The Chosen Child Read online

  ‘He gave me a serious inkling, let’s put it that way. In fact I’ll tell you how serious it was. I’m here now, at Warsaw airport.’

  ‘I can’t believe it! Listen – if you can wait there for twenty minutes, I’ll have the company limo pick you up.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll take a taxi. Just tell me where you are.’

  ‘Our office is Grzybowska 12. Ask for Irena, she’ll take care of you. She’s booked you a room at the Marriott, you should be comfortable there. I’m down on site at the moment. I’ll meet you later.’

  Sarah tossed back her hair. She was feeling better already. Not only had Muller and his men made enormous progress on the demolition site in only a few hours, but now Clayton Marsh had arrived. Clayton was retired now, but his track record in homicide investigation was legendary. He had caught Jay Wakeman, the baseball player who had killed his wife and her lover in a housefire that even fire department investigators had described as ‘accidental’. He had found Rafaello d’Annunzio, the racketeer, and secured a conviction for first-degree murder, even after nine people had sworn that he was attending a charity concert in Cicero at the time the homicide had taken place. Clayton Marsh had one of the most original minds in criminal investigation, and if he couldn’t find the Executioner, then nobody could.

  Muller came over and said, ‘We’re just about ready to take out the old sewer pipe and replace it with a new section. Do you want to watch?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  They climbed down the aluminium ladders into the basement area. Muller’s men had excavated all around the broken section of pipe and cut it free at both ends. They had wrapped heavy-duty chains around it, and now they were preparing to lift it out.

  Sarah said to Muller, ‘You know why I called you in, don’t you?’

  Muller nodded. ‘Your Mr Brzezicki made a point of telling me. Well, more fool him, that’s what I say. If he wants to miss out on a fat contract like this just because he’s scared of some devil... I’ll tell you what, if any of my men came face to face with this Executioner, devil or not –’ He made a neck-wringing gesture with both hands.

  The crane’s diesel bellowed, the chains jangled and tightened, and the broken section of sewer pipe shifted in the soil. Slowly, dripping sewage, it was raised out of its excavated bed, and lifted over their heads. It was loaded onto the back of a dump-truck, and then the chains were lowered back into the basement so that the workmen could hitch up the new section of pipe.

  One of the workmen jumped down into the excavation with a sweeping-brush to clear soil away from the severed ends of the piping.

  Muller said, ‘Once we’ve got this sewer sealed, do you think Brzezicki and his men will want to come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some of his men were saying that they would only come back if the Executioner was caught and killed and they could see the body for themselves.’

  Muller tapped his forehead. ‘Verrückt,’ he said. ‘They’re mad.’

  The new pipe was chained up and swung over the hole. They were just about to lower it, however, when one of the workmen whistled and lifted a hand to stop them. ‘Hey! Where’s Hans?’ he called out.

  ‘He was down there, sweeping out the pipes.’

  ‘Yes, but where is he now?’

  The workmen looked around. There was no sign of Hans. Sarah had seen him down at the open mouth of the sewer pipe, but she couldn’t recall having seen him climb out. Muller said, ‘Uwe! Jurgen! Take a look inside the pipe! We don’t want to seal him up in there!’

  Two workmen jumped down into the trench and peered inside the pipe. ‘Hans? Hans, are you in there? Come on, Hans, we’re closing the pipe!’

  Sarah frowned at Muller and approached the edge of the excavation. ‘Did anybody see him climb out of the hole?’ asked Muller. There was general murmuring and head-shaking.

  ‘How could he disappear like that?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘He didn’t go for a piss, did he?’ Muller demanded. ‘Jakob, go take a look in the john.’

  ‘Hans!’ yelled one of the workmen down in the hole, his hands cupped around his mouth. ‘If you’re in there, Hans, you’d better come on out quick!’

  All they heard was an echo. The man hesitated for a moment, and then ducked his head and entered the pipe. They could hear his footsteps splashing along the water-course. Then they heard him say, ‘Christ, it stinks in here.’

  A few seconds later, though, he came back out again, and he was holding the long-handled broom that Hans had been using to sweep away the loose soil. His face was serious. ‘I found this,’ he said. ‘And it looks as if there’s blood in the pipe, too.’

