A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Do we really talk about our ailments all the time?” Mr Rojski switched on his running commentary again. “Maybe not, it’s just that Thomas put me in the mood, somehow I had it there before my eyes, the image of him poking about in Jesus’s side. Maybe it’s because of those paintings, I don’t know, I don’t like standing next to April, that’s where the very worst tortures are, that fellow impaled on the stake always grabs my attention, and he’s got something trickling down that stake…”

  “Janusz!” Irena Rojska virtually came to a stop. “Just you shut up about those monstrosities.”

  As if to emphasize her indignation, right beside her head, a blue-black raven landed on the wall surrounding an abandoned, tumble-down manor house; it was a really big bird, and it tilted its head as it looked at the old couple. They stared in amazement – it was only an arm’s length away. The bird must have understood it had committed a faux pas, because it quickly hopped down on the other side of the wall. Mrs Rojska made the sign of the cross, at which her husband tapped his forehead knowingly. Without a word, they continued their walk up the hill, and then the raven came back. This time it jumped down on their side, marched past underfoot, and disappeared in the gateway of the abandoned property. It was behaving like a dog that wants to show its master something.

  Mrs Rojska felt anxious and increased her pace, but her husband, whose eyes were ageing more slowly than hers, stayed on the spot, staring at the granite paving stones. The bird had left behind small, characteristic three-point tracks, as if it had deliberately dipped its claws in dark paint earlier on.

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “Wait a minute, I think something’s happened.”

  There was a flutter of wings, and now there were several ravens sitting on the pitted wall. As if hypnotized, Mr Rojski stepped over a signboard warning that the building was in danger of collapse and went into the overgrown garden. Standing amid the bushes, the two-storey mansion was also partly covered in weeds and had been rotting away here for decades, until it had acquired the lifeless look so typical of abandoned buildings. The walls had gone green, part of the roof had caved in and the windows were like empty eye-sockets, making it look like the face of a water demon looming out of the duckweed for a moment to hunt down its next victim.

  “Have you gone completely mad now? Janusz!”

  Mr Rojski didn’t answer; pulling aside the grey branches of the bushes he was walking slowly towards the house. His leg hurt like hell, so he could only shuffle along torpidly. The courtyard was full of ravens, which weren’t flying, or cawing, just walking about in silence, staring expectantly. The house’s empty windows made him think of the tortured martyrs from the cathedral again, their burnt-out eyes, grimaces of pain and mouths open for a scream. Behind him, his wife was making a fuss, scaring him with her palpitations and threatening never to make another meat loaf if he didn’t come back instantly. He heard and understood, but he couldn’t stop. As he went inside the house, the rotten floorboards didn’t so much creak, as make an unpleasant squelching noise.

  His eyes took a while to adapt to the semi-darkness; the windows were quite small, and partly boarded up, so, despite the sunshine, not much light could force its way inside – or at least not into the ground floor, because there was a bright glow coming from upstairs, and that was where Rojski headed. The ravens stayed outside; one, the biggest, stood on the threshold, cutting off the retreat. The old gentleman stopped at the foot of the stairs and thought this wasn’t a good idea; not many of the steps were left, and the ones that were did not inspire confidence. Even if he had been an extremely light, extremely brave cat he should have decided against it. Nevertheless, he started going up, mentally reproaching himself the whole time for being a silly old codger, telling himself that the days were long since over when after each adventure, once he had recovered, he could say: “Oh, what the heck, it always turns out well”.

  The banister was slippery with damp and mould, and it was impossible to get a grip on it with his bare palm, so he wrapped his hand in his scarf. The first stair broke as soon as he set foot on it, but luckily he was ready for that. The second one was solid, so was the third and they all looked the same up to the eighth, but just in case he left out the seventh, which had a strange bulge in it. After that it was worse. The ninth stair was missing, and so were the eleventh and twelfth. As for the tenth – well, anyway he’d come too far to go back, so he stood on it and quickly pulled up his painful leg. The stair gave a warning groan and creaked, then started to tip slightly and Rojski felt himself slipping on the rotten wood. Afraid of falling, quickly for his age he jumped across the hole, and that was the moment when he should have given up, but he had the floor of the upper storey at eye level, and that was his undoing. Wanting to cross the finish line as fast as possible, he rapidly surmounted two more steps, but his bad leg let him down and he lost his balance. Afraid of tumbling down the stairs, he threw himself headlong into the stream of sunlight falling through holes in the roof and a large French window. Something cracked, but unfortunately it wasn’t a floorboard; the pain from his broken wrist flooded Rojski’s body in a hot, sickening wave. Groaning, he turned over onto his back, and the sunlight dazzled him; as a reflex he shielded his eyes with the broken hand and felt a stab of pain, a terrible sensation, as if the bones in his forearm were being ripped out with pincers. He let out a loud scream and pressed his hand to his chest, breathing fast and heavily through clenched teeth; then he felt faint, and under his tightly closed eyelids the afterglow of sunlight fought for space with scarlet spots. Nevertheless he managed to clamber to his knees and open his eyes; the first thing he saw was a family of tiny mushrooms growing from a chink in the red floor. This sight was so absurd that he had to laugh. What a silly old codger, why on earth had he climbed up here at all? And how was he going to get down now? The fire brigade would have to fetch him down, like a cat stuck up a tree.

