A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  The guide had a pleasant, cheeky voice, which didn’t alter the fact that she was deadly dull, especially if you had to listen to the same story a second time over in only a few months. But even if she hadn’t been boring, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that Marcin had already found so surprising the last time – the famous Sandomierz underground vaults looked like the cellar in a prefabricated block of flats. Brick walls, concrete ceilings, terrazzo flooring, fluorescent lights. No magic, no mystery, no nothing. Extraordinary how they’d managed to screw up an attraction like that.

  “And suddenly the Mongols surrounded the city,” said the guide in a low voice, which made her sound silly instead of adding drama to her tale. “Halina Krępianka, inconsolable in her grief after losing her entire family, went to the enemy camp. There she told the Tatar chief she would guide them into the city along secret corridors, because she wanted vengeance on the citizens for dishonouring her…” The guide suddenly became embarrassed; she must have been unsure if the children understood exactly what she meant.

  “Dishonoured her? So why did she run away, was she like stupid?” muttered Marysia.

  “LOL,” her best friend chimed in.

  “The Tatars trusted the girl, and she led them a long way into the labyrinth of corridors, but meanwhile, the citizens walled in the entrance to the underground. All the invaders perished, and so did the heroic girl.”

  “Once they twigged, like that was when they really dishonoured her.” Marysia was priceless.

  “Ha ha, big LOL.”

  “…and to prove that every legend contains a small grain of truth, I can tell you that to this day you can dig up human bones near here, maybe the actual remains of the Tatars who were buried alive.”

  They shuffled into the next chamber, interesting in as much as it resembled a passage in a mine, and Marcin listened to the lecture on how the city was saved from collapse after the war. That was interesting, more so than legends about dumb-ass heroines. How the miners drilled shafts in the market square, how the houses in the Old Town had to be taken apart and rebuilt again, how the empty tunnels and cellars were filled in with a special substance to reinforce the rock, which was as full of holes as a sieve. He leant back against the wall; listening didn’t prevent him from staring at the thin ribbon of a lilac thong sticking out of Marysia’s hipsters. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but it bothered him a bit that almost all the girls did their best to look like tired old tarts. Good thing Ola wasn’t like that.

  The guide paused for a moment, and there was total silence.

  In the quiet he heard a faint, distant howling that seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth.

  “Can you hear it?”

  Marysia turned round to face him and pulled up her trousers.

  “What are we supposed to be hearing, perv?”

  “Sort of howling from deep in the ground. Oh, shush, shush, there it is…”

  The girls swapped glances.

  “O-M-G. Are you crazy?”

  “Just listen, you really can hear howling.”

  “Howling like someone’s dishonouring someone, or howling like the Devil? Coz I’m only interested in the first kind.”

  “LOL.”

  “Jesus, you’re such a dumb bimbo. Just shut up for a while and listen.”

  “And you go and get cured, you psycho freak – I’m gonna tell Ola.”

  The girls giggled together and joined the group, which was moving into the next room. Marcin stayed put, pressed his ear to the wall in various spots, and finally found one where the howling was very clearly audible. It was a weird noise, which sent shivers down his spine − the long, modulated, almost uninterrupted howling of a tortured human being or animal. Whatever was emitting that sound must have been in a pitiful state. Though maybe he was just imagining it – maybe it was the wind, something to do with the ventilation.

  The light went out, and there was only a gentle glow, combined with whispers, coming from the direction in which his class had disappeared. He lay down with his ear to the floor; something about the noise was still bothering him, something he hadn’t fully heard. As he sought the best quality, he shuffled his ear across the cold flooring and heard the howling better and better; now he was sure it was coming from more than one throat. And apart from the howling there was something else, another kind of noise, familiar, animal…

  He was just about to put a name to it when he felt a painful blow in his side.

  “What the fuck…” The darkness was lit by the pallid gleam of a mobile phone display. “Marcin? Are you a complete twat-head?”

  Marcin got up and brushed off his clothes.

  “There’s this howling…”

  “Sure, pal, howling on a violin. Better have a drink, Vivaldi.”

