The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  She paused, and closed her eyes, and squeezed Sarah’s hand very tight. Almost three minutes passed by in which she said nothing at all. Olga kept glancing at Marek as if she wanted to laugh; but Marek had experienced Madame Krystyna’s seance before, and this time he was deadly serious. Sarah turned to Rej and thought how old he was looking. It didn’t occur to her then that losing your beliefs is always a deeply ageing experience; and so is losing your heart.

  She looked at the painting of the flying woman, and suddenly realized that she understood what it meant. Freedom, at a price. That’s why it had saddened her so much when she first saw it. That’s why it saddened her even more, when she looked at it today.

  ‘I am trying to find the owner of this toothbrush,’ said Madame Krystyna. ‘I am trying to find a man in black, who calls himself Mr Okun. You must help me find him... he has hurt so many souls.’

  They waited and waited, Madame Krystyna repeated her incantation. ‘I am looking for the man who owned this toothbrush... I am looking for Mr Okun.’

  Still nothing. Only the noise of traffic, from the street outside, and the chatting of Madame Krystyna’s clocks. Madame Krystyna was gripping Sarah’s hand so tightly that Sarah thought that her fingernails were going to penetrate her skin. But abruptly, Madame Krystyna released her hold. She looked around the table, her eyes alight. ‘Somebody here has seen Mr Okun!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marek, uncomfortably. ‘I did. I saw him two or three times.’

  ‘Then you can really help us! What I want you to do is to place your hands on the sides of the pyramid, and I want you to think what Mr Okun looked like. I want you to imagine him, as clear as day. Then the souls will know who we’re looking for.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ said Marek, dubiously, but Olga nudged him and said, ‘Go on. I want to see what happens.’

  Marek stood up; and Madame Krystyna guided his hands so that he was holding the pyramid with his fingers splayed. ‘Now... you must think of Mr Okun as if you were seeing him for the first time... you must remember the moment when you first caught sight of his face. Close your eyes; see him in your mind. How was it? How did it happen?’

  Marek closed his eyes, although his eyelashes still fluttered. ‘We were coming out of the Green Cat Club... we were crossing Piekna. I turned, and there he was.’

  ‘Why did you notice him?’ asked Madame Krystyna.

  ‘He was climbing out of the manhole... just like it was a door to another room. He closed it behind him, and then he walked away.’

  ‘Think of him,’ urged Madame Krystyna. ‘Imagine that moment, the way he looked. Try to believe that you’re back there now, crossing the street, turning around, and –’

  Above the pyramid, another pyramid began to shine, a pyramid of light. Inside this pyramid, Sarah could see shapes moving, just like before, shadows and reflections and patches of sunshine. Gradually the picture began to clear, until she could see a wide street, with traffic passing backward and forward. It was all angular, strangely distorted, but she could still distinguish the figure of a man on the opposite sidewalk, climbing out of an open manhole. He looked elderly, and emaciated, yet he closed the manhole covers with efficiency and confidence, and walked like a man who has a mission in life.

  The next second, the picture changed, and the man was walking out of an elevator door, and staring at them, right in the face. He was so close and so vivid that Sarah couldn’t help shifting her seat back, and Olga whispered, ‘Oh my God... this is so real? Is he really thinking that?’

  The image wavered and changed, so that one moment it looked as if Mr Okun were smiling; and the next it looked as if half his face had melted, and he was looking at them with an appalling snarl.

  ‘Who is this?’ Madame Krystyna appealed. ‘Is there anybody there who knows who this is, and where we can find him? He has destroyed so many souls. He has caused so much pain. Please, show us where he is!’

  The picture of Mr Okun danced and flickered. Sarah could tell that Marek was straining hard to keep it focused. His finger joints were spots of white, and he was sweating.

  ‘Please!’ begged Madame Krystyna. ‘All you homegoing souls, returning to your cemeteries to sleep! All you saddened spirits, sinking into your memories! We need you, my darlings, we need you! Please help us to find this man!’ There was a moment of utter silence. Above the pyramid, the image of Mr Okun was beginning to twist and collapse, like a dying tornado. Madame Krystyna pressed both hands against the sides of her head, and squeezed her eyes tight.

  The room was shattered by a cracking explosion. The alabaster pyramid burst apart in Marek’s hands, and shards of broken plaster rattled around the room like shrapnel. Marek stepped back, his hands bleeding from dozens of tiny cuts. The air was thick with dust and settling fragments.

  Then a dry, attenuated voice said, ‘Gerhard von Zussow.’

  Rej looked at Sarah in alarm, and then at Madame Krystyna. ‘What did it say?’

  The voice repeated itself, as dry as unoiled hinges, as dry as autumn leaves. ‘Gerhard, von Zussow... and you will find him here.’

  Although the alabaster pyramid was shattered, a tilted picture appeared directly above it, like a slide displayed on a slanted ceiling – an apartment block, with a statue of a soldier in the forecourt. They all watched as they appeared to enter the apartment block and climb two flights of stairs. They turned left, and reached a door marked 277. Then, without warning, the picture faded.

  They all sat back. Madame Krystyna opened the curtains, and the room was filled with morning sunlight. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There was so little to go on.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your pyramid,’ said Marek, trying to collect up the lumps of broken alabaster. ‘Was it really expensive?’

  ‘I’ll find another,’ smiled Madame Krystyna. ‘It isn’t often that I see a force so strong. It’s a privilege, not a problem.’

  Sarah looked at Mr Okun’s toothbrush, lying amidst the dust. Its handle was warped, as if it had been held over a fire, and its bristles were thick with blood. She laid a hand on Rej’s arm and said, ‘Look...’

  But all Rej did was to nod, and stand up. ‘Madame Krystyna, I want to thank you for everything. When you find a new pyramid, send the bill to Wilcza Street, addressed to me. I’ll sort it out. Come on, Sarah, we have to go.’

  ‘Go? Go where?’

  ‘Lazienkowska Estate. To look for Gerhard von Zussow.’

  ‘You know who he is?’ asked Madame Krystyna, in surprise. ‘He sounds German to me.’

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s German. He was an SS Major-General, during the war. He was one of those who helped to crush the Warsaw Uprising. A war criminal. After the war, everybody thought that he was dead.’

  ‘Mr Okun?’ asked Marek, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Rej nodded. ‘One and the same, I’d say.’

  ‘And how do you know where he is?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the picture? Some soul knew who he was, and where he is now. That soldier statue stands right outside the centre block of the Lazienkowska Estate. Whoever that soul was, he even gave us von Zussow’s apartment number.’

  Sarah tiredly stood up. ‘So what now? We go to pick him up?’

  ‘You got it,’ said Rej. He looked down at the toothbrush with its blood-clotted bristles. ‘It’s about time we cleaned Major-General von Zussow out of our system, what do you think?’

  *

  They drove through the early traffic towards Ochota. Hazy sunlight filled the interior of the car. Rej kept flicking his eyes up to his rear-view mirror, and after a while Sarah turned around and looked out of the back.

  ‘You don’t think we’re being followed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rej. ‘You see that black BMW? It’s been two or three cars behind us, most of the way.’

  ‘It’s not Zboinski, is it?’

  Rej made a face. ‘Who knows? You still have the printouts, don’t you? Or you will, when Jarczyk’s fin
ished with them.’

  Marek said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to get involved with that Zboinski guy. Absolutely no way. You can let us off here if you like.’

  ‘He won’t do anything,’ Rej reassured him. ‘It’s daylight. Too many people around. Besides, I’ve got hold of a gun.’

  ‘Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better – not.’

  They reached the Lazienkowska Estate and Rej parked with his bumper nearly touching the statue that they had seen in Madame Krystyna’s apartment. ‘There you are,’ said Rej. ‘A soldier of the 1939 barricade. I knew I recognized it.’ As they left the car and walked towards the apartment block, the black BMW passed them by, and kept on driving south-west. Both Rej and Sarah saw it, and Sarah raised an eyebrow; but Rej simply shrugged. All the same, he knew whose BMW it was. There were dozens of black BMWs in Warsaw, but only one with totally black-tinted windows. Roman Zboinski was watching them.

  They climbed up to the second floor. The Lazienkowska Estate had been ultra-modern in 1965, with its concrete stairs and its wired-glass windows and its decorative wall panels in turquoise and yellow. But now it was shabby and worn out. The elevators kept breaking down and the walls in the lower hallways were dense with graffiti. All around them, the building sounded like Babel: televisions jabbering, men and women arguing, children crying. And everywhere the smell of sauerkraut, as if that was all that the inhabitants of Lazienkowska ever lived on.

  They reached the chipped, salmon-painted door numbered 277. Rej said, ‘Stand right back: let me do this. I don’t want anybody getting injured.’ He clenched his fist and beat a furious tattoo on the door.

  They waited – Marek and Olga almost ten metres down the corridor, hiding behind a pillar. Rej knocked again, and shouted, ‘Gerhard von Zussow! I know you’re there! Open the door, this is the Wyzdial Zabostwj!’

  They waited two or three minutes more. Then Rej braced his back against the corridor wall, and gave the door a deafening kick. Nothing happened, so he kicked it again. A disembodied voice from the next apartment called, ‘Shut up, will you, some of us are trying to sleep!’

  Rej was about to kick the door a third time when they heard a chain being drawn back, a lock being turned, and a latch clicked out of its socket. The door opened and there stood Mr Okun, in a brown wool robe, looking red-eyed and cadaverous. Rej immediately kicked the door wide open, stepped inside, and seized Mr Okun’s lapels.

  ‘I want you to understand something!’ he shouted at him. ‘You make one unpredictable move and I’m going to blow your head off!’

  Mr Okun looked at them all with his glittering, cavernous eyes. ‘And what is this?’ he asked, in sharply-accented Polish. ‘The circus has come to town?’

  Rej said, ‘I am Komisarz Stefan Rej. This is Miss Sarah Leonard, of Senate Hotels. And this is Marek Maslowski, who first saw you coming out of the manhole cover on Kosyzkowa.’

  ‘Well, I see,’ said Mr Okun. ‘And what does this prove?’

  ‘You know what it proves,’ said Rej. ‘We have enough evidence to connect you to the Executioner, and to every one of the Executioner’s murders. You feed it, don’t you? You take care of it. And in return, it hunts down all of the insurgents you hate so much, and their children, and their cousins, and their children’s children.’

  Mr Okun smiled, and passed his hand over his hair in a curiously effeminate gesture. ‘I suppose it’s good to know that one’s efforts are appreciated.’

  ‘You’ll have to show us where it is,’ said Rej.

  ‘Oh, it’s not an “it”, by any means. It is most definitely “he”. He’s a boy, a child... an innocent creature who lives his life according to his nature.’

  ‘You’ll still have to show us where it is.’

  Mr Okun frowned. ‘This is very difficult. You have to understand that this is very difficult.’

  ‘Just show us where he us, Major-General von Zussow, before he hurts anybody else.’

  ‘Then you’d better come in, while I change.’

  They all entered the small, dingy apartment. Mr Okun had obviously arrived here in a hurry. There were two unpacked suitcases in the living-room, and a stack of cardboard boxes crammed with books and newspapers and magazines. There was no carpet, only a dark brown vinyl floor, like cheap chocolate, and a bedsheet hung up at the windows in place of curtains. Mr Okun went into the bedroom and tried to close the door, but Rej kicked it open and told him to get changed in full view.

  ‘Well, there’s no privacy any more,’ said Mr Okun, resentfully.

  ‘You didn’t give anybody much privacy in Treblinka, did you?’ Rej retorted.

  ‘That was a very long time ago, komisarz.’

  ‘But the Polish people haven’t forgotten it, and it seems that you haven’t either.’

  Mr Okun turned his back while he stepped into his droopy cotton underpants. ‘You seem to have forgotten that you killed ten thousand Germans, and that seven thousand went missing, and never reappeared, and that nine thousand were seriously injured. It was madness, that Uprising! Madness! I lost all of my boyhood friends. I lost everybody! I saw my brother lying in the street with his throat cut!’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have occupied Warsaw in the first place,’ said Marek.

  ‘Who are you to speak of destiny?’ Mr Okun retorted. ‘Warsaw has been occupied again and again, by the Russians, by the French, it’s history! You deserved what you got, and you still deserve more!’

  ‘You mean you’re not going to rest until you’ve beheaded us all,’ said Sarah.

  Mr Okun buttoned up his plain shirt. ‘That is what you should expect, yes. I was in charge of the Executioner, during the Uprising. An SS patrol found him half buried in a cellar, in the Old Town. He was alive, yes, but we didn’t know what he was. The Poles said that he was a basilisk, do you know what that is? A monster that can hypnotize you, just by staring at you; and then kill you with its poisonous breath. But that was just stories. When I saw this poor creature, I knew that it wasn’t a monster, but a child, a strange and interesting child; and I asked General von dem Batch-Zelewski if I could find out what it was, and why the Poles were so afraid of it.’

  Smartly dressed now, he came back into the meagre living-room. ‘I talked to our historians in Berlin; and our theologians in Dresden; and I soon discovered what we had unearthed. A child bred to survive for ever. A child bred to carry the word of God from century to century, so that the word of God would never die... even after the holy order of monks who had created him had been dead for centuries.

  ‘I discovered that he was obedient to anybody who said that they spoke the word of God, and that he would serve anybody who cared for him, and fed him. So when the insurgents began to escape through the sewers... well, I thought, who better to catch them for me? A devoted child who can slide through the sewers quicker than they can; and will bring me their heads.’

  Sarah said, ‘The war was over fifty years ago. Why are you doing it again now?’

  Mr Okun stared at her and his eyes glittered like black beetles in a pool of freshly spilled ink. ‘We lost so many young men... we lost everything. I tried to forget, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Rej. ‘I mean, what happened to this child of yours, at the end of the war?’

  ‘He didn’t even survive that long. General von dem Bach-Zelewski brought in howitzers, and started to bombard Warsaw with shells that were almost a metre in diameter. On the same day, I sent my child down the sewers to search for insurgents trying to escape from Mokotow back to the city centre. Those shells could penetrate two metres of concrete. One of them hit Koszykowa, exactly at the intersection with Piusa XI. It went right through the roadbed into the sewer, and my child was buried under tons of rubble and tons of earth. There was no hope of digging him out, not then. We had too many other problems to deal with. And then, of course, the Russians crossed the Vistula, and that was that.’

  ‘But you never forgot?’ asked Sarah. ‘And you never forgave? The P
olish Home Army were fighting for their own city!’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Okun.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Rej. ‘Just “no” – you never forgave, and you never forgot?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Okun.

  ‘So what happened to this so-called child of yours?’

  ‘Why do you ask? You know the rest. I came back to Warsaw two years ago, when you started to redevelop and to dig up your sewers for your fine new hotels. And I found my child, with the help of some of my friends. He was buried in five metres of rubble and mud, still hibernating, still alive, on the site of the US Insurance building.’

  ‘And you revived it?’ said Rej. ‘You revived it, and fed it, and gave it a knife, and sent it out looking for former insurgents, and their families, too?’

  Mr Okun tugged repetitively at his cuffs. ‘I saw my brother lying in the street with his throat cut.’

  Rej held up his hand, with half of his little finger missing. ‘You see this? Your baby did this! And you want me to understand why you did it? You want me to feel sympathetic? You cwel!.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Sarah asked Marek, but Marek shook his head, as if to say ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Everybody has their own view of history,’ said Mr Okun, licking his lips. ‘We carried out our orders. We would have been shot if we didn’t, and what was the point of that? And our young men suffered too. Seven thousand Germans disappeared in Warsaw, in just a few weeks. Where are they? Where are their graves? How can their families ever mourn them?’

  Rej said. ‘We’re going to get rid of this child of yours, once and for all. And you’re going to take us down in the sewers to find him.’

  Mr Okun sniffed, and coughed. ‘Don’t you know how dangerous that is?’

  ‘On past experience, yes.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘I won’t have the slightest hesitation in blowing your brains all over the wallpaper.’

  There was a long silence, in which they all stood like figures in a tableau. Then Olga said, ‘You wouldn’t really shoot him, would you?’