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  “The screams of someone being hit and raped on the other side of the wall,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “You were wrong. Not reporting a crime is punishable, but only in exceptional cases, such as murder or terrorism. You can commit rape at a sports stadium that’s filled to capacity, and for the spectators it’ll be, at most, morally reprehensible.”

  “Actually, in the case of rape you could concede that forty thousand spectators took part in sexual assault along with the perpetrator, and then you could slap gang rape on the whole lot of them. Even better, a higher sanction. Are you trying to test me on the penal code?”

  She averted her gaze in confusion. He had reacted too sharply.

  “I know you’re familiar with the code. I was just curious why you said that.”

  “Let’s call it casting a spell on reality. I believe Article 240 should be extended to include domestic violence. Anyway, that’s how it works in the legislation in several other countries. I thought in this case a slight exaggeration would have educational value.”

  The girl nodded like a teacher who has heard out a good answer.

  “Very well said.”

  Szacki bowed and walked away. Freezing drizzle hit him in the face like pellets from a shotgun.

  4

  From a distance it looked like the set for a fashion shoot, in industrial style. In the background the dark shape of the city hospital, built during the German era, emerged from the gloom. In the middle distance there was a yellow excavator leaning over a hole in the ground, as if peering into it out of curiosity, and close up was a patrol car. The streetlamps and the police vehicle’s headlights carved tunnels into the thick Warmian fog, casting strange shadows. There were three men standing next to the car, all staring at the hero of the scene, an immaculately dressed man with white hair, standing by the open door of an angular Citroën.

  Szacki knew what the engineer, the policeman, and the unfamiliar young CID officer were all waiting for—for the pretty little pencil pusher from the prosecutor’s office to fall on his ass. He really was having a hard time keeping his balance on the cobblestones, which were coated, like everything else, in a thin layer of ice. The situation wasn’t made any easier by the fact that Mariańska Street ran slightly uphill, and the loafers he’d worn, to make an impression on the high school kids, were now behaving like skates. He was afraid he’d take a tumble as soon as he let go of the car door.

  His presence, like that of the police, was a formality. The prosecutor was called out to every death outside the hospital where there was a concern of foul play. And a decision had to be made whether or not to launch an investigation. This meant that sometimes they had to tramp around a road-construction site or a gravel pit, where bones from more than a hundred years ago were quite often found. In Olsztyn it was called “checking off a German.” A thankless and time-consuming obligation, often involving an expedition to the other end of the province and wading up to your ankles in mud. Here, at least the German was lying in the center of town.

  A formality. Szacki could call them over to have them tell him the facts, then fill out the forms in his nice warm office.

  He could, but he never proceeded like that, and he realized he was too old to start changing his habits.

  He spied some lumps of ice-coated mud on the ground, which should provide some grip. In four bizarre steps he reached the excavator and grabbed its muddy bucket, managing to restrain a smile of triumph.

  “Where’s the corpse?”

  The young CID officer pointed at the hole in the ground. Szacki had been expecting to see bones sticking out of the mud, but instead there was a black pit gaping in the roadway, with the top of a small aluminum ladder protruding from it. Ice-coated like everything else. Without hesitating, he descended. Whatever lay in wait for him down there was sure to be better than the freezing rain.

  He groped his way downward; in the hole it smelled of wet concrete, and after a few steps he was standing on a hard, wet floor. Freezing rain was lashing through the opening a couple of feet above him, and he could reach up and touch the ceiling. He took off his gloves and ran a hand over it. Cold concrete. A shelter? A bunker?

  He stepped back to make room for the CID officer. The policeman switched on a flashlight, and handed a second one to Szacki. Szacki put on the LED light and looked at his companion. Young, about thirty, with sad eyes and a very out-of-date mustache. Handsome, with the provincial good looks of a healthy farmer’s son who has done well for himself.

  “Prosecutor Teodor Szacki.”

  “Deputy Commissioner Jan Paweł Bierut.” The policeman made a gloomy face, surely expecting the joke he usually heard in this situation. It must have been hard sharing first names with the Pope and last names with an infamous Communist president.

  “I don’t know you, but then I’ve only been here two years,” said Szacki.

  “I was transferred recently from the traffic police.”

  The constant rotation of CID staff was the bane of Szacki’s existence. No rookies ever turned up there, just officers who had already done their time, mostly in the operations department. Most of them soon found out that working in criminal investigation was nothing like being a detective in a Hollywood action movie, and they eagerly took advantage of early retirement. These days it was easier to find an experienced community cop than a CID officer.

  Without a word, Bierut turned and set off down a regular concrete corridor that could have been the remains of anything—it didn’t matter much to Szacki. After a dozen paces the side walls disappeared, and they found themselves in a vaulted hall, square in shape, over six feet high and about fifty feet long. In one corner towered some rusty junk, including hospital beds, tables, and chairs. Bierut went past the heap and approached the opposite wall. There was a bed there, white in several places where the enamel hadn’t come off, elsewhere orange with rust. There was a piece of plywood lying on the frame, black with dampness, and on the plywood lay an old skeleton. Pretty much complete, as far as Szacki could tell, though the bones were partly mixed up, perhaps by rats, and some of them were lying on the floor. At any rate the skull was intact, with almost its entire dentition. The perfect German.

