A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  “You can’t. Budnik knew a little more than others by accident – he was interested in the history of the city, it was thanks to him that Dybus and his pals could do their research. The matter ceased to concern the other politicians when it turned out they weren’t going to make a new tourist attraction out of it, but for Budnik it was pastime. A pastime which at a key moment turned out to be very handy. Of course it’s not true that you can go down into the underground at any point. You know the entrance inside Nazareth House, and as Budnik explains it, and as we’ll have to check, there’s another entrance near the castle, by that meadow at the bottom, where there’s a ruined building. That would make sense – with a bit of luck you could get from there to the synagogue through the bushes without being noticed, and you could also go through the bushes to the mansion on Zamkowa Street, and if you slip through the cathedral garden, you end up on the terrace at the Budniks’ house. Hence his need to blow up the part of the underground tunnel that leads to that entrance. It would have pointed to Budnik, and then we could have started to look for him. In fact, he planned to be far away by now thanks to Fijewski’s passport, but as we know: you can never be careful enough…”

  “Admit it, the passport was a shot in the dark.”

  “Yes, but on target. Once I was just about certain whose identity he had stolen, it wasn’t all that hard to make sure. But to convince several registry offices to check on a Sunday evening whether it was true, and when he’d call to collect it… I don’t think I’ve ever run into a greater challenge in my career. Do you know what’s interesting? That his biggest regret is Dybus.”

  “What a bloody nutcase. To think I knew him for all those years. How long will he get for it?”

  “Life.”

  “And why? For what? I don’t get it.”

  Szacki didn’t get it either, not entirely. But he could still hear Budnik’s words in his ears: “I wanted to kill Ela and Szyller, I really did, it gave me pleasure. After all those months imagining what they were doing together, after hearing those lies, the stories about business meetings with theatre people in Krakow, Kielce and Warsaw… You don’t know what it’s like, how that hatred grows day after day, floods you like bile; I was capable of anything by then, anything not to feel that acid consuming me, every minute, every second, all the time. I’d always known she wasn’t really mine, but when she finally told me to my face, it was terrible. I decided that if I couldn’t have her, nobody was going to have her.”

  Maybe it’s better that you don’t understand that, Basia, thought Szacki. And that I don’t either, and few people do in general. And although Budnik’s explanation had got through to him, although he did understand his motives, there was something in all this – dammit, he could only bring it up aloud in jokes; after all, he didn’t believe in curses, nor did he believe that some sort of energy sometimes has to even out the scores for the order of the universe. And yet there was something unsettling about it. As if the old Polish city had seen too much, as if the crime committed seventy years ago was too much for these stone walls, and instead of soaking into the red bricks as usual it had started to ricochet off them, until finally it hit Grzegorz Budnik.

  The clock on the town-hall tower struck midnight.

  “It’s the time for ghosts,” said Basia Sobieraj, and slipped into bed.

  It occurred to Prosecutor Teodor Szacki that ghosts certainly don’t appear at midnight.

  14

  Friday, 8th May 2009

  In the Jewish calendar it is Pesach Sheni, or Second Passover, a holiday decreed by the Torah to take place on the fourteenth day of the month Iyar, for those who could not celebrate it at the right time, and a symbol of a second chance granted by God. Benedict XVI visits Jordan, where on Mount Nebo, from which Moses saw the Promised Land, he talks about the unbreakable tie that binds the Church and the Jewish nation. In Spain some lucky devil wins 126 million euros on the lottery, in California the world’s smallest light bulb is produced, and British Sikh policemen want bulletproof turbans to be invented. It is only a month until the European elections, and according to the polls in Poland the Civic Platform party is winning against the Law and Justice party by forty-seven to twenty-two per cent. Sandomierz is excited by a TVN helicopter flying over the city, by the story of a former secret policeman who persecuted the opposition, and whose security firm now protects church buildings, and – like the entire region – by the discovery in Tarnobrzeg of Poland’s first case of swine flu. The police catch two sixteen-year-olds smoking “stupefying dried plant material”; but meanwhile, Bishop Edward Frankowski ordains seventeen new deacons, so the balance is maintained. Spring is in full bloom; in the morning it rained, but the evening is lovely, warm and sunny, and it’s impossible to find an empty café table in the market square.

  There was probably no better place in Poland to spend a lazy spring evening over a pint of beer than in the shade of the chestnut trees on the terrace of the Kordegarda restaurant, known to regulars as the Korda. Slightly raised above the level of the market square, and as a result slightly separate, it was the ideal spot to lose yourself in watching the tourists milling around the town hall, the newly-weds taking pictures of each other, the high-school children glued to their mobiles, the kids glued to their candy floss, and the lovers glued to each other.

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was waiting for Basia to come back from the toilet, and staring insolently at the people sitting around him. As ever, he envied them all their lives, he was feeling mawkish somehow, and wistful. Right next to him by the terrace railing sat a couple of locals, in love with each other like teenagers, although they must have been well over fifty. He was the portly manager type in a scruffy shirt, and she was in a colourful top and had a bold sex appeal that had come unscathed through decades of baking cakes and bringing up offspring. They were talking non-stop about their children, of whom they seemed to have three, judging by the vividly described ups and downs of their lives – all around the age of thirty, all in Warsaw. They didn’t say a word about themselves, but just kept reeling off colourful yarns about their daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren, what they were doing, what they weren’t doing, what was going well for them, what might go well or might not. He was more positively disposed in a quiet way, she occasionally got wound up in negative scenarios, and then he would clear his throat and say: “What can you know about it, Hania?” Then she would stop for a while, to let him enjoy the feeling that of course Witek knows better, and after that she – well quite, what could she know about it? – went back to telling her story. Watching them and eavesdropping was a treat – Szacki was smiling, and at the same time he felt sad. It took several decades nurturing love and affection to get to be that sort of couple. He had destroyed his family, he was too old for a second one now, and he wasn’t destined to grow into old age with someone with whom he had shared his entire previous life.

