"What about Kamil Sosnowski?"

"No."

"Pity. Please don't be surprised by the next question, I'm not joking, I'm checking an important lead in the inquiry."

"Pity. I was getting fond of your jokes."

"In that case there's a prosecutor who'd say you were the first person ever to do so. Do you remember, either from your student days, or maybe Henryk Telak told you about even earlier times, the women he used to date? Did he have a great love? Did some great tragedy occur that affected both him and her, an alarming, traumatic experience?"

"I know nothing about that. The polytechnic was never any good for that sort of observation, there weren't many girls there, but I do remember that Henryk very rarely came along when we went out - forgive the expression - 'after p.u.s.s.y'. A couple of times he dated someone for a few months, though I wouldn't say it was anything serious. On the whole he was quite shy. In the final year of college, I guess it was 1984, he fell madly in love with Jadwiga. She didn't want him. He went about in a daze. It's a miracle he defended his thesis. But straight after that we parted ways, and then the next time we met, they were already married. They got married in 1988 or 1989."

"Was it a successful marriage?"

"We didn't see each other often enough for me to judge."

As soon as Kuzniecow had left the company headquarters, Igor went into his office. He wasn't wearing a jacket.

"What a b.l.o.o.d.y oik, enough to make me come out in a sweat. I felt a shudder run through me every time he opened his mouth. I hate people like that. Did you hear it all?"

He said yes.

"It looks as if we can't go on pretending. They're not just blundering about in the dark. I went cold when he asked about him. I never thought they'd get onto that."

The Chairman stood up and went over to the window. Indeed, it was an inconvenience, but compared with other threats he'd had to face in the past few years it was nothing to get upset about. He gazed at the concrete funfair that stretched out below and thought that if he had divine power, in a single instant he would reveal all the secrets hidden in the walls of this sad little city. All of them. Not just the major ones - he was their depositary too - that had to be kept for the sake of state security. But all the commercial frauds, disloyalties, marital infidelities, flirtatious lies, parents' half-truths and children's concealments. Just like that, at the click of his fingers, it would all be exposed. Would there be a single person left after that who would dare to repeat the words of the feeble little G.o.d they worshipped so blindly, "the truth will set you free"? He doubted it.

"You're right," he said, turning away from the window. "Time to start taking action. In my view Kuzniecow is harmless, but we need to know as much as possible about Prosecutor Szacki: where his wife works, where the daughter goes to school, who he's shafting on the side, who he meets for a beer and who he doesn't like at work. I think before the end of the week it'll be necessary to pay him a visit."

"How long have we got?"

"Until Wednesday morning. After that it might already be too late."

IV.

Cezary Rudzki had recovered and returned to his stylish Hemingway look. A thin polo neck, fluffy-looking hair that had mostly gone white, beard, piercing pale-blue eyes and therapeutic smirk, kindly and mocking all at once. His entire appearance seemed to say that this man would definitely listen to you with interest and understanding, but he'd keep a healthy distance and restrain himself from invading your most personal territory. Yes, Cezary Rudzki could have appeared on billboards advertising psychoa.n.a.lysis.

Szacki had started a conversation about hypnosis, and the therapist had been giving long wordy answers, until finally the prosecutor had had to ask him not to explain his theories to him in such detail, but just answer the questions.

"Are you able to hypnotize your patients?"

"Of course. I rarely make use of it, because in my view the therapeutic process should be fully conscious. But often the source of the condition is such a firmly denied memory that there is no other way of reaching it than by making the patient regress. I treat it as a last resort."

"Regress?" Szacki preferred to make sure he and Rudzki had the same thing in mind.

"Taking the patient back into the past. It's a delicate operation, demanding caution and tact. And courage, because the patient often brings up the memories that have set the most firmly in his mind or been the most strongly denied. It can be shocking. I once had a patient who had been abused in childhood by the carers at a children's home, a terribly badly scarred woman. But I didn't know about that. In a way, neither did she. During the regression, when she suddenly started telling me in the voice and words of a little girl about the details of the orgy she had been forced to take part in - just imagine, I vomited."

"Perhaps it's better we can't remember certain things."

"I think so too, though many therapists are of a different view. I think our brain knows what it's doing when it tells us to forget. Though of course there are deeds that we're not free to erase from memory. You know best about that."

Szacki frowned.

"What do you have in mind?"

"Deeds for which their perpetrators must suffer the penalty. Crimes, offences."

"And did you inform the police or the prosecutor's office about the carers at the children's home?"

"The patient was almost sixty."

"But if during hypnosis you came upon information about a recently committed crime and you knew that keeping it a secret would be better for your patient, what would you do?"

