A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “Come on, you can help me carry all this clutter into the kitchen,” said Basia to her husband.

  “For God’s sake…”

  “What about the dancing flower?” asked Helka innocently.

  “Of course I’ll show you the dancing flower,” said Sobieraj, reviving. “And the prosecutor will help you with the crockery. The child’s come from the city, let her have a bit of fun.”

  He and Helka went back into the garden to set up the dancing flower, whatever it was, while Szacki and Basia Sobieraj gathered up the plates and went inside the house to kiss. Only when joyful shouts announced the success of Operation Flower did they stop, and go back onto the patio with a baking tin full of cakes.

  The dancing flower really did dance – it must have been constructed so that the water flowing through it tossed its head in all directions, producing a jolly, comical effect. Helka stayed by the flower to squeal, jump up and try in vain to escape the sprays of water, and Andrzej Sobieraj came back to the table.

  “You’ve got a wonderful daughter,” he said and picked up his beer can. “To your genes.”

  In reply Szacki raised his glass of Cola. At the same time he remembered what Basia had once told him about the fact that they couldn’t have children. Did that mean she didn’t use any contraceptives and was used to the fact that sex never meant procreation?

  “When will you tell the media about Wilczur?” asked the breathless Andrzej in a whisper. Earlier they had agreed not to discuss the case in front of the child.

  “We’ll tell them the arrested man is a police officer on Monday. And the rest of it as late as possible,” explained Szacki, never taking his eyes off the child, an old paternal habit. “We’ll talk in general terms about personal motives, we’ll deny the rumours about a serial killer and use investigation confidentiality as an excuse. The hysteria will die down, and then it’ll be as usual. The inquiry will go on for months, and once it’s possible to look at the files and find out Leon W.’s motivation, few people will be interested. There’ll be some fuss at the time of the trial, but by then it won’t be our problem any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “These are our final days on this case,” said Basia, who in contrast to her white-haired colleague was not suffering for this reason – on the contrary, she seemed delighted. “Teo still has to interrogate Wilczur before we can issue the arrest warrant, but soon the documents will be passed to another prosecution service – I’d bet on the regional one in Rzeszów.”

  “That’s a pity.” Sobieraj crumpled his can and threw it in a rubbish bag. “I’d have liked to hear from you what it was really like.”

  II

  Changing into his suit took longer than the actual interview. Leon Wilczur was brought in, and confirmed his personal details, then announced that he was refusing to make a statement. Szacki thought hard for a while, then passed him the transcript to sign. Wilczur was an old hand who knew his options perfectly well, so no requests, threats and appeals to his conscience would have been any use. The strategy of saying nothing was ideal – if Szacki had been the policeman’s lawyer he would have recommended the same, without even looking at the documents. The case was complicated and circumstantial, the historical motivation was exceptionally obscure and the investigators had hard work ahead of them looking for proof and witnesses – to start with they’d have to repeat all the functions performed by the police because Wilczur’s presence invalidated them.

  “Maybe, though?” he asked. “Three murders. Three victims. After so many years in the police, after solving so many cases, catching so many criminals, don’t you think you should confess? So that justice can be done. Quite simply.”

  “You’re wrong, Prosecutor,” wheezed Wilczur, without even turning his head to face him.

  12

  Sunday, 26th April 2009

  For Orthodox Christians it is Renewal Sunday, a holiday similar to the Polish All Souls’ Day, when feasting at the cemeteries is meant to help the souls of the dead to reach heaven. For prison guards in Poland it is Prison Service Day. Cabaret star Jan Pietrzak and actress Anna Mucha are celebrating their seventy-second and twenty-ninth birthdays, respectively. Swine flu is raging. The media are talking non-stop about those infected in new countries, some Polish musicians report from Mexico that “the streets look like intensive care units”, and the Minister of Health provides assurance that Poland is well prepared. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko arrives in Rome on his first foreign trip since 1995. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk signs a declaration agreeing to donate his organs for transplant – to the disappointment of the opposition, only in the event of his death. The people of Sandomierz are advertising their city at a tourist fair in Warsaw. Meanwhile in the city an ethnic-rock band called Jacyś Kolesie – “Some Guys” – is giving a concert, and the excursion boats are back on the Vistula, but the big news of the day is the spring, finally the spring is here! It’s warm and sunny, and the temperature rises above the magic barrier of twenty degrees.

