The Chosen Child Read online

  ‘I don’t know about tonight.’

  ‘What are you going to do, sit in your apartment all night and have nightmares? Come on, it’ll do you good. It’ll do me good, too. I haven’t had a pretty woman on my arm since my wife passed on.’

  8

  As soon as the ambulance crew had left, the door swung open and Rej came in. Dr Wojniakowski looked up from the sink, unsurprised.

  ‘Oh, Rej, I was wondering when you would pop up.’

  There were three stainless steel autopsy tables and there was a large black plastic bag on each of them. Dr Wojniakowski dried his hands, took out a cigarette, and lit it with nerveless fingers. Once he had puffed out a satisfactory amount of pungent blue smoke, he approached the first bag and palpated it gently between both hands.

  ‘Pigs’ guts,’ he remarked. ‘Not literally. That’s what it feels like, that’s all.’

  Rej said, ‘The news report said they were chopped to pieces.’ He approached the bags cautiously, almost as if he expected them to burst open, and three hideously-disassembled bodies to come jumping out.

  ‘It certainly feels as if they were chopped to pieces.’

  ‘In just a few minutes? The three of them? How the hell did he manage that?’

  Dr Wojniakowski coughed, and cleared his throat. ‘That’s what we have to find out.’

  He started to untie the first bag. The early afternoon light fell through the wired-glass windows and illuminated Room Three like a chapel, with Dr Wojniakowski’s cigarette smoke for incense. ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know, Rej. You’ll get me into all kinds of trouble.’

  Rej approached the autopsy table and smelled that thick pungency of recent death – blood and fat and digestive acids, as well as excrement. He watched while Dr Wojniakowski rolled back the top of the bag and revealed a heap of bones and flesh. He saw pallid, sliced-open lungs; dark slippery slices of liver; and endless bloody coils of intestine.

  ‘I don’t know what they expect me to do with all this,’ he said. He reached into the bag and took out an indescribable piece of flesh with another piece dangling from it. ‘Do you know what they said? They’ve done their best to put all the right pieces in all the right bags, but there may be some margin of error.’

  Again, he plunged his hands into the bloody heap in front of him. This time he came up with two penises, one with a single testicle attached, and one without any at all. ‘Margin of error?’ he said, snorting smoke. ‘Either they don’t know anything about anatomy, or this man had the happiest wife in the whole of the German Republic.’

  Rej swallowed, and peered into the glutinous depths of the bag.

  ‘Do you want some gloves?’ asked Dr Wojniakowski. ‘Then you could really rummage.’

  ‘I can’t see a head,’ said Rej, cautiously; praying that he wouldn’t.

  ‘No, that’s right. None of them has a head. Your colleague Komisarz Jarczyk warned me of that, on the phone.’

  ‘So it could be the Executioner?’

  Dr Wojniakowski looked at him steadily. ‘I don’t know who it is, or what it is. Who do you know who can chop up three grown men in only two or three minutes? Or what?’ He paused, and smoked, and then he said, ‘By the way, you’d left the office before my results were sent round, but your friend Jan Kaminski was definitely beheaded with the same knife that beheaded all previous six victims: and so was Mr Wroblewski. There were microscopic traces of metal on all of them, and they all matched.’

  ‘How about the fabric sample?’ asked Rej.

  ‘That was very interesting, too. We’ll be testing it again tomorrow, but the fibres under Jan Kaminski’s fingernails matched the fabric sample that you found in the sewer... so, presumably, the fabric was worn by Kaminski’s assailant. The reason we’re testing it again, though, is because of its apparent age.’

  ‘What are you talking about, “apparent age”?’

  ‘It’s velvet; and it was originally dyed black. Our chromograph tests show that it probably dates back to the mid-17th century, maybe even earlier.’

  ‘Seventeenth century? Are you kidding me?’

