He lowered his head so that Mock would not see him crying. His bald head turned purple and spasms shook his entire body. Tears flowed through the fingers which he pressed against his cheeks and eyes. Mock sat on the armrest next to him and just about managed to put his arm around his friend’s broad back. He sat there for a long time, until Popielski grew still, then got up and went to the parlour. Leokadia was staring at the face of the grandfather clock. A cigarette smoked in front of her.
“I’ll stay with you for a few days,” said Mock quietly.
“Aren’t you going to see your wife for Easter?” asked Leokadia.
“No. I’ll stay here, with Edward.”
“You have no idea what will happen here! You don’t know what his attacks of despair can be like!”
“I don’t? Then I’ll find out,” said Mock, and he returned to the study.
PART III
The Minotaur’s Head
Theseus is passing through a sea
of bloody columns leaves restored
in a clenched fist he holds a trophy
– the scalped head of the Minotaur
Bitterness of victory An owl’s shriek
measures dawn with a coppery stick
so that he will feel the sweet defeat
to the end a warm breath in his neck
“Head”, Zbigniew Herbert
LWÓW, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13TH, 1937 SEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
Edward Popielski sat in the Sea Grotto and sipped at his second large glass of vodka. The place was almost empty. The small number of customers glanced surreptitiously at the commissioner and knew perfectly well what he was thinking about.
There had been no news of Rita for half a year now. The whole town was weighing up whether she had been kidnapped or murdered, and whether her disappearance had anything to do with the Minotaur’s escape. Such speculation was dangerous in Popielski’s presence, as Kacnelson had once discovered the hard way. Every officer knew that Popielski blamed himself for Zaremba’s death. And everyone knew that shackling the beast to the leg of a bed which could easily be lifted was an act of inexcusable negligence. Popielski interpreted the coincidence of Potok’s getaway and Rita’s disappearance simply and personally: if he was responsible for the Minotaur’s escape and it had something to do with Rita’s disappearance, then he was also responsible for his daughter’s disappearance. When Kacnelson once analysed this coincidence, Popielski had seen it as a personal attack. He had leaped at his friend like a raging bull, thrown him to the floor and set about kicking him. He would even have hurt him had Kacnelson not shouted: “Do you want to kill me like Zaremba?” That had calmed Popielski straightaway and he had slumped into a chair, where for the next hour he held his face in his hands and said nothing. The following day he had apologized publicly to Kacnelson, who had been perfectly understanding, and Inspector Zubik did not even think of initiating disciplinary procedures.
Since Palm Sunday, when the bundle with Rita’s belongings had landed on his balcony, Edward Popielski had been a different person. The changes which had occurred in him manifested themselves differently at home and away. At home he was unusually affectionate and thoughtful towards Hanna and Leokadia. When she spoke to other maids the former praised him to the heavens, while the latter sensed a certain falseness; Leokadia could not believe that her cousin, who until then had concentrated almost exclusively on his own thoughts, hypotheses and investigations, was all of a sudden interested in everyday matters. He talked to her incessantly about her games of bridge and her reading, and had become exceedingly polite and obsequiously helpful. He never lost his temper, and this seemed unnatural. Only sometimes would his eyes, reddened by insomnia and alcohol, flash dangerously. Leokadia had heard it said on many occasions that suffering ennobles a man, but her cousin’s false smile was not a sign of noble-mindedness; rather it was some kind of mask beneath which Edward hid his true feelings.
Away from home Popielski’s behaviour was completely different. If up until then he had been hot-headed and irascible, now he had developed into an irritated hornet who attacked anyone around. His fury and aggression were most keenly felt by the rogues and chancers from the suburbs, since Popielski was convinced that the Minotaur was hiding somewhere in their midst – and most likely in Łyczakow – waiting for the right moment to leave town unnoticed which, with his likeness posted on every announcement pillar, would prove very difficult. But the beast was not the main reason for Popielski’s fury at the bandits of Lwów. He was tormented by another obsession: Rita’s abduction. Popielski was certain that she had been snatched by certain elements from the criminal underworld for a ransom. The fact that no ransom had yet been demanded indicated that they wanted to push up the price – at least that was his view. The commissioner firmly believed that Lwów’s bandits would soon be asking for something that would ruin his life – his resignation from the police force.
