The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t remember seeing a doll like that.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to go in and ask, won’t we?’ said Rej.

  ‘There’s no point in trying number 5,’ the woman told him. ‘They’ve been away for over a week.’

  ‘Away? Do you know where they are?’

  She shook her head again. ‘She never tells me anything. She’s always very quiet, coming and going like a mouse. She’s a single mother, see. Her husband left her and went off with some tart.’

  ‘Did she say when she was coming back?’

  ‘I didn’t even know that she was going. She didn’t say a word. She just went.’

  ‘Do you have a key to that apartment?’ Rej asked her.

  ‘Yes, but she won’t like it if I let you in. She keeps herself to herself.’

  Rej took out his wallet and handed her ten zlotys. ‘That’s for your expenses.’

  ‘What do you think I am?’ the woman asked him, one eye slitted against the sunlight. ‘A tart, too?’

  Rej looked at Clayton completely deadpan; and then they both laughed; and Sarah laughed too.

  ‘Just give me the key,’ said Rej; and the woman stood up and fished a huge bunch of keys out of the pocket of her housecoat.

  ‘Here,’ she said, fussy and embarrassed, and laughing, too, and pried a long brass key off the ring. ‘But don’t tell her I gave it to you.’

  ‘All right,’ Rej agreed. ‘So long as you don’t tell her that I gave it to you.’

  The woman couldn’t resist grinning and slapping his arm. ‘It’s men like you...!’

  They entered the apartment block. Inside the lobby, there was a red vinyl-covered chair with knobby gold feet and, on the wall, a faded photograph of John Paul II celebrating mass in Pilsudskiego Square. They pressed the button for the elevator, and rose together to the fifth floor. Sarah looked at herself in the mottled mirror and wished she hadn’t worn her pink linen suit: it creased so easily, especially in Rej’s sticky-seated car.

  Number 5 was right across the corridor from the elevator. There was a name-card pinned to the brown door: Wierzbicka. Rej knocked, waited a few seconds for an answer, and then opened the door with the key. ‘Anybody home?’ he called; but it was obvious that nobody was.

  Inside, there was a cramped little entrance hall with overcoats and woolly hats hanging on pegs. To the right, an open door led to a kitchenette, with a small electric cooker and a collection of cheap plastic jars for sugar and tea. There was a door at the end of the kitchenette, with a small wired-glass window in it. Sarah peered out through the window and saw darkened service stairs. They reminded her of the service stairs in the apartment building that she had lived in when she was little: she had always imagined Morlocks and other monsters shuffling up and down them.

  On the right side of the entrance hall, there was a drab, brown-wallpapered living-room, furnished with a sagging green couch, a small television set and two mismatched armchairs, one plum and one lime green. Sarah went to the window to look out over the street, but what caught Clayton’s attention was a coffee mug lying on its side next to the couch, and a dry brown stain of coffee on the carpet. He beckoned to Rej and nodded at it without saying anything.

  Rej carefully searched the room from one end to the other, going down on his knees to look behind the couch, lifting the cushions, peering under the chairs.

  ‘What’s he looking for?’ Sarah asked Clayton.

  ‘Anything,’ Clayton told her. ‘People don’t usually leave their apartments without cleaning up.’

  Rej stood up and brushed the knees of his trousers. ‘Nothing else,’ he said. ‘Let’s try the bedroom.’

  They went through to the single bedroom. It smelled of lavender talcum powder and damp. There was a double bed on one side, covered with a knitted bedspread, and a single bed on the other. Above the double bed hung a crucifix. Above the single bed a poster of Michael Jackson had been taped, and on the pillow there were three more knitted dolls, all of them bearing a striking family resemblance to the one they had found in the sewer.

  Clayton said, ‘This is it all right, Zofia’s house. But where the hell is Zofia?’

  Rej opened the rickety chipboard closet. It was cramful of clothes, and a purple plastic travelling-bag was wedged into the bottom of it, next to the shoes.

  ‘These people didn’t go on holiday.’ he said. ‘These people just upped and left. Or else they were kidnapped. Or worse. That was why nobody reported a girl missing on the night that Kaminski was killed.’