  Muller gave Sarah a quick, hard glance. ‘Maybe your Mr Brzezicki wasn’t so stupid after all. Jurgen, go find a couple more flashlights. Go down that sewer as far as you can and take a look. Take a pick-handle with you. Jakob! While you’re up there, get on the phone for me and call the police, and an ambulance, too. Who’s the detective in charge?’ he asked Sarah.

  ‘Komisarz Stefan Rej. I’ve got his number.’

  Armed with a pickaxe handle and a crowbar, the two workmen switched on their flashlights and crouched their way into the sewer.

  Muller called, ‘Hey, you two! Any sign of trouble, don’t worry about being heroes, just get your asses out of there.’

  ‘Try to stop us,’ came the sardonic, disembodied reply.

  Sarah checked her watch. She tried to appear upbeat, but she was beginning to feel anxious and edgy about this project. She had suffered catastrophic setbacks before, and even fatalities: two workmen had been buried alive in concrete when they were building the Senate Sofia. Nine more had been injured when scaffolding collapsed at the Senate Belgrade. But this project was different. This project had the smell of brimstone about it; the feeling of irredeemable ill-luck. It wasn’t just Jan Kaminski’s murder, either, or Jozef Brzezicki’s superstitious belief in an underground devil. It was the way that Ben had suddenly appeared to take personal control – Ben, with all his talk of persuading city officials ‘to take a better decision’ – and Piotr Gogiel’s allegations of criminal money-laundering.

  She knew that she was going to have to take back control of this whole development, otherwise she was going to find herself increasingly pushed to the edge of what was really going on – while still being answerable for the consequences. If she lost her grip any further, her head would be at risk, and not just from the Executioner, either.

  ‘Nothing so far!’ came an echoing voice from out of the pipe. ‘But this definitely looks like blood!’

  Muller jumped down into the excavation himself. ‘How far does that stretch of pipe run?’

  ‘Two hundred metres. Then it runs into a wider chamber.’ Sarah heard police sirens in the distance. But she heard something else, too. Deep within the pipe, a throaty, tremulous sound, like a primitive wind instrument, or someone blowing across the neck of a large empty bottle. She frowned at Muller, and he said, ‘Air... moving along the pipe.’

  ‘Why should it do that?’

  ‘Could be a surge of water. I don’t know.’

  Then they heard another sound. A slow, insistent chuffing. This was followed almost immediately by an odd, strangled noise, and then a ringing, reverberating clang of metal.

  ‘Jurgen!’ shouted Muller. ‘Uwe!’

  There was no answer. Muller looked up at Sarah uneasily. ‘Maybe they went further.’

  ‘Maybe they did, but don’t try looking for them. Leave it to the police.’

  The workmen began to shuffle and murmur. One of them said, ‘We can’t just leave them there, can we? Supposing they’re hurt?’

  ‘Let’s give them a couple more minutes,’ Muller suggested. ‘They’ve probably gone around a bend in the sewer, and they can’t hear us.’

  At that moment, a fragment of something crimson came flying out of the open mouth of the sewer pipe. It struck Muller’s shin, and dropped to the ground just beside his shoe. He reached down to pick
it up, and then suddenly stepped away from it, his face contorted with disgust.

  ‘What is it?’ Sarah asked him, although his expression said everything.

  ‘It’s a – part of – somebody’s hand.’

  Sarah stared down at it. Muller was right. The bloody fragment was somebody’s palm, chopped off like a cutlet. No fingers, no thumb, only a squarish bony joint.

  The sirens were whooping closer now. Sarah pressed her hand over her mouth. She had never seen a dead body before, except for her grandfather, in his casket, with a Bible held in his hands. She didn’t want to see one now. Muller said, ‘There’s somebody in there, apart from them. Somebody’s killed them, for God’s sake!’

  Sarah said, ‘You don’t know for sure that they’re –’ But she was interrupted by a terrible wet bursting noise, and the frantic clashing of steel against the sides of the sewer pipe. The next thing she knew, more pieces of flesh and bone came flying out, a grisly blizzard of arms and feet and curved sections of rib, followed by long stringy streamers of intestine and soggy lumps of lung. Muller, standing right in front of the opening, was inundated in human offal. He stood there, too stunned to move, while half a pelvis hurtled out of the pipe and fell at his feet, and then a shin bone hit him on the right shoulder.

