The Chosen Child Read online

  THE CHOSEN CHILD

  Graham Masterton

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  About The Chosen Child

  American businesswoman Sarah Leonard is supervising the construction of a major new international hotel in post-Cold War Warsaw. If the job doesn’t come in on time and under budget, Sarah will be out of a job.

  Shockingly, a headless body is discovered in a sewer tunnel at the construction site. Polish authorities pressure the Warsaw police to solve the case quickly, even if they have to invent a murderer, lest the hotel chain withdraw its investment dollars.

  Unluckily for the authorities, the case is assigned to Komisarz Stefan Rej. Rej wants a real investigation and real justice, particularly once his investigation turns up evidence that more than one person has disappeared or been slaughtered near the hotel site. The location is linked to the ancient legend of the Tunnel Child, a murderous creature with the face of an angel. Rumors insist that the Nazis attempted to create such a being with their warped science. Who, or what, are Sarah and Rej chasing?

  Author’s Note

  By 29 July 1944, the Red Army had reached Praga, on the eastern bank of the Vistula, in sight of the German-occupied city of Warsaw. Radio messages were sent from Moscow to the Polish Home Army: ‘People of Warsaw! To arms! Help the Red Army... show the way! The hour of action has struck... by fighting in the streets of Warsaw we shall bring nearer the moment of ultimate liberation!’

  On 1 August, at five o’clock in the afternoon, in response to these messages, and to orders from the Polish government in exile in London, the Home Army rose up against the Germans, and managed to seize more than two thirds of the city in three days. There were nearly 40,000 of them, with 210,000 unarmed helpers, but they were short of weapons and supplies, and the Russians stayed where they were, on the eastern bank of the river, so that the Home Army found themselves fighting alone against overwhelming odds.

  Molotov denied that any calls to arms had ever been broadcast from Moscow, although the Russians’ motives in hanging back were obvious. Stalin regarded the Home Army as ‘power-seeking criminals’, and he wanted to see them broken by the Germans before taking Warsaw and installing his own communist regime.

  The price that was paid was terrible beyond belief. German reinforcements poured into the city, under the command of SS Lieutenant-General Erich von Bach-Zelewski, whose forces included the Dirlewanger penal brigade and 6,000 Russian defectors, who enthusiastically obeyed Himmler’s instructions to destroy ‘tens of thousands’.

  Gradually, the Poles were forced back into shrinking pockets of territory. They had no food, little water, and dysentery was rife. Young children crawled miles through the city’s slimy sewers carrying messages; and on 24 September, the 2,500 insurgents left alive in the Old Town had to escape to the northern suburbs by the same route.

  The German advance was relentless and sadistic. Rape and looting were widespread. Doctors and nurses in hospitals were all shot on the spot. Thousands were herded into Warsaw’s parks and executed.

  After the Home Army surrendered, however, the Germans recognized them as prisoners of war, and more than 15,000 of them were marched away to prison camps. People knelt as they passed, which shocked even the insurgents themselves. ‘In Poland, you knelt only for the Holy Sacrament.’

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Chosen Child

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About Graham Masterton

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  About the Scarlet Widow Series

  Also by Graham Masterton

  From the Editor of this Book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  1

  Her bus came grinding to a halt at the bus stop and he said, ‘One last kiss,’ not knowing that it really would be.

  She laughed and gave him a flurried little peck on the cheek. He took hold of her hand as she started to climb the stairs of the bus and tried to pull her back.

  ‘Come on, I don’t have all night!’ the bus driver snapped at her.

  The doors shut with a sharp pneumatic hiss, and Jan was left at the kerbside while the bus bellowed away to Mokotow in a thick cloud of diesel smoke. He briefly glimpsed Hanna waving at him, but then the bus was lost in the traffic, and she was gone.

  A small fat woman in a headscarf came hurrying up to him, puffing and sweating. ‘Was that the 131?’ she demanded, as if it were his fault that it had left without her.

  ‘Don’t worry. There’ll be another one in five or ten minutes.’

  ‘That’s what you say!’ she protested. ‘It’s worse than the old days!’

  He laid a hand on her shoulder and gave her a wide, movie-idol grin. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked her.

  ‘Czerniakowska. What’s it to you?’

  He turned his back to her, crouched down, and extended his hands behind him. ‘Hop on. I’ll carry you there myself.’

  This enraged her even more. ‘Idiota!’ she spat at him. ‘What do you take me for? I’ll give you “hop on”!’ But he was in such a good mood this evening that he didn’t care. He left her at the bus stop and started making his way north on Marszalkowska with the confident, unhurried stroll of a man for whom everything is going right.

  It was just past nine o’clock on a warm and windy August night, and the centre of Warsaw was brightly lit and busy. Taxis banged and jolted past him on worn-out suspension, and half-empty buses blared diesel into the air as they headed out for the suburbs of Zoliborz and Wola and east across the river to Praga. Newspapers were tossed by the wind and tangled around the legs of the people walking past the brightly-lit shops on Jerozolimskie Avenue.

