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  PRAISE FOR ZYGMUNT MIŁOSZEWSKI

  “Polish mystery writer Miłoszewski’s first novel, Entanglement (2010), earned the High Calibre Award and was made into a movie . . . Miłoszewski’s compelling mystery offers a revealing glimpse of life in modern Poland, a country still dealing with its complicated past.”

  —Barbara Bibel, Booklist

  “Miłoszewski takes an engaging look at modern Polish society in this stellar first in a new series starring Warsaw prosecutor Teodor Szacki . . . Readers will want to see more of the complex, sympathetic Szacki.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Entanglement has all we require from a thriller. It opens with a murder and quickly develops into a fast-moving and tightly plotted whodunnit with a host of colourful characters . . . Ultimately it is the descriptions of Szacki’s personal life and his emotional turmoil which transcend our expectations of the genre.”

  —Oxford Times

  ALSO BY ZYGMUNT MIŁOSZEWSKI

  Entanglement (Polish State Prosecutor Szacki Investigates)

  A Grain of Truth (Polish State Prosecutor Szacki Investigates)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Zygmunt Miłoszewski

  Translation copyright © 2016 Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Gniew by W.A.B. in Poland in 2014. Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503935860

  ISBN-10: 1503935868

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  For Marta

  CONTENTS

  NOW

  Imagine a child…

  TEN DAYS EARLIER

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  NOW

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki…

  A LITTLE LATER

  By the gate…

  LATER

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  NOW

  Imagine a child who has to hide from those he loves. He does everything other children do. He makes towers out of building blocks, crashes toy cars together, has his teddy bears hold conversations, and paints houses under a smiling sun. A kid like any other. But fear makes everything look different. The towers never tumble. The car crashes are more like gentle bumps than major collisions. The teddy bears converse in whispers. And the water in the paint jar rapidly turns to dirty gray sludge. The child is afraid to go change the water, and eventually all the paints are smeared with sludge. Every little house, every smiling sun, and every little tree comes out the same nasty black and blue.

  Out in the Polish provinces, that’s the color of the Warmian landscape tonight.

  The fading December light is too weak to pick out distinct shades. The sky, a wall of trees, a house at the edge of the woods, and a muddy meadow only differ by their depth of blackness. With each passing minute they progressively merge together, until finally the separate elements can no longer be seen.

  It’s a monochromatic nocturne, bitterly cold and desolate.

  It’s hard to believe that in this lifeless landscape, inside the black house, two people are alive—one of them only just, but the other so sharply and intensely that it’s agonizing. Sweating, panting, deafened by the thudding of his own blood pulsating in his ears, he is trying to overcome the pain in his muscles to finish the job as fast as possible.

  He cannot ward off the thought that in the movies it always looks different, and that after the opening credits they should give a warning: “Ladies and gentlemen, be advised that in reality, committing murder demands bestial strength, physical coordination, and above all, perfect fitness. Don’t try this at home.”

  Just holding on to the victim is a major feat. The body defends itself against death in all sorts of ways. It’s hard to call it a fight; it’s more like something in between convulsions and an epileptic fit—every muscle tenses, and it’s not at all the way they describe it in novels, where the victim gradually weakens. The nearer the end, the more forcefully the muscle cells try to use the last remnants of oxygen to liberate the body.

  Which means you can’t let them have that oxygen, or it’ll start all over again. Which means it’s not enough to just hold on to the victim so they won’t break free; you’ve also got to choke them effectively. And hope the next jolting kick will be the last, and there’ll be no strength left for more.

  But the victim seems to have an endless supply of strength. For the killer it’s the opposite—the sharp pain of his overstretched muscles is rising in his arms, his fingers are stiffening, starting to rebel. He can see them slowly slipping, second by second, from the sweat-soaked neck.

  He’s sure he can’t do it. But just when he’s about to give up, the body suddenly stops moving in his hands. The victim’s eyes become the eyes of a corpse. He has seen too many of them in his life not to recognize that.

  And yet he can’t remove his hands—he goes on strangling the dead body with all his might for a while longer. He knows he’s in the grip of hysteria, but he goes on squeezing, harder and harder, ignoring the pain in his hands and arms. Suddenly the larynx caves in disturbingly under his thumbs. Terrified, he loosens his grip.

  He stands back and stares at the corpse lying at his feet. Seconds pass, then minutes. The longer he stands there, the more incapable he is of moving. Finally, he forces himself to pick up his coat from the back of a chair and pulls it over his shoulders. He keeps telling himself that if he doesn’t act quickly, his own corpse will soon be lying beside his victim’s on the floor. He’s surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

  But on the other hand, isn’t that Prosecutor Teodor Szacki’s greatest wish right now?

