Szacki felt as if he"d been called up to the blackboard.
"I don"t know, I hadn"t thought about it. Is he afraid to? Does he feel guilty towards them? Is he ashamed?"
"None of those things," said Wrobel, shaking his head. "He simply can"t take his eyes off the person who"s standing right opposite him and who is probably the most important of all in this constellation. I don"t know who it is, but that tie is terribly strong. Please note that he doesn"t even blink - he"s looking at that person the whole time."
"But there"s no one there!" Szacki suddenly felt furious. He"d frittered away so many hours with this lunatic. He got up. Wrobel rose to his feet too.
"Of course there is," he replied calmly, moving his nose in a feline way. "There stands the person who"s missing from the constellation. Do you want to make progress in your inquiry? Then go and find that missing person. Just find out who Telak is staring at with such panic and fear in his eyes."
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki nodded his head in silence, gazing at the fuzzy image of Telak"s pained face, quivering slightly on the television screen. That look had worried him earlier on, but he had ignored his instinct, knowing Telak was drained by the therapy. Now he understood that his face wasn"t pained. It had worried him, because he"d seen that look before, in the eyes of people he"d interrogated - a mixture of fear and hatred.
He switched off the machine and removed the tape.
"Wouldn"t you like to take part in a constellation?" the therapist asked Szacki as they walked towards the main exit together. "See what it"s like from the inside?"
Szacki opened his mouth to answer that he"d be very willing, but in the short while it took for the air to get from his lungs to his vocal cords, the mental image arose of himself arranging his parents, Weronika and Helka, and the therapist asking how they were feeling.
"No, thank you. That"s probably not necessary."
Wrobel smiled in a feline way, but didn"t pa.s.s comment. Only at the door, when he"d already said goodbye to Szacki, did he say: "If someone in the constellation seems to be good and someone else bad, it"s almost always the other way around. Please remember that."
II.
Not many bits of this metropolis look like a genuine city, rather than a large area cluttered with streets and buildings. However, even in this dump there are some beautiful bits, thought Szacki, as he drove down Belwederska Street towards the city centre. This section of the Royal Way, from Gagarin Street to Triple Cross Square was one of the few that bore witness to what this city had once been and what it could be. First the modern ma.s.s of the Hyatt hotel, then the Russian emba.s.sy, the Belweder Palace, azienki Park, the government buildings, then Ujazdowski Park and the emba.s.sies on Ujazdowskie Avenue (with the exception of the breeze block the Americans had built themselves), and finally the big-city Triple Cross Square. Szacki didn"t like Nowy wiat, and couldn"t understand all the fuss about that street where the buildings looked as if they"d been transferred from Kielce. Ugly, low little tenements, one not at all suited to another. Szacki couldn"t believe Nowy wiat and the squalid Chmielna Street fancied themselves as the prettiest part of town. Maybe only so visitors from the provinces could feel at home here.
But now Nowy wiat made him think of the Cava cafe and Miss Grzelka - that is, Monika - and it was hard for him to foster any ill feeling for the place. He wished she was waiting there, and that instead of going to work on Krucza Street he could have a cup of coffee with her, sit and chat like friends. Or like potential lovers. Was that really his intention? An affair? How could he possibly do it? To have a lover, you had to have a bachelor flat or the money for a hotel, or at least work non-standard hours that could justify your absence from home. He, meanwhile, was a poor civil servant who came home from work every day at eight at the latest.
What am I actually doing, he thought, as he went round the Prosecution Service building for the second time looking for a parking place - the only official one was taken. And what do I really imagine? Am I truly so starved of s.e.x and love that it"s enough for me to meet with a woman a couple of times and no longer be capable of thinking about anything else?
Finally he found a place on urawia Street, not far the Szpilka cafe. It was one o"clock. In five hours he"d be sitting there with Monika, having supper, stretching his budget. He wondered how she"d be dressed. He locked the car when finally it dawned on him.
Monika, Szpilka, six p.m.
Nawrocki, police headquarters, six p.m.
f.u.c.k.
Pinned to the door of his room he found a message to come and see the boss IMMEDIATELY. Of course it was about Nidziecka. He ignored it, went inside and called Nawrocki, but the policeman had already summoned Boniczka"s father to police HQ, and it was impossible to cancel. Szacki thought he could persuade Nawrocki to apply a sort of hara.s.sment - summon him, keep him in the corridor, then let him go and invite him to come back the next day (the secret police had done it to his grandfather in the 1950s) - but he dropped the idea. He preferred to get it over and done with. He called Monika.
