A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was not able to expel these thoughts from his mind. And he was afraid, because there was something prophetic about them, something which meant he couldn’t just regard them as theoretical. As if Providence were preparing the biggest test of all for him, and with his sixth sense he could tell that one day he would have to weigh up love on the one hand, and someone’s life on the other.

  As Budnik droned on, successive elements jumped into place, and the jigsaw started looking like a picture ready for framing. Usually at such moments Prosecutor Teodor Szacki felt calm, but now he was filled with a strange, irrational alarm. Grzegorz Budnik hadn’t planned to become a murderer. He hadn’t been born with that thought, and it had never been part of his existence. Quite simply, one day he had realized it was the only alternative.

  Why was Szacki so strangely convinced that a day like that would come for him too?

  III

  Arresting Grzegorz Budnik was a bombshell, and on the news bulletins even the swine flu was put on the back burner; in Sandomierz no one was talking about anything else. The general commotion allowed Basia Sobieraj to keep her husband in the dark by saying she didn’t know how late they’d have to work at the office, and so they ended up at Szacki’s flat, so the married woman with a bad heart and a fifteen-year training period could discover her erogenous zones with the commitment of an A-grade student.

  They had wonderful fun together, and at a certain point Szacki fell in love with Basia Sobieraj. Quite simply and frankly, and it was a very nice feeling.

  “Misia said you were behaving like a lunatic.”

  “It could have looked like that, I admit.”

  “Was that when the penny dropped?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know it excites me?”

  “What does?”

  “The fact that you’re a crime-solving genius.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Don’t laugh. Really, after all, the case was already solved, so how did it enter your head?”

  “Because of a grain of truth.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “They say that in every legend there’s a grain of truth.”

  “There is.”

  “But there are legends, such as that blasted anti-Semitic legend of blood, in which there isn’t a single drop of truth, which are one hundred per cent lies and superstition. I’d been thinking about it just then in the market square, never mind why. And I remembered what your father had said. That everyone tells lies, and you mustn’t forget they’re all lying. And suddenly I thought about the case as one big lie. What it would mean, if you were to suppose there wasn’t anything true in it, suppose it was all a creation. What would be left if you threw out all the stuff from seventy years ago, the ritual murders, ritual slaughter, Hebrew inscriptions, biblical quotations, rabid dogs, gloomy underground tunnels and barrels studded with nails. What would happen if I realized all the evidence and clues which had been driving our investigation from the start were lies. What would be left?”

  “Three dead bodies.”

  “Actually no. The three dead bodies were a creation, a lie, the three dead bodies were to make us think about three dead bodies.”

  “Well then, three times one dead body.”

  “Exactly. I could tell that was the right way to think. But I wasn’t quite there yet. I already knew there weren’t three dead bodies but three times one dead body. I knew that to see something, I had to strip those bodies of all the theatrical scenery. I knew I should latch on to what came from outside, the objective things which weren’t imposed on us, and hadn’t been specially prepared, as had the badge in the victim’s hand, for example.”

  “Ela’s hand,” muttered Basia quietly.

  “Yes, I know, all right, Ela, I’m sorry,” said Szacki, surprising himself with his tender manner, hugged his lover’s slender body to him and kissed her hair that smelt of almond shampoo.

  “And so what came from the outside?”

  “You mean who.”

  “The profiler?”

  “Bravo! Do you remember how the four of us sat together? You and I, Klejnocki and Wilczur. Under a huge picture of your friend’s corpse projected on a screen. Once again the staging overwhelmed us. That picture, Klejnocki’s irritating manner, his pipe, his boring twaddle. There was a great deal happening at that point, we wanted a lot and quickly, and he said things that might have seemed obvious, his ideas seemed a bit thin, because he didn’t know as much as you do, for example, about Sandomierz, about the Budniks, about the relationships between the people. But he said the most important thing for our investigation: that the key to the riddle is the first killing and the motives behind it. That the first murder was committed under the influence of the greatest emotions, and the ones that follow are just the fulfilment of a plan. The anger was vented on the first victim, the hatred and bile, whereas the second was simply, if you can say that, murdered. And I started thinking. If we don’t treat the three killings as a whole, if we focus on the first, most important one, and forget the stage setting for the moment, the case is obvious. The murderer has to be Budnik. He had a motive in the form of his wife’s betrayal, he had the means, and absolutely no alibi whatsoever, he fibbed in his statements and he deceived us.”

  “But who would have suspected a dead person?” Basia Sobieraj got up, put on Szacki’s shirt and fetched some girly cigarettes from her handbag.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “One pack every two weeks. More of a hobby than a habit. May I smoke in here, or should I go into the kitchen?”