  TEN DAYS EARLIER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday, November 25, 2013

  Scientists experimenting on mice prove that it is possible to eliminate the male Y chromosome entirely without any harm to the mouse’s procreative abilities. A world without men is actually becoming technically possible. The world has its eyes on Ukraine, whose rulers have lately refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union. One hundred thousand people come out onto the streets of Kiev. It’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. According to statistics, 60 percent of Poles know at least one family where a woman is the victim of violence, and 45 percent live or have lived in a family where violence has occurred. Nineteen percent believe that there is no such thing as rape within marriage, and 11 percent do not agree that hitting your wife or female partner counts as abuse. During trials, the Italian-made high-speed train Pendolino beats the record for rail travel in Poland by reaching a velocity of 182 miles per hour. Kraków, the third most polluted city in Europe, makes it illegal to burn coal. The citizens of Olsztyn express their views on what their city needs most: bike paths, a sports arena, and a major festival. And new roads, to deal with the plague
of traffic jams. There is surprisingly little support for the streetcar network that’s meant to be the flagship urban investment project. As the deputy mayor explains, “I think a lot of the people out there have never ridden a modern streetcar.” The Warmian fall continues—it’s gray and ugly, and whatever the thermometer may say, everyone can tell that it’s damned cold outside. There’s fog in the air, and freezing drizzle.

  1

  Prosecutor Teodor Szacki was convinced that nobody deserved death. Not ever. Nobody, regardless of the circumstances, should take another person’s life, neither in defiance of the law nor following it to the letter. He had firmly believed this for as long as he could remember, but now, as he waited at the lights at the junction of Żołnierska and Dworcowa Streets, he felt his deeply rooted faith begin to waver for the very first time.

  On one side there were apartment buildings, on the other a hospital, and facing the hospital were pavilions, with a huge banner advertising a “Leather and Skins Fair.” Szacki wondered if that sounded ambiguous only to his prosecutor’s mind. It was a typical junction in a provincial town, where two streets bisect simply because they have to do it somewhere; nobody ever slows down to admire the view—instead they just drive on.

  Though actually they don’t—they drive up, come to a halt, and sit there like sheep, waiting for the green light while their feet merge with the pedals, and they grow long white beards that reach their knees, and clawlike nails on their fingertips.

  Just after moving to this city, he had read in the Olsztyn Gazette that the city’s traffic operations designer doesn’t believe in the “green wave”—because it makes people drive too fast, and thus presents a danger for road traffic—and at first thought it quite a funny joke. But it wasn’t a joke. He soon discovered that in this not very large city, which you could walk across in half an hour, and where the vehicles moved down wide streets, everyone was always getting stuck in traffic jams. And, to give the traffic designer his due, they really were at risk—of having an apoplectic fit, but at least they didn’t present a danger to other road users.

  On top of that, the traffic designer didn’t believe that the citizens of Olsztyn were capable of turning left in the usual way, after first letting the cars pass from the opposite direction. And so, out of concern for their safety, at almost every junction it simply couldn’t be done. Each stream of cars approaching the intersection from each street that led to it was given its own green light, one after another, while the rest sat and politely waited for their turn.

  Which was why Szacki cursed aloud when on Dworcowa Street, two hundred yards ahead of his Citroën, the light went yellow. He had no chance of getting through. So he stopped, put the car in neutral, and sighed heavily.

  Some sort of Warmian crap was coming out of the sky, neither rain, nor snow, nor hail. The stuff froze as soon as it hit the windshield, and even on the fastest setting the wipers couldn’t scrape off this mysterious substance. The windshield washer fluid did nothing but smear it around. Szacki couldn’t believe he was living in a town where such atmospheric phenomena were possible.

  He was sorry Poland didn’t have any overseas colonies—otherwise he’d have had himself assigned to some paradise island, where he’d have prosecuted old ladies for trying to persuade waiters and rumba instructors to submit to more advanced erotic activities. Although, knowing his luck, the only Polish overseas colony would have been an island in the Barents Sea, where there aren’t any old ladies because nobody makes it to forty.

  For entertainment he started imagining what he would do to Olsztyn’s traffic operations designer—all the ways he’d punish him, and what sort of pain he’d inflict. That was the moment when his belief in not killing began to waver, for the more refined the tortures he devised, the greater joy and satisfaction he felt.

