The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  16

  Sarah and Rej met Marek shortly after five o’clock, at a corner table in the Welcome Bar. There were dark circles under his eyes but he was jumping with nervous energy. The waitress brought them two cups of strong coffee and a Russian tea for Sarah.

  Marek described how he and Clayton had followed Mr Okun down into the sewers, and how the Executioner had caught up with them, right underneath Ujazdowskie Avenue.

  Rej said, ‘I didn’t see it, when it cut off my finger, but it sure sounds the same.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same as my nightmare,’ said Sarah. ‘I was absolutely terrified, but I couldn’t wake up.’

  ‘Do you think it was human?’ asked Rej.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marek. ‘It had a human face, but so small. I thought it was a mask, at first, but it couldn’t have been. It came after me so damn fast, man – I don’t know how I got out of that grating.’

  ‘Do you think that it could have been this Mr Okun of yours – changed, somehow.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean by “changed”.’

  ‘Well, changed, you know, like a werewolf. A what-do-you-call-it: a shape-shifter.’

  Marek shook his head. ‘Clayton definitely saw his shoe marks leading into that narrow tunnel, and that must have meant that he was ahead of us. The Executioner came up from behind. Anyway, they were so completely different. Mr Okun’s skinny. Just a skinny white-haired old man. The Executioner – it’s huge.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Sarah, sipping her tea.

  ‘I think we ought to pay Mr Okun a visit.’

  ‘He’s very creepy,’ warned Marek. ‘Even his next-door neighbour is scared of him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I talked to him. He said that Mr Okun was “one of von dem Bach’s bastards”. He said his name wasn’t Okun at all, and that he didn’t speak Polish when he was alone in his apartment. He was “one of them”, that’s what he said.’

  ‘“One of von dem Bach’s bastards”? Are you absolutely sure?’

  Marek nodded. ‘He kept on shouting that Mr Okun was a criminal, and “one of them”.’

  ‘Von dem Bach?’ said Rej. ‘He really mentioned von dem Bach? This could be the best connection yet!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Von dem Bach was the German general who was given the job of putting down the Uprising. He hated Poles so much he was almost like a maniac. He hunted down every man, woman and child who had anything to do with the Polish Home Army, and he shot them, thousands of them. There’s one other thing – he was particularly furious when the Home Army managed to escape through the sewers. He was the one who filled drainpipes with barbed wire, and dropped tear gas and burning gasoline down manholes, even though he knew there were children down there. He had another invention, too: the Taifun-Gerat. It was an apparatus for pumping gas into the sewers and then setting it off in a massive explosion. The “typhoon machine”.’

  Sarah said, ‘You don’t think that Mr Okun could still be hunting down the Home Army... all these years after the war?’

  ‘Why not? The Jews are still looking for Nazis.’

  ‘Clayton wasn’t a member of the Home Army, though, was he?’ said Marek. ‘Why do you think the Executioner killed him?’

  ‘He was a threat,’ said Rej, ‘just like you were.’ He finished his coffee. ‘Let’s go see what Mr Okun has to say for himself.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s going to be okay?’ asked Marek, doubtfully.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Rej. ‘There’s two of us. There’s only one of him.’

  They crossed the street and Marek guided them to the entrance of Mr Okun’s apartment building. Marek pressed the bell-push marked ‘Gajda’ and they edgily waited for an answer. After almost a minute, Marek rang again; but there was still no answer.

  ‘Maybe he went out,’ Sarah suggested.

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s in a wheelchair, and he’s really old and sick. Maybe he switched off his hearing-aid.’

  Marek pressed the bell-push again and again, but without success. After a while, Rej said, ‘Which bell do you think could be Okun’s?’

  ‘He lives right next door. I guess it’s either the bell directly above it or the one directly below it.’

  Rej pushed both of them.

  ‘What are you going to say if he answers?’ said Sarah, wide-eyed.

  ‘I’ll say, “Are you Mr Okun? You’ve just won a two-week vacation to sunny Auschwitz”.’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to have to say anything,’ Rej told her. ‘There’s nobody in.’

