The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Ben, you simply can’t force Brzezicki and his men to work; and you can’t force anybody else, either.’

  ‘Turks,’ said Ben. ‘They’ll do it. They don’t give a shit for your so-called devil.’

  ‘If you try to bring in Turkish labour, you’re going to antagonize everybody from the President downward. It was risky enough bringing in Germans. Besides, you won’t get any of your major sub-contractors to co-operate. Can you imagine Wola Electrics allowing their ducting to be put in by Turks?’

  ‘Well, you may be right,’ said Ben. ‘But New York’s looking for somebody to blame, and the first somebody on their list is you.’

  ‘There have been four murders on that site, for God’s sake. What do they expect?’

  ‘They’re four thousand miles away, Sarah. They expect their hotel to go up on time.’

  Sarah looked at him narrowly. The way he was sitting, the way he was folding his paper dart, the way he was setting up one obstacle after another, she began to suspect that Ben was up to something. It almost had a smell of its own, like scorched newspaper; or burned hair; or brimstone.

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ she said. ‘Are you trying to manoeuvre me out of this job?’

  ‘Of course not. The total opposite.’

  ‘Then what is this all about?’

  Ben put on a half-exasperated expression as if to suggest that he had been trying everything possible to protect Sarah’s interests, but well, you know what they’re like in New York...

  ‘The fact of the matter is, sweetheart, I could manage to buy us a few more days. Jacek Studnicki says that Vistula Kredytowy could possibly waive interest payments so long as the Warsaw police are preventing us from continuing work. They’re insured against certain types of delay, although whether they’re insured against the site being cordoned off by the police... well, that’s arguable. I might have to offer him some kind of sweetener in return, and I’d have to spread a little sunshine around the insurance company.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  Ben eased himself off the desk and came around so that he was standing only inches away from her. ‘The trouble is, Sarah, that I would be putting my ass on the line, and for what? You’re in direct charge of getting this hotel built on time, why should I risk my whole career with Senate just for you?’

  Now Sarah understood where this conversation was going. She was so shocked by what Ben was saying that the hair on the back of her neck started to prickle, and she began to wish she hadn’t drunk her morning glass of tropical fruit juices so quickly.

  ‘You don’t have to risk your career for me. I didn’t ask you to, and I don’t expect it.’

  ‘Oh, no? You asked me to risk my career the moment you let Brzezicki and the rest of those superstitious morons walk off the job. Because once you’d allowed him to do that, somebody had to save you, and the only person around who could do it was yours truly.’

  His eyes softened and he tried to take hold of both of her hands, but she twisted them away. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘This is the problem. I take risks for you and one day you may have to take risks for me. We’re supposed to be team-players. But how can we be team-players if we’re not a real team?’

  Sarah said, ‘I’ve told you. We’re colleagues; we’re friends. That’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘Oh, come on, baby – right now it doesn’t even go as far as that. You treat me like I’m carrying some kind of disease.’

  ‘Maybe you are. It’s called galloping presumption.’

  ‘Didn’t that brooch mean anything to you?’

  ‘It showed me that you’ve got more money than taste, and more taste than sense.’

  Ben said, ‘Sarah, I’m not asking you this. I’m telling you. I want you and me to try again. The spark’s still there. You know it’s still there. All we need is more time together.’

  Sarah stared at him for a long time without saying anything. He stared back at her, trying to read her expression. She saw hope in his eyes; and cunning; and self-pity; but most of all she still recognized the monstrous arrogance that had eventually broken their first relationship. It needed feeding: but she was determined that it wasn’t going to feed on her.

  She said, ‘Get lost, Ben. This is beneath both of us.’

  He lifted both hands. ‘I tried, sweetheart. You can’t say I didn’t try. I always thought you had spirit. I always thought you were the kind of woman who could seize the dream.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means that I can’t continue to work with you on this project because of your consistently hostile attitude and your refusal to co-operate with critical matters of policy. It means that you’ve mishandled labour relations and relations with local planners; and that you’ve cost Senate almost a million dollars in unnecessary delay. Its means, my tough little cookie, that I’m going to recommend to New York that Senate lets you go. That’s unless...’