"Hi, has something come up?" she asked before he"d had time to speak.
"I have to be at police HQ at six - I"ve no idea how long it"ll take. Sorry."
"So maybe call me if it doesn"t take long. And don"t say sorry for no reason. What"ll you say when you do something really naughty?"
Szacki gulped. He was sure she heard him do it. Should he tell the truth, that after the interrogation he"d have to go home? And did he really have to? Was he the father of a family, or a little kid who has to ask his mummy"s permission to come home late from the playground? And in fact why couldn"t he say that? After all, if she wanted to flirt with a married man, she must know what she was choosing to do. But what if she was some sort of madwoman who"d start calling Weronika and screaming "He"s mine, all mine"? He panicked.
"I don"t want to promise anything, because I really don"t think I"ll make it today," he said, trying to buy time. Why the f.u.c.k hadn"t he made a plan before calling her?
"Hmm, that"s a pity."
"Maybe tomorrow during the day - I"ll be hanging about in town, could we make a lunch?" he stammered ungrammatically, when he finally remembered that tomorrow he"d have to be at Telak"s funeral. He could always tell Weronika he had to drop in at work after the funeral. Should he take a change of clothes? Maybe he should - he couldn"t go to the pub in a suit that was good for family ceremonies like weddings and funerals. b.u.g.g.e.r it.
They agreed that he"d send a text once he knew at what time they could meet, and she"d just have a light breakfast (mango, coffee, maybe a small sandwich) and wait to hear from him. Instantly he imagined her lying in bed in the morning, with tousled hair, reading the paper and licking mango juice off her fingers. Would he ever see that for real?
Oleg Kuzniecow was not happy about having to question the people from Telak"s circle again, this time about his lovers, former partners and girlfriends at school.
"Are you crazy?" he moaned. "How do you think I"m supposed to check that? His parents are dead, his wife can"t possibly know a thing, and I"ve already asked his work colleagues about it."
Szacki was unyielding.
"Find out what high school he went to, what and where he studied, find his male and female friends, and question them. That"s what the police do anyway, for f.u.c.k"s sake - look for people and interview them. I just fill in forms and number the pages in files."
Oleg sent him a torrent of abuse down the phone.
"I"d understand if it would still do any good," he grumbled. "But the whole time we"ve just been chasing shadows, nothing solid. Say we find some bit of fluff of his who was killed in a car crash when he was driving. Say he felt terribly guilty about it and that"s why his daughter killed herself. So what? Can you tell me how that moves the inquiry forwards?"
Szacki could not. He knew it would probably be just another bit of non-essential information that would take a lot of work to obtain. A solid chunk of hard work of no use to anyone. But did they have any alternative?
So he told the policeman, who growled that he was behaving like some grand company director.
"You"re p.i.s.sed off because we haven"t got anything, and you"re making some panic-stricken moves to give the impression that you"re doing something. I know you - it"s just that you don"t want to get on with some other job. Can"t you at least wait until next week for the results of the voiceprint a.n.a.lysis? Then you"ll know for sure if it was Kwiatkowska pretending to be Telak"s daughter. You know Jarczyk"s fingerprints are on the bottle of pills. That"s enough to search their places and check they haven"t got something else to connect them with Telak. I"d give Kaim and Rudzki the once-over too. If only to stop them from feeling too secure. And as for Rudzki, can"t you have a chat with him about Telak"s past? He ought to know something - the guy confided in him once a week, didn"t he?"
Kuzniecow was right. And at the same time he wasn"t. Rudzki was a potential suspect, and as such he was hardly a reliable source of information. His revelations would have to be verified in any case.
So he didn"t give in to Kuzniecow. Yet straight after finishing the conversation with the policeman, he called Cezary Rudzki and asked him to come in on Monday. In the process he discovered that the therapist would be at tomorrow"s funeral too.
Janina Chorko had put on make-up. It was terrible. Without make-up she was just ugly; with it she looked like a corpse that the undertaker"s children have made up with mummy"s cosmetics just for fun, and that as a result of these efforts has come back to life and gone to work. She was wearing a thin polo-neck top and maybe nothing underneath. And to think only a short time ago he was sure nothing could excite him like a woman"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s. That was the distant past, prehistory, the Silurian era, the Devonian, the Cambrian. He was afraid to look at her, which was easy because she immediately started to give him a dressing-down, so he could lower his gaze in relief and play the ticked-off prosecutor.
Murder is murder, it"s not up to the prosecutor to help the defendant out, surely he hadn"t forgotten what they"d talked about the other day, he could always change the cla.s.sification in the courtroom without p.i.s.sing off all his superiors in the process, and so on.
