The Chosen Child Read online

  ‘I don’t know how it is,’ she said. ‘You tell me.’

  Ben sat down next to her. ‘Sarah, we both work for Senate and whatever Senate wants we have to deliver.’

  ‘I never knew that Senate wanted to bribe the building regulations department.’

  Ben laughed and shook his head. ‘Sarah – sweetheart – you’ve done a terrific job for us here. Nobody but you could have got this project so far ahead. When it comes to persuasion, when it comes to bullying, you’re the best mover and shaker we’ve got. But sometimes people just can’t be persuaded. Sometimes they say thus far and no further. And when it comes to that situation, you have to forget about Plan A and turn to Plan B.’

  ‘Meaning B for bribery?’

  Ben laughed. ‘We’re not talking bribery, for God’s sake! We’re talking business expenses! We’re making new friends, that’s all! Oiling the wheels!’

  Sarah jabbed him with her fingernail in his hot-air balloon tie. ‘It’s bribery, Ben. It’s illegal, and it’s immoral, and in the long term it’s bad for Senate’s reputation. When it came to planning permission, all right, I shouted at those poor guys until they would have come round to the Holiday Inn and washed my pantyhose for me. That’s business. That’s negotiating skill. But it doesn’t take any skill to put ten thousand dollars into some poor bastard’s bank account so that he doesn’t kick up a fuss about inferior concrete mixes or sub-standard wiring.’

  ‘Hey,’ grinned Ben. ‘I’ll come around and wash your pantyhose any time you like.’

  Sarah gave him a look that her intimidated male colleagues used to call ‘the ray’. ‘What happened to you, Ben? You used to be so acute. Look at you now. You’re coarse, you’re crude, and you’re corrupt, too.’

  Ben was still smiling but every muscle in his face was clenched. ‘Why do you think I gave you that brooch? To show you that things were just the same. You’re the one who’s changed, Sarah, not me. Just because your parents were Polish, you think you have some God-given right to come to this country and behave like Joan of Fucking Arc.’

  ‘Joan of Fucking Arc was French.’

  ‘Sarah – for Christ’s sake – these people need every Western cent they can lay their hands on. They need to grow, they need to develop. I know they’re proud. I know they need to have all of their committees and their departments and their goddamned regulations. But that’s just theatre. The reality is that the West is screwing them on one side and the Russians are screwing them on the other. So what are they going to choose? Senate Hotels and McDonalds, or some gun-running crack-dealing bunch of Moscow mafiosi? You can call it bribery if you like. But from where I’m standing, it looks like nothing worse than financial encouragement to make the wiser choice.’

  Sarah stood up. She was fuming. She couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching her fists. ‘Mafiosi? Who’s the goddamned mafiosi? Those men at the Wydzial Gospodarki Przestrzennej, they were scared of me, yes, but they respected me, and I respected them. I never once offered them money. Never. How can I go back now and look them straight in the face?’

  Ben admired his fingernails. ‘All you have to do is smile. And I didn’t offer them money per se. All it took was six new BMW 5-Series and six three-week family vacations at Disney World. Cheap at twice the price.’

  Sarah stalked to the high french windows and opened them. The noise of traffic suddenly filled the room. She stepped out onto the balcony and looked down at Jerzolomiskie Avenue and for the first time since she had come back to Warsaw she felt insecure. Ben came up behind her and stood with his hands in his pockets jingling his loose change.

  ‘This is a great, great city,’ he remarked, after a while. ‘You and me are going to make it even greater.’

  She turned around and looked at him. Did I once really love you? she thought. Did I really stroke your hair and run my fingertips along your jaw and kiss your lips as if I could drown in them? Can anybody change so much – or is it me, have I lost my wide-eyed innocence?

  ‘We were a terrific couple,’ he said.

  ‘No, we weren’t. We were terrific, but we weren’t a couple. We were two yous.’

  He tried to put his arm around her waist but she side-stepped across the balcony, and sat on the balustrade.

  ‘You know something?’ he said. ‘I never really understood you. I thought I did. But when it came down to it, there was always something that you were holding back.’

