The Chosen Child Read online

  Rej waited and listened. He was sweating from heat and exertion and nausea. He was also beginning to feel immensely claustrophobic. The pipe was so low that he couldn’t even straighten his neck, and his whole body was beginning to judder from keeping himself in a crawling position.

  The dragging sound continued; and came closer still. The air, which had temporarily been motionless, began to stir past his face, forced along the pipe by whoever was coming his way.

  ‘You have one last chance!’ Rej shouted. ‘Either you stop and identify yourself, or else I’m going to shoot!’

  He heard a metallic clanking sound. He lifted his flashlight; but then his flashlight began to die. The beam faded to dull yellow and then to orange, and then he was left with no illumination except for the tiny amber filament of the bulb. There was a moment’s pause, and then he was plunged into absolute darkness.

  He held his breath. The dragging noise slowly came closer. Whoever it was, whatever it was, it sounded as if it were no more than four or five metres away. Rej breathed in, and when he breathed in, he smelled not only sewage but a sour, rotten stench, like fish guts. It was so putrid that he retched.

  ‘Hold it!’ he yelled, into the blackness. ‘Hold it right there!’

  But then there was another metallic clank, much louder than the first, and another; and sparks flew from the side of the pipe. He glimpsed a shining triangle of steel, and he suddenly realized that somebody was approaching him with a huge knife, which was clattering from one side of the pipe to the other.

  What was more, this somebody was dragging himself along the pipe at an unbelievable speed.

  Rej fired. The shot deafened him, but all he saw in the muzzle flash was a momentary glint of steel. He couldn’t have missed, yet the knife blade continued to rattle against the pipe with increasing fury. He felt a quick, intense pain in his left hand, and then a terrible hacking on his left shoulder.

  He yanked wildly at the rope. ‘Get me out of here!’ he screamed.

  He was hit across the cheek. He felt warm blood pour down the side of his face. In panic, he fired his gun again. The blast was so close that it scorched his hand.

  He thought for one instant that he saw a face. A white bony cheek; a half closed eye. He thought he saw a mouth that was stretched open impossibly wide. But it could have been nothing more than a fold of fabric, or a complicated arrangement of shadows.

  For a few seconds, though, Rej’s attacker hesitated – and in that moment of hesitation Rej’s rope abruptly tightened, and he was dragged bodily back along the pipe.

  His knees and his elbows were burned by the friction. His head was knocked against the sides of the pipe. But all he wanted to do was to get away from his attacker as fast as he possibly could.

  He slid around the curve in the pipe, literally bodysurfing on raw sewage, and now he could see reflections from the sewage workers’ flashlights. Made it, he thought.

  But then he heard the clatter of his attacker’s blade, and it was coming nearer, and fast. The dragging of fabric sounded like a steam locomotive, and ahead of it the stench of rotting carcasses came in a nauseating wave.

  ‘Faster!’ Rej shouted. ‘For God’s sake, faster!’

  He felt another sharp blow on his forehead, and he clamped both his hands on top of his head in case his attacker tried to split his skull open. In the next instant, however, an even brighter light shone up the pipe; and the dragging and clattering suddenly stopped. Rej was dragged at high speed along the last twenty metres and pulled out into the main drain. He stumbled, and almost fell, but he was caught by Matejko and one of the sewage workers.

  ‘I saw him!’ he shouted, almost hysterically. ‘He’s in there! I saw him!’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Stefan,’ said Matejko. ‘What did he do to you?’

  ‘What?’ said Rej. He looked around and everybody was staring at him. ‘He hit me, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, but what with?’

  Rej looked down at his left hand. It was smothered in blood, like a glistening scarlet glove. He lifted it up, and saw to his horror that the last joint of his little finger was missing.

  ‘He – he cut my finger off!’ he shouted, in amazement. ‘My God, look! He cut my fucking finger off!’ He stared at it, unable to believe that it didn’t hurt.

  ‘He cut your face, too,’ said Matejko. ‘We’d better get you out of here right now. You don’t want to get infected.’