  III

  Chief Commissioner Dr Jarosław Klejnocki was sitting with his legs crossed, puffing on a pipe and looking at them with a calm gaze, hidden behind thick glasses. The glasses really were thick, thick enough to show the bulging shape of the lenses, and to make the bit of the profiler’s face visible behind them seem much thinner than the rest. As well as that he had short grey hair, an equally short beard, below it a polo-neck top, a tweed jacket, suit trousers and black sports shoes in the style of House MD.

  His clothes hung on him loosely, and it crossed Szacki’s mind that he must have been fat until quite recently – he looked rather haggard, with a touch of surplus skin on the cheeks, and his way of dressing and slow movements testified to the fact that for years he had been used to his own corpulence. Which he must have lost to illness, or a compassionate wife who had realized she didn’t want cholesterol to make her a widow prematurely.

  Present in the conference room at the prosecutor’s office, as well as Klejnocki and Szacki, were Basia Sobieraj and Leon Wilczur, who had earlier shown the profiler around the crime scenes. The windows were shielded by blinds, and pictures of the corpses were being projected on a large folding screen. Sobieraj was sitting with her back to the screen, refusing to look at it.

  Klejnocki puffed on his pipe again and set it down on a special little stand, which he had produced from his pocket earlier on. If someone had held a competition to find the archetypal Krakow boffin, the chief commissioner would offer a simple choice – either first prize, or chairman of the jury. Szacki suddenly felt irritated. He could only hope there was some substance behind this ideal academic appearance, and not just clairvoyance.

  “Can you imagine, I recently took part in a competition to find the most typical attribute of the Polish character. Do you know what I suggested?”

  Bloody-mindedness, thought Szacki, smiling politely.

  “Spleen,” said Klejnocki emphatically. “Spleen – it covers certain generalizing features, and in a symbolic way it determines the nature of the community that, admittedly not all that often, employs it.”

  Fucking hell, this can’t be true, thought Szacki. He couldn’t possibly be sitting here listening to this lecture, no way.

  “Spleen reflects a certain mental and psychological state that is characteristic on the banks of the Vistula. Embitterment, frustration, sneering underlined with negative energy and a sense of one’s own lack of fulfilment, being on the ‘No’ side, and constant dissatisfaction.”

  Klejnocki broke off, shook the ash from his pipe, and pensively began to fill it again, taking the tobacco from a small velvet pouch the colour of the cloth on a billiard table. A scent of vanilla wafted about the room.

  “So why have I brought this up?”

  “We’re wondering that too,” said Sobieraj, unable to hold back.

  Klejnocki gave her a polite bow.

  “Of course, dear lady. I bring it up because I have noticed that apart from crimes of passion, there is also such a thing as, let us call it, a crime of spleen. Fairly typical for this place on Earth which, like it or not, we call our homeland. Passion is a sudden burst of emotion, a moment of over-excitement and blindness that removes all the brakes imposed by civi
lization. A red curtain falls before the eyes, and only one thought matters: to kill. Spleen is something else. Spleen builds up slowly, in small droplets. At first it just makes itself felt occasionally, then it changes into an unpleasant ache, it starts getting in the way of life, becoming an ever more irritating noise in the background, like a nagging toothache, except that we cannot remove the causes of spleen in a single procedure. Few people know how to deal with it, and meanwhile each moment adds another droplet of vexing emotion. Drip, drip, drip.” Each “drip” was accompanied by a puff on the pipe. “Finally we feel nothing but bile, there is nothing else inside us, we would do anything to be rid of it, not to feel that bitterness any more, that humiliation. This is the moment when the sufferer casts everything to the Devil. Some people cast themselves – off a bridge or the top of a tall building. Others cast themselves at someone – a wife, a father, a brother. And I think we are dealing with an instance of it here.” He pointed the pipe at the pale corpse of Ela Budnik.

  “In other words we’re getting down to specifics,” remarked Szacki.

  “Absolutely – surely you didn’t think I was going to piss the whole day away like that.”

