The Chosen Child Read online

Muller crunched his way back to the ladders, and Sarah turned to follow him. As she did so, however, she thought she heard a faint, high-pitched cry. A cry like a child in distress.

  She stopped, and listened, and there it was again. Very far away, very distorted, but a child crying all the same.

  ‘Herr Muller!’ she called. ‘Come back here!’

  Reluctantly, Muller came back. ‘What’s the matter? We can’t do anything now until tomorrow.’

  ‘No – listen. I’m sure I can hear a child crying.’

  They listened, both of them, but all they could hear was the airy booming of traffic and the sickly trickling of sewage.

  ‘They make all kinds of strange noises, these pipes,’ said Muller. ‘Think about it, they cover every street in Warsaw, and a few streets that don’t exist any more.’

  Sarah waited for a long while, but she didn’t hear any more crying. She followed Muller back up the ladder, accompanied by more wolf-whistles.

  ‘Are your men happy here?’ she asked him. ‘They can all eat at McDonald’s tonight. Senate will pay. There’s a foodstore on Krolewska if they need coffee or bread.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ Muller assured her. ‘And don’t worry about your excavation... we’ll have your foundations dug before you know it.’

  Sarah hesitated at the doorway. She thought she could hear the tiniest of cries. But the traffic was far too noisy, and as she stepped outside, Brzezicki’s workers began to jeer and shout, ‘Krauts out! Krauts out!’ and she wouldn’t have been able to hear a distressed child if it had been crying in her ear.

  *

  They stood around the open manhole in their khaki waterproof suits, four sewage workers and six police. They talked a lot and smoked a lot but none of them seemed to be particularly anxious to be the first to enter the sewer.

  ‘The main drain along Grojecka is big enough to stand up in,’ Mr Chwistek told them, consulting his plastic-covered map. ‘But if you want to search any of the pipes that lead into the side streets, you will have to crawl on your elbows. You’ll soon get the hang of it. You all have your lines... don’t attempt to search any of the narrow pipes without making sure that it’s fastened to the main drain. Some of these pipes keep on branching off, and it isn’t difficult to get lost. Besides which, some of them are so narrow that it’s impossible to turn around.’

  Rej zipped up his crackly waterproof suit and tugged on his heavy-duty rubber gloves. Mr Chwistek gave him an ingratiating smile and Rej tried to give him a reassuring nod in return.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to do this ourselves,’ said Matejko. He walked even more like a puppet than ever.

  ‘We have to do it ourselves because we have to show the media that we’re prepared to do anything to catch this bastard... even crawl through shit.’

  Matejko looked uneasy. He gave a ‘hmm’, which meant that it might be necessary for Rej to crawl through shit to save his reputation, but why did he have to do it, too?

  ‘I have to say this, komisarz. I don’t want to go down any of those really narrow pipes, I’m claustrophobic.’

  ‘Twelve-year-old kids did it, during the war. Why can’t you?’

  ‘This isn’t the war, Stefan. This is a homicide investigation. And I’m not a kid.’

  One of the sewage workers came up and gave them a gap-toothed, maniacal grin. ‘Are you ready?’ he wanted to know. ‘Just watch out for rats. If they come at you in one of the narrower pipes, just smack them to one side, like this.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Matejko. ‘Rats.’

  The sewage worker slapped him cheerfully on the back. ‘You’ve got it. That’s what this business is all about. Shit, and rats.’

  An officer came across with a mobile phone. ‘Komisarz Rej... Nadkomisarz Dembek wants to talk to you, urgently.’

  ‘Tell him I’ve gone down the sewers.’

  ‘He says it’s to do with this evening’s news bulletin on TVP 2.’

  ‘Oh God, it’s that bitch Pronaszka. Tell him I’ve gone down the sewers and I’m not expected back until next week.’

  He left the officer holding out his mobile phone, and climbed down the manhole. The gap-toothed sewage worker immediately followed him. Matejko went next, followed by two more sewage workers, the rest of the police officers, and a single sewage worker to take up the rear.

