Entanglement (22 page)

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 glass 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.

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 Piłsudski 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 Okęcie 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 Okęcie, the tourist might go away with the impression that Warsaw was a very pretty city. Chaotic, but pretty. And full of cafés, pubs and clubs, as there were plenty on this route.

Especially the section along Świętokrzyska 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 Małachowski Square, the Zachęta Gallery (as if it were a city of art) and the stunning panorama of Piłsudski 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 underpass to the small square in front of the Muranów 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 Muranów, 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 classical 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 associated 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 unbuttoned 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 documents in silence.

“What’s this actually about?” croaked Boniczka finally, and cleared his throat. “Why do you want to talk to me?”

“Some new circumstances have come to light in the case of your daughter’s murder,” replied Nawrocki. He set aside the documents, 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 Hoża 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 appliqué, 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 Hoża 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.”

Boniczka fell silent. Szacki and Nawrocki held their breath. The whirr of the tape recorder suddenly became perfectly audible.

“It’s funny how very unlike their parents children can be,” said Boniczka, and Szacki involuntarily shuddered. It occurred to him that someone else had said the same thing to him recently. But who? He couldn’t remember.

“Everyone always used to say how like me Sylwia was. The same eyebrows, the same eyes, the same hair. The spitting image of her dad. But she wasn’t my daughter. There wasn’t a drop of my blood in her veins.”

“How’s that?” asked Nawrocki.

“Iza, my wife, was raped a month after our wedding. One evening she was on her way back from the station to my parents’ house, where we were living then. Sylwia was the rapist’s child. When Iza got home, all she kept talking about was the lilac. It was the end of May, and there really was a smell of lilac everywhere, most of all near the station. Enough to make you feel sick when you walked past. And she kept going on about that lilac. Then she stopped. We never talked about it again. Not about the rape or the lilac. We pretended Sylwia was our daughter. It’s a very small town, so it never even crossed our minds to go to the police about it. Except that Iza was never again the woman I’d married. She was empty. She went to work, took care of the child, cooked, cleaned, baked on Sundays. She stopped going to church, and I had a hard time persuading her that we should have Sylwia christened. She didn’t come to her first communion because the entire church was decorated with lilac. She saw that from a distance and went back home. Sylwia cried. But we didn’t talk about it then either.”

Boniczka fell silent again. For a long time. There was nothing to suggest he’d return to the subject that most interested them.

“And that night at the school you thought…” Nawrocki gently led him on.

“I thought I didn’t want my daughter to be like my wife. Empty. I thought that sometimes death might be a solution. That if I were her, I wouldn’t want to stay here either.” Boniczka gazed at the palms of his hands. “But I couldn’t kill her. I fastened the cord and went outside. I decided I’d go back in ten minutes, and if by then she hadn’t made up her mind, I’d join her in
pretending nothing had happened. As if I didn’t know why she refused to wear shoes with heels, although she wasn’t very tall.”