  ‘What do we do now? Wait?’ asked Marek. ‘That waitress is beginning to think that I’ve moved in.’

  But Rej was already working on the lock. Within six or seven seconds, he had sprung the levers, and the doors opened. ‘What we do now is, we go take a look at Mr Okun’s apartment while he’s out’

  ‘What if he comes back?’

  ‘Then we’ll make up some stupid excuse; or hit him. How should I know?’

  They crowded into the elevator and Marek pushed the button for 3. The elevator wearily dragged them up to the third floor, and they climbed out. The corridor seemed even gloomier than Marek remembered it, and there was a strong, unpleasant smell.

  ‘Which one’s Okun’s?’ asked Rej, and Marek pointed to the door at the very far end of the corridor. They walked towards it, but as they passed Mr Gajda’s door, the smell became so strong that Rej stopped where he was, and looked the door up and down.

  ‘Is that a gas leak?’ asked Sarah, with her hand cupped over her face. ‘It smells totally disgusting.’

  Rej said, ‘You’d better go back downstairs. I think we’ve got ourselves a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘That smell... I think that something could be dead in there. Maybe it’s just a dog or a cat, but I’ll have to take a look.’

  ‘If you’re going to take a look then I want to take a look too.’

  ‘Believe me, Sarah, you’ll regret it. Why don’t you and Marek go back outside until I’ve seen what this is. Otherwise, I promise you, you’re going to lose your lunch at about twenty times the speed that you ate it.’

  ‘I can take it.’

  ‘All right,’ Rej shrugged. ‘But if you do feel sick, make sure you’re pointing the other way. I just washed and pressed these trousers.’

  He took out his lockpicks again, and opened Mr Gajda’s door. A steady, warm draught blew out of it, sickly with the smell of corrupted flesh. Marek gave a cackling retch, and said, ‘Sorry’, and had to turn away. Rej took out his crumpled pack of Kleenex and covered his face. Sarah had only a small lacy handkerchief in her bag, but she took it out and sprayed Giorgio perfume on it, and held it to her nose.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Rej, in a muffled voice.

  ‘I want to, Stefan. I’ve come this far.’

  ‘All right, then. It’s your funeral.’

  They entered the hallway. It was cramped and dingy, and crowded with coats and walking-sticks and old, bunion-distorted shoes. Rej nudged open the kitchen door. The kitchen was better lit, because it had a frosted-glass window facing to the south, but the sunlight revealed how filthy it was in the way that old people’s kitchens become filthy, through semi-blindness, and lack of strength, and forgetfulness. Rej glanced around it, without saying a word. Then he stepped across the corridor and opened the living-room door.

  The living-room was shabby, too, although there were some homely touches like a hand-woven blanket over one of the chairs, and a gilded statuette of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece over the electric fire, and a reproduction of a painting by Jacek Malczewski, called Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet, although it was a woman in a white blouse who was doing the washing, and the disciple had the abstracted, sombre look of a careworn father, or a soldier returned from the war.

  Rej paused for a momen
t, looking, listening. Then he went further along the corridor to the bedroom; and by his stiff-legged movement, and the jerky way in which he opened the door, Sarah could tell that he knew what he had to expect. Except that she didn’t expect it: a torrential swarm of fat green blowflies, thousands of them, pouring out of the open doorway and pattering against the walls. Rej stepped back, and swatted at them, but all Sarah could do was shut her eyes and cover her hair with her hands.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she cried out. ‘Oh, God, no!’

  Blowflies tapped against her hands and dropped from her sleeves and crawled on her shoulders. One flew right into her lips, and she spat and spat and furiously wiped her mouth with her handkerchief. But at last the storm began to subside, with flies on the ceiling and flies on the walls, and more flies circling around the kitchen. Rej didn’t even look back at Sarah, but stepped into the bedroom alone. Sarah swallowed, and felt as if she were swallowing flies, but she knew that she had to go, too. She was never going to let Ben bring her down; she was never going to let Piotr Gogiel cheat her; and she was never going to let Stefan do something which she couldn’t do.

