A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  They talked for a while longer about plans for action to take in the next few days and drew up a list of matters to attend to, and factors which could verify or exclude certain assumptions relevant to the inquiry. It was an arduous process of elimination, but Szacki didn’t feel overwhelmed; at this stage there could be a breakthrough at any moment, thanks to some important new piece of information or an important turn of events. They tossed a coin to decide who would eat the last profiterole. Szacki won; as he was smearing the last bits of it against his palate and starting to think about a cup of mint tea, Miszczyk fired her final question.

  “Apparently you’ve dropped Klara Dybus?”

  This assault on his private life was very unexpected, and Szacki was completely tongue-tied. He wasn’t accustomed to the speed at which information circulates in a small town.

  “There are rumours going around that she’s been crying and cursing all day, and her brothers are loading their muskets.”

  Fucking hell, he didn’t even know she had any brothers.

  “It wasn’t a promising relationship,” he said, just to say something.

  She snorted with laughter.

  “You didn’t find a relationship with the best match in Sandomierz promising? All the perfect knights around here have already broken their horses’ legs trying to climb her glass mountain. When she chose you, even the deaf could hear the suicidal thoughts emanating from hundreds of houses. She’s beautiful, clever, rich – as God’s my witness half the women round here would become lesbians for her. But you didn’t think it a promising relationship?”

  Szacki shrugged and made an idiotic face. What else could he do?

  VIII

  “The town itself fills me with sadness, the poverty and crudity are pitiful, there’s nothing to drink and nowhere to eat, because all the restaurants are closed. At the People’s Tavern I had a bad start and clashed with the waiter, but luckily I buried my pride and apologized. So I’m getting something to eat there. Things are worse when it comes to having a crap. There are two cubicles that they keep locked – filthy and stinking. There’s no question of sitting. This is the side of living in this place that I find frightful, and I think in future I’ll stop coming here.”

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was pleased that this particular comment from Iwaszkiewicz’s Diaries no longer applied. He scooped up a teaspoonful of the milky froth gracing his coffee and slurped it down, as specks of icing sugar tickled his palate. Either some anonymous Sandomierz genius had had the bright idea of sprinkling coffee with icing sugar instead of cocoa powder, or the café owners had seen it done somewhere, it didn’t really matter which – the upshot was that the first sip of coffee at the Mała Café was always so delicious that Szacki had no desire to go anywhere else. This café was one of his favourites anyway – it was the epitome of the middle-class dream of “an unpretentious little café downstairs”. The short menu offered toast and crêpes, coffee, tea and homemade cakes. There was a sofa, a few chairs, and just four small tables. The locals complained that the prices were as bad as in Warsaw, which always amused Szacki as he handed over just seven zlotys for a first-class latte here, actually far less than in the capital. He’d paid even less recently, since for some reason he had gained the status of a regular customer, which was as nice as it was surprising – he had never exchanged a single word with anyone here apart from placing his order; he just sat quietly in the corner, drinking his coffee and reading Iwaszkiewicz – sheer Sandomierz-style snobbery.

  Iwaszkiewicz, or something else dug out of the little bookshop opposite. Which in its turn was the dream-come-true of those yearning for an “unpretentious little bookshop downstairs” – an antidote for shops in the Empik chain, which always made Szacki think of an overcrowded high-security prison. As if the books in there were serving a sort of sentence, not just living there while they quietly waited for a reader. This local bookshop may have been a little shabby, but at least in here he didn’t feel like the victim of a prison gang rape, about to be beset by special offers and bestsellers, even though not all the new books have finished with him yet.

  Right now he didn’t have a book with him, but was sitting there with his eyes closed, warming his hands on his coffee cup. It was already dark outside – it was almost nine, and they’d be closing soon. Time to blow the whistle for the end of break and go back to squinting at a computer screen. Basia Sobieraj was sitting next to him on the sofa, cross-legged, flipping through a popular children’s comic she had extracted from a pile of newspapers.

