Entanglement (32 page)

Just then she called.

“Hi, what are you doing?” she asked.

“Thinking about you,” he replied truthfully.

“You’re lying, but that’s nice. Have you got email there, or doesn’t the state budget run to the Internet?”

He gave her his address and asked what she wanted to send him.

“A dreadful virus that will accuse you all of subversive activity and send you on a five-day seminar to Łódź. Eight hours of compulsory lectures a day by Miller, Jaskiernia and Kalisz, finishing with Pęczak pole-dancing,” she said, referring to a very unappealing group of left-wing politicians. “Don’t you want a surprise?”

He explained that he didn’t like surprises.

“Everyone does,” she said gently, “but that’s not why I called. I talked to Grześ this morning - just imagine, he still likes me - and he promised he’d be happy to help. He called just now and said he’d found something there and that he’d prefer to meet up with you. I didn’t want to give him your mobile number, so I’m going to give you his. You can call at the taxpayer’s expense. In other words, mine.”

He started to thank her, but she said the editorial meeting had just begun so she had to go, and hung up before he’d had a chance to invite her for another coffee.

So he quickly made an appointment with “Grześ” and went to the toilet.

In full “Grześ” was called Grzegorz Podolski, and he looked like a nice guy, though he gave the impression of being biologically incapable of getting past adolescence. He was tall, disproportionately skinny and stooping, his arms and legs were too long, and on top of that he was slightly spotty and clean-shaven. He was dressed in an extremely old-fashioned way, like the hero of an East German youth film from the 1970s. Gym shoes, trousers made of brown stuff, a greenish shirt with short sleeves and braces. Szacki didn’t know that this old-school style cost Podolski a large part of his archivist’s salary.

“Do you know what Department ‘C’ was?” Podolski asked him once they’d exchanged formalities.

He didn’t.

“It was the nervous system of the SB - the Communist secret police - you could say, the neurons connecting every functionary, department and unit. On official documents the name ‘Central Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ appeared, but within the firm no one ever called it anything but ‘C’. I’ve been interested in it for years, and I have to tell you, if the Reds had had the sort of computers we have nowadays, they could have reduced us to dust at a single mouse click. And that’s nothing: I think the card-index system they had in those days for registering and compiling information was miles better than the famous ultra-modern computer system at the National Insurance Agency.”

Szacki shrugged indifferently.

“Impressive, but it’s no news that bureaucracy is a vital element of any totalitarian regime.”

“Exactly,” said Podolski, for whom it really must have been a fascinating topic. “Without bureaucracy, without cataloguing information, without keeping the documents in order no such system could be maintained. That’s why the Germans
did so well - because they had order, there were receipts for everything. But it cuts both ways. On the one hand, thanks to bureaucracy a totalitarian system can function, but on the other, it leaves behind a lot of paper for those who are going to appraise that system. For us, in this case. I’ll give you an example…”

Szacki tried to interrupt him with a gentle wave, but Podolski didn’t even notice.

“Do you know the story of Lesław Maleszka? Everyone must know it. Maleszka was a well-known member of the opposition; of course he had his number on the list of internees, like everyone they kept under surveillance or kept operational files on, etc. Of course, not any old secret policeman or militiaman could just take a look at the documents on secret agent ‘Zbyszek’, as Maleszka was dubbed - it was all secret and of special importance. But just imagine - in the operational budget’s completely unclassified reports there’s a note saying how much was paid to ‘Zbyszek’ for informing, and there’s the same number for Maleszka. Makes no sense? Oh no - it’s just that the papers had to be in order. One person - one number. That’s why it riles me so much when every little sneak starts whining that the wicked Reds falsified his file to incriminate him. All the functionaries had heaps of work to do filling in forms. Only someone with no idea about it could claim they spent their evenings faking dodgy receipts. The SB were bad, sometimes stupid, but they weren’t retarded. Just imagine, every person they were interested in - even in the most trivial way - was instantly registered under the next ordinal number in the general information index. On condition they hadn’t been registered there earlier, which of course had to be checked using some special cards. Once they’d been registered, every time something happened to them, supplementary cards had to be filled in that ended up in the individual files and indexes.”
“What for?” asked Szacki automatically when the archivist stopped for a moment to take a breath. Though in fact he didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