  A piece of tar-paper struck him gently on the back. Rojski started to breathe more easily and stood up, banging his head on a hanging bit of roof. He cursed and turned around to discover that unfortunately the tar-paper wasn’t tar-paper, nor was the bit of roof a bit of roof. It was a corpse hung from the ceiling on a hook like a side of meat, with the torso locked in a reinforced barrel studded with spikes. Above the barrel the body was as white as plaster, and below it was covered in a layer of congealed blood; the sunlight glinted gaily on the purple sheen. There was a raven perched on the cadaver’s shock of red hair. It had one eye fixed on Rojski, as it half-heartedly pecked at a sticking plaster dangling pitifully from the corpse’s forehead.

  Rojski closed his eyes. The sight vanished, but the image remained beneath his eyelids for ever.

  IV

  I wonder if they’ve found the body by now. It’s of no significance, I’m just wondering. Whether they find it today, or – doubtful – in a week is of no consequence. I switch on the TV, tune into the news channel and turn down the sound. That MP Palikot is drinking a miniature whisky and complaining about the president, and the Jewish Uprising survivor Edelman is laying flowers at the Heroes of the Ghetto monument. The same two images alternately. If they find the body, all that will be minor news.

  V

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had run to the spot before Wilczur got there, and climbed a ladder to the upper floor of the abandoned manor house straight after the police officers. The news had spread quickly and there was already a crowd of people on Zamkowa Street, with more descending from all directions. The Marshal, the fat policeman with a bushy moustache, clambered up the ladder behind him. Before Szacki had time to issue any orders, the Marshal began to shake with nausea, battled with it for a while, and then threw up all over himself and his moustache. Incredible, thought Szacki, but actually he couldn’t blame the man. The sight was horrible, probably the worst he had seen in his career. Decomposing corpses, fire victims, drowned bodies, the victims of gang killings and fights with smashed-in skulls – it all paled in comparison
with the corpse of Grzegorz Budnik hanging from a hook, until recently a wanted man with a warrant out for his arrest, the only suspect in the case of his wife’s murder.

  Szacki gazed at the image, surreal in its monstrosity; under attack from an overload of stimuli, his brain tried to process the information, but with some resistance, as if running at half speed. What was the most striking feature of all?

  Definitely the barrel, a ghastly stage-prop that gave the scene a theatrical, unreal quality, thanks to which a part of Szacki was waiting for the applause, and then for the corpse to open its eyes and smile at the audience.

  The face was definitely a riveting sight. Szacki had learnt on a criminology training course that the human brain is programmed to recognize faces, to identify the nuances of their expression, the emotions they display, and all sorts of changes that tell us whether to smile at another person or gear up to run away from them. That’s why we sometimes see the Virgin Mary on a window pane, or a ghostly grimace on a tree trunk – it’s the brain, endlessly seeking human faces everywhere, always trying to pick them out, classify them into familiar and unfamiliar, and recognize the emotions. Szacki’s brain was agonized by the sight of Budnik’s face. The distinguishing marks of the chairman of the City Council – morbid emaciation, sunken eyes, a shock of red hair and a red beard, that unfortunate cut on his forehead – had been distorted by the hook, stuck in the chin and emerging from the cheek. The mutilated muscles gave the face a strange, unsettling expression, as if Budnik had glanced into hell for a moment and seen images there that had changed him for ever. It crossed Szacki’s mind that, depending on the killer’s degree of sadism, this metaphor might not be far from the truth.

  But the worst thing was the colours, mercilessly brought out by the sunlight, which was sharp by this time of year. Budnik’s corpse was snow-white on top, drained of blood like his wife’s body a few days earlier, but the bottom half of it shone blood-red; it looked like a perverse modern art installation, an iconoclastic artist’s statement about contemporary Poland: Take a look at your national colours. Here’s a naked Polish corpse, murdered according to a legend his ancestors invented to be able to kill others with impunity.

  The entire floor was covered in blood as well, mixed with dirt; there was a brownish, dried-up puddle of it, three metres in diameter, with its centre right under Budnik’s gnarled feet. In a spot near the stairs it was smudged, probably by the person who found the body.

  “Should we unhook him?” asked the Marshal, once he had recovered.

  Szacki shook his head.

  “First the photographs, then the technicians have to gather all the evidence. This time the corpse is in the place where the crime was committed – there has to be something left.”

  Cautiously, watching out for the most rotten floorboards, Szacki walked up to the middle of the room. His impression was right – around the edge of the puddle, like on the rim of a coin, there was a sort of inscription, probably written with a finger. He quickly said a mental prayer for it to be a gloveless finger, and for the lunatic who had done this to be registered. He leant over the puddle and read it. Not this, please, he thought. Please, please don’t let it be a nutcase who’s been watching lots of American films and is playing cat and mouse with us now. On the edge of the puddle there were some letters carved in the dried blood: KWP, and straight after them three six-figure numbers: 241921, 212225, and 191621. It didn’t mean much to Szacki, but just in case he took a picture with his mobile phone.

