Everything seemed to match up, all their hypotheses appeared logical, and the killer had to fit one of them. So it would seem. Murder has its own inner workings, its own harmony, comparable to a well-composed symphony. The investigation was like finding each of the musicians and positioning them on the stage. To start with, there’s just a single flute, sounding once every five minutes, and that leads nowhere. Then, let’s say, a viola comes along, a bassoon, and a French horn. They play their parts, but for the longest time all you can hear is a cacophony. Finally something like a tune emerges, but only once you’ve discovered all the elements, found all one hundred musicians, and placed yourself in the role of conductor—only then does the truth ring out in a way that sends shivers down the audience’s spine. Here there were only a few elements, a handful of musicians staring into space, but something already sounded wrong, as if the bassoon player was just pretending to play or he was out of tune. Presumably, at this stage it shouldn’t really matter. It was just noise and nothing more, but despite that, there was something hard on the ears.
He suddenly felt terribly sleepy. It was happening to him more and more often at this time of day; with each passing birthday he felt sorrier that Poland had no tradition of taking siestas. The view from the window wasn’t particularly stimulating. There was some construction equipment moving about in the fog at the bottom of the black-and-green hole, like monsters on the ocean bed, idly, regally, and with a very soporific effect on the spectator.
“What would you like to specialize in at the prosecution service?” he suddenly asked Falk, to wake himself up. He was surprised by his own question, but now it was too late to withdraw it.
The junior prosecutor froze with his hands on the keyboard. Rather than seeming surprised, he looked disappointed that Szacki wanted to chitchat like the office gossip.
They both seemed equally embarrassed by the situation. Szacki was waiting for Falk to say “organized crime,” because every junior wanted to pursue the big, bad Mafia, whose members never carried suitcases full of underwear or wood for the fireplace in their trunks, just stiffs, machine guns, and drugs in wholesale quantities.
“Organized crime,” said Falk as predicted.
Szacki was disappointed. He had hoped Falk was different—unique. That in some way he’d stand out from the crowd of young prosecutors. The disappointment was irrational; his junior—that was how he thought of Falk, as “his” junior—had summed up the possible investigation hypotheses well; they all came out of a commonsense evaluation of the situation and logical thinking. Maybe he should add another theory.
“It could also be that this whole performance is a smokescreen,” said Szacki. “And as usual it’s about money, or because somebody screwed another man’s wife. Not very likely, but possible. People can be hypersensitive about their property.”
Szacki instantly felt bad about describing people’s wives as their property.
Falk stopped tapping the keyboard and cleared his throat.
“Perhaps I’m hypersensitive after my training courses at feminist NGOs on the issue of violence against women,” he said. “But I believe we should avoid sexist comments even in private conversations. Language has meaning.”
“Of course, you’re right,” said Szacki, though Falk’s remark had raised the level of his irritation. “It’s a pity you weren’t here this morning. I had a pseudo panda in here who’d have been right up your alley.”
“A pseudo panda?”
Szacki cursed mentally. First property, and now he’d used the sort of dumb cops’ slang that he despised, but he’d heard it so often it was etched in his mind. He waited for Falk to get the idea, but he just went on staring at him with the dumbstruck dark eyes of Peter Sellers.
“The cops tend to call battered women ‘pandas,’” Szacki explained. “You get it?” He drew a ring around his eye with a finger.
“So a pseudo panda,” said Falk slowly. “That must be a victim of psychological abuse?”
Szacki nodded.
“It’s interesting how much sexist contempt can be contained in a single word. It’s pretty disappointing to be hearing something like that from you, of all people.”
That rendered Szacki speechless. It was a long time since he had encountered such direct criticism, and he had no idea how to react. Edmund Falk wasn’t a suspect, he wasn’t a witness, nor was he his child or student. He was a colleague of lower rank, but not low enough that Szacki could take him to task. Szacki tensed; in his mind the words were forming into snappy comebacks and aggressive reactions.
He swallowed them all.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Falk was nodding, with a look on his face clearly saying that in his view it was better to behave in a way that didn’t mean having to apologize afterward. That was the logical choice.
“What was it about? If I may ask.”
Szacki shrugged.
“Nothing, really. Work here for a while and you’ll see that some people just come along looking for therapy. He hasn’t done anything to her, or the kid, but she’s afraid. But actually she just hasn’t got a grip on herself. And he’s a great guy. But he terrorizes her by telling her to keep a record of expenses. But she’s scatterbrained, so maybe that’s a good thing.”
“That’s typical.” Falk was nodding.
“Unfortunately.”
“That’s the typical behavior of a victim of abuse. Either the woman reacted prematurely, or she’s not saying everything. More likely the latter. Did you send her to the Sunbeam?”
“Where?”
“The family support center on Niepodległość Avenue, five hundred yards from here. It looks like a beautiful villa, as you drive by.”
“No.”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing. I sent her home.”
“You’re joking?”
Szacki shrugged. He couldn’t understand the problem. He’d never actually dealt with a harassment case in his professional life—he’d always managed to dump them onto someone else.
