Rej lifted his automatic, cocked it, and pointed it directly at Mr Okun’s left eye. ‘The answer to that, Olga, is yes.’
*
They were about to push their way out of the doors of the apartment building when Rej said, ‘Stop! Look! Wait!’
Across the street, barely visible in the shadows, a black BMW was parked, its windows gleaming in blue-and-white waves.
‘Zboinski,’ said Rej. ‘He’s waiting for us.’
‘Zboinski?’ asked Mr Okun. ‘Wer ist Zboinski?’
‘There are some people who make your life a little sunnier every day,’ said Rej. ‘Roman Zboinski isn’t one of them.’
Mr Okun said, ‘The best way into the sewers is on Krucza, right in the town centre.’
‘In that case, show us the way.’
Marek touched Sarah on the shoulder. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I don’t want Olga involved in this. Let me take her home, and I’ll join you later. Is that okay?’
‘Of course it is,’ Sarah told him. ‘And – thanks, Olga. You’ve really been a help.’
Olga gave her a shy smile, and Marek ushered her away. Mr Okun called after him, ‘You can’t miss the manhole, it’s eighty metres south of Jerozolimskie Avenue, on the west side of the street. We look forward to seeing you!’
Rej dug his automatic into Mr Okun’s shoulder blade. ‘Stop being so goddamned happy,’ he ordered him.
‘Happy? Why shouldn’t I be happy? I’m bringing the people I hate the most to meet the worst fate that they could ever imagine.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?’ said Rej.
They squeezed into Rej’s car, and Rej handed Sarah his automatic so that she could keep Mr Okun covered.
‘I’ve never fired a gun before,’ she told him.
‘It’s easy. Just point, and pull the trigger. Imagine it’s Ben.’
They drove back towards the city centre. Rej glanced in his mirror from time to time, and sure enough the black BMW was following them, making no pretence of staying out of sight.
Krucza was busy with pedestrians and traffic by the time they arrived. The early mist had cleared and it looked as if it was going to be another warm day. Rej drove half way onto the sidewalk and parked, and they all noted with satisfaction that the black BMW had to pass them by in search of a parking space.
‘You see that?’ said Rej. ‘One of the biggest criminals in Eastern Europe, and he’s afraid of getting a parking fine.’
Mr Okun led them over to a large inspection cover. It was one of the earliest type, with a double-headed Polish eagle embossed on it, and the name of the steelworks in Katowice. Mr Okun took two special keys out of his pocket and heaved the cover out of its frame. Inside, Sarah could see a rusted iron ladder leading downward.
‘He’s here?’ asked Rej.
‘Not far,’ said Mr Okun.
‘Well, you lead on,’ Rej suggested.
The morning breeze caught Mr Okun’s white hair and he brushed it back with his hand. ‘I hope you understand what could happen. This is no ordinary being, and he respects and protects only me.’
‘Just shut up and get down the hole,’ Rej told him.
Mr Okun shrugged, and began to climb down the ladder. Rej had his regulation flashlight, but Mr Okun didn’t seem to be concerned about the dark. He disappeared almost immediately, and although they could still hear his feet clanging on the rungs, Rej had to hurry to catch up with him.
‘You stay here,’ he told Sarah. ‘Make sure that nobody falls down the manhole.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m coming too. This is just as much my affair as it is yours.’
‘That thing nearly killed you last night.’
‘Yes, but you’ve got the icon, haven’t you?’
‘All right, then. But you’ll have to close the cover after you. And make it quick.’
He disappeared, and Sarah heard his feet go clang-clang-clang on the ladder as he went after Mr Okun. She climbed into the manhole herself, much to the amazement of two old women who were passing by, and she dragged the cover back over it. God, it stank down here, and it was so dark that she couldn’t even see her hands on the ladder.
Rej was at the bottom now, and he shone his flashlight up to help Sarah climb down. When she reached the foot of the ladder, she found that they were standing in a large arched chamber, with dry footing on either side, and a deep channel of sewage flowing sluggishly down the centre. Mr Okun said, ‘It isn’t far now. But I warn you, he won’t take kindly to your coming down here. There’s nothing that I can do to save you, you know.’
