The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [53]
At one point in “Amok,” Chris intimates that he has also killed a man. When one of his girlfriends doubts his endless mytho-creations, he says, “Which story didn’t you believe—that my radio station went bankrupt or that I killed a man who behaved inappropriately toward me ten years ago?” He adds of the murder, “Everyone considers it a fable. Maybe it’s better that way. Fuck. Sometimes I don’t believe it myself.”
Wroblewski had never read about postmodernism or language games. For him, facts were as indissoluble as bullets. You either killed someone or you didn’t. His job was to piece together a logical chain of evidence that revealed the irrefutable truth. But Wroblewski also believed that, in order to catch a killer, you had to understand the social and psychological forces that had formed him. And so, if Bala had murdered Janiszewski or participated in the crime—as Wroblewski now fully suspected—then Wroblewski, the empiricist, would have to become a postmodernist.
To the surprise of members of his detective squad, Wroblewski made copies of the novel and handed them out. Everyone was assigned a chapter to “interpret”: to try to find any clues, any coded messages, any parallels with reality. Because Bala was living outside the country, Wroblewski warned his colleagues not to do anything that might alarm the author. Wroblewski knew that if Bala did not voluntarily return home to see his family, as he periodically did, it would be virtually impossible for the Polish police to apprehend him. At least for the moment, the police had to refrain from questioning Bala’s family and friends. Instead, Wroblewski and his team combed public records and interrogated Bala’s more distant associates, constructing a profile of the suspect, which they then compared with the profile of Chris in the novel. Wroblewski kept an unofficial scorecard: both Bala and his literary creation were consumed by philosophy, had been abandoned by their wives, had a company go bankrupt, travelled around the world, and drank too much. Wroblewski discovered that Bala had once been detained by the police, and when he obtained the official report it was as if he had already read it. As Bala’s friend Pawel, who was detained with him, later testified in court, “Krystian came to me in the evening and had a bottle with him. We started drinking. Actually, we drank till dawn.” Pawel went on, “The alcohol ran out, so we went to a store to buy another bottle. As we were returning from the shop we passed by a church, and this is when we had a very stupid idea.”
“What idea did you have?” the judge asked him.
“We went into the church and we saw St. Anthony’s figure, and we took it.”
“What for?” the judge inquired.
“Well, we wanted a third person to drink with. Krystian said afterward that we were crazy.”
In the novel, when the police catch Chris and his friend drinking beside the statue of St. Anthony, Chris says, “We were threatened by prison! I was speechless…. I do not feel like a criminal, but I became one. I had done much worse things in my life, and never suffered any consequences.”
Wroblewski began to describe “Amok” as a “road map” to a crime, but some authorities objected that he was pushing the investigation in a highly suspect direction. The police asked a criminal psychologist to analyze the character of Chris, in order to gain insight into Bala. The psychologist wrote in her report, “The character of Chris is an egocentric man with great intellectual ambitions. He perceives himself as an intellectual with his own philosophy, based on his education and high I.Q. His way of functioning shows features of psychopathic behavior. He is testing the limits to see if he can actually carry out his…sadistic fantasies. He treats people with disrespect, considers them to be intellectually inferior to himself,