“Why unfortunately?”
“Just a moment. In the meantime we can cross off a fourth hypothesis, which is acid. Have you seen the Borys Lankosz movie Reverse? The heroine’s mother dissolves the secret policeman in hydrochloric acid, and then buries the bones in town. The screenwriters went to the usual trouble for a Polish movie because hydrochloric acid dissolves everything, including the bones.”
“A pity,” said Szacki. “Trade in hydrochloric acid is controlled because it can be used to produce narcotics, so it’d be easy to get a fix on a purchaser.”
“That’s why I’d use perchloric acid instead,” said Frankenstein. “It’s more caustic and has a stronger effect. The only problem is toxic fumes.”
Szacki did not pass comment. He was starting to fear that eventually all he was going to find out was that, unfortunately, the nice, kind scientists had no idea how someone could possibly have transformed a guy who liked walking in the woods to a crumbling skeleton in a single week.
“Here you are,” said Jagiełło, as she handed him a dry piece of old bone.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Two hours ago it was a lovely bit of veal,” explained Frankenstein. “Pink and fragrant, maybe not good enough for a schnitzel, but you could have made goulash.”
4
As Wojciech Falk watched his son across the table, he couldn’t help being amazed that both genes and upbringing could have so little impact. Even if he had devoted his entire life to planning every element of Edmund’s personality to make sure he turned out as his exact opposite, he could never have achieved such a thorough effect.
They were eating spit-roasted chicken, which he had fixed himself. Really tasty chicken, marinated all night in chili, cilantro, and lime juice. He liked to cook, and he had made Edmund promise to take a break from his work every other day and come here for dinner. He was concerned that his son would eat nothing but fast food in the city or sandwiches in cling wrap, when it was only ten minutes’ drive to his father’s house from the prosecution service.
And so they were eating together. As usual, Falk Senior was pretty hungry and eating sloppily, wiping his hands on his clothes, which were already filthy because he never bothered to change after coming home from his workshop. Sawdust and wood shavings littered the table and floor around his chair.
Whereas his son was behaving like a customer at a Parisian restaurant showered with Michelin stars. He had hung his jacket on a coat hanger (he never hung it over the back of a chair if he could help it), neatly rolled up his cuffs, and covered his lap with a clean napkin. And he was separating the meat from the bones with his knife and fork with the precision of a future jeweler or neurosurgeon, not a junior prosecutor.
Falk Senior sighed softly. There were two topics of importance to him that he wanted to bring up, but he knew that his son would not be pleased. He simply wanted what was best for him.
“You know, Tadek dropped by today. Partly to ask how much I’d charge to make his friend a dresser in the German style, but more art deco. Like I made for that doctor, you remember?”
Edmund gave him a searching look.
“Knowing Tadek, he came to ask if you’d do three weeks’ work for his pal at cost. He’s probably on the municipal or regional council.”
“Tadek’s almost like family, you know that.”
“But his friend isn’t. Dad, how many times do I have to tell you that you can’t treat every client like your oldest friend? People take advantage of you.”
Falk Senior shifted around. Suddenly his old armchair felt uncomfortable. He didn’t want to explain himself, but he believed it was worth getting to know people, getting close to them. After all, he made the furniture they’d be looking at for decades.
“Somehow it came up in the conversation that they slapped that traffic fine on you the other day, and Tadek said that if you like, he’ll get it thrown out for you. So you don’t have trouble right at the start.”
At these words, Edmund froze and put down his knife and fork.
“Dad, I’ve explained it to you already. The traffic cops have to inform the office, and I’ll get reprimanded.”
“You say that as if you were counting on getting reprimanded. Tadek simply won’t have them issue the fine, and that’ll be that.”
“In a way I am counting on it. I broke the law, and like everyone I should be punished for it. As a prosecutor I should provide an example. Otherwise, what I do makes no sense. I think you’ll agree with me.”
He agreed—what else could he say? But he was more concerned about the other matter.