  She walked down to the bedroom, and forced herself to go through the door. Her eyes were open, but at first she was blind with panic; and even when the room did come into focus, she couldn’t understand what she was looking at.

  A double bed stood against the right-hand wall, with a pale green coverlet slewed across it. Above the wooden bedhead, the wall was literally hosed in blood, all the way up to the picture-rail, and beyond the picture-rail, and across the ceiling. The coverlet, too, was covered in massive, dark-brown stains, all dried now, like maps of terrible continents, and islands, and places where no sane man would ever dare to travel.

  In the middle of the bed lay two glistening black mounds, side by side. They seemed to move and glitter; and it was only gradually that Sarah could see what they were. Two headless human bodies, smothered in blowflies, thousands and thousands of feeding, egg-laying, green-glistening blowflies.

  Vomit rose up in her throat, sharpened with bile; but with an effort she managed to swallow it back down. Rej was standing at the end of the bed, looking at her. He seemed to be transformed; a different kind of Stefan altogether.

  ‘Somebody’s cut off their heads,’ he said.

  Sarah couldn’t do anything but nod, and nod, and try to stop herself from being sick. She was perspiring so much that she could feel it trickling down the small of her back.

  Rej flapped away another fly. ‘Don’t tell Marek this, but this could have happened because of him. If Mr Okun knew that Gajda had identified him as one of von dem Bach’s SS men... and then Marek and Clayton chased him down the sewers... well, he could have decided to shut Gajda up.’

  ‘Are you going to call the police station?’ asked Sarah, her voice muffled behind her handkerchief.

  ‘In a minute. I want to take a look in Okun’s apartment first, although I’ll bet you ten million zlotys that he’s gone. Old zlotys, that is, in case he hasn’t.’

  He walked around the bed, and as he did so, his toe accidentally chipped against the left-hand leg. Instantly, the blowflies billowed up from both of the bodies in a thick, noisy cloud, and for a split-second Sarah could see what they really looked like. Headless, horribly anonymous, their stomachs distended with gas. Every inch of them was bobbly-white with flies’ eggs, and their crotches and armpits were alive with maggots.

  Then, like a glittering veil, the blowflies covered them up again, and preserved the modesty of their awful death.

  Sarah managed not to be sick. She didn’t know how. But when she reached the corridor she went directly to the window and pushed it open, and took a deep, thankful breath. Marek came up behind her and laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘They’re dead, huh?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘They’re dead. A man and a woman, both with their heads cut off.’

  In a surprisingly mature and gentle movement, Marek drew her hair away from her face. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘It was my choice,’ said Sarah. ‘I knew that it was going to be bad. I just wanted to face up to it.’

  Rej came up the corridor jingling his lock-picks. He was trying to appear nonchalant, but he too was looking ashen. ‘Let’s take a look into Okun’s apartment. Maybe it’ll give us some clues.’

  Deftly, he opened the door, and they all stepped inside. They could see at once that the apartment was empty. There was no furniture, no pictures on the walls, no curtains, no lampshades, nothing. All that was left of Mr Okun’s tenancy were some rusty circular marks on the pea-green carpet where his chairs had stood, and a tiny triangle of paper stuck to the opposite wall. Rej walked across the room, pulled out the thumbtack that was holding it, and turned the little piece of paper this way and that. On one side it had a fragment of dark-blue border, and a beige-and-white pattern that could have been streets, on a street map. On the other side, the words ‘Powstanie Warszawskie postawilo ponownie w koncowej fazie wojny przed swiatem problem Polski...’

  ‘This is a part of a map of the Warsaw Uprising,’ said Rej. ‘You can buy them in all of the tourist shops.’

  Marek was in the kitchen. ‘He’s left most of his food behind. Sugar, coffee, black cherries in syrup. Phff, this milk’s off.’

  ‘So where has he gone, I wonder?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘More to the point,’ said Rej, ‘who the hell is he?’

  Sarah paced around the room, looking for anything that might give them a clue. She found a single white shirt-button; a used postage-stamp with a picture of the Pope on it; a small spring; and a desiccated toenail clipping.

