Chapter 29 The Suitcase

01:29

They didn’t even bother to ask anyone from the Warsaw University dorms for the permission to enter the room. Lena quietly approached the screened reception desk. She was still in possession of the pass to her previous room, which she now took out from her wallet. The receptionist was sleepy and she was focused more on reading the morning newspaper than checking the validity of the pass. She took a glimpse. The key was gently placed on Lena’s hand and Robert followed her up the stairs.

The room was empty. Barbara was away. There wasn’t a trace that someone moved there after Lena left it a few months before. All Barbara’s clothes were folded in neat, square piles. All her books were carefully piled up on the shelf and there wasn’t a speck of dust either on the room’s desk or on the floor.

Lena dug out some of her notes to find the address. She searched through notebooks, separate pieces of papers, but Barbara took all her documents with her. Lena ran down the stairs and asked for Barbara’s address at the reception desk.

‘I need it to post a present. She will have a birthday next week. I forgot the address, I know that it is Gdańsk but I forgot the street and the number of the house.’

‘It’s so nice of you,’ the woman at the reception desk was apparently pleased ‘These students’ friendships. Sometimes they last a lifetime!’

Lena seriously doubted that this particular one would last a lifetime, but she smiled enthusiastically with gratitude and ran back the stairs.

‘I have the address!’, Lena was triumphant.

‘Maya mentioned the suitcase, but this traveling thing is killing me. We have barely returned from Hamburg and now we have to go to Gdańsk.’

Lena stopped for a second. It was something about Robert’s complaining, ‘Maya mentioned the suitcase.’ Something bugged her.

She crossed the room, opened the wardrobe and saw this monstrosity again. To Robert’s surprise, she took it from the wardrobe and placed in the center of the room. She opened it. It was empty. Lena carefully looked inside and very slowly asked.

‘How quickly can we check if there are remains of blood and DNA?’

Robert took out his phone and called to the office.

It was an old house, as it turned out not in Gdańsk but on the far outskirts of the city. It had a huge garden with a barn and old farm equipment. It looked as if it had been built just after the war and there was no one who looked after it, no one who wanted to modernize it or renovate it to a better standard. The door was unlocked, so they slowly walked inside. It was a standard Polish house with a set of cheap furniture from the nineties. A flowered cloth covered the table, religious kitsch pictures brightened the walls and old books burdened the shelves with their gray and greenish covers.

‘I guess we have visitors,’ they heard a voice behind them, ‘Welcome. Please, sit down.’

Robert took out his gun.

Barbara smiled.

‘Please, be seated. I was waiting for you. Hanna Weber called me to inform that you had found traces.’

Robert felt betrayed.

‘You keep in touch with Hanna Weber?’

Barbara smiled.

‘We have been good friends. I didn’t burn bridges once I left the gates of my schools behind,’ now she turned to Lena, ‘You look better than at the time we lived together. You looked heart-broken and miserable. The move did you well.’

Lena didn’t know what to say.

‘Please, sit down. I will make you some tea. You have already covered such a long distance, you might want to rest and I will try to answer your questions.’

‘Why do you think we have questions?’

‘Don’t you?’

They were actually kept off track. She was really polite.

The flat was clean just as was the room in the dorms. Everything was old, but it was shinning with spotlessness only Barbara was able to achieve.

Barbara noticed that Lena was paying attention to the interior.

‘My mother taught me that it doesn’t matter how much money you have or what conditions you live in, you should always have a clean place. In case you had visitors. In case you died unexpectedly. Just in case. She also told me that there’s no reason to do something in life unless you are going to be really good at it. When I was three I was cleaning my room like a professional cleaner. If it wasn’t clean enough, I had to start all over again. She would throw all my toys on the floor if there was a speck of dust on the shelf. I assure you that it builds the character.’

Barbara encouraged Lena to sit down. Lena politely sat down, charmed by Barbara’s politeness. Robert was still standing. In a second, they heard the noise of boiling water and Barbara disappeared to bring a kettle with pots on a tray.

‘How old are you?’, Lena broke the silence.

‘I will be sixty-seven in May. Surprising, isn’t it? You wouldn’t tell. No one could ever tell. I was always officially in my early twenties. But even now I use much more make-up than you, Lena. I learned to take care of myself. To sleep at least eight hours a day, to drink a lot of water. My mother told me that genes are one thing, the other is the ability to make oneself look respectable. Little did she know that I was blessed with genes. I was born with a rare genetic condition. I simply don’t age.’

Lena looked at Robert with raised eyebrows in ‘I told you’ manner.

‘Why are you so nice to us?’

‘Why shouldn’t I? You didn’t do anything to me, right? Lena, you were messy, but I suppose you weren’t raised with the respect for cleanliness. I don’t know you, young man. I don’t hold any grudges.’

Robert felt strange ordered around by someone who looked like a teenager.

‘So what grudges did you hold against Franciszek Pieczka, Seligh Roth, Conrad Koch, Markel Lang, Gerald Meler and Adel Neuman?’