  ‘There’s no mistaking it. The button supports it, too. It’s made of solid brass, handmade, and it’s embossed with the face of some kind of beast. We took it to our button-making friend on Zabkowska Street, and he confirmed that it had to have been made well before 1700... that was when they stopped using powdered zinc ore to make brass and started using molten zinc. The beast, too, is a very old symbol. We think it’s a basilisk – a monster that was supposed to paralyse anybody who looked at it.’

  Rej said, ‘What do you think? Do you think that the Executioner was actually wearing this 17th-century velvet?’

  ‘That’s beyond my competence, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Was it rotten? Would it have torn easily, when Kaminski grabbed hold of it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It was soaked in sewage, of course, and it was just like rotten velvet curtains.’

  Rej shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I’m dealing with here, Teofil, I really don’t.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t think you were dealing with anything. I thought you were on suspension.’

  Rej untangled his bandaged left hand from its sling and defiantly held it up. ‘See this? I think this gives me an interest in what’s going on, don’t you? It was sheer luck that I didn’t end up all jumbled up in a plastic bag, like these three poor bastards.’ He took a deep breath. The scent of death was beginning to make him feel queasy. ‘What about the girl, did you find any new evidence on her?’

  Dr Wojniakowski shook his head. ‘We don’t have her arm, so it’s impossible to say whether it was pulled through the mailbox manually or mechanically. I’ll tell you something, though. It would have taken the force of your average carjack to tear her arm off like that.’

  ‘More power than most men could muster?’

  ‘More power than any man could muster, in my opinion, except if he’d been on steroids or some kind of drug like the athletes use. Even so...’

  Rej blinked at him impatiently. ‘Even so, what? Where does that lead us?’

  ‘I don’t know, Rej. You’re the detective.’

  Rej took a last look at the plastic bags. ‘All right, then. Thanks for everything. I’ll leave you to it.’

  With a thick squelching sound, Dr Wojniakowski plunged both hands back into the mess of stomachs and intestines. For the first time since Rej had first met him, fifteen years ago, he thought that Teofil looked genuinely happy.

  *

  Muller was waiting for Sarah when she returned to the office. He was wearing a cheap beige suit and his face was ashen.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ms Leonard. The men won’t go back to work.’

  ‘Somebody’s going to have to seal the sewer.’

  ‘I know that. But it won’t be us.’

  Sarah sat down at her desk. Her computer screen said Welcome! Have A Positive Day! but she couldn’t think of anything positive. All she could think of were bloody lumps of body, flying through the air. All she could think of was legs and hands and pieces of ribcage.

  ‘You were down there,’ she said. She still couldn’t help quaking when she thought about it. ‘What do you think happened?’

  Muller shrugged. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t see anything at all. First of all I saw their flashlights, then there was nothing but dark. Then –’ he raised both hands as if he were still warding off the shower of flesh. ‘I only once saw anything like that before, and that was when a man walked into an airplane propeller at Tempelhof.’

  Sarah was quiet for a moment. Then she said, ‘You wouldn’t like another day to consider?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ms Leonard. Es tut mir leid. But the men all believe that it was some kind of devil, and they won’t go back. Perhaps Mr Brzezicki and his men weren’t so mad after all.’

  There was no point in reminding Muller that he was under contract. Senate International could be liable for millions of dollars of compensation if the dead worker
s’ families decided to sue, which they almost certainly would. Sarah said, ‘All right, then, if that’s the way you feel. I can’t say that I blame you.’

  Muller stood looking at her as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. At last, he said, ‘It wasn’t natural, you know. The way those men were killed. It was – something out of a nightmare.’

  Sarah gave him the smallest of shrugs. She was supposed to go to a meeting with a Polish advertising agency this afternoon, but she pressed her intercom buzzer for Irena and told her to postpone until next week. Muller waited as if waiting might solve something; as if it proved his sincerity. Sarah started writing in her diary and he stayed where he was, not moving.

  She stopped writing and looked up. It was only then that she realized that his eyes were closed, as if he were asleep.

  *

  Because it was so warm, Antoni Dlubak took his sandwiches into the Saxon Garden and sat down to eat them on a bench in front of the fountain. He unwrapped the greaseproof paper, and immediately four or five birds came hopping up to him.