  I

  Saying goodbye to Helena Ewa Szacka was heartbreaking. The closer her bus departure time came, the worse the atmosphere, despite Szacki’s efforts to provide first-rate fun. On the way to what was generously called the bus station, which was really a booth made of plywood and corrugated iron, Helka was quietly crying, and outside the bus she started to sob and clung on to her father so hysterically that he began to consider driving her to Warsaw by car. But then a portly lady came to the rescue, who was travelling with a granddaughter of a similar age to Helka; seeing the direness of the situation, she offered to look after the other little girl as well during the journey. And as soon as she caught the whiff of some entertainment, at once the “other little girl” cheerfully kissed her dad on the brow and disappeared inside the surprisingly decent-looking coach.

  Even so, Szacki felt sad and downcast as he went back to – well, quite, to where? His home? That alien flat wasn’t his home. His place? That was more like it – “his place” could be a home, but it could also be a hotel room, a bed in a hostel or a tent at a campsite. You could talk about any temporary lodging like that.

  So he went back to his place, but it only took a glance into the box-like kitchen window for him to turn on his heel and set off down the steps that ran towards the river. He felt like going for a really long walk – he wanted to get tired, eat dinner, drink a couple of beers and sleep dreamless sleep.

  God, what a beautiful day it was! Basia was right a week ago when she said you have to see the spring in Sandomierz. The spring had decided to make up for all its lost days, it had showered the branches, bare until now, with green mist, and on the ones that had already gone green, white flowers had appeared; in the air the sweet scent of blossom mixed with the smell of earth and a muddy odour of sodden meadows blowing in from the Vistula. Szacki inhaled them like a drug addict, trying to experience all of them at once, and each one separately; never in his life before had he seen any other spring apart from the faded urban variety, which seemed tired and used up from the very start.

  He went down onto the common, and next to the statue of John Paul II – where there was a curious plaque announcing that here the pope had celebrated “mass in the presence of the restored Polish knights” – he went left and crossed the meadow towards the road to Krakow. Only there did he turn around and look back at Sandomierz. And then he thought: all right, there has to be more than a feeble grain of truth in the legend about Colonel Skopenko. He couldn’t imagine anyone seeing the city from this perspective and then giving an order for artillery fire. It was beautiful, it was the most beautiful city in Poland, it was Italian, Tuscan, European, not Polish, it was a place you wanted to fall in love with at first sight, settle in and never leave. It was – it occurred to him for the first time ever – his city.

  He tore his gaze from the tenement houses banked up above the Vistula escarpment, from the white block of the Collegium Gostomianum which sat next door to the Gothic red-brick D
ługosz House, from the town-hall tower and the cathedral bell tower, slightly hidden from this perspective. And set off along the road, casting the occasional glance at the soothing architectural splendour.

  He took a slight turn along Piłsudski Boulevard, where a pleasure boat had appeared, so he sat on a bench for a while, watching the tourists getting on and off. Depending on the person, he either felt glad he wasn’t them, or quite the opposite – he envied them their lives. He could amuse himself like that for hours. Then he climbed the mysterious, murky gorge that led up to Saint Paul’s church, from where he took the road back to the castle, encountering on the way a crowd of people leaving Saint James’s church after mass.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t helping looking at the meadow spread out below, the exact spot underneath which a few days ago the explosion had thrown him against the wall and crippled Marek Dybus for life. That wasn’t a good memory.

