A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Can we go now?” asked Sobieraj quietly.

  “We’re not achieving anything here anyway.” Wilczur stood up, creaking, and glanced at his watch; there was still a sort of nervousness and impatience about him that were completely unlike the usually so phlegmatic policeman. “We’ll have to send in the experts, floodlights, evidence bags. They’ll have to examine this room and the whole area – I think this is also the place where Mr and Mrs Budnik ended up, there’s bound to be some evidence in here.”

  “Possibly even more than we imagine.” Szacki turned his head slowly, lighting up the room. “Until now we’ve been operating on the murderer’s terms, we’ve found everything cleaned up and prepared for us, but we’ve discovered this place too early.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That crash we heard before the dogs got to us – look, there’s a sort of timing mechanism on the cages which opened them before we arrived. Except that if it weren’t for one schoolboy gifted with perfect pitch, we wouldn’t be down here. Those dogs would have run about the underground, maybe they would have lived a bit longer, maybe they’d have eaten up the rest of Szyller, maybe they’d have got out of the labyrinth somehow and we’d have found them by the river, and had yet another riddle. But if we hadn’t found them, we’d probably have been offered a pointer. Whatever, we’re definitely here too soon, and definitely not in keeping with the killer’s plan. We must take advantage of that, and get the technicians down here as quickly as possible.”

  “And tell them to be careful,” added Sobieraj.

  “Aha, I knew that pervert wasn’t sitting here by candlelight!” they heard from a side corridor, down which Dybus had disappeared unnoticed. “Over here, I’ve found an accumulator battery!”

  Szacki’s brain cells heated to red-hot in the thousandth of a second needed to add two and two, but even so Wilczur was quicker than him.

  “Leave it!” the policeman yelled horrendously – Szacki had never heard such a shout. But it came too late.

  First Szacki saw a white flash, then he heard thunder, and then a shock wave hurled him against the wall like a rag doll. With his last vestiges of consciousness he was aware of a surprising sense of relief, a feeling of floating off into the darkness that meant it would stop hurting. Maybe for a while, maybe for ever – but it would stop.

  X

  It looked as if he had found out everything he could find out at the Sandomierz archive. Time to move on – luckily everything implied that he wouldn’t have to leave the province to get all the information the prosecutor needed. Who knows, with a bit of luck the work might be finished tomorrow. How funny – a job for the legal authorities on a difficult case had proved simpler than the traditional hunt for crest-bearing aristocracy.

  He could have left all the registers in the reading room and gone – that was the usual procedure – but this time he tucked them under his arm and went back to the prayer hall. Why? By now he must have been infected with the mood of a criminal investigation, which in laymen always prompts heightened suspicion, caution and paranoia. He didn’t want to leave documents that were crucial to the prosecutor just lying there for anyone to look at them. Anyone – meaning presumably the killer himself, his associate or someone close to him. Apart from which, he was bothered that the main room at the archive still inspired some fear in him, which made him incapable of thinking about it calmly. Was he really quite so soft? One weird incident, one corpse seen through the fog from a distance and here he was, whining like an old woman.

  So, at a brisk pace Roman Myszyński crossed the threshold of the heavy, steel door and went into the synagogue’s main room. In the light of the afternoon sun, falling through the window, it didn’t look scary – above all it looked dusty. The signs of the zodiac painted on the ceiling didn’t seem grim or sinister, but just awkward, betraying the unskilled hand of their eighteenth-century artist. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel entirely secure as he ascended the jolting staircase of the metal scaffolding – because the mortgage registers were kept right at the top, of course, next to the blasted drawbridges and the blasted windows from which you could see dead bodies.

  He put the archive records down in the right place and stood next to “his” window, thinking of it as therapy. Oh, look – here I am, and there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s just a place, like any other, no sweat.

  And just at that very moment a strange vibration ran through the scaffolding, every rivet, joint and weld of the entire structure seemed to creak, and the drawbridge broke free of its catch, fell and landed with a metallic crash against the window sill, as if inviting him to find a new corpse.