  Szacki waved a hand, dragged himself out of bed too and reached for his own cigarettes. He lit up, the warm smoke filled his lungs, and goosebumps appeared on his skin; maybe the spring had arrived at last, but the nights were still cold. He wrapped himself in a blanket and started walking about the flat to warm up.

  “Nobody suspects a dead person, of course,” he continued. “Still, if it hadn’t been for Budnik’s corpse, the whole thing would have been obvious, because in Szyller’s case, too, he was the most natural suspect. All that was left was to apply Sherlock Holmes’s old principle that if we eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, has to be true.”

  Sobieraj dragged on her cigarette; the cold was making her breasts, visible in the open shirt, look extremely enticing.

  “Why didn’t we notice that? You or I, or Wilczur.”

  “An illusion,” said Szacki, shrugging. “Perhaps Budnik’s most brilliant idea. Do you know what conjuring tricks usually rely on? On distracting your attention, don’t they? While one hand is shuffling two packs of cards in the air, or changing a burning piece of tissue paper into a dove, you haven’t the time or the desire to look at what the other one is doing. You see? We were the ideal spectators for his show for various reasons. You and Wilczur were local enough for everything to have too much significance for you. I was enough of a stranger to be unable to separate the important things from the unimportant ones. The whole time we were looking at the top hat and the rabbit – at pictures in churches, quotes from the Gospels, barrels, naked corpses on the site of an old Jewish cemetery. The less spectacular things escaped our attention.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the loess sand under Mrs Budnik’s fingernails. If you remove a mysterious symbol from someone’s hand, the fingernails don’t interest you. And if they had, we’d have started to think about the underground cellars sooner. Such as the second victim’s feet, with a shiny coating of blood. You see something like that, plus that barrel too, and you don’t stop to wonder why a town council official has carved-up, bruised, mangled feet.”

  “The feet of a tramp…”

  “Exactly. But it was sitting inside me the whole time, all those little details, reminding me of their existence the whole time. Klejnocki’s words, first of all. Your father’s words, second.”

  “That everyone tells lies?”

  “Those words too, but there were others
that made me itch. At first I thought it was about passing on hatred from generation to generation, which in the context of Wilczur was obvious. But your father was talking about life in a very small town, where they’re all looking in each other’s windows, so if your wife is unfaithful, you’ve got to stand next to her lover in church. Bloody hell, somewhere in there I had Budnik at the back of my head the whole time, but I pushed away that solution, because it was too fantastical. Only when I started to consider that option did it all come together. Take the reversed letter on the painting – the rabbi in Lublin said no Jew would have made a mistake like that, just as we would never write a B with the loops to the left. That doesn’t indicate Wilczur. It points at someone who had a good general idea, but had to keep looking at Wikipedia to add the details. And Budnik was pretty well clued up, he’d been interested in the painting, he had fought for the truth about it, he had a good enough grasp of the anti-Semitic obsessions to know perfectly well which strings to pluck.

  “That wasn’t his only mistake either. He had pressed the badge into his wife’s hand because in that flood of bile – to quote Klejnocki again – he wanted to injure Szyller at any price, to incriminate him. It didn’t occur to him that as soon as we got to Szyller, from the story of the love affair we’d come bouncing straight back to his doorstep like a rubber ball. Or maybe he did think of it, but reckoned Szyller wouldn’t give the game away out of concern for his lover’s good name? Hell knows. Either way, if Szyller hadn’t gone to Warsaw, if I’d interviewed him a day earlier, he would be alive, and Budnik would have been in jail for a week by now.”

  Sobieraj finished her cigarette; he thought she’d come back under the duvet, but she did some more rummaging in her handbag and took out her phone.

  “Are you calling your husband?”

  “No, the Modena, to order pizza. Two Romanticas?” she said, fluttering her eyelashes in comedy fashion.

  He agreed willingly and waited for Basia to place the order, then pulled her back under the duvet. Not for sex, he just wanted to cuddle and talk it all out.

  “And that business with Wilczur?” she asked. “Was that a smokescreen? What was that about? They have let him go, haven’t they?”

  “Yes, of course they have. He told me he has an infinitely kind heart, so he isn’t going to report his arrest to the Anti-Defamation League, and he won’t make me into Poland’s chief anti-Semite. Only because Fakt is going to do it for him.”

  She snorted with laughter.

  “What a charming old boy. But is he really a Jew?”

  “Yes, he really is. And that whole story is true, except that Wilczur didn’t know as much about it as we thought – for instance, he had no idea Elżbieta was the granddaughter of the unfortunate midwife whose daughter was scared by the barrel. Budnik knew the most. The issue of Dr Wajsbrot and what happened in the winter of 1947 was a strictly guarded family secret. Which Budnik only learnt about when he fell in love with Miss Szuszkiewicz. His father, as you remember, was the head of the secret police prison who hadn’t let Wajsbrot deliver his wife’s baby. And, terrified by the coincidence, he had revealed all to his son on his death bed. The old man was afraid of a curse, he was afraid none of it was happening purely by chance, and that Dr Wajsbrot was demanding justice from beyond the grave.”

  “There’s something in that,” whispered Sobieraj. “However you look at it, there’s something eerie about the fact that those people’s fates were joined together again. Especially now that Budnik will live out his days in prison.”

  Szacki shuddered. He hadn’t thought about it like that, but Sobieraj was right. It looked as if the curse doing the rounds of Sandomierz had taken control of him as well to do its work. He remembered the recording of the Jew disappearing in the fog – that was the one single aspect of the investigation that he hadn’t been able to explain. And which he intended to keep to himself – there was no need for any trace of that recording to remain in the case files.

  “Yes,” he muttered. “As if some sort of providence—”

  “Anti-providence more like…”

  “You’re right, as if some sort of anti-providence were helping Budnik. Strange.”

  For a while they were silent, hugging each other; outside the clock on the town-hall tower struck eleven p.m. He smiled at the thought of how very much he would miss those noises now if they weren’t there. To think that not so long ago they had irritated him.

  “Pity about that vagrant,” she sighed sadly, and snuggled closer to Szacki. “There was no curse affecting him, as I see it.”

  “No, probably not, I have no idea – we certainly don’t know anything about that so far.”

  “God, I shouldn’t keep saying it or you’ll be crushed under the weight of your own ego, but you’re a real crime-solving genius, you know?”

  He shrugged, although his ego was indeed lapping up this compliment with relish.

  “Yeah, the next things I should have taken notice of were the laptop and the family photos.”

  “What laptop?”

  “The polystyrene kind they pack takeaways in at restaurants.”

  “You call that a ‘laptop’?”

  “Yes, and?…”

  “Never mind, go on.”

  “On Tuesday the camera caught Budnik coming out of the Trzydziestka restaurant with two dinners. That made no sense at all. Mrs Budnik wasn’t there any more by then, and nor was there any explanation for why he needed two dinners. It only had to be linked up with the other facts. Such as the fact that if Budnik was meant to be the murderer, someone else must have been stuck on a hook in the mansion on Zamkowa Street. Such as the fact that one of the local tramps had been stubbornly looking for his lost vagrant pal. And then the family photographs.”

  “I don’t get it – what family photographs?”

  “Here the whole trick relied on making himself look as much as possible like the tramp, that unfortunate Fijewski. From his explanations it turns out Budnik had been preparing for the crimes for weeks, even months on end. Of course, it sounds like utter madness, but remember that until there was bloodshed, he could treat it like a perverse game, testing himself to see how far he was capable of going. He must have neglected himself pathologically, lost weight and lightened his hair a bit from reddish-brown to ginger, and grown a beard. The dodge with the sticking plaster was a stroke of genius: yet another way of distracting attention worthy of an illusionist, but it would have been useless if someone had started having doubts about whether the corpse on Zamkowa Street was Budnik’s body. Why didn’t we have doubts, and especially why didn’t I? I’d seen the same skinny little man with a ginger beard and a plaster at the interview. The hook through the cheek made things additionally complicated. I saw that same face in the ID card I took out of the wallet lying by the remains. But unfortunately, the fact that there was no driving licence in there didn’t set me thinking, and the ID card has been issued two weeks earlier. It didn’t set any of us thinking, because in the past few hours we’d all seen Budnik’s face on the television, from where? From a photo taken at the time of the interview. But could we have seen his face somewhere else? Of course we could, if we’d looked. But in the most obvious place, in other words his house, there weren’t any pictures of him, only of Mrs Budnik. He knew we’d search the property carefully after his disappearance. He knew that if we feasted our eyes on his actual face in there, we might have some doubts. As it was, all we had to look at was a skinny face with a plaster on the forehead.”

  The doorbell interrupted Szacki’s clarifications, and soon they were eating pizza and garlic bread, which – what a coincidence – was brought in a white polystyrene “laptop”, just like the one Szacki had recently seen in the hands of the murderer on a fuzzy film recorded by a camera on the market square. The thought made him lose his appetite for this particular dish. Basia seemed to lose hers too, because not once did she reach into the container. Anyway, she didn’t seem keen on the pizza either, although it was as deliciou
s as ever. She ate one piece, took a couple of pecks at a second one, and put it aside.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t eat and think about all that at the same time – those vaults, Szyller… Now, of course, I understand more, the way he died… It confirms Klejnocki’s words. Szyller was the most cruelly tortured, the hatred for him was the greatest. That also pointed at Budnik, didn’t it?”

  He nodded in agreement.

  “Did he keep the tramp in the vaults too? And how? Did he go down into them from his cellar? I didn’t even know there was anything except for that wretched tourist route, and soon it’ll turn out you can get in there from every tenement.”