  Nor unfortunately could he carry on pretending to be occupied by his daughter, views of Sandomierz, walks and the search for spring. He was mercilessly, exhaustingly anxious, shaken, frazzled – any word in any language suited him, as long as it expressed anxiety. Which he was feeling painfully with every fibre of his existence; regardless of whether he was playing with his daughter, eating or sleeping, he could only feel that one emotion. And he could only see one thing: Wilczur’s face. And he could only hear one thing: “You’re wrong, Prosecutor.”

  Nonsense, bloody nonsense, he couldn’t be wrong, because all the facts – though fantastical – fitted together perfectly. So what if they were unusual? So what if the motive seemed fanciful? People have killed for stupider reasons, and Wilczur knew that better than he did. Besides, no one was forbidding him to speak. He could explain why Szacki was wrong. He could prove where he was at the time of the murders. He could gabble away endlessly, keep talking until they ran out of paper at the prosecutor’s office. But he wouldn’t do that, he wasn’t stupid, the bloody old codger, damn and blast it all.

  Last night, unable to sleep, Szacki had already put a name to what was bothering him. He was sitting in the kitchen, listening to his daughter tossing and turning, and scribbling out possible versions of events – now with a suspect behind bars at least. The versions had various nuances, but they all answered the question “why?” neatly, in typical crime-novel style. A great wrong, transferred hatred, revenge years later. Revenge planned in such a way that everyone would hear what had happened in the frosty winter of the Year of our Lord 1947. Just as Klejnocki had explained: infamy is an important part of a vendetta, a dead body alone is not sufficient compensation. And Wilczur had achieved his aim – all of Poland would be talking about him and how he had been wronged.

  Yes, on the question of the motive it all made sense. It was less straightforward when it came to the question “how?” How did this skinny, seventy-year-old kill three people? Many of the relevant questions could be explained by the fact that he was an experienced Sandomierz cop. Always first at the scene of the crime, he dealt the cards and issued the orders. He controlled the interviews and police activities, he controlled the entire machinery of the investigation. He supervised the recovery of the recordings from the urban security system, at the same time proving that modern technology was not unfamiliar to him. Which explained the account with the information service and using the mobile phone to keep the media informed. It was just a pity they hadn’t found the phone. He knew Sandomierz inside out, which could explain his familiarity with the vaults. It would be necessary to interview Dybus about that circumstance, once he recovered – who knew about their research, who took part in it, whether the municipal services or officials were involved in it. Supposing Wilczur knew the underground, and supposing the fantastical thesis that there were hidden entrances to it in various parts of the town were true, that could explain how the bodies were transported. Placing a policeman in the role of the culprit also explained something that had bothered Szacki earlier on, which was the badge in the victim’s hand. Wilczur had pressed the “rodło” symbol into Ela Budnik’s hand to direct suspicion towards Szyller, and for suspicion to bounce off him in turn towards Budnik, and for the love affair among the upper echelons of Sandomierz society to come to light. It fitted Klejnocki’s theories about infamy.

  But that was very little, still very little.