“Tadek said Wanda’s back in Olsztyn. Apparently for good.”
He did his best to make it come out naturally, but of course, Edmund smiled icily.
“Are you trying to set us up?”
The armchair became even more uncomfortable.
“What do you mean? I just thought you’d like to know. That’s all.”
They ate in silence. Falk Senior couldn’t hold out for long.
“I’d like to see you happy. And fulfilled. Not just at work.”
“Dad, I’ve told you before. Until I pass my exams and become a fully qualified prosecutor, there’s no point in even dating, not to mention getting married. I might be staying here, or they might send me to the other end of Poland—I don’t want to give myself any false hopes, let alone some girl.”
Falk Senior gave his son such a pitiful look that it must have betrayed all the hopes and fears of a man who became a father at an advanced age, who longed for his one and only child to gift him with the wonderful family he had never had. And so Edmund decided to explain himself further.
“It’s the logical choice,” he said.
5
Szacki fixed his eyes on the bone being shown to him, like a paleontologist staring at the remains of a dinosaur previously unknown to science. And heard out Alicja Jagiełło’s explanations.
“I repeated this experiment several times, and the result was always the same. I had to monitor the course of it carefully, because if the process is too short, there are bits of tendon and cartilage left, not many, but always some. If it goes on for too long, the bones don’t actually disappear, but they become fragile and brittle.”
“What is it? Some kind of acid?”
“It’s an alkali, specifically sodium hydroxide, commonly known as lye. As caustic as acid, but at the opposite end of the pH scale. A simple compound, been around for centuries, very good at dissolving protein, but above all fats, which is why it’s used in the manufacture of soap. It has a bigger problem with bones because of their calcium content. It manages eventually. It really is an aggressive agent, and yet it’s easy to observe the moment when there’s no more protein or fat left but the skeleton is still in good shape. I’ll show you.”
Next to the table was a plastic bag from which she took out a bottle of drain cleaner and a polystyrene tray with several chicken wings neatly lined up under cling wrap. She extracted one of the chicken wings and placed it in a surgical dish, next to a shiny stainless steel container.
“One thing about lye is that you only have to go to a dozen stores to obtain a sufficient amount to dissolve a horse. In fact, any substance for clearing drains with a fancy name and snazzy packaging is really just sodium hydroxide, usually in the form of granules. It’s a fairly safe way to preserve it—you have to dissolve it in water for it to become a caustic alkali.”
She poured the entire packet into the pot and mixed it for a while with a steel spatula. The solution hissed and fizzed like an Alka-Seltzer thrown into water, then it finally went quiet and changed into a liquid the color of highly diluted milk. Jagiełło picked up the chicken wing with a pair of tongs and carefully placed it in the solution. Szacki was expecting something big, but the chicken simply sank to the bottom.
“Nothing’s happening,” he said.
“Just give it a few minutes.”
“The recent philosophy on sodium hydroxide has been
undergoing some changes, not so much legal as ethical, perhaps,” said the professor, smoothing his perfectly flat gown.
He said it in a tone that sadly left no room for doubt that he was about to embark on an anecdote. Szacki peered wistfully into the pot, but everything still looked ordinary, like Thai soup with a bit of raw chicken floating in it.
“We’re afraid that having found out it dissolves fat, the female students could start drinking lye with their steamed vegetables. As you can imagine, that could have lamentable consequences.”
Szacki said nothing. But Frankenstein needed no encouragement.
“It’s an intriguing problem, the whole question of the diet pill, the Holy Grail of the pharmaceutical industry. There have been some interesting attempts to develop one. It didn’t take long to discover the existence of a repletion hormone that’s released when we’ve had enough to eat, to make us stop guzzling. In which case, what could be simpler than taking that hormone in pill form? The perfect, natural way to allay hunger. Unfortunately it turned out to have a list of side effects as long as the phone book, with infertility right at the top. Did they give up? You bet they didn’t. Somebody noticed there are no fat drug addicts. Curious, isn’t it?”
