Entanglement by Zygmunt Miloszewski Page A

checked it in Monday’s paper, and who knows? Maybe Telak had got all six right. Szacki felt ashamed at the thought that he could keep the coupons for himself instead of handing them over to the widow. Could he really? Of course not! Or maybe he could? A round million, maybe more - he wouldn’t have to work for the rest of his life. He had often wondered if it was true that everyone had his price. How much would it take for him to drop an inquiry, for example? A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand? It’d be interesting to see at what price he’d start to wonder, instead of simply saying “no”.

IV
    Henryk Telak hadn’t even got three numbers right. Szacki had dug out yesterday’s paper at the prosecution front office and checked the numbers. Two right three times, and of the “lucky numbers” only 22 was correct. He also got a copy of Rzeczpospolita and read Miss Grzelka’s article about the murder, confirming his opinion that this paper was capable of turning any case into a sensation on a par with a new type of margarine appearing in the shops. Boring, boring and more boring. Despite which he still felt bad at the thought of how he’d treated the journalist yesterday. He could still remember her smile as she said: “You’re a very rude prosecutor.” Maybe she wasn’t his type, but that smile… Perhaps he should call her? All in all, why not? You only live once, and in twenty years’ time no young journalist would want to go out for a coffee with him. He’d been faithful as a hound for the past ten years, yet somehow he didn’t feel particularly proud of the fact. Quite the contrary - he couldn’t help feeling as if life were passing him by as he gave up the best side of it.
    He took Grzelka’s business card out of the desk drawer, turned it in his fingers for a while, took the decision, put his hand on the receiver, and just then the phone rang.
    “Good afternoon, Ireneusz Nawrocki calling.”
    “Good afternoon, Superintendent,” replied Szacki, putting the business card aside with some sense of relief.
    Nawrocki was a policeman from City Police Headquarters, perhaps the most original of all the cops in the city. Szacki thought highly of him but didn’t like him. They had worked together twice, and each time trying to get information out of Nawrocki on what he was doing, what he’d done and what he was planning to do had been like an inquiry in itself. Nawrocki went his own ways, but none of them ran past the prosecutor’s office, and hardly anyone was as bothered by that as Szacki,
who wanted tight control over every stage of the proceedings. But both their inquiries had ended in success, so Szacki had to admit that thanks to the information gathered by the policeman he’d written an unusually powerful indictment.
    “Do you remember the corpse they dug up at the playschool?”
    Szacki said he did. It was a well-publicized case. They’d been renovating the play area at a nursery school on Krucza Street to replace the ancient swings with an adventure playground, a sports pitch and so on. They’d dug up the play area and found a body. An old one, so everyone had thought it might date from the war, from the Uprising. But it soon appeared that it was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl from the school next door to the nursery who’d gone missing in 1993. They’d located all her classmates and teachers, it had been a huge job. Of course it was all a waste of time, because hardly anyone could remember what they’d been doing on one particular night ten years ago. They had some files from the inquiry into the girl’s disappearance, but that sort of case is conducted in a completely different way - certain questions are never asked. Finally the inquiry was suspended because they hadn’t been able to establish the addresses of several of the girl’s friends. The police had tried looking for them, but not very persistently. He knew that Nawrocki was still plodding along at this case, but he had