  Rej cautiously opened the bathroom door and peered around it. A tap was softly dripping into a brown-stained bath. On a plastic shelf under the cabinet, he found a glass with two toothbrushes in it, one adult size, one smaller. Sarah came and stood beside him while he opened the cabinet and sorted through it. Deodorant, shower gel, L’Oreal shampoo, tweezers, three false eyelashes, tampons.

  ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’ said Sarah. She found their cheap, abandoned belongings infinitely poignant.

  ‘We won’t know that for sure until we find their bodies. But, yes. Even if you’re running out on your unpaid rent, you take your toothbrush with you.’

  They went back into the living-room, where Clayton was searching through the drawers of a small varnished bureau. There was nothing much: a few untidy bundles of letters, five or six envelopes stuffed with photographs. A carefully-folded communion gown, beautifully embroidered, silky and stale, in tissue paper. A red tin chocolate box with sewing materials in it. Half a dozen different-coloured balls of wool.

  Rej looked through the photographs. He came across one of a blonde-haired young girl in a yellow flower-printed dress, standing by the concrete bear pit at Praga Zoo. One hand was lifted to shield her eyes from the sun, which cast a dark shadow on her face. Rej shuffled through the pictures and found several more of the same young girl.

  ‘Zofia?’ he asked, passing one of them to Sarah.

  Sarah nodded. ‘She must be.’

  Without a word, Rej passed her another one. It showed the girl sitting on the steps outside the apartment block, hugging the same knitted doll that they had found in the sewer. The same knitted doll that had bled on Madame Krystyna’s table.

  ‘The question is,’ said Clayton, ‘how did one man manage to abduct both Zofia and her mother without anyone seeing him?’

  ‘Who says it was one man?’ Rej countered. ‘Maybe that’s the key to this case... it wasn’t just a lone psycho. It was two people, or possibly more.’

  ‘I don’t know... we only saw one figure in those psychic images.’

  ‘Clayton, those were nothing more than pictures in the air. Intuition. Magic, if you like.’

  ‘They led us here, though, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rej admitted. ‘They led us here. But we still have to have substantive evidence. Even if we find the Executioner, we can’t make an arrest on the basis of psychic images, can we?’

  ‘Let’s find him first,’ said Clayton. ‘We can worry about the evidence later.’

  Rej opened another packet of photographs. These were older, black-and-white and sepia, with folded, dog-eared edges. There was a picture of a pretty teenage girl in a black coat and white ankle socks, standing self-consciously in a park. Whoever had taken the photograph had cast their shadow across the path. Then there was another picture of the same girl, wearing a one-piece bathing-costume. He turned it over. Pencilled on the back were the words ‘Iwona, 1976’.

  ‘This must be Zofia’s mother,’ said Rej. ‘You can see the resemblance.’

  Clayton nodded. ‘She must have been about fourteen here, by the look of her, which would make her early to midthirties now. So Zofia must have been – what, six or seven?’

  Rej found photographs of Iwona as a very small girl – then pictures of her parents, and her grandparents. Then he came across three pictures which had obviously been taken in wartime. One showed three girl couriers who had somehow managed to find
themselves Polish Army uniforms, complete with peaked caps, standing next to a broad-shouldered man in a jacket and a beret. Another showed the same man shaking hands with another man who was wearing a dark military uniform. In the third, he was standing next to a barricade of asphalt blocks, smoking a cigarette. He was trying to look nonchalant but he succeeded only in looking hungry.

  Only the second photograph bore a caption. In slanting writing, it said ‘K. Kucma & J.Z. Zawodny, August 7, 1944.’

  ‘Home Army,’ said Rej. ‘J.Z. Zawodny was one of their main leaders.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Clayton.

  ‘I don’t know yet. But this fellow Kucma must have been related to Iwona and Zofia. He could have been Iwona’s grandfather... maybe her father, even. He looks pretty young in this picture. No more than twenty or twenty-one.’

  ‘And? So?’

  ‘When I looked over Ewa Zborowska’s apartment – you know, that girl who was murdered on Grojecka – she had a picture of her father from 1944, with General Bór.’