  Sobieraj raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. Wilczur didn’t even bat an eyelid. Entirely motionless and silent until now, he seemed to realize the foreplay was over and it was time to get down to action. That meant he leant forwards in his chair – Szacki would have sworn he heard creaking, and it wasn’t the chair – tore the filter off a cigarette and lit up.

  “I admit this is a strange case,” Klejnocki began, and Szacki thought, Here we go. He had always regarded the average profiler as a sort of psychic who provides so much information and multiplies the doubts so much that something has to fit. Then no one ever remembers the incorrect bits. “If it weren’t for the fact that the culprit is obviously and undoubtedly one and the same person, I would suggest that in the case of the second killing you are dealing with a copycat. There are too many differences here.”

  “Such as?” asked Szacki.

  “Both victims were bled to death − apparently a similarity. But let’s look at the details. The male victim has precisely severed femoral arteries. In a way it’s an elegant solution, the blood flows out rapidly, pours down the legs, and it’s over. Whereas the female victim has her throat slashed so that it looks like a gill, which means lots of enraged cuts. He wanted to punish her, to humiliate, to disfigure, he wasn’t impeded by the fact that there was blood pouring all over the victim’s face and torso, and also spattering the culprit. Using that method to slash her throat, everything must have been covered in blood.”

  Szacki was reminded of the large crimson pool upstairs in the abandoned mansion.

  “So the first crime was one ‘of spleen’, and in theory it should have closed the whole matter. Once the murder has been committed, the bile flows out with the victim’s blood, there’s peace, then a sense of guilt, pangs of conscience. Such are the dynamics. Why did he kill a second time?” Klejnocki stood up and began to pace up and down the room. “As well as that, both victims were undressed − apparently a similarity. But let’s look at the details. The female victim is abandoned naked in a public place, humiliated once again, all of which clearly shows how strong the need to kill was. So we can exclude the idea that the culprit is a stranger or a random passer-by. The male victim is hanging in a secluded spot – more than that, the barrel can even be regarded as a sort of covering, after all, it didn’t do great harm, it was more for appearance’s sake. It looks as if this time the culprit was subconsciously ashamed of his action, while earlier he had wanted the whole world to hear about it. Why? For the time being we don’t know, but I advise you to accept that the key to the whole puzzle is the first murder, and the motives behind it. The second is supplementary, so to speak, not pivotal. Please excuse my cynical tone, but I understand that at this stage your overriding concern is to catch the killer.”

  “You have said ‘he’ the entire time,” put in Sobieraj. “Does the profile fit a man?”

  “Very good question, I was just going to talk about that. Unfortunately you can’t rule out a woman for several reasons. Above all, the victim was not raped. It is very rare for a man in a frenzy of desire to kill not to exploit the unconscious woman, because for her that means additional humiliation. As well as that, the victim’s face is untouched, even though the killer cut her throat to ribbons with a sharp instrument. That might indicate a woman, because for women the face is a calling card, a manifestation of beauty which testifies to high value, fertility, a better position. Destroying this calling card is a stronger taboo for a woman than for a man. And finally what I was talking about earlier. The first killing is a typical murder with a strong emotional foundation, but the second has been committed as if with shame, out of obligation, because it was called for by a plan, of revenge for example. But women are far more systematic. A man would do the killing, the tension would leave him, and he’d stop. But a woman would tick off point one and start to implement point two. Of course I’m not saying that the killer is a woman, I’m just saying that unfortunately you cannot rule it out.”

  “A lot of help you are,” remarked Szacki tetchily. “You can’t confirm anything, or deny anything, everything’s possible. That doesn’t move us forwards.”

  “The victims did not die in the same place. What do you say to that solid fact, Prosecutor?”

  “You’re mistaken,” wheezed Wilczur from the back.

  “Rank does not guarantee infallibility, Inspector,” bristled Klejnocki, evidently not accustomed to small-town cops holding a higher rank than he did.

  “The tests showed that some of the first victim’s blood was found under the second body.”

