Most poignant of all, though, was an oval picture of a good-looking man with a big moustache and his hair extra-neatly parted, and a curiously defensive look on his face, as if he wasn’t used to being photographed.
‘Jozef’s father,’ said Mrs Brzezicki, picking it up. ‘He died in 1982. A good Solidarity man.’
‘I can see the resemblance,’ said Rej.
‘So, how was the exorcism?’ asked Mrs Brzezicki, sitting down on the sofa so close to Rej that he could feel her corsets.
‘The exorcism, pfff!’ said Brzezicki.
‘I saw it,’ said Father Xawery, his single eye darting from one side of the room to the other. ‘I was saying the Our Father; and everything went dark; but then it came right at me, with its face shining and its knife held high... and I was never so frightened in my whole life. I held – I held up the relic – that was all I could do – and then it was gone. I hid myself under the table and I prayed like I’ve never prayed before.’
‘It was the Tunnel Child,’ said Brzezicki. ‘My mother said it was, as soon as she heard about Jan Kaminski. I know that it’s hard to believe in such things; but it’s true.’
Sarah said, ‘I didn’t believe you before, Mr Brzezicki. But I believe you now. I talked to my father this afternoon, in Chicago, and he knew about it, too. My father used to carry messages for the Home Army during the war. He said that there was something in the sewers... something that used to chase them, and cut off their heads if it caught them.’
Mrs Brzezicki sat back and nodded. ‘My great-grandfather told me all about it. He helped to build the sewers and the drains. One day they were digging close to the city centre and they found it buried in the ground. A child, but not a child. Dead, but not dead. They left it in their hut, but in the morning it was gone. Afterward, nine or ten people were killed in the middle of Warsaw, and their heads cut off. Some of the sewer workers said that they could hear children crying in the sewers, and the sound of somebody rushing along the pipes. They were always frightened to go down into the sewers alone, and who can blame them? But the next year, the killings suddenly stopped. My great-grandfather didn’t know this for certain, but some of the men said that they found the creature sleeping, whatever it was, child or monster or a bit of both, and they buried it, and stamped down the earth, and called in a priest to say the sacrament over it.’
She patted Brzezicki on the thigh, and laughed. ‘This poor boy, I used to tell him such frightening stories, when he was little! It isn’t surprising he thought of a devil, when Mr Kaminski was killed. But I think he was right. It is a devil, and it’s the same devil. They’ve been digging up Warsaw right, left and centre – digging all these deep foundations. I think they’ve set him free, that’s what they’ve done. Dug him out of the ground, without even realizing it. And that’s who your Executioner is; or whatever you call him; your Tunnel Child.’
Father Xawery rattled his teacup back into his saucer, and sat up straight. ‘I didn’t realize what they were asking me to do. They offered me money, to restore my church, and said that they needed an exorcism. I imagined a bad smell, perhaps; or oozing walls; or something of that kind. I didn’t realize it was that.’
‘You knew about it already?’ asked Sarah.
‘Of course. When the Germans invaded, I was a novice at Our Lady of Grace, Patroness of Poland. I’m afraid to say that I wasn’t so holy in those days. I did everything I could to help the Home Army. I knew “Karol” very well – Lieutenant-Colonel Rokicki. He was fighting to hold Upper Mokotow, but in the end he had to order an evacuation through the sewers – and it was then that we were attacked. That creature went through twenty or thirty at a time, cutting off their heads, and there was nothing that anybody could do to stop it.’
He paused, and then he said, with infinite sadness, ‘I didn’t go down the sewers. I surrendered to the Germans. Because I was a priest, they let me go. They beat me, and kicked me, and then they said, “Go on... go away”, and I never felt so defeated in my life. They shot so many of my friends; and those they didn’t shoot they sent to the camps.’
Rej said, ‘That thing down the sewers, did you ever find out what it was?’