  ‘So two victims out of fourteen had parents or grandparents in the Home Army. That can’t be too statistically unusual, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know. Many of the Home Army were shot. Many were taken prisoner. But a lot of them survived. And it’s a connection, isn’t it?’

  Clayton said, ‘Why don’t you follow it up? You know, check on the family backgrounds of every single victim?’

  ‘That’s going to take days. You think it’s worth it?’

  ‘Of course. It rings a little bell in the back of your head, doesn’t it? A little tinkle-tinkle-tinkle. It may come to nothing, but you’re a cop, just like me, and when those little bells start tinkling, it’s time to find out why.’

  ‘You’re right,’ agreed Rej. He took out a Marlboro but Sarah gave him the ray and he didn’t light it.

  ‘Question is,’ said Clayton, ‘what did the Executioner do with Zofia and Iwona’s mortal remains? It’s difficult enough to abduct somebody who doesn’t want to be abducted. It’s even harder to get rid of two dead bodies.’

  Sarah said, ‘There was a service door in the kitchen, wasn’t there? Maybe he took them out that way.’

  They went back to the kitchenette. The service door was locked. Clayton and Sarah searched through the cupboard and peered in all of the plastic spice-jars, but they couldn’t find a key. While they did so, Rej placidly produced a worn black leather wallet full of lock picks, and took less than a minute to open it.

  ‘That’s very effete,’ said Clayton. ‘In Chicago, if we couldn’t find the key, we always use to kick them down.’

  ‘In Warsaw, doors are expensive,’ said Rej. ‘We treat them with respect.’

  The service stairs were gloomy and smelled of dust. On the far side of the landing, there was a battered metal flap, with a handle. ‘Garbage chute,’ said Rej. He opened it up and they were overwhelmed by a warm, foul draught. ‘Straight down into the basement.’

  They all looked at each other. ‘What do you think?’ said Clayton.

  ‘I don’t even want to think,’ Sarah told him.

  ‘We have to face it. He could have killed the mother, thrown her down the garbage chute and abducted the little girl. That wouldn’t have attracted so much attention.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Rej.

  ‘Come on, Rej,’ Clayton told him. ‘We have to sift through the trash; there’s no other way of knowing; not for sure.’

  ‘I’m on suspension. I can’t call out for a search squad, not without consulting Nadkomisarz Dembek. I can’t even call out for a pizza.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to be the search squad, you and me.’

  The garbage from the apartment building was stored in four large galvanized metal bins in a small high-walled yard, right at the rear. There was a strong smell of rotting cabbage and burning. The woman with the mole came down to show them where they were. ‘They’re supposed to come to collect them once a week, but they never do. And kids are always setting fire to it, look.’ One of the bins had been burned out, its sides scorched and all of the rubbish inside it turned to ash.

  Rej said, ‘Iwona didn’t go on vacation, you know. You see these ashes?’

  The woman stared at him for a long time. Then she turned towards the trash bins. Rej said nothing, didn’t even blink. After a while the woman turned and went back up the steps to the apartment block’s rear entrance. The door closed behind her with a vibrant bang. In Warsaw, for people of a certain age, there were things that didn’t bear remembering, and among those things that didn’t bear remembering were killings, and ashes.

  Clayton opened the top of the burned-out trash container. It was heaped to the brim with greyish-white ashes, as well as an odd assortment of objects that wouldn’t burn, like blackened cans and bottle tops and spoons and wire coat hangers. He dug his hand into the ash and let it run through his fingers. ‘God, this must be five feet deep. We’re never going to find anything in this.’

  ‘We’re the search squad,’ said Rej.

  Sarah said, ‘Tip the bins over, that’s all you have to do. If there’s any charge for clearing up, Senate will pay for it.’

  Rej looked at her with respect. ‘Okay. That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.’

  Between them, he and Clayton took hold of the bins, one by one, and threw them onto their sides. They made a thunderous banging, and their lids flew open, and heaps of garbage spread all across the yard, until they were ankle deep in it. The woman with the mole came to the back door and stared at them for a while, but then she went away again, still without saying a word. Rej and Clayton used a sweeping-brush and a garden fork, and started to comb through the ash.

  ‘God, I never thought that I’d ever have to do this again,’ said Clayton, in disgust, as he flung away a filthy discarded diaper. But Rej was too busy raking through twisted bottles and cans and springs.

