Polychrome (4 page)

.
He laughed out loud as he gazed with disgust at the plastic
flowers – practically immortal – hideous things.
And what if one can’t live with them in this world? When
there’s a problem of surplus and not of lack? Someone will
understand – as if.
Is somebody going to say: I can imagine what you feel;
I’m sorry they’re alive; it shouldn’t happen; it shouldn’t have
happened; it’s so unfair?
He looked around one more time; he was now entirely
alone.
He was slowly calming down, setting his thoughts on the
right track.
He pulled a small gold pendant out of his pocket and
carefully placed it beneath the lettering on the next vacant
place in the queue to the unknown harbour. From another
pocket he extracted a rope of triple twine, wrapped it around
his clenched fists and started to repeat as if in prayer:
Funiculus
Triplex Difficile Rumpit, Funiculus Triplex Difficile Rumpit,
Funiculus Triplex
…

mAcIej bArtol
couldn’t wake up, and rose groggy; then he
stood staring blankly out of the window for a long time. An old
man wound his way between the blocks on Bukowska Street.
Bartol had known the man since he was a boy. The old man
had always walked with an ugly little yapping mongrel but for
the past year had only carried a leash which swayed lifelessly
in step; he obviously couldn’t walk without it anymore.

The old man disappeared around the corner. Actually, all
the old men and women were slowly disappearing, and Bartol
didn’t intend to get used to the new residents who treated the
blocks like stopovers – while studying, before getting a loan,
before buying a house. It seemed to him as though he was the
only one who didn’t have any far-reaching plans; and he wasn’t
all that sure whether that was a good thing.

In the end, he opened the window to wake up faster. He
sensed, straight away, that the frost had eased and saw the snow
had melted.

Exactly as he hated. Everything was grey: grey air, grey
remnants of snow, grey world. One more time the word ‘grey’
ran through his head and he woke up for good.

