The Fourth Courier Read online

  “No. I work for the airport. Are you a businessman?”

  “I’m sort of a policeman.”

  “A policeman?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Your nose is not broken.”

  Jay laughed. “It could happen, but I’m a different kind of policeman.”

  “What kind of policeman? FBI?”

  Her question startled him. “You know about the FBI?”

  “It is always on the television.”

  “Would you like that, if I worked for the FBI?”

  “It must be very exciting.”

  “I didn’t say that I did. I said if I worked for the FBI.”

  “It’s okay. I believe you.”

  Jay laughed again. He didn’t know what she believed or understood and didn’t care. He was glad to be with her.

  The waiter interrupted them by setting an ice bucket on the table. He lifted the bottle to show the label to Jay. It was in Russian. “Is Russian champagne okay?” he asked Lilka.

  “Of course,” she said. “There is no Polish champagne.”

  He flashed the waiter a smile. “It’s fine.”

  The man popped the cork and poured the champagne. Before walking off, he folded back a napkin on a small plate to reveal a small blue tin. “You want Russian caviar? Black?”

  Lilka caught Jay’s eye and shook her head. “Maybe it is black from shoe polish.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Jay told the waiter in English.

  He left and they clinked glasses.

  “Na zdrovia.”

  “Not bad,” Jay remarked. “Maybe a little sweet.”

  “You are an expert?”

  “All I know is that it’s supposed to be bubbly.” He pulled the bottle out of the bucket to look again at the label. “Do you read Russian?” he asked.

  “Of course. Everybody reads Russian.”

  “Someone else told me, everybody speaks English.”

  “Not everybody, but soon many more will speak English. We are capitalists now.”

  “She said that, too.”

  “We say it about many things.”

  “Like what?”

  “We said it at first about the bread lines. Now we say it about the price of bread.”

  “I take it there are shorter lines now.”

  “Now there are no more lines.”

  “Higher prices can cause that.”

  “It’s been only two years, and there have been so many changes, good and bad changes.”

  “Like what?”

  Lilka smiled when she answered. “There was no executive class.”

  “So now there is and you have a job. That’s a good change, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course it’s good, but I worry for my son. He is not ready for capitalism. I see it every day in the lounge. The telephones, the computers, everybody has nice clothes.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “He still has time to get ready for capitalism. So you were married?”

  The shake of her head was tentative.

  “Sort of yes, sort of no?” Jay ventured.

  “If I understand you, yes.”

  “Me too. Sort of yes, sort of no. Once upon a time, I had a wife who had a bad temper, and one day I came home and she had kidnapped our sons.”

  “You had sons?”

  “That’s right—had—before she took them and convinced a judge it was too dangerous for them to spend time at my house. She has full custody until a final hearing next month.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t understand everything,” she said.

  “I don’t either,” Jay sadly acknowledged.

  They talked easily through dinner, pausing only to find words in a language they barely shared. He explained how a stalker—a defendant in one of his cases—had threatened his family, and it had so panicked his wife that she eventually moved out and took the boys with her. His visitation rights were almost none, and gave no allowance for makeup visits if he was away on a case. Lilka described being forced to live with an abusive ex-husband whom she feared, displaying a bruise on her wrist as a sailor might a tattoo that bespoke a sentiment no longer felt.

  As the hour became a wee hour, the waiter hovered more insistently, especially after they drained a second bottle of champagne and weren’t likely to buy a third. When Jay finally asked for the check, he brought it on the same small plate with the tin of caviar. “Only five American dollars,” he said.

  Jay examined the tin. “You’re right, it says ingredients: caviar and shoe polish. I’ve always loved shoe polish.” He handed the man five dollars and they left.

  Outside, the streets had been all but abandoned. They passed through puddles of orange light cast by the overhead lanterns, unaware of the cold, only aware of each other. At her car, they kissed. Jay wanted it to go on longer, but she pulled keys from her purse. “I drive you to the hotel.”

  “If you do, will you come in?”

  He sensed that she wouldn’t, and he was right. “Not tonight,” she said, leaving it open for another night. “I drive you to your hotel.”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Nie,” she protested. “It is too far.”

  “It gives me time to think about you.”

  Lilka kissed him again.

  He murmured between her lips, “Would a nightcap tempt you to come inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to be tempted?”

  “Not tonight.”

  Jay pulled away. “Then I won’t tempt you.”

  He wanted it to be another night because she did, and she was right. When they finally made love, it would be better the better they knew each other. Their evening had felt that promising. “I’ll telephone you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Lilka got in her car and pulled away and braked to turn a corner. One of her taillights was out. He would tell her that tomorrow, he thought, pulling his cap tighter. He rewound his scarf. It was a dark night and he was alone on the street, but for the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JAY WAITED IN THE LOBBY of the police station for Detective Kulski.

  A minute later, he came down the stairs. They shook hands and went out into the brisk morning. Thin clouds foiled the sun’s efforts to break through and Jay turned up his collar against the clipping wind. Both men were dressed in sneakers and casual clothes.