  They had spent two hours sitting in his flat, trying through unofficial means to find any sort of connection between the numbers left at the crime scene: 241921, 212225 and 191621. All good things come in threes, and all three numbers appeared at once on exactly three Internet sites. One was in Arabic, serving – as far as they could work out from the Roman-alphabet names scattered among the squiggles – for the illicit sale of drugs to increase sexual potency. One was Icelandic, and consisted of dozens of pages of figures published for IT purposes. And the third was in German, a bibliographical list where the figures appeared within index numbers. And that was all. In view of this total failure, they started studying the numbers individually, swapping jokes and observations as they did so. They tried to find phone numbers, and converted the figures into dates – thanks to which Szacki discovered that on 2nd April 1921 the first Poznan Fair had opened and Albert Einstein gave a lecture in New York on the theory of relativity, and on 4th February 1921 the Indian politician Kocheril Raman Narayanan was born, who lived eighty-four years – however, they couldn’t find any point of contact. Anyway, the whole idea was pretty desperate, because only the first number could be converted into a fairly modern date.

  Sobieraj folded the comic and put it back on the pile.

  “I must have got older – it hardly makes me laugh any more,” she said, and took a folded piece of paper from her fleece pocket. “Well, back to work, eh?”

  “I thought we were having a break,” he groaned, but he picked up the piece of paper, on which Sobieraj had written out the interpretations of the numbers that seemed the most reasonable. Just the pick of the bunch, after rejecting numerology, identity numbers on dating services and Internet auction numbers. On the page there were:

  241921 – the symbol for “economic promoter for technological development” in the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy’s classification of professions; the number under which Goldenline, a company that runs a community business service, is registered with the National Cooperative Council.

  212225 – the patent number for some trendy Gucci slip-on shoes.

  191621 – the number of the Polish patent for a tube for fibre-optic cables; and of an asteroid in the asteroid belt stretching between the inner and outer planets of the Solar System.

  What a disaster. Szacki glanced at it and immediately closed his eyes again.

  “We’re not thinking the right way,” he said.

  “Hmm?” mumbled Sobieraj; Szacki had learnt by now that a polite “hmm” was her way of actively listening.

  “We’re just pretending to be doing something – let’s drop this Google nonsense, as if we really believed the whole world was on the Internet by now. We’re not after someone who murders IT guys by hanging them with network cables. It all has something to do with old traditions, superstitions, historic things. Google won’t help us. We must think. Three six-digit numbers, relatively close to each other, but not arranged in order. We’ve established that local phone numbers used to have six digits, so let’s check them in the old regional phone books. What else?”

  “Police ID cards!”

  Szacki opened his eyes. That was it. That had to be it. K-W-P, the Polish abbreviation for the regional police headquarters (as Miszczyk had reminded him at the crime scene), and three six-digit numbers. He set aside his coffee and immediately called Wilczur, who luckily was still at the police station. He told him to put the three numbers into the system and call back. S
obieraj listened with flushed cheeks as he gave the official orders in a cold tone of voice – she looked to him like a little girl with red hair on the trail of a mystery in a children’s adventure story.

  “What else?” asked Szacki. “What else is denoted by six-digit numbers? Tell me everything that comes into your head, the remotest associations, things that are right off the point.”

  Sobieraj glanced at him. If she wanted to ask a question, she thought better of it, and chewed her lower lip pensively.

  “Concentration camp numbers. Germans, Jews, anti-Semitism. ‘KWP’ could be the symbol denoting a particular category.”

  “Good. To be checked. What else?”

  “I think the numbers for the Gadu-Gadu instant-messaging service have six digits, but I’m not sure.”

  “To be checked. What else?”

  Sobieraj bit her lip harder, frowned and leant towards him.

  “Got it! The number of grey cells.”

  “The what?”

  “The number of grey cells that die every time you give an order instead of doing the thinking.”

  “Somebody’s got to organize the work.”

