A Blind Eye: Book 1 in the Adam Kaminski Mystery Series (25 page)

T
he metal
double
doors leading to the glass enclosed bridge were closed, but not locked. Adam followed the bridge over the driveway through to the main storage facility behind the genteel public space of the archives.

This building was simple and square. No windows exposed its contents to the sun’s potential damage. The air was dry and purified, dehumidifiers and air conditioners humming away actively in the background. No dust motes would be permitted to dance in the air here, Adam thought, seeing the fluorescent lights reflected sharply off the spotless tile floor, the gleaming metal of the modern shelving units stacked against each other throughout the large open space.

The room filled half the floor of the large building, and down a long hallway to his right Adam saw another similar room. Silver and gray shelves, pushed up close together, back to front and front to back, created narrow aisles for archivists to squeeze through.

Each individual shelf had its own metal wheel that, when turned, would slowly shift all the shelves in that unit, gradually exposing the desired contents. The room was clean but an earthy scent lingered, as if someone had tried but failed to wipe away the last traces of the outside world within this protected space.

Adam walked through the long, narrow aisles, reading the small labels on the end of each shelving unit. These archives held over two thousand archival collections of records of central state institutions, social records, political records and records from the interwar period of Polish independence.

On the labels that he could read with his limited Polish, Adam saw records of institutions including the Civil Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other ministries from the period between the wars.

The records were kept in a variety of formats, holding for posterity not only written documents, but images and sounds as well. Copies of old slides filled a series of boxes while another held old tape recordings. Slide viewers and tape players had been placed strategically throughout the space, easy to hand for archivists responding to requests.

He paused when he came across a series of labels noting the location of documents from the Polish Underground State from the period of World War II. These included documents of underground institutions and military units active during German and Soviet occupations of World War II. If he had had more time, he could have spent hours, days, discovering the secrets held within these historic files.

He searched the shelves, working through years of history. Eventually, he found the more recent records, records of social institutions, labor organizations and political parties from within the last thirty years.

He leaned in to the metal wheel at the end of the unit, and it slid smoothly around. The shelves silently shifted, opening up to Adam’s touch. As they moved, a whiff of the musty scent of the documents stored here floated out, then lost itself to the air purifiers above.

Adam walked slowly along the shelf, running his hands across the file folders and books, breathing in the feeling of walking through history. He closed his eyes and could almost hear the din of the marches and parades, the shouts at labor union meetings, the anger at the student protests. The sounds of gunfire as the Polish people were attacked by their own government. The cries of joy as the truth was realized, that the communist state was no longer in control. The cheers, and cries, as Lech Wałęsa accepted the position of president of a free Poland.

As Adam pulled down file after file, box after box, his shoulders sagged. He was searching for a needle in a haystack. A very large haystack. He had to find a way to narrow his search. He knew there was something in these records that implicated one of the men involved. It had to be something Basia Kaminski would have come across on her own.

He narrowed his search to records of political activities in the Warsaw area, but even that would take him all night to work through. This wasn’t going to be easy. He had to trust that Łukasz would successfully talk his way out of his confrontation with the police. And he had to trust that Sylvia would keep his plans secret, even knowing the risk to her political career.

With a deep breath and a glance at his watch, he got started.

A
dam grimaced
as he stretched his back
,
his neck cracking as he turned it from side to side. He put a hand on the shelf to his right and pushed himself up off the ground. Realizing that carrying the files he wanted back and forth to small tables on the far wall was taking too much time, Adam had resorted to squatting on the floor between the shelves as he read, pulling out one file, skimming through it, then replacing it and pulling out another.

So far, he had found records showing Kapral’s involvement in a variety of political institutions since the regime fell, as well as documentation of Tomek Malak’s involvement in student protests throughout the 1980s. None of this was secret, however, and none of it a motive for murder.

Looking around him, he realized with a start that beyond the narrow aisle he occupied, the rest of the room lay in darkness. Only weak red light from emergency exit signs lit the paths between the metal shelves.

Łukasz’s distraction must have worked even better than they expected if the young woman at the front desk had forgotten to mention to anyone else that Adam was in here.

He stretched again, his back screaming at him. He ran his tired eyes over the shelf one more time, then stepped out into the aisle to turn the wheel for the next set of shelves.

He froze at a noise coming from the next room.