“Do you know, if all my training courses are to be believed, that’s the typical behavior of a victim of domestic abuse? Not an unhappy wife, or a scatterbrained woman, but a victim of abuse. Desperate enough to come and see the prosecutor. But too ashamed to tell him the whole story. On the one hand she says something’s wrong, but on the other she keeps saying it’s her own fault. If she came in with a forensic report, screams on a voice recorder, and a journal with every instance of abuse written down in it, our red light would go on at once. But this is a clear-cut case.”
“So what should I have done, in your view?”
“Behaved like a prosecutor, not a rigid misogynist from a bygone era.”
“You know perfectly well that without a victim statement our hands are tied,” said Szacki, finding it hard to keep his cool.
“Why? It’s not a crime where a private individual has to bring the charge. Our task is to eliminate the criminal from society, even if his persecuted wife is going to clutch at our lapels and beg us not to do him any harm.”
“Without a statement the body of evidence makes no sense.”
“Of course it does. A good expert will recognize her attitude as typical of the psychological state of a victim.”
“Your attitude is based on naive idealism devoid of reality.”
“And yours is based on cynicism.”
The phone on Szacki’s desk rang. The police had brought in Teresa Najman. Falk got up, closed his laptop, and put it in a leather case.
“I’ll have to inform our superiors of your conduct.”
He didn’t even add as a courtesy that he was sorry he’d have to do it.
“You’re going to report me?”
“Of course. In this case the principle of general deterrence has relevance. We’re trained lawyers, and if others find out that a star like you has been penalized for ignoring domestic abuse, that should give others something to think about. It’s n
othing personal, I assure you.”
8
WITNESS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT. Teresa Najman, née Brode, d.o.b. March 25, 1975, place of birth Olsztyn, resident at 34 Irysowa Street, Stawiguda, university graduate (Polish philology), deputy director at the University Library, University of Warmia and Masuria in Olsztyn. Relationship to parties: wife of victim. No convictions for bearing false witness.
Cautioned with regard to criminal liability in accordance with Article 233 of the Penal Code, I testify as follows:
I met my husband, Piotr Najman, in February 2005, when I had just received an annual bonus from the university and decided to buy myself a trip to a sunny place. I had no other expenses, and the winter was particularly awful. Piotr was very kind and friendly, and he made an excellent impression on me. He was so convincing and gave me such good deals that although I’d been planning to go to Turkey, I ended up buying a trip to the Canary Islands—I’d always dreamed of going there. A month later he came to the library on my birthday with a bunch of flowers. He was very apologetic about the fact that he’d committed the date to memory after seeing it on my ID, and begged me not to report him. It was very funny, and of course I made a date with him, and we met up. In April I went on my trip, and there he was, waiting for me at the airport in Fuerteventura. That was when we started to date seriously. We got married in October 2006, and in December 2007 our son, Piotruś, was born, on Saint Nicholas’s Day. We were living in an apartment and building a house on my lot in Stawiguda. We moved there early in 2009. We had a good life together.
The last time I saw my husband was on the morning of Monday, November 18, when he left for work. From there he was due to go straight to Warsaw, and then fly to Albania. And Macedonia, too, as far as I remember. Albania is being heavily promoted these days as a new destination, the country’s getting back on its feet, the prices are low, and the Adriatic’s lovely. Those trips are always made outside the season, when the tour operators show their best agents the new sites and hotels. The trip was supposed to be ten days, but I’m not sure, because they’re often combined with briefings in Warsaw about other destinations.
I admit that Piotr’s absence couldn’t have come at a better time, for all sorts of reasons. We’ve spent a lot of time sorting the collections at the library, reorganizing the catalogs according to new EU rules, and even if we moved in there for the duration we’d never get it all done. On top of that the last few weeks before he left were exhausting. Piotr is a hypochondriac, and right through the operation on his toe he behaved like he was terminally ill. That day he went to work, and I took our son over to my parents in Sząbruk. I was planning on spending the week working and watching TV in the evenings without having to take care of anything but myself.
Piotr and I exchanged a few short texts to say everything was all right. That was the only contact I had with him. Ten days went by in a flash.
There were various methods for taking a witness statement, and every prosecutor had his own approach. Some, for example, noted it down verbatim, every stutter and curse, transforming themselves into pen-wielding Dictaphones. Szacki very rarely used that method, only in dealing with the most aggressive suspects and witnesses. He knew from experience that later on in court, it gave the ideal impression when he calmly read out all the “fuckallyoucandotome’s” and “I’llfuckingdestroyyou’s,” while on the other side, the defendant gradually shrank to three feet tall. But usually he listened and summarized, limiting the statement to the most important information and potentially significant details.
In the case of Teresa Najman, he didn’t apply his summarizing method, because he didn’t have to. The woman came in, sat down, and in a steady voice dictated it all to him—he didn’t have to change a single comma. She was so well prepared that it was as if she had spent the week practicing her performance. Now she was looking at him, waiting to see what he’d do.