‘Grudges! I didn’t kill them out of revenge. It was more complicated than that. You have to understand me, to know the whole story. My father was a simple farmer and my mother was a cook. They survived the war and wanted nothing but a simple life for themselves. But my mother didn’t want me to be a cook and my father didn’t want me to get married to a farmer. They aimed higher. My father taught me German, my mother told me to study the subject that I would be incomparably good at.’

‘History,’ Lena whispered.

‘Yes, history. At that time history was grand. It was the time after the war, we tried to understand what happened, why so many people were killed. We wanted to deal with the trauma of so many deaths, so much injustice. When I was growing up nothing great happened. No great battles, no concentration camps, no spectacular bombings. We started to like fantasy more than reality.’

‘Who do you mean by we?’

‘I mean my friends. My generation. Of course, there were those who remembered the atrocities of war, they remembered the pain, the suffering. But for us this peace was boring.’

‘This is why you started killing professors?’

‘Lena, you make everything sound so trivial. I didn’t start killing them. I was studying them. I was a student of each and every one of these academic employees. For years. See, I had already been good at history. My high-school teacher was impressed over the progress I made during my summer holidays. But these men were different. They were passionate. There’s a difference between talent and craft. There’s a difference between being good at something and being passionate. I was simply good. Perfect. They were in possession of something else. Something, which I couldn’t have.’

‘You were jealous, then?’

‘To some extent, yes. I was also hurt by them. They knew I was good, but they ignored me during classes. They gave me slightly worse marks, they didn’t think that my work was good enough. There were no mistakes, everything was perfect. But for them, something was missing. It made me angry. It humiliated my ambitions. It was also extremely sexist. They took advantage of the fact that I was a quiet, little girl. They didn’t feel threatened.’

‘So you decided to finish them off.’

‘After I took everything that I needed from them, I gained all their knowledge, I learned all their materials, I decided that the competition was over and I didn’t need the contestant anymore.’

Lena felt the chills.

So it was all true. She killed all of them. And now they were at her place, talking to her, with no one to be of help.

‘My mother told me that if you were going to do something, do it well. There were no traces, no suspects, no one who knew anything. I chose a random date, visited them out of the blue, used an injection. My father had substances which could kill suffering animals. I took their body in a...’

‘Suitcase!’

Barbara smiled.

‘You’re actually clever, Lena. Yes, in a suitcase. My size doesn’t really allow me to carry grown men on my shoulders. I got on the train and brought them here. The ticket inspectors were rather worried that I was traveling alone to even suspect that I had a body in my luggage. I buried them in a barn. I didn’t like the mess.’

‘And you did it all by yourself? Didn’t you feel anything? No remorse? No guilt?’

‘Of course, I thought about them for some time. It wasn’t easy to wipe out people, whom you knew for years. But I came back to my standard routine. I watched my father kill farm animals. You soon get used to the sight.’

‘So it wasn’t homophobic...’, Lena glimpsed at Robert.

‘Was any of them a homosexual?’ Barbara was interested.

‘Pieczka.’

‘Well, it wasn’t really any interest to me. Pieczka was actually my first. He wasn’t attracted to me at all. Now it all makes sense. You get better at knowing men. The more you know them, the more you are able to read them. Some of them, Koch especially, thought I was in love. I attended his every class. I’m sure he thought I had a crush on him. A young innocent student. Well, I wasn’t that young. I was actually older than him at that time. Hanna Weber hated him, I could tell. He was so full of himself. They treated him better than her just because he was a man. She complained to me during the museum excursions. I understood her. I also wasn’t taken seriously. Even these men from the Museum Island ignored me. For Koch, it was a five-minute chat and a handshake to get access to museum’s artifacts. For me, it was hours of waiting, begging and humiliation. I don’t like waiting. After all, I sent her his ear. She thanked me immensely. Otherwise, he would have made her life at the university unbearable.’

Robert was under the impression that he had talked to a completely different Hanna Weber.

‘And Woźniak?’

Barbara smiled in a different way.

‘Darling, they are asking about you!’

Robert gasped, as they heard the footsteps. Down from the first floor came an old man, whom they knew only from pictures, and welcomed them with a smile.

‘He’s alive!’ Lena sighed.

‘Of course, he is. I was actually surprised that we could fall in love. I thought it was another competition. Another trial of proving who is better. But he was so nice to me, he didn’t want to compete. He gave me the best marks. He even told me about his failed marriage. Imagine such a brilliant man with such a simple woman! What a waste. I slowly started to open. I told him about all history professors. He was actually impressed about how ambitious I was.’

Woźniak smiled and disappeared somewhere in the kitchen.

‘I think it had something to do with the fact that I look so young but I’m almost his peer. With you, Lena, I felt this age gap. You remembered nothing of what I remember. You lived a completely different life with your head stuck into this computer machine. All students were the same to me. I felt older. He was attracted to me and we had so much common ground. I felt I met my soul mate.’

‘She was brilliant! She effortlessly answered every question. And she was simply beautiful!’ Woźniak came back from the kitchen with a rifle ‘Should I do the honors or will you invite our friends to the barn?’