  Rej eased himself off the lowest rung of the ladder and into the stream of sewage. Fortunately, it was early in the evening and it wasn’t too deep or too malodorous. The waste water was mainly from showers and kitchen sinks. He waded a short way north-east, in the same direction as the flow of sewage, flicking his flashlight beam from side to side. The sewage worker came splashing down behind him, followed, very awkwardly, by Matejko.

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Matejko, as the weight of the sewage pressed his boots against his shins, ‘I didn’t join the police force for this. I thought it was going to be all fresh air and fast cars.’

  ‘Don’t whinge,’ Rej snapped at him. ‘And don’t blaspheme, either.’

  ‘I thought you were a non-believer.’

  ‘What does that matter? She was somebody’s mother.’

  They waded fifty or sixty metres along the sewer, until they reached a large domed intersection with another main pipe. ‘This is Wawelska,’ said the sewage worker, his flashlight darting about. Water and waste matter was pouring in from both sides, filling the central channel even more deeply. There was another iron ladder here, leading up to a manhole cover directly above their heads.

  Matejko said, ‘How do we know which way the Executioner went?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Rej. ‘We’ll just have to search every sewer until we find some evidence.’

  The sewage worker grinned, and spat. ‘Search every sewer? I’ve been working down here for seventeen years, and I don’t think I’ve seen a tenth of them yet. The trouble is, they were built in 1886. An Englishman built them, did you know that? But they were all changed and modernized in 1939. Then the city was flattened by the Nazis, and rebuilt, and new pipes were laid, and nobody knows where half of the old pipes actually run.’

  He took hold of Rej’s sleeve, and said, ‘Let me tell you something. We still find skeletons down here, now and again, in some of the disused pipes. Two years ago we found a young girl’s skeleton. She couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven. She was trapped in a whole mess of rusty barbed wire that the Nazis had crammed into the sewer to stop the Home Army from using it. She was still wearing a little felt coat and little woolly mittens, and she was still carrying a message in her hand. Who knows how many men and women died because she never got where she was supposed to be going?’

  Another sewage worker called out, ‘Let’s get on with it. Don’t listen to him. He’s been down the sewers so long he’s full of crap.’

  They carried on north-eastwards, towards Plac Narutowicza. The sewage was much deeper now, and colder, and the air stank of methane gas. They made a slop, slop, slop sound as they walked, and they had to be careful that the sewage didn’t pour over the top of their boots. ‘You should see some of the foot infections people get down here. Believe me, you’d rather have leprosy.’ Rej’s eyes began to water, and he cupped his hand over his nose and mouth in an attempt to suppress the smell. He swung his flashlight from one side of the sewer to another, into the dark, dripping subsidiary pipes, looking for any kind of unusual debris, or any scratching or scoring on the filth-caked concrete to indicate that somebody might have crawled that way. So far, they had all been the same: dark, stinking, and dripping. Rej had boldly called for a general search, but now that he was down here, things seemed very different. Even the thought of having to shuffle along one of these narrow pipes on his knees and elbows made him hyperventilate: and he began to pray to himself that they wouldn’t find anything at all.

  He couldn’t imagine how children could have made their way through these pipes, with nothing but candles to light their way, under constant threat of gassing or being roasted
alive by burning gasoline, or being trapped underground until they died of thirst.

  They had just passed the major sewer junction under Plac Narutowicza when Matejko said, ‘Look – what’s that? Is that newspaper?’

  Off to the left, in one of the narrower pipes, a double sheet of yellow paper was stuck to the wall. Rej waded across and peeled it off. It was Ex Libris, the book section from yesterday’s newspaper, the same paper that they had found on the lowest rung of the manhole. It was heavily stained with blood, but most of it was still dry.

  The sewage worker aimed his flashlight up the pipe. ‘No doubt about it... he went this way. You can see the marks on the walls.’

  ‘Headed where?’ asked Rej.

  The man consulted his map. ‘Right underneath the Church of the Immaculate Conception.’

  ‘Don’t suppose we’ll find many condoms in there,’ joked Matejko, but was instantly silenced by Rej’s stone-hard face.

