Chiefly because being on the right side gave you unusual strength and confidence. In a world where most professions relied on tricking people into wanting objects and services they didn’t need, where moral relativism and being prepared to be humiliated were often the pillars of a career, the prosecutors were on the side of the angels. Sometimes it worked out better for them, sometimes worse, but their profession involved administering justice, doing good, and making sure the world was a safer place. How many people could feel pride in their profession?
But it was also worth being a prosecutor for moments like this. The two men entered the office like actors in a pantomime. Stiff, straight as ramrods, dressed in their identical suits, rather aloof. To start, the younger one listened, then asked brief questions, but the further the account progressed, the more he lit up. In ten minutes they were both jacketless with their sleeves rolled up, sitting over two mugs of steaming coffee, coming up with numerous hypotheses.
It was great to be a champion of justice. But it was also great to be a detective out of an adventure story now and then. The older prosecutor loved that more than he was prepared to admit to anyone. The younger was only just falling madly in love.
“All this theatrical stuff will be their undoing,” said Szacki, buttoning his cuffs—after their moment of excitement, each man was returning to his practiced persona.
“Why ‘their’?”
“You’ve got to kidnap an adult male, kill him, reduce him to a skeleton, and drop it off in the city center. I’d be surprised if just one person did that.”
“And why will the theatrical stuff be their undoing?” Falk finished his coffee and put on his jacket.
“I’ve been through this a few times. The really clever criminals, if they want to kill someone, get the guy drunk, strangle him, and bury him in a tough plastic bag somewhere in the middle of the forest. It’s the perfect crime—one-third of this country is covered in forest. You’ve got to have really bad luck to get caught. But when someone starts to use theatrics, play games, stage corpses, they leave so many clues in the process, they’re bound to get caught.”
6
He exited onto Emilia Plater Street, which was covered with melting snow, and realized that he needed a good walk before returning to the realm of the two witches. He was too wound up and excited by the investigation, he might easily start a fight. He decided to take a stroll around the Administrative Court building—far enough to cool down a little.
He turned left. The wet snow had a strange consistency, like overcooked oatmeal. A quick march warmed him up and gradually took his mind off the case; finally he stopped seeing the skeleton before him, laid out on the chrome table. Beyond the lights, between the court building and the gallows—as everyone called the old “Gratitude to the Red Army” monument—his thoughts had already turned to what awaited him at home.
“We have to talk.” Sure, they always had to talk. Best of all for hours and hours, best of all carry on an endless conversation that never led to any catharsis. Eventually they would fall asleep out of weariness, and the next day they wouldn’t even remember what they’d been talking about. But he politely held these conversations, with a small part of his consciousness, devoting all the rest of it to not erupting, not tearing free, not banging his fist on the closet door, not running away. He knew that was necessary, that women demand it.
So he talked, negotiated, tried his best to be modern. He put a lot of effort into building a partnership. But goddammit, people are not identical. You can keep saying gender doesn’t matter, but it will always matter. It’s hormones, it’s genetic memory, shaped by predefined social roles for centuries. They were building a partnership, but it was easier for Szacki—even if Żenia laughed at it—to go out to work with his briefcase. Of course, it wasn’t mammoth hunting, but a symbolic gesture: I’m leaving the domestic hearth so we can have food on our plates and peace and quiet. On top of that, his profession meant, I’m leaving the house so we can feel safe. It would be interesting to know how many Wild West sheriffs came home from chasing bandits and shared the domestic chores with their wives.
He realized this wasn’t America in the 1950s. He didn’t expect to enter the house and have someone help him take off his shoes and put on his slippers, and then miraculously find a glass of bourbon and a newspaper in his hands after dinner. And only to take notice of his children once they came home from college, when he could decide if he wanted to befriend them or not.
He also realized this wasn’t the ’70s, which he remembered, the years of his happy Communist-era childhood. He knew he couldn’t expect to return from the office to find a two-course dinner waiting for him—at worst to be heated up—and the delicious aroma of a freshly baked cake on Sundays.
He also realized this wasn’t the ’90s, that not every sexist joke was funny, and the length of a woman’s skirt was something for her to decide, not her boss.
But goddammit, that business with the plate and two mugs was taking it too far. Today he’d had to stand beside a dissection table. He’d had to tell a strange woman her husband had been murdered. He’d gone down a hole in the ground to examine human remains. And for that he was due a little respect. Just a little fucking respect.
7
Meanwhile in the suburbs of Olsztyn, not very near and not very far away, toward the end of a road running from the city center to Równa Street, an ordinary man, so ordinary he counted as a statistic, was on his way home from work, listening to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. He used to think it was by Georges Delerue because it was featured in Platoon, right in the middle, when Willem Defoe gets killed. He loved this music, and now as he drove along the winding road toward Gdańsk he was listening to it over and over. He’d had a good day, and he always listened to it on the way home after a good day.