Thus began the commissioner’s personal and – what was worse – solitary crusade amongst Lwów’s criminal classes, conducted in his very own way. He would drop into a dive – whether public or illegal, with or without a sign outside – order vodka and something to eat, then cast his aching, sleepless eyes over the clientele, who would more often than not then disperse. Not all of them, however. Some he stopped and sat down at his table. He would offer them vodka and ask courteously about Rita and the Minotaur. When they refused a drink and helplessly shook their heads at his questions, Popielski would pour vodka down their throats and manhandle them in front of the assembled company.
It is not surprising, therefore, that black clouds had gathered above him – ever thicker, and ever more ominous. Only a few months earlier, straight after Rita’s disappearance, a delegation of the legendary kings of the underworld, Mosze Kiczałes and the Żelazny brothers, had paid him a visit. Kiczałes, wearing an immaculate pale suit, had offered his sincere condolences regarding the disappearance of his daughter and had sworn that no criminal group from Lwów had anything to do with it; he had even promised to help catch the abductors. Popielski had accused him of lying and thumped his fist on the table with such force that he had spilt coffee over Kiczałes’ suit. Kiczałes and the Żelazny brothers had been furious when they left, but despite this they ordered their men to tolerate Popielski’s whims for a while – at least until they had come to a final decision about him. Not everyone listened to the kings, however, and the commissioner’s excesses were becoming intolerable for the bandits. In tavern after tavern he received warnings in the form of a pig’s ear transfixed by a nail, but he scoffed at them. He would remove the ear now and again and shove it under everybody’s nose, shouting: “Did you give this to me, you son-of-a-whore?”
The pedantic dandy with the ironic sense of humour and polite manners who smelled of expensive eau de cologne had become a vulgar sloven. He forgot to take medication for his epilepsy and he no longer visited Szaniawski. One day he had collapsed, shaking, on the tavern floor and had wet himself. The street urchins had thrown him into the yard in disgust, and one of them had shoved his face into horse shit, hoping the commissioner would choke on it.
He did not change his shirt for weeks on end and wispy tufts of hair sprouted at the sides of his bald head. He drank vodka by the glass, but his strong body stubbornly resisted it; the commissioner was not able to drown his sorrows and sleep like a log afterwards. Instead he would come home towards morning, swaying on his feet, and smile mockingly at Leokadia, who was terrified. He would ask the sleepy woman about household affairs and her bridge games, kiss her respectfully on the hand, then go to his room, tumble into his sheets and lie awake until midday. He would then get up, splash his face and go to work, having thanked Leokadia profusely for a delicious breakfast which he scarcely touched. Letters from Mock piled up unread on his desk and the telephone was, on his orders, picked up only by Hanna who would simply replace the receiver when she heard German spoken.
Had Zaremba been alive he would have known how to take car
e of his friend. He had seen him in such a state once before, when his wife Stefania, a well-known actress from Lwów, had suffered a postpartum haemorrhage and died after bringing Rita into the world. Unfortunately, like Stefania Gorgowicz-Popielska, Zaremba now rested in peace in Łyczakowski cemetery, and the others whom Popielski would have allowed to approach him – Leokadia and Eberhard Mock – either did not know how to speak to him or were too far away.
On this sad and rainy October afternoon he was out on one of his escapades, which he described in his reports as “reconnoitring”. He was sitting in the Sea Grotto, waiting for he knew not what. On this occasion his clothes were exceptionally clean. He wore a striped shirt from a shop called Poland on Gródecka Street, given him that morning by Leokadia as a name-day present. And because it was his name day – which looked to be marked by a sad dinner for two – he had been coerced into having a bath and shaving. He was not, however, wearing a tie, his signet ring or cufflinks, and nor had he polished his shoes. He sat sipping his second glass of vodka and waiting. As people entered he studied them carefully, but without aggression, while they looked at him and nodded. Those with a lighter conscience sat down, those with a heavier one left, not wanting to have anything to do with a guardian of the law.