‘You said you wanted us to get what was coming to us,’ said Rej, grimly. ‘So, come on, then – let’s go get it.’
Mr Okun led the way along the main sewer. Their footsteps echoed, and when they spoke, their voices were hugely distorted, like the voices of lost souls down the bottom of a well. Every now and then Mr Okun would turn around to make sure that they were following him closely, and there was an expression on his face like nothing that Sarah had ever seen before. It was more than pleasure: it was glee.
As they walked, he marked arrows on the walls with a small stick of chalk. ‘You see? Your friend can follow us now.’
They crossed the central channel by a small steel bridge, and then turned down a narrow, brick-clad side tunnel. A faint draught blew down it, and it carried a cloying, sickly smell, like bad pork. Although she wanted to see the end of this business, Sarah was beginning to wish that she had obeyed Rej’s instruction, and stayed up on street-level.
‘Not far now,’ said Mr Okun. ‘Speak quietly... don’t alarm him. He will attack anybody and anything that alarms him.’
They reached the end of the tunnel, and came out onto a concrete landing, with a railing around it, and concrete steps going down into the darkness. Even before it was lit up by Rej’s flashlight, Sarah realized that they were standing in a huge vaulted chamber. Every drip and splash of sewage echoed in chorus, and there was a feeling of empty vastness.
‘It’s immense,’ she said. ‘I never knew that – ‘
She stopped talking as if she had been struck dumb. Rej’s flashlight beam was slowly moving across the walls of the chamber, and what it illuminated filled her with such horror and disgust that she was unable to speak. Hundreds and hundreds of human skulls were nailed in rows to the brickwork. Some of them were so old that they had turned to the colour of mahogany, but many were much whiter. Right at the top, nearly reaching the highest part of the vaulting, there were heads which still had remnants of hair and flesh on them.
One by one, Rej lit up the puffy, decaying faces of all of the Executioner’s recent victims – Jan Kaminski, Mr Wroblewski, Zofia’s mother Iwona. They had all been brought here, and nailed up as trophies.
‘What is this place?’ said Rej, his voice hoarse with shock.
‘It’s been here ever since they built the sewer system,’ said Mr Okun. ‘When they rebuilt the sewers after the war, it became redundant. Nobody ever comes down here, because it doesn’t appear on any of the official plans. It’s safe, and secret. Just the place for a child to hide.’
‘And these heads?’
‘If you are buried without your head, your soul can never go to heaven. That’s what he believes, anyway. He has deprived all of these people of their place in paradise. It’s part of their punishment.’
Rej shone the flashlight down to the floor. It was ankle-deep in grey, filthy water, and in the water there were scores of wet, greyish humps. At first neither he nor Sarah could understand what they were. Then they made out a white, childish face, its eyes as sightless as boiled cod’s. Then they saw an arm, and another arm, and a foot.
‘Oh, God,’ Sarah whispered. ‘They’re all children. They’re all dead children.’
‘He is a child himself,’ said Mr Okun, with no passion in his voice whatsoever. ‘He likes to take children and play with them. Unfortunately he can’t understand why they cry when he tries to take
them back here. He doesn’t know why they scream when he takes off their arms. It’s sad, but what can you do? Every creature has to live after its own fashion.’
‘Is he here?’ asked Sarah.
‘Oh, he’s here all right. Look. Look up... that niche in the roof, that’s where he is.’
Sarah looked up and saw a narrow, darkened crevice in between the vaulting. Just the kind of crevice in which a cockroach would secrete itself, damp and lightless and undisturbed.
‘Do you want me to call him for you?’ said Mr Okun. ‘It would be a pleasure.’
Sarah took a quick, shallow breath. ‘Rej, do you have that icon?’ she whispered.
Rej felt in his pocket and nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it. If it worked before, it’s bound to work again.’
Mr Okun went half way down the concrete steps. He cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a high whooping sound, like a boy calling another boy out to play. He whooped two or three times, and then he stood silent.