  Sarah was quaking with anger. ‘That’s unless what? Unless I let you fuck me, is that it?’

  Ben looked mock-shocked. ‘You said it, sweetheart. Not me.’

  *

  Rej arrived at the office with a large plastic carrier bag from the children’s department store Smyk. He sat down at his desk, laid the bag on top of his blotter, and almost immediately Matejko walked in and peered inside it. He took out a rolled-up sweater, turned it this way and that, and then put it back again.

  ‘What the hell are you looking for?’ Rej demanded.

  ‘Sandwiches. I’m hungry.’

  ‘There’s a bar of chocolate in my desk.’

  ‘I know. I ate it this morning. Well, don’t look at me like that. You’re supposed to be off duty. By the time you came back it could have gone stale.’

  Rej lit a cigarette. ‘How’s the investigation?’

  ‘Oh, dragging along. You know what Witold’s like. No stone unturned, except that he keeps forgetting which stones have been turned and which haven’t.’

  ‘Have you had any word from Dr Wojniakowski yet?’

  ‘On Antoni Dlubak? Nothing much. Decapitated with a sharp cleaver, like all of the others. But he says there’s one noticeable difference. Dlubak was sexually assaulted. Somebody stuck a sharp-pointed instrument right through his penis.’

  ‘Ouch, painful,’ said Rej, his cigarette waggling between his lips. ‘But interesting, too. What does Witold make of it?’

  ‘Witold thinks that he was tortured. Probably to find out what he knew about the money-laundering at Vistula Kredytowy.’

  ‘That makes sense. If he was, though, that means that he was probably killed by organized criminals, rather than a lone psycho. Mafia, maybe... or somebody working a scam through Senate Hotels.’

  Matejko nodded. ‘That’s right. But if that’s true, why were organized criminals interested in killing a tour guide, a mailman, a pharmacist and all those other people?’

  ‘Well... they probably killed Kaminski for the same reason they killed Dlubak. The others... God knows. Listen, get on to Dr Wojniakowski and ask him to put a rush on checking whether Dlubak was killed with the same weapon as all the rest of them.’

  Matejko shook his head. ‘You’re off the case, Stefan, or had you forgotten?’

  ‘You can still do it. Witold would want you to do it.’

  ‘If Witold wanted me to do it, Witold would have asked me to do it.’

  Rej took his cigarette out of his mouth. ‘Why don’t you just fucking stop arguing and do it?’

  Matejko laughed and picked up the phone. While he was dialling, Rej said, ‘Listen... I left my towel in my locker. That’s what I came in for.’

  He picked up his carrier bag, left the office and walked along the corridor. When he reached the end of it, however, he didn’t turn right to the washrooms, but left to the stores where they kept all the evidence from recent cases. It was a long, narrow room, lined with olive-drab filing cabinets. A single police officer was sitting at a desk under the window, painstaki
ngly writing in a ledger. On the desk in front of him stood a pair of cheap brown shoes, covered in blood.

  The officer stood up when Rej came in, and clicked his heels. ‘Can I help you, komisarz?’

  ‘Yes, the Executioner case. I need to see that doll again.’

  ‘Excuse me, komisarz. I was told that Komisarz Jarczyk was conducting the Executioner case now.’

  ‘Of course he is. But that doesn’t stop me taking a look at the evidence, does it?’

  The officer looked uncomfortable. ‘Komisarz Jarczyk specifically said that you were not to have access to the evidence, sir.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Rej, ‘I only want to look at it. And that was evidence that was found when I was still handling the case.’

  ‘Well...’ said the officer, dubiously.

  Rej offered him a cigarette. ‘Stop taking your job so seriously. I just want a couple of seconds to check if it’s got any kind of label on it, then I’ll put it back.’

  The officer accepted the cigarette and Rej lit it for him.