  Kulski led them to a beat-up miniature Fiat that looked like a stray amid a dozen or so police cruisers. Jay folded himself into the passenger seat. His knees pressed the dashboard and he looked for a way to push the seat back, but Kulski told him there wasn’t one. “You have probably never conducted an investigation in such a miserable car,” he added.

  “It depends on the case.”

  “Nothing should depend on this car. The communists designed it for people not permitted to travel.” Kulski pulled out the choke and turned the key. The engine coughed and died. After a couple more tries, he pounded the dashboard with his fist. “And like a communist, you must hit it to make it work!” The pounding worked and the engine sputtered to life. Careful not to flood it, he gently revved the motor to warm it up. “I don’t usually use my own car, but I prefer it when I visit a crime scene. I don’t want to announce that I am a policeman.”

  They drove down streets with dirty melting snow in the gutters. Concrete high-rises, claustrophobic in their massive sameness, pressed close to the pavement, leaving little space for gardens or trees. All were made of prefab concrete panels that had already fissured, even in the new buildings. The factories wedged between them belched black smoke from chimneys more reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution than the approaching end of the high-tech twentieth century.

  Jay reported on what he’d learned from Ann Rewls about the missing uranium without mentioning the secret town’s name.

  “Is ten kilos enough fo
r a bomb?” Kulski wanted to know.

  “Any amount can be destructive. It’s more critical how you deliver it. It’s one thing to scatter it on sidewalks to contaminate an area, and another thing to actually explode it. And who knows how much might actually be stockpiled? Or how many couriers were missed? Or taking different routes? There are many things we don’t know, except that a significant amount of uranium is missing.”

  They agreed it was ominous, and that Kulski would inform Pani Husarska about it. Jay wanted to know why the detective worried he might not have a secure line. “Because here in Poland people changed faster than technology,” Kulski explained. “If the communists were listening to you, maybe the devices are still there, only someone different is listening. Nobody knows.”

  Kulski pulled up to a corner where a life-size crucifix stood upright in a patch of faded plastic flowers. It made for rather grim yard art. The detective pointed to the building behind it. “I live there,” he said.

  “There?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Only because I don’t really know how anybody lives in Poland.”

  “I think how we live, because we must live this way, would surprise most Americans. We only have two rooms.”

  “Most Americans would find two rooms with two kids a tight squeeze.”

  “Until last year, Magda’s parents also lived with us.”

  “A very tight squeeze.”

  “We waited seven years for our two rooms, so we are glad to have them.”

  The detective turned off the main road. Eventually the apartment blocks gave way to more fashionable buildings that had survived the Soviet era’s obsession with conformity. He pulled up catty-corner to a four-story pinkish building which, while peeling, at least had been painted sometime in the last half century. Bushes flanked its entrance; overhead, narrow balconies wrapped around its corners. “That is where Pani Husarska lives,” Kulski told him.

  “It’s nice,” Jay said. “So who chooses where you live?”

  “Before the transition, this building was only for nomenklatura.”

  “So the Party. And now?”

  “I think you say in English, she is the life of the party. We have the same expression. Basia has many friends and knows many secrets.”

  Kulski drove off, and soon they slipped past the Warsaw Zoo to merge with traffic on a busy road following the river. In a short kilometer, they made a fast left in front of honking traffic and bounced along an asphalted track that ended at a whitewashed building. Needing repair, it bore a sign that simply identified it as Nightclub.

  “We walk from here,” Kulski told him.

  A dirt road continued to the edge of bigger bushes turned brown by winter. Deeply grooved by tires, it had frozen and was rough walking. Jay followed the detective through underbrush tamped down enough to make a path that took them to the edge of the river. A short cement jetty led to a sandbar overgrown with scrubby brush. The jetty was narrow, and the black water swirled dizzyingly at their feet as they crossed it.

  “The first body was found here,” the detective said.

  “Who found the bodies?”

  “Fishermen.”

  “Even in winter?”

  “Poor people must eat, and there are still fish, yes?”

  Jay looked back where they had walked and couldn’t see the car through the thicket. “It would take a strong man to carry a body out here.”

  “Maybe the murderer had help.”

  “Is there anything to suggest that?”

  “No. It is only my thought.” Kulski pointed to a shoal at a distance upriver. “The second body was found there, and the third, there.” He pointed an equal distance downriver.

  Each site was in prominent view. Each had a rise to it. Display cases for the dead: the killer wanted his work to be admired.

  “What’s the chance that other bodies were never found? Maybe there were other couriers. A fourth, or a fifth or sixth?”

  “We never lose a body. The river has many shallow places where the weeds catch them.”

  “Even when the river is high like this?”

  The detective shrugged inconclusively. “Possibly.”

  “Possibly what? Possibly the weeds catch them, or possibly a body or two might slip past?”