  He should have eaten his lunch in the office because he still had the Interpress accounts to finish, but he spent most of his days and all of his nights alone, and he enjoyed coming out and mixing with other people. In the 19th century, the Saxon Garden had been called ‘the Warsaw salon’ because the cream of society used to meet here. Today the passers-by were less fashionable, but Dlubak usually managed to find somebody interesting to talk to – a bus driver, or an antiques dealer, or a waitress, or an old soldier.

  He munched his sandwiches and expectantly looked around. The broad avenue that runs through the centre of the garden was crowded with strollers. The sun sparkled through the oak trees, and threw dancing shadows on the statues that lined the avenue on either side – figures representing the seasons, and the arts, and strange mythological creatures – so that they looked almost as if they were alive.

  A pretty girl in a tight white T-shirt and a short pink skirt came walking towards him. Dlubak silently willed her to stop and sit on the bench next to him, but of course he had no such luck. She didn’t even glance at him as she strutted past.

  All she gave him was the briefest waft of perfume, and then even that was gone.

  Dlubak was twenty-eight years old. He had contracted rickets when he was four, and so his legs had never developed properly. His blond hair was thinning, and he was plumper than he ought to be, but he was oddly good-looking, with a broad, genial face, and a winning smile. The trouble was, his good-looking face sat so incongruously on his distorted little body that women seemed to find him more repellent than they would have done if he had been out-and-out ugly.

  He had only ever had one girlfriend, a very plain girl called Magda who worked for Mazurkas travel agency. Magda had no interests in life except her skin condition and complained about everything. They had made love three times in Dlubak’s room. After the third time, she complained that he ‘didn’t know how to make a woman happy’ and that was the last he saw of her.

  He wasn’t altogether sorry. She never stopped scratching her elbows.

  Dlubak had diverted his frustrated sexual energy into his work. He had already been promoted four times at Vistula Kredytowy, and now he was the youngest member of the international loans and finance department. He stayed at the office late every night and worked on projects which his superiors had never even asked him to do. Which was how he had come to detect the unusual movement of millions of dollars through Senate International’s contingency account.

  He didn’t much like his sandwiches today, mashed sardines with tomato ketchup. It was close to the end of the month and he hadn’t had enough money for sausage. But while he was sitting there eating them, a man in a brown suit came from nowhere at all and sat down next to him, and said, unnecessarily loudly, ‘They look tasty!’

  Dlubak blinked at him. The man was very swarthy and unshaven, with thick dry lips and a bulbous nose. He smelled of cigarettes and body odour, which he had unsuccessfully tried to mask with an aftershave that smelled like Pif-Paf flyspray.

  ‘They’re only sardine,’ said Dlubak. ‘But you can have one, if you like.’

  The man took the proffered sandwich without hesitation and started to eat it. Dlubak was expecting him to say something, but all he did was wink and nod as if he thought that Dlubak were party to some incredibly funny private joke.

  ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’ said Dlubak. ‘The fountain, the trees. I always sit by the fountain.’

  The man glanced at the fountain without much interest. It was like a huge champagne glass, made of stone, decorated with dolphins. The water glittered in the sunlight, and the breeze blew trails of spray across the flowerbeds.

  ‘Summer is never long enough, don’t you think?’ asked Dlubak. ‘Mind you, that’s something to do with age. When I was a boy, summers seemed to last for ever.’

  The man finished his sandwich and brushed crumbs from his lap. ‘Nothing lasts for ever, Mr Dlubak.’

  Dlubak stared at him open-mouthed. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘I was given your name, that’s how.’

  ‘Not by me, you weren’t. Not unless we’ve talked before. And even then, I don’t usually –’

  The man said, ‘We haven’t talked before, don’t worry. Mr Zboinski sent me. Do you know Mr Zboinski? Mr Roman Zboinski. Very powerful businessman.’

  The name sounded horribly familiar, but Dlubak wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Mr Zboinski wants a little chat with you,’ the man continued. ‘He thinks that private affairs ought to stay private, that’s why.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand what you’re getting at.’

