‘Open the door, quick,’ the man repeated.
Against all of her instincts, Sarah opened the door, although she kept it on the security-chain. ‘Stefan, I can’t see you! I just wanted to make sure that it was you! I don’t think you needed to –’
She didn’t have a chance to say anything else, because the door was kicked with such violence that the security-chain was torn out of the architrave. It slammed backward against the wall, and Sarah was confronted with a fat man in a purple shell-suit, holding a sawn-off shotgun. He had a flat, masklike face with a white crewcut, and there was a huge brown wart on his cheek.
‘Give me the papers!’ he demanded, in English. He was as nervous as she was. ‘Come on, papers, or gun!’ and he cocked the shotgun to show that he meant what he said.
Sarah retreated from the front door and the man followed her. ‘Papers,’ he kept repeating. ‘Papers.’
‘What papers?’ said Sarah. She didn’t know whether to be frightened or furious. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The man kicked the door shut behind him and advanced on Sarah until she had reached the living-room wall, under a silver-and-enamel icon of the Blessed Virgin. ‘Papers! Papers!’ he kept shouting at her. His voice was half strangled with asthma. ‘Bank papers! Gogiel!’
‘Listen, I’ve called the police,’ Sarah told him. ‘They’ll be here in two minutes... maybe one minute,’ and she tapped her wristwatch and lifted a single finger.
‘Bank papers, now quick,’ the man repeated. He came up closer, holding the shotgun one-handed. Sarah feinted to the right, and the man shifted to the right But when she tried to duck to the right, he grabbed her hair and slammed her back against the wall, so that the icon dropped onto the parquet floor. He pushed the shotgun barrels right up against her nose. She could smell nothing but gun oil, and far too much Obsession for Men. She didn’t move. She had been in business long enough to know when people were bluffing and when they weren’t, and this man wasn’t bluffing. He had everything to gain, and nothing whatsoever to lose.
He made an extraordinary face, as if he were trying to dislodge a shred of meat from between his front teeth. Then, very slowly, he said, ‘You, must, give, bank. Papers, to, me. I, will. Shoot, your, head.’
Sarah looked him in the eye and the bastard meant it. She nodded towards the coffee table in the centre of the living-room. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Take them, if you want to. I’m not arguing.’
The man glanced at the brown envelope. For one long moment, Sarah thought that he was going to blow her head off, and then walk out with the printouts. Dad, she thought, mom. There wasn’t even time to say a prayer. But the man lowered his shotgun, and eased back the hammer, and grinned at her.
‘Dobrze,’ he said; and went across to pick up the envelope.
At that moment, there was a devastating knock at the door. It was so hard that the upper right-hand panel split in half, and pieces of plaster dropped from the architrave. The man jumped back in shock. He turned round to Sarah, and then looked at the door, and half lifted his shotgun as if he couldn’t decide whether it would be wise to be caught with a weapon in his hand, or not.
‘What?’ he asked, in alarm.
Sarah was about to say, ‘Gliniarze, what else?’ when there was another knock, and another. Massive, timber-cracking knocks that wrenched the hinges out of their sockets.
The man snatched the envelope and hurried towards the french windows. He furiously rattled the handles, but Sarah had locked them. The knocking went on: heavy, regular blows, as if somebody were determined to beat the door down, no matter how long it took.
‘What?’ the man screamed, coming back across the room. ‘What?’
Sarah shook her head, and retreated away from him, one hand held up to fend off his shotgun. She didn’t know what it was, either. But oh God, she could guess.
The man hesitated; and then he obviously decided that it was worth trying to shoot his way out. He edged his way towards the front door, and stood beside it, his shotgun cocked, while the deafening banging went on and on. The top hinge had almost broken free, and the screws were hanging out. Plaster sifted from the ceiling, and cracks appeared in the wall.
God help me, thought Sarah. It’s come for me, too. It must have picked up my scent at the exorcism. It must have smelled what I was; the daughter of one of its enemies.
