A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miloszewski Read Free Book Online Page A

very Italian, Tuscan impression from a distance. Once you were on the inside of the Old Town, everything was very Polish. Sandomierz was too far away from Krakow, and above all too far from Warsaw to become a holiday resort like Kazimierz Dolny. Which it deserved infinitely more, being a beautiful town, and not just a big village with three Renaissance houses and a few dozen hotels, so that every Polish company chairman had somewhere to roger his mistress. Its location off the beaten track meant that Sandomierz’s lovely old-town streets exuded boredom, emptiness, Polish hopelessness – it really was nothing but “a bloody museum”. In the afternoon the school tour groups disappeared, the old residents of the tenement houses shut themselves at home, not long after the few shops closed, and a little later so did the bars and cafés. As early as six p.m., Szacki had sometimes walked right across the Old Town, from the castle to the Opatowska Gate, without meeting a living soul. One of the most beautiful towns in Poland was deserted, dead and depressing.
    Szacki really did feel better once he had got to the end of Sokolnicki Street, left the Old Town and started walking along Mickiewicz Street to the Modena. Cars appeared, and people; the shops were still full at this hour, there were kids glued to their mobile phones, someone eating a doughnut, someone running for the bus, someone shouting to a woman on the other side of the road to say, “Coming, coming, in a moment.” Szacki breathed deeply, and was afraid to admit it to himself, but he was badly missing the city. So badly that even themodest substitute for it offered by this part of Sandomierz made the blood run quicker in his veins.
    The Modena was a provincial dive that stank of beer, but he had to grant it to them, they served the best pizza in Sandomierz here, and thanks to their delicious “Romantica”, armed with a double helping of mozzarella, Szacki’s cholesterol level had jumped more than once. Just like a typical cop, Inspector Leon Wilczur was sitting in the blackest corner with his back against the wall. Without a jacket he looked even thinner, and Szacki was reminded of the hall of mirrors at a holiday fun fair. It was impossible for a person to be quite so skinny, like a fake head set on top of some old clothes for a joke.
    Without a word he sat down opposite the old policeman, and a whole set of questions flew through his mind.
    “Do you know who did it?”
    Wilczur’s look acknowledged the question.
    “No. Nor do I have any idea who could have done it. I don’t know anyone who would have wanted to. I don’t know anyone who could gain from this death. I’d have said no one from round here, if not for the fact that it must be someone from round here. I don’t believe in the idea of a wandering stranger putting himself to so much trouble.”
    That really did answer Szacki’s key questions, even if he had been intending to answer each of them in person. Time to move on to the supporting ones.
    “Beer or vodka?”
    “Water.”
    Szacki ordered water, as well as Cola and a Romantica. After that he sat and listened to Wilczur’s scratchy voice, while mentally drawing up a record of the divergences between the old policeman’s account and Sobieraj’s mawkish delivery. The dry facts were the same. Grzegorz Budnik had been a Sandomierz councillor “for ever”, i.e. since 1990, with unfulfilled mayoral aspirations, and his late wife Elżbieta (Ela for short), fifteen years his junior, was an English teacher at the famous “Number One” – in other words the grammar school that occupied the building of the old Jesuit college – ran an arts club forchildren and was active in every possible kind of local cultural event. They lived in a small house on Katedralna Street, apparently once occupied by Iwaszkiewicz, the famous writer. Not particularly wealthy, childless, ageing philanthropists. With no political colouring. If one were forced to look