“What do you mean, what for? So that when you go on holiday to Łeba on the coast and the secret policemen watching the local ‘enemy’ there find out you ate flounder with him off a paper tray, at once they’ll want to know who you are. They’ll submit a question to ‘C’. There someone will check if you’re in the index, what your number is and if your case is ‘open’ and under the management of one of the regional commands, for example, or is in the archive. And provide the relevant information as far as possible - because you might be or have been a very valuable secret agent whose files do of course exist, but gaining access to the information contained in them is limited by numerous…”

Szacki was utterly uninterested. He switched off and sank into erotic fantasies.

They had already talked for an hour. In this time he had learned, among other things, what the differences were between registration forms EO-4 and EO-13-S, and he only remembered the second of these because he associated it with Canon EOS cameras. He’d like to get himself one of those one day. Maybe on hire purchase? He’d have to have a chat with Weronika about it - after all, they should have a digital camera. Everyone had one by now. He was bored with this discussion of secret-police card indexes and forms. He felt like shaking Podolski and shouting: “Man, I’ve got to lock up a murderer and you’re screwing me around with bloody card indexes!”

“I’m very sorry, Mr Podolski,” he politely interrupted his argument on the fact that practice doesn’t always follow theory, files wandered, were detained, added to other cases “for a while”, and sometimes he, archivist Grzegorz Podolski, felt as if it would be easier to find the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail in a single day than a bloody secret-police file.

“But we do find them all the time,” he said, raising a finger, “so they shouldn’t be under any illusions.”

Szacki didn’t even try to imagine who “they” were in Podolski’s mind.

“I’m very sorry,” he cut in more decisively, “and thank you very much for telling me all this, but what about Kamil Sosnowski’s file? Is it there? Or not? What happened to prevent you from telling me over the phone?”

Podolski behaved like someone who has been suddenly hit in the face. He buried his head in his arms, folded his hands on his chest and turned down the corners of his mouth. But at least he shut up.

“It’s not there,” he said after a pause.

Szacki sighed and started rubbing his temples with his left thumb and index finger. He felt a headache coming on.

“Thank you for taking the trouble. Your knowledge is impressive and I’d love to talk to you some more, but please understand me, I have a lot of work to do.” What he’d have loved most would have been to kick the boring Podolski out of the door, but he restrained himself, because a friendly expert from the Institute for National Remembrance archive could still come in handy.

“There’s no file,” said Podolski, plainly wanting to torture him with this fact. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no information. I realize you’re bored, but I will tell you that the main thing is knowing which catalogue to look in. Monika told me your subject was young, not much over twenty, so it’s fairly hard to imagine he’d be a secret agent or a candidate secret agent - then he’d be inventoried under the symbol ‘I’ for PSIs, candidate PSIs, LCs and CF owners…”

“Sorry?” The abbreviations meant nothing to Szacki.

“Personal Sources of Information, Local Contacts and Conspiracy Flats. I thought it was obvious.” Podolski gave him a
superior look. “In any case, at once I started looking in the ‘II’ index, where the investigation operational files were catalogued.”

Szacki took the manly decision to throw him out. He stood up.

“And I found him. Your subject, Kamil Sosnowski, was thoroughly investigated by the Warsaw SB. He was registered in the general information index under catalogue number 17875/ II. The file was started in 1985, two years before his death. He was twenty years old then. He must have been fairly active in student organizations, or his parents were in the opposition - they rarely kept files on such very young people.”

Szacki sat down.

“Did you manage to find out anything else?”

“From the inventory you can only tell how the files have roamed - when someone took them out and when they returned them. Nothing more.”

“And did these ones roam?”

Grzegorz Podolski folded one skinny leg in unfashionable trousers over the other and leaned back in his chair.