  ‘My face?’ said Rej. He cautiously lifted his right hand to his cheek. He thought that his attacker had dealt him only a glancing blow, but he felt a deep, gaping cut. He touched it with his fingertips and he could actually feel his bare cheekbone.

  He stared at Matejko and understood with complete clarity that he was in shock. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’d better get me out of here.’

  ‘Do we go after him, komisarz?’ asked one of his officers.

  Rej shook his head. ‘Leave him for now. The speed he travels, you’ll never catch up with him anyhow. At least we know how he gets around.’

  Matejko helped him to splash back towards the manhole.

  ‘We know how he does it,’ said Rej. ‘All we have to work out is why.’

  ‘Let’s get you to the hospital first,’ said Matejko.

  Rej turned around and looked back towards the entrance to the sewer pipe. ‘I’ll get him, Jerzy, I swear to God that I’ll get him.’

  7

  Sarah was just about to leave the office for lunch when her secretary Irena came in. Irena was a tall, wide-shouldered brunette of frightening efficiency. Sarah had hired her because she was capable of intimidating Polish men almost as much as she did herself. Irena had dark brown eyes and a slight but alarmingly attractive squint, for which she wore large glasses to correct. She always wore a crisp white blouse and a slim black skirt. Sarah may have been called ‘the Ayatollah’, but Irena was called ‘Ayatollah II’.

  ‘Mr Gogiel to see you,’ she said.

  ‘He doesn’t have an appointment, does he?’

  ‘No, but he says that he needs to talk to you urgently.’

  ‘All right then. Is the taxi here yet?’

  Piotr Gogiel was standing waiting for her, pretending to admire the scale model of the Senate Hotel that stood in a glass case in the middle of the entrance lobby. He looked sweaty, as if he had been walking fast.

  ‘Ms Leonard, I’m sorry to bother you.’

  ‘Listen, Mr Gogiel, I’m late for a lunch appointment I’m taking a taxi to the Old Town. Do you mind coming with me, and talking on the way?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  The morning was humid and the air was tinged yellow with photosynthetic smog. Even with the windows rolled right down, the interior of the taxi was sticky and smelled of other people’s perspiration. Sarah leaned forward and said to the driver, ‘Don’t go by Krakowskie Przedmiescie, it’s going to be solid.’

  The driver said something deprecatory about interfering women, his cigarette waggling up and down between his lips. Sarah ignored him.

  ‘What’s so urgent?’ she asked Piotr.

  ‘This is very embarrassing.’ he said. ‘I didn’t know whether I ought to tell you or not, because I don’t have any real proof, not as yet.’

  ‘You don’t have any real proof of what?’

  ‘Well... there’s a chap in the foreign investment department called Antoni Dlubak. I happened to be talking to him about Jan Kaminski – you know, and the way that work was being held up because the demolition workers think he was killed by a devil. He said that Kaminski had been in touch with him two or three times, because he was investigating Senate’s finance structure.’

  ‘I know he was. But I don’t know what he expected to find.’

  ‘Antoni Dlubak knew what he expected to find, and Antoni Dlubak helped him to find it.’

  Sarah turned to him with narrowed eyes. ‘What are you talking about, Mr Gogiel?’

  Piotr lowered his voice. ‘Dlubak had been curious for two or three months abou
t the irregular way in which large sums of money were moving in and out of Senate’s contingency account.’

  ‘When you say “large sums”, how much are you talking about?’

  ‘Two, two and a half. Sometimes less, mostly more.’

  ‘Two, two and a half thousand? That’s not much.’

  Piotr shook his head, and Sarah’s eyes widened.

  ‘Two and a half million?’ she said. ‘I’ve never authorized expenditure on that scale – and we’ve never had any receipts on that scale. As far as I know, there’s about $750,000 in that account, probably less.’

  ‘That’s how much there should be. But it looks as if somebody’s been using Senate’s account to launder money. That was what Kaminski was on to.’

  ‘And that would easily be a motive for somebody to murder him, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes. These days, people are being killed for a roll of carpet.’