Father Xawery nodded. ‘After the war, I devoted many hours to trying to discover what the Tunnel Child might have been. It was like a dreadful fairy tale, you know; a terrible story to frighten your children; and nobody dared to speak of it; but I knew it was true. I went right back through all of the history books, and in the end I think I understood what it was. The trouble is, it seems impossible. Yet I think to myself, if Christ is capable of miracles, perhaps the Anti-Christ is capable of miracles, too.’
Sarah laid her hand over his, and she felt as if she were laying her hand over history; as if his papery skin was a palimpsest of years gone by, rubbed out but never completely erased.
‘In Checiny, in the 13th century, there was a small order of monks, the Recondites, who concerned themselves with discovering the mysteries of life. They were self-sufficient, and spoke to nobody, but there were many stories told about them; and the things that they did in search of earthly and supernatural knowledge. They were supposed to have joined two pigs together, to make one; and to teach a bull to walk on its hind legs. The legend says that the Recondites found a girl in a nearby village who was deaf-mute and malformed at birth. They bought the girl from her impoverished parents, and kept her at their monastery until she was old enough to conceive. Then they tried to impregnate her with a mixture of human semen and cockroaches, to see if a woman could give birth to a child that had the attributes of both species. Intelligent, like a human being. Reverent to God, and obedient to its masters. But possessed of enormous strength, and longevity, and a merciless turn of mind.’
‘You’re not trying to say that it worked?’ asked Rej.
‘It’s legend. We don’t have any proof. And you know what it’s like, trying to find historical evidence in Poland. The Swedes invaded, and took everything away. Then the Russians swept in, and took everything away. Then the Prussians, then the French, then the Russians again, then the Germans, then the Germans again, then the Russians. It’s very difficult to trace such old documents.’
‘But you’re saying it worked,’ Rej repeated.
Father Xawery nodded his head. ‘I believe that it did. I don’t know how; but the Recondites had extraordinary scientific skills, far in advance of the age in which they lived. I believe it worked more than once; and that the Order of Recondites produced six or seven children who were human, but not quite human. Like humans, they could think. Like humans, they needed companionship, and someone to love. But just like cockroaches, they abhorred the light, and they needed to live in damp, dark places. They could bury themselves in the soil and they could hibernate for months. I don’t know, perhaps they could hibernate for years, if you can believe that such a thing is possible.’
‘But how did they get into the Warsaw sewers?’ asked Sarah.
‘It all started in 1409. The Teutonic Knights heard stories that the Recondites were capable of working magic. They sacked the monastery and killed all the monks. However, they spared the lives of these six or seven children, because they discovered that they would fight like demons for anyone who fed them and protected them while they hibernated. They clad them in armour, and sent them off to fight in eastern Pomerania. There are many stories about that. They fought so fiercely, with no regard for anything but killing, that many Polish soldiers ran away as soon as they saw them. It was only when King Ladislaus defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald that the children were left without anybody to protect them. Most of them escaped, but one was brought back to Warsaw, and buried.’
‘That’s exactly what Clayton told me!’ Marek put in. ‘He’d been in the library, looking up everything he could find about people who were killed by having their heads cut off. He mentioned the Battle of Grunwald – and, what else? Somebody the newspapers called Mr Guillotine. I don’t know when that was.’
> ‘Oh, I know when that was,’ said Father Xawery. ‘That was in the autumn and winter of 1881 and 1882. There were nine murders then, all by beheading, and in every case the head had been taken away. They bore all the hallmarks of the children’s killings, but it took me a long time to work out why there had suddenly been such a spate of them. When I realized what the answer was, it seemed obvious. In 1881, the British engineer William Lindley was constructing Warsaw’s first sewage system. That was the time that your great-grandfather was talking about, Mrs Brzezicki.
‘I didn’t know that the sewage workers managed to find the Tunnel Child and bury him. I’d always assumed that he simply crawled back into the soil and continued his hibernation. But it seems clear that the Germans found him again, when they started to bombard Warsaw. Somehow they must have discovered who or what he was, and used him against the insurgents.
