A Grain of Truth Read Online Free

So it’d be a short walk to the market square, to be able to sit down at the Mała Café or the Kordegarda restaurant and have a cup of coffee. When he first moved here, this image was so vivid that he even found it hard to call it a plan or a dream. It wasa reality which had entered his life and started to take effect – simple as that. He could remember the exact moment when he had sat on a bench outside the castle, basking in the autumn sunshine, and seen his own future so clearly that the tears almost came to his eyes. Finally! Finally he knew exactly what he wanted.
    Well, to put it subtly, he had been wrong. To put it unsubtly, he had thrown the life he had spent years building down the toilet in exchange for a sodding pipe dream, and now he was left with nothing, which felt so terrible that it even gave him a sense of exoneration for his own bad behaviour. Absolutely and exactly nothing.
    Instead of being the star of the capital city’s prosecution service, he was an outsider who prompted mistrust in a provincial city, which was in fact dead after six p.m. – but unfortunately not because the citizens had been murdering one another. They didn’t murder each other at all. They didn’t even try to commit murder. They didn’t commit rape. They didn’t organize themselves into criminal gangs. They rarely attacked one another. Whenever Szacki mentally browsed the catalogue of cases he was working on, he got a bad taste in his mouth. It couldn’t be true.
    Instead of a family, he had loneliness. Instead of love, loneliness. Instead of intimacy, loneliness. The crisis triggered by his pitiful – as well as brief and mutually unsatisfying – affair with a journalist, Monika Grzelka, had pushed his marriage into a hole from which it had no chance of digging itself out. They had carried on a bit longer, as if for the good of the child, but by then it was in its feeble, dying phase. He had always thought he was the one who deserved more, and that Weronika was dragging him down. Meanwhile, less than six months after their final parting she had started dating an up-and-coming lawyer a year younger than herself. Recently she had casually informed Szacki that they had decided to live together at the man’s house in Warsaw’s Wawer district, and that maybe he should meet and talk to Tomasz, who was now going to be bringing up his daughter.
    He really had lost everything there was to lose. He had nothing and nobody, on top of which, of his own free will, he had become an exile in a place he didn’t like and that didn’t like him. Calling Klara, whomhe had picked up in a club a month ago and then sent packing three days later, when in the light of day she didn’t seem either pretty, or intelligent, or interesting, had been an act of desperation, the ultimate proof of his downfall.
    He stubbed out his cigarette and went back to the monochrome world. Only briefly – some long red fingernails appeared on his fleece. He closed his eyes to hide his irritation, but he couldn’t muster the courage to be cruel to the girl, whom first of all he had seduced, and to whom now he was still giving false hopes that there might be something between them.
    He went to bed like a good boy to perform some boring sex. Klara wriggled away underneath him, as if trying to make up for the lack of tenderness and fantasy. As she gazed at him, she must have noticed something in his face that made her try even harder. She squirmed and began to moan.
    “Oh yes, fuck me, I’m yours, I want to feel you deep inside.”
    Prosecutor Teodor Szacki tried to control himself, but he couldn’t, and burst out laughing.
    III
    No corpse looks good, but some look worse than others. The cadaver lying in the ravine below the medieval walls of Sandomierz belonged to the latter category. One of the policemen was mercifully covering the woman’s nakedness, when the prosecutor appeared at the scene of the murder.
    “Don’t cover her up yet.”
    The policeman