  Sarah worriedly sat back in her seat. ‘Mr Gogiel – this could be catastrophic. Does your friend Dlubak have any inkling who’s behind this laundering?’

  ‘He says he’s made an educated guess. But he won’t tell me what it is. He says he wouldn’t tell Kaminski, either, not until he was sure. Even when he has proof, he says he’ll have to be very, very cautious. The kind of men who are laundering ten or eleven million dollars a year are not the kind of men who are going to take kindly to whistle-blowers.’

  ‘Do the police know about this yet?’

  ‘They’ve arranged to talk to Dlubak this afternoon. Two detectives... one from the fraud squad and one from the homicide squad. He’s not going to tell them anything, but he’ll have to show them the records.’

  Sarah said, ‘Who has the authority to move money in and out of the Senate contingency account, apart from me?’

  ‘You’re the only one... and, as you know, even you need a countersignature from Jacek Studnicki. I suppose somebody from Senate’s headquarters could authorize transactions directly from New York, but they would always inform you, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Not if they didn’t want me to find out about it.’

  Piotr nodded. They had reached the Old Town Market Place, wide and cobbled, with medieval façades on all four sides, every one of them reconstructed from rubble after the war. The taxi stopped outside the Basilisk Restaurant, and the driver twisted around in his seat and dropped ash onto Piotr’s knee.

  ‘Wait a moment – I’ll be going back,’ Piotr instructed him. Then, to Sarah, ‘Listen, Ms Leonard, you have to be very careful about this. If somebody has managed to move so much money through Senate’s accounts, then you can be sure that they’ve covered their tracks. You may even find that they’ve made it look as though you’re responsible. I don’t want to frighten you, but if they were prepared to cut off Jan Kaminski’s head... well, you shouldn’t do anything rash.’

  ‘You mean they’ll want my head, too?’

  Piotr flushed. ‘I didn’t want to put it that way, but yes.’

  ‘In that case, thanks for the warning. Call me later this afternoon, when the police have finished talking to your friend. This is one time when I need to stay well ahead of the game.’

  *

  Rej came back from hospital to find Nadkomisarz Dembek in his windowless office, talking to Matejko. He still felt battered and sore. His left arm was in a sling, his cheek and his forehead were bandaged, and he walked with a limp because both knees had been severely bruised when he was pulled out of the pipe. He walked around Dembek as if he were no more significant than a hat-stand, and sat at his desk.

  ‘Have you drawn up that plan for a full-scale search of the sewers?’ he asked Matejko, lighting up a Camel and blowing out smoke.

  ‘If he has,’ said Dembek, ‘it’s no longer any concern of yours.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning that you don’t tell television presenters to get stuffed on the evening news. Especially when they’re voicing a genuine public concern about a major series of crimes which you can’t solve.’

  ‘What is it with you and this Anna Pronaszka?’ Rej demanded. ‘Don’t tell me there’s something going on between you. She may be a bitch but she’s a good-looking bitch.’

  ‘You’re off the case, Stefan. You can’t solve it and you can’t handle it. You’re on suspension until further notice.’

  Rej said, ‘This is a joke, right?’

  ‘As you’ve told me often enough, I don’t have a sense of humour. I want you to hand all of your notes and files over to Witold Jarczyk.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Artur! Witold couldn’t find an elephant if it was sitting in his lap.’

  ‘I’m sorry... you haven’t left me any choice. Go home, take some leave. When was the last time you went on vacation?’

  Rej was about to start shouting at him when Matejko caught his eye and gave him a quick shake of the head. He had every right to be angry, but it wasn’t worth it. The more abusive he was, the longer he would be suspended. He might even lose his job altogether, and he certainly couldn’t afford to do that.

  ‘Get some rest,’ Dembek told him. ‘Go up to the mountains, I always do. It gives you a chance to think.’

  Rej nodded in resignation.

  ‘We all need to think things over, now and again,’ said Dembek, trying to be conciliatory. ‘Our batteries get run down. Who knows, once you’ve had a rest, maybe you’ll think of a way to catch the Executioner.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rej replied, with deep sarcasm. ‘Maybe it’ll come to me in a vision.’

