Chapter 24 Another Type of Business

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This time Lena didn’t even intend to attend the classes of the Spanish language. She kept a bunch of keys in her pocket and with a certain aim, she entered the train later than usual. For some time she hung around Galeria Krakowska, Cracov’s shopping mall. She bought a mascara, a new pair of underwear and the new Florence and the Machine album, which she listened to twice to kill the time. She ate at Subway one of those meatball sandwiches with tomato sauce, drank some Pepsi and waited until it got darker. After nine in the evening, she took her things and headed towards the building so well-known to her.

She took the key and tried to open the entrance door. After a few attempts, she was able to enter the staircase. She decided to head straight to Kafka’s office. It took her some time to find the right key, but once she got inside, she was sure that there was no one except for her. All Kafka’s employees were happily at home, enjoying the weekend.

It was an ordinary publishing house. There were three rooms, one small segment with kitchen utensils and a toilet. Two rooms were cramped with office desks, another room was a storage for newer and older editions of books (which were filling floors, bookshelves, and tables: the numerous scraps from the printer’s orders or bookstore’s returns). Some of the books she had already seen in the plastic bag Robert held in front of her some months before. The place was messy in an ordered and catalogued way, as if it was important for the employees of Kafka to keep track of books, but everything else (half-empty tea mugs, pieces of paper, chopsticks, candies’ leftovers) was lying here and there without anybody’s slightest effort to make the place clean. Lena opened some boxes and desks’ drawers to find traces of mischievous activity, but there was nothing of significance. Kafka ran for years, and as it was a small publishing house and it printed mostly classic literature, not Swedish crime novels or fitness tutorials, the number of books it was selling was getting lower and lower each year.

Surprisingly enough, every year on Kafka’s documents the same names appeared, including Izabella Kieliszek, who seemed to stay there purely out of sentiment and love for the language, translation, and grammatical correctness. Until October the previous year written in bold on the majority of papers was also the name of Henryk Tamka.

After a couple of hours, Lena decided that the office contained nothing of significance. She put all things in place, left rubbish in the way she found it and locked the door. Then she found the key to a Xerox place, hoping that it wasn’t monitored in any way. She opened the door and found herself in a single room. On the left, there were desks with five computers (probably connected to the internet). On the right there stood two Xerox machines. In front of the entrance, there was a reception desk. Lena tried to copy something, but the quality was poor. She remembered how the woman downstairs complained about the service. Behind the reception desk, there was a small utility room for the employees and a toilet with a washbasin. That was it. Nothing of significance.

Lena felt discouraged. She believed that there was nothing at the doctors’ offices, nothing in the Spanish school. Possibly Izabella Kieliszek with her colleagues spent time earning extra money correcting classical texts and improving translations. There was nothing wrong in what they were doing, nothing suspicious.

As she still had keys to every single door in the building, Lena decided to make use of the opportunity and the fact that she was in Cracov, and give it the last go. She entered the school and took a stroll around the place so familiar to her. It was too late to hold any classes and all rooms were empty.

There was a big level of trust in the place and the last teacher finishing classes was to close all windows and doors, which many failed to do out of a busy schedule or by trying to avoid the responsibility at all cost. Lena poured some water into the plastic cup and headed towards the Portuguese Embassy. The woman that had opened the door for her must have finished work long time before. Lena was looking at the place with an intention of opening some drawers and doing research (maybe the Portuguese Embassy was not really an embassy) when something hit her. The Spanish school and Embassy were just under Kafka and the Xerox place. They should have been exactly the same size and (as buildings were built in a similar fashion) rooms on the upper floor should correspond to the rooms on the lower. Why was it so that on the floor of Spanish school and Embassy there seemed to be far more space? Kafka consisted of three rooms. The Xerox place of one big and one small. The school and Embassy combined must have had at least a dozen.

Midnight was approaching when Lena opened the door to Kafka publishing house for the second time. But this time she carefully counted the doors. If all rooms corresponded to the rooms downstairs, there should have been more space. Lena counted her steps.

The walls of the final room (the one in which all books were stored) were covered with shelves and closets from top to bottom. There was nothing suspicious about the shelves in which the boxes were kept. Lena opened a few of them and all of them were full of books. Lena approached the wardrobe. It was closed. She had to open the drawers of the desk to search for a key. She found a couple of keys and tried to open the wardrobe. The second one worked and the lock gave way.

To Lena’s surprise, the wardrobe wasn’t an actual wardrobe but it contained another door. This time Lena used the first key and it worked just fine. She opened the hidden door like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and disappeared to an entirely different space.

You know the feeling when the whole life you spent your holiday days in a budget hostel and everything was just enough, considering its price, all facilities were available, mattresses were comfortable, there was enough privacy for each backpacker and, all in all, you could spend there days without any pain? And then you happened to enter an actual hotel room with all conveniences, little chocolate bars to make you feel welcome, soft towels to make you comfortable and you became aware why so many fell for the charm of luxury.

The door behind Kafka’s wardrobe led to a hotel-like apartment. In each room, there were vintage sofas and four-poster beds. On each floor lied soft carpets, in front of each window were hanging ornamented curtains and each room had access to an equally glamorous bathroom with a separate bathtub standing on four curved vintage legs. Golden chandeliers, doorknobs, and lamps added to the sophisticated design of the place. Each room had a different theme. The first one was burgundy, the second - white and gold, the third was purple while the fourth one was painted in the noble dark green shade. Lena was walking from room to room, utterly awe-struck and she didn’t know what to make of them. There was no one in the room and equally, there were no remains of activities which were held there to make Lena aware what kind of place it was.

Lena opened the drawers to see expensive sets of underwear, she uncovered the bed covers to look at silk duvets and embroidered pillows. In the toilet’s closets she found silk gowns hanging on sparkling hangers, on the mirror shelves she noticed bottles of perfumes and cosmetics.

She opened another wardrobe and this time she saw a dozen items of electronic equipment: digital cameras, tripods, and sound systems.

‘Why do they need cameras?’, she whispered to herself trying to add pieces to the puzzle.

Then something hit her again. She ran back to Kafka’s office and unboxed one of the boxes of books which was standing innocently on the floor. The first layer might have comprised Dostoyevski’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ edition, but the second layer was full of nicely wrapped-up boxes of DVD films. Lena took one of them, closed the box and run back to the Xerox place. She turned on one of the computers and inserted the disk.

The DVD disk ran smoothly. Suddenly the screen turned dark and she heard the sound of music. The room of noble green appeared on the screen. There was a man lying on the bed, sipping champagne from the glass and massaging his chest with his empty hand. Then a red-headed woman approached him. She was wearing the same gown which Lena had seen in the bathroom, and in a moment she let it fall on the floor in the manner of the blissful sensuality of Kate Winslet in Titanic. She stood there completely naked, her breasts hanging lightly, her pubic hair matching the color of her hair. She approached the man and in a couple of minutes, Lena witnessed intense love making, colored by moans, shouts, and whispers of passion. There wasn’t a body part that she didn’t see, there wasn’t any doubt that the couple was having an actual sexual intercourse.

And there wouldn’t be anything strange in watching a sophisticated porn film, nothing extraordinary, nothing which Lena hadn’t already seen before if she hadn’t been looking at so well known to her Izabella Kieliszek and Henryk Tamka caught in flagranti by the digital camera hidden in the wardrobe.