Entanglement (19 page)

“Why didn’t you file a case for harassment?”

She had, five years ago. He had almost killed her when he found out. He had slashed her with a disposable razor. The sentence had been two years suspended for five. He came home from the courtroom sad, so he’d only raped her. She’d expected something worse. “Now I might go and do time, so you’d better watch out,” he had warned her. “Before they shut me up you’re going to bite the dust.” “You’ll never do that,” the words had escaped her, “you’d have no one to torment.” “I’ve still got a daughter, I’ll manage,” he’d replied. She believed him. Just in case, from that day on she’d given him reasons to hit her instead of the child.

“But sometimes I used to wonder what it would be like if he wasn’t there. If he wasn’t there at all.”

“Does that mean you planned the murder?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t,” she replied, and he sighed with relief, because otherwise he’d have been left with no choice but to charge her with murder under Article 148, paragraph 1. Then the minimum sentence would be eight years. “I just wondered what it would be like.”

The day when she’d woken up so tired, Zuzia had come home from school in tears. She’d quarrelled with a boy. He had pulled at her, she’d pulled away, and the strap on her satchel had broken. “So you’ve been fighting with boys,” her father had said as they were eating dinner, stuffed cabbage leaves in tomato sauce and mashed potatoes. His favourite. Zuzia had vehemently denied it. She said it wasn’t her who’d been fighting, but they had pulled her. “For no reason at all?” he’d asked, mashing up the potatoes
and tomato sauce, turning them into pinkish goo. The girl vehemently agreed. Nidziecka knew she’d been too vehement. She was numb with terror; she had no idea what to do. She knew he would want to punish Zuzia. She’d have to come to her defence, and then he’d kill her. And no one would ever defend Zuzia again, just as no one had ever defended her.

“All right,” he had said after dinner, wiping his mouth on a napkin, leaving a pink mark, like a consumptive’s cough. “You’ve got to understand you mustn’t provoke rows with boys.” “I understand,” replied Zuzia, who had only now realized where the conversation had been leading from the start, but by now it was too late. “You’ve got to understand,” he explained, “that if I give you a smack now, you’ll never forget you’re not allowed to do that. Otherwise by tomorrow you’ll already have forgotten, and the day after that the same thing will happen, and in a week you’ll have a reputation as a troublemaker, and it’s hard to go through life with that sort of label.”

The little girl had burst into tears.

“No hysterics,” he’d said, annoyed by now. “Let’s get it over with. Believe me, this is harder for me than it is for you.” He rose, picked up his daughter from her chair and dragged her towards her bedroom.

“I sat there as if paralysed. He had hit her sometimes before, but compared with what he did to me it was stroking. I was glad he treated her so mildly. Now I could sense he might do more, but I was still hoping he’d only hit her a few times.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

She shrugged.

“I was afraid he’d hear me. I was afraid as soon as I went out he’d do something to Zuzia. I was afraid that even if I did call they’d tell me they’re not my bodyguards. That has happened before now.”

“So what did you do?”

“Nothing. I waited to see what would happen. And then I saw him take a braided leather lead off the clothes rack. We used to have a dog, a sort of mongrelly Alsatian. He was hit by a bus a couple of years ago. Somehow I’ve never had the heart to throw away the lead. I loved that dog. I started shouting that he was to leave her alone now, otherwise I’d call the police and he’d go to prison.”

“And what happened then?”

“He said I shouldn’t interfere but should remember what he’d said earlier. Then I replied that he should watch out because he wasn’t immortal either. Then he let the child go, came up to me and lashed me with the lead. It didn’t even hurt, because the hardest blow hit my hair, but the end of the lead wound around my head and cut my lip—” she put her finger to a scab at the corner of her mouth. “Zuzia began to wail of course. Then he went mad, shouting that neither of us would ever forget this day. Then I stood up. He swung the lead, but I raised my hand and it wound around my arm. That upset him terribly. He pushed me onto the work surface, but as we were both still holding the lead, he came flying after me. I was afraid that would be the end of me. I reached out a hand, grabbed the bread knife and stuck it in his side. I wasn’t trying to kill him, I just wanted him to stop. He flew at me and lost his balance.”

“Why didn’t you withdraw the hand holding the knife?”

She licked her lips and looked at him. For a long time. He understood, but he couldn’t put it in the report. However, he had to write something down. Without dropping her gaze, she opened her mouth, then gently shook her head. She understood. And instead of what she was probably intending to say, in other words “I didn’t want to”, she replied:

“I wasn’t quick enough. It all happened in a flash.”

And that was how the earth came to carry one less son of a bitch, he felt like adding as the punchline. But instead of saying
anything, he let her finish her story. The inquiry had confirmed that the woman’s life was hell. Even the victim’s own parents had picked him to shreds. Nidziecka’s father-in-law was amazed it was him that was dead and not her. “But that’s good, very good,” he’d kept saying over and over.

A simple case. At least for the police. They’d arrested her, interviewed her, got a confession, the end. The rest of the job was up to the prosecutor and the court. The policeman didn’t have to wonder which article in the Penal Code had been contravened, how to classify the crime and what penalty to demand. The policeman didn’t have a supervisor above him in the shape of the Preparatory Proceedings Department who’d write him letters demanding that he catch criminals in a different way. Szacki often wondered if he wouldn’t have been a better policeman than a prosecutor. As it was, he performed lots of tasks that his colleagues had only heard of, never done. He went to incident scenes and autopsies, and sometimes even took the trouble to go and see a witness to interview him on the spot. Rarely, but he did do it. Though on the other hand, as a policeman, often living on the fringes of the underworld, making concessions, occasionally turning a blind eye in exchange for something, he wouldn’t have had the satisfaction he got from being part of the legal machine, whose aim was to administer justice - the penalty for breaking the law.