  “Well, I’m listening.” Sobieraj laced her hands together, leant against the back of the sofa and began to twiddle her thumbs. She looked sweet, and Szacki felt he was getting to like her more and more. She was a bit like the girl who’s your friend in the scouts, the kind with whom you can stay up all night on watch, and chat away with right through camp, but when it finally gets through to you that it was more than just a friendship, it’s too late and she’s been someone else’s wife for ages. He closed his eyes and started imagining the figures. He saw a record book at a registry or an archive, but pushed the image away from himself – all the catalogue numbers in the world always include the year, so that couldn’t be it. For the same reason, prisoners and detainees were out of the picture, and besides, their numbers weren’t six-digit ones. He cursed himself for thinking in too normal a way. He had to give it a twist, he had to think the other way around. Break them up, maybe? Not six-digit numbers, but three-digit groups? 241 921 – 212 225 – 191 621. A bit like parts of national insurance numbers. A bit like mobile phone numbers without the operator’s prefix. And what about two-digit groups? 24 19 21 – 21 22 25 – 19 16 21. He projected them in his mind, turning them every which way.

  “There’s a strange regularity…” he said quietly.

  “Hmm?”

  “There’s a strange regularity,” he repeated. “If we break the numbers up into two-digit ones, none of them is higher than twenty-five. Look.”

  He took a pen from his inside jacket pocket and wrote out the numbers on a paper napkin in the following way:

  24 19 21

  21 22 25

  19 16 21

  Sobieraj turned the napkin to face her.

  “A magic square? A mathematical rebus? A sort of code? The Roman alphabet has twenty-six letters.”

  Szacki quickly wrote out:

  X S U

  U V Y

  S P U

  He and Sobieraj glanced at each other. It didn’t look as if it made sense. But Szacki felt uneasy. Some idea had escaped him. Something had flashed past at the back of his head. When he changed the figures into letters? No, before that. When he was looking at the figures written out in a square, and Sobieraj said something about a rebus? No, first she had mentioned a magic square. Goodness knows why, but the idea of a magic square made him think of paper, mystery, a book read under the duvet by torchlight. What was it? Something for children, about a Jewish alchemist resurrecting the Golem in Prague by putting a piece of paper with a magic square into his mouth. My God, was the Kabbalah really coming into his investigation? It was a sort of lead, but that still wasn’t it – some other thought had flown by when he was looking at those numbers, some remote association. Pairs of numbers. A magic square. The Kabbalah. Superstitions. Old wives’ tales. The esoteric. Faith. He seized Sobieraj by the arm and pointed a finger to say don’t speak – the idea that had surfaced was getting nearer and he didn’t want to lose it. Numbers. The Kabbalah. Faith. Just a bit more. He held his breath, closed his eyes, and saw the answer looming out of the fog in his brain.

  And just then his phone rang. Wilczur. The idea vanished, Szacki answered and listened to what the old policeman had to say. Sobieraj looked at him expectantly, placing her hand on his; Szacki found the sight of two prosecutors gripping each other’s hand somewhat surreal, but he didn’t pull his away.

  “Well?” she asked as soon as he had finished the conversation.

  “Well nothing,” replied Szacki. “A lady chief commissioner from CID in Brzeg, a traffic police officer from Barczewo and a beat cop from Gorzów. Different places of birth, different names, no points of contact either with each other or with our case. And Wilczur promised his pal in Tarnobrzeg is also going to check the archive of militia IDs. There might be something there.”

  He felt like crying. His lost thought could have contained the solution to the riddle.

  “Hmm,” mumbled Sobieraj. “Yes, I hear you, Brzeg, Barczewo, Gorzów, places on the map. Do you think they could be geographical coordinates? You know, degrees, minutes and seconds?”

  Szacki quickly downed the rest of his coffee and they almost ran back to his bachelor pad, where he could still smell Klara’s perfume. Klara – the best match in Sandomierz.

  By trying various combinations, on this quarter of the globe (latitude north, longitude east), they managed to mark several spots in the desert in Libya and Chad. Other experiments took them to the Namibian wilderness and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Let’s try fixing a spot in Poland,” said Sobieraj, leaning over his arm. Her ginger hair tickled his ear.