  Szacki clamped his lips to avoid sighing. For months he’d been waiting for a decent case. It could be tough, or controversial, or not at all obvious. In any regard—investigative, evidential, or legislative. But there was nothing. Cases of a more serious nature had included two murders, one armed robbery, and a rape at the university campus. All the culprits had been caught the day after each incident. The murderers, because they were in the immediate family, the robber, because the street cameras had recorded him almost in HD quality, and the rapist, because his pals at the dorm had roughed him up, then taken him straight to the station—evidence that something was changing in this country after all. Not only were all the criminals detained the same day, they had all immediately confessed. They’d made detailed statements, and Szacki had been able to go home at four o’clock, without his blood pressure rising.

  And now a German. For dessert, after the school gala.

  Bierut cast him an inquiring glance. Szacki said nothing, because there was nothing to say. Bierut had such a sorrowful look on his face it was as if the bones belonged to a member of his family. If the policeman was like this all the time, his pals at the station were probably passing around the phone number of a therapist to get them out of their depression.

  There was nothing to do here. Szacki swept the room with the flashlight, partly for the sake of routine, partly because he wanted to prolong the moment—it was far warmer down here, and he wasn’t being assailed by any atmospheric phenomena.

  Nothing interesting. Bare walls and the ends of a few corridors; judging by the architecture, the room was an old shelter, probably for hospital staff and patients. There must be some buried entrances somewhere, washing facilities, maybe a few more halls like this, or smaller rooms.

  “Have you checked the
rest of this space?”

  “It’s empty.”

  Szacki wondered how it had happened. Were the patients evacuated for the duration of some shelling at the end of the war, then this guy died, and the rest got out? Was there too much going on for them to remember a single corpse left underground? Or maybe someone hid down here when the war was already over, and his heart gave out?

  Szacki went up to the remains and examined the skull. No visible injuries, characteristic depressions or holes from being struck by a blunt instrument, and nothing remotely resembling a gunshot wound. If someone had helped the German to the world beyond, there was no evidence of it. Whatever, death hadn’t saved him from wartime or postwar looting.

  “There were no clothes,” said Bierut, reading his thoughts.

  Szacki nodded. Even supposing rodents and worms had eaten what was left, there should still be some shreds of material—buckles, clasps, buttons. Someone must have helped themselves just after his death, before the clothing began to disintegrate.

  “Secure these remains and have them taken to the university. I’ll write an order for their transfer. We might as well find a use for the German.”

  Old Warsaw practice. No John Doe ever ended up in the ground. First, it was a waste of the taxpayers’ money, and second, the medical schools were always happy to process the cadavers. Old bones were worth more to them than ivory.

  5

  He wasn’t in a hurry to get home. He dropped by the office and quickly wrote out an order to transfer the remains for educational purposes. From his office in the regional Olsztyn-North prosecution-service building on Emilia Plater Street he could almost see the spot where half an hour earlier he had gone down into the old shelter.

  In fact, he had a pretty good view from his office. The impersonal building stood at the top of an embankment, below which flowed the narrow River Łyna, from which Olsztyn took its name. Its former name, of course, when the river was called the Alle and the city was Allenstein. Wild undergrowth lined either side of the river—the people of Olsztyn, hopelessly in love with their own city, called it a park. Szacki called it a black-and-green hole. He wouldn’t have gone down there after dark, not even with bodyguards, because he sensed that the black-and-green hole was inhabited by more than just thugs, muggers, and those eager to commit sexual assault. The one reason for something like that to be hidden away at the very center of the provincial capital was evil spirits.

  Now bulldozers had forced them to retreat because the hole had just started to be revitalized. Bearing in mind that in Olsztyn the words improvement project sounded like a threat, they’d be sure to rip out the bushes, roots and all, replace them with a gigantic mosaic of pink paving bricks, and then boast that it was the only such structure visible to the naked eye from outer space.

  As long as they didn’t build any pink hotels and he still had his view. He got up, put on his coat, and switched off the light. Outside, the blackness of the green hole separated him from the city. Straight ahead, the brilliantly illuminated cathedral towered above the buildings of the Old Town, like a large mother hen gathering a brood of chicks. To the right, the keep of a Gothic castle and the Town Hall clock tower rose above the roofs. To the left, Olsztyn descended downhill, and it was there, just behind the green hole, that the old city hospital was located, and the shelter, which a short while ago had ceased to be the German’s eternal resting place.

  It had stopped raining, a thin mist had risen, and the little side street had become the dream site for a photographer working on an album depicting the melancholy of Warmia. Everything was black and gray, as usual in late November, and everything was covered in a thin layer of ice. On the sidewalk it was a danger, but on the leafless trees the effect was fabulous. Every last little twig had changed into an icicle that sparkled in the soft lamplight. He took a deep breath of cold, damp air and thought how his fondness for this great big village was always growing.

