2 July, 8:45 AM, Czernograd, “The Czernograd Gazette” newsroom
When in need, he turned to every journalist’s best friend: Google.
Maciar was not going to make it easy for anyone. His ghost was probably laughing now, at Igor, and at his killers, going through phone directories and breaking into railway station lockers. If it were to be that easy he might as well have not bothered. On the other hand, he could not have made it too complicated – the secret, after all, was not to be destroyed, it was to be found.
The exact query did not throw up any hits. There did not seem to be anything called “Pansky 144” that the search algorithms of the gods of Google were aware of. He dropped the quotation marks and repeated the search.
Now, that’s better, he thought. Or maybe not quite, he thought again after a while.
There were a few pages’ worth of results, both most of them appeared meaningless, consisting simply of internet pages on which “Pansky” and “144” appeared, but not together, and not even necessarily closed to each other.
He discovered there was something called the Pansky Institute, which accounted for a number of top results, where various works by scholars associated with this entity were referenced to. Ivan Bucior, “Ruthenia and the Eastern Question: A New Perspective”, Proceedings of the Pansky Institute, Volume 10, May 2005, pp 144-157. That sort of things. There was also someone called Marian Pansky, a historical figure, after whom perhaps the Institute was named, with quotes from page 144 of his biography. Then there were contemporary Panskys, quite a few of them, and the unconnected digits “144” somewhere on the same page, maybe a part of someone else’s phone number, or address.
Igor rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t even nine in the morning and they were already stinging. His eyes used to hurt the same way years ago, at school and then at university, mostly around the exam time, when his body would subconsciously rebel against the things he didn’t feel like doing but had to. Exam time again, Svoboda. Can you pass this one? One simple question: “Explain Pansky 144 in 1,000 words. Or even 5, if you can”.
He has always been a lazy student.
He typed “Pansky” and “Maciar” and hit search again.
The first four search results were pages with “The Maciar Etude” by Aleksander Pansky, apparently a poet, though not one that Igor has ever come across before. Not that this in itself was particularly surprising; Igor never got into poetry and never quite got it. The other six search results were essays and commentary discussing the poem.
Igor clicked on the first link. It seemed to be a whole website devoted to Pansky, rather Spartan in its design, clearly the work of love by some fans. The page itself contained what seemed at first glance to be the complete “Etude”.
He scanned the text quickly, but there were no numerals “144” anywhere in its body. No matter; this was interesting. He started to read.
I walked a quiet path alone, by the church
At Maciar’s edge, made of stone and wood
And prayers. To come and rest in peace
At the old cemetery, amongst those who
Have come before me, and to wait patiently
For those who will come later, unknown to me
But blessed by my prayers, unheeded they may be.
Where wrathful angel spreads his wings,
And with his extended hand, the finger
Made of stone points to the road to heaven
Or hell, which one I do not know,
And dare not ask to make clear to me
What should have been long time revealed
But for my sins, and the weight upon my shoulders.
I will lay my head to ground between the mounds
Of earth, and build a sepulcher made of air
Over me, so that I can still feel the rain
That baptises me to sleep. My eyes will follow
South, to Maciar’s edge, and my heart shall turn to stone
Behind an iron plaque which says: for he is gone,
He is no more.
OK. Morbid. Sad. Strange. That’s why I don’t do poetry in the first place, Igor thought.
So Maciar then, aside from a family name, seemed to be a geographic location, a town or a village. Quite possibly one came from the other; it wasn’t uncommon. Maybe even that’s where Maciar’s family – maybe Maciar himself – came from. Igor hasn’t heard about it either until today, true, just like he hasn’t heard about Pansky the poet, but it didn’t mean much. The place must be small, or maybe doesn’t even exist anymore. Mathias Maciar himself, after all, was quite ancient.
Igor checked, nevertheless. No, it still existed, and yes, it was small. The best information he could find told him it was a village of about two hundred inhabitants in north-eastern Ruthenia, where the foothills slowly sunk into the northern plains. He’s never been to that part of the country but he’s heard it was desolate and depressing, not dissimilar to his own home town. Young people couldn’t wait to get out. Pansky’s narrator, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to die there. Maybe it was just the two different sides of the same coin.
And all this left him where exactly?
Could they have known each other, Pansky and Maciar? From a quick look at the bio page of the fan website Igor gathered that Aleksander Pansky died a few years before the Second World War, at age thirty two, only one collection of his poems printed, and forgotten, in his short lifetime. The bulk of his work remained unpublished and rediscovered when due to the unknowable vagaries of popular taste Pansky became suddenly trendy, some thirty years after he had laid his head to ground between the mounds of earth, so to speak. Maciar by that time was already a few hundred years old. Was that what attracted him to the “Etude” – the death-wish?
All that was clear so far was that Maciar the vampire had left the clue connected with something or someone called Pansky. Pansky the poet had written a poem about Maciar the village. It was pitifully tenuous, but it was the best link between the two that Igor had so far.
What about “144” then?
What could a number 144 mean for a poet – a writer?
A page number? Perhaps.
A book? A book of poems?
Igor checked the website again. According to the “complete bibliography”, there were seventeen different editions of his anthologies, most of them out of print. Igor instinctively knew that books of poetry tended not to be too long, but he would have guessed, nonetheless, that the majority of the seventeen would be longer than 144 pages.
So which one of the seventeen?
This was crazy. It had to be less complicated than that. Maciar wanted to hide something, but surely he wouldn’t do it by leaving seventeen different possibilities, many of them probably almost impossible to track down.
Yes, it had to be less complicated than that.
A book of Pansky’s poetry. Page 144.
Yes, but which one, damn it?
Perhaps one owned by Maciar himself.
Igor leaned back in his chair as far as it would go and closed his eyes.
Could it as simple as that?
Well, it was not simple at all.
But could it be true?
There was only one way to find out.
I can’t believe you’re contemplating doing this, he thought.
I can’t believe you’re contemplating not doing this, he thought a second later.
He swung back to the vertical and opened his eyes. As if he was coming out from under the water and breaking through the surface, he was assailed by the noise, the smells, and the light of the newsroom at full morning buzz. Ah, work; what’s that?
He brought up Google Earth on his screen. While the rest of the world has been photographed from above by satellites and stitched into a seamless image by the IT wizards of Palo Alto, this wasn’t possible for Ruthenia and Galicia, mainly because no one knew where the country actually was and satellites passing overhead merely captured the still images of the Polish, Slovak and Ukrainian countryside. Instead, Google has hired a small aircraft and took photos of the whole country from a much lower altitude. The end result, however, was pretty much the same.
Igor typed in “34 Lipska Street, Czernograd” into the window and pressed the search button.
Slowly, square by square, a picture appeared before his eyes of a residential suburb seen from the height of a few hundred metres; the wide expanses of roofs over Kranberg mansions and villas, insulated by old greenery, with grey asphalt of the streets visible occasionally where the expansive foliage did not succeed in completely covering them. Only the dark blue of Lake Busza broke the pattern in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. In the middle of the screen, a small arrow and a bubble pointed to him the subject of his search.
He pressed on the “plus” sign of the sliding scale on the side of the map and brought in 34 Lipska Street into focus.
It was a big house that Maciar used to enjoy until a few days ago. He did not appreciate its true size through the fence and the cypress palisade, and until now he had no reason to contemplate the place in any detail. It was large even by the Kranberg standards, and these were considerable in themselves for the city where the great majority of residents spent their lives on top of each other, crowded in tenements a century or two old. Maciar’s house was shaped like a fat and flattened letter U, with the two horns pointing away from the street frontage. In between them, the end of a driveway that led to... Bingo. Thank you, Google Earth. The back of Maciar’s property faced a little cul-de-sac that also seemed to provide a discrete back entrance to two other neighbouring mansions. Still, it looked a lot more private than the Lipska Street approach. And a lot less likely to attract anyone’s attention when an intruder would attempt to scale the wall. And then... Then, let’s wait and see, and take things one step at a time.
Just before he left his desk, he did something that he should have done right at the start of his search: bought himself some time.
What was he looking for? What did Maciar hid from the people who killed him? What were they trying to find now at Pansky 144? Sure, it might have been a rare sixteenth century figurine, a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills, or maybe a chunk of a philosopher’s stone. But far more likely – nine times out of ten – what was at stake in wild goose chases like this one were papers. Documents. Words and numbers. Precious, damaging, both.
It was moments like these that he fully appreciated the value of going through life scattering favours like a peasant of old sowing the seeds with every wave of his hand. Now was the time to call on one of them.
He dialed the archives section, in the basement – where else? he thought – and asked to be put through to Alina.
“I’ve got an extra special favour to ask,” he told her. What he meant was: you’ve got an extra special favour to return. And she did. He did not particularly like reminding people and putting them in difficult positions, but now he didn’t have much choice.
“How extra special?” she asked. Igor could not hear but imagined he could feel the dread behind her words.
“You know the file on Prince Piotr?”
“Yes.”
“No, not the official one. I mean the one about which existence only four people are supposed to know.”
“But five do,” she said. Another time and another occasion both of them would have chuckled conspiratorially. Not today.
“That’s the one,” he nodded. “I need it all on a flash drive.”
There was a pause where all he could hear was Alina’s deep breath and the static in the background.
“You know that this could cost me my job?” she asked, not to resist or dissuade but to make sure he knew they would definitely be squared now.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t worry; I’m not planning to make it public or let anyone else do it,” he added. Both of these intentions happened to be genuine. Anyone who might see it would likely already be familiar with the contents.
“Just as long as you remember,” she said.
“I will. Pick it up in fifteen?”