"I have no idea. I saw him a while ago. If it was him, he"s aged a lot. But I"m not sure."
Szacki asked Mamcarz a few more questions about the details, about people who might have known the Sosnowskis, and what might have happened to the files. In vain. The retired militia captain actually remembered very little. After yet another question that got no answer Szacki glanced with hatred at the bottle of apple wine, which over the years, along with its pals, had changed his personal source of information into someone whose brain structure resembled pumice. A semblance of solidity, but essentially full of holes. Only as Szacki was leaving, thinking how he"d probably have to burn his clothes in the courtyard dustbin before entering the house, Mamcarz said something that the prosecutor should have thought of earlier.
"You should ask your colleagues who dig around in secret-police files about Sosnowski," he said.
"Why?"
"He was a college boy from an intelligentsia home. There"s a chance they kept a file on him. Even if they didn"t gather much information, you might find some names or addresses. I know what it"s like when you haven"t a splinter to hang the inquiry on."
That must have been his favourite phrase.
Just as he expected, Mamcarz"s concubine was waiting for him outside the door, smiling insincerely. He was upset by the thought that this woman was going back to the Captain, who had ultimately seemed to be a sympathetic, despondent man. But "if someone in the constellation seems to be good and someone else bad, it"s almost always the other way around". Was it she who had planted the flowers and painted the railings?
Of course she asked him for a small favour. She was ready to spend a long time explaining her needs to him, but he waved a hand to stop her and reached into his pocket for some change. He gave her a ten-zloty note. She thanked him effusively, as the door - behind which the siblings he had met downstairs had disappeared - opened, and out came a young couple. Their neighbour fled back into her den as fast as possible. The horrible thought crossed Szacki"s mind that in Mamcarz"s flat the c.o.c.kroaches must run across the people"s faces while they slept. He shuddered.
"The midget"s to have her light out at ten, and you"re not to spend the whole time playing games. We"ll be late - if there"s any need, I"ve got my mobile," a young man holding the handle of the open door was instructing the s.h.a.ggy teenager.
The three of them got into the lift together. The couple gave Szacki the same sort of pitying look he himself would have bestowed on any visitor to Captain Mamcarz. He replied with an acid smile. They both looked about twenty-something, and Szacki thought they couldn"t possibly have such big children. Or maybe they looked young because they were happy? Because they loved each other? Had s.e.x often and kissed each other on the mouth a lot? Maybe he"d look younger too if it weren"t for Weronika"s worn-out Tatra Highlander slippers and pyjamas that had gone yellow under the arms. It was quite another matter that he wore just the same slippers. And to think he"d once said Tatra Highlander slippers were death for a man. He"d liked that joke a lot. One day he"d got them some of those peasant-style slippers from a souvenir shop on Krupowki Street in Zakopane - just for a laugh. And now they wore them every day. They were even comfortable.
Szacki averted his gaze from his fellow pa.s.sengers. Reluctantly. The woman was very s.e.xy, exactly his type. Not too skinny, but not fat, with nice womanly curves and full lips, wearing a red dress with small black flowers on it, with a low-cut neck that was enough to arouse the imagination without being vulgar. She looked like someone who laughed a lot.
The lift stopped, and Szacki felt like telling them they had fabulous kids, but he held back. Ever since the incriminating photographs had been found in the paedophile therapist"s dustbin, such remarks were no longer considered innocent.
As he walked home he thought about the bantering siblings. He often wondered if they hadn"t done Helka a wrong by not trying for another child. But perhaps it wasn"t too late yet? There must have been six or seven years" difference between the teenager with the speech defect and his sister with ADHD. If he and Weronika were to decide on it now, there"d be eight years between Helka and her brother or sister.
And maybe then everything would become easy. Maybe then he wouldn"t need change. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
All it took was to make a decision. For Teodor Szacki, a man who preferred everything to just happen to him rather than to be the result of his own decisions, that thought was on a par with deciding to climb Mount Aconcagua at the weekend.
He reached his block and glanced up at the illuminated kitchen window on the second floor. He didn"t feel like going home, so he sat on a bench in the courtyard to enjoy the June evening. It was already after nine, but it was still warm and light, and there was a smell of the city cooling down. At moments like these he felt like the nightingale in Julian Tuwim"s poem, who upsets his wife by coming home late for supper.
"My golden one, forgive me do, the night"s so fine, I came on foot," he repeated the nightingale"s excuse aloud and laughed.