The whirring, grinding sound grew louder as Adam moved toward it. He slid through the doorway to the next room and crept toward the sound, keeping his back against the steel shelves. He moved slowly, cautiously, closer.

He was so close he could see the yellow light escaping from a room only a few aisles away when he recognized the sound. Such a familiar sound, he heard it at the precinct all the time. He just hadn’t placed it because it was so unexpected, in this place, at this time.

He was listening to someone using a document shredder.

The waist-high machine sat in a small room off the main floor. The door to the room was closed, but the wall facing the main records floor was lined with windows, and both light and sound escaped through these.

Peering around the last shelf, Adam saw a man standing at the shredder. A pile of files lay on a table to his right, and he systematically pulled them apart into thin sheafs then fed them into the hungry machine. And unless the national archives had taken to hiring thugs to clear out their unneeded files, these were not documents that should be shredded.

Stefan Wilenek focused on the work at hand, not looking around, not even reading the files he was destroying.

“Shit,” Adam thought to himself. This was not good. He glanced around, but saw nothing but rows and rows of dark metal shelves. Looking back at Wilenek, he was not surprised to see the hilt of a knife peeking out from a sheath on his belt. Adam couldn’t attack him. That was a fight he would lose.

Closing his eyes, Adam pictured the halls he had roamed through that evening. Tried to think of something he could use, some weapon or tool.

He ran back up the silent aisles, through to the other room. First going to the files he had already reviewed, he set up the tools he needed there then moved on to the far door. Just beyond that door, he found a small metal cabinet built into the wall. Fingers crossed, Adam pulled it open and saw what he was hoping to see: light switches.

Pushing all the switches to the “on” position, Adam ran again, almost sliding on the spotless tiles, back to the second step of his plan.

Here, he turned on the tape player to its highest volume. The sound of voices, students debating the merits of an arcane law, filled the room as the bright overhead lights slowly kicked on, one after another.

Running ahead of the sequence of lights, Adam returned to the small office where Wilenek had paused in his activity. Looking up, he could see the lights slowly moving toward him, as each connection in the sequence caught the power and kicked on with a flash. The voices were dim from this far away, loud enough to be heard but not, Adam hoped, to be understood. As if a group of people had just entered the archives and were slowly moving this way.

Wilenek frowned and looked at his watch, then back up at the aisles where the lights were coming ever closer. With a snarl, he grabbed the sheaf of papers still in his hand and shoved it carelessly back into a cardboard file box.

Moving quickly, he carried the box to a rolling cart, one of several pushed up against the wall, each storing file boxes of different sizes. Wilenek pushed his box to the back of a larger pile, arranging the boxes in front of it so it couldn’t be seen. Leaving the files somewhere he could find them easily when he returned, Adam assumed.

With one more look out into the main room, Wilenek left the small office, killing the lights as he left, and slipped out through an unmarked metal door. Adam heard his footsteps ringing on the steps, fading away, as the last of the overhead lights kicked on.

Adam stood there, exposed under the bright lights, listening for any sound of Wilenek’s return.

Leaving the students’ voices playing, Adam moved into the room Wilenek had vacated. Going right for the box the other man had tried to hide, Adam pulled out the papers Wilenek had been so eager to destroy.

At first, Adam wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Flipping through three folders, he saw a word or two he recognized, but nothing that helped explain why Wilenek had been destroying them.

Finally, he saw a word stamped on the front of one of the folders:
Służba Bezpieczeństwa
. These were the records from the secret police. The records that could be used to verify someone’s lustration statement, if necessary.

Whoever had hired Wilenek to kill Basia and Łukasz had also paid him to destroy the evidence.

That’s what this has been about all along. Not corruption, not connections with the Russian mafia, not illegitimate children. It was all here, if anyone had taken the time to dig. It was only a matter of time before it came out.

Only one name Adam recognized appeared consistently on all of the sheets: Tomek Malak.

These were the records of Malak’s meetings with the secret police. These were proof that he had acted as an informant under the previous regime, meeting with the secret police, sharing information on the activities, plans, even thoughts of his friends and comrades. Exposing them to questioning, arrest, torture.

Why would he have done it? Adam asked himself this question as he stuffed the papers into his coat to take them to Łukasz for translating. Had he been forced? Was he a willing informant, seeking recompense for his knowledge, or just another victim of this deadly history?