The banging quickened, until it was a thunderous drumming. Suddenly, the door broke open and twisted sideways. At the same instant, all the lights in the apartment dimmed until they were nothing more than fitful points of light, no brighter than fireflies.
In the doorway stood the same dark shape that Sarah had seen during the seance at Madame Krystyna’s. The same dark shape that had pursued her through her dream. She was so frightened that she could hardly move her legs. She stepped backwards towards the kitchen, but she felt as if she were wading through syrup.
There was a long silence. The shape remained where it was, silhouetted in the doorway. Beside the door, the man with the shotgun was poised, obviously assessing his chances of getting out. Sarah took another step back, and then another, but then she found herself against the wall.
The shape came through the doorway, with a deep dragging noise from its cape. The man with the shotgun pushed past it, and tried to get out onto the starkly lit landing.
Sarah wasn’t sure what she saw. But it looked as if a thin, spidery hand leaped out from underneath the cape and snatched the man by the shoulder. The man twisted around, and shouted out, ‘Help me! Jesus Christ, help me!’ The shotgun went off with an ear-cracking explosion, and fragments of black cape flew everywhere. But the shape kept its grip on the man’s shoulder, holding him so tightly that Sarah was sure that she could hear his collarbone slowly cracking.
The two of them wrestled on the landing, thickly wreathed in gunpowder smoke. The spidery hand released the man’s shoulder and seized his hair, and the man screamed out again, ‘Help me! For God’s sake, help me!’
The shape appeared to hunch up, as if it were lifting its arm. Then Sarah caught the bright, excited flash of metal. There was an extraordinary noise, like a whip cracking.
The shape moved away from the man with the shotgun, and left him standing on his own on the landing, under the bare bright light of the chandelier. The man couldn’t have stood there for more than a split second, but to Sarah it seemed that it was almost an eternity. He had the strangest look on his face, as if he were about to say something amusing.
But then his knees began to buckle, and his arms dropped by his sides, and his head tilted sideways and dropped off his neck. A huge gush of blood spouted up unto the air, and then another, and then the man fell to the floor and lay on his side, quivering and twitching. His head rolled across the landing and came to rest in the doorway of the apartment opposite.
Stiff with shock, Sarah shifted along the wall, feeling behind her for the kitchen door. If she went through the kitchen, she could make her way out onto the fire escape, and at least she would have a chance of getting away. For a while, the shape stayed motionless in the hall, but then it turned towards her, and came back through the shattered door.
‘Oh God,’ she said, and tried to run. But the shape came so swiftly across the room that she was much too late. She heard its cape dragging, she heard its breath whining. It stood between her and the kitchen, exuding the deep, sweet stench of sewage and death, and she knew that she could never make it to the fire escape before it caught her. She backed away. She could hear herself whimpering, almost as if she had a child with her, a terrified child who wasn’t her at all.
The shape came closer. She thought she could make out the paleness of its face, beneath its cape, its dead black eyes. She tried to say, ‘Don’t hurt me,’ but her lips were numb.
She backed away even further. The shape shuffled after her. It was exactly like her dream, only far worse, because this time she could smell it, this time she could hear it whispering and whining,
and this time it was real, and it meant to kill her.
She heard the dreadful metallic dragging of a huge knife being drawn out of its scabbard. The fact that she couldn’t see the knife made it all the more frightening.
‘Go away,’ she managed to whisper. ‘Go away, please go away.’
The shape’s breathing began to quicken. It came closer still: so close now that it blotted out almost all of the light from the landing. For one instant Sarah saw its face, its perfect childlike face, with its black impenetrable eyes. It could have been a wax effigy or a religious statue, like one of the eerily serene Virgins sculpted in the 15th century by the Master of Beautiful Madonnas. She was so terrified that she felt as if the whole room were slowly imploding, as if darkness were flooding in on her from all sides.
She saw the creature’s jaw drop, and its mouth stretch open, and suddenly that eerie beauty was transformed into a nightmare.
‘Get away from me!’ she screamed at it. ‘Get away from me!’