Now, as he wondered about the legal classification, he felt as if the merciless machine had got stuck. He knew what was expected of him - that he should charge Nidziecka as severely as possible under Article 148, paragraph 1: “Whoever kills a person is liable to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of no less than eight years.” Would that be in accordance with the law? Surely. Szacki was convinced Nidziecka had wanted to kill her husband. And that alone should have interested him. The court would probably have given her a low sentence, a special
commutation of the sentence and so on, but still: that would mean Nidziecka was a worse murderer than the merciless thugs responsible for “causing grievous bodily harm resulting in death”. He could decide on Article 148, paragraph 4: “Whoever kills a person while in a state of extreme agitation justified by the circumstances is liable to a penalty of imprisonment of from one to ten years”. One year was less than eight.

Szacki pushed the computer keyboard away from him. He had already written the entire indictment, he was just missing the classification and the grounds for it in a few sentences. In fact he felt like writing a draft decision to dismiss under the rule of self-defence - the right to repulse an unlawful attack. Without doubt that was what had happened here. But the supervisory board would stamp him into the ground if in such an obvious case he didn’t submit an indictment that plainly improved the official statistics.

Finally he wrote down the classification from Article 155: “Whoever causes a person’s death unintentionally is liable to a penalty of imprisonment for from three months to five years.”

“And I’ll quit this rotten job sooner than change that,” he said aloud to himself.

Half an hour later the indictment was ready. He left it with Chorko’s secretary, as the boss had just gone home. It was six p.m. High time to leave this charming place, he thought. He packed up quickly and switched off his computer. Just then the phone rang. He cursed out loud. For an instant he simply wanted to leave, but duty triumphed. As usual.

It was Nawrocki calling. He had located the people from the parallel class to Sylwia Boniczka’s , including someone repeating the year, as the clairvoyant had said. Some of them had no idea what he was talking about, some seemed truly scared, and the one repeating the year was terrified. He’d trembled all over, and Nawrocki was convinced that if he’d put more pressure on him
he’d have cracked. Szacki didn’t say it aloud, but he was sorry Nawrocki had interviewed the man. Although the policeman had a brain like a computer, physically he looked like a wimp and wasn’t best suited to “putting pressure” on interviewees. Kuzniecow was quite another matter - he only had to appear in the doorway and they all became very talkative in an instant.

“I don’t think we could establish a rape case,” said Nawrocki. “There’s no injured party, no evidence, no proof, no circumstantial evidence; there’s just the clairvoyant and a few potential suspects who are digging in their heels.”

“What about the father?”

“Well, yes, I’ve had an idea that we should interview him jointly.”

“How do you mean jointly?”

“I think if he’s squeezed a bit he’ll tell the truth. But we’ve only got one chance. If he doesn’t admit it the first time, that’ll be it. So I suggest a massed attack: policeman, prosecutor, the darkest interview room in Mostowski Palace, being brought there by the police, a two-hour wait… Do you see, Prosecutor?”

Theatre, thought Szacki, he’s suggesting bloody theatre. What should I do now? Go to the costume-hire place and get a bad cop’s mask?

“What time?” he asked after a short silence, regretting it before the words had reached Nawrocki.

“What about six tomorrow evening?” suggested the policeman, sounding as if they were off to a nice pub.

“The perfect time,” said Szacki emphatically. “Don’t forget I only drink lightly chilled red wine, best of all from the Puglia region of Italy. And the table mustn’t be too near the window or by the door.”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind. Tomorrow at six at your place. I’ll call from downstairs.”

It was approaching seven as he turned off Świętokrzyski Bridge onto Szczecińskie Embankment towards the zoo and politely joined the queue in the left lane. The right one ended just past the little bridge at Praga port - you could only turn right from it - which didn’t prevent some crafty customers from driving all the way down it, then playing dumb with their indicators on. Szacki never let them in.

He glanced at the ugly river-police building, and thought it was just about the start of the season for bodies in the Vistula. Drunken bathing, rape in the bushes, bets who could swim further. Luckily they rarely found anything in the City Centre section of the brown river. He couldn’t bear drowned bodies, those livid, swollen corpses that looked like seals with the fur shaved off. He hoped this season he’d be spared that nightmare. A year ago, when they’d found one right by Gdański Bridge, he had felt like moving it by hand a few yards further down - then his colleagues from the Żoliborz district would have had to deal with it. Fortunately the case was simple - the guy turned out to be a suicide who had jumped off Siekierkowski Bridge. Szacki had never understood why he had fully undressed before doing it, but didn’t put that in his letter to the wife. The wife claimed he had always been very shy.

At the lanes by the main entrance to the zoo he had to stop to let a man and his daughter cross the road. The man was several years older than him, horribly emaciated, maybe sick. The girl was Helka’s age. She was holding a balloon shaped like Piglet. Szacki thought how strange it was that all the cases he was involved in lately featured fathers and daughters. Boniczka, who may have murdered his daughter out of shame and buried her at night in the nursery school playground. Nidziecki, dragging his daughter into her bedroom and explaining that it was harder for him than for her. Telak wanting to commit suicide to follow
his daughter into death. But also perhaps in some twisted way guilty of her death. And himself. Desperately wanting change, chasing after a young journalist. Was he prepared to sacrifice his daughter? And what exactly did it mean, “sacrifice”? It was too early for solutions of that kind. But why too early? he wondered, as he waited for the lights to change at the corner of Ratuszowa and Jagiellońska Streets. A hopeless junction. If there was traffic, at most two cars could turn left. And that only if the drivers were quick to react. Why too early? Wasn’t it better to sort it out at once and have a free hand? Not have to tremble during dates in case his wife called. Not have to deceive either one or the other party.