A Grain of Truth (22 page)

A piece of tar-paper struck him gently on the back. Rojski started to breathe more easily and stood up, banging his head on a hanging bit of roof. He cursed and turned around to discover that unfortunately the tar-paper wasn’t tar-paper, nor was the bit of roof a bit of roof. It was a corpse hung from the ceiling on a hook like a side of meat, with the torso locked in a reinforced barrel studded with spikes. Above the barrel the body was as white as plaster, and below it was covered in a layer of congealed blood; the sunlight glinted gaily on the purple sheen. There was a raven perched on the cadaver’s shock of red hair. It had one eye fixed on Rojski, as it half-heartedly pecked at a sticking plaster dangling pitifully from the corpse’s forehead.

Rojski closed his eyes. The sight vanished, but the image remained beneath his eyelids for ever.

IV

I wonder if they’ve found the body by now. It’s of no significance, I’m just wondering. Whether they find it today, or – doubtful – in a week is of no consequence. I switch on the TV, tune into the news channel and turn down the sound. That MP Palikot is drinking a miniature whisky and complaining about the president, and the Jewish Uprising survivor Edelman is laying flowers at the Heroes of the Ghetto monument. The same two images alternately. If they find the body, all that will be minor news.

V

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had run to the spot before Wilczur got there, and climbed a ladder to the upper floor of the abandoned manor house
straight after the police officers. The news had spread quickly and there was already a crowd of people on Zamkowa Street, with more descending from all directions. The Marshal, the fat policeman with a bushy moustache, clambered up the ladder behind him. Before Szacki had time to issue any orders, the Marshal began to shake with nausea, battled with it for a while, and then threw up all over himself and his moustache. Incredible, thought Szacki, but actually he couldn’t blame the man. The sight was horrible, probably the worst he had seen in his career. Decomposing corpses, fire victims, drowned bodies, the victims of gang killings and fights with smashed-in skulls – it all paled in comparison with the corpse of Grzegorz Budnik hanging from a hook, until recently a wanted man with a warrant out for his arrest, the only suspect in the case of his wife’s murder.

Szacki gazed at the image, surreal in its monstrosity; under attack from an overload of stimuli, his brain tried to process the information, but with some resistance, as if running at half speed. What was the most striking feature of all?

Definitely the barrel, a ghastly stage-prop that gave the scene a theatrical, unreal quality, thanks to which a part of Szacki was waiting for the applause, and then for the corpse to open its eyes and smile at the audience.

The face was definitely a riveting sight. Szacki had learnt on a criminology training course that the human brain is programmed to recognize faces, to identify the nuances of their expression, the emotions they display, and all sorts of changes that tell us whether to smile at another person or gear up to run away from them. That’s why we sometimes see the Virgin Mary on a window pane, or a ghostly grimace on a tree trunk – it’s the brain, endlessly seeking human faces everywhere, always trying to pick them out, classify them into familiar and unfamiliar, and recognize the emotions. Szacki’s brain was agonized by the sight of Budnik’s face. The distinguishing marks of the chairman of the City Council – morbid emaciation, sunken eyes, a shock of red hair and a red beard, that unfortunate cut on his forehead – had been distorted by the hook, stuck in the chin and emerging from the cheek. The mutilated muscles gave the face a
strange, unsettling expression, as if Budnik had glanced into hell for a moment and seen images there that had changed him for ever. It crossed Szacki’s mind that, depending on the killer’s degree of sadism, this metaphor might not be far from the truth.

But the worst thing was the colours, mercilessly brought out by the sunlight, which was sharp by this time of year. Budnik’s corpse was snow-white on top, drained of blood like his wife’s body a few days earlier, but the bottom half of it shone blood-red; it looked like a perverse modern art installation, an iconoclastic artist’s statement about contemporary Poland: Take a look at your national colours. Here’s a naked Polish corpse, murdered according to a legend his ancestors invented to be able to kill others with impunity.

The entire floor was covered in blood as well, mixed with dirt; there was a brownish, dried-up puddle of it, three metres in diameter, with its centre right under Budnik’s gnarled feet. In a spot near the stairs it was smudged, probably by the person who found the body.