"No," he replied curtly, once she had finished, raising his head and looking her in the eyes. Just in the eyes. He took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lit the first one that day. And it was long past noon - not bad at all.
"There"s no smoking in this building," she said coldly, lighting up herself. He knew he should have offered her a light, but he was afraid she"d get the wrong idea. She took an ashtray full of dog-ends out of a drawer and put it on the desk between them.
"What do you mean, "no"?"
"I mean I"m not going to charge Mariola Nidziecka with murder," he said very slowly and very calmly. "To tell the truth, I"m surprised I wrote an indictment at all in a case of such obvious use of self-defence. I"m ashamed I yielded to imaginary pressure. Evidently, my intuition was right. But even so there"s no worse censorship than self-censorship. Please excuse me, as my boss and the person responsible for my decisions too."
Chorko blew smoke at the ceiling and leaned towards him. She sighed heavily, straight into the ashtray, raising a cloud of ash. Szacki pretended not to notice.
"Are you s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me around, Mr Szacki?" she whispered.
"I"m saying," he replied, unable to use a verb that he a.s.sociated with s.e.x, "I"ve had enough of predicting what someone"s going to like and what they"re not. I"m saying we should work the way we regard as correct, and only start worrying when someone gives us a hard time about it. I"m saying I start worrying when I hear you telling me I should read my superiors" minds, because I"ve always thought you were different. I"m saying that I"m extremely sorry about it. And I"m asking: do you think that legal cla.s.sification is wrong?"
The head of the City Centre District Prosecutor"s Office stubbed out her dog-end with the firm gesture of an inveterate smoker and offered Szacki the ashtray. She sank back in her fake-leather armchair, and suddenly Szacki saw the old, tired woman in her.
"Prosecutor Szacki," she said resignedly. "I"m an old, tired woman, who has seen more of these stories than I should have. And I"d be the first to sign a decision to dismiss this case under the rules for self-defence. What"s more, I think that son of a b.i.t.c.h should be dug up, resurrected and put away for years on end. And you"re right that the longer I sit in a leather armchair instead of interviewing witnesses, the more I think about "what they"ll say". It"s not good, dammit. And I thought about what I told you yesterday: that sometimes you have to give way in order to survive. A lesser evil. Do you agree?"
"Partly yes, partly no," he replied diplomatically. That was a question no prosecutor in Poland could have categorically answered with a clean conscience.
"Yes, they should write that underneath the eagle above the door as our heraldic motto. Partly yes, partly no. But more of a no?"
"More of a no."
"You"re right." She sighed again. "I"ll sign your indictment, we"ll send it to Krakowskie Przedmiecie and we"ll see what happens. And if things become unbearable, we"ll have to think again. One of my friends from Wola qualified as a legal adviser and got a job in the legal department at a mineral water factory in Beskidy. She"s got a holiday home in the mountains, works eight hours a day and earns twelve thousand a month. And no one throws acid in her face or scratches her car out of spite because she"s "that b.i.t.c.h from the prosecution"."
Szacki nodded in silence. She was right, but he was afraid that if he started agreeing with her too eagerly, she"d think she"d found a fraternal soul in him and would suggest he drop in at her place for a gla.s.s of wine and a nice little chat about the sad lot of the prosecutor in the Polish Republic. He waited a while out of courtesy, thanked the boss, muttered something about a huge pile of paperwork and went out, leaving Janina Chorko surrounded by unhappy thoughts, the stink of cigarettes and the smell of her imitation leather chair.
III.
He went to Mostowski Palace on foot, because the entire city centre was stuck in a gigantic traffic jam. Not a single vehicle could cross the heart of the city - the roundabout by the Rotunda. Nowadays it wasn"t actually "the roundabout by the Rotunda" any more, but officially "Dmowski Roundabout", in memory of the pre-war politician, who had been honoured by having this utterly charmless junction of two motorways named after him. Szacki could easily have got to Bankowy Square by metro, but the underground railway was closed too. Therefore, not without pleasure, he walked down Bracka Street towards Pisudski Palace, hoping the city would get moving by the time the interview ended so he"d be able to go back to the office by bus.
It was a nice stroll, and Szacki thought that if he were to drive a blindfolded foreigner from Okcie airport to the start of it, then take him for a walk along this route, cover his eyes again at the end and take him back to Okcie, the tourist might go away with the impression that Warsaw was a very pretty city. Chaotic, but pretty. And full of cafes, pubs and clubs, as there were plenty on this route.
