David Grann - The Devil & Sherlock Holmes

Several weeks after her date with Janiszewski, Stasia said, Bala showed up at her place in a drunken fury, demanding that she admit to having an affair with Janiszewski. He broke down the front door and struck her. He shouted that he had hired a private detective and knew everything. “He also mentioned that he had visited Dariusz’s office, and described it to me,” Stasia recalled. “Then he said he knew which hotel we went to and what room we were in.”

Later, when she learned that Janiszewski had disappeared, Stasia said, she asked Bala if he had anything to do with it, and he said no. She did not pursue the matter, believing that Bala, for all his tumultuous behavior, was incapable of murder.

For the first time, Wroblewski thought he understood the last line of “Amok”: “This was the one killed by blind jealousy.”

Spectators flooded into the courtroom in Wroclaw on February 22, 2007, the first day of Bala’s trial. There were philosophers, who argued with each other over the consequences of postmodernism; young lawyers, who wanted to learn about the police department’s new investigative techniques; and reporters, who chronicled every tantalizing detail. “Killing doesn’t make much of an impression in the twenty-first century, but allegedly killing and then writing about it in a novel is front-page news,” a front-page article in Angora , a weekly based in Lodz, declared.

The judge, Lydia Hojenska, sat at the head of the courtroom, beneath an emblem of the white Polish eagle. In accordance with Polish law, the presiding judge, along with another judge and three citizens, acted as the jury. The defense and the prosecution sat at two unadorned wooden tables; next to the prosecutors were Janiszewski’s widow and his parents, his mother holding a picture of her son. The public congregated in the back of the room, and in the last row was a stout, nervous woman with short red hair, who looked as if her own life were at stake. It was Bala’s mother, Teresa; his father was too distraught to attend.

Everyone’s attention, it seemed, was directed toward a zoolike cage near the center of the courtroom. It was almost nine feet high and twenty feet long, and had thick metal bars. Standing in the middle of it, wearing a suit and peering out calmly through his spectacles, was Krystian Bala. He faced up to twenty-five years in prison.

A trial is predicated on the idea that truth is obtainable. Yet it is also, as the writer Janet Malcolm has noted, a struggle between “two competing narratives,” and “the story that can best withstand the attrition of the rules of evidence is the story that wins.” In this case, the prosecution’s narrative resembled that of “Amok”: Bala, like his alter ego Chris, was a depraved hedonist, who, unbound by any sense of moral compunction, had murdered someone in a fit of jealous rage. The prosecution introduced files from Bala’s computer, which Wroblewski and the police had seized during a raid of his parents’ house. In one file, which had to be accessed with the password “amok,” Bala catalogued, in graphic detail, sexual encounters with more than seventy women. The list included his wife, Stasia; a divorced cousin, who was “older” and “plump”; the mother of a friend, described as “old ass, hard-core action”; and a Russian “whore in an old car.” The prosecution also presented e-mails in which Bala sounded unmistakably like Chris, using the same vulgar or arcane words, such as “joy juices” and “Madame Melancholy.” In an angry e-mail to Stasia, Bala wrote, “Life is not only screwing, darling”—which echoed Chris’s exclamation “Fucking is not the end of the world, Mary.” A psychologist testified that “every author puts some part of his personality into his artistic creation,” and that Chris and the defendant shared “sadistic” qualities.

During all this, Bala sat in the cage, taking notes on the proceedings or looking curiously out at the crowd. At times, he seemed to call into question the premise that the truth can be discerned. Under Polish law, the defendant can ask questions directly of the witnesses, and Bala eagerly did so, his professorial inquiries often phrased to reveal the Derridean instability of their testimony. When a former girlfriend testified that Bala once went out on her balcony drunk and acted as if he were on the verge of committing suicide, he asked her if her words might have multiple interpretations. “Could we just say that this is a matter of semantics—a misuse of the word ‘suicide’?” he said.

But, as the trial wore on and the evidence mounted against him, the postmodernist sounded increasingly like an empiricist, a man desperately looking to show gaps in the prosecution’s chain of evidence. Bala noted that no one had seen him kidnap Janiszewski, or kill him, or dump his body. “I’d like to say that I never met Dariusz, and there is not a single witness who would confirm that I did so,” Bala said. He complained that the prosecution was taking random incidents in his personal life and weaving them into a story that no longer resembled reality. The prosecutors were constructing a mytho-creation—or, as Bala’s defense attorney put it to me, “the plot of a novel.” According to the defense, the police and the media had been seduced by the most alluring story rather than by the truth. (Stories about the case had appeared under headlines such as “TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION” and “MURDER, HE WROTE.”)

Bala had long subscribed to the postmodernist notion of “the death of the author”—that an author has no more access to the meaning of his literary work than anyone else. Yet, as the prosecution presented to the jury potentially incriminating details from “Amok,” Bala complained that his novel was being misinterpreted. He insisted that the murder of Mary was simply a symbol of the “destruction of philosophy,” and he made one last attempt to assert authorial control. As he later put it to me, “I’m the fucking author! I know what I meant.”

In early September, the case went to the jury. Bala never took the stand, but in a statement he said, “I do believe the court will make the right decision and absolve me of all the charges.” Wroblewski, who had been promoted to inspector, showed up in court, hoping to hear the verdict. “Even when you’re sure of the facts, you wonder if someone else will see them the same way you do,” he told me.

At last, the judges and jurors filed back into the courtroom. Bala’s mother waited anxiously. She had never read “Amok,” which contains a scene of Chris fantasizing about raping his mother. “I started to read the book, but it was too hard,” she told me. “If someone else had written the book, maybe I would have read it, but I’m his mother.” Bala’s father appeared in the courtroom for the first time. He had read the novel, and though he had trouble understanding parts of it, he thought it was an important work of literature. “You can read it ten, twenty times, and each time discover something new in it,” he said. On his copy, Bala had written an inscription to both his parents. It said, “Thank you for your … forgiveness of all my sins.”

As Judge Hojenska read the verdict, Bala stood perfectly straight and still. Then came the one unmistakable word: “Guilty.”

The gray cinder-block prison in Wroclaw looks like a relic of the Soviet era. After I slipped my visitor’s pass through a tiny hole in the wall, a disembodied voice ordered me to the front of the building, where a solid gate swung open and a guard emerged, blinking in the sunlight. The guard waved me inside as the gate slammed shut behind us. After being searched, I was led through several dank interlocking chambers and into a small visitors’ room with dingy wooden tables and chairs. Conditions in Polish prisons are notorious. Because of overcrowding, as many as seven people are often kept in a single cell. In 2004, prison inmates in Wroclaw staged a three-day hunger strike to protest overcrowding, poor food, and insufficient medical care. Violence is also a problem: only a few days before I arrived, I was told, a visitor had been stabbed to death by an inmate.