  Sarah turned away. Her whole body was stiff with shock. She took two mechanical steps towards the ladders, and then she couldn’t move any further. She felt as if her nervous system had shut down; as if her body couldn’t understand what her brain wanted her to do.

  She stood rigid while police and ambulancemen came hurrying down the ladders, passing her by on either side. She heard them shouting; and the workmen shouting back at them in German. She heard somebody saying, ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ over and over again.

  *

  She was still there an hour later when Clayton Marsh arrived. He was a tall, heavy, silver-haired man in his early fifties – handsome in the mould of Howard Keel. He was wearing a camel-hair coat and dark brown trousers. An enamel pin in his lapel bore the badge of the Chicago Police Department. He gripped Sarah’s hand and said, ‘Hi. Your secretary told me you were here. Looks like you’ve got yourself some kind of pig’s dinner.’

  ‘You’re not joking. There were three workmen killed here, less than two hours ago. Not just killed, they were chopped up.’

  ‘You saw it happen?’

  ‘I was right here. Whoever did it, he just – God, he just chopped them to pieces.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Clayton asked her. ‘You look like you could use a stiff drink.’

  ‘I’m okay, really. I just can’t stop shaking.’

  Clayton looked around. ‘Listen, I just arrived, there’s not very much that I can do now. I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes. But I wouldn’t mind talking to that Komisarz Stefan Rej you mentioned.’

  ‘They took him off the case. I don’t know why: he seemed to be making some real progress. The new man they’ve put onto it seems pretty dim to me.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s good news,’ said Clayton, hitching up his belt. ‘The dimmer the cops, the more chance I’ve got of solving the case without any interference.’

  Komisarz Witold Jarczyk came over. He was dark-haired, and thin to the point of emaciation. With his sharp nose and his pointed ears he looked like a court jester, starved of approval and overwhelmed by gloom.

  ‘Thank you for waiting, Ms Leonard,’ he said. ‘We might need to speak to you again later, but you don’t mind that, do you?’

  ‘No, komisarz, I don’t mind that.’

  Clayton said, ‘Pardon me, sir, do you have any idea how these three men died?’

  Jarczyk stared at him with bulging eyes. ‘I’m sorry? Who are you?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Ms Leonard’s, that’s all.’

  ‘Well... we don’t know yet. They were cut to pieces with a very sharp instrument. But we’ll have to wait for the autopsy to find out how, or why. Quite frankly, we don’t know whose fingers belong on whose hand. Now, if you don’t mind –’

  ‘Can I go now?’ Sarah pleaded.

  Jarczyk was fumbling in the pockets of his baggy brown suit. He produced a single unwrapped mint and started sucking it. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll let you know if I need to talk to you any more.’

  Clayton shepherded Sarah out of the basement area and helped her up the ladder to street level. There were people milling everywhere – police lights flashing, TV lights glaring. ‘Let’s go someplace quiet,’ Clayton suggested.

  They went to the mezzanine bar in the Marriott Hotel. A pianist was playing a convoluted version of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. Clayton ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and Sarah joined him. She didn’t usually drink hard liquor, but after seeing those men massacred, she needed it. She was still trembling as if she was coming down with a fever, and when she caught sight of herself in the mirror on the other side of the bar, she looked completely bloodless, paler than ever.

  Clayton said, ‘Your pa sends his love. All the same, he’s worried about you, what with all these murders.’

  Sarah sipped her drink and looked away, trying hard not to cry.

  ‘I’ve read all of the e-mail you sent me,’ Clayton told her. ‘But I’m not so sure that Kaminski was killed because he was checking out Senate’s financial affairs. I can’t see anybody at Senate taking a contract out on anybody, can you, just because he stumbled across a little palm-greasing. These days, even the Mafia prefer to take somebody to court, rather than go to the trouble of whacking them and then disposing of the body.’