  “Libya in Poland?”

  “I mean let’s see where these longitude lines cross Poland. You know, like In Search of the Castaways.”

  In Jules Verne’s book it was actually about a parallel, but Szacki soon saw the point. Indeed, if all three numbers did denote geographical latitude, they would cross this part of the world. 19°16′21″ ran from Bielsko-Biała in the south, through the western suburbs of Łódź in the middle of the country, to the Vistula Spit on the Baltic coast. Then 21°22′25″ started further to the east, quite near Krynica Zdrój, ran right through the middle of Ostrowiec – here they exchanged knowing glances as this city was nearby – crossed the eastern districts of Warsaw and ran via Mrągowo to the Russian border. 24°19′21″ was entirely outside Poland, but still within its pre-war borders, passing slightly east of Lviv, Grodno and Kaunas.

  “Ostrowiec is something,” Sobieraj muttered into his ear, trying at any cost to prove that for a true optimist even a broken glass can be half full.

  “And I know what that something is,” said Szacki, standing up suddenly.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s a load of shit. A smokescreen. Lies. A great big load of shit the size of Australia, a vast pile of crap!”

  Sobieraj tucked her hair behind her ears and watched him patiently, waiting for him to calm down. Szacki paced the room from wall to wall.

  “In the American films some genius always shows up who tries to think like the murderer, right? He frowns, walks about the crime scene and in abrupt, black-and-white flashbacks we see how his mind attunes itself, how he works out exactly what happened.” Something flashed between the wardrobe and the wall, something that looked like a silver wrapper, and Szacki had to fight the temptation to check if it was a condom wrapper, or an empty condom wrapper.

  “Hmm?” This time Sobieraj supplemented her mumbling with an encouraging gesture. With one hand she tapped something out on the keyboard.

  “Except that films follow a different logic from real life. They have a logic which has to reach a solution, a denouement so the killer is caught in an hour and a half. But now let’s feel our way into the logic of a real case and of our murderer. He certainly doesn’t want us to catch him in an hour and a half, so if he isn
’t completely and utterly fucked up he’s not going to leave riddles we only have to solve in order to find him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning either he’ll leave a riddle that sends us off on a completely false trail. Or – which from his, or her, point of view has to be a more amusing solution – he or she will leave a riddle that makes no sense. The kind that has no solution and leads nowhere, but just makes us waste time looking at satellite pictures of the Libyan desert. And with every minute he or she is sure to be further and further away, safer and safer.”

  “OK,” said Sobieraj slowly, rocking on a chair, with her hands entwined under her chin. “And what do you suggest?”

  “Let’s go to bed.”

  Sobieraj slowly raised one eyebrow.

  “I haven’t brought my lacy underwear, so if you’d be willing to postpone until another day…”

  Szacki snorted with laughter. He really was getting to like her more and more.

  “You people are terribly randy in this province.”

  “Long winters, long nights, there’s no cinema and just boring stuff on TV. What can you do?”

  “Sleep. Let’s go to sleep, get a rest. Tomorrow we’ve got the profiler, the data will come through from the lab, recordings from the urban security cameras, maybe we’ll get something extra.”

  Sobieraj turned her laptop towards him.

  “First look at this.”

  He went over to her; the comment about the underwear meant that first he looked at her, differently, but he saw the same thing as usual. Jeans, thick hiking socks, a black fleece, no make-up. A textbook example of the one-hundred-per-cent Catholic girl guide. The only lace he could imagine in her context would have to be on the Virgin Mary’s veil. But she smelt nice, he thought, as he leant over her – more of shampoo than perfume, but it was nice.

  In the browser window the words Konspiracyjne Wojsko Polskie were entered – meaning the Polish Underground Army. Yes, of course, the KWP. Some scraps of superficial historical knowledge sprang to mind – the “cursed soldiers”, post-war partisans fighting against the Communists, underground tribunals passing sentences, and anti-Semitic goings-on. Szyller?