  Roman Myszyński leapt and screamed with horror.

  “Sir, have you gone mad, sir, or what?” Below him stood the archive manager, staring at him in disapproval.

  “I never… I never… It’s not my fault you’ve got tectonic movement here.”

  The disapproval vanished from the manager’s face, and was replaced with a look of mild indulgence for a lunatic.

  “Quite so, tectonic movement. Is there anything else I can help you with? Because if not,” he said, smiling mischievously, “I’d like to lock up our local seismic research centre now.”

  XI

  He knew it was bad. In his life he had seen enough documentaries about war to know it was very bad. Now his body was working in a different gear, there were more hormones in his veins than blood, biology was trying to give him the greatest chance of survival. But in actual fact his limbs had been torn off, his guts were gathering in puddles, he couldn’t open his eyes, and when he saw this he’d be sure to have hysterics like at the front, he’d crawl along with the torn-off leg in his hand or try to shove his intestines back inside. Rather a pity that was how it would all end, but on the other hand, maybe there was an afterlife, or life began over again, who knows.

  “Get up, Teo! We can’t stay here!” White light dazzled him even through his eyelids, and he shielded his face with a hand, thinking that meant he had a hand – a good sign.

  “What about my legs?” he asked senselessly.

  “What about them? Get up onto them, we’ve got to get Marek out of here, there might still be a chance to save him. Quickly, Teo, please!” Tearful, hysterical notes rang out in Sobieraj’s voice.

  Szacki started to cough and decided to open his eyes. There was so much dust in the air that the light from the headlamps was carving cartoon-style, sheer white tunnels into it. Basia Sobieraj’s face was covered in a thick layer of loess, and he saw her terrified eyes shining in the dust, her moist, nervously licked lips and a trail of thick snot trickling from her nose. He was dusty and carved up too, but he was intact, he could move all his limbs, his head and back just hurt dreadfully at the spot where he had slammed into the wall. With some difficulty he got up; his head was spinning.

  “Wilczur?”

  “He’s bandaging Marek.”

  “Get out of here as fast as possible and call an ambulance. You’ve got a straight path to the dogs, then remember the arrows. Take care.” He pressed his Glock into her hand.

  “Have you gone mad?”

  “Number one, other dogs; number two, the killer. Don’t argue, run!” He pushed her towards the exit and, staggering, headed towards the torch-glow and agonized moans coming from the tunnel into which Dybus had disappeared.

  Wilczur was leaning over the boy’s body, with one torch on his forehead and another secured to the rubble that had piled up after the explosion, blocking the passage into the part of the caves beyond. Hearing footsteps, he turned to face Szacki; he was just as dusty as the rest of them, which gave his long, furrowed old face a ghostly look; decked with his moustache and his pale eyes it looked like a ritual mask. Szacki was struck by the fact that the policeman’s eyes were full of genuine pain. As if he were sorry it wasn’t he who had gone down the ill-fated corridor, but the young man who had his whole life ahead of him.

  “He’s still in shock, but if he’s going to have any chance at
all he’s got to be on the operating table within the next quarter of an hour,” said the policeman.

  His estimate seemed optimistic. Dybus had open fractures of one arm, his fleece was visibly soaked in blood and his jaw was showing through a hole in his face. But worst of all was his leg, blown off below the knee. Szacki’s eyes were drawn to the white, nastily shredded bone sticking out of the stump.

  “I’ve put a tourniquet on his thigh and dressed the wound on his stomach, I think his spine is intact, because he’s reacting to stimulus, I don’t think any of his arteries are severed either, which is good. But it can’t last long.”

  Szacki went back and looked around “Szyller’s room”, without even taking any notice of the corpse. He was looking for something to use as an improvised stretcher and his gaze fell on the doors of the dog cages. He removed them from their hinges, arranged them next to each other on the ground and jammed them together to form a structure roughly the size of a garden gate. Not a very big gate. Wilczur watched.