  ‘People do that. Ben. That “something”, as you call it, is their own personality.’

  He ignored that remark. ‘We were still a terrific couple,’ he said. ‘God... if you’d given us half a chance.’

  She looked down at the sidewalk below; at the people walking back and forth. She could tilt herself backwards, over the balustrade, and be dead within six or seven seconds. Or Ben could push her. She stepped back. It was only vertigo. But she wondered what the attraction was. Almost everybody felt it. The fear of falling; and yet the terrible desire to do it.

  She was still looking down when she saw a dented red Passat pull up to the kerb directly below, and a white-haired man climb out. He crossed the sidewalk and entered her building.

  ‘Komisarz Rej,’ she remarked.

  ‘He’s coming up here? What the hell does he want?’

  ‘I expect he wants to tie me to a chair and beat me with a rubber hose. Most men do.’

  Ben caught her arm. ‘Listen, Sarah. I’m serious about you and me. I know things went out of control the last time around. But we’re both different people now. We’re more mature. More – I don’t know – more –’

  ‘Sensible?’ Sarah suggested.

  ‘If you like, yes. More sensible.’

  ‘Well, in that case, let’s hope we’re sensible enough to keep our relationship on a business footing only.’

  ‘Sarah, quit playing with me, will you?’

  She pried his fingers off her arm, one by one. ‘I wouldn’t play with you if I was the last little girl on the planet Earth, and you were the sole surviving Raggedy Andy.’

  He gave her a look which she didn’t like at all. It was a distillation of possessiveness, jealousy, and sexual frustration. She had never been raped, but she could imagine that a rapist might look like Ben just at that moment. He was about to say something to her, but then the doorbell rang, and she pushed past him to answer it.

  Rej was standing in the doorway in a brown coat that looked as if it had been fought over by four Dobermanns, and washed-out, tubular trousers. His hair was sticking up at the back and he looked immensely tired.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ he asked her. He spoke English this time.

  ‘What news? I’ve been working all morning.’

  ‘Two more dead. One beheaded. It looks as if it could be the same perpetrator.’

  ‘Not at the Senate site?’ said Sarah, in alarm.

  ‘No, no. Grojecka, an apartment block. A young girl and an elderly man. I’ve been there most of the night, and I’m going back there now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too. But I still have to follow up the idea that Jan Kaminski might have been killed because he was being too nosy about your company’s finances.’

  Ben made an explosive, derogatory noise with his lips. ‘All of these people are being murdered at random, mister. You’ve got yourself a homicidal maniac out there, that’s what you’ve got. The fact that Jan Kaminski was looking into Western scams is totally irrelevant.’

  Rej gave him a long, old-fashioned stare. ‘In a homicide inquiry, we don’t rule out anything as irrelevant until we’ve proved it as irrelevant.’

  ‘You want to look at our books, is that it?’

  ‘That would be a good start.’

  ‘You’d better get yourself a court order then, hadn’t you?’

  Rej said, ‘I was hoping that you would offer them up voluntarily.’

  Ben smiled and shook his head. ‘Sorry, mister. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.’

  Rej l
ooked around the apartment. ‘Fine. Okay, if that’s the way you want it. I’ll be in touch.’ He went to the door. ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Ms Leonard,’ he added, and left.

  After he had gone, Sarah said, ‘You could have been more co-operative. The sooner he catches this killer, the sooner Brzezicki’s men can get back to work.’

  ‘He’s clutching at straws, Sarah, can’t you see that? Kaminski just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Same as all those other victims. Your friend Komisarz Rej doesn’t want to admit that he’s looking for an out-and-out loony, that’s all.’

  ‘I like him. He’s all kind of battered and defeated and sad.’

  ‘Is that what’s happened to you? You’ve gone off winners, and started to feel sorry for losers? You said it yourself. The guy’s hopeless.’

  Sarah checked her watch. ‘I’d better get back to the office. That German gang should be here by four. By the way, I think I’ve found us a good private investigator. I called my father last night and he knows a retired detective from the Chicago police department He’s going to ask him if he’s interested in flying out here to help us.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Ben. ‘Anybody has to be better than our little Rej of sunshine.’

