Part 23 (1/2)
Podolski snorted with laughter and stood up, getting ready to leave. He handed the prosecutor a card with the name of the ”SB-hound”. Karol Wenzel.
”f.u.c.king h.e.l.l,” he said, standing in the doorway. ”Can a prosecutor of the Polish Republic really have said those words? In that case I'm emigrating to join my brother in London. Well, f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. How could you? Not even reading all those biased editorials in Gazeta Wyborcza should have killed the desire within the Prosecution Service to establish the truth at any cost. That's what you're for - not to look at the balance sheet of losses and injustices, but to establish the truth. f.u.c.king h.e.l.l, I simply do not believe it.”
He shook his head and left before Szacki had a chance to say anything in reply. He should have called Karol Wenzel at once, but instead of that he checked the emails, curious to see if Monika had sent his surprise yet.
She had. A picture from the seaside, taken in the same dress she'd been wearing the other day. It must have been taken a year ago - she was very tanned, with shorter hair. She was wading barefoot in shallow water and the whole bottom of the dress was soaked. She was smiling flirtatiously towards the camera. To a man? Szacki felt a pang of jealousy. Irrational jealousy, considering the fact that he had a child and a wife, with whom lately he had been sleeping pretty regularly, not with her.
He looked at the picture for a while longer, came to the conclusion that maybe she wasn't wearing a bathing costume underneath, and went to the bathroom. Not bad, not bad. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had s.e.x twice in one day.
III.
The conversation with Karol Wenzel went completely differently from how he'd imagined. He had expected he'd just be telling an older man to come and see him as soon as possible, but the voice at the other end of the line was young, and its owner had no intention of showing up at the prosecutor's office.
”Please don't crease me up,” said Wenzel emphatically, exaggeratedly rolling the letter ”r”. ”On the list of places where I wouldn't want to talk to you, your office is in the top five. Well, maybe the top ten.”
Szacki asked why.
”What do you think?”
”If you say you're afraid of bugs, I'll know that years of contact with secret-police files have driven you into... a sort of paranoia.” Szacki was sorry he couldn't simply define his interlocutor's mental state.
”I have no desire to explain the obvious to you,” bristled Wenzel. ”But out of the goodness of my heart I'll advise you that as you have reached a point in your inquiry - whatever it may be about - where you want to talk to me, I would recommend caution. No interviews at the prosecutor's office, just over a private phone, maximum discretion with regard to colleagues, superiors and the police.”
Teodor Szacki suddenly felt the phone receiver get very heavy. Why? Why was this happening to him right now? Why could there not be one single ordinary element in this inquiry? A decent corpse, suspects from the underworld, normal witnesses who come to be interviewed by the prosecutor with fear in their hearts. Why this zoo? Why was each successive witness more eccentric than the one before? He had thought after the feline Dr Jeremiasz Wrobel nothing could surprise him, but here if you please: first a crazy denouncer of collaborators and now a nutcase seized with persecution mania.
”h.e.l.lo? Are you there?”
”Yes, sorry, I've had a tough day today. I'm very tired, I'm sorry,” he said, to say something.
”Has someone already been asking questions about you?”
”Sorry?”
”Has someone pestered your family or friends, asking about you, on some trivial pretext? From the police, perhaps, the Internal Security Agency or the Office for State Protection? So has anything like that happened?”
Szacki denied it.
”Then maybe it's not that bad yet. But we'll see tomorrow. Be sure to drop by without fail after ten. I'll be waiting.”
Szacki agreed automatically. He didn't want to argue. He wanted to read the message from Monika.
”A year ago at the seaside. It was fabulously sunny, like being in Greece. The other day I saw you liked that dress, so voila: you can have it for good. And if you'd like to see some of my other clothes for real (there aren't many of them today, I admit), let's meet this afternoon in town.”
IV.