  “Lucky he’s shorter,” he sniggered eerily, to which Szacki couldn’t help reacting with the same snigger, which had nothing to do with black humour, but was a symptom of shock and rising hysteria.

  They had to hurry.

  They carefully shifted the groaning Dybus onto the stretcher and picked it up from either end; the weight was unbearable. The boy was strong and well-built, and the cages were made from reinforcing bars welded together. Nevertheless, they set off down the corridor, Szacki hobbling slightly. After a few steps he noticed the reason for the pain in his thigh – his suit trouser leg was gradually becoming saturated with blood.

  Cursing, moaning and groaning, they reached the stairs and the dogs’ corpses. This was more or less halfway, but Szacki was incapable of taking another step. The muscles in his arms were howling with pain and his hands were being rubbed raw against the bars. He didn’t even dare imagine how Wilczur felt, who was thirty years older. But Wilczur wasn’t interested in telling anyone how he felt – he just leant against the wall, wheezing. Szacki found a reserve of will-power. First he dragged Dybus, whose moans were getting quieter, up the stairs, then the stretcher, and finally helped Wilczur to come up.

  “I can’t do it,” said the old policeman quietly, when he came back for him.

  “Yes you can, just a little more.”

  “If I don’t make it, there’s something you must know…”

  “Oh, bollocks, man – let’s just get out of here.”

  Once they had got Dybus back on the stretcher, Szacki grabbed hold of it at the heavier end, where the boy’s head was, and waited for Wilczur to lift his end. Reeling, battling the pain and dizziness, the nausea and the spots dancing before his eyes, forcing every cell in his body to strain itself to the utmost, hoarsely gulping in air, he moved forwards, dragging the stretcher, the injured man and Wilczur after him. His entire mind was focused on nothing but the thought of taking the next step.

  “Left,” groaned Wilczur from behind. “Left.”

  Indeed, he had moved automatically, without looking for the arrows. The need to retreat two paces depressed him. He was terrified that now he definitely wouldn’t have enough strength, and he burst into tears. But, sobbing and sniffling, he forced himself to turn into another branch, and once again set his mind to focus on nothing but his steps. One, two, three. He was on the edge of losing consciousness, but he was miraculously being kept on this side of it by a sense of duty, responsibility for Dybus. When he saw lights skipping across the walls of the tunnel, coming closer from the direction in which they were going, it didn’t even occur to him what it meant, he just took the next step. He couldn’t trust the lights, he could only trust his legs. One, two, three.

  Only when the paramedic dragged him onto the grass outside Nazareth House, only when he was laid on a stretcher and saw the blue sky above Sandomierz, with not a single cloud to spoil it, did Prosecutor Teodor Szacki lose consciousness.

  9

  Thursday, 23rd April 2009

  In Turkey it is Children’s Day, in Britain it is Saint George’s Day, and in Canada it is Book Day. Seventy-six people are killed in two suicide bomb attacks in Iraq, and in Mexico a flu epidemic claims its twentieth victim. Nepal installs GSM transmitters below Mount Everest and Scottish scientists are looking for forty volunteers to eat chocolate. In Lublin, police officers trying to prevent defecation in public arrest a man and find a flare gun on him, and in his flat an arsenal of weapons dating from the Second World War. In Gliwice, a customer dies at the meat counter in a Biedronka supermarket and other shoppers have to walk around the corpse in a plastic body bag. In Poznań, a Rossmann’s pharmacy insists that a teenager who wants to buy condoms must show his ID card. In Łódź, the ultra-conservative League of Polish Families party informs the prosecution service that naturist nights are being held at a swimming pool. And also in Łódź it turns out the policemen from an anti-terrorist unit have been earning a lot of extra money from gangsters. Only in Sandomierz is it deadly dull, not even the weather changes – it is sunny and chilly. The pressure falls and everyone is feeling sleepy.

