A Grain of Truth (41 page)
Authors: Zygmunt Miloszewski
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.
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 Pozna
ń
, a Rossmann’s pharmacy insists that a teenager who wants to buy condoms must show his ID card. In Łód
ź
, 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?”
“The old man’s fine, he’ll outlive us all. They did some tests and sent him packing with orders to drink half a litre of vodka and sleep it off. Worse news about Marek, as you saw for yourself.”
“Worse news… meaning?” he asked cautiously, fearing the worst.
“He’s alive, if that’s what you’re asking. If he’d got to the operating table a few minutes later they probably wouldn’t have been able to save him.” Sobieraj looked at him as if he was a hero, sat down by the bed and gently began to stroke his bandaged hand. “I went to see him, but they’re keeping him in the ICU, in a drug-induced coma. His leg’s been amputated, above the knee unfortunately, though apparently the worst injuries were internal, some problem with the vascular bed, I didn’t fully understand what it was about. But they dealt with it, they put him back together. A strong, young constitution, he’ll be all right, so they say.”
Suddenly she began to cry.
“It’s my fault, I dragged him in there. W-w-we sh-shouldn’t have gone down there at all,” she stammered, “we should have sent in the technicians, the specialists with floodlights and equipment. Teo, we’re civil servants, not some sort of agents – what kind of a sick thing to do was that, anyway?”
“We thought there was a chance of saving Szyller.”
“Then we thought wrong!”
“I’m sorry.”
Just as he said that, Klara passed by in the corridor, embraced by an older man who must have been her father. She looked at him, but didn’t even slow her pace. Nevertheless, for that brief moment Szacki
locked gazes with her, seeking in her dark eyes forgiveness for what had happened to her brother. And the hope of a second chance? No, perhaps not any more. I wonder if she is pregnant after all, or not, he thought, when their gazes disengaged. That would be rather unfortunate in the present situation.
“Yes, sorry,” whispered Sobieraj, probably more to herself. “Easy to say. Harder to think ahead of time.”
“Especially since he wasn’t meant to die, was he?”
Prosecutor Barbara Sobieraj nodded in silence, lost in her own thoughts. This went on a while, and Szacki didn’t disturb her; he too had a few things to sort out in his mind.
“They say they’re keeping you here until Monday. Just in case.”
“I’m leaving after the evening round.”
“Are you off your head?”
“I need my office, the case files and a pot of strong coffee. We can’t let ourselves take a holiday right now. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with me. But I do have a favour to ask you – there are three things I need.”
“Yes?”
“One, I want to know all the new information as it comes up. Two, I want my computer with an Internet connection, and three, a TV with all the news channels.”