“Should we unhook him?” asked the Marshal, once he had recovered.

Szacki shook his head.

“First the photographs, then the technicians have to gather all the evidence. This time the corpse is in the place where the crime was committed – there has to be something left.”

Cautiously, watching out for the most rotten floorboards, Szacki walked up to the middle of the room. His impression was right – around the edge of the puddle, like on the rim of a coin, there was a sort of inscription, probably written with a finger. He quickly said a mental prayer for it to be a gloveless finger, and for the lunatic who had done this to be registered. He leant over the puddle and read it. Not this, please, he thought. Please, please don’t let it be a nutcase who’s been watching lots of American films and is playing cat and mouse with us now. On the edge of the puddle there were some letters carved in the dried blood: KWP, and straight after them three six-figure numbers: 241921, 212225, and 191621. It didn’t mean much to Szacki, but just in case he took a picture with his mobile phone.

He forced himself to look up at Budnik’s face again. Changed beyond recognition, the man looked even more wretched than a couple of days ago at his office; death had deprived him of the last remnants of his predatory, athletic look. Worst of all was that plaster – pitiful enough then when it had been stuck to his forehead, but now it was dangling wistfully, revealing a barely healed cut, the cherry on the cake of posthumous humiliation.

By the time Basia Sobieraj and Maria Miszczyk reached the spot simultaneously, the corpse had been taken down and covered with black plastic. Wearing disposable gloves, Szacki was looking through the dead man’s wallet, while Wilczur stood leaning against an empty window frame, smoking.

Sobieraj took one look around the room and burst into tears. When Szacki went up to comfort her and put a friendly hand on her shoulder, she threw herself round his neck and hugged him tightly. He could feel her whole body shaking with sobs; over her shoulder he kept an eye on Miszczyk, hoping she wouldn’t faint, firstly because he didn’t want to catch her one-hundred-kilo body, and secondly because he was afraid she would fall through the rotten ceiling. But not a single maternal muscle twitched on his over-endowed boss’s face; she cast an eye over the crime scene and fixed her gaze on Szacki. She raised an eyebrow enquiringly.

“The autopsy will be done today, and so will the crime scene inspection and tests to see if this blood includes Mrs Budnik’s blood too,” he replied to her unspoken question. “We’ll get a new case hypothesis ready as fast as possible, and present an action plan. Unfortunately it looks like a madman – we’ll have to have a psychological profile done, and review the databases to examine crimes with a religious motive. We can have a press conference tomorrow at noon.”

“And what are we going to tell them?”

“The truth. What alternative do we have? If it’s a madman, the fuss might help us. Perhaps he’ll boast to someone, perhaps he’ll accidentally say something that betrays him.”

“Do you want to bring in the family to identify the body?”

Szacki said no; there was no point burdening others with this nightmare. He had all the necessary facts in the documents.

“Do the letters KWP mean anything to you?”

“
Komenda
– headquarters,
Wojewódzka
– regional,
Policji
– of police. Why?”

VI

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki couldn’t bear chaos. The feeling of being lost in events and in his own evaluation of them, the feeling of being unable to keep his thoughts on one theme, of losing the logical thread, of helplessly, ineffectually thrashing about from thought to thought. You got a result by evolving one thought from another, by meshing them together, by creating a complex, precise logical mechanism, which eventually produced a fine, aesthetic solution. This time that was out of the question – his thoughts were rampaging in his head like a flock of nursery-school children in the playground. Budnik’s death had dismantled all his previous suppositions, which he had had enough time to get used to. In a way, from the very start of the investigation, somewhere deep down he had been convinced Budnik was guilty of his wife’s death, and that had given him peace, allowed him to look for the proof. Never before had his intuition let him down so badly.