He thought about what he"d heard from Captain Mamcarz. Once again all he had gained was information that didn"t move him forwards. But the itching in his head was getting more and more irritating. He was sure by now he should have twigged what it was all about. He felt as if he had heard everything, but instead of joining the information together in a logical whole, he was twisting it all into nonsense, like a chimpanzee playing with a Rubik"s cube.
A strange visit, slightly surreal because of the family with whom he"d shared the lift on his way in and out. He thought about the young couple - or at least young-looking - and sprang to his feet. The itching feeling had stopped, and in its place a thought had appeared, so clear and sharp it was painful.
Teodor Szacki started energetically pacing up and down outside his block, going round and round the green bench and the concrete bin, asking himself the same question a thousand times over, sometimes out loud and sometimes adding the word "f.u.c.king": is it possible? Is it really possible?
9.
Tuesday, 14th June 2005.
A new world record is set for the 100 metres. In Athens, Jamaican Asafa Powell runs this distance, equal to the length of Konstytucja Square, in 9.77 seconds. In Poland, as in twelve other European countries, the grand finale takes place of a police operation called "Ice-breaker", aimed against paedophiles, which began with surveillance of Internet chat rooms. One hundred and fifty houses and flats are searched and twenty people are arrested. The papers do not report whether anyone charged with the crime of paedophilia was on the owicz prison team that played a match against clerical students from the local seminary. Initially leading the game, the future priests ultimately lost to the crooks 1-2. Apart from that, members of a marksmen"s society in Rawicz, including the mayor who has the backing of the Democratic Left Alliance party, held a compet.i.tion to fire at a target bearing a portrait of John Paul II. They say they did it as a tribute to the Pope, but the opposition wants the mayor"s head to roll. To keep the political balance, in Biaystok a lecturer at the Higher School of Economics has lost his job for forcing the students to sign a letter in support of ultra-conservative politician Maciej Giertych to launch him as a candidate in the presidential elections. In Warsaw city guards appear patrolling the parks in the Powile district on roller skates. Maximum temperature in the city - twenty-seven degrees; no rain, no clouds. A perfect June day.
I.
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was furious when he finally ran out of the court building on Leszno Street. It was ages since he"d had a day like this, when everything went against his plans. That morning he"d quarrelled with Weronika, making her cry and incidentally Helka too, who witnessed the scene. Worst of all, he couldn"t now remember what it was about. Moreover, he was sure that even as they were shouting at each other he couldn"t remember what it had been about to begin with. He had got up quite early after a fitful night"s sleep, planning to go to the swimming pool. He felt he should tire himself out properly and get all thought of the Telak case out of his head for a while. He"d woken his wife with a kiss and made coffee, but then he hadn"t been able to find his swimming goggles, though he was sure last time he"d put them away in the underwear drawer. He"d rummaged in all the drawers, growling, while Weronika drank her coffee in bed and teased him, saying maybe he just hadn"t been to the pool for such a long time that his goggles had dried up for lack of water and crumbled to dust. He"d retorted that as for keeping fit, he didn"t have much reason to reproach himself. Then it had gone downhill. Who does what, who doesn"t do what, who gives up what because of whom, who makes the sacrifices, who has the more important job, who takes more care of the child. The final remark hurt him, and he"d screamed back that didn"t recall a father"s main obligation being to take care of little girls, and that unfortunately he couldn"t do everything for her, which she surely regretted. And left. It was too late to go to the pool, and in any case he had lost the urge to swim, plus he didn"t have any goggles, and without them the chlorinated water made his eyes sting. The only good thing was that during the quarrel he hadn"t thought about Telak.
At the office, he called a friend from college. He knew Marek had worked for some time at one of the suburban prosecutor"s offices - it may have been in Nowy Dwor, Mazowiecki County - and then been transferred at his own request to the investigative department at the Inst.i.tute of National Remembrance, where Communist-era collaboration was investigated. Unfortunately, not only was Marek on holiday at a lake near Nidzica, he responded quite coldly, suggesting Szacki should stick to official channels.
"Sorry, old man, but since the Wildstein affair everything"s changed," he said, with no hint of regret, referring to the famous leak to the press of an Inst.i.tute file. "We"re afraid to check anything on the side, because it could result in problems. They watch us like hawks, we daren"t ask to check anything in the archives. Write an application, then call, and I"ll do my best to make sure you don"t have to wait too long for an answer."
It turned out "not too long" meant no less than a week. Szacki thanked him coldly and suggested at the end of the conversation that Marek shouldn"t hesitate to call him next time he needed help with something. f.u.c.k you, I"ll get revenge on you, he thought as he heard the traditional a.s.surances that one day they"d meet for a beer and talk about old times.