  ‘Do you want to take a look?’ asked the sewage worker. ‘Put this line around your waist first. If you get stuck, or if you panic, we can always drag you back out again.’

  Rej said, ‘Matejko?’

  Matejko stepped back, and the sewage slopped into his boot. ‘I’m sorry, komisarz. I’m really claustrophobic. I can’t.’

  ‘You’ll be tied to a line. What are you worried about?’

  ‘I just can’t stand confined spaces, that’s all. It’s bad enough here, where there’s headroom. I mean, even if I did find the Executioner, what could I do?’

  ‘What could he do, in a pipe as small as that? Besides, you’ve got your gun.’

  Matejko came up close to him – so close that Rej thought for one absurd moment that he was going to kiss him. ‘Stefan, I can’t go up that pipe. Please don’t ask me.’

  ‘I’m not asking you. I’m ordering you.’

  Matejko took a deep, quavering breath. ‘I don’t care whether you’re asking or ordering. I still can’t do it.’

  ‘Because you’re claustrophobic?’

  ‘Because I’m shit scared, if you want to know the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that.’

  ‘Because I’m shit scared!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because I’m shit scared, all right?’

  Matejko’s voice echoed and re-echoed through the sewers. All of the other men looked at him, but there was no reading their faces. They were probably just as scared as he was, and were quite relieved that somebody else had come out and said it first.

  Rej turned to the sewage worker and said, ‘Okay, then. It looks as if it has to be me. What will you do, follow up behind?’

  The sewage worker nodded. ‘You’ll be all right. The main thing is to keep very calm. People get bigger when they panic, their lungs inflate and their muscles tense up. Panicking always makes things worse.’

  Rej took off his gloves and reached inside his overalls so that he could extricate his Tokarev automatic from its shoulder holster. Then the sewage worker knotted a line around Rej’s waist and another gave him a heavy-duty flashlight. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Let’s do it.’

  He turned to Matejko and said, ‘If anything happens to me, Jerzy, you can have my tropical fish. Make sure you clean them every two days.’

  Matejko said nothing, but with an expression of humiliation and helplessness watched Rej climb up into the narrow pipe. There were times when he found himself wishing that Rej would be injured in the line of duty so that he would have to retire. He liked Rej: he was almost an older brother. But because Rej could never forgive his own weaknesses, he could never tolerate anybody else’s weaknesses, either.

  Rej found it harder to make progress along the pipe than he had expected. It was too narrow for him to crawl properly, and so he had to shuffle himself along on his elbows and knees. Holding a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other didn’t help, but he wouldn’t have been without either of them.

  Up ahead of him, the pipe ran in a straight line for fifty to sixty metres, and then curved off to the right. Its sides were thick with grease, and the bottom of it was filled with a gritty beige sludge. Rej had only been crawling a few metres before his overalls were caked in filth.

  ‘In America, you know, they use skateboards to roll themselves along pipes like this,’ said the sewage worker. ‘I asked my boss for a skateboard but he said I was down in the sewers to work, not to play.’

  Rej thought he heard a scuttling, scuffing sound. He stopped for a moment and directed his flashlight further up ahead. He glimpsed something moving, a curved shadow that flickered across the inside of the pipe and then vanished. He listened, but he couldn’t hear anything. It must have been a reflection from his own flashlight.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the sewage worker.

  ‘I don’t know. I thought I heard something.’

  ‘Rats, more than likely.’

  ‘They don’t bite, do they?’

  ‘Only if you’re trapped, and you can’t fight back. But don’t drink their piss. That’s fatal.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on it. I’m a schnapps man myself.’

  He continued to shuffle himself forward, with the sewage worker following close behind. Too close, most of the time, because he could wriggle through the pipe much faster than Rej, and he kept nudging Rej’s shoes.

  ‘Where does this pipe lead?’ asked Rej, as they reached the bend.

  ‘The intersection of Niemcewicza and Jerozolimskie.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘Wherever you like, komisarz. We could crawl from one side of the city to the other, and never see daylight once.’

