A Grain of Truth (42 page)

“I don’t know if it can be linked up in here…”

“Then have them move me to another room.”

She got up, and only now let go of his hand. Perhaps it was to do with the emotions they had experienced together, perhaps he had a better appreciation of this world now that he’d come so close to leaving it, but he thought she looked very pretty. Her orange top combined with her carrot-coloured hair made a nice, lively contrast to the green-and-white hospital room, and her legs, revealed by her rucked-up jeans skirt, were much better than he might have expected from a woman of her age.

The spring had come. Basia Sobieraj smoothed down her skirt and left, without looking round.

II

Only a little further and the border between a precisely planned vendetta and homicidal insanity would have been crossed. Who knows, perhaps it will be, if the boy dies. I look out of the window, gripping the sill helplessly. How could this have occurred? How? Now I must think calmly whether it changes anything. Maybe not, quite the opposite – paradoxically, maybe I can feel safer now.

III

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was feeling dreadful. Not because his entire body ached. And not even because every hospital worker who had helped him to move into the television room had felt the need to joke that he must be keen to see himself on TV. He was feeling dreadful because it was the first time since this case began – not counting the famous front page of
Fakt
– that he had bothered to check how events in Sandomierz were being reported in the media, and he had found out that he featured in far too many scenes. At the press conferences, sure, but there were also plenty of shots of him going in or out of the prosecution building; once he had been caught near the town hall, crossing the market square at a rapid pace, and once coming out of the Trzydziestka restaurant. The loss of anonymity, though surely only temporary, was painful, but Szacki’s dreadful frame of mind was first and foremost to do with losing his own positive image of himself.

He didn’t claim to be an amazing tough guy, but he liked to think of himself as a sheriff, who instead of a conscience has the Penal Code, and acts as its embodiment, guardian and executor. He believed in it, and on this belief he had built his entire public persona, which over the years had become his uniform, his official costume. It had taken over the way he dressed, his facial expressions, his way of thinking, talking and communicating with people. When Weronika used to say, “Hang the prosecutor in the wardrobe and sit down at table,” she wasn’t joking.

Well, the camera saw him rather differently. At the press conferences he looked like a prosecutor – stiff, businesslike, excessively serious, not flirting with the audience and not engaging in unnecessary exchanges. Next to him, Miszczyk and Sobieraj looked like assistants. Unfortunately he had a rather unpleasant, high-pitched voice – maybe not squeaky, but it didn’t sound like Clint Eastwood.

The less official the situation, the worse it got. In the scene on the steps outside the prosecution building, when he had uttered the unfortunate words taken by some as a declaration of anti-Semitism, he was evidently losing his temper, and with it his control over his persona. An ugly scowl of aggression had appeared on his face, one eye had been blinking, the rapidly spoken words had run together, and there were moments when he was jabbering unclearly. He looked like the sort of person he always laughed at – a pen-pusher in a grey suit: aggressive, frustrated, lisping, incapable of constructing a coherent remark.

But most depressing of all was the clip recorded in the market square. Here he didn’t feature as the refined champion of Justice, crossing the centre of the ancient city at a cavalryman’s saunter. But as a thin, pale, prematurely middle-aged little man, tightly pressing his jacket flaps to his sunken ribcage to retain some precious warmth. Scowling, with his lips clenched, taking the small, rapid steps of a man who has drunk too-strong coffee and is now running to the toilet.

What a nightmare.

Wading through the information on the television sites, newspaper archives and information portals was a ghastly job, because the reports were incompetent, chaotic, given in a hysterical tone and reduced to the cheapest, shabbiest sensationalism. If Szacki hadn’t been familiar with the case, based on the press articles alone he’d have made a decision to leave the county as fast as possible, or even better, the province, where a bloodthirsty madman was hunting down his victims, making the murders into gory rituals, and where no one – for God’s sake, no one! – was safe.