  The man grinned at him. ‘You don’t mind if I have another sandwich? I’m quite partial to sardines. But you shouldn’t put so much ketchup on them.’ He dipped into Dlubak’s greaseproof wrapper without waiting for an answer. He took a mouthful of sandwich, and then he said. ‘My car’s parked just across the street. This won’t take very long.’

  ‘You want me to come with you now? I can’t do that. I have a meeting in twenty minutes.’

  The man swallowed and sniffed, and then – almost as an afterthought – he held open his coat to show Dlubak the butt of an automatic pistol stuck in his belt. Dlubak couldn’t believe it. He looked quickly left and right, as if one of his colleagues from the office were suddenly going to appear and tell him that it was all a practical joke, and that the rest of the international finance department were smothering their laughter behind the trees. But passers-by came and went, talking and laughing. A mother pushed her baby past him in a buggy with red balloons tied to the handles. The fountain continued to sparkle in the sunshine, and everything was so quiet and normal that Dlubak knew that the man was serious.

  ‘Come on,’ the man told him. He lifted the packet of sandwiches from Dlubak’s lap, took one more, and threw the rest in the nearest waste-basket. ‘Get walking. This way.’

  With Dlubak walking slightly ahead, they left the Saxon Gardens and walked past the huge marble slab which commemorates the suffering of the people in Warsaw during the Second World War. They crossed the street and the man took out his keys and unlocked the doors of a dilapidated white Polonez estate. Dlubak glanced quickly around for any sign of a police car, but then the man gave him a sharp nod of the head and said, ‘Get in.’

  For the first few minutes they drove in silence. The car felt as if it didn’t have any shock absorbers and the tyres were only half inflated, so that they made a flatulent noise on the tarmac. They passed the Centralna Station and headed east, crossing the Vistula over the Poniatowski Bridge. The river gleamed in the sunlight as if it were polished bronze, and Dlubak had to shade his eyes. ‘You’re not taking me far, are you?’ he asked. The man turned to him and winked, but said nothing.

  They were now in the suburb of Praga South, and Dlubak was growing increasingly anxious. They drove along a crowded, grimy street where most of the 19th-century
brick houses had escaped destruction by the Nazis, so that they still had the between-the-wars seediness of one of Warsaw’s less prosperous districts. The sidewalks were thronged with cheaply-dressed people and there were battered trucks and cars parked everywhere, even one or two East German Trabants.

  Dlubak lived on the north-west side of Warsaw, in a small dull housing development between Wola and Zoliborz, and he had visited this part of Praga only once or twice before. He found it too intimidating: too seedy and down-at-heel. Besides, his wallet had been pickpocketed on his second visit, and he had lost almost a week’s wages.

  They passed a roadside stall where a dark Mongolian woman in a shaggy goatskin bolero was selling blankets and saddles and offering to tell people’s fortunes. She was disturbingly beautiful; and for some reason her eyes caught Dlubak’s as he was driven past her, and she fleetingly frowned, as if she could tell that something terrible was about to happen to him.

  The man drove to an almost-deserted square. On the corner stood a Byzantine orthodox church, with five onion domes. The man drew up outside it, and parked.

  ‘Where are we?’ asked Dlubak.

  ‘You’ll see,’ the man told him.

  They climbed out of the car and crossed the street to a tatty block of 1960s apartments. A drunk in a soiled suit was sitting on the low concrete wall outside. When he saw them approaching, he clambered unsteadily to his feet and called out, ‘Hey! What about some change?’ in that thick, vulgar accent that nobody speaks in any other part of Warsaw any more.

  ‘Fuck off,’ the man told him. The drunk spun on one heel as if he had been physically slapped; staggered; and only just managed to regain his balance.

  They entered the apartment building. Inside it was echoing and painted diarrhoea-brown. The man pushed Dlubak into a small elevator and pressed the button. They had to stand so close that Dlubak had to breathe in his body odour and his Pif-Paf aftershave. What was worse, he kept silently burping sardines.