Especially the section along witokrzyska Street, Mazowiecka and Kredytowa Streets with their beautiful tenement buildings, art supply shops (as if Warsaw were a city of artists), the Protestant church on Maachowski Square, the Zachta Gallery (as if it were a city of art) and the stunning panorama of Pisudski Square, with the Wielki Theatre (city of theatre) and Norman Foster"s Metropolitan building (city of fine architecture, ha ha ha).
And finally the walk through the Saxon Garden, with the mandatory stop to admire the Polish girls sunning themselves on the benches. For many years Szacki had been unable to bear this place, because here on one of those benches he"d been turned down by a girl he was in love with at school. Not long ago he"d seen her in a shop. Her balding husband was pushing a trolley with items spilling out of it, and she had a sulky face as she dragged a couple of children after her. Or maybe she was dragging one and carrying the other? What Szacki really remembered best from the entire scene was that she had greasy hair and her roots were showing. He had pretended not to know her.
At Bankowy Square Szacki quickened his pace; it was a few minutes after six. He ran through the underpa.s.s to the small square in front of the Muranow cinema and immediately felt guilty. He regarded himself as a member of the intelligentsia, and as such he shouldn"t miss any premiere at the Muranow, where instead of Hollywood trash they showed more-or-less-ambitious European films. Meanwhile he"d only ever been there once in a blue moon. He kept promising himself he"d see them later on DVD, but he never took out any ambitious European films. Bah, he didn"t even fancy watching those boring things on TV. This time they were showing Reconstruction, some sort of Danish reflection on the meaning of life, apparently. He turned his gaze from the accusingly large letters of the repertoire. Half a minute later he was in the atrium of the cla.s.sical Mostowski Palace, where the tsarist authorities had once been based, then the Polish army, then the Civic Militia; now it was the City Police Headquarters.
Nawrocki had made an effort. He had kept his promise, putting Olgierd Boniczka in the smallest, gloomiest interview room in the building. Szacki wasn"t at all sure it really was an interview room - Nawrocki may have put a table and three chairs in some forgotten box room just to make Boniczka feel as if he was having a Gestapo-style interrogation. The room was a few square feet in size, with dirty walls, a dirty door and no windows. The only source of light was a bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. Luckily Nawrocki had stopped before lugging in a desk lamp on the end of an arm - a standard prop for totalitarian interrogations.
"I"m sorry you"ve had to wait," said Nawrocki to the man who was sitting at the small hardboard table, looking scared. The veneer, imitating a non-existent type of wood, was frayed at the edges, and in several places there were cigarette burns. "This is Prosecutor Teodor Szacki from the City Centre District Prosecutor"s Office. We thought the matter so important that we"re talking to you together."
Boniczka instantly stood up. Szacki indicated that he could sit down. He took a chair himself and sat by the door, leaving the policeman and the interviewee at the table. He didn"t say anything, because he didn"t have to. Boniczka gave him a frightened look. People often reacted to the presence of the prosecutor this way. For them a policeman was someone acceptable. He plodded around the housing estate in uniform, made a note of the yobs" IDs and took a bribe if you drove too fast after drinking. He was our lad, battling with life, who knows it"s never easy and that nothing"s black or white. The prosecutor was a.s.sociated with the sort of officials with whom nothing could ever be sorted, who didn"t understand a thing, spoke in an incomprehensible language and were always against you. So Szacki kept quiet, knowing that for now his suit and his stern expression were enough to do the job. Compared with him, Nawrocki looked like "one of us" - fat and neglected, with a puffy face and thin, greasy hair, in a yellow shirt unb.u.t.toned at the neck with no tie and a crumpled grey-green jacket. Now and then he blew his nose, clearly suffering from some sort of allergy.
Boniczka"s only similarity to the policeman was that they both looked as if they"d only ever heard of final high-school exams, not taken them (despite appearances, Nawrocki had two degrees, in law and psychology). Very thin, skinny even, with the particular leanness of a man who does physical work and already knew the taste of harmful substances in primary school. There really was something of the janitor about him, and Szacki thought he gave off a smell of sweat, cleaning fluids, cellars and rotting leaves. He had a very thick, very black moustache and very black hair with a distinct bald patch on the top of his head. He kept his hands on his knees with his fingers locked as he cast suspicious glances, now at the prosecutor, now at the policeman, who was looking through the doc.u.ments in silence.
"What"s this actually about?" croaked Boniczka finally, and cleared his throat. "Why do you want to talk to me?"