  He forced himself to look up at Budnik’s face again. Changed beyond recognition, the man looked even more wretched than a couple of days ago at his office; death had deprived him of the last remnants of his predatory, athletic look. Worst of all was that plaster – pitiful enough then when it had been stuck to his forehead, but now it was dangling wistfully, revealing a barely healed cut, the cherry on the cake of posthumous humiliation.

  By the time Basia Sobieraj and Maria Miszczyk reached the spot simultaneously, the corpse had been taken down and covered with black plastic. Wearing disposable gloves, Szacki was looking through the dead man’s wallet, while Wilczur stood leaning against an empty window frame, smoking.

  Sobieraj took one look around the room and burst into tears. When Szacki went up to comfort her and put a friendly hand on her shoulder, she threw herself round his neck and hugged him tightly. He could feel her whole body shaking with sobs; over her shoulder he kept an eye on Miszczyk, hoping she wouldn’t faint, firstly because he didn’t want to catch her one-hundred-kilo body, and secondly because he was afraid she would fall through the rotten ceiling. But not a single maternal muscle twitched on his over-endowed boss’s face; she cast an eye over the crime scene and fixed her gaze on Szacki. She raised an eyebrow enquiringly.

  “The autopsy will be done today, and so will the crime scene inspection and tests to see if this blood includes Mrs Budnik’s blood too,” he replied to her unspoken question. “We’ll get a new case hypothesis ready as fast as possible, and present an action plan. Unfortunately it looks like a madman – we’ll have to have a psychological profile done, and review the databases to examine crimes with a religious motive. We can have a press conference tomorrow at noon.”

  “And what are we going to tell them?”

  “The truth. What alternative do we have? If it’s a madman, the fuss might help us. Perhaps he’ll boast to someone, perhaps he’ll accidentally say something that betrays him.”

  “Do you want to bring in the family to identify the body?”

  Szacki said no; there was no point burdening others with this nightmare. He had all the necessary facts in the documents.

  “Do the letters KWP mean anything to you?”

  “Komenda – headquarters, Wojewódzka – regional, Policji – of police. Why?”

  VI

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t bear chaos. The feeling of being lost in events and in his own evaluation of them, the feeling of being unable to keep his thoughts on one theme, of losing the logical thread, of helplessly, ineffectually thrashing about from thought to thought. You got a result by evolving one thought from another, by meshing them together, by creating a complex, precise logical mechanism, which eventually produced a fine, aesthetic solution. This time that was out of the question – his thoughts were rampaging in his head like a flock of nursery-school children in the playground. Budnik’s death had dismantled all his previous suppositions, which he had had enough time to get used to. In a way, from the very start of the investigation, somewhere deep down he had been convinced Budnik was guilty of his wife’s death, and that had given him peace, allowed him to look for the proof. Never before had his intuition let him down so badly.

  God, how furious he felt. Angrily he kicked a can lying in the street, and a beautiful pregnant woman coming in the other direction gave him a reproachful look. She would be beautiful, she would be pregnant, as if to spite him. He was tired, because every time he tried to place one thought on top of another, Klara appeared, demolished the entire structure and forced her way into his consciousness. So what if she was pregnant? Maybe that would be a good thing – after all, last night had been great, maybe that would mean he’d be settling down with a beautiful young wife at his side? But what if he had just been overcome by the mood of the moment? What if she really was a dumb, plastic dolly-bird who had never attracted him and who had once managed by some miracle to make a positive impression? And was it a good thing he had dumped her? And if she was pregnant, would she give him a second chance, or quite the opposite – would she change into a bitch out of hell making claims on him, getting maintenance out of him by the bucketload? So if she wasn’t pregnant, should he be pleased or sorry?

  He reckoned the long walk from the hospital to the prosecutor’s office would sober him up, and the cool air would help him to gather his thoughts. But it just got worse. He turned from Mickiewicz Street into Koseły Street; in a moment he’d be there, he’d sit down in Miszczyk’s office and present her
with the investigation plan. The investigation plan! He laughed out loud. What a joke, the investigation plan!

  There was a small group of journalists standing in front of the steps into the building. Someone said something, and they all moved towards him. Since his exchange of views with that pesky monkey in green had appeared on television, he had become recognizable. He straightened up and assumed a stony expression.

  “Prosecutor, a word of comment?”

  “There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow, we’ll tell you everything then.”

  “Is it a serial killer?”

  “Tomorrow. Today I’d have nothing but hearsay for you, tomorrow we’ll have information.”

  “Hearsay will do.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “The man suspected of the previous murder has been killed. Does that mean the investigation is at a standstill?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Should the schools be closed?”

  Szacki was dumbstruck. He had been methodically pushing his way through to the entrance, but the question was so stupid that he stopped.

  “Why the schools?”

  “To protect the children.”

  “I’m sorry, from what?”