  Sarah said, ‘It was more than bribery, it was fraud. Piotr Gogiel thinks they could be laundering ten to twelve million dollars a year.’

  ‘Jesus H. Priest. Now that’s a reason for putting someone away. Listen – I’m going to have to see your bank records. It shouldn’t take too long to find out who’s been using your account.’

  ‘Whoever it is, he’s been very clever.’

  ‘I’m sure he has. But I’m not just some dumb old flatfoot, Sarah. I took a three-year course in accountancy with the FBI. It takes more than clever to hide funny money from me.’

  Sarah said, ‘I just can’t work out if these murders are connected to Senate International or not. We’ve had four people killed on our site now, but the Executioner is supposed to have killed at least twelve people altogether, and they don’t seem to have anything in common.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I gathered from your messages. But there are ways and means of finding guys like this, even if there’s no obvious connection between any of his victims.’

  Clayton ordered another drink, and explained to Sarah how he was going to isolate the linking factors between the Executioner’s victims. ‘The cops run through all of the obvious data, and so they should. But if your linking factor isn’t immediately apparent, then you have to carry on and start intersecting your non-obvious data, such as star signs and shoe size and speech mannerisms and all kinds of arcane stuff like that. And if you’re still drawing a blank, you really have to go right off the map and intersect factors like what age they lost their virginity and where they were on 13 April, 1991, and what’s their favourite tropical fish.’

  He reached across the table and laid a paternal hand on hers. ‘Let me tell you, this, Sarah. I’ve investigated thirty-seven multiple homicides. I didn’t catch all of the perpetrators, but I never once failed to discover what it was that linked all the victims together. Once, it was the fact that they lisped. Can you believe that? The perpetrator couldn’t stand anybody who lisped. He had a perforated eardrum and lisping set his teeth on edge.’

  ‘It said on the news that the Executioner hides in the sewers. You know, like Harry Lime.’

  ‘Sure – and I bet there’s a reason for that, too. But it’s no use searching the sewers. If this guy knows his way around, they’ll never find him down there, not with a hundred cops with tracker dogs. We had a pretty similar case on the South Side once, a guy using the sewers as a getaway rou
te. All we caught was hepatitis. No – the only way to find him is to work out the factor that links all of his victims, and make sure that we’re there when he goes for his next victim.’

  ‘You mean a trap? An ambush? Wouldn’t that be too risky for the victim?’

  ‘Properly worked out, not at all. This guy has a driving force, Sarah. I don’t know what it is yet but I intend to find out. It could be revenge, it could be guilt, it could be the fact that his mother was frightened by an aardvark when she was eight months pregnant. Who knows? Nobody knows, as of right now, but we’re going to find out.’

  ‘How’s your Polish?’ Sarah asked him.

  ‘I couldn’t give the Pilsudski Memorial Lecture, but I can get by. My mother was Polish, and she didn’t speak anything else when dad was at work. That’s why I grew up calling a doughnut a paczki.’

  ‘This could be really dangerous, you know. Whatever happened today, those poor men were chopped up like – God, like something out of an abattoir. They were just bits.’

  ‘That’s part of this Executioner’s technique,’ said Clayton, leaning back in his chair. ‘He’s got this reign of terror going, and the more frightening he is, and the more everybody panics, the more he gets off on it. Taking the heads off, that’s part of it. But a killer is a killer is a killer. I mean, sure those guys were just bits. But when somebody kills you it doesn’t matter how they do it or what they do with you afterward, does it? You’re fucking dead, excuse my language.’

  ‘Do you really think you can catch him?’

  ‘Oh, for sure, I’ll catch him. He’s taking too many risks now... killing right out in the open. And he’s not expecting me.’

  He tipped back the last of his drink. ‘By the way... I overheard one of the cops saying that your friend Komisarz Rej is pretty damn pissed because he was taken off the case. I’ll give him a call tomorrow and see if I can’t pick his brains.’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Sarah. ‘He’s good, but he’s not what you’d call amenable.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Clayton was silent for a while, staring at a point just west of the Marriott ashtray. Then he looked up and said, ‘Your pa didn’t tell me what a looker you’d grown up to be. Do you want to show me some of the nightlife in this Godforsaken city?’