Two men who entered when Popielski had already drained his glass behaved differently to the others. Neither sat down, and neither beat a hasty retreat. With their boots ringing loudly against the stairs and dirt floor, the men approached the table at which the commissioner sat alone. They stared at him for a moment through their motorcycle goggles, then one of them reached into his long leather coat, pulled out a photograph and placed it on the table. On it appeared a younger, smiling Popielski. Rita, perhaps seven years old, was smiling too, her head resting on her father’s shoulder. She had always carried the photograph with her.
“We found this on your daughter,” said one of the men, indicating the photograph. “You want to see her? Come with us!”
Without waiting for an answer both men made towards the exit. Popielski gazed at their military boots for a moment, then left the table.
LWÓW, THAT SAME OCTOBER 13TH, 1937 EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING
Popielski had no idea where he was. He recreated the events from the moment he had tipped back his second vodka and met the motorcyclists. When he had seen the photograph and the mysterious men left, he had sprung to his feet. He wanted to tell everyone that these two were his daughter’s kidnappers and should be arrested, yet something stopped him. It was not so much the indifferent expressions on the faces surrounding him as the voice of reason: it was more important for him to see his daughter than to catch her kidnappers. He stepped out into the yard, pale and shaken. The men were waiting for him, one seated behind the other on a Sokół motorcycle. The driver pointed at the sidecar and handed Popielski a pair of goggles, which the commissioner pulled over his eyes. They were lined with black velvet.
“If you try to see where we’re going,” he heard one of them say, “we’ll throw you out, understand?”
They rode for a long time. Popielski counted twenty turns, got confused and stopped counting, and after about half an hour the motorcycle rumbled into a yard and the engine was switched off. He felt himself being taken under the arms and pulled out of the sidecar. They entered a place which stank of chemical reagents. He was set down on a chair which creaked dangerously beneath his weight and felt his arms being slipped under the backrest. When they handcuffed him from behind he did not protest, he simply waited.
The goggles were then removed, and at first he thought he was in a theatre. He was sitting in darkness and before him stretched a spot-lit, dark cherry-coloured curtain. But when he looked around him he saw that there was no audience; his chair was the only one there. The curtain was not very large and hung on a free-standing semi-circular screen. Lights on tripods, cameras and flashlights were ranged around the curtain. He heard the rattle of hooks and the curtain parted. The young man seated on a chair in the spotlight seemed familiar to Popielski. He wore a pale-grey suit of expensive wool and a contrasting wine-coloured tie, with a red rose in his lapel. His feet were clad in golf shoes. The young man’s facial features were exceptionally regular, his lips full, and his face oval and slender. If it were not for the short hair combed to one side, the masculine body and faint five-o’clock shadow, he could have passed for a woman. A beautiful woman.
“Do you want to see the Minotaur, Commissioner?” His voice was deep and expressive. “We’ve got him. He’s alive and waiting for his Theseus. And you, sir …”
Popielski could not place the man. Could it be possible that it was Father Kierski, the youthful chaplain who set alight the hearts of girls with his strong preacher’s voice? It seemed impossible, and yet …
“Are you a priest? Father Konstanty Kierski?” he interrupted him mid-sentence.
“As far as I know I’ve never been a priest,” the man replied solemnly. “Although I used to know one very well. Do you have any more questions, or are you going to let me continue?”
“What do you mean ‘we’ve got the Minotaur’? I haven’t come here for the Minotaur! Where’s my daughter?” Popielski strained at his chair.
The man rose and picked up a long object from the floor. A golf club. He approached Popielski, leaned over him and studied his earlobe for a moment. The commissioner did not register the movement but felt a pain which pierced his head like a thorn. His ear throbbed and quickly swelled and a dreadful ringing vibrated in his skull. The man walked round to Popielski’s other side and began to examine his other ear like an otolaryngologist. He took a swing. A second blow threw Popielski’s head to the side and the commissioner toppled over with his chair. The ringing grew louder. There was only one way to drown it: he had to scream. Howling with pain like a wounded beast, he convulsed on the floor and thrashed his legs. Instead of ears he had two hot, damp, aching jellies.
He caught the scent of perfume and opened his eyes. The man was crouching over him, golf club in hand. Popielski expected another blow and stopped yelling; he had to reserve some strength for further beatings.