"I'd keep it a secret. I am guided by the patient's well-being, not society's."

"That's where we differ."

"So it would seem."

Szacki discreetly glanced at his watch; it was half-past three. He'd have to speed up the pace of the conversation if he didn't want to be late for his meeting with Monika.

"And could you hypnotize someone so that afterwards - regardless of their own will - they did something they wouldn't normally be capable of doing?"

This was one of his theories, which in spite of everything seemed to him more credible than the idea of Hanna Kwiatkowska committing murder. The charismatic therapist exploits his natural influence on people and uses hypnosis to settle his own scores by means of the patient's hands. All right, it's more fantastical than a TV crime series, but who said something like that couldn't happen? The reasoning had lots of weak points: first and foremost there was the lack of a motive, and apart from that it was hard to answer the question why Telak would have gone to have therapy with someone who had a score to settle with him. But Szacki felt instinctively that this case was not going to have an obvious solution and that he'd have to consider every theory, even the ones that at first sight looked the most idiotic.

"I don't know, I've never tried; I'm a doctor, not a conjuror, my dear Prosecutor." Rudzki was clearly hurt by the question. "But please don't believe what Dean Koontz describes in his trashy novels. Programming someone to make them do something against their own will and conscience would require not hypnosis, but plain old brainwashing. A lot of hypnotism sessions, probably combined with pharmacological back-up, aimed at rebuilding the patient's personality so that he might behave according to an imposed programme. But even then success is not guaranteed. In any book about hypnosis you will find the information that it is virtually impossible to force someone to act against his morality. To give you a well-known example: during cla.s.ses at an academy the lecturer had to leave a patient who was deep in a hypnotic trance in the lecture room, so he put her in the care of a student. Of course the student immediately told her to undress, at which she woke up and hit him in the face. You see yourself, if it were that simple, hypnosis would be used by every firm to stop the employees from wanting to go out for a cigarette, gossip or play patience."

Teodor Szacki automatically agreed, wondering the whole time if he should tell Rudzki about Kwiatkowska pretending to be Telak's dead daughter. He had already spoken to Wrobel about it, so he didn't need a psychologist's opinion. But he could check something else. He asked Rudzki for total discretion and played him Telak's recording.

"Absolutely incredible," said the therapist, not looking at all shocked or horrified. Quite the opposite - he was flushed with excitement. "Do you know what that means? That the field can be stronger than anyone could have imagined. If the recording is from eleven p.m., four hours after the session ended, it's simply extraordinary."

He stood up and started pacing the room. Or rather skipping around in circles, as the size of the room did not allow for long walks or even a couple of energetic steps.

"Such a strong identification four hours after the session that it's hard to believe. You might suppose Miss Kwiatkowska's personality was in some way similar to that of Henryk's daughter, so that a link was made, but even so! Do you know what a potent force this attests to? I wouldn't be surprised if the theory of the field went beyond psychology and became the embryo of a new religion!"

Rudzki was getting more and more excited; meanwhile it was already three forty-five.

"a.s.suming she's not pretending," Szacki coldly put in.

"Sorry? I don't understand. What do you mean, 'pretending'?" The doctor stopped skipping about and looked at the prosecutor in amazement.

"Please don't forget that the conclusion of your therapeutic experiment was a body lying on the floor with his eye spilled down his cheek. Someone killed him and I won't conceal the fact - though I hope this will remain between us - that Hanna Kwiatkowska is my main suspect. Just take a look - it all fits. She plays the role of the daughter who committed suicide because of her father; her identification with her doesn't stop; she asks him to come to her, but he escapes; she can't bear that, so she seizes the skewer. It all fits."

Rudzki sat down.

"You're mad," he uttered. "Hanna had nothing to do with it. I'd stake my life on it. It's absurd."

Szacki shrugged and leaned back in his chair nonchalantly.

"Why do you think that? Do you know something I don't? Please tell me."

"No, of course not, you just don't understand. Murder overloads the system in a dreadful way, it's always against, never for. A constellation could be a source of suicide, but murder - never."

"Maybe she had another motive apart from the system."

The therapist was silent.

"I don't believe it," he said after a while.

"Definitely not? She came to see you for therapy; she told you about herself, her life, childhood, loves, hates. Don't you remember anything that could have been a motive?"

The therapist was silent.

"Yes, yes, yes," said Szacki and sighed. "Even so you won't tell me because you're guided by the patient's well-being, not society's . We've established that already. Never mind, even if people don't confide as readily in policemen and prosecutors as they do in a.n.a.lysts, sometimes we too manage to find things out. I hope you are aware that at present any contact with Miss Kwiatkowska could lead to your arrest? The court is not inclined to regard helping someone suspected of murder as part of keeping a medical secret."