  I

  Even if China is the homeland of the apricot, it is worth knowing that in Poland it is a fruit typical of the Sandomierz region, whose introduction to Poland we owe to the Cistercians. It was the monks in white habits who, after they had built their abbey at Jędrzejów in the seventeenth century and started to disseminate culture in the surrounding area, established the first apricot orchard just outside Sandomierz.

  Out of boredom, Prosecutor Teodor Szacki read the entire article about apricots and their patriotic local history, realized The Vistula Valley Weekly had nothing better to offer him and put the magazine down on a stool next to his bed. That morning there had been hospital procedures, tests, drugs and conversations with the doctors to entertain him, but now he was bored to death and felt he was wasting precious time. He had taken anti-tetanus drugs and been vaccinated against rabies, he had let them smear ointment on him and bandage him, but he had refused painkillers. Yesterday he had had no such objections, had let them pump something into him, and had floated off into a ten-hour sleep, but today he was afraid of any kind of doping – he had to think fast and efficiently, he had to reanalyse the facts gathered to date and all the new ones that would result from the underground research. Forgoing the drugs had its price – the muscle pain was coming back, his grazed hands were stinging nastily, and above all he had a steady, shooting pain in his bitten hand, which now and then made him groan and clench his lips.

  The phone rang.

  “I’m sorry, but why do I have to find out from the Polsat news ticker that you’re in hospital?”

  Weronika.

  “I’m sorry, but the prosecution service hasn’t got control of the media yet. Soon perhaps, if Law and Justice wins the next election.”

  “Very funny.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I’m not asking if there’s anything wrong with you, because I don’t give a shit. I’m asking because my daughter called from school in complete hysterics saying her daddy’s in hospital, and the only thing I could say to her was, ‘Wait a moment, hold on, I’ll just switch on the telly, maybe I’ll find something out.’ Are you really all right?”

  “Bruises. But they pumped me full of something yesterday, I slept. I hadn’t a clue there was anything in the media.”

  Basia Sobieraj entered the room. Seeing that he was on the phone, she stopped in the doorway, but he beckoned her to come closer.

  “Well, just fancy that, there is. About you, about some underground explosions, about some shooting.”

  He cursed mentally. Who the fuck had told them about all that? Meanwhile Weronika was getting wound up in the familiar, all too familiar way.

  “Underground explosions?” she went on. “Shooting? Have you gone completely off your head? Have you forgotten you’ve got a child? I know, midlife crisis, for fuck’s sake buy yourself a motorbike or something,
man, but don’t swap your office for an underground shoot-out. It’s enough for me that I’m a divorcee, I have no desire to be a widow. How does that sound? As if I were sixty.”

  “I don’t think you can be a widow if you’re a divorcee.”

  “You’re not going to tell me who I can and can’t be – luckily those dismal days are over. Just don’t frighten me and upset me. You’ve got a child, right? Remember? Every-other-weekend Dad?”

  “That’s below the belt.”

  “Maybe. Try stopping me. And what now? Is Helka supposed to come to you tomorrow? Or have you nothing to offer for now except changing your potty and tending to your bedsores?” Her voice faltered.

  He wanted to say something nice, to hug her over the phone, to admit that he missed her too and he felt regret, he was sorry as all hell. But he didn’t want to do it with Sobieraj sitting there.

  “Of course, let her come, I’ll be out of here in a while, I’ll be back in working order tomorrow,” he quipped in an official tone, the coolness of which surprised even him. All the more Weronika at the other end. He could clearly sense that it caused her pain.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll send you a text tomorrow when I put her on the bus. Take care.”

  And she hung up. Sobieraj looked at him enquiringly.

  “My daughter’s mother,” he explained, making a weird face as if to apologize for the fact that she’d had to be a witness to some long-forgotten bird screwing him around, but then, you know, the child.

  “You look great,” he said, to reinforce the false impression that the past had long since been in the past. “What about the others?”