“You’re not going to interrupt me any more, are you, Commissioner?” the man said quietly. “What you’re going to hear now is the story of a certain boy who became a young man. As coherent as a sequence. As true as the extremum of a parabola.”
The man pulled out a thick notebook with an elephant-skin cover, and began to read:
The boy was born in 1910 into the wealthy, aristocratic Woroniecki family on the Baranie Peretoki estate in Sokalski district. He was a late child to his parents. His father, Count Juliusz Woroniecki, a large landowner, was a mathematics alumnus of Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. He harboured a great passion for community work, which he put into practice by teaching mathematics to peasant children. When he discovered a child with a scientific mind he would look after it. He paid for the child to go to secondary school, so that its talent should not go to waste. The boy’s two older, grown-up brothers were also mathematicians. Both had perished at Gorlice during the Great War. The boy could hardly remember them. From an early age he was brought up to be an outstanding mathematician. Instead of fairy tales he had mathematical puzzles read to him at night; instead of toy soldiers he arranged geometrical figures on the floor; instead of sandcastles he built rectangles on the sides of a triangle; instead of flying kites he played with square trinomials. He was magnificently talented. At the age of six he solved sets of equations, and at the age of ten he studied function graphs.
All this ceased to mean anything when a certain Rusyn peasant girl revealed to him the world of physical sensations, a world which he found utterly absorbing. To sets of equations he preferred carnal sex; exponential functions he now associated with nothing other than a woman exposing her breasts. In Sokal, where he went to school, he spied with his friends on the manager of the Dawn cinema, Mr Karol Poliszuk, as he crushed local courtesans against the wall of his little office. One day he was caught spy
ing. The manager of the cinema wasn’t at all angry with him and suggested he join in.
The boy grew increasingly bored with mathematics and kept interrupting his lessons to run to the school lavatory. He had to repeat a year twice, and was treated for gonorrheoea. His father would often fly into a rage, but in between times he assumed that adolescence, this rebellious age – which he took to be the reason for all this misfortune – would sooner or later pass and his son would once again fall into the arms of “the Queen of the Sciences”. He decided to remove him from all bad influence and handed him over to the iron care of his brother, Count Stanisław Woroniecki, a veteran officer who was now the owner of the large Palus umbrella and walking-stick factory in the Silesian town of Skoczowo. Unfortunately, Uncle Stanisław had a twenty-year-old son, Janusz, who was no less depraved than his cousin. Through Janusz, the boy – now a young man of eighteen – met Klementyna Nowoziemska, a wise and worldly woman, former brothel owner and now boss of a marriage bureau. She soon suggested a way in which he might make use of his exceptionally good looks and how he could prosper at something which, to cap it all, he greatly enjoyed doing.
The young man obeyed the madame. He generously bestowed his charms on both men and women, and all repaid him in kind. When he was nineteen he moved out of his uncle’s house and in with Miss Nowoziemska. Miserable and in despair, his father disowned his only son and broke off all contact with him which, as it turned out, did not worry the guilty party in the least. Without the slightest regret he forgot all about his father, who represented to him the personification of mathematics, and his mother, for whom nothing existed apart from her migraines. He lived as he wanted to. He had no shortage of money since – thanks to Miss Nowoziemska’s contacts – he granted sexual pleasures to and frequently accompanied rich German eccentrics on their journeys along the Kattowitz–Breslau–Berlin line in luxurious private compartments. Usually he travelled from Breslau with Baron von Criegern, who confided various plans to him, one of which the youth found particularly to his liking. Baron von Criegern intended to open a brothel for the rich in Breslau. According to the baron the biggest problem was the turnover of personnel, since prostitutes frequently changed their place of work. There was only one effective way of holding on to them permanently: smuggle them in illegally and keep them locked up, half-enslaved. Since Polish and Czech women were extraordinarily beautiful, and bringing them in entailed crossing only one border, they naturally became the most suitable merchandise. When Baron von Criegern first introduced the idea to him, the young man’s eyes lit up. The men quickly came to an agreement: the baron would put in the money and give his associate a two-year interest-free loan, while the youth would contribute his invaluable contacts. A few days later the forwarding company Woroniecki und von Criegern was registered in Breslau.
The Minotaur's Head: An Eberhard Mock Investigation (Eberhard Mock Investigation 4) Page 25