  He would have just gone through on red, if not for the fact that as a state prosecutor he couldn’t simply get a ticket, pay up, and forget about it. If he were caught by the traffic cops, he’d have to declare his profession, and then the cops would have to inform his boss of the incident and ask for the delinquent sheriff to be punished. It usually ended in a warning, but it remained on file, leaving a black mark on his service history, and depending how malevolent his boss was feeling, it could have an effect on his salary. And as Szacki was already getting the feeling that there was no love lost for him at his new job, he preferred not to expose himself. Finally he began moving again, drove past the hospital, the brothel, and the old water tower, and then—after serving his time at the lights again—he took a gentle curve onto Kościuszko Street. Here there was finally something worth looking at, first and foremost the Administrative Court. A huge edifice that demanded respect, it had originally been built as the headquarters of the Allenstein regional administration in the days when the city was part of Germany. It was a wonderful building—a stately, majestic five-story sea of redbrick rising from a ground floor made of stone blocks. If it had been up to Szacki, he’d have housed all three of Olsztyn’s prosecution services in this building. He thought it would mean something to witnesses to be escorted up the wide steps into a great big building like this one, rather than into the miserable little 1970s box where his own local office was situated. The public should know that the state meant dignity and strength built on a solid foundation, not penny-pinching, stopgaps, terrazzo tiles, and gloss paint on the walls.

  The Germans had known what they were doing. Szacki was born in Warsaw, and at first he’d found the Olsztyn citizens’ deference toward the builders of their little homeland irritating. To him, the Germans had never done any building—on the contrary, they had reduced Warsaw to a heap of rubble, thanks to which his native town was a pitiful caricature of a capital city. He had never liked the Germans, but he had to give them credit: everything attractive in Olsztyn—everything that gave the city its character, or made it interesting with the not-so-obvious charm of a thick-skinned woman of the North—had been built by them. Everything else was bland at best, but usually hideous. And in numerous cases so ugly that time and again the capital of Warmia was held up as the laughingstock of Poland, thanks to the architectural horrors adorning it with a persistence worthy of a better cause.

  It didn’t really bother him, but if he’d been an old German on a sentimental journey to the land of his childhood, he’d probably have wept.

  The school he was heading for was called Adam Mickiewicz High School, in honor of Poland’s greatest poet. Yet the first kids to go to school here hadn’t studied the Polish bard, but rather Goethe and Schiller. Again it occurred to him that location has significance, as he gazed up at the large, gloomy nineteenth-century redbrick block. It would have been a regular, large German-era school, if not for its neo-Gothic design features—pointed gables, a small round skylight, and huge windows in the central part of the building. This gave it an austere, churchlike quality, suggesting the set for a horror movie about a didactic experiment that has gone awry. Nuns with clenched lips, children sitting in silence in identical uniforms, all pretending they can’t hear the bestial screams of their fellow student who hasn’t done his assignment for the third time in a row. Nobody’s hitting him, oh no. He just has to spend one hour alone in a small room in the attic. Nothing has ever been done to anyone there yet. But no one has ever come back the same. The nuns call it “private tuition.”

  “Prosecutor Szacki?”

  For a couple of seconds he stared blankly at the woman standing before him in the school doorway.

  He nodded and shook her outstretched hand.

  The teacher led him down the hallways. There was nothing special about the interior. You could probably have smelled the odor of old brick walls in here, if not for the nose-tickling mixture of hormones, deodorant, and floor polish.

  Before he even had time to wonder if he missed his school days and if he’d like to go through the hell of youth again, they entered the auditorium, where the assembled students were applauding three women of various ages, who had j
ust finished a debate on the stage and were standing there smiling.

  “Have you got a short speech ready?” whispered the teacher. “The kids are very much counting on it.”

  He said yes, he had, while thinking that even the penal code lets you tell lies if it’s for your own cause.

  2

  Meanwhile, in a nondescript house on Równa Street in the suburbs of Olsztyn—neither very near, nor very far away—an ordinary woman, so ordinary she could be counted as a statistic, was sinking into unhappy thoughts about herself. She had just reached the conclusion that she’d been wretched and worthless from the moment she was born. She must have spent the nine months before birth drifting away from her perfect self. That’s how she imagined it—at the moment of conception, the needle on the pressure gauge of God’s control panel was in the middle of the green field, then suddenly it shifted in completely the wrong direction. Not enough to mean she was sick, disabled, or stupid—nothing of the kind. The needle had simply shifted from green to orange. And when the first cell—who knows, it could have been a really great one—divided into two, those were the first two parts of her imperfect self. After that, things just continued downhill, and by the time she was born she consisted of such a huge number of lousy cells that the harm was irreversible.

  The list of her imperfections was infinite; paradoxically, she found it easier to bear the psychological ones because only she was aware of them. Lack of patience. Lack of logic. Lack of concentration. Lack of empathy. Lack of maternal instinct—that one probably hurt the most. She was always telling her friends there was nothing she could do about it—the one child she could stand was her own, her kid was the only one who didn’t get on her nerves. They always laughed, and so did she, though not at what she’d said, but at the fact that it was total crap—her own child got on her nerves most of all. Even when she was nowhere near a mirror, she only had to glance at that square-shaped brat with the tiny little eyes to see herself, all her crap-shit genes, produced by her crap-shit cells.