  ‘Well...’ he said. ‘I suppose it can’t hurt.’ Rej was still popular among the lower ranks. He always remembered their names and their birthdays, and he had a healthy disregard for pompous senior officers. The officer took out his keys, and beckoned Rej to follow him along the left-hand wall until they reached a filing drawer marked Hydra No. 1, which was their codename for the hunt for the Executioner. Hydra, because the case involved so many heads. Dembek’s idea of a joke.

  The doll was stored inside a large padded postal envelope. ‘There,’ said the officer. ‘Help yourself. I’ve got to get on with this Kepliz case.’

  ‘Oh yes, I heard about that,’ said Rej. ‘Some woman attacked her husband with a steam iron.’

  ‘That’s right. You should have seen him.’

  ‘Looking a little depressed, I expect.’

  ‘Yes! That’s a good one.’

  Rej eased the doll out of the envelope. She was completely dry now, but she was still greyish-brown. He guessed that she was supposed to be a little farm-girl. She was wearing a knitted bonnet and a knitted smock, and her feet were covered in little knitted boots.

  He wondered what her name was.

  The phone rang, and the officer picked it up. It sounded to Rej as if it were his wife or his girlfriend calling, because he started to get involved in a lengthy discussion about where they were going over the weekend. Whatever happened, he didn’t want to go to her mother’s.

  As the officer talked, Rej gradually turned his back. He opened his carrier bag and dropped the doll into it. Then he lifted out his sweater and pushed it into the postal envelope.

  He turned around again, held up the envelope in acknowledgement, and made a show of sliding it back into the Hydra drawer, and closing it. The officer, still on the phone, gave him a wave of thanks. Rej left the evidence store and made his way back towards his office. He was surprised how quickly his heart was beating.

  Half way there, he heard Matejko calling him, from behind.

  ‘Stefan! I thought you were going to find your towel.’

  ‘Oh... I got talking to Dembek, and I forgot.’

  ‘What? Dembek’s in Poznan today.’

  ‘Well, actually, it was one of the girls in filing,’ Rej blustered. ‘I didn’t particularly want you to know.’

  Matejko gave him a suspicious frown. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in officers getting involved with the secretarial staff.’

  ‘She’s gorgeous, this one. I couldn’t resist her. Come on. Jerzy, I’m a man. I’ve got needs.’

  ‘You’ll have to point her out. All the girls in filing look like cows to me. Anyway, I managed to get through to the Department of Forensic Medicine. Dr Wojniakowski wasn’t there, but I talked to one of his assistants. They’ve just had the metallurgical results from Dlubak’s neck.’

  He didn’t even have to say what the results were. His face told it all. Rej pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead in frustration.

  ‘God, Jerzy. This is like one of those damned nightmares – you know, when the faster you run, the further away everything gets.’

  10

  They met at eleven o’clock that night outside a tall, narrow apartment block overlooking the market place on the corner of Banacha, only a few streets further south from the building where Ewa Zborowska and Kaczimicz Wroblewski had been killed. It was almost uncomfortably warm, but a strong breeze was blowing, filled with grit. It was one of those nights when you were conscious that you were right in the heart of Europe; breathing air that had blown over Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic, and which would blow over Russia and up to the Arctic Circle.

  Clayton and Sarah had arrived first. Sarah wore a primrose summer coat and a sunflower-coloured beret. Clayton looked sombre in a black coat and grey slacks. ‘I always dress in mourning for seances. You’re talking to the dead, after all.’

  Marek arrived soon afterwards, abruptly and very loudly, on the pillion of a motorcycle ridden by another black-leather jacketed young man. He was wearing reflecting sunglasses and chewing a toothpick, and he walked with a conspicuous swagger. All the signs of nervousness, Sarah thought to herself, and she really felt for him.

  She had always been shy when she was younger; and even now she had to hype herself up before she spoke to an audience, or to reprimand anybody who had let her down; or to perform her notorious Ayatollah act, a fire-breathing performance of rage and hurt, followed by a display of inspirational encouragement that would have done credit to a television evangelist. She had a talent for making people feel that they had let her down; and an even greater talent for making them feel that they wanted to make amends. But it didn’t come easily, and as Marek approached them she gave him a smile to make him feel relaxed.