  Sarah found a spade with a broken handle and started sorting through the ashes, too. Working with Clayton and Rej was so unlike anything that she had ever done before that she felt quite amateurish and inexperienced. She had misjudged Rej, in a way. He was cautious, yes, and deeply suspicious of anything novel, especially if it came from the West; but he had a persistence that she had never found in anybody else before, a single-mindedness that was both sad and admirable at the same time.

  Rej said, ‘For God’s sake, how many jars of sauerkraut do these people eat?’

  Clayton said, ‘Look – I think I’ve found a ring. Is this somebody’s ring?’

  He held it up and Sarah and Rej came to look at it. It was a thin circlet, deeply discoloured by fire, but it was undeniably a woman’s ring. Not a wedding band, necessarily, but something similar. The kind of ring that a single woman might wear to ward off unwelcome approaches.

  All three of them concentrated their efforts on the heaps of ash close to where Clayton had discovered it. They found more bottle tops, more cans, more half incinerated newspapers and magazines and potato peelings. Then Rej tried to dislodge the next heap with his sweeping-brush. There was a terrible soft lurching sound, the ash dropped, and a ribcage was revealed, a scorched ribcage, with part of a shoulder blade.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Clayton. ‘I was right.’

  ‘I don’t think we should touch this any more,’ Rej told him. ‘We could mess up the evidence. Let me call Matejko and have him come down here with the guys from forensic.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Clayton. He reached out and took hold of Sarah’s hand. ‘Besides... I think you’ve probably had enough of this kind of stuff for one lifetime, haven’t you?’

  Sarah dropped her shovel. Her mouth felt dry and she felt as if she had a temperature. All the same, she couldn’t stop looking at the ribcage lying in the ashes, and thinking of the photographs of Iwona in her bathing-costume, smiling into the sunlight.

  ‘Do you think that’s her?’ she asked Rej.

  He put his arm around her shoulder and led her through the spilled ashes, back to
the steps. ‘I don’t see how it could be anybody else. But the forensic people will tell us for sure.’

  ‘Iwona,’ said Sarah, under her breath, almost as if she had known her.

  *

  Jarczyk’s pre-dawn raid on Roman Zboinski’s apartment had gone badly wrong, but only because Roman Zboinski hadn’t been there. Six police cars had arrived simultaneously at the corner of Targowa Street and Solidarnosci Avenue, their lights flashing, and a group of seven armed officers had burst into the apartment block with a battering-ram and two police dogs. They had knocked open the door of Zboinski’s apartment, to find it dark and completely deserted, although there were signs that Zboinski intended to return, such as a video-recorder timed for Gliniarz i Prokurator, the American cop show on Channel 1.

  Now, at 11:07 in the morning, Jarczyk and Matejko and twelve other officers were waiting impatiently in four unmarked cars for Roman Zboinski to come home. The sky was hazy, but the sun was almost unbearably hot, and they sat with the windows wide open, sweating and smoking and passing round cans of Coke. Matejko kept checking his watch. He had promised Helena that he would drive her to the clinic this afternoon, but unless Zboinski showed up soon, it looked as if he were going to have to let her down.

  Jarczyk was nervous, jumpy, and kept drumming his fingers on the dash. ‘It’s typical,’ he kept saying. ‘He lives in that apartment 364 days of the year; but the one day I want to arrest him, he isn’t there.’

  ‘Actually, he only lives here in August and September,’ Matejko told him. ‘The rest of the time he’s in Holland; or else he’s in Spain.’

  ‘What are you, a friend of his?’ asked Jarczyk.

  ‘No... but I pulled his file as soon as I knew you wanted to arrest him.’

  Jarczyk said, ‘Good. Fine. Good work,’ although he was obviously irritated.

  They waited another hour. There was scarcely any breeze through the trees around St Mary Magdalene Church. Two of the men were sent to a delicatessen on Targowa for sandwiches, and returned with broad smiles and armfuls of ham, salami and salad rolls.

  ‘Very subtle,’ said Jarczyk, as they went from car to car, handing out the food. ‘You don’t suppose this looks anything like a stakeout, do you?’