Luckily he didn’t have to plunge himself into this sea of glorified shit, because he was only interested in one thing, with the working
name of alpha information. So what was the point? He understood the way the media worked well enough to know that basically it relies on consuming its own vomit. The circulation of information was so rapid that there was no time to look for sources or to check facts; the information itself became a source, and the fact that someone had posted it was enough of a justification for repeating it. After that, it only had to be repeated over and over, adding a word of comment from oneself or an invited guest. Staying with the vomit comparison, it looked as if someone had been given scrambled egg to eat and then brought it back up. Someone else had fried up a bit of bacon, eaten it and brought that back up. The next person had added salt and pepper to the vomit, eaten it and regurgitated. And so on and so on. The less scrambled egg there was at the start, the more garnish had to be added afterwards. Which did not change the fact that somewhere at the start someone must have broken the eggs – and that was who Szacki was so feverishly looking for.

He was looking because this case had involved a media furore from the start. He remembered his surprise when the first broadcasting van had driven up to the prosecution building – it had happened quickly, too quickly, especially considering how far Sandomierz was from Warsaw and Krakow. He’d been surprised, but he hadn’t paid attention to this detail, because generally the biggest problem with this case, which was unduly rich in shocking, stage-directed events, was the fact that Prosecutor Teodor Szacki hadn’t paid attention to the details.

Now he was correcting that mistake. He divided the case into several essential stages. Above all, the finding of Mrs Budnik’s body, the identification of the razor as a knife for ritual slaughter, and the finding of Mr Budnik. And he was trying to find the point at which the dry facts had appeared the quickest, and then become fodder for the rest of the media. For a while he thought it was Polsat News; there, for example, they had talked about Mrs Budnik before eight o’clock. But in all the other instances Polsat was way behind. Radio Zet was quick, but not quite quick enough to be ahead of Polsat in the case of Mrs Budnik, or TOK FM in the case of Mr Budnik. TVN24 stayed
on a fairly even keel, and was never significantly late, but it wasn’t the first in any instance. But perhaps this was a blind alley? Perhaps the information wasn’t coming from one single source?

No, he couldn’t believe that, he bloody well couldn’t. Too great a role in obscuring the case had been played by the media hysteria for no one to be controlling it.

Suddenly the monitor started ringing above his head. Szacki tensed – he had no idea what it meant, surely nothing good. In less than fifteen seconds a nurse came running into the room. She raced towards him, but soon slowed down, and the worry on her face was replaced by a reassuring smile. She thrust a hand under his hospital gown.

“Don’t wriggle so much or the sensor falls off and it sounds the alert,” she said in a very low, almost masculine voice. “Why scare yourself and the staff, eh?”

She sorted things out, winked and left. Szacki didn’t wink back, because he was busy chasing after a thought that was racing across his brain cells. Alert. Why did that matter? Oh, of course – Alert. That was the name of the
Gazeta
newspaper’s online service that gave readers the chance to send in information along with pictures and videos. A brilliant solution in the age of the dictatorship of information on the one hand, and budget cuts at newspaper offices on the other.

He took a quick look at the service, and naturally didn’t find anything. He cursed aloud; his injured hand didn’t like tapping at the keyboard and now the pain was radiating right up to his shoulder, which had its good side, keeping him in gear and not letting him float off into a doze or sink into non-essential thoughts.

Think, think, Teodor, he urged himself – not Alert, but there must be other services like it. He searched. On TVP’s site it was called Your Info, on Radio Zet it was Infotelefon, but both the former and the latter were of bugger all use. He began to wonder whether there might be some news blogs, and shuddered at the thought of plunging into the abyss of Twitter, Blip and Facebook. He took another look at TVN24, which also had its own society of informers (he tried to imagine Facebook in the 1980s, and wondered how many people would have liked the Secret Police, and how many would
have added it to their friends), which was called Kontakt24. It was the best organized of them all – here each user could run his own information mini-service in the form of a blog, the editors looked through the entries and the most interesting ones ended up on the front page of the service, or were even used on television, which was denoted in a special way. In turn, the news items on the service were tagged in a corresponding way, marking which users’ information had been utilized.

