Szacki had uttered the final syllable of his remark.

  “In all my life I never would have imagined you’d be on first-name terms so quickly! You’re totally forbidden to talk to the press about the inquiry, especially Prosecutor Joker here – send them all to me. I’ll do my best to make sure the rotten egg doesn’t break.”

  Szacki had a ready-made opinion on that subject – not for this had someone gone to so much trouble – the killer clearly wanted it to leak out. He’d have placed a large bet on the fact that tomorrow morning it’d be hard to push one’s way through the broadcasting vans here. But if Miszczyk was taking the press on herself, well then – not his circus, not his monkeys. He kept these considerations to himself, and also his view that the lady district prosecutor had just signed up for the centuries-old Polish tradition of sweeping things under the carpet. She could have had a brilliant career in the Church.

  VI

  Perhaps it was because Oleg Kuzniecow, the police detective he’d worked with in Warsaw, was completely different – burly, bawdy and jovial, always trying to get a stupid joke into every sentence. Perhaps it came down to the fact that he and Kuzniecow had known each other for years, worked together, drank together and used to meet up at each other’s houses. Or maybe it was to do with the fact that Kuzniecow was a real friend of his, and that Prosecutor Teodor Szacki loved him like a brother. Maybe that was why he was incapable, he couldn’t and didn’t want to like Inspector
Leon Wilczur.

  It was quite another matter that Inspector Wilczur was rather far from being likeable. He had arranged to meet him in the “Town Hall” bar, a dreadful dive in the basement of a tenement house on the market square that stank of the cigarette smoke which had infused every bit of the decor for decades, and was full of weird customers and weird waiters. Szacki was sure that behind the scenes there were weird cooks weirdly preparing weird meat, so he limited himself to coffee and cheesecake. The cheesecake smelt of an old sofa which everyone sits on, but no one fancies cleaning. The coffee was real, but made in the cup.

  Wilczur looked like a demon. In the gloom and the cigarette smoke, his deeply set yellow eyes shone feverishly, his pointed nose cast a shadow across half his face and his cheeks sank with every avid drag on his cigarette.

  “A shot each, perhaps, gentlemen?” The waiter’s tone was funereal, as if he meant a shot of fresh blood.

  They refused. Wilczur waited for the waiter to go away, and then started to speak, occasionally glancing at the documents lying in front of him or at a small laptop. Which at first surprised Szacki. The inspector looked more like the sort of person whom one should spare the torture of explaining what text messages are.

  “We know Budnik’s version of events, and now we can supplement it with various statements. On Sunday they were definitely at the cathedral at about six p.m., and they definitely left before mass, which starts at seven. We have two independent witnesses to that. Then they went for a walk, and at a quarter past seven they were caught by a camera on Mariacka Street.”

  Wilczur turned the computer towards him. On a short recording he could see the vague outlines of a couple walking along arm-in-arm. Szacki magnified the image, and for the first time he was able to see Elżbieta Budnik alive. She was the same height as her husband, with dark blonde hair spilling down her sports jacket; she wasn’t wearing a hat or a cap. She must have been telling him something – with one hand she was gesticulating vehemently; at one point she stopped to adjust her boot top, while Budnik went on a few paces. She caught him up in three small hops, like a little girl, not a mature woman. Next to the solemn Budnik, dressed in a brown raincoat and a felt hat, she looked like his daughter, not his wife. She drew level with her husband at the edge of the camera’s range of view, and stuck her hand into his pocket. Then they disappeared.