At first there was no movement at all. But then Sarah saw a black triangular shadow creeping out of the crevice. Then a bony hand, with spidery fingers. Gradually, a huge dark shape slid into sight caped in tattered, decayed velvet, and began to climb down from the ceiling by using the skulls as toeholds and fingerholds. Sarah watched it in dread and fascination as its fingers clawed in and out of eye sockets and gripped vacant jaws.
The shape reached the floor, and stood in the water, its cape floating amongst the dead, bobbing bodies of so many children.
‘Did you ever see such a child?’ said Mr Okun, with dreadful pride. ‘Did you ever see such a creature? Born to slaughter, born to survive.’
The shape came wading towards them. A few metres away, it stopped.
‘These people wanted to find out where you lived,’ Mr Okun told it, in a challenging voice. ‘These people want you to stop killing.’
The shape stayed where it was, not stirring.
‘These people want to bury you not just for years, not just for centuries, but for ever. What do you say to that?’
There was a long silence, punctuated only by the sickening slopping of corpses in the shallow sewage. Then, with a terrible magnificence, the shape lifted its arm and threw back its hood.
Its face was ivory white, perfect as a miniature. Its head was large and lumpy, and covered in fine white filaments that looked more like mould than hair. It was a child, of sorts, and it was definitely human, but how it had managed to survive in these sewers and live for so long, Sarah couldn’t imagine. It stood so still that if it hadn’t been breathing, Sarah wouldn’t have believed it to be real.
‘They want to see the end of you,’ said Mr Okun. ‘They want to take down your heads, and break down your home, and bury you so deep that nobody will ever find you again.’
The child drew out the largest knife that Sarah had ever seen. It was more like a sword than a knife, except that it had a broad, curved blade. Without any more hesitation, it began to wade through the water towards, the steps.
‘Sarah! Get back!’ Rej shouted, and pushed her back towards the tunnel.
Mr Okun pressed himself against the wall as the child mounted the steps and came towards them with its knife lifted.
Rej fired one shot. The child’s cape flapped, but it kept on rushing up the steps.
‘Stefan!’ screamed Sarah. ‘Stefan, the icon!’
Rej pulled the icon out of his pocket and held it up. But the instant he did so, there was a deafening boom from inside the tunnel, and the left shoulder of Rej’s coat exploded into a mixture of nylon, padding and blood. He spun around and fell heavily onto the floor. The icon bounced out of his hand, skipped across the concrete landing and dropped down into the sewage.
Just as the child reached the landing, one of Roman Zboinski’s men appeared, a thickset man in a green suit, holding up a shotgun. Behind him came Zboinski himself, with his baling hook in his hand.
He saw Sarah first. She was up against the railings, one hand lifted to protect herself.
‘You think you can put me in jail?’ he snarled at her. ‘You think you can –’
He stopped. The child was standing only three metres away from him, its knife still lifted, its eyes as dead as asphalt. Zboinski looked it up and down, and then turned to his bodyguard. ‘What are you waiting for? Shoot him!’
But the bodyguard started shaking his head and backing away. ‘It’s the devil. It’s the Executioner. I’m not shooting the devil.’
‘Shoot the fucker!’ screamed Zboinski. He snatched the shotgun and fired it, and the child’s cape billowed and flapped. But it continued to drag itself forward, and its eyes never wavered, and neither did its knife. The bodyguard made a whimpering noise and ran away down the tunnel.
Zboinski lifted his hook. ‘Do you know what they call me?’ he said to the child. ‘They call me the Hook, and you’re going to find out why.’
He advanced on the child, his hook waving from side to side, his mouth cracked into a triumphant grin. ‘Did you ever see a man with a hook through his nose?’ he taunted. ‘Did you ever see a man with a hook in his ear? Lodge it deep enough, and you can swing him around the room.’
He ducked to one side, and the hook tore through rotten fabric. It tore again, and again. Zboinski said, ‘Come on, you fucker, let’s find your ribs!’
But then the knife flashed; so fast that Zboinski didn’t even see it. He actually managed to say. ‘What?’ before his head flew from his shoulders and dropped down into the water below. Blood pumped out of his severed neck in loops and ribbons and splattering question marks. His body rolled down the steps, its arms and legs uselessly flailing. His head floated for a moment, but then sewage poured into its open mouth, like an unwelcome helping of awful soup, and it bubbled once, and sank.