She collided with the telephone table, snatched up the phone and threw at it the shape, but it seemed about as ineffective as throwing it into a heavy velvet curtain. She picked up the brass table-lamp and threw that, too. Then she tried to pick up the table, but she lost her balance and fell back against the wall.
Gasping, she reached for anything she could find. A fallen cushion, a glass paperweight. Then she picked up the silver icon that had dropped from the wall, and threw that, too.
Immediately, she heard a high, desperate cry, like a child in distress. It was the same cry that she had heard at the excavation site, when the German workers were killed. It was so sad and filled with such pain that she couldn’t believe that it had been uttered by this huge, menacing shape.
It tried to come nearer, but it seemed as it couldn’t. It stepped forward two or three times, its robes swinging and swaying. Every time, it cried in anguish; a heartbreaking cry that came straight from the soul.
Sarah said nothing, but sat on the floor staring at it in horror. It tried one last time to approach her, but then it turned away, and swept back across the room as dark and as swift as a cloud-shadow crossing the moon. It didn’t pause for a moment, but hurried out onto the landing, and was gone. At the same time, the lights came back on.
She heard the street door bang, and then she knew that she was safe.
*
Rej came into the room and gave her a hug. Jarczyk, unshaven and dishevelled, looked the other way. Out on the landing, photoflashes flickered like summer lightning, and police ran up and down stairs.
‘Are you all right?’ Rej asked her. ‘It didn’t hurt you at all?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘It came right up to me. It took out its knife... but I kept on throwing things at it, and it started to cry this terrible crying, and then it went away.’
‘You saw his face?’ asked Jarczyk.
‘Only for a split second.’
‘But you’d know him again?’
‘Oh, yes, komisarz. I’d know him again.’ The idea that she would have any trouble identifying the shape that had attacked her almost made her smile.
Rej said, ‘You know who that was – the man it killed?’
‘No. I don’t think I’d ever seen him before.’
‘His name was Lukasz Wlosowicz: another of Zboinski’s heavies. I think he was under orders to get back those printouts: and then to kill you. It seems as if the Executioner saved your life, in a way – even though it was trying to kill you, too.’
Jarczyk said, ‘We’re taking the printouts for blood and fingerprint tests, but you can have them back after that.’ He ruffled his hair, which was already sticking out in all directions, as if he hadn’t had the chance to comb it. ‘Anything to get that bastard Zboinski.’
Rej looked around the room. He picked up a cushion and righted the fallen telephone table. Then he saw the silver icon on the floor. ‘Did you throw this at it?’
‘That was the last thing I threw.’
Rej turned the icon over in his hand. ‘This is genuine, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I bought it when I visited Poland last year. It came from the church of St Elisabeth, in Wroclaw.’
‘You threw a religious symbol at it, and it started this crying, and went away?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
Jarcyk went back out onto the landing, where the medical examiners were ready to take away Wlosowicz’s body. Rej said, ‘You remember what happened at that so-called exorcism? Father Xawery was holding a religious relic, wasn’t he? St Gerard Somebody’s ring finger.’
‘What do you mean – that religious symbols could actually ward the Executioner off?’
‘It makes sense, in a way.’
‘But how you can believe that? You’re a communist!’
‘I believe it simply because it makes the best logical sense. I mean, if Father Xawery’s story is true, and these children were bred and brought up by monks, they would be bound to have a fear of anything holy, wouldn’t they? The Executioner may have hibernated for five centuries, but it must still have a medieval sense of heaven and hell.’
‘I don’t know. I suppose you could be right.’
Rej said, ‘We have to go after it. You know that, don’t you? Otherwise you’re never going to be safe in Warsaw, ever again.’
‘You want to go now? It’s 3:30 in the morning!’
‘No time like the present. Let me call Madame Krystyna, and see if she’ll do us a seance.’
‘We’re going to need five people.’
‘Then I’ll call Marek, too, and get him to bring that Olga of his.’ He held up the icon and said, ‘You don’t mind if we take this with us, do you?’
‘Of course not. It always gives me a good feeling to see somebody converted.’
They were still talking ten minutes later when Jarczyk came back from the landing, shutting the aerial of his mobile phone with the palm of his hand. ‘Miss Leonard, I’m sorry, I’ve just had a call from headquarters. They found the body of Mr Piotr Gogiel, on waste ground in Praga South.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Sarah. ‘Oh, no, not him.’
‘I’m sorry. Can I get one of my men to make you some tea, or coffee, perhaps?’
‘It’s all right. I have things to do.’
Sarah went into the bedroom, closed the door, and changed into jeans and a checkered cotton shirt. As she brushed her hair in the mirror, she couldn’t get over how bloodless she looked, but she made a deliberate effort not to think about the Executioner, or the way that Lukasz Wlosowicz’s head had tumbled from his shoulders; nor to think about Piotr Gogiel. ‘It’s a story,’ she told herself. ‘None of it’s real.’
She pulled on a pair of calf-length leather boots, and then she came out of the bedroom and took hold of Rej’s arm. ‘Ready,’ she said.
Jarczyk said, ‘I may want to talk to you again later. You won’t be going far, will you?’
They passed the building supervisor, the grumpy, bullet-headed Mr Sprudin, who was hammering nails into the door frame as a temporary repair. ‘Do you know how much this is going to cost?’ he demanded. ‘Doors like these, they cost thousands!’
Sarah and Rej went downstairs. The street was crowded with emergency vehicles, their lights flashing under a lightening sky. They climbed into Rej’s Volkswagen and headed off in the direction of Marek’s house, to pick him up.
‘I’m really sorry about Piotr Gogiel,’ said Rej, resting one hand on top of Sarah’s hand. ‘I know how much you trusted him.’
‘He had a family, that’s what makes it worse. I feel so guilty, because I shouted at him for giving me the doctored printouts. God – why didn’t I just let it go? I didn’t think that they would actually kill him.’
‘Come on, Sarah. He made his own decision.’
The streets were almost deserted, although a few early morning buses were beginning to bring in haggard-faced office cleaners and shift workers. ‘How did he die?’ asked Sarah.
‘They cut his h
ead off. Zboinski’s idea of a joke.’
Sarah covered her mouth with her hand and said nothing more until they reached Marek’s apartment. She was filled with so much grief that she was right on the very edge of tears, but she was determined not to cry, not yet, until she had found the Executioner: and not until she had made sure that Ben and Roman Zboinski were both punished for what they had done.
They found Marek and Olga both waiting on the kerb, sharing a cigarette. Olga was wearing a black mini-skirt and her face was painted as white as the Executioner’s. They climbed into the car, and Marek said, immediately, ‘You’ve seen it? You’ve actually seen it?’
‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ve actually seen it.’
‘Is it really awful?’ asked Olga, excitedly.
Sarah turned around in her seat. ‘Let’s put it this way. I’m not going to have nightmares about it. It’s far too frightening, even for nightmares.’
*
Madame Krystyna was surprisingly charming and equable, considering that they had got her up at four o’clock in the morning. She bustled around in a smart silk robe of amber and blue, making them strong mocha coffee.
‘This is a good time for contacting the spirit world,’ she said. ‘It’s very quiet, a time when the spirits like to reminisce about the life they left behind. Do you have a talisman?’
Rej produced Mr Okun’s yellow toothbrush. ‘I’m afraid this is all we have. I hope it’s going to be enough.’
Madame Krystyna held it disdainfully between finger and thumb. ‘Hardly a sentimental object, is it? Still, I suppose I can try.’
They sat around the table. Between the thick floral curtains, there was a narrow isosceles triangle of wan, early morning light. It softly illuminated the painting of the woman flying through the sky. It also fell on the sides of the polished alabaster pyramid in the centre of the table, so that it gave off a milky, suffused shine. Rej laid the toothbrush in front of Madame Krystyna, and then held hands with Sarah and Olga.
‘Are you ready to begin?’ asked Madame Krystyna. ‘This isn’t going to be easy. You must try to empty your minds of everything else except the matter at hand... which is to find the owner of this toothbrush, wherever he may be.’
The Chosen Child Page 36