  Szacki was now standing in the castle forecourt; he liked this place, and the view stretching away below the terrace on to the bend of the Vistula, worryingly broad at this time of year. He liked knowing that people had stood there for several hundred years, admiring the same landscape. Well, maybe a slightly finer one, not hideously disfigured by the glassworks chimney. There were lots of people around, who were spilling out of the neighbourhood churches after High Mass. Typically for a small town, they were wearing their Sunday best: the gentlemen in suits, the ladies in bizarrely coloured matching skirts and jackets, the boys in shining sports shoes, and the girls in black tights and evening makeup. There were a hundred potential reasons for mockery in each of them separately and in all of them together, but Szacki found the sight of them touching. All those years living in Warsaw he’d sensed that something wasn’t right, that the ugliest capital city in Europe wasn’t a friendly place, and that his attachment to its grey stone walls was in actual fact a sort of neurotic dependence, urban Stockholm Syndrome. Just as prisoners become dependent on their prison, and husbands on their bad wives, so he believed that the very fact of living among dirt and chaos was enough for him to bestow affection on that dirt and chaos. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, the Varsovian. The Varsovian, in other words the homeless person. Now, in the forecourt of Sandomierz castle, full of sunlight and chatter, he could see that clearly. As someone from a big city he had no mini homeland, no happy childhood realm that was his place on earth. A place you can come back to years later to be greeted by smiles, outstretched hands and the same familiar, though time-worn faces. Where the features of the neighbours and friends who have already gone are there to be found in their children and grandchildren, where you can feel part of a greater whole, discover what it means to be a link in a long and sturdy chain. Here he could see this chain, under the suits and outfits from the local market, and he envied all these people for it. He envied them so badly that it hurt, because he could tell it would never be his fate, even in the happiest exile he would always and everywhere remain homeless, without a land of his own.

  “Prosecutor?” Klara had materialized beside him in a floaty beige dress. He opened his mouth, wanting to apologize.

  “Marek’s doing better now, he has regained consciousness, and I even managed to exchange a few words with him. I saw you and I thought maybe you’d like to know.”

  “Thank you. That’s wonderful news. I’d like to say—”

  “It’s all right, you don’t have to apologize. Down there, with Marek, none of it was your fault. I just hope that old geezer breathes his last behind bars. And as for us, well, we’re adults. We had some extremely nice times together, the way I see it. Thank you.”

  He hadn’t a clue what to say.

  “I’m the one to say thank you.”

  She nodded, and they stood without talking; the silence was awkward and in other circumstances they would probably have gone to bed to avoid hearing it.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did a pregnancy test?”

  “That’s not keeping me awake. It would be an honour to be the father of your child.”

  “Well, well, so you do know how to behave after all. In that case…” – she stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek – “…see you. This is a small town, we’re sure to run into each other now and then.”

  She waved goodbye and rapidly walked away towards the cathedral. Szacki’s thoughts went back to Dybus, to the underground, to Wilczur, to the case. And to the question nagging him like an itch: how? How the fuck did he do it? How? Even supposing he was familiar with the system of tunnels, even supposing there was an entrance into them at each gateway, ho
w did that old man cope with the corpses? OK, so Mrs Budnik was light and her husband was scrawny too, but Szyller was a muscle-packed bull of a man. So what? Was he to believe Wilczur had anaesthetized him, then tossed him over his shoulder and crucified him underground? That he had put himself to the trouble of carting Budnik up to the first floor of the mansion on Zamkowa Street? And what about Mrs Budnik? He couldn’t possibly have known she would decide to move out to live with her lover on that day at that time. Had he been watching the property? How? Through cameras?

  And there was the inscription on the painting in the cathedral. Wilczur was a Jew, several times he had shown himself to be an expert on Jewish culture, and he could quote the Gospels in Hebrew by heart. Would he have made such an obvious error? Would he have childishly reversed a letter in a simple word? That couldn’t have had any purpose in his plan. Did it mean he had an accomplice? That would also explain his silence. It would be the perfect strategy, but also a guarantee that he wouldn’t give anyone away by accident.

  Szacki’s head was starting to ache, and he thought it must be from hunger; it was coming up to dinner time, and he hadn’t had a bite to eat since early morning. He made his way through the scent of blossoming apple trees in the garden by the cathedral, climbed uphill to the market square, and without thinking about it, aimed straight for the Trzydziestka restaurant. The place he always went to when he had no desire to experiment, where no food critic would have lasted out until the dessert, and where they served the best buckwheat in the world. He refused to think how many times the nice waitress had set a piece of fresh chuck steak from the grill before him, served with prunes, a heap of buckwheat and a pint of cold beer. He refused to think about it, because he was afraid his liver might overhear.