Chapter 30 Graves

23:40

Woźniak held the rifle aimed at Robert and asked for his gun. Robert had no choice but to hand him the only weapon he had with him, regretting that he didn’t take some other subtle form of security.

‘You told us that you have nothing against us. We didn’t do anything to you.’

‘Lena, don’t be naive,’ Barbara’s voice was somewhat comforting, ‘I didn’t tell you everything to let you go and spread the news. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. It will be just a mild injection and you will fall asleep.’

Now Lena felt fear. It slowly started to strike her that Barbara was dead serious. She was about to die just the same as all people who fascinated Barbara to the point of manslaughter. She did it before, she could do it now.

The rifle was pointed at their backs. Barbara and Grzegorz Woźniak followed them across the garden to the barn. Inside there were no animals, only square boxes of hay and very old farm equipment: a tractor, a thresher and things Lena couldn’t name, most probably items owned by Barbara’s father.

Lena tried to look at Robert, but he was ignoring her. Even at the time of their certain death, he was indifferent, which started to be irritating.

Woźniak handed them shovels.

‘I hope you don’t mind. We are getting older.’

‘Are we supposed to dig our own graves?’

‘I know it sounds cruel, but I have already dug a few graves in my life. You are still young.’

Robert started digging without hesitation. Lena started to get angry. He wasn’t even initiating any defense or escape. He didn’t even complain.

‘Darling, will you prepare the injections? I’ll keep an eye on them. Just hand me his gun.’

Woźniak wasn’t in the mood for negotiations, he nodded, gave Barbara the weapon and left the barn.

A moment later they heard a thud. Lena turned around and saw Robert on the ground.

Barbara approached him.

‘He fainted!’ she was surprised.

Lena rolled her eyes. Robert was really useless when it came to critical situations. He once lost consciousness in Berlin and she had to cover hundreds of kilometers to take him from Berlin’s hospital, being his only trusted acquaintance. Lena wasn’t sure he should carry on with his profession, taking into account his body’s functions.

‘He’s been traveling for a long time. And now this stress of soon being put to sleep. Sometimes it’s too much for a fragile soul.’

‘It doesn’t seem too much for you.’

‘You see, Barbara, I was studying medicine for some time. I saw dissected bodies. It doesn’t impress me. You get used to the sight.’

Lena’s aim was to make Barbara a little bit afraid of her, but the news didn’t make an impact on her. She didn’t answer. She simply ordered Lena to dig for both of them. With a certain pleasure, she was watching Lena dig up a hole in the ground. Dig after dig, the hole was getting bigger. Robert was still lying on the ground, unmoved.

‘I think, it’s finished.’ Lena looked at her grave.

‘There’s only one, you need two...’ but by the time Barbara finished the sentence, they heard a noise, as if someone cut the air with something really sharp, she opened her eyes from the shock and pain in her legs, and helplessly fell to the ground.

Robert had apparently regained his consciousness, took his shovel, aimed below Barbara’s knees and knocked her to the ground. Lena used the chance to kick her into her own grave, run quickly and pushed the thresher on top to make it impossible for her to get out.

‘I’m sorry for the mess, but my mother didn’t teach me to clean properly.’

Robert reached out for his phone, Lena was wet from sweat, resulting from the physical effort of digging in the ground and pulling heavy agricultural machines. Barbara was lying unconscious in the hole in the ground.

Grzegorz Woźniak came to this spectacle with a couple of syringes on the tray. It was the same tray that Barbara used for tea. Apparently, she was teaching him manners.

Robert picked up his gun from the floor.

‘Well, actually, you have a choice. Either you will wait patiently for my friends from the Gdańsk Police Department, who are about to be here in a few minutes, or we will try to use these syringes on you.’

Grzegorz Woźniak would have told something, but the sound of sirens broke the silence of his decision-making process.

Soon a dozen of gunned men ran into the barn and Lena felt relieved.

The barn was an excavation center. They dug out the bodies of six historians, all in various stages of decomposition. Barbara and Woźniak were imprisoned and waiting for trial. All relatives and friends of the victims were shocked at the news what really happened to their colleagues, saddened was also Jakub Krakowski, an old friend of Franciszek Pieczka. But, once the mystery was revealed, a lot buried this part of their lives and started a new chapter, dealing with the fact that they would never see the missing ones alive.

Lena was for once glad that she wasn’t so good at history as to provoke Barbara to another murder. Robert bought a significant number of books about genetic disorders which made people age faster or never age at all, and soon admitted that he was ignorant about people’s biology. The world was such a big place with so many secrets.

When they returned to Warsaw, Lena came back to her classes and the part-time job, Robert caught up on the duties of his regular job. But it wasn’t over yet. There was one mystery that they had to solve.

One evening, Lena forced him to visit one more acquaintance. Out of the blue, just as Barbara tended to visit her professors.

‘Yes?’ Izabella Kieliszek opened the door.

Robert and Lena waved a DVD disk in front of her eyes.

‘Can we come in? We have a few questions.’

There was a strange smell coming from Kieliszek’s apartment. Lena smelled the perfumes, but she thought that Kieliszek was cooking something unspecified, a broth of some sort, a sour cabbage soup, something equally stinky as a cauliflower.

Izabella Kieliszek looked strangely agitated. She was trembling and allowed them inside. Lena looked outside to check that five undercover policemen were waiting for the signal in case they were in danger. They learned to rely on back-up and Roberts contacts proved to be really useful.

Kieliszek invited them to the living room.

‘Could you, please, explain to us what kind of relationship did you have with Henryk Tamka?’

‘He was my co-worker at the University.’

‘Listen, we watched it.’ Lena pointed at the DVD disk ‘We know what is Kafka’s business apart from spreading classic literature to the world. We know what you were doing there.’

Izabella Kieliszek felt defeated.

‘It was all Henryk’s idea. He recruited us. I was struggling financially. They took my grant, I had problems with paying off the mortgage. It’s not the best-paid job. They constantly cut my hours. And then this opportunity came along. For two days of work, I was earning more than a month at the University. I had no choice. And everything was done so tastefully. They asked about our fantasies. We could be in control. We liked it.’

‘So why did you decide to get rid of Tamka? Business conflict? Was it about money?’

Lena looked at Robert. He seemed to know more than her.

‘I fell in love. I asked him, us, to stop. But he started it way before me. He got used to this lifestyle. I couldn’t watch him make love to other women. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand how popular he was with his students, girls especially. It killed me inside.’

Izabella Kieliszek started crying. Robert was numb. He silently handcuffed her and opened the window.

‘I would recognize this smell even if she used liters of perfumes! I’m not sure you should see this, Lena.’, he opened the door to another room.

There was someone sitting on the bed, his head was leaning against the wall. Lena looked closer.

It was her own previous professor, surrounded by a cloud of perfumes.

‘How long has he been here?’

‘Since October.’ Izabella Kieliszek answered.

‘And what have you done with his eyes?’

‘I kept them in formalin. He has glass ones.’

‘And the decomposing?’ Did you mummify him?’

The information that Robert and Kieliszek were exchanging were slowly sinking in. They were talking about a body. Henryk Tamka, whom Lena had known from her own student’s past, was lying there on the bed, rotting in a slowed process of decomposition. The perfumes were there to alleviate the stench. Lena felt shivers, she had a panic attack, opened the door, ran down the staircase and threw up in front of the block of flat. This was considered a signal enough for five undercover policemen. They ran up the stairs to take care of Henryk Tamka’s body and Izabella Kieliszek.