Right on the curve at Giedajty there was a short lull in the music in the seventh minute, as if on request. After the bend he accelerated, raising his hand like a conductor, and letting it drop softly onto the steering wheel as the violins sang their mournful tune. Wonderful, today everything was wonderful. A long straight stretch and he’d be home—there should be just enough Barber left to get him to the gate.
There was. He kept the engine running a while longer, to avoid ruining the diesel turbine. Apparently you only had to do that after a long drive, but better play it safe. He looked at the house that he had built, and the tree by the terrace that he had planted, now charmingly coated in snow. At the lights in the windows, behind which his son was playing, and his wife was puttering in the kitchen. On the whole her culinary efforts didn’t produce much, but he didn’t complain. There are various types of women, and this one was his, the type he had chosen, and this was the type he cared for the best he could. He was a man, he had his job to do, and he did it. A modern man, who didn’t demand reciprocity or gratitude for the care he devoted to his home and his family. He did it out of love, and—as he was prepared to admit—for the proud feeling that came with running the family.
8
He went into the house and hung up his coat, but unfortunately there was no aroma of a nice hot meal to greet him.
“Hela!” he shouted.
He took off his shoes and felt weary. It was ages since he’d had such a long day.
“What?” she shouted back from the depths of the big apartment, her voice echoing.
Sure, she’d sooner drop dead than come to him. He went into the kitchen—the house had the sort of layout where your natural instinct was to go past the hall and turn straight into the kitchen. Most of their guests never got as far as the rest of the apartment, all domestic and social life happened in the huge kitchen. He switched on the light. The plate, coffee mug, and empty glass were still in the exact spot where he’d left them. The crumbs too.
“Hela!” he yelled in a tone that made her come running. She gave him an annoyed look.
“What day is it?” he asked.
She raised an eyebrow, just like Żenia—surp
rising how people only have to live together for a short while to start being similar.
“I can explain . . .”
“Hela”—he interrupted her with a raised hand—“just one thing. Not a hundred, not ten, just one. You don’t have to look after three younger siblings, or help me run the family business, you don’t even have to wash your own panties or clean the tub, which miraculously cleans itself for you. Once a week, on Tuesdays, when you finish school at two, you have to fix the dinner. One thing a week. One, literally one. Which yet again has proved too difficult.”
Of course she had tears in her eyes.
“You just don’t understand my situation.”
“Yeah, sure, a poor little kid from a broken family, raised by a psychopath father and a wicked stepmother. A fragile little flower, violently ripped from her Warsaw roots. Don’t get on my nerves. We all walk around you on tiptoes, Princess Helena, and as a reward you spit in our soup. Oh, I’m sorry, of course you don’t do that. You know why not? Because there is no goddamn soup!”
She was staring at him angrily, her mouth twitching, as if she didn’t know which insult to choose.
“Go ahead and hit me!” she finally shouted tearfully.
He was dumbstruck with rage.
“Have you gone totally crazy? You’ve never had a smack in your life.”
“I must have suppressed the memory. The teacher said that’s possible. Suppressing trauma. God, what I’ve been through.”
She hid her face in her hands.
He was trying to calm down, but he could feel his blood seething.
“I cannot believe it. Just get out of my sight before you earn yourself some real trauma. And I guarantee you won’t be able to suppress it, not for the next seventeen years. Get out.”
She turned and walked off, head held high. How proud, despite the injustice done to her. He couldn’t stop himself from giving her the finger.
“And I’m subtracting the cost of a pizza from your allowance. I promise it’ll be very expensive.”
Worn out, he sat down on the counter, right on a blob of ketchup from breakfast. He felt a wet stain spread across his buttock.
He couldn’t help laughing. He rolled up his sleeves, washed the breakfast items, and ordered a pizza. He was really in the mood for one. He was putting on the kettle for his sacred evening coffee when Żenia came home. And with her came the unexpected aroma of Chinese food.
He heard her taking off her boots in the hall, and then she came straight into the kitchen, tall, flushed from the cold, with a mega-long rainbow scarf around her neck. She looked lovely, like a teenager.
“I want coffee too. And if you heat up some milk, I’ll . . .” She made a hand gesture implying a blow job.
He tapped his forehead. But he really liked this girl. Enough for the word marriage to have ceased to sound like a threat to him. Wouldn’t it be great to put up with her earthy wisecracks for the rest of his life? He should give it some thought.
She put two big bags of Chinese food on the table.
He gave her a questioning look.
“Oh, I couldn’t make up my mind, so I got more than we need—at worst there’ll be some leftovers for tomorrow. Helena”—she always spoke of his daughter as Helena, which surprisingly enough, Hela really liked—“called me after school to apologize and say she couldn’t fix dinner, because they had a charity project. She promised to make apple fritters tomorrow. Why are you staring at me like that?”