God, how furious he felt. Angrily he kicked a can lying in the street, and a beautiful pregnant woman coming in the other direction gave him a reproachful look. She would be beautiful, she would be pregnant, as if to spite him. He was tired, because every time he tried to place one thought on top of another, Klara appeared, demolished the entire structure and forced her way into his consciousness. So what if she was pregnant? Maybe that would be a good thing – after all, last night had been great, maybe that would mean he’d be settling down with a beautiful young wife at his side? But what if he had just been overcome by the mood of the moment? What if she really was a dumb, plastic dolly-bird who had never attracted him and who had
once managed by some miracle to make a positive impression? And was it a good thing he had dumped her? And if she was pregnant, would she give him a second chance, or quite the opposite – would she change into a bitch out of hell making claims on him, getting maintenance out of him by the bucketload? So if she wasn’t pregnant, should he be pleased or sorry?

He reckoned the long walk from the hospital to the prosecutor’s office would sober him up, and the cool air would help him to gather his thoughts. But it just got worse. He turned from Mickiewicz Street into Koseły Street; in a moment he’d be there, he’d sit down in Miszczyk’s office and present her with the investigation plan. The investigation plan! He laughed out loud. What a joke, the investigation plan!

There was a small group of journalists standing in front of the steps into the building. Someone said something, and they all moved towards him. Since his exchange of views with that pesky monkey in green had appeared on television, he had become recognizable. He straightened up and assumed a stony expression.

“Prosecutor, a word of comment?”

“There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow, we’ll tell you everything then.”

“Is it a serial killer?”

“Tomorrow. Today I’d have nothing but hearsay for you, tomorrow we’ll have information.”

“Hearsay will do.”

“No, it won’t.”

“The man suspected of the previous murder has been killed. Does that mean the investigation is at a standstill?”

“Not in the least.”

“Should the schools be closed?”

Szacki was dumbstruck. He had been methodically pushing his way through to the entrance, but the question was so stupid that he stopped.

“Why the schools?”

“To protect the children.”

“I’m sorry, from what?”

“From the blood ritual.”

“Have you gone crazy?”

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki felt as if he had opened the door into a parallel universe, an alternate reality, which he had thought to be in the remote past, forgotten and untrue, strewn with the corpses of old demons. Wouldn’t you know, you only had to peep through a chink to find out none of the demons were dead, they had just gone to sleep, and what’s more it was an extremely light doze. And now they were wagging all their demonic tails with joy at the chance to come out through the door set ajar in Sandomierz and play with Prosecutor Szacki. Unbelievable. How deeply the stereotypes that substitute for thinking must be etched into the national consciousness, if sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sixty-three since the last pogrom and forty since most of the Jewish survivors were driven out in 1968, here we have a lunatic, born at a guess in the 1970s, who believes in blood rituals.

“I have not gone crazy and I’m not joking,” the man went on, who with his diminutive physique and curly black hair reminded Szacki of a caricature Jew. He was wearing a tank-top. “And I don’t understand why we haven’t got the courage to wonder out loud whether by chance after all these years ritual murders haven’t come back to Poland. I’m not saying that is the case. I’m just asking.”

Szacki was waiting for someone to help him out by shutting up this clown, but no one was in a hurry to; the cameras and microphones just waited to see what he would do.

“You’re out of your mind. Ritual murder is an anti-Semitic legend, that’s all.”

“In every legend there’s a grain of truth. I remember that lots of Jews were condemned in legitimate trials for kidnapping and killing children.”

“Just like lots of witches. Do you think witches have come back to the Most Serene Commonwealth too? Are they busy screwing with the Devil, squeezing the juice out of black cats and plotting how to dethrone Christ the King?”

The small group of journalists burst into servile laughter. The lunatic didn’t have a notebook or a Dictaphone, and Szacki realized that apart from journalists there were all sorts of conspiracy-mongers here too.

“Political correctness won’t change the facts, Mr Prosecutor. And the facts are: two dead bodies, killed according to the old Jewish blood ritual, practised for centuries in many places worldwide. You can swear it’s reality, but you’ve still got two corpses in the morgue. And a Jewish ritual whose existence is beyond debate. There are documents, there are statements by witnesses, and we’re not talking about medieval stories here – independent courts were still confirming the existence of this practice in the twentieth century.”