‘For the sewers, you see, the Tunnel Child is a perfect predator. He can sense his prey in almost total darkness, and he is completely at home in damp, polluted places. He has enormous strength in his arms and legs, in the same way that a cockroach has enormous strength. Yet he has the intelligence of a human being, and he can wield a knife.’
‘Would he be hard to kill?’ asked Rej.
‘He seems to have proved almost invulnerable, up until now. Remember that cockroaches are one of the few creatures on earth who have shown themselves to be capable of surviving a nuclear explosion.’
Sarah finished her vodka and stood up. ‘You’re looking tired, Father Xawery. Why don’t we take you back to your hotel?’
‘Oh, no, I won’t hear of it!’ said Mrs Brzezicki. ‘The Father must stay with us! I have a good soft bed in the spare room, Father. You’ll sleep like a baby!’
‘Well, I’m not so sure of that,’ Father Xawery told her, trying to smile. ‘It’s one thing to know the history of something terrible, like the Tunnel Child. It’s quite another to meet it face to face.’
Sarah and Rej and Marek shook Father Xawery by the hand, and said goodbye to Mrs Brzezicki. In the hallway, Jozef Brzezicki said, ‘You believe me now, that it’s a devil?’
‘I should never have doubted you, should I?’ said Sarah.
‘You’re going to try to hunt it down?’
Sarah nodded. ‘We have some leads. We’re going to follow them up in the morning.’
‘If there’s anything you need –’
Sarah kissed his stubbly cheek. ‘Thanks, Mr Brzezicki. I appreciate it more than you know.’
*
They dropped off Marek and then Rej drove Sarah back to her apartment.
‘I’d ask you up for a drink, Stefan, but I desperately really need to get some sleep.’
He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll see you in the morning. How about ten o’clock. I’ll call Madame Krystyna and see if she can help us to track down Mr Okun.’
She squeezed his hand, and kissed him lightly on the lips. They both knew that they would never sleep together again.
‘Goodnight,’ said Sarah, and climbed out of the car.
Rej waited until he saw her putting her key in the door, and then he drove away. Sarah had already opened the door and was just about to go inside when she heard somebody calling her in a hoarse stage whisper. ‘Miss Leonard! Over here, Miss Leonard!’
She turned. A man was standing in the narrow dark alley beside her apartment building. He was wearing a creased blue suit and holding a large brown envelope.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked.
‘Over here, quick! I don’t know whether anybody followed me!’
Cautiously, Sarah stepped across to the alleyway, making sure that she stayed in the light. The man came forward, and the streetlamp illuminated his face. It was Piotr Gogiel, looking sweaty and tired.
‘I’ve been waiting for you for two hours. I was just about to give it up and go home.’
‘You could have come to the office in the morning.’
‘Not to give you this,’ he said, handing over the envelope. ‘This is your proper bank statement... I found a copy in Antoni Dlubak’s filing cabinet. It shows you how all of Roman Zboinski’s money was run through the Senate contingency account, and who authorized it, everything.’
‘Ben Saunders?’
Piotr Gogiel said, ‘Yes, I’m sorry to say. He had another account, too, with a Russian gangster – a man called Shtemenkov. I asked one of my friends about Shtemenkov, and apparently he’s a well-known drug dealer.’
Sarah grasped Piotr Gogiel’s hand and said, ‘Thanks, Mr Gogiel. I know how risky this was. Believe me – you’ll get your reward for it.’
‘Sometimes there are only two choices,’ said Piotr Gogiel. ‘The right one, and the wrong one.’
17
She undressed, put on her silky blue Japanese robe, and made herself a cup of herbal tea. She opened the french windows and went out onto the balcony, leaning on the balustrade and looking at the lights of Warsaw. Although it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, a warm wind was blowing from the west, carrying with it the distant clanking sounds of trains being marshalled.
She kept thinking of Ben’s abortive ‘exorcism’, and everything that Father Xawery had told them about the Tunnel Child. She didn’t think it was possible that any human being could really have hibernated through hundreds of years; but she believed in the Tunnel Child’s existence, and she knew that she was going to have to find it and destroy it. The very thought of going looking for it made her feel queasy, but there was no other choice.