He paused as he realized that for him, the more important question was, did Sylvia know? She worked with him so closely, she must have at least suspected.

Shaking his head, Adam pushed the thought away. He needed to get to Malak before Wilenek did.

L
ights gleamed
from every window in the front of Malak’s house, just as they had the first time Adam had been here. But he saw no figures profiled in the windows.

He approached the ornate wooden door. Someone was moving around inside, making small noises that Adam could just hear over the pounding of his own heart. He raised his hand in the air, then held it there, balled into a fist, while he took a breath. The air was heavy with the scent of juniper and burning wood.

He knocked, loudly. The noise inside the house stopped.

Adam waited.

Ten seconds later, the door opened. Malak stood in the entranceway, this time dressed in a dark blue track suit, a silver streak running down the sides of his legs. He held a thick crystal tumbler in one hand, and he used this to wave Adam inside. As it moved through the air, fumes from the scotch trailed behind.

Malak led the way into his opulent living room, then turned to Adam without sitting. Adam stood near the doorway, and the two men faced each other.

“You’ve done well for yourself,
Pan
Malak.” Adam gestured around the gaudy room.

Malak nodded. “Yes.”

They fell silent again, and Adam considered his options. They weren’t many.

“You knew Stefan Wilenek.” Adam finally spoke. “From your time in university.”

Malak nodded and took another sip of his drink. He didn’t speak, so Adam continued.

“He was your contact. With the Polish secret police. He was the one you would give the information to. When you were informing on your colleagues. Your friends.”

Malak glared at Adam, the contempt and hatred in his eyes so strong Adam felt them physically repulsing him.

“You provided information in return for what — security? Because you believed in the cause?”

No response from Malak.

“Money?”

Malak blinked and Adam knew he had hit home.

“You informed on your friends, turning them in when they were standing up for what they believed in, fighting for what they believed could really happen here in Poland. And you did it for money?” Adam grabbed the back of a chair, squeezing his fingers around the carved wood, its solidity helping him keep his mind in the present, ignoring the sound of dirt hitting a coffin.

Malak’s anger, which had been barely controlled, flared. “Yes, I did it for money. They were ridiculous. Ideologues. What they believed, what they wanted, that could never happen. How could a labor union succeed against the mighty communist regime? Their cause was already lost. I was not hurting them. I was looking to the future.”

“Your future.”

“Yes, my future. I enjoyed the politics, I enjoyed the thrill of feeling like we were doing something big. But I am practical. I knew that in the end it would not succeed. And I would be on the side of the winner. And I would be rich.”

“They did succeed. And you were so ashamed of what you had done, you lied on your lustration form.”

“I was on the side of the winner after all, it turned out. No one needed to know the truth. They saw me as one of them. A compatriot.”

“You had betrayed them.”

Malak’s voice softened, took on a whine. “Who could have expected this? Who could have expected Solidarity to succeed? No one… even the sharpest academic minds of the time thought it impossible. It
was
impossible. No, I made the right choice.”

“So you prospered. You rose in prominence in the political circles within the student movement of Solidarity. And at the same time, you were bringing in extra cash by selling out your friends. When Solidarity won, you must have been quite disappointed. Your secret well had dried up; how were you going to make a living?”

Malak laughed without humor. “There are always ways to make money for someone who wants it badly enough.”

“Small things. Taking a little bit here, a little bit there. Not enough so anyone would complain, even if they did notice.”

“And all the time, I have been doing great things for Warsaw. Look at the business I have brought in. Look how the economy is thriving under my leadership. Look how the people are happy. We are a democracy. And I am a hero to them.”

“If the truth ever came out about your past, you would lose all this. You would lose your job. You would lose the respect of the people. You would lose everything.”

“I could not let that happen, you must understand.” Malak sounded almost apologetic. “I cannot let that happen.”

The sound of a door closing from a connecting room was as soft as a puff of air, but it set Adam’s hair on end. Keeping his eyes on Malak, he moved cautiously to the door leading into the kitchen and listened. Footsteps, he was sure of it, in a room beyond the kitchen.

Malak took another long drink from his scotch then sat heavily in one of the silk chairs. He raised his eyebrows and dipped his head toward Adam. Adam stepped through to the kitchen.