Rudzki began to laugh quietly and shook his head.

"Dear G.o.d, you don't know how wrong you are."

"I'd love to find out."

"I've already told you everything."

"Sure. Did you know Kamil Sosnowski?"

"Sorry, what was the name?" Rudzki was doing his best to look as if he hadn't heard the question, but Szacki had interviewed too many people not to know when someone was trying to buy time. An old, simple trick providing a few seconds more to decide whether to tell the truth and to think up a lie.

"Kamil Sosnowski," he repeated instantly.

"No, I'm sorry. At first I thought you said Kosowski. I used to have a patient of that name."

Like h.e.l.l you did, thought Szacki. You're trying to put me off the scent, you lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

"Kosowski? That's interesting. Did he get treated for depression after spending the entire season on the bench at FC Kaiserslautern?"

"I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"No, I'm sorry, I was having a little joke." He glanced at his watch. He was already late. "I've got one more request: I'd like to hear the tapes of Henryk Telak's individual therapy sessions. Could you get them to me by noon tomorrow?"

"But I have already told you the therapy wasn't recorded."

"That was when I didn't know you tell lies. Give me the tapes, or do I have to call the police so we can go and search your flat together?"

"Please be my guest. You can even rip up the parquet. If you find a single tape recording of Telak's therapy, I'll give you my year's income."

"Unfortunately I'm not allowed to accept even a ten-groshy coin from you. Under the law on prosecution."

Even if this information did worry Rudzki, he didn't let it show.

"In that case please answer one question. And I stress that this is a transcribed interview that can be used in evidence and you are obliged to speak the truth. Otherwise you might later be charged with bearing false witness."

"You already cautioned me earlier."

"I know, but I have noticed that you don't always hear what I'm saying. Did Henryk Telak tell you about the love affairs he had years ago, at college, or perhaps about a lover from the time when he was already married? About someone very important who might have died tragically, though not necessarily so? Or with whom Telak parted in dramatic circ.u.mstances?"

The man on the other side of the desk took off his gla.s.ses, wiped them with a piece of chamois taken from his jacket pocket and set them carefully on his nose. Szacki thought how lately he'd interviewed nothing but people wearing gla.s.ses. Jarczyk and Kwiatkowska had poor eyesight too.

"No, he never mentioned any woman of the kind," he said, looking Szacki in the eye, and the prosecutor was amazed, because the witness' expression was full of sorrow. "And I don't believe any such woman existed. Henryk Telak only loved his Jadzia and no one else. He didn't even love his daughter as much as her. He loved her so much that probably neither you nor - far more - I will ever experience such love. And perhaps we should thank G.o.d for that."

V.

It was ten past four. Prosecutor Teodor Szacki quickly marched down urawia Street along a tree-shaded pavement. In the arcade of the building on the other side, people were sitting at the tables of the bars and cafes that had appeared here in recent years. One of them, the Italian Compagnia del Sole, would have been among his favourites if he could have allowed himself to go there more than once a year. He so rarely ate out in town that it was hard for him to say he had a favourite place, not counting the kebab shop on Wilcza Street. He knew all the local Turkish fast-food outlets, and in this particular sphere he was an expert. Bar Emil was in his view the best kebab shop in the City Centre. But he doubted if this information could make much of an impression on anyone who regularly spent forty zlotys on lunch.

He slowed down because he didn't want to arrive at Szpilka out of breath. He had just run across to the other side of the street opposite the Warsaw University ethnography faculty when Kuzniecow called.

"Be quick, I'm late for a meeting."

"Does your wife know about it?"

He thought that as long as Kuzniecow was working at the city police, he'd never dare commit a crime - Kuzniecow would be sure to catch him.

"I really am in a hurry."

"Telak's son and his mummy don't have to worry about the cost of an operation abroad. Our widow will inherit about a million in cash, and she'll get half a million from his insurance policy. Are you still standing?"

"No, I've rolled into a ball on the pavement. The guy was head of a prospering firm, he'd put money aside for years, someone was making good investments for him. It all makes sense. And as for the insurance, if a beggar like me is insured for a hundred thousand, what's he going to be worth? Let's say he paid a premium of 500 zlotys a month. Do you think that left him with nothing to tank up his Merc? Give over. Anything else?"

"There's no trace of Kamil Sosnowski and his murder in the City Police Headquarters archive, apart from a note of it in the registration book and the case compendium. The files have vanished into thin air."

"Maybe your pal doesn't know how to look?"

"My pal's been working there for seven years - there's never been a case he couldn't find in half an hour."

"What could that mean?"