As she was sipping her tea her eye was caught by a black Mercedes parked in a line of cars on the opposite side of the road. She was sure that she had seen the brief orange flare of a match in the windscreen, as if somebody were sitting inside it, smoking a cigarette. All the other cars were parked facing the kerb; the Mercedes was parked so that it was facing outward, towards her.
She stared at it for more than a minute, and she was sure that she could distinguish a man’s arm, resting against the driver’s window. Then she saw the pinprick glow of a cigarette tip, and a waft of smoke blew out of the window.
She went inside and rang Rej. He had only just come through the front door, and sounded flustered.
‘Stefan? It’s Sarah. There’s a car parked opposite my apartment and I think the driver may be watching me.’
‘Hold on. What kind of car?’
‘Black Mercedes. I don’t know what model.’
‘Can you see the registration plate?’
‘Not from here.’
‘How do you know he’s watching you?’
‘I don’t, not for sure. I just have a feeling. But Piotr Gogiel was here when you dropped me off. You know, from Vistula Kredytowy. Would you believe it, he gave me all the printouts from the Senate account. The real printouts, not the doctored ones that Ben gave me. The trouble is, I’m wondering if he was followed.’
‘Gogiel actually gave you the printouts? I thought you told me he was stonewalling you.’
‘Obviously he changed his mind. He’s one of the few executives at Vistula Kredytowy who don’t think they’re Gordon Gekko.’
‘That’s excellent,’ said Rej. ‘Maybe things are starting to look up at last. Listen – I doubt if anybody would make it so obvious that they were watching you, but I’ll ask a patrol car to take a look. All I can say is, keep your doors locked. I’ll call you if I find anything out. If not – well, sweet dreams.’
Sarah put down the phone and went back to the window. The Mercedes was still there. After a few moments, the driver tossed his cigarette out of the window, and sparks drifted across the road. She was probably being paranoid; but she couldn’t forget the way that Roman Zboinski had winked at her during the exorcism. He frightened her almost as much as the Executioner, or the Tunnel Child, or whatever it was called. In some ways, he frightened her more.
Shortly before 2:30, she closed the french windows, and locked them, even though her apartment was so high up. She went into the bathroom, dr
opped her robe, and stepped into the shower. She switched it on full and rested her back against the tiles, letting the water gush through her hair and over her shoulders. For the first time in a long time, she realized that she was lonely, and it was an unfamiliar and unwelcome feeling. She didn’t love Stefan. She knew that she never could. But he had given her such strong companionship, and listened to her with such respect, that she found that she was missing him.
Just to be able to turn around to him and say, ‘What did you really think of Father Xawery?’ or ‘Children and cockroaches... I mean, was this guy serious?’
Slowly, she soaped herself, her eyes half closed with tiredness. Tomorrow she would have to go through all of the printouts that Piotr Gogiel had given her; and then she would probably have to talk to Senate’s lawyers. At least she had a way of defending herself against Ben’s attempts to oust her from Eastern Europe. In fact – depending on what she found – she probably had enough incriminating information to have Ben arrested for major fraud. She wouldn’t have chosen to see him prosecuted. She was hard, but she had never been vindictive. All the same, she thought that Ben had made himself a bed of barbed wire, and so there was no injustice in making sure that he lay on it.
She was rinsing her hair when she heard a ring at the doorbell. God, she thought, it must be Stefan. He was so damned protective that he had driven all the way from Ochota to see how she was. She turned off the shower and found herself a large green towel. Then she left the bathroom and padded across the living-room to see who it was.
The bell rang again, long and loud. ‘All right, all right! Keep your shirt on!’ she said. She peered through the spyhole but all she could see was the landing outside, and the curving art-nouveau banister rails.
‘Stefan, is that you?’ she called out.
‘Open the door,’ said a muffled man’s voice. She wasn’t sure whether it was Stefan or not.
‘Stefan?’ she repeated. ‘Stefan... go to the spyhole, so that I can see your face.’
The Chosen Child Page 35