He remembered the end of the past day with distaste; rarely
did he think so badly of himself. His head started to ache.
He’d been preparing a report on Antoniusz Mikulski’s postmortem and exchanging, with Olaf Polek, the information
they’d gathered when the latter ended by mentioning that the
mother of Bartol’s future child wasn’t feeling well. She worked
with Polek’s wife. Besides, it had been Polek’s wife who’d
introduced Bartol to her, seeing as they both seemed lonely.
Now there’d be three lonely people. Was that better than
two?
He phoned and drove off to the girl’s new apartment in
Polanka.
She did, in fact, appear very pale, although he wasn’t entirely
sure if it wasn’t the effect of the background.
The walls were grey, simply grey. Who paints the walls of
their apartment grey? Right then he heard the question: ‘How
do you like the new colour?’
He must have taken his time replying because he then
heard:
‘You chose it yourself.’
He practically choked on his – instant – coffee.
‘Don’t you remember, I preferred desert sands or sunbeams.’
He did recall something. A conversation they’d had two
weeks earlier. About colours! He hadn’t been listening; he’d
been thinking about something else, wanting to leave as soon
as possible. Repeatedly asked whether he preferred desert
sands or some sort of sunbeams, he’d answered that what he
liked best was lunar dust. He later decided not to be spiteful;
she didn’t really want anything from him. Too late.
There was dust – and lunar at that – on the walls. Never,
never in a hundred years, would he have imagined it to be the
name of a colour – as it was he already felt bad.
He improvised – it would make a wonderful undercoat for
colourful wallpaper, it’d look good in the middle, he’d bring
the samples himself, he’d help her.
Supporting himself with what he’d seen earlier at the
architect’s office, he somehow managed to wangle his way out of
it but, as it was, he knew he wouldn’t tell his mother about it that
year, or the next – perhaps one day when things were different.
He stayed a while longer. The mother-to-be was only tired;
other than that everything seemed in order. He asked her to
rest more, and left.
Before going to bed, he drank a large vodka.
He never had much energy in the mornings, now he had
even less.
Nevertheless, he decided to get to work as soon as possible,
even early; there the whirl of other people’s problems needing
to be solved would suck him in.
When, at a quarter to eight, he arrived in the room where
they usually gathered, Lentz – first as always – was already
there, Polek was just entering and right behind him – their
present boss. The only one with whom they were all relatively
happy. Over the last years, the bosses had changed in quick
succession and some of the men didn’t even try to get used
to the new one – in no time at all there’d be another election.
The boss wasn’t in a good mood. He merely informed them
that they were to work on the numismatist and weren’t to forget
the Byelorussian woman who used to stand on Grzybowa Street
but hadn’t stood there for a month, unlike their investigation
which was at a standstill. This especially annoyed Polek who
rebelled saying he’d already learned several languages while
questioning that ‘wild game’. The boss couldn’t care less;
he simply asked whether Polek expected a pay rise for this,
because if not then he’d be well advised to temper his Polish
and not talk about the murdered girl in that way, if only because
– apparently - somebody had recently brought Polek’s daughter
home having found her on Stary Rynek.
The comment hit the mark. Everyone was instantly serious
wondering how he knew.
Polek’s fourteen-year-old daughter hadn’t, in fact, spent the
night at her friend’s a month ago as she’d so nicely told her
parents she would. It was a good thing that someone from the
vice department had miraculously recognised her among some
drunken teenagers at two in the morning in the Czarna Owca.
Polek didn’t say a word. He ground his teeth in rage and only
exploded once the boss had left.
Bartol didn’t pay much attention to him. The investigation
into the case of the girl was almost wound up; all they had to
do was wait for the perpetrator to get bored of Byelorussia.
He liked the word ‘numismatist’ being used to describe
Antoniusz Mikulski. They had, indeed, had a serious theft of
old coins a couple of years ago, and for a good six months they’d
all walked around amazed. They never knew who they were
going to question – elegant antique dealer or unwashed trader,
in turn, round and round in circles. All the numismatists knew
each other and all talked about things nobody could understand.
They bought and sold money for large sums of money, conned
each other, enjoyed doing so and didn’t take too much offence
when they were conned themselves. All that counted was who
knew most, who was the first to catch on, who was cleverest. And
the man whom everyone spoke of with the greatest recognition
and who apparently had the largest collection and – what went
hand in hand with it – real money, had half of his teeth missing
and no intention of having new ones put in. Because, as he
explained, sellers couldn’t care less whom they were selling to
as long as it was for the highest sum possible, and buyers love
to buy from someone stupider than themselves – and he was
guaranteed to give just such an impression.
The case had never been entirely cleared up, nor was it
known if the numismatists hadn’t somehow sorted it out
between themselves. The aggrieved party had allegedly
come to some agreement with the suspect, whom he himself
suspected; they’d made some sort of exchange and carried on
doing business with each other.
Ever since then, whenever the team was dealing with
something totally removed from the reality in which they were
immersed on a daily basis, somebody evoked the numismatists
and everything became clear, at least where information was
concerned.
Now they all put forward what they’d managed to determine
the previous day and what had reached them from the lab.
Not much.
Antoniusz Mikulski was seventy-eight years old and, according
to the doctor, could have still lived for a long time; there was
nothing seriously wrong with him, just a slight arrhythmia of the
heart was recorded. His death had resulted from strangulation;
he must, however, have fainted beforehand or lost consciousness.
The presence of any substance that could have helped him do
so was not ascertained. None of the questioned neighbours had
heard or seen anything – not quite neighbours because the two
villas standing on each side now housed solicitors’ offices and the
people who worked there rarely looked around, so Maćkowiak
stated. That – possibly – left the clients who’d arrived or left at
the time; a list was established.
Mikulski, ever since the death of his wife eighteen months
ago, had lived and coped alone. He’d also done his own cleaning.
They had one son who’d settled somewhere abroad, the States
apparently, and wasn’t married. Nothing was known about
any grandchildren. The list of phone calls he’d made didn’t