From this angle he started to read all the news connected with his case, beginning with the oldest, the discovery of Ela Budnik’s body. In Sandomierz, at the crack of dawn, bla bla bla, historical city, corpse below the Old Town, a mystery worthy of Father Mateusz, bla bla bla. Lots of people had applied themselves to producing the chaotic text. Sando69, KasiaF, OlaMil, CivitasRegni, Sandomaria…

Oh my fucking God.

One of those mentioned was a user with the tag “Nekama”.

Szacki clicked to open his page. There were only ten entries, all to do with the Sandomierz murders. By each one there was a note to say they had been used by the online information service and also on air. Short and written in dry, simple language, they provided the most important information.

The first entry was dated 15th April and said: “In Sandomierz Old Town, next to the old synagogue building, the naked corpse of a woman has been found. The woman was undoubtedly brutally murdered, her throat had been slashed repeatedly.”

Prosecutor Teodor Szacki stared at the screen and felt his heart pounding in his chest – another moment and the alert would sound to summon the nurse, who would surely be very surprised to find the sensor in its place under his gown. However, his excitement was not brought on by the content of the information, or even by the author’s tag, but the time it had been published.

He remembered the moment when he got the call from Miszczyk to say he must show up on Żydowska Street as soon as possible. Klara had dragged him back to bed; a moment earlier he’d been standing by the window, watching as thanks to the approaching dawn the first
shadows of the beings inhabiting the darkness had started to appear, heralding the new day. Myszyński had described the moment when he noticed the body in a similar tone. Even making allowance for the fog, it had all happened at daybreak.

He checked – on 15th April 2009 the sun had emerged over the horizon in Sandomierz at 4.39.

The entry on Kontakt had appeared on 15th April at 4.45. Which meant that its author was either the murderer, or one of the people who had taken part in the investigation from the start. Either one or the other; since yesterday he had had a growing conviction that he knew the killer, and that it had to be one of the people with whom he worked on a daily basis, with whom he drank coffee, looked through documents and planned what to do the next day. And even though he had been weighing this option since morning, this confirmation of his theory was making his heart thump like mad.

Now he needed the information from Myszyński, and he also had to call Kuzniecow. But above all he needed the documents. He needed the documents bloody urgently.

IV

OK, so he needed the documents, but this was a bit over the top. The delectable assistant at the Kielce branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, made of nothing but curves, but none of them superfluous, was pushing a cart full of documents towards him. She smiled in a friendly way and started unloading the files onto the table. There must have been about a hundred of them.

“Is all that definitely for me?”

“Trials of the cursed soldiers from Sandomierz county, 1944 to 1951, right?”

“Exactly so.”

“Well, then all this is definitely for you.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just making sure.”

She gave him an icy look.

“Sir, if you please, I’ve been working here for seven years, I’ve done a master’s, a PhD and a post-doc on the cursed soldiers, I’ve written over a dozen papers and two books. I can fetch these particular files from the shelves blindfolded.”

His eyes smiled at the mention of being blindfolded – it reminded him of a joke, rather obscene but funny.

“And I warn you, if you try to drag up the joke about the blindfolded hunters and the shovel, I’ll take away the documents, the security guard will see you out and next time you’ll have to send a proxy. There’s no academic degree that works on you chauvinist, sexist lot – you need a smack in the mouth and a kick in the balls to knock some manners into your stupid heads. Anyway, never mind – is there anything else I can help you with?”

He merely shook his head, afraid of betraying what effect that sort of temperament had on him – he’d give anything for her phone number now. The assistant glared at him, turned and walked off, showily swinging her hips.

“Just a moment! There is one thing…”

“As God’s my witness, if it’s my phone number or that sort of gambit—”

“On the contrary. It’s to do with some information.”

From his notebook he took a piece of paper with the list of names that interested him written on it, and handed it to the young woman.