Sarah knelt down next to Rej. His face was ashen and he was shivering with shock, but his shoulder didn’t seem to be bleeding too badly. ‘I’m all right,’ he coughed. ‘Run, while you’ve got the chance.’
‘You can run, too,’ she begged him, but he shook his head.
The child approached them quite slowly. It stood over them, staring at them. Sarah stared back at it, marvelling at its beauty, paralysed by the horror of it.
She thought for a moment that it was going to spare them; but she was her father’s daughter, a Lewandowicz, and she knew that Mr Okun had fed it and cared for it and given it a solemn duty of revenge. It lifted its bloodied knife, and she closed her eyes and waited for the blow.
It was then, walking at a pace that was almost leisurely, that Marek appeared.
‘Are you there?’ he said, his voice echoing in the tunnel. ‘Miss Leonard? Komisarz Rej? I followed your arrows!’
Sarah opened her eyes. ‘Marek! No!’ she screamed. ‘The Executioner’s here!’
Marek came running the last few metres. He saw Sarah and Rej and the Executioner, and he stood there, open-mouthed.
‘Run!’ Sarah told him.
But Marek stayed where he was, and reached inside his T-shirt, and lifted out the little silver cross that the waitress in the Welcome Bar had given him. Sarah looked at him in astonishment. ‘That won’t work,’ she told him, her voice wavering. ‘For God’s sake, that won’t work.’
‘It was blessed by the Pope,’ said Marek. ‘It’s the sign of God, and it was blessed by the Pope.’
He approached the child, standing so near that the child could easily have cut off his head. He lifted the cross until it was only a few centimetres from the child’s face. The child didn’t move.
‘Why don’t you rest?’ Marek told it. ‘Why don’t you give yourself some peace? Don’t you think you’ve lived long enough and killed enough people? This wasn’t what your fathers wanted, was it, when they made you? They wanted you to protect people, not to murder them. It’s time you stopped. It’s time you put down that knife and rested.’
‘Don’t you listen to him!’ shouted Mr Okun. ‘He’s a deceiver! He’s telling you lies!’
The child stared at the cross, unblinking.
Marek said, with increasing desperation, ‘It’s over, don’t you understand? What you’ve been doing – killing people – that isn’t God’s work!’
The child slowly raised his knife and Sarah thought, Oh, no, we were wrong about the holy relics; we were wrong about the icon. This creature has lived under the ground for hundreds and hundreds of years. It won’t be deterred by anything.
Marek took one step back, and then another, and the child came after him, its knife lifted higher and higher. Almost screaming, Mr Okun called out, ‘You see! You won’t stop him with that because you don’t believe in it! His faith is total! His faith can never be shaken!’
Marek’s hand began to waver. He glanced back at Sarah and Rej and his eyes were wide with fear. Of course, thought Sarah. Father Xawery believed implicitly in the relic that he carried; and I believe in the Blessed Virgin Mary – but poor Marek doesn’t really believe at all.
She stood up, her heart pumping, and cried out, ‘I believe!’
But before she could take a step forward, she felt somebody pulling at her arm. It was Rej – his face white with shock, his shoulder bleeding, but with an extraordinary expression on his face, eyes staring, almost alight. ‘Stay here,’ he said, hoarsely.
He walked towards Marek until he was standing beside him. Marek looked at him nervously, but Rej kept his eyes on the child, with his upraised knife. He probably could have cut off both of their heads with a single blow, and he drew his arm back even further. But for some reason he hesitated.
Rej took the cross out of Marek’s hand and held it up.
‘I believe,’ he said, with a note of triumph in his voice. ‘Until I saw you, I believed in nothing. I didn’t believe in God and I didn’t believe in the Holy Spirit. But now I do, completely – and it’s you – you’ve shown me that it’s true!’
The child stayed where it was, frozen.
‘I believe!’ Rej shouted at it. ‘You’ve done what you were always supposed to do! You’ve carried the word of God! You’ve converted me!’
There was a long, stretched-out moment when Sarah was sure that the child was going to kill him in front of her eyes. Even Marek stepped back.
The Chosen Child Page 38