reveal anything either. A call to the doctor’s surgery and to an
acquaintance, Edmund Wieczorek, from whom they obtained
some initial information. Mikulski hadn’t used up all his phone
credit. He didn’t own a computer and the television set probably
wasn’t working. There was only a small radio in the kitchen.
Mikulski had once been an important figure in the administration
of regional restoration and, after retiring at the beginning of the
nineties, never appeared at his old place of work, nor was he ever
invited anywhere – he was not liked. Antoniusz Mikulski himself
never belonged to the Party ,whereas he did have an ambitious
brother who’d even rubbed shoulders at the Ministry of Culture
and was not a liked figure even among his own. The brother had
died childless twenty years ago.
They didn’t quite know who to inform about Mikulski’s
death. There was some hope, however, that the son – or
eventually some relative – would turn up seeing as there was
a large estate to inherit. A solicitor had once held Mikulski’s
will but Mikulski had visited him in August asking for it to
be destroyed. The solicitor couldn’t remember whether Mr
Mikulski had said why or whether he was going to make out
another one.
Slowly, a picture of a totally lonely man was emerging;
whether the world had so ordained it or whether it was of his
own making remained unclear.
They could find no motive for the murder, nor was there
anything they could get their teeth into. There were no traces
of a break-in, struggle or robbery. The latter could not be
excluded, although there was nobody at present who could
have confirmed whether anything was missing or not. There
was, admittedly, an empty wooden box on his desk but it could
have been used for anything and had no lock.
Since they didn’t really know where to start and the
technicians hadn’t yet returned a report of their findings (at
present, they only had one unidentified broken fingernail), they
decided to start with the possibility that something may have
gone missing.
They took seriously the hypothesis that there’d been
something so valuable in the house that it had been worth
stealing only that one thing without needlessly running the
risk of selling off other antiques. Perhaps not many people
knew about the existence of that something. Perhaps nobody
other than the murderer and the victim who could no longer
say anything. Nobody, therefore, would look for it. Perhaps,
as an art restorer, he had recognised something others hadn’t
seen, and taken it home – times had been different. Perhaps not
everybody was as honest as the two female art historians who
had recognised an El Greco beneath a dusty painting so that
now everybody could look at it in Siedlce museum.
They also had to search for something in the dead man’s
past. Some old troubles perhaps.
Olaf Polek eased the helpless tension by stubbornly
maintaining that the whole thing had to do with coins, that he
suspected the numismatists for the whole masquerade with the
red cloth; they were capable of anything. One way or another,
the police officers decided they’d ask around among various
antique dealers and traders. This Polek had to take care of. The
dead man’s one and only acquaintance, Edmund Wieczorek,
eighty years old and in a wheelchair, also had to be paid a visit
– there was no point in summoning him to the station. Seeing
Lentz cough, Maćkowiak allocated the assignment to himself.
Only Maciej Bartol and Piotr Lentz, wiyh his cold, remained
in the room.
Both had time on their hands; one was waiting for the
female architect, the other for a lawyer who hadn’t been in the
previous day.
Lentz really did have a bad cold. For the past three weeks. As
usual, he’d initially been very interested in his illness, suspecting
cancer of the lungs, larynx or bronchi, if there was such a cancer.
He studied and held forth with excitement about the symptoms
which, also as usual, were practically all manifest. An X-ray and
another test had dispersed his fears. As if to spite himself, he’d
then grown sadder and refused to treat what was nothing but
a banal cold. It seemed absurd, but after cancer of the prostate
and all its symptoms had turned out to be mere sand in the
kidneys not worth bothering about, cancer of the bowel simply
the effect of beetroots in his diet, and a whole spectrum of other
fascinating diseases which had ended up being nothing but
minor ailments, nothing surprised anyone anymore. Lentz had
never been seriously ill; nobody knew how he’d react if faced
with a real problem. They often wondered whether it was Lentz
who worked himself up like that or whether his mother – with
whom he was still living although he’d turned forty-five – aided
him in this; nobody dared ask. He was easily annoyed and stayed
annoyed for a long time.
‘I once bought a puppy, you know,’ he began unexpectedly,
wiping his nose with his hand. ‘A little white Bolognese.’ Bartol
hadn’t known, nor could he imagine it, but he didn’t laugh,
didn’t comment – besides, he wouldn’t have known what to
say; he just listened, staring at Lentz with some amazement.
‘The dog had some sort of convulsions several times a
day,’ continued Lentz after a while. ‘I did the rounds of several
private vets and every vet made a different diagnosis: epilepsy,
a dodgy heart and such like. They told me to give the dog back
since it was going to die anyway. I couldn’t. It was only in a
state-run clinic that a wise vet told me the dog’s nervous system
was being poisoned by worm toxin. The dog had been treated
for worms but those particular worms had proved resistant.
A banal explanation but he was right: he saved the dog’s life.
But what I’m thinking about is what he said at the end – a
wise doctor, as I say: you always have to start with the simplest
diagnosis and only then start to look for something interesting.
Interesting cases are tempting but truth is often more banal.
I remembered that very well and often recall his words.’
Bartol had an entirely different opinion on this particular
point, unless Lentz was thinking exclusively about work. In
which case it could, to a certain degree, be true. He remembered
how Lentz had once insisted that the wife had been the
murderer, because she’d the most to gain by getting rid of her
husband yet nearly everybody else had thought it had been
the case of an unfortunate accident with a fatal ending. Lentz
had been right.
‘And you know something? I think nothing’s going to be
that obvious this time. We have to make sure it wasn’t burglary,
then find the person who inherits the house. Maybe he or she
couldn’t wait. But it all looks odd, very odd. Have you studied
the photos yet?’
‘Cursorily.’
‘Then take a good look at these. Precisely these.’ He passed
him two photographs.
One of them showed the whole of Mikulski’s body on the
floor, the other was a close-up of the so-called towel around his
waist. The tiny letters running down the length of the entire
piece of material were clearly visible. They couldn’t have been
taller than half a centimetre. One sentence repeated over and
over: