Part Four: What Was Inside
Her daughter lay as she should have lain.
Light dress, appropriate. Flowers placed in her hands in the customary way. Her face arranged with the particular care of funeral professionals who understood their work as a final act of dignity for the dead and their families. Peaceful, in the way that faces in death were sometimes genuinely peaceful and sometimes only appeared so because the muscles had released.
But the interior of the coffin was deeper than it should have been.
The padding — white satin, typically draped over a base of perhaps three or four inches of material — was higher on the sides than normal, and the base beneath it had a quality that was not the yielding compression of appropriate lining but something more rigid, something structural.
Damian looked at Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk looked back.
Damian reached down and carefully, with the care of someone who understood he was in the presence of something that had moved beyond his understanding of the situation, lifted the inner insert.
The smell reached them before they fully processed what they were seeing. Chemical — sharp and specific in the way that could not be mistaken for anything natural, the kind of chemical smell that spoke of a deliberate attempt to suppress something biological.
Under the insert, wrapped in black plastic sheeting that had been sealed at the edges, was another body.
It was a man. Middle-aged, heavyset, with dark hair and a tattoo on the left side of his neck — a small geometric shape, partially obscured by decomposition that had advanced further than the chemical wrapping had been able to prevent. The face was at a stage that made recognition difficult for anyone who was not specifically looking for this person, but did not make it impossible for anyone who was.
The crowd did not see this immediately. The coffin lid was between them and the interior. But they saw the staff members’ reactions, they heard the inhaled breath and the small involuntary sound, and they saw Irena take one step back and then stop, and they knew, in the collective way of a gathered group, that something had happened that was outside the category of funeral.
Someone in the crowd took out a phone.
Paweł Wójcik put his hand on his mother’s shoulder and gently, firmly, turned her away from the coffin.
“Don’t look,” he said. “Mama. Don’t look.”
She let him turn her, and she looked at the October sky instead, the gray pressed-low sky with the light that was no light, and she did not cry. She had, perhaps, used up the immediate reserves of crying in the weeks before this morning, or perhaps she was simply in the place that was past that for now.
Someone in the crowd said: “I’ve called the police.”
And then everyone waited.