  “Perhaps they did, perhaps it was there. I advise you to check again, take samples from several places. Psychologically it is unlikely for a murder under the influence of emotion to have been carried out with such an effort. The second murder has been coolly staged, but the first was not, that’s absolutely out of the question. If, however, the culprit went to the trouble of planting the blood of the first victim there, it means he’s very anxious that you shouldn’t find the place where she was murdered.”

  Szacki glanced at Wilczur, who just nodded in agreement. They would have to check.

  “Thank you,” he said to Klejnocki. “Confirmation will be very important for us.”

  “Will he or she attack again? Could it be a serial killer?”

  “No, he doesn’t fit the profile of a serial killer. As I said earlier, it looks more like the fulfilment of a plan, and of course revenge is the motive that suggests itself. So if the plan includes further victims, then yes, he will kill again.”

  “What is there to imply that?”

  “The inscription left at the murder scene. If the whole matter were over and done with, he wouldn’t be keen to play any little games.”

  “So it’s a little game?”

  “Or a way of communicating what the revenge is about. Often for avengers the death of the person whom they blame for their injury is not enough. Infamy is also important – the world must find out what the victims were punished for. Of course there is also a third possibility − after all, murderers exist, just as we do, on a certain meta-criminal level.”

  “I know where you’re heading,” sighed Szacki. “They watch the same films and the murderer has simply scrawled a few random numbers to confuse us.”

  “Exactly.”

  Klejnocki reached out a hand and switched off the projector.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t look at that corpse any more.”

  Silence reigned in the conference room. Szacki was thinking that despite everything the meeting had been fruitful, and to be fair to Klejnocki he reasoned very logically, without letting an excess of theory obscure his view of reality.

  “Assuming there is still someone on the list to be ticked off. Who might it be?”

  “Someone connected,” replied the profiler
, just as Szacki thought he would. “First the wife, then the husband, I don’t think it’s the turn of a shop girl from Białystok now. A family member, maybe a long-standing friend, or someone from the same set-up. If you manage to discover what the whole matter is about, if you find the next person before he attacks…”

  Klejnocki didn’t have to finish, Szacki had been hearing the clock ticking in his head incessantly from the very start of this case, and now it had simply started ticking louder and faster. If they found the potential victim, they’d find the murderer too. Maybe a man, maybe a woman, certainly someone connected with the Budniks, someone familiar. Maybe someone he had passed in the street, or maybe even someone he already knew. He glanced at Sobieraj, who was asking about a few more small points, he glanced at Wilczur, who was talking on his mobile in the corner of the room. He thought about the others, about Szyller, about Miszczyk, about Sobieraj’s husband, about the bizarre pathologist Ripper, about Judge Tatarska, about the guy who had accosted him that morning outside the shop. They were all in some way connected, they had known each other since childhood, they went to parties together, spread gossip, knew hidden facts and revealed secrets together. He wasn’t paranoid, he didn’t admit the idea of a city-wide conspiracy of silence, but he had noticed that he was being more and more careful to censor what he said to his new fellow citizens.

  Until this point he had only sensed that the solution to the riddle lay in the walls of this old town that had existed since the dawn of Polish history. Now he was certain of it.

  IV

  For obvious reasons the press conference happened without him; every question about Teodor “the Jew-baiting sheriff” Szacki was dismissed by Miszczyk in the same way – with the chilly statement that the prosecutor supervising the investigation was busy with his official functions. They had only had a brief conversation in advance about the front page of Fakt; his boss had laconically informed him that she had had a long talk with the prosecutor general, and it hadn’t been a pleasant one. The facts – how appropriate – which ensured the investigation was not taken away from them and transferred to the regional prosecutors in Kielce were firstly that the prosecutor general had hated the tabloids ever since they published photos of him in his swimming trunks (with the headline Justice at the Sauna), and secondly that some mysterious citizen, high up in the power structure, had claimed that if anyone was capable of cleaning up this small-town mess, it was the white-haired prosecutor. Szacki was a realist, he knew what that meant – someone was very keen for him not to return to Warsaw. All right, he had no such intention.