  ‘You found yourself a psychic, then?’ Marek asked.

  ‘A pretty good one, by all accounts,’ Clayton told him. ‘She writes a weekly horoscope for Wszystko o Milosci – that rag that’s all full of sex and recipes and stuff. That’s how I found her.’

  ‘Rej’s late,’ said Sarah, checking her watch. ‘He promised he’d be right on time.’

  ‘Give the guy a break,’ Clayton calmed her. ‘He’s probably knocking back a couple of vodkas to pluck up the courage to come at all. This isn’t easy for him. He’s lost half his goddamned finger. He probably knows more about this Executioner character than anybody else in Poland; yet they’ve bumped him off the case and told him to sit at home and watch Knots Landing dubbed into Polish. I know what it feels like. It happened to me once, back in 1975. In fact it was worse for me because I had to watch Knots Landing in English.’

  Marek said, ‘All my friends said this psychic stuff was bullshit.’

  ‘Why did you come, then?’ asked Sarah, sharply.

  ‘Because I want to see if it works, that’s why. You really believe it’s going to work?’

  Clayton shrugged. ‘I really have no idea. The odds are that I’m making a complete asshole of myself. But like I said before, why restrict yourself? If there’s an infinitesimal chance that you can solve a case by using a psychic medium, then use a psychic. What’s the harm? The worst that could happen is that we get a message from somebody else’s long-dead Aunt Janina, telling us where she left the lottery tickets.’

  They talked a little more. Clayton’s Polish wasn’t very good, but he and Marek seemed to understand each other almost immediately. All through his professional life, Clayton had been dealing with disaffected kids from Polish families in Chicago, and he knew the frustrations that young men like Marek were up against: all the temptations of a material world, and not enough money to buy them. All the problems of living at home with their parents in an apartment that was two sizes too small, and where there was never enough hot water and the toilet always seemed to be occupied. All the disappointment of leaving school with a good degree and finding there was no work for them – or work that was so poorly paid they might just as well have been taxi dri
vers or gas station attendants or counter clerks.

  ‘What I really want,’ said Marek, ‘you know, more than anything else, is to step out onto a stage in front of thousands of people, and they’re cheering like crazy, and then I start playing this amazing guitar solo that blows everybody away.’

  ‘You play with a band?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘Sort of; but there’s only two of us; and it’s almost impossible to find anywhere to practise. All I ever get is, “stop making that bloody awful noise, your sister’s doing her homework!”’

  ‘Sounds like the story of every great musician’s life,’ said Clayton, and clapped him reassuringly on the back.

  Just then, Rej’s Passat came around the corner and jounced onto the sidewalk. Rej climbed out, carrying his plastic bag. ‘Sorry I’m late. I had a call from my mother’s nursing home.’

  ‘Everything okay?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Well, she hasn’t been too well lately. Angina. I guess she’s not bad, though, for seventy-six.’ He rummaged in the bag and produced the doll. ‘This is it, the original doll. If my boss finds out I’ve borrowed it, I’ll probably end up in a nursing home myself.’

  ‘You did good,’ said Clayton. ‘Now, let’s go see this Madame Krystyna.’

  They went up three shallow steps to the front doors of the apartment building. Through the wired-glass doors they could see a dingy vestibule with a mushroom-coloured dado and a striplight that flickered like a migraine. There were two rows of bellpushes beside the doors, and Clayton picked out the one with Madame Krystyna’s card tucked under it. Love, Health, Wealth: Your Fate In The Stars.

  A crackly, expressionless voice said, ‘Madame Krystyna, psychic professional.’

  ‘It’s Clayton Marsh, we have an appointment.’

  Madame Krystyna psychic professional pushed the buzzer and the doors opened. They stepped into the vestibule and found a narrow elevator on their left, so small that they could scarcely squash into it. Rej was standing next to Sarah, and made a conscious effort to keep his arm behind him so that it wouldn’t press against her breast. The lift slowly clanked its way up to the third storey, and they extricated themselves with sighs of relief.