  He cautiously crossed the street, thinking it was time to move house. It was truly perverse that he lived across from work. He had counted once—only thirty-nine steps away. He had no time to calm down on his way home, to settle his thoughts and switch into domestic mode. And he couldn’t stand the gloomy formerly German villa, once home to the manager of the private gynecological clinic situated on the other side of the fence, now a youth club. Unfortunately the manager had wanted to be modern, and instead of a normal house he had put up a heavy block, a modernist monster, monumental, to the extent that a single-family home can be monumental. Suffice it to say that the traditional balustrade up the entrance steps had been replaced by a covered colonnade. Szacki had recently joked to himself, as he hung up a flag for Independence Day, that they ought to employ someone to stand guard holding a flaming torch.

  On top of that, lately he really had needed a little time to prepare himself psychologically for what lay ahead at home. So he decided to give himself another minute, and instead of going straight into the house, he walked around it, crossed the icy garden, and peeped into the kitchen, trying to stand outside the pool of light coming from the window. With his overcoat and briefcase he looked like a perverted Peeping Tom from the ’70s.

  Of course the big sulky witch and the little sulky witch were having a great time together. The big witch was drawing something on a huge sheet of paper, most likely the seating plan for the guests at yet another wedding. The little witch was sitting on a high stool, swinging her legs and excitedly telling a story, gesticulating wildly. The big one looked up, intrigued, and finally burst out laughing.

  “Goddamn man-eaters,” whispered Szacki.

  He had been living in Olsztyn for two years now and had met Żenia soon after he got here; they had been living together for more than a year. It was his first serious relationship since breaking up with Weronika over six years ago. And it was a good, successful relationship, really great. He wasn’t afraid to use the word happy.

  Despite various obstacles and minor spats, he had also made it up with his daughter, Hela, who had been to see them for shorter and longer stays. He had tentatively grown used to the idea that maybe he could still have a normal life, which for a good many years had not been so obvious.

  So when the great scriptwriter in the sky had decided to add a new twist to the plot, he had felt more excitement than anxiety. Weronika’s new husband had obtained a grant to do research at a technical university in Singapore, and she had decided to go on the adventure of a lifetime. She also realized that as her hormone-fueled daughter had just finished middle school, the new stage in her education could be combined with strengthening her relationship with her father. His response had been enthusiastic, to which his first wife had replied with a long silence, and then burst into the bitter laughter of an experienced woman.

  And so, near the end of August he had brought a tearful, hysterical Helena Szacka to Olsztyn, to be educated at High School Number II, which didn’t have as nice a building as Wiktoria Sendrowska’s but took pride in its reputation as the best school in the province. Naturally Hela had spitefully dug up the national rankings to show him that coming first in the province of Warmia and Masuria meant coming in eighty-second in Poland, and twenty-five Warsaw schools were ranked ahead of the local pride and joy known as “Number Two.”

  After that it had only gotten worse.

  The two women in his life had turned into the big sulky witch and the little sulky witch. Functioning quite normally until the second he appeared, when they began to fight for his attention. He realized he was the one doing something wrong, but he had no idea what. And in this emotional tangle he was totally helpless.

  His foot had gone stiff. He changed position, and the inevitable happened—a few seconds dancing in place, and then he tumbled into the frozen rosebushes.

  The kitchen window opened.

  “Jerzy?” asked Żenia in terror.

  Jerzy was Żenia’s ex-husband, who had stalked her after their divorce and received a minor suspended sentence for it.
/>   “It’s me. I wanted to walk around the garden.” Szacki scrambled up, hissing with pain because the rose thorns had scratched his hands.

  “Aha.” A chill replaced the fear in her voice. “I always thought Jerzy had a screw loose. But maybe I’m the one who’s nuts, seeing that all my guys go hiding in the bushes.”

  “Give it a break. Look how nice it is out here. I just wanted to get some air.”

  “Dad?” He heard Hela’s feeble voice coming from an upstairs window—she must have teleported herself up there, as she’d only just been sitting in the kitchen.

  She had the face of a child from a documentary on third-world orphanages.

  “Hey, darling. Everything all right?”

  “I’m not feeling great. Dad, can we talk about something? Will you come up?”

  Żenia shut the kitchen window.

  Szacki hung up his coat and went into the kitchen to give Żenia a hug. She really was working on a guest list; judging by the layout of the tables, the wedding reception was going to be held in an unusual space.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Floating platforms on Lake Ukiel. Combined wedding and solstice party. What a disaster—I keep imagining the dead bodies rising on the waves. I should put a proviso in the contract. Do you want your pasta from yesterday? It’s matured well . . .” She hesitated, as if she were about to say they’d left him some, but that would mean admitting they’d had dinner together. “It’s a bit too spicy for me.”

  “Put it out for me, I’m going up to see Hela.”