  Sarah said, ‘One more thing, Ben.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What’s that?’

  ‘I know you’d like us to get back together again, but it’s not going to work. I’m happy on my own. I love my work and I’m not looking for any kind of intimate relationship.’

  ‘You’re going without sex?’

  ‘That’s none of your business, Ben. I just want you to stop pushing me, that’s all.’

  Ben came close up to her and leaned against the doorway. ‘The day I stop pushing you, Sarah, is the day I cut my throat and die.’

  5

  It was just after three o’clock in Lazienki Park, south-east of the city centre. The breeze was warm and the sky was filled with huge, majestic clouds, full-rigged to cross a continent. They were reflected in the ruffled lake that was Lazienki’s centrepiece. On one side of the lake stood a small 18th-century palace, built in high romantic style, with urns and pillars and stone balustrades with live peacocks strutting on them. Further around the lake, there was an open-air auditorium, with rising rows of wooden seats, and facing it, on an islet, a stage set with fake ancient ruins.

  A Polish military band was playing this afternoon, selections from Karol Szymanowski and Witold Lutoslawski. The music echoed across the water, and the trees on the opposite shoreline shushed and rustled.

  On one of the seats in the auditorium sat Jacek Studnicki, Sarah’s associate from the Vistula Kredytowy Bank. He was wearing a dark business suit and a striped shirt, and he was perspiring. He was thin-faced, almost hawklike, but too many business lunches and too many late nights were beginning to make him look jowly, and his eyes even more heavily-lidded.

  He had been waiting in the auditorium for more than half an hour, but the people he was meeting were rarely on time, and they weren’t the kind of people to whom it was wise to express too much irritation. So he kept on waiting, and checking his Rolex wristwatch, and feeling tense and impatient.

  The first half of the programme finished, and the lake rippled with applause. It was then that three men appeared in the distance, walking across the wide patio in front of the palace, and around the side of the lake towards the theatre-on-the-isle. The man in the middle was immensely tall, and built like a prize ox. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black linen coat. His head was huge. It looked as if it had been carved out of a single block of limestone and then sand-blasted to make it pitted and scarred. He had a wide, flared nose and slitted, Slavic eyes.

  The two men beside him were small by comparison, but they still looked hard and well-muscled. One of them wore flappy brown trousers and a short-sleeved shirt; the other wore a black shell-suit. They walked with a threatening self-consciousness, glancing tightly all around them as if they expected to be set upon at any moment. They reached the auditorium and stopped. Jacek stood up, and beckoned them. They climbed up between the seats. The tall man in the black coat made no attempt to shake hands.

  ‘How are you, Roman?’ asked Jacek.

  ‘How do you think?’ the tall man replied. His voice was so harsh that it almost gave Jacek a sore throat to listen to it. ‘All this fresh air... it’s poison.’

  ‘I just thought it would be safer if we met here. The Wydzial Zabojstw are showing an interest in our finances, as well as the Wydzial Przestepstw Gopodarczych, the fraud squad.’

  ‘Because of this Jan Kaminski character?’

  Jacek nodded. ‘They want to go through Senate’s accounts.’

  ‘They won’t find anything, will they?’

  ‘It depends how hard they look. We still haven’t cleared that last payment through Gdansk.’

  ‘Don’t they have to have a court order of some sort?’

  ‘Of course. But they’ll certainly get it.’

  Roman Zboinski bit the edge of this thumbnail and slowly tore off a jagged crescent, which he spat out onto the auditorium floor. ‘Who’s investigating all of these murders?’

  ‘Komisarz Rej. Do you know him?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Zboinski, with a lipless smile. ‘I know comrade Rej. He and I are very old friends.’

  ‘Do you want me to have a word in his ear?’

  ‘There’s no point, not unless he’s changed. Comrade Rej was never susceptible to –’ and he rubbed his finger and thumb together, in the classic gesture for paper money.

  The military band returned from their break and started to tune up again. Jacek said, ‘We’d better sit down.’

  ‘No, I can’t stand music. It makes me nauseous. Let’s walk.’