They met for a while in Ujazdowski Park. It was the first place that entered his head, he didn't know why. He grew up in this district, and if his childhood photos were to be believed, he first used to visit this park in a big pram, then in a pushchair, then holding his mother's hand, and finally he came here on his own with girls. The older he was, the tinier the beautiful city park became. Once it had seemed to be full of paths leading to nowhere, mysterious back alleys and undiscovered places, but now, as he entered the gate, Szacki could plainly see every nook and cranny of it.
He arrived early to have a bit of a walk. The old playground and its battered steel ladders with peeling paint had been replaced with modern toys - a rope pyramid, and a complicated adventure playground with little bridges, slides and swings. All on a foundation made of strange soft slabs, so the falls were less painful. Only the sandpit was in the same place as ever.
He remembered how every time he'd been here with his mother he'd stood hesitantly with his toys in his hand, watching the children who were already playing together. He'd start to tremble, because he knew what was going to happen next. His mother would gently push him towards the other children, saying: ”Go and play with your mates. Ask if they want to make friends with you.” So off he went, as if to his beheading, sure he was just about to be rejected and ridiculed. And although nothing like that ever happened, every time he pa.s.sed the gate into the park with his mother he was choked by the same fear. Until later in life, when at a party, he'd go up to a group of people he didn't know, and the first sentence to appear in his mind was: ”h.e.l.lo, I'm Teodor - can I make friends with you?”
Someone covered his eyes.
”A penny for your thoughts, Prosecutor.”
”Nothing interesting, I was just dreaming about s.e.x with those children in the sandpit.”
She laughed and removed her hands. He looked at her and felt completely defenceless. He stepped back a pace. She noticed his reaction.
”Are you afraid of me?”
”Like any femme fatale. I wanted to see how you're looking today,” he lied.
”And?” she asked, standing in contrapposto. She was wearing an orange s.h.i.+rt with the sleeves rolled up, white trousers and flip-flops. She looked like the allegory of summer. Her freshness and energy were quite unbearable, and Szacki thought he should run away, or else he wouldn't be capable of resisting them and would turn the life he'd toiled away at building all these years into a heap of steaming rubble.
”Extraordinary,” he said, sincerely at last. ”Perhaps even too extraordinary for me.”
They walked, chatting about unimportant things. Szacki got pleasure from listening to her voice, so he encouraged her to talk as much as possible. He teased her a little with his big-city superiority when he found out she was born in the town of Pabianice. She told him about her family, that her father had died recently, about her younger brother, her older childless sister stuck in a toxic relations.h.i.+p, and her mother, who in her old age had decided to go back to Pabianice. Her stories kept breaking off and lacked any conclusion, so Szacki couldn't always keep up with them, but it didn't bother him.
They walked around the pond, where some children were throwing b.a.l.l.s of bread at some indifferent overfed ducks, hopped across the stepping stones in the fake stream, the source of which was a rusty metal pipe - all too visible - and reached a small hillock crowned with an undefined something. It was a modern sculpture, a bit like a Vienna doughnut but without the wrinkles. It was covered in declarations of love, and Szacki remembered how once he had carved his own initials here, and those of his ”sweetheart” in year eight at primary school.
He leaned against the statue and she sat in its hollow. Below, the azienkowska Highway roared by in its gully, on the other side they had Ujazdowski Castle, and on the left swaggered - what else could it do - the church crossed with a fortress, where a few days ago he had been kneeling beside the body of Henryk Telak.
They didn't say anything, but he knew that if he didn't kiss her now - despite all later explanations and attempts to rationalize - he would never cease to regret it. So for fear of being ridiculed, he leaned over and kissed her awkwardly. She had narrower, harder lips than Weronika, she didn't open her mouth as far and generally wasn't a champion kisser. Either she stood without moving, or she swivelled her head and stuck her tongue in his mouth abruptly. He almost snorted with laughter. She tasted great - a bit like cigarettes, a bit like mango, a bit like watermelon.
She quickly pulled away.
”I'm sorry,” she said.
”What's that?”