9
Meanwhile, on Równa Street, obscenely ordinary in its suburban way, in the house with nothing to distinguish it, as the man sat down to dinner, he cast his mind back a few months to the training course they’d had at a hotel near Łódź. The instructor had asked what they would compare their families to. They had laughed the most at a guy who’d said “a holiday on the Baltic Coast”—a vacation, kind of; something we wanted, kind of; and a whole pile of cash has gone into it, but where’s the sunshine? He had told the truth, knowing that on a management training course it wouldn’t sound too bad: his family was like a well-oiled machine.
It was good to be part of this machine. Well, maybe not so much part of it as the engineer. He was thinking about that as he sat down to eat. The meal looked delicious, beefsteak with a creamy sauce. And potato puree—each of them had their initial in potato puree on their plate. The kid was really thrilled, bouncing up and down in his high chair as if he knew what was written there, and he kept jabbing a finger at his letter, laughing out loud.
“You did that beautifully,” he told his wife.
She smiled. She wasn’t all that pretty or all that feminine, but she had her good days. This was one of them. And he was having a good day too. Really. A well-oiled machine.
“Mm, this sauce is yummy. What’s in it?”
“Gorgonzola. Do you like it?”
“You don’t have to ask. Isn’t he having any?”
“Somewhere I read that blue cheese is only a good idea after they turn three. It’s probably an exaggeration, but just in case.”
“Did you take cash out from the ATM?”
“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. He knew his wife was sometimes like that. Even if she wrote something down or tattooed it on her hand, she’d either forget, or do the opposite.
“Never mind,” he said reassuringly, because he could see she was upset, and stroked her hand. “It’s just that if you pay by card it’s easier to keep track of the expenses. Thanks to our notebook we know what we’ve spent in which store, and then we can decide if we need to cut back anywhere. And we can save up for a really cool vacation.”
“I forgot, I shouldn’t go to the local store.”
“We don’t do the shopping there, do we?”
“Yes, I know. I was trying to get to the supermarket, but somehow it just didn’t work out, so I got cash from the ATM to shop at the local store.”
“OK, I see, but you know what happens with cash.”
“Yes.” She repeated his words: “You break a hundred, and you no longer have a hundred.”
He gestured to say, “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” and with the last bit of meat he wiped up the rest of the puree. He finished eating and started amusing the baby with some peas. Not that you should play with food, but the kid still had a while to learn that.
A well-oiled machine. He liked his career, his house, and his tree. But this family—this well-oiled machine—this was his greatest achievement in life. He’d never stop being proud of it.
10
Szacki tried to make up with Hela, but she wouldn’t let him into her room. He’d just have to talk to her the next day when she’d gotten over it. Why couldn’t she just say something now? Wouldn’t that be easier? He knew he’d goofed, but he was still a little angry. With her, with himself, in general. Some kind of male PMS had come over him.
The good thing was that Żenia had taken pity on him and dropped the “we have to talk.”
He was lying in bed reading Lemaitre. Although he usually avoided crime novels—not only were they far-fetched and predictable, they studiously avoided all mention of prosecutors—he had to admit that the Frenchman was really good.
Żenia came out of the bathroom in a long nightshirt, rubbing cream into her palms. She had stopped running around the house naked since Hela had come to live with them. He was grateful for that because before she had paraded her nakedness like a flag, and he realized it must have been a sacrifice for her to cover up for his child’s sake.
She was one of those women who look older once they’ve wiped off their makeup, but without losing any charm. On the contrary, he liked her this way. Her features sharpened, and some might have found them masculine, but this raw look was to his taste. Strange how that works. Whenever he saw girls like her—tall, angular, androgynous, with sharp features, a small bust, and a husky laugh, he thought: not my type. But one look from Żenia and he’d been smitten. Now as he watched her buzzing through the bedroom,
he was deriving immense pleasure from it.
“They spent three hours telling me about all their friends and relatives, who has what relationship with whom and why. Normally I’d take no notice, but I’m afraid if I get the seating plan wrong on those rafts and a fight breaks out, someone will drown. I did my best to draw it all out—that whole sheet of paper looks like a Soviet battle plan—but it’s one hell of a brainteaser. The young people are seated together, but the young people from his work can’t sit next to the young people from her family, because her father’s firm once took a commission away from his firm. Are you listening to me?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, pretending to be actively listening because during her diatribe he had gone back to his book.
“So what did I say?”
“Her father’s firm took a commission away from his firm. Are you listening to me?”
She collapsed onto the bed beside him.
“I thought, what’s the point of it all? I gave up medicine because I couldn’t bear to be responsible for the fact that somebody’s life would depend on my decisions. In that light it looked as if wedding planning was the safest business in the world. But what do you know? Fate has caught up with me. If I seat somebody wrong at the reception, I might have blood on my hands.” She theatrically laid a hand on her breast—it looked quite sexy. “At any rate, I came back from that hellish meeting, drove to the gas station for a coffee, and ran into Agata. Remember? The one who used to go out with the guy who later married Agnieszka, whose uncle worked with my dad for a while at Michelin. I told you about the factory summer camp where I once got a tick, right? Not the Michelin camp, the one run by my mom’s employers.”
Rage Page 7