  The detective smiled. “Never a body that we found. Now I will show you where was the second victim.”

  They crossed back over the jetty and followed a path upriver. Trash peppered the ground, as did the leavings of fishermen who had squatted for relief in the cover of the dead greenery. Twice they turned back from paths that ended at love nests—discarded condoms witness to what had flattened the weeds. Eventually the path turned soggy and sucked at their shoes. Around a bend in the river, they came upon two skiffs pulled onto the shore and in such disrepair that neither appeared seaworthy. Short wooden steps led up the sandy bank to a yard littered with auto parts. Next to a toolshed, a white van was jacked up at its front end, and beyond that was a derelict shack.

  “Is this the mechanic’s place you mention in the files?” Jay asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t realize it was so close to where the bodies were found. What’s his name?”

  “Billy.”

  “He says he didn’t hear or see anything. Is that part of the Polish tradition of not cooperating with the police, or do you believe him?”

  At that moment, the shack’s door swung open and two dogs charged out, growling and running hard for them. Jay grabbed an oar off a skiff and held it with both hands over his head. When the bigger and blacker dog came flying off the bank, he caught it in the chest and sent it sprawling. The smaller gray dog retreated to a safe distance, but the black dog was instantly lunging at them again. Jay was fending it off when a man rolled out from under the white van and stood up. He had a bushy black beard and a broad chest—strong from heavy lifting—that gave him a brutish appearance. “Aleks!” he shouted, and a young man—pimply, gangly, and tall—stepped outside the shack and yelled, “Chodz!” The dogs ran back to him, dodging the bearded man, who kicked at them.

  Another man stepped into view around the boy. Had Jay ever imagined the face of someone risen from the dead, this was it. His jaundiced features appeared pinched from a rotting apple. Instinctively, Jay stepped back, and his movement roused the dogs. They sidled venomously at the boy’s feet, panting growls, the hair on their backs stiffening on end.

  The detective displayed his badge. “Policja,” he called.

  “I remember you,” hideous Billy replied.

  The exchange that followed was too fast for Jay to sort out what they were saying. At some point he realized that they had switched into Russian. Billy’s tone, never friendly, grew increasingly abrupt, and the dogs, sensing the tension, growled at the boy’s feet. The bearded man retreated back under his truck.

  Finally Kulski said, “Let’s go back.” They retraced their footsteps along the mucky path. Halfway back to the car, the dogs caught up with them. They threw stones to fend them off. Nevertheless the animals grew bolder, egging each other on, daring the other to attack first. Kulski, realizing that waiting any longer might be waiting too long, pulled out a concealed gun and fired once in the air. The animals fell back, but as soon as the men started to move, the gray dog nipped at their heels until they left the territory he had marked as his, which ended at the clearing where their car was parked. The dogs watched from the line of bushes as the men crossed the open field. The closer they got to the car, the quicker they moved, and the dogs, sensing their vulnerability, raced for them again. They had to kick them back before managing to shut themselves protectively in the car, and even then, the animals lunged at the windows and dragged their claws down its sides.

  When Kulski started the engine, the dogs ran off. The two men sat there, not moving, giving themselves a moment to recover from the explosion of violence.

  Jay finally broke the silence by saying, “You never mentioned the dogs in the
files.”

  “I never saw them before.”

  “And the bearded guy and the kid? You don’t mention them either.”

  “It’s the first time I saw them, too.”

  “The dogs are obviously the kid’s. So the bearded guy isn’t a mechanic?”

  “Billy rents the toolshed for people to make their own repairs.”

  “That many people want to repair their own cars?”

  “We learned to be very self-sufficient under the communists. If you think about it, it’s a good business model. Off-the-books, no labor, just money in the pocket.”

  “Billy didn’t seem too happy about what you were saying to him.”

  “I told him he might need a license if he wanted to keep watchdogs on the property.”

  “Does he?”

  “As you also say in English, I like to keep him on his toes.”

  “Why did you switch into Russian when you were talking to him?”

  “He speaks it better than Polish. For me, it is the same.”

  “So he’s from Russia?”

  “Ukraine.”

  “Is he legal?”

  The detective shrugged. “His papers are legal, but he has too much for a Ukrainian to be operating legally. He repairs cars, and he also has a business—a bar—at the train station. How can a Ukrainian have two businesses in Poland?”

  “Is he a suspect in the murders?”

  The detective pursed his lips thoughtfully. “He lives at the shack, near where the bodies were found, and he is not a good character. For those reasons he is a suspect. But I don’t agree with my own thought on that. I think there is another possibility. All the bodies were found on small islands with sidewalks to them.”

  “You mean sandbars with concrete jetties? What’s your point?”

  “They are the only three such islands, perhaps the whole river, I don’t know.”

  “And those would be the best places to display the victims, which would mean, the shack’s proximity is only coincidental. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s my thought,” the detective replied.

  “I wonder what the killer will do now that he’s run out of islands. Unless he’s finished.”