Szacki nodded, feigning interest—after all, he was in the man’s debt for these experiments.
“You could say, What’s so strange about that? Drug addicts are poor, they sleep under bridges, they spend the money they steal on drugs, not on food rich in nutrients. But drug addiction doesn’t affect those on the margins of society. Quite the opposite—it’s the white-collar workers who snort a line of coke, and they eat one-pound steaks with fries.”
Szacki peeked into the vat again. The chicken wing hadn’t changed an iota.
“That drain cleaner must be past its use-by date,” he muttered.
“I don’t think so,” said Jagiełło, and picked out the wing with the tongs. She shook it a few times and the pale skin coating the piece of meat dissolved, leaving red, seared-looking flesh on the thin bones.
“Chicken skin is mainly fatty tissue, so it dissolves the fastest.”
“Just imagine,” Frankenstein continued, “during the research, which must have had plenty of volunteers, what stood out was the protein CART—cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript—which is responsible for lowering stress and increasing euphoria, and above all, lowering the appetite. You realize what it would have meant to give people that sort of ambrosia without it leading to addiction?”
“So did they make a pill out of it?” asked Szacki, letting himself be sucked in.
“They tried. Too many side effects for the circulatory system, and it’d be hard to convince anyone that the best cure for obesity is coronary disease. That was the second factor. But the first was that people are weak. What would you do if you were given a pill that made you slender, relaxed, and happy? And that had no side effects?”
“I’d swallow them by the handful,” said Szacki.
“Exactly. In theory, the substance didn’t cause physical addiction. In practice, after two days people were walking up walls to get their next fix. Clearly mankind is not yet mature enough for modern medicine,” said Frankenstein sententiously, fixing his gaze on the skeleton lying on the table, as if it alone could understand him.
Jagiełło took hold of the wing and gently stirred the liquid with it, helping the gloop that was gradually replacing the soft tissues to dissolve in the solution. Then she took out the wing—in under ten minutes all that was left of it were grayish bones with scraps of tissue attached to the thicker joints.
“Great. We’ve got a winner,” said Szacki.
A new element appeared in the investigation, namely an industrial amount of drain cleaner. It was always a starting point. It had to be bought somewhere and transported, the crime site had to be prepared, and the corpse dissolved, then removed. The site had to be cleaned, the overalls thrown away. In short, plenty of opportunities for leaving evidence along the way.
Jagiełło didn’t share his enthusiasm. She dropped the wing back into the solution.
“Unfortunately I’m not a chemist, just a forensic scientist. Which means I had to combine all this data to come up with an image of the victim’s death.”
The atmosphere became tense. Szacki drew his prosecutor’s mask over his face and did up the top button of his jacket. He was ready.
“Go on,” he said.
“The victim wasn’t dissolved in lye after death but while he was still alive. The injuries on the bones testify to that. Wherever he was locked up, he tried to scratch his way out of there in a fit of pain and hysteria, ignoring that he was grating his finger bones to the second phalanx. When he realized it was in vain, he tried to commit suicide, or at least lose consciousness. Hence the cracks on the skull. That’s why they’re so even. Nobody hit him on the head—he did it himself, banging it against the floor on which he must have been lying tied up.”
Szacki drove his emotions somewhere into his subconscious. He focused on imagining this scene in all sorts of different ways. Somewhere in there was evidence, proof. A great deal would depend on what questions he asked next.
“Do we know where it was? A bathtub? A factory vat? A concrete cellar?”
She turned off the light. There was no need to draw the blinds; the early November afternoon in Olsztyn was darker than a night in June.
“Take a look at the bones under UV light,” said Jagiełło, switching on a lamp. The skull, the fingers, toes, and knees lit up blue, as if they’d been coated with fluorescent paint.
“Is that blood?” asked Szacki, who had seen this sort of image many times before at crime scenes.