  That afternoon, Jan’s producer Zbigniew Debski had told him that his idea for a new weekly satirical programme had been approved, and that Radio Syrena was going to increase his salary to 950 zlotys a month. Jan was going to have enough money to save up for a car, and the chance to do what he did best, which was waspish, irreverent investigations into political scandals. Zbigniew had celebrated by bringing out vodka and platefuls of chocolate biscuits. At least he hadn’t hugged him and kissed him, which he was occasionally inclined to do. Zbigniew had a moustache like a bramble-bush and boar-like body odour.

  Best of all, though, Hanna had at last agreed to move in with him (her eyes shyly shining because she thought it was so daring). On Saturday he would borrow his friend Henryk’s van and transport all of her belongings from her parents’ apartment on Goworka to his own new apartment overlooking the river at the Slasko-Dubrowski bridge. He knew that Hanna’s mother would complain, but mostly because the family would now be deprived of Hanna’s income. Although she had graduated as a doctor of microbiology she worked as a fashion buyer at Sawa department store, and made almost as much money as Jan did, 650 zlotys a month.

  Hanna’s mother might miss the money, but she couldn’t deny that he and Hanna were suited. They were both twenty-five years old; they both liked Blur and REM; they both enjoyed dancing and nightclubbing and pizzas and staying up most of the night talking about what they would do when Jan was famous. They could
both collapse into helpless laughter at the slightest provocation. Their only difference was their complexion and their looks: Hanna was blonde and round-faced and a little plump. Jan was thin as a rail, with dark cropped hair and eyebrows that looked like children’s drawings of two rooks flying over a potato field. At least, that was his own description of them.

  High over Marszalkowska towered the Palace of Culture and Science, over 230 metres high, with 3,000 rooms, a gigantic monument to Stalinist architecture, as if a baker of impossibly grandiose wedding cakes had been commissioned to design a rocket ship. By day it was grey: by night it was luridly lit with amber lights.

  Jan reached the corner of Krowleska and waited to cross. A group of teenagers were larking about, passing around a bottle of vodka and cans of 7-Up. One of them was playing air guitar and singing ‘Born in the USA’ in a thin breathless whine.

  Most of this corner was boarded up with high, red-painted hoardings. A huge sign on the Marszalkowska side showed an artist’s impression of a twelve-storey hotel, a tall column of glass and stainless steel – ‘Warsaw Senate Hotel, A Joint Development of Senate International Hotels and Vistula Bank Kreditowy’. Up until a month ago, the old Zaluski-Orbis Hotel had stood here, a relic of the worst that the Communist years had offered in the way of dingy accommodation, poor food and surly service. Jan had described it on his radio show as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. But now the whole of the centre of Warsaw was being regenerated with glossy new stores and shiny new offices. Sheraton had just completed a new hotel on Plac Trzech Kryzyzy, and the Senate Hotel would be the next.

  The lights changed and Jan was about to step off the kerb when he heard a faint but very high-pitched scream. He stopped, and turned, and listened. The teenagers were all crossing the street, laughing and looning around. He called out, ‘Hey! Did you hear – ?’ but it was obvious that they hadn’t heard him, let alone a distant scream.

  He waited, and then he was sure that he could hear another scream, and then another, although a bus roared past him and blotted it out. He was sure that the screams had come from somewhere behind the red hoardings. They had sounded like a woman, or a child, although he couldn’t be sure.

  He walked back along the hoardings, peering between the cracks. There were one or two knotholes which he might have been able to see through, but they were too high up. All he could make out was a single arc lamp, which presumably had been left shining for security.

  At the very end of the hoardings he came to a crude door. It must have been padlocked at one time, but now it was fastened only with a twisted length of wire. Jan stood looking at it and wondered what to do. If somebody was hurt or needed help, he really ought to take a look. Or maybe not. Maybe he ought to call 997 and leave it to the police.

  As usual, there were no police on the streets, although a stocky man in a blue uniform and a peaked cap was approaching him, carrying a briefcase.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Jan said. ‘I think there’s something going on in here. I heard somebody screaming.’

  The man stopped and doubtfully stuck out his bottom lip. You would have thought that he didn’t understand plain Polish.

  ‘Two or three screams,’ Jan insisted. ‘It sounded like a child.’

  The man cupped one hand to his ear, then shook his head. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure what to do. You’re wearing a uniform.’

  ‘I work at the Palace of Culture. Doorman.’

  The man waited for a while, then shrugged and started to walk away.

  ‘Listen!’ Jan called after him. ‘I’ll go in – you call the police!’

  He didn’t know whether the man heard him or not: he kept on walking and turned the corner into Krowleska. Shit, Jan thought. Thanks for your help.

  He tried untwisting the wire. It was stiff, heavy-duty stuff, and whoever had twisted it up had obviously used a pair of pliers. He gashed his thumb, but he wrapped a handkerchief around it and continued trying to pull the wire free. A few people stopped for a moment and stared at him while he was doing it, although nobody intervened, except a thin youth with spiky hair and the beginnings of a silky black moustache. He stood close to Jan in his jeans and his denim jacket, and lit a Marlboro.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, man,’ he said. ‘That site was stripped weeks ago.’

  Jan glanced at him. ‘I thought I heard somebody inside. There were screams, two or three of them.’