“Well?” prompted Szacki.

“From the case compendium it appears that in July 1988 they were removed by Department ‘D’.”

“Meaning? Is that another sort of archive?”

“No, it’s not. I don’t know anything about them. That is, I know a bit, I can guess a bit. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to. I don’t know, I’m not an expert, I’m just an archivist. I can give you details of a person who deals with all that. He’s a real SB-hound, he’s not afraid of anything. Unmarried, no children, his parents are dead, some say he has cancer. Someone like that can take risks.”

Podolski uttered the final sentence with evident envy, which Szacki found strange.

“Would you prefer to be alone and dying so you could track down secret policemen?” he exclaimed.

“No, of course not. But if you’d seen what’s in those files… If you knew as much as I do, had seen the photos, read the reports, leafed through the receipts. And the whole time knowing that most likely no one will ever see it, the truth will never come to light, it will all be swept under the carpet in the name of peace and quiet for whatever regime happens to be in power… Wildstein did take out that list of names, but what did that add? Have you seen the film
Fight Club
? Or maybe you’ve read Palahniuk’s book?”

Szacki hadn’t seen or read it. He felt ashamed, because he remembered the title as pretty well-known.

“In it ordinary people band together to blow up this world of hypocrisy, lies and financial gain. Sometimes I dream of how brilliant it would be to set up an organization like that, take over the Institute archives, scan everything in a week and post it on a server in a truly democratic country. If only it could happen.”

“Not all secrets should come to light. Sometimes the price of fighting injustice is too high,” said Szacki cautiously.

Podolski snorted with laughter and stood up, getting ready to leave. He handed the prosecutor a card with the name of the “SB-hound”. Karol Wenzel.

“Fucking hell,” he said, standing in the doorway. “Can a prosecutor of the Polish Republic really have said those words? In that case I’m emigrating to join my brother in London. Well, fucking hell. How could you? Not even reading all those biased editorials in
Gazeta Wyborcza
should have killed the desire within the Prosecution Service to establish the truth at any cost. That’s what you’re for - not to look at the balance sheet of losses and injustices, but to establish the truth. Fucking hell, I simply do not believe it.”

He shook his head and left before Szacki had a chance to say anything in reply. He should have called Karol Wenzel at once,
but instead of that he checked the emails, curious to see if Monika had sent his surprise yet.

She had. A picture from the seaside, taken in the same dress she’d been wearing the other day. It must have been taken a year ago - she was very tanned, with shorter hair. She was wading barefoot in shallow water and the whole bottom of the dress was soaked. She was smiling flirtatiously towards the camera. To a man? Szacki felt a pang of jealousy. Irrational jealousy, considering the fact that he had a child and a wife, with whom lately he had been sleeping pretty regularly, not with her.

He looked at the picture for a while longer, came to the conclusion that maybe she wasn’t wearing a bathing costume underneath, and went to the bathroom. Not bad, not bad. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had sex twice in one day.

The conversation with Karol Wenzel went completely differently from how he’d imagined. He had expected he’d just be telling an older man to come and see him as soon as possible, but the voice at the other end of the line was young, and its owner had no intention of showing up at the prosecutor’s office.

“Please don’t crease me up,” said Wenzel emphatically, exaggeratedly rolling the letter “r”. “On the list of places where I wouldn’t want to talk to you, your office is in the top five. Well, maybe the top ten.”

Szacki asked why.

“What do you think?”

“If you say you’re afraid of bugs, I’ll know that years of contact with secret-police files have driven you into… a sort of paranoia.” Szacki was sorry he couldn’t simply define his interlocutor’s mental state.

“I have no desire to explain the obvious to you,” bristled Wenzel. “But out of the goodness of my heart I’ll advise you that as you have reached a point in your inquiry - whatever it may be about - where you want to talk to me, I would recommend caution. No interviews at the prosecutor’s office, just over a private phone, maximum discretion with regard to colleagues, superiors and the police.”