  They left the auditorium and started to walk through the woods. The sunlight flickered through the leaves and shone amongst the ferns.

  Jacek said, ‘That last payment should be safely credited to Senate by next Friday. Then Rej can look all he likes.’

  ‘There could be another payment by the following Wednesday,’ Zboinski warned him. ‘I’ve already got seven Mercedes from Berlin and three BMWs coming in from Prague.’

  ‘What about that shipload from Britain?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. We’re probably bringing them in through Rotterdam. Four Jaguars and seven Range Rovers. Right-hand drive. I want to move them straight through to Japan.’

  They walked back towards the Lazienki Palace. The peacocks screamed and spread out their tails. The palace had been built as a bath-house for Marshal Lubomirski, and had taken over thirteen years to build. After the Warsaw Uprising, the Nazis had burned it to the ground – but, like so much of Warsaw, it had been reconstructed after the war by architects and builders who could not bear to see their national heritage erased.

  Zboinski stood in front of it, his long black coat flapping in the breeze, and said, ‘I hate history. What’s the use of it? It only reminds you how hard things used to be.’

  Jacek said, ‘I have to ask you something.’

  ‘Nothing that’s going to upset me, I hope?’

  ‘It’s these Executioner murders... all these headless bodies. You don’t have any idea who’s doing it, do you, and why? The trouble is that the workforce on the Senate site have got it into their heads that it’s a devil, and they’ve downed tools until somebody catches it. Which of course makes it even more difficult for us to doctor our cashflow.’

  ‘They think it’s a devil?᾿ Zboinski grated, then laughed.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me different. I mean, if you had any inkling who was doing it, I could tip off Rej, and then he wouldn’t need to look into Senate’s accounts, and the work-force would get back to clearing the site.’

  Zboinski nibbled his ragged thumbnail into some semblance of smoothness. ‘I haven’t heard a whisper. It’s not as if this maniac’s killing dealers or runners. Cutting heads off, that’s Czvdowski’s style, but then he usually cuts the
hands off, too. Anyway, I get your point. I’ll have my people ask around.’

  ‘My people’ stood a little way away, their hands in their pockets, looking as if they could get an answer out of anybody.

  They walked back up to the main road, past the souvenir stand, where a large black BMW was parked. ‘Let me tell you one thing, though,’ said Zboinski. ‘If Rej starts becoming a nuisance, then the Executioner might very well strike again... when he’s least expecting it. And if Rej finds any of my money in Vistula Kredytowy’s accounts... then maybe the Executioner won’t just strike once, but twice.’

  He twisted Jacek’s lapels between his nail-bitten fingers and pulled him so close that Jacek could smell the onions on his breath. ‘I’m a calm man, Jacek. Everybody knows that. I never lose my temper, ever. Do you know why? Because I’m never frustrated. If I want a woman I can have her. If I tell somebody what to do, they do it. If somebody upsets me, I make sure that they don’t upset me any more. Do you know what my father used to say? He said, “Only the mad dog sleeps undisturbed.” Well, the mad dog is me; and people take care not to wake me up; because if they do, they know very well what will happen to them.’

  Jacek managed to twist himself free. He looked queasy, and he couldn’t look Zboinski straight in the eye. ‘You don’t have to threaten me,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my bit with the bank. All I’m asking you to do is to keep your ear to the ground... see if you can find out who’s been doing these killings.’

  Zboinski laughed harshly and patted Jacek’s cheek. ‘You’re a good fellow, Jacek. I’ll see what I can do.’

  He climbed into the back seat of the BMW and put down the black-tinted window. He grinned at Jacek, and then he growled and said ‘Woof!᾿

  Jacek stood by the side of the road watching the BMW drive at high speed back towards the city centre. There were times when he wished that he had never involved himself with Zboinski; but if he hadn’t, then somebody else would have done, and the amount of commission that he was paid almost trebled his salary at Vistula Kredytowy. But there was always the fear that his money-laundering operation would be discovered. The prospect of jail didn’t frighten him. But the thought of what Zboinski might do to him was enough to make his bowels turn to ice-water.