  ‘Cats, probably.’

  ‘Well, I just want to make sure.’

  ‘I thought you were scrounging for salvage. I found a bronze fireplace in there. I got 400 zlotys for it.’

  Jan pulled at the lapels of his bottle-green suede jacket. ‘Do I look like I’m scavenging for salvage?’

  ‘I don’t know. It takes all sorts. Do you want a hand?’

  The youth took a Swiss Army knife out of his jacket, inserted one of the blades between the twisted wires, and slowly levered them apart.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jan. ‘I’ll give you a mention on the radio for that.’

  The youth looked perplexed.

  Jan held out his hand and said, ‘Jan Kaminski, Radio Syrena.’

  ‘Really? That’s cool. I’m Marek: but most of my friends call me Kurt – you know, after Kurt Cobain.’

  Jan tugged open the door in the hoarding, and stepped into the demolition site. The Zaluski-Orbis had been knocked down to ground level, and all that was left were its dark cavernous basements, like entrances to the underworld. The arc lamp gave the site the brilliant, artificial appearance of a deserted movie-set. Weeds and nettles rustled in the wind.

  Over to their left-hand side, a Russian-built crane and a caterpillar excavator were parked, silent mechanical dinosaurs. On the right-hand side were two temporary wooden huts with tarpaper roofs, and a stack of drainage pipes. A latrine stood at a dangerous tilt, and somebody had scrawled on the side ‘The Leaning Tower of Pisa’. There was a strong smell of building-dust, and damp, and something else, too. Something sweet and ripe that clung in the nostrils.

  ‘Sewers,’ sniffed Marek.

  Jan stood still and listened. He thought he could hear somebody crying. A thin, pathetic wailing cry – the way that children cry when they’re utterly exhausted, or women cry when they feel that everything is absolutely hopeless. The traffic noise was slightly less deafening inside the hoarding, but all the same it was difficult to tell if it was really somebody crying, or whether it was nothing more than the wind blowing across the hollow piping.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked Marek.

  Marek sucked the last hot smoke from his cigarette and flicked it away. ‘I don’t know. Maybe there’s something.’

  Cautiously, they approached the brink of the excavated basements, and peered down into the darkness. It was so black down there that they couldn’t see anything at all, but they could feel a soft, rotten draught blowing into their faces. And yes, they could hear crying, although now it was even fainter.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Marek. ‘There is something down there. But it sounds more like a cat to me.’

  ‘I wish we had a flashlight.’

  ‘There’s probably one in those huts.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and how do you propose to get it? They’re both padlocked.’

  Marek looked around and then picked up a heavy chunk of broken brick. He went right up to the door of the nearest hut, and bashed the padlock with it, three or four times. The padlock sprang open and dropped off.

  ‘My grandfather showed me how to do that. He used to break into German food stores during the war.’

  ‘Sounds a handy kind of character to have around.’

  ‘Oh, he was, when he wasn’t pissed. The trouble was, he was pissed twenty-three hours a day, and the rest of the time he had a hangover.’

  They swung open the door of the hut. Inside, the atmosphere was solid with sweat and stale tobacco smoke and the rank smell of demolition and disturbed soil. The light that shone through the dust-encrusted windo
ws picked out a table crowded with dirty coffee mugs, coffee-stained newspapers and tin lids overflowing with cigarette butts. The walls were stuck with pinups. One huge-breasted girl sported a felt-tip moustache just like Lech Walesa and the caption ‘Miss Poland’.

  In the far corner, beside a scarred collection of hard hats, Marek found a big canvas holdall. He rummaged through hammers, drill bits, crowbars and screwdrivers, and at last produced a flashlight. He shone it up into his own face, so that he looked like a thin grinning ghoul.

  They walked back to the brink of the basement and shone the flashlight into the darkness. They saw cascades of rubble, and an overturned chair, but there was no sign of anything alive.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Marek. ‘Just the wind, probably.’

  But as they were about to leave, they heard it again, the same crying, but much more distinctly this time.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a cat?’ Jan asked. ‘Maybe we should call the police.’

  ‘Why don’t we take a quick look? Here – we can climb down this brickwork.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go down first,’ Jan volunteered. ‘You point the flashlight so that I can see where I’m going.’

  Jan knelt down on the concrete-strewn edge of the basement, and carefully felt behind him for toeholds. He found one, and then another, and the rubble seemed quite firm. He slid a little way, but he was able to snatch at a large chunk of brick and stop himself from slipping any further.

  He swung his left foot from side to side, trying to find another toehold. His shoe caught on a protruding timber, partly wrapped in chicken wire. He tried his weight on it, and it seemed to hold, so he lowered himself a few feet further. He rested for a moment, clinging to the rubble, breathing heavily.

  ‘Hey, are you all right?’ called Marek.

  ‘Fine. Just out of condition, that’s all.’

  He thought he heard a whimpering sound; and then another. But after that, he could hear nothing but his own harsh panting, and – beyond the hoardings – the weary grinding of home-going traffic. He was beginning to think he was mad, climbing down here to look for a child who was probably a cat. Up above him, Marek lit another cigarette and blew smoke into the evening breeze.