  She went into the bathroom – and there, in a cloudy glass, was a yellow plastic toothbrush with widely-splayed bristles. ‘I’ve suddenly thought of something,’ she said. ‘Madame Krystyna managed to use Zofia’s doll to show us where Zofia used to live. Maybe if we gave her this toothbrush?’

  Marek came across and wrinkled up his nose at it. ‘You’re not serious, are you? That’s disgusting.’

  ‘It worked before; why shouldn’t it work again?’

  ‘But Zofia’s doll, that was something she loved... something personal.’

  ‘What’s more personal than somebody’s toothbrush?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rej. ‘Zofia was dead, and the spirits wanted to help us. So far as we know, Okun’s alive; and I can’t see him being very popular, especially with the spirits in Warsaw.’

  ‘All the more reason for them to help us to track him down.’

  ‘Well...’ said Rej, taking the toothbrush between finger and thumb. ‘I guess we can only try.’

  Marek said, ‘What are we going to do about them? Mr Gajda, and that woman? We can’t just leave them there.’

  ‘No, we’re not going to,’ said Rej. ‘We’re going to the nearest call-box and make an anonymous phone call. I don’t want Nadkomisarz Dembek to know that I’m involved. I’m supposed to be on temporary leave, remember? I don’t want Dembek making it permanent.’

  ‘You’re still coming to the exorcism tonight, though, aren’t you?’ asked Sarah.

  Rej gave her the grimmest of nods. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the life of me.’

  *

  She called her father. In Chicago, it was only 9:30 in the morning, and he was still reading the morning paper. She could see him with her mind’s eye, sitting on the porch at the back of the house, wearing his striped blue-and-white bathrobe, handsome in a slabby, Jack Palance kind of way, his grey hair combed straight back from his forehead.

  ‘Dad? It’s Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah? Are you back in the States?’

  ‘No, I’m still in Warsaw. Yes, I know it sounds clear. I’m sorry I haven’t called for so long. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, your mother’s fine. We’re taking a short vacation at the end of next week: we’re going to Tampa to see your Aunt Clara.’

  ‘Dad – I called for a reason.’

  ‘You don’t want to borr
ow money, do you? I thought you were loaded these days.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing to do with money. It’s something I’m trying to find out. You were in the AK, weren’t you, the Polish Home Army?’

  There was a short silence. ‘What suddenly brought this up?’ her father asked her.

  ‘I know you don’t like to talk about the war. But something’s been happening here in Warsaw, people have been murdered, and the police think it may be connected with the Uprising.’

  ‘What does Clayton think about it?’

  ‘He – ah – Clayton thinks the same.’

  ‘How’s he getting on, by the way? He’s a great character, isn’t he? Clayton and me, we go way back.’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s out of town right now, doing some research.’

  ‘Well, you have him call me, soon as he gets back.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll do that,’ Sarah said sadly. She didn’t want to tell him yet that Clayton had been killed. It would upset him far too much – and, besides, the police hadn’t even recovered his body yet, if they ever could.

  ‘So, what is it you want to ask me?’ said her father. She heard him cup his hand over the receiver, and say to her mother, ‘It’s Sarah... she just wants to ask me something. I’ll put her on in a minute.’

  Sarah said, ‘You ran messages, didn’t you, down through the sewers?’

  ‘That’s right. Mainly I used to take them from Stare Miasto, that’s the Old Town, right along the main sewer that runs under Krakowskie Przedmiescie, and out at Warecka, in the town centre. Sometimes I went as far as Marszalkowska... right underneath that hotel of yours, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘The Germans tried all different ways of stopping you, didn’t they, like pouring gasoline down the sewers, and blocking them with barbed wire?’

  ‘Smoke they used, too. Thick black smoke. Once I nearly died from breathing in smoke.’

  ‘Dad – was there anything else they used? Like somebody specially trained to hunt you down?’

  This time the silence was even longer. ‘I don’t know, Sarah. Those were terrible days, and they’re best forgotten.’

  ‘This is important, Dad. This is really important. If I don’t find out about this, I may lose my job.’