Szacki just clicked his pen and thought. Contrary to the fashionable theories, which Falk would probably give his right arm for, he regarded the modern methods of questioning as dumb shamanism, the only aim of which was to make the state budget cough up money for unnecessary training. They’d once forced him to go to one of those courses, and he’d almost died laughing. You were supposed to start with a conversation about meaningless crap as a way of checking how the witness behaved—this was called “tuning your inner lie detector”—then suddenly attack with a question relevant to the case and observe the reaction.
Over the lunch break he’d sat down with the course leader and chatted about the weather and politics, then debated which is better, an automatic or a stick shift. Suddenly Szacki had asked the man what had happened when he stuck a knife in his wife’s ear and gave it a few hard twists. Did she scream? Try to defend herself? Was the blood on his hand warm?
The guy choked on his sandwich and Szacki had to give him the Heimlich maneuver.
Then he’d expelled Szacki from the course, but Szacki had proved his point. Anyone reacts when a conversation about the weather suddenly shifts to murdering your wife. Tuning your inner lie detector had nothing to do with it.
Nor did he believe in the good-cop, bad-cop method. All that soft-soaping and terrorizing seemed tacky—he felt embarrassed when he saw policemen behaving that way. People are vacuous, but not enough to say something they don’t want to. Telling lies is not rocket science. If you’re going to play games with them, you’ve got to have something up your sleeve. Something they want, or something they’re afraid of.
Teresa Najman was telling so many lies that a lie detector—a normal one, not that inner one—would be shooting sparks in all directions and would eventually explode. But Szacki had absolutely nothing on her.
It didn’t bother him. People are amateurs, think they’re so sharp, but meanwhile the wheels of the investigation keep turning. He’d soon have the content of her texts, recordings from industrial cameras near her work, a list of times when her cell phone logged on to the network, statements from her colleagues at the library and from Piotr Najman’s coworkers at the travel agency. He’d have another chance to talk to Teresa Najman once the files were a bit thicker; he didn’t need tricks for an efficient investigation, just proof.
He looked at her. She was tense, all done up as if going to a job interview—neatly, modestly, office style, in a white blouse buttoned up to the neck, a dark jacket, and slip-ons with a low heel. Hair in a bun, contact lenses replaced by glasses. Good lawyers advise female defendants to look just like that in the courtroom.
He turned the transcript around and pointed to the spot where she was meant to sign.
She was surprised.
“Aren’t you going to question me?”
“You’ve said it all already.”
“You don’t have any further questions?”
“Is there something you want to add?”
She thought so hard that he could hear the cogs going around in her brain.
“You don’t believe me.”
“If I say I don’t, will you tell me the truth?”
She chewed her lip and gazed out at the November evening. For a brief moment she changed into the woman she’d been the day before.
“Will any further questioning be necessary?”
“I think we’ll be seeing some more of each other.”
“But do you suspect me of something?”
“Where do you get that idea?”
“Yesterday I wasn’t myself at all.”
It occurred to him that he really was unlucky where the women who came to his office were concerned. If not for the fact that a prosecutor isn’t allowed to earn money on the side, he’d have had them pay him the standard eighty zloty an hour for all these confessions.
“I’m sorry, but do you want to add anything that might have a connection with your husband’s disappearance and death?”
“Only that I had nothing to do with it.”
“With what?”
“With it.”
“Mea
ning?” He wanted her to say it.
“I didn’t kill him.”
“But are you pleased he’s dead?”
She frowned, then looked shocked. She signed the transcript and got up to leave.
Next time he’d record her.
9
Szacki had no luck with his bosses. When he got to Olsztyn, at first he’d sighed with relief. Ewa Szarejna seemed a fairly typical product of the civil service. A good lawyer, not particularly interested in the front line, quickly got into the regional prosecution service, and from there, a few years later the supervisory board had sent her to be a district chief. Knowing the dynamics of a career in the prosecution service, she would either return to a higher post at the regional service or end up in appeals. He doubted the latter—like everyone here Szarejna was a psychopathic local patriot. She’d sooner drown herself in one of the eleven Olsztyn lakes than move to Białystok or Gdańsk, where the nearest appeal services were located.
Reliable, hardworking, decent, well organized, more of a specialist in theory than practice, but that had its pluses—everyone including Szacki treated her like a walking legislative database.
Around forty, a little younger than Szacki, slender and fit, she was into cross-country. Which was the source of plenty of workplace jokes because the walls of her office were decorated with competition photos in which, sweaty and mud stained, she hardly looked human.
But if anyone was ever asked about Ewa Szarejna, the first thing they mentioned was not her job, or her legal knowledge, or her eccentric hobby. They always said, “Ewa? She’s a very good person.”
The first time he heard that, he was worried. That was what they’d always said about his mother. But he knew better than anyone that his mother was not a good person. Behind her warm facade radiating empathy and understanding, there was an aggressive, bad-tempered bitch, putting up endless walls of goodness to conceal her rage and resentment toward the entire world. She was like an alligator in a velvet jumpsuit. Everyone wanted to cuddle up to her, but if anyone knew her as well as her own son, they understood she mainly consisted of claws and fangs.
Rage Page 12