  ‘You can laugh, Stefan, but homicide investigation is 90 per cent spadework, 10 per cent intelligence, and 100 per cent inspiration.’

  Rej blew out a long thin stream of smoke. ‘You know who said that? I did, to you, on your very first day on the homicide squad.’

  *

  He drove back to his apartment block in Ochota, one of six identical blocks built right under the flight path to the airport. He went up in the elevator to the fifth floor, opened his front door, and closed it very quietly behind him. He felt totally drained, as if he had been visited by vampires every night for a week. Apart from that, his left hand was throbbing, because he had taken it out of the sling so that he could drive.

  He hadn’t taken any kind of vacation since Maria had left him. He hadn’t seen the point of it. Two years ago, he had taken a day trip to the picturesque town of Otwock, on the River Swider, and had wandered in the rain through its aromatic pine forests feeling more miserable than he had ever felt in his entire life.

  He took off his coat and hung it up on the peg in the hallway. Then he went into the living-room, poured himself a glass of vodka, and went out onto the balcony. Below him, on the scrubby grass, some small boys were playing gangsters. One of them had made a model Uzi out of two pieces of wood, and was mowing his friends down with six hundred imaginary rounds a minute.

  Rej’s apartment was white-painted and sparsely-furnished with cheap varnished furniture, but there were still feminine touches around. He always kept a bowl of fresh fruit on the sideboard, even if he didn’t eat it until it turned brown, and there were lace doilies under the ashtrays. He always tried to remember to buy fresh flowers, at least once a week. An apartment without flowers was too painfully lonely. There were some bronze chrysanthemums on the coffee table, but they had started to drop their petals.

  On the wall hung a print of Cracow in winter: snow-covered roofs, and church spires seen dimly through the fog. Maria had been born and raised in Cracow, and that was part of the reason that their relationship had been flawed from the very beginning. Warsaw was a place: gritty and competitive. But Cracow was a state of mind.

  Rej sat on the balcony in a rickety green-and-white-striped picnic chair that Maria had bought from a street trader. He was trying very hard to feel angry and humiliated that Dembek had taken him off the Executioner case, but after his first vodka he was surprised to find that he was almost relieved. Apart from the physical damage that the Executioner had done
him, his finger and his forehead and his shoulder, he was beginning to suffer mentally, too. The Executioner case was like a Rubik’s cube. No matter which way he twisted and turned it, he couldn’t grasp how it worked, or what he had to do to match one incident to the next. If he was at home, maybe he could think about it more laterally. Maybe, for all of his sarcasm, he might indeed have a vision that would make it all clear.

  He sipped vodka, and listened to dogs barking and the brrrrrrpp-brrrrrrppp of boys playing with pretend machine-pistols. He watched washing idly flapping on makeshift lines, and women coming and going with baby-buggies. He saw all the everyday things that happened around his block of flats, which he had never seen before. The very ordinariness of it all was a revelation to him: the way the sun rose and people walked past and buses came and went.

  He sat on his picnic chair and his eyes filled with tears.

  *

  Sarah was down at the excavation site on Marszalkowska when her mobile telephone vibrated in the back pocket of her jeans.

  ‘Sarah Leonard.’ She was watching the German workmen noisily digging up the broken section of sewer pipe with an excavator. Senate’s civil engineers had estimated that they would have to tear up thirty metres of old piping and replace it with new; and Muller, the German foreman, had agreed with them.

  ‘You have to do this job properly. Once you have a hotel standing on this site, it’s going to be too late. Do you know how much human waste a twelve-storey hotel produces in a day?’

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact. Solid waste, 1,112 lbs. Liquid waste, 4,504 US gallons. Paper, 412 lbs. Tampons, pantyliners and other material, 37 lbs. Do you want that in metric?’

  Muller had stared at her for a long time, and then walked away.

  The voice on the end of the phone said, ‘Sarah? This is Clayton Marsh.’

  ‘Mr Marsh! I’m so glad you called! Did my father tell you what all this was about?’