“Not this time—all the organic evidence has been consumed by the lye. Blood glows under UV rays at the scene of a murder because it contains hemoglobin, and hemoglobin contains iron. These traces testify to the fact that the victim was enclosed in some sort of steel container, perhaps made of cast iron, which seems the logical choice. Lye doesn’t react with iron. Besides, a piece of pipe would be easy to transfer or remove. A concrete cellar would be impossible to clean.”
Szacki forced himself to examine this mental image in detail. An old barn in a formerly German settlement, perhaps? Or maybe an old collective farm storehouse, or a ruined mill in the middle of the woods. A piece of old cast-iron pipe a couple of feet in diameter and six and a half feet long. One end welded shut.
“How do you think it happened? Did someone pour the solution into a container with the victim inside it?”
She shook her head. Evidently, unlike Szacki, she was doing her best to push these images away from her.
“In that case, death would have been instant. An instant burning of the entire body and airways, a shock, more like fractions of a second than whole seconds.”
“So how did it happen?”
Jagiełło was in no rush to reply. The old professor came to her aid.
“As you’ve seen, sodium hydroxide is preserved in a dry form. It’s also easiest to buy it in this form. We suspect that the victim was gradually buried in granules. At first he wouldn’t have known what was happening and probably would have figured it was mothballs or Styrofoam or stearin. Before any of the granules fell into his mouth or eyes, nothing would have happened.”
“And then water was added?” asked Szacki.
“What for? The body of a man weighing 175 pounds contains about thirteen gallons of water. Plunged into the granules and trapped in a metal pipe, the terrified victim must have started to sweat instantly. The more he sweated, the more of the little white granules changed into caustic soda. His sweat was quickly replaced by blood, lymph, and other bodily fluids. The victim was eaten alive by lye. I imagine from the first burn until the moment he died must have taken about a quarter of an hour.”
Szacki was trying to summon images of what had happened in those long fifteen minutes. He knew it was very important. But it was beyond his imagination.
6
Szacki a
rranged to meet Bierut at the Statoil station by Olsztyn’s main crossroads, exactly halfway along the short stretch between the university hospital and the place where the corpse had been found. He planned to examine the German cellar again, but first he wanted to talk to the policeman. He’d had two cups of coffee, a hot dog, and an inferior croissant in the past half hour while waiting for Bierut to fight his way through traffic to get there. He’d have made it in fifteen minutes on foot.
Bierut gave him the results of the DNA tests. The lab had confirmed that the bones were definitely those of Piotr Najman. Szacki was extremely pleased with this information, as it gave the investigation a solid direction. He instructed Bierut to bring in Mrs. Najman for questioning to establish whether the victim worked on his own at his tourist agency and to find witnesses who could help establish when and where he had last been seen.
Then he gave Bierut a summary of the pathologists’ findings, without sparing him the macabre details. At a certain point Bierut gestured for him to stop, then stood up. Szacki was sure he’d overdone the description, and the policeman needed a breather. But he merely went to get a slice of pizza, a raspberry croissant, and a hot chocolate. Then he sat calmly eating his meal, nodding to indicate that he got the idea, as Szacki conjured up the vision of a remote place and the horrible death of a man being slowly dissolved in lye.
“It looks as if he was conscious to the end,” Szacki said.
Jan Paweł Bierut shook the crumbs off his fake leather jacket—he could just as well have been wearing a fluorescent vest marked “POLICE”—and went over to the coffee machine.
“Can I tempt you with a hot chocolate?” Bierut asked, pressing a button. “It’s really good.”
Szacki shook his head.
“Can you imagine anything like that?”
“Yes, of course, you described it in full Technicolor.” Bierut tasted the hot chocolate, added two packets of sugar, took a little stir stick, and came back to their place by the window. He sipped the chocolate, which left a streak of brown foam on his outdated mustache. “What are the priorities?”
Rage Page 10