  Rej kept on heaving himself forward. His elbows were beginning to feel sore now, and every time he bent his knees they knocked against the side of the pipe. He tried not to think that he was seventy-five metres along a filthy pipe that was only one metre in diameter. He tried not think that he was deep beneath the foundations of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, under tons of soil and tons of stone. More than anything else, he tried to forget that he was sliding through untreated sewage, and that every breath was thick with the stench of human waste. For a moment, he had to stop, because he was starting to breathe too quickly, and he was very close to the edge of panic.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked the sewage worker.

  ‘I was just listening, that’s all.’

  He was about to carry on when he heard a sharp, scraping sound, somewhere up ahead of him.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Rats, that’s all. We’ve disturbed them; and they hate to be disturbed.’

  But then there was another scraping sound: and something else. Up until now, a faint current of air had been blowing through the pipe – but now, abruptly, the air had become stagnant, as if the pipe had been blocked.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ asked Rej.

  ‘Yes. Something’s obstructed the airflow.’

  ‘A rat couldn’t do that, could it?’

  ‘I’ve seen some monsters... but I’ve never seen one big enough to block a whole pipe. It’s a man.’

  Rej managed to twist his head around and shine his flashlight on the sewage worker’s face. ‘A man? You’re sure about that?’

  ‘It’s always the same, when somebody else enters a narrow-diameter pipe. They cut off the airflow.’

  ‘Then there is somebody down here!’

  ‘It feels like it. But don’t start shooting. It could be one of our guys.’

  Rej turned back and shone his flashlight further up the pipe. ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted. His voice didn’t echo any more: it sounded flat and muffled. ‘Is anybody there?’

  They listened, and waited, but there was no reply. ‘Maybe he’s too far away to hear us,’ Rej suggested.

  ‘He can hear us, all right,’ said the sewage worker. ‘In these pipes, you can sing “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela” in Zoliborz and they can hear you in Mokotow.’

  ‘What do we do, then?’ asked Rej.


  ‘You tell me. You’re the one who’s trying to catch him.’

  Rej listened again. There was no doubt about it, he could hear a slow, thick, dragging sound, and it wasn’t retreating along the pipe, it was coming towards him.

  ‘Hallo!’ he shouted. ‘Is anybody there? This is a warning – come out slowly! We’re armed police!’

  The dragging sound was louder now, but there was still no reply. Rej was shining his torch directly up the pipe but he still couldn’t see anything, only darkness.

  ‘Come out and identify yourself!’ he demanded. His voice was off key. He cocked his automatic and straightened his arm, so that it was pointing straight down the pipe. He wasn’t a very good shot, but if somebody was crawling up the pipe towards him, there wasn’t much chance of missing.

  Still there was no response. But now Rej could see that there was something dark filling up the pipe, something that seemed to blot out all reflected light. The dragging sound grew louder, like somebody heaving something wet and indescribably filthy. Another sound became audible, too. A regular, laboured scratching, as if overgrown finger-nails were making a terrible effort to claw their way along the grease-lined pipe.

  Rej was not a coward. He had been attacked by drunks and petty criminals more times than he could remember. But whatever was approaching him along this sewer pipe filled him with a feeling of dread that he had never experienced before. His gun-hand was shaking uncontrollably, and he couldn’t keep the flashlight still, either.

  ‘What is it?’ the sewage worker asked him, in a frightened rasp.

  ‘I don’t know. But I suggest you start making your way back.’

  ‘Can you see it?’ the man wanted to know.

  ‘I can and I can’t.’

  ‘What does that mean, you can and you can’t?’

  ‘It’s dark, it’s totally dark. But I can see something there. I mean I can see it because I can’t see anything else.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said the sewage worker, and immediately tugged on his rope.

  ‘What? What is it?’ Rej asked him.

  ‘You stay and find out, komisarz. I’m not.’

  He tugged his rope again. There was a moment’s pause, and then he was dragged back out of the pipe, feet first. Rej heard him sliding around the bend in the pipe with a sound like somebody riding the toboggan in the winter Olympics, then there was nothing but an echo, and then he was gone.