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Nowacki got two yellow cards. First for a foul, then for stupidly faking an injury. What an idiot. But even so we were in the lead the whole game…”
    “Who scored?”
    “Karwan headed it off a pass from Włodarczyk. Groclin equalized a few minutes before the end. What a disgrace! It’s not worth talking about.”
    “When’s the rematch in Groclin?”
    “The fifteenth.”
    “Are you going?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t want to hear an entire stadium full of village idiots bellowing: ‘Legless Warsaw!’ ”
    Szacki nodded sympathetically and went into the kitchen to make supper. Weronika came in for a smoke. As he made the sandwiches, he told her about the Telak case and today’s interviews.
    “Interesting. Babinicz once told me about a therapy like that. I remember thinking it sounded like a sect.”
    “Well, I never, Mr Babinicz has turned up in our house again,” cut in Szacki, without looking up from the board on which he was slicing tomatoes for a salad with feta and sunflower seeds.
    “Teo, please don’t be a pain. Do I keep asking you which of the trainees makes you coffee?”
    “I make it for myself.”
    “Right, like we only met yesterday, eh?”
    He just shrugged. He didn’t feel like bickering. Once it had just been a joke. Later on jealousy had crept into the jokes. Now all such conversations quickly turned into aggressive provocation on both sides.

    He finished the salad, served himself some, chivvied his daughter into the bathroom and sat down at the computer. He needed to switch off from the rest of the world for a while; he needed to play a game. He was proud of the fact that he had gone through every evolutionary stage in this particular field, from ZX Spectrum and Atari with games recorded on cassette tapes, via C64 and Amiga with floppy discs, to the first PCs with greenish monochrome monitors, and finally today’s machines, which created alternative worlds in millions of colours and real time right before your very eyes. He was sure the ever-more-perfect games with better and better storylines would soon be cultural events on a par with the novels of Dan Brown and the films of Steven Spielberg. Admittedly, the world of computer games hadn’t achieved the equivalent of The Name of the Rose or Amadeus yet, but it was only a matter of time. He usually played adventure and strategy games, but today he felt like being the one just man on a tropical island, where a very evil doctor was conducting very evil genetic experiments, and benefiting from the protection of some very evil mercenaries. If only those people at the trials knew what the haughty, impeccably dressed prosecutor, whose hair was white at just thirty-six, did in the evenings… He felt like laughing every time he fired up the computer.
    “You’re not going to play games, are you?” asked Weronika.
    “Just half an hour,” he replied, angry at himself for explaining.
    “I thought we were having a talk.”
    Of course he felt guilty.
    “In half an hour. You’re not going to bed yet, are you?”
    “I don’t know, I’m tired. I might go to bed early.”
    “I’ll be done in a moment, honest. I’ll just get to a save point,” he replied automatically, already focused on a sniper lurking on the bridge of a smashed-up Japanese aircraft carrier.

    “I’ve got a bullet here with your name on it,” thundered out of the speakers, and seconds later one of the mercenaries ripped the air apart with a burst of machine-gun fire. He dodged behind the aircraft carrier’s metal span, but even so the mercenary got him. Dammit.
    “Sorry, but could you put on headphones?” asked Weronika coldly.
    He reached for them.
    “I’ll make a new hole in you!” rasped the speakers hatefully, before he’d had time to plug in the jack.

3
    Tuesday, 7th June 2005
     
    Seventy per cent of Poles claim that the life and teachings of Pope John Paul II have changed their lives. The Pope is viewed negatively by zero per cent. Polish President