"Some new circ.u.mstances have come to light in the case of your daughter"s murder," replied Nawrocki. He set aside the doc.u.ments, switched on the tape recorder, leaned his elbows on the table and folded his hands as if to pray.
"Yes?"
Without answering, Nawrocki just looked at Boniczka reproachfully.
"Have you caught them?"
Nawrocki sighed and smacked his lips.
"Were you aware of the fact that your daughter was raped shortly before she was murdered?"
Szacki had been waiting for this question. Now he watched Boniczka closely through slightly lowered eyelids, trying to recognize the emotions in his face. The man raised his eyebrows a little, that was all.
"What do you mean? Have I misunderstood? And are you only telling me about it now?"
"We"ve only just found out about it ourselves," replied the policeman and gave a mighty sneeze, then spent the next few moments wiping his nose. "Sorry, I"m allergic to dust. Quite by chance, while investigating another case we picked up the trail of the rapists."
"And what then? Did they admit they killed Sylwia?"
"No."
Boniczka cast a brief glance at the policeman, then at the prosecutor.
"But maybe you don"t believe them?"
"Whether we do or don"t, that"s our business. First we wanted to talk to you. They told us exactly what happened that evening."
And Nawrocki started telling the story. Twice Boniczka asked the policeman to stop, but in vain. The second time Szacki almost joined in with the suspect"s request. The superintendent didn"t spare them a single detail. Starting from the first moments, when someone shouted to the girl as she was crossing Hoa Street: "Sylwia, wait, it"s me!", via the tussle in the stairwell at the apartment building when she didn"t want to come in "for a while", the insistence that "it"ll be cool" and the chortled remark that "everyone knows when a bird says "no" she means "yes" and "yes" means "please be my guest"", up to the scene in the flat on the first floor.
The prosecutor realized that Nawrocki had not found all this out from the rapists - if such they were - who had denied everything. If he was bluffing, it was a blind alley. Sylwia Boniczka might have told her father exactly what happened that evening, and then their suspect would quickly twig that they didn"t really know anything. If he wasn"t bluffing, he was probably quoting the story told him by the clairvoyant. Szacki cursed mentally. Clairvoyants and screwed-up therapies - his work was getting more and more like a bad TV series about a prosecutor who investigates paranormal phenomena. Nawrocki could have warned him.
"When she left, or rather when they"d thrown her out of the flat, threatening her as a parting shot with what would happen if she told anyone about their - as they put it - "little knees-up", at first she didn"t know where she was. All she knew was that she felt very cold. She set off, instinctively heading towards home. But as she went past the school, she thought of you. She stood at the bottom of the steps for a while, then went up to the door and rang the bell. A tearful teenage girl in a green top, a denim skirt with shiny applique, and her first ever pair of high-heeled shoes - one of them broken."
Nawrocki paused. Boniczka was rocking back and forth. Szacki was multiplying three-figure numbers in his head to kill the images of the rape scene that kept arising in his imagination. A crime that, in his opinion, should be punished on the same scale as murder. Rape was murder, even if the corpse went on walking about the streets for years after.
"She didn"t have a broken heel, she arrived barefoot," Boniczka suddenly whispered, without interrupting his steady rocking.
"How can you know, if she never found you?"
"She did, she did find me," muttered Boniczka. "Do you know, she discarded the shoes herself on the way? Funny, but she was terribly sorry about them. She kept saying they were such wonderful shoes, she liked them so much. And that when her heel broke as she was walking down Hoa Street she thought she"d better throw them away, but at once she"d begun to regret it. She asked if I could go and get those shoes for her, because she was afraid. Finally she wouldn"t talk about anything else, just those shoes. My shoes, my shoes, go and fetch them for me, Dad, my shoes, they must still be there."
Szacki was trying not to listen. All he could think was that maybe he should take his family, or at least his daughter, and get as far away from this city as possible. How he hated this place.
"Did you go and fetch them?" asked Nawrocki.
Olgierd Boniczka said he had. Plain black court shoes with a strap around the ankle. If it weren"t for the broken heel, they"d have looked straight out of the box. It was the first time she"d worn them outside - before that she"d only worn them in the house, to practise walking in them.
"And what happened after that?"
"When I came back, she was trying to hang herself with the cable from the electric cooker. She didn"t protest when I took it away from her. She was glad I"d brought the shoes. She put them on and started telling me again that she"d been afraid of falling over, and as a result she"d missed the tram because she couldn"t run to catch it; on the way there she and her friend had walked arm in arm... And so on without a break. About nothing else. And then she asked me to kill her."