He tried calling Oleg, but he didn"t answer his mobile, and all they could tell him at the police station was that he"d been held up by important family matters and would only be in after twelve.
He lit his first cigarette, though it wasn"t yet nine.
On impulse he called Monika. She was ecstatic, and ardently a.s.sured him she"d been up for hours, though he could tell he"d woken her. He was so preoccupied with the Telak murder that he didn"t even try to flirt. In a rather official tone - as she told him later - he asked her if she had any friends or press contacts at the Inst.i.tute for National Remembrance archives. Incredible, but she did. Her ex-boyfriend from high-school days had graduated in history and then ended up among miles of files at the secret-police archive. Szacki couldn"t believe his own luck, until she said that last time she"d seen the man he"d just had a child with Down"s syndrome and he might have changed his job for something better paid. But she promised to call him. He had to leave to get to court on time for the start of the Gliski trial, at nine thirty, so he regretfully ended the conversation.
He was in the courtroom at nine fifteen. At ten the court clerk arrived and announced that the prison van bringing the defendant had broken down on Modliska Street, so there was a recess until noon. He ate an egg in tartare sauce, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a second cigarette and read the newspaper, including the business news. Boring, boring and more boring - the only interesting thing was a debate about the pearls of Communist-era architecture. In the architects" views, they should be treated like monuments and put under conservation orders. The owners of the Central Committee building and the Palace of Culture were in a panic - if they had to fight for permission for every hole in the wall, no one would rent so much as a studio flat from them, and the buildings would turn into empty sh.e.l.ls. Szacki thought sourly that if the Palace of Culture had been blown up straight after 1989, there"d be no problem, and Warsaw might have had a central landmark worth its salt by now. f.u.c.k knows, in this Third World city you couldn"t be sure of anything.
At noon a recess until one was announced. Oleg turned up at work, but Szacki didn"t want to talk to him about the conclusions he had reached on the phone. He just asked him not to intrude upon Rudzki and Co., and to dig further into Telak"s past, because that was sure to be the key to the whole case. Kuzniecow had no desire to talk about the inquiry, but did confess that he was late for work because every other Tuesday in the month he and Natalia had a traditional "morning romp".
At one the case almost began, the defendant was finally brought in, but there was no barrister, who had "nipped out to the office for a moment" and got stuck in a traffic jam, for which he was deeply sorry. With stoical calm the judge declared a recess until two. Almost shaking with rage, Szacki invested in a copy of Newsweek to keep him occupied. He flicked through the weekly and felt like phoning the publisher to ask for the four and a half zlotys back that he"d spent on A Portrait of the Modern Polish Prost.i.tute - attractive, educated and hard-working.
At two he finally read out the indictment. Gliski pleaded not guilty. Nothing more happened in the trial, because for a Warsaw court it was quite late now, and the defence counsel threw up half a ton of formal motions that Szacki forgot as soon as they"d been put forward, but which were enough to postpone the trial for six weeks. He stood up and left without waiting for "Your Honour" to leave the courtroom. He only just stopped himself from slamming the door.
When he found a parking ticket under his windscreen wiper he just shrugged. He lit his third cigarette and thought: frankly, to h.e.l.l with his rules - he was a free man and he"d smoke as much as he liked.
He was incapable of concentrating on his work. He kept thinking about the Telak murder, or, more often, about Monika. He had trouble restraining himself from calling her just in order to hear her voice. He used Google to try and find information about her, but there was nothing but articles from Rzeczpospolita and an old site where her name appeared as a member of the student"s union in the Polish department. No pictures, unfortunately. Would it be rude of him to ask her to send him her photo by email? He felt as if even considering that idea was embarra.s.sing, but he couldn"t stop himself. A moment of shame seemed to him a small price to pay for a photograph of Monika, especially in the dress she"d been wearing the other day. He could make it the wallpaper on his computer - after all, no one used the computer except him, and Weronika never came by his office.
His visions were very graphic, and he started to wonder if, were he now to go and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e in the toilet at the district prosecutor"s office, it would mean he should go and get specialist help. He hesitated for not more than a few seconds. He got up and put on his jacket to hide his erection.
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 od. Eight hours of compulsory lectures a day by Miller, Jaskiernia and Kalisz, finishing with Pczak 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 Grze 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 "Grze" and went to the toilet.
II.
In full "Grze" 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments 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 Lesaw 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 doc.u.ments 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 uncla.s.sified 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded. 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 eba 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me around with b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 Inst.i.tute 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 t.i.tle 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 Inst.i.tute 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.