  If only he were ten years younger. On the other side of the garden there was a couple just like that. They both looked quite young, but they must have been about thirty; in the first instance he thought “my generation”, but he soon corrected himself. That’s not your generation any more, Prosecutor – you know all Jacek Kaczmarski’s opposition protest songs by heart, but for them music starts with Kurt Cobain. You were grown up when Gazeta Wyborcza published its first edition, as Poland’s first independent newspaper, but to them it was just a rag their parents brought home. There aren’t many generations in the world where ten crappy years make as much of a difference as in this instance.

  The couple were all touchy-feely and totally absorbed in each other; their glucose level must have fallen really low for them to have decided to get out of bed. From snippets of conversation he understood that it was the man’s birthday today. It’s great to have your birthday in May, he thought, to have a barbecue party or meet up in a pub garden – in November he never had the chance. For a while he was tempted to offer his best wishes.

  But he let it rest; dragging the bi
rthday boy out of the tent created by his girlfriend’s long chestnut hair would have been cruel. As soon as his neighbour sensed Szacki’s gaze on him, he looked vigilantly around the café and Szacki quickly turned away. Something tickled Szacki’s ear. The something was an absurdly large chestnut flower, being held by Basia. In the corner of his eye he just caught the man’s smile, a smile that said yes, he too thought Sandomierz in May was the ideal place for lovers.

  “Shall we go?”

  He nodded, drank up his beer, and together they went down the steps onto the cobblestones of the market square. The setting sun was shining red at the top of Oleśnicki Street, coating everything in a crimson glow, including the walls of the old synagogue.

  “We can’t stay here if we want to be together,” she said.

  She smiled, kissed him on the cheek, waved a slender hand in farewell, and walked off at a rapid pace towards the Opatowska Gate, her skirt swirling around her bare, pale and – as he knew – very freckly calves. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki gazed after her for a while, and then walked towards the sun to catch its final rays. He stopped below the synagogue and watched as the orange light on the wall of the building was gradually displaced by a shadow from below. He was so absorbed in watching it that there was no room inside him for any other thought. Only as the sunset came to its end did he look around him.

  Eighty years earlier in all the flats and all the houses in the district, for a quarter of an hour by now the candles would have been burning, lit by the women as a sign that the Sabbath had begun, and that everyone should stop working now, recite kiddush and start supper. He glanced down Żydowska Street towards the castle, and remembered the recording shown him by Wilczur, of the figure dissolving into the mist.

  He shrugged and started walking in the same direction.

  Author’s note

  I owe the origin of this book, like its predecessor, to my brother, who decided to tie the knot with Ola, a wonderful girl who happens to come from Sandomierz, and so I went there for the wedding, fell head over heels in love with the place and left knowing I had to write a novel set there. The fact that it is a crime novel and that the plot involves stereotypical attitudes that are still alive and painful, is due to Beata Stasińska, whom I take this opportunity to thank for all our conversations about all my books. Many thanks are due to everyone who helped during the several months I spent living in Sandomierz to research the book, above all Ola’s parents, their friends and the invaluable Renata Targowska and Jerzy Krzemiński.

  I used a lot of sources for this book, but the city of Sandomierz is the most important one of all, and I would recommend anyone who wants to know more about this magical city on the river Vistula to pay it a visit. Those interested in the sinister legend about ritual murder should read Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s essay Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesądu (“Legends of Blood: the Anthropology of Prejudice”), published by WAB, Warsaw, in 2008. Another important source I should mention is Sława i chwała (“Fame and Glory”) by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the family saga I was reading while writing this book, and the careful reader will find echoes of it here. As a matter of form I should add that all the characters (well, almost all – my respects to Jarosław and Marcin) and all the events are fictional, and I am entirely responsible for any deliberate distortions or mistakes in the facts and the topography; also, making Sandomierz into a sinister capital of murder does not, God forbid, testify to my attitude towards this city, which I regard as the most enchanting place in Poland.

  Sandomierz and Warsaw, 2009–11

  ENTANGLEMENT

  Zygmunt Miłoszewski

  The morning after a gruelling psychotherapy session in a Warsaw monastery, Henryk Telak is found dead, a roasting spit stuck in one eye. The case lands on the desk of State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki. World-weary, suffering from bureaucratic exhaustion and marital ennui, Szacki feels that life has passed him by, but this case changes everything.

  He must steer his way among a gallery of colourful characters: a flirtatious young journalist, an eccentric psychiatrist, a lecherous police colleague and a paranoid historian. Szacki’s search for the killer unearths another murder that took place twenty years earlier, before the fall of Communism. The trail leads to facts that, for his own safety, he’d be better off not knowing.

  PRAISE FOR ENTANGLEMENT

  “Miłoszewski takes an engaging look at modern Polish society in this stellar first in a new series starring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki. Readers will want to see more of the complex, sympathetic Szacki.” Publishers Weekly

  “Entanglement has everything I want from a thriller. It opens with a murder and quickly develops into a fast-moving and tightly plotted whodunit with a host of colourful characters and vivid descriptions of contemporary Cracow. But it’s the unsatisfactory personal life and emotional turmoil of its hero, State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, that steal centre stage.’ Oxford Times

  “The character of Prosecutor Szacki has enough charisma and complexity to give competition to the likes of Mikael Blomkvist and Rob Ryan. Hopefully the first of many mystery novels from Miłoszewski.” Foreward Reviews

  £8.99/$14.95

  Crime Paperback Original

  ISBN 978-1904738-442